The Transformational Relationship

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I found someone with whom I could engage in healthy, healing, growth-inclined conflict mediation and repair. It was extraordinary. Since then I have cherished every day of it, not just because she makes me laugh until I choke or because there’s nothing she doesn’t call me out on with care and respect, but because she’s open to enduring those conflicts with me, over and over again, in order to do the work.

She is open to taking my hand and entering into the underworld of our traumas and allowing the pain to warp us until we hardly recognize ourselves let alone each other. And yet every time we go there we find yet another part of us that is longing to be found, healed, and reintegrated.

And when we bring that part back, and come to peace and resolution above ground, having braved the fires below, we look at each other and suddenly laugh, and cry, and then hold each other with such love, because we have done it again. We have braved the agony of eons-old wounds within the fathomless depths of the psyche and have returned more whole because of it.

That is the journey I’ve been blessed to explore ten thousand times over with her, my clients, and their partners over the past two decades, where suddenly the perennial truths that have been spoken of for so long they’ve become cliché, become alive again – that after a dark night comes the sun, with death always comes life, and only by accepting the inevitability of war can an enduring peace abide … if we are willing to take the ride.

If you’re currently in a relationship with some challenging conflicts that you’re having trouble resolving, reach out for an experience of what psyche and soul are actually doing in that most sacred of crucibles – why the conflicts keep repeating – and how to re-contextualize them into what they actually are – healing and empowerment initiations between soul family members.

broadly speaking, does not include the energetic dimensions of the soma. I can’t overstate how important this is. Because what it means is that most conflicts, especially those at the geopolitical level, are not going to be resolved in our lifetime. Because we’re not addressing the energetic root of them. Because as a species, we’ve only just begun to understand how to do that. And I say this after twenty years of training in conflict resolution plus the anabolic, energy-sensitivity-upgrade that ten years of chronic illness gifted me. I explore some of this in my: Roots and Antidote of Conflict, but I’ll summarize it all here as clearly as I can:

Conflict is always the result of a psycho-somatic system unable to repress, or metabolize its pain, and which, as a consequence, has no choice but to relieve itself by exorcising that pain onto another.

We used to have tribal processes for this with an actual goat, but since that was abandoned it’s been blood feuds as far as the eye can see: at the level of the psyche, where one part marginalizes another, at the level of the family, where one person’s pain spills onto the others, in executive teams, political parties, nation-states. You get it. It’s all one continuum, growing in complexity and intensity at every scale.

But because most of us can’t see this energy or feel it, and as a result, are unable to metabolize it, we have no choice but to address “the pain” at less fundamental levels that include:

• Differences in worldview
• Divergent religious beliefs
• A fight for resources
• ‘Othering’ people

And yes, those things are also happening. But unless the energetics underneath them are correctly untangled first, even when we do come up with a “solution” to the narrative tangle above it, we will continue to feel the unresolved energetics beneath it, and, as a result, the resolution will be short lived and the conflict will ultimately flare again, and again, at some point in the future, ad nauseam.