Family

" 'How is an Island a part of the land (asked the kitten)?'

...

And the fish told the kitten how all land is one land under the sea.

The cat's eyes were shining with the secret of it."—Golden MacDonald from The Little Island

For me, looking for Reflection in my family life meant delving into the most painful parts of my life. It is in my relationships with women, my children, and my parents that I am probably the most out of harmony with my inner self, or in other words the area of my life in which I practice the strongest self deception. Because it is the area with the least harmony, it is the area that has the deepest pain.

This relationship is generally true—that is, the more out of harmony one is with one's inner needs, the more painful will be the external reality, and the more difficult will it be to understand or accept Reflection. During my 20's and 30's I saw the different effects of Reflection in my work and play as described in the previous chapters, but these areas of my life were in general more harmonious than not. I did not have to look that deep to find both the joyful and painful parts of Reflection.

My family life was different. While I had begun to see how Reflection worked in some cases, I was not willing to explore or accept that it was a working principle for my family life. Because of this, I did not see Reflection as an all pervasive phenomenon, but as an amazing curiosity for some parts of my life.

It was only as I went through my second divorce and saw the same repeating patterns with my second child and a step-parent role that I finally saw how even this area of my life was filled with perfect reflections, and the pain associated with my relationships was related to a self-image that was very different from who I really was.

Looking back on my second marriage I can see Reflection throughout it, but I never wanted to acknowledge any of my inner feelings at the time. The thought of introspection about my family situation was frightening. Even in this there was perfect reflection, for my second wife was also afraid of introspection and we both avoided as much as possible talking of the tensions within. The marriage ended with my affair with Mary and an ensuing divorce.

The divorce fight, and all its pain, reflected my complex inner needs at the time. During the marriage I projected the image of being a totally reasonable person whose mate was the cause of all the problems. I continued to project that image during the divorce.

I was positioning myself as the sane one trying to dissolve the marriage quickly and fairly, in contrast to my ex-wife who was a raving lunatic with ridiculous demands, hell bent on carrying the divorce on forever, fighting over every little detail.

But the reality of her irrational fury was a perfect reflection of the pain I felt inside. While on the one hand Mary was just the person I needed in my life at the time, I still felt awful about breaking up the seventeen-year marriage. I felt guilty guilty guilty. Further, I felt guilty about the years of self-deception and lies during the marriage. I don't think I can ever articulate the many layers of guilt, lies and self-deception, but it is clear to me that my ex-wife's anger and the legal hassles she was putting me through were my penance.

So, while I was in some sense the "victim" of abuse during the divorce, it filled a definite need in me.

I needed abuse for another reason as well. If my ex-wife became a reasonable understanding person, then I would have been crazy to leave her. I was having serious doubts about the change in my life. By acting at her most insanely combative, she helped make me hold fast to my decision to leave. If she hadn't, it would have been very difficult for me to stay on my course of action.

I needed the divorce fight for yet another reason. I was angry at her for what I perceived as her years of disrespectful and abusive behavior towards me. I was always afraid to fight in the marriage. I was afraid to fight after the marriage. She forced me to fight. Using the lawyers and courts I could fight and win. I could feel righteous and listen to judges support my position.

So, while the outward appearances were of an unreasonable hostile wife preventing both herself and husband from rebuilding new lives at great expense to both, the situation was a perfect reflection of at least three of my inner needs. While I would hesitate to admit I wanted it, it was clear that I needed the drawn-out pain and agony of that divorce, and that it perfectly reflected my own inner turmoil.

It is not that I created the abusive aspects of my ex-wife, nor did I create the positive aspects of Mary and our blossoming love, yet both were accurate reflections of my inner self as it went through changes. My inner changes and life changes were in perfect harmony. The "good" and the "bad" were both parts of the exact same phenomenon, reflections of my inner self.

One could look at the reality of my life at the time, ignore everything I said about how my life was, and get a perfect understanding of exactly what I was feeling inside—even a better understanding than I might have had myself. The growing love, the nature of the relationship with Mary, the protracted divorce, the anger and fighting, all told the story more accurately than I ever could have.

The reality certainly told the story better than I was telling it at the time, because, as is so often the case, the words I spoke were not designed to communicate what was happening, but to protect the self-image I was trying to project. The conscious outer-self is the one that is speaking and it is not always in tune with the inner-self. Reality, on the other hand, is.

It was sometime after the divorce that I was involved in a big fight with Mary that showed me even the most painful events in life are reflections of the inner self. The fight was on a Christmas day before a visit from my daughter.

Due to trading of visit days, my ex-wife and I had agreed to have the week-long Christmas vacation visit start on the day after Christmas, but she forgot and told my daughter it would start at 2:00 p.m. on Christmas. Mary had expectations that we would be alone for all of Christmas and wanted to keep it that way. Given the situation, I said I wanted to see my daughter, partially because my ex-wife had also made plans and wanted to bring her over. There were tears in my daughter's voice on the phone as we tried to figure the day out—her parents were fighting over her Christmas visit, not to have her, but to not have her.

I really wanted to get her and fix the pain, so I made arrangements to pick her up. Mary, then, started feeling horribly sorry for herself, claimed I didn't love her, laid guilt trips on me for ruining Christmas for her and was basically, in my eyes, a jealous brat standing between a father and his daughter, whom he loves very much. I was so furious I punched a hole in the wall. It was the second time in my life I reached that level of fury. (The first was a similar situation when my ex-wife was interfering with a visit between myself and my daughter. Both incidents were over interference with my daughter, again showing how deeply hidden feelings lead to the most disruptive realities.)

It is easy in this reality to blame my ex-wife for using my daughter as a weapon, and easy to blame Mary for being childishly jealous of my daughter, but if I look inside I see deep lies that reflect themselves in my discordant reality.

While I love my daughter deeply, I can feel trapped by her, or more precisely, I can be trapped by my own image of how I should behave as a father. This leads to adaptive behavior towards my daughter and denial of my own needs, thus creating internal stress, but I keep it hidden, because I am afraid to admit to myself that there is a part of me that needs to be myself apart from my children.

It was here that I finally saw for the first time the full effects of Reflection. It was here that I saw the horrible beauty of the symmetry between inner self and external reality. At that emotion-filled Christmas holiday, I was clearly a victim of my ex-wife's screw-up on dates, Mary's oppressive behavior, and my child's hurt at being caught between her parents—and yet I wasn't. The movie being played before me was the same one playing inside me.

The anger I felt at both Mary and my ex-wife and the hurt I drew from my daughter's pain were anger and hurt derived from my own inner conflict with myself and my children. I was striving to reach my kids, but external forces were standing in my way. Those external forces were just expressions of those parts within me that were afraid of my kids, that were afraid of having to be someone I'm not. The anger at my ex-wife and the anger at Mary were really angers at myself for not being true to myself with my kids.

As always, the extreme pain of the situation was due to the distance between wants and needs. I needed some separation from my daughter, but I wanted to be constantly close to her. The reality of the divorce, and Mary standing in the way of visits perfectly reflected the inner need but thwarted the want.

As we began to understand the forces within and accept them, the reality began to change. My ex-wife did not use visitation as a battleground anymore; Mary's jealousies (typical in step-parent type situations) began to subside; and I don't try so hard to be the perfect father.

It was only by searching for the inner self reflected in the actions of both my ex-wife and Mary that I was able to begin to understand the turmoil within me. Up until that point, any introspection would have stopped short at my view of myself as a caring and loving father, and self pity at the way I was treated by the selfish women in my life.

Further, by understanding my turmoil within and how the reality of Mary's behavior was a reflection of that turmoil, it became much easier to forgive and accept her behavior.

This story was also pivotal in understanding the magical symmetries of Reflection, for while Mary's actions were part of my reality reflecting my inner self, my actions were part of her reality reflecting her inner self, as will be shown in the next chapter.

Copyright ©1992 Dennis Merritt. All Rights Reserved.