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Introduction

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

LAO TZU

In the decade and a half since the publication of The Art of Possibility, its ideas and stories have evolved into something like a movement. People from multiple walks of life have taken up the practices and embedded them in their workplaces or in their family life. We get letters of gratitude from many with whom we have no connection—the producer who attributes the existence of the wonderful film As It Is in Heaven to reading The Art Of Possibility, a candidate for public office who whispers that he keeps it by his bedside as his guide. A company that was the only one in its industry that went cash positive in the 2007–9 downturn attributes its success to the concepts and messages in The Art of Possibility. We received a newspaper article in the mail that informed us that President Uribe of Colombia offered the book as his only gift to President Chávez of Venezuela in tense times, and we heard from many a parent grateful for being able to get on a more life-enhancing track with a son or daughter.

We cast out a pebble in a pond, and we are unable to see the extent of the ripples although we know they go far. In those intervening years, Ben and I, the authors of The Art of Possibility, haven’t stood still. Nor has the earth, for that matter. It has spun through some sixty-three billion miles of space in the interim, sweeping up new information from the universe and sending out its own messages. Meanwhile, Ben’s activities have accelerated, as he has presented our model of Possibility to groups and institutions on every continent. His astounding energy seems to gather its resonance from the world around him, like fine crystal emitting harmonics at the touch of a finger.

While Ben has been circling the globe, I have been doing a deep dive into the inner world of our being, on a mission to discover how we may continue to grow beyond what we settle for as maturity. Most of us associate “growing up” with reaching a certain age, or taking on responsibilities, or passing our wisdom and resources on to the next generations. But I believe that when we become aware of patterns in our behavior, when we learn to identify and rewrite the stories that give us our identities, we will gain passage, at any age, into a new phase of adulthood. In this territory of maturity, where old fear-based patterns no longer hold us back, we will, I wager, do what we now think of as remarkable, even magical, things. In defiance of the adage “You Can’t Change People,” people around us will change in our presence, step into productivity and contribution, and flourish. In this further phase of adulthood, we might well be agents for powerful action in the collective interest, helping rain forests to renew themselves, children to dedicate themselves to worthwhile pursuits, and relationships between nations to thrive. And further, when we become aware and adept at putting our outdated stories out of their misery and creating new ones, we have a pretty good chance of experiencing that sense of profound and ecstatic connection to the universe that monks and shamans talk about. It’s to understanding and articulating this vision of human growth and expansion that I have dedicated the last fifteen years.

The mission of The Art of Possibility was to teach people to distinguish two broad categories of approaches to life: one is the everyday attitude we call the “downward spiral,” with all its joys and sorrows, triumphs and losses. The second approach we named “radiating possibility,” and it is the attitude that life is a story we tell and live. The underlying assumption of the downward spiral is that life is all about survival, where you stand to win big if you are clever enough, get the right education, meet the right people, and make the best choices. But of course, chance and circumstances being what they are, in the downward spiral you are always faced with the fearful prospect that you might also lose. Your money may run out, the power you once enjoyed may disappear overnight, and the love you counted on may wane, or indeed be snatched away.

In the second approach, “radiating possibility,” you can change your story at any time to be better adapted to the magnificent flow of the way things are, and the world will reflect the change in you, opening doors and showing you a path to where you want to go and what you want to do. This outlook gives rise to joy, love, and gratitude, leaving room for fear only in circumstances where feeling fear will mobilize you best to avoid an immediate threat to life and limb—a truck bearing down on you, for instance; not the prospect of losing someone’s affection or being fired from your job.

So the first outlook, the downward spiral, is about the struggles over winning and losing, and the second, radiating possibility, is about creating the world in which you want to live. Each one is accompanied by its own distinctive postures, emotions, and expression. Each is a way of being. If, after spending time with The Art of Possibility, people were able to distinguish between the two attitudes through doing the practices, Ben and I felt we had accomplished our mission. At that point readers had a choice of perspective, and as a rule they chose to live in Possibility.

The current book, Pathways to Possibility, is firmly situated in the realm of possibility, but its mission is not focused on the distinction between the two attitudes addressed above. Your experience may deepen if you have read or choose to read The Art of Possibility, but it is not a necessary starting point for your journey through this manuscript. The mission of this book is to illuminate new pathways for growth. Throughout history, we human beings have bumped up against glass ceilings that have stopped us in our tracks and prevented us from going any farther, even in our imaginations. And then come the breakthroughs. Someone beats the record of the four-minute mile, and the door swings wide open for others. A black woman refuses to go to the back of the bus, and the whole of America wakes up, cheering or fighting, and from then on everything is different.

The glass ceiling I am addressing in this book is related to our assumptions of our limits as to how much we can grow and change, whether we can change others and even affect the world at large, and how much freedom and joy we can experience. To begin dismantling these assumptions, I trace how patterns we blindly enact get started and what we can do to initiate new ones, so that as we grow fearlessly and shatter the glass ceiling holding us down, others around us will grow as well.

The first part of the book attempts to demonstrate how the inevitable traumas of childhood provoke the young person into rigid patterns of thought and behavior that persist into the future. These childhood lessons such as “don’t show when you are upset” or “dogs (all) bite” are designed to help us feel safe, but may be a poor fit, and may actually provoke danger, when carried into adult life. An example would be an instance where a friendly dog approaches a person who believes dogs bite. The man brandishes a stick, and soon there may be two frightened beings on the attack. The different stories in this section show how patterns develop and how they can be reengineered to reflect life as it is now and ourselves as we are now, in contrast to the environment in which they were first conceived, and our minds as we first conceived them.

The second part of the book turns our attention outward, and expands our vision to enable us to see through the individual stories and patterns that hold other people back. We learn to generate the combination of energy and love that is likely to enhance the possibility we see in others. Having rewritten our own stories in an adult voice, we avoid the common trap of being advice givers (at best) and meddlers (at worst) and we become natural agents for their transformation. We learn to connect with others on an energetic level that creates a synergy for realizing our collective dreams.

The third part shows how, having gained the capacity to witness our own patterns and contribute to an environment in which others can grow, we can become pioneers of a new territory where world and mind, mind and world are one. In this section you will read stories of remarkable accomplishments by people who sought to move in tune with the way things are, clear of wishful thinking and ideology, their minds open to patterns laced throughout our world; people who have gained a perspective on their place in it that allows them to enter into energetic connection with life around them.

The final section of the book presents a series of “games” that will usher the reader into this new territory of possibility and connection. These belong to the category author/philosopher James Carse dubbed “infinite games,” open-ended engagements with no winners or losers; games that offer only the joyousness of play. The promise of this section is great: if we engage fully, we are likely to discover facets of reality we have never before experienced, and become occasional conduits for rare moments of perfect attunement with life.

You might think, from reading this introduction, that the book falls into neat compartments, but it isn’t so. It develops in the way life evolves, in a radiating, spiral pattern that is anything but linear. So you will find you are experiencing echoes of earlier stories and ideas throughout the progress of the narrative, and this structure may help to give you a deeper perspective on each concept as it recurs in a different form. The possibility is that you will undergo an evolution of sorts, like a creature moving from the ocean onto land, that will leave you more aware of your primal beginnings but with greater capacities to move effectively in a new and expanded territory of life.

Chapter One

Voices, Ages, and Parts

I work best in silence in the wild. So I often write late into the fall on an island retreat, in Maine, when most visitors have already left to go back to the city. One particular day in October I walked down to the water and was looking out at the cove through a delicate screen of spruce branches. Lovely as the scene was—white sunlight on the water and all—I felt an unforeseen and quite unwelcome melancholy that sent my mind in three directions. One was to plan my escape from this troublesome sadness by leaving the island altogether and rejoining the busy world; I certainly couldn’t be faulted for that; the season was well past. Another was to fret over the failings of my day, as in, “What have I actually accomplished?” And yet at the same time, I was noticing how lucky I was to be in this beautiful landscape. The emotional incongruity was not new to me, but this time it jolted me awake. Those melancholic feelings had belonged to my mother, I suddenly realized. They were only barely my own!

I remember, as a child, my mother speaking of bleak or gloomy feelings particularly in the summer, and such talk unsettled me. As I was her chosen confidante, I was the likely candidate to hear stories of the experiences that had disturbed her. Maine had been the place where her family gathered after a winter apart, but it was also an environment where she felt most keenly rejected by her older siblings. Later, when my grandmother died, my mother and her siblings had argued over the disposition of a family house that stood high above Penobscot Bay. As they were unable to agree, it was eventually sold—to my mother’s regret. All of the members of that generation settled into summer houses of their own, but the tension between my mother and one of her sisters continued as an undercurrent whenever they were both in residence in that small community, until her sister passed away. Although Maine had meant privacy to my mother—a place of beauty and relaxation where she felt protected from the pressures of society—she wouldn’t walk alone in the spruce woods for fear of the dark.

So even as I felt those twinges of sadness, I realized that while for my mother there were many disheartening memories associated with the trees and water, that was not true for me. I love the woods; I lived in a tent in the forest by the ocean for an entire summer by myself and was pretty much in ecstasy. So I surmised—as I stood there looking through the screen of dark spruces at the white sparkling water—that something, the slant of sunlight perhaps, or the sound of the bell buoy in the distance, put me in touch with a six- or seven-year-old part of myself that had absorbed my mother’s feelings and her history. At that thought, a smile came over my face, the wisps of melancholy dispersed, and the landscape became once again the place I wholeheartedly enjoy. It occurred to me that in that little transformative awareness, I had redeemed us both, for notwithstanding moments of unhappiness, my mother had been inspirational in her love of the coastline, and that, too, had rubbed off on me.

“All of us, when we engage in relatedness, fall under the gravitational influence of another’s emotional world, at the same time that we are bending his emotional mind with ours.” I was struck by this passage in A General Theory of Love, by three neuroscientists, and had mused over what is really happening as we bring up our children, or share experiences with colleagues or friends. Are our minds covertly drawing their minds into attunement? Are theirs drawing ours?

Now looking out over the water, I asked myself, how is it possible that I can say “I feel sad” and a moment later I say, “No, it is not I that feels sad, but only a part of me that has absorbed my mother’s sadness”? To what am I referring when I use the word “I”?

EMOTIONAL MASTERY: PART ONE

To shed some light on these questions and gain some mastery in the emotional arena, let’s imagine for a moment that you and I comprise many different voices, ages, and identities. Picture that below your consciousness a host of characters have been busy making themselves comfortable in your psyche, like mice in the basement, heedless of how their presence fits with any business you are trying to conduct. Or imagine that these characters are like a family of invisible children that troop along with you to your employer’s house for lunch, and just as you are making an important point, one of them upsets his water glass, or decides your boss is taking advantage of you and derails the deal.

And all the while you, like everyone else, take pride in being the master of your destiny. (The inner kids are having a good chuckle at that one.) Almost everyone, when confronted with some unpleasant piece of behavior he has performed that disturbs his sense of control, finds a way of justifying it, often by foisting the blame somewhere else.

“If you were more committed to me I wouldn’t be so sullen.”

“Sorry I haven’t called—I’ve been deluged with work.”

Sometimes those inner folks seem to be completely at odds with one another, as when with the best intentions to follow a course of discipline—a diet, say, or exercise regimen—you indulge. Or, you come dazzlingly close to someone and then you just disappear. Huh?

The best explanation for all this is that some parts of you, parts with the self-doubt or combativeness of a teenager, or even the confusion of a very young child, step forward and hijack the show. Then, predictably, they do it again, forming a pattern as distinctive as water in a riverbed.

Let’s say that in frustration you complain to your friends, not for the first time, that a certain person is late for dinner, or doesn’t call when he swore he would. They sigh and shake their heads over your inability to see the obvious: “That’s just the way he is,” they say. “You won’t change him.” No, that’s not who he is, it’s just one of his characters who keeps stepping up. But if you find yourself hoping that he won’t do it again, well, that hope resides in a part of you, age five or seven or nine, who was impelled to trust someone who was patently unreliable, for your own survival’s sake. That part of him and that part of you have minds of their own—they are not under his or your conscious control—and given certain circumstances, are bound like clockwork to come to the fore.

Each “part” of us appears to have a point of view about how life should go and is living a story of its own. Some of the stories grow out of the rubble of a traumatic situation where, as children, we perceive a life-threatening danger and figure out what to do about it. The story and patterns initiated in these instances we will call “safety patterns.”

Other stories may get their impetus from the necessity to distinguish oneself in the sibling group, to get enough attention from the parents. It almost never happens that two children born consecutively into a family pop up with the same personality and identical interests. Each seems to know intuitively that he cannot bask in the very spot in the sunlight of parental attention that his sibling occupies and develops a unique way of being: what we call personality. Personality is a major story for human beings, a narrative that gets defined and polished as time goes on.

Finally, some of our stories are shaped through daily exposure to the surrounding culture, beginning with the family. It’s the story a person is “living into” that we notice when we identify someone as of a certain class, or as liberal or conservative, or as hailing from a certain country, or perhaps as our type or not our type. Our own stories are mixed in there as well, of course.

In the ensuing chapters you will see, through personal accounts, how individual stories are acquired and transformed. You will begin to understand how to find and articulate the physical, emotional, and cognitive patterns that are currently governing you, and you will learn to see them from the perspective of their author, yourself at a younger age, so that you will be able to rewrite them.

We begin our voyage with a trauma-based story in which we witness how a safety pattern was born out of a series of interactions that created fear in a child and overwhelmed his capacities. You may not always find this young hero of ours sympathetic, and that’s intentional—desirable even. I want you to stay at an interested and neutral distance from which you can view Alan as he grows and perhaps find some aspects of yourself in him to consider with the same dispassion. My intention is to help to strengthen the observing part of you that really is your most valuable tool for making any changes.

So we open with the tale of this young boy, Alan, a child of divorce, who remembers the excitement of his father arriving from afar on Christmas Eve when he was three and a half.

Chapter Two

Alan’s World

A man is returning as a visitor to his former home carrying Christmas presents for his two children: for his five-year-old daughter he bought a large stuffed panda bear and for his three-year-old son a gift of a windup music box made of glass. We might debate the appropriateness of such a gift for a three-year-old boy, but no one would deny that such an unusual item might seem magical to a child. However, just before he received the wondrous glass box into which you could look and see tiny tines plinking against a moving cylinder, little Alan Spingold’s mother whispered that she had a secret to tell him. She leaned over and spoke these subversive words, softly in his ear: “You’re not going to like Daddy’s present, but I’ll make it up to you. I’m going to give you a stuffed bear just like the one he is giving to your sister.”

This frightening message was much too complicated for the child to process. On Christmas Day, when he opened his presents, he discovered he loved the music box he wasn’t supposed to love; and he also loved the bear his mother gave him. Feeling upset and exposed, he yearned for relief. What could he do to feel secure? His young mind did not have the capacity to imagine that this wasn’t about him. There was no way that he could conceive of the idea that his parents might be acting out ancient, multigenerational problems of clandestine affiliations and betrayal.

Lying awake that night, the big stuffed bear by his side, and the glass music box concealed under the covers, Alan listened, troubled, to the voices arguing in the living room below. Then a brilliant solution found its way into his three-year-old mind and heart. His ancestors murmured approval from the dark corners of his room. Aha! If he kept his loves a secret, he could have them both, a bear and a music box, a mother and a father.

Now in his fifty-sixth year, Mr. Alan Spingold hasn’t made any connection between his overt memory of that Christmas long ago and his deep-rooted pattern of infidelity. His dalliances had always seemed so logical—and of little importance. He told himself that his needs were unmet in his marriage; that not all men are designed to be monogamous; that in sophisticated circles, taking a mistress is quite common ….

His close friends, in discussing him, often shook their heads. “It would be dignifying his behavior to call it ‘teenage,’ ” they said. “He is acting like an emotional three-year-old!” And indeed he was.

As thinking creatures, we don’t tolerate well the illogic of our emotion-based impulses, so our minds will always produce reasons for the things we do, even when there is no connection whatsoever between our actions and what we say about them. Alan’s mind produced rationales to fill in the blanks between a three-year-old’s fear and an adult’s impulses. On a visceral level, his fear-driven instinct told him that if he hid his love for each warring parent from the other, neither would leave him. That strategy for keeping himself safe created links and neuronal pathways that would remain active for years to come. Later on, whenever he felt the slightest disapproval from a woman with whom he was intimate, his feet, seemingly on their own, would seek out another lover. Double-dealing in secret appeared as his only possible strategy to cope with a loved one’s displeasure or a colleague’s frown, the seeds of which were delivered along with his father’s bewildering absences and his mother’s fateful whisper.

Alan’s story and the patterns of action it stimulated were formed implicitly, that is, quite outside of his awareness. Almost from birth, Alan’s nervous system had been captivated by his mother’s intimate ways and shaped by his father’s tendency to attach elsewhere. His Christmas quandary was an outcome of their patterns colliding, and it prompted him to discover a way of moving forward for himself out of the material that lay at hand: episodic intimacy, abandonment, and betrayal. It was the air he breathed.

Alan’s life unfolded and proliferated under the banner of “Love in Secret,” like a tree putting out branches, each new move a variation of the last. He formed multiple close relationships to anchor his fragile sense of attachment, like a toddler who moves from table to chair, never letting go of the furniture. During his school days, he had unusual friendships with teachers and mentors, and uncommonly close ties with the parents of his friends. In college when he dated he always had more than one girl on a string, though each of the young women felt comfortable that she was the favorite. Obtaining a degree in law, he gravitated toward opening a private law practice where he found himself engaged in one privileged conversation after another. Not long after he was married, he started to have affairs, but he was so discreet and so genuinely interested in treating each relationship with “integrity” (or so he told himself) that there was hardly ever any disturbance ….

GENERATIONAL PATTERNS

Patterns of this sort are generally not stand-alones. We could say that Alan’s life was an offshoot, an altered copy of his parents’ lives, and theirs, on deeper investigation, were iterations of their parents’. Alan’s mother, Sarah, lost her beloved father in childhood, and subsequently lost her mother’s attention as she became immersed in grief. Alan’s father, Lou, was an only child of divorced parents, like Alan. Alan’s grandmother had whisked Lou away from any contact with his own father, and Lou unintentionally perpetuated the pattern with his son. Lou found himself in multiple relationships of a secret nature, though of course Alan “knew” nothing of these facts when his three-year-old self came up with his brilliant strategy for remaining in connection with his separated parents.

How can it be that patterns so reliably repeat through generations, yet so often catch us unawares? We know how family traditions are overtly handed down: through the lighting of candles and reading of scriptures, through shared credos and family stories. Parents take children to art museums and talk of values and insist that kids come to the dinner table to eat together and discuss world affairs; or perhaps they keep a pot simmering on the stove for impromptu meals, should neighbors drop in. As children grow into adults, they often talk about these memories and discuss how they have used or discarded these traditions in their own lives.

Patterns of life that are explicit are easy to follow, modify, or reject, but not so with patterns that travel underground in subterranean rivers below our awareness. What are the mechanisms by which implicit emotional “traditions” and patterns of action are transmitted?

The answer is remarkably simple: they just rub off on you. We learn the ways of others by being around them, without ever having to think about it. An infant wrapped in the blanket of his mother’s or caretaker’s style of relating learns the nuances, the gestures, the stops and starts of love without ever “understanding” what is happening or, as in learning to speak, ever becoming conscious of what he has learned. Love is for all time, then, made up of the particular dance steps he had with his mother and she with others. If she is well and secure, he will learn that love is something akin to generosity, loyalty, and joy. If she is troubled, he will learn the lessons of her troubled relationships, that “love” is perhaps entrapping and frightening or explosive or demeaning.

PATTERNS IN THE SPINGOLD FAMILY

We would have to go back generations in the Spingold family to see all the patterns at work. But from the glimpse we have, we can surmise that Alan’s parents, Lou and Sarah, were having some difficulty before Alan was born. Perhaps the pregnancy and the anticipation of becoming a father for a second time stirred up in Lou some disturbing memories of the disruption of his original family. Judging from his later behavior we could posit that he found himself going to another woman for comfort. As we play out our story, we might imagine that Lou’s absence would bring up in Sarah old feelings of hurt over her father’s death, subjecting the baby in her womb to a wash of sadness conveyed from mother to child through the changing rhythms of her heartbeat and the tightening of her muscles. The feel-good chemical oxytocin, which a mother’s body produces at birth and with breast-feeding, may well have been in short supply for both mother and child under Sarah’s emotional stress. So in this scenario, the infant Alan would likely have emerged into the world braced for danger.

Now let’s say his mother, Sarah, wasn’t able to tune in well to her baby’s needs, her capacities overwhelmed by her emotional turmoil over the absence of the two important men in her life, her straying husband and the father she mourned for. Alan himself may not have been able to relax in her arms, either because of the atmosphere of tension or because she wanted more response from him than he knew how to give. One can certainly imagine that Sarah would have reacted negatively to anything less than a wholly accepting attitude from her infant.

So as in a choppy sea, where competing waves intersect and create interference patterns, the themes of loss and resistance to entrapment traveling through the generations made up the cross-currents of Alan’s world. By the Christmas of his fourth year Alan was probably as familiar with this particular emotional weather as a child of sailors is accustomed to the power of the wind and the rocking of the boat.

We know that Alan was struggling as a toddler to connect safely with each of his parents, in a discordant environment of intermittent intense intimacy from his mother, and random contact with his father. Psychologists have turned their attention to naming those earliest attachment patterns because of the influence they have on a child’s ability to flourish.

ATTACHMENT PATTERNS

When the caretaking parent is able to attune to her infant and respond appropriately to his needs over time, she could be said to be providing an atmosphere of “secure attachment.” Barring other influences, the child is likely to grow into an adult who, without anxiety, is able to balance independence and dependence and express feelings openly. However, if the child is brought up in an environment where the caretakers are sporadically more in tune with their own memories and troubles than they are with their baby, as were perhaps both Spingold parents, their child is likely to experience the effects of “ambivalent,” or “anxious,” attachment. He may learn that people are not dependable, feel anxiety over separation, and have difficulty reading feelings. Another pattern psychologists name is the “avoidant” attachment style, where the atmosphere in the home is one of consistent emotional distance and neglect. The product of such an upbringing is likely to view the world as a cold place where he has no chance to make an impact, and later may say, “I don’t ever remember being hugged; in fact I remember very little of my childhood.” And finally, if the parents’ own concerns are overwhelming to them and incite them to unpredictable responses or violence, the pattern is called “disorganized.” In this case the child is faced with the difficult task of integrating his need to come close to his parents and his need to escape the danger they present. His solution may be to become, in one way or another, emotionally absent as a result of his impossible dilemma.

PATTERNS PERSIST

Unwittingly, the parent who himself was never embraced and cherished may become frozen in a posture that gives insufficient comfort to his child. And children of divorce, alas, often find themselves at the brink of divorce no matter how determined they are to make great marriages. Children of tightly knit families may struggle for independence but often eventually find themselves holding on too tight. How an infant is drawn into relationship matters. Patterns of attachment that remain below consciousness tend to play out far into the future in novel iterations, like designs woven into handmade carpets, each, within its repeating rhythm, unique.

As an adult, Alan could not see the “repeat” in the patterns, as there was no precedent for self-examination in the environment in which he was raised. He simply didn’t see the extent of the ambivalence and untrustworthiness that were pervasive in his relational life. He was not aware that all his connections were serving virtually the same purpose: hedges against anticipated loss, a loss that he had long ago experienced as a body sensation, and which was now simply a body memory. So, because the arrested child in him had had no guidance in growing up, fifty-two years later Alan was no better able to tolerate those memories of upset, fear, and exposure than he was when the circumstances overwhelmed him during the Christmas holiday at the age of three. His flight from those feelings had left him with a block on his heart that prevented him from growing and changing with a partner. He obviously could not reveal himself fully to any lover, or even to any friend. His own way of interpreting that was to characterize himself as a private person, but that was simply rationalization of what he sporadically knew to be true, that he was betraying people right and left. Now and again he would consider leading a straight life, but his relationships were so entangled that he couldn’t conjure any way to do that. In any event, because each time he thought about it he saw nothing but loss, the idea scared the living daylights out of him.

LOSS ARRIVES TO HAUNT HIM

In his early fifties Alan became more captivated than usual with a particular woman he was seeing on the side. He prided himself on his ability to manage such complex situations. And then, at some point, it all fell apart. The very thing he had been staving off all his life, the eventuality that his friendly approach and his skills of listening and expertise at managing had been designed to prevent, happened. He was betrayed; he was abandoned. After twenty-five years of marriage, his wife, Betty, went off with another man. Soon thereafter the “other” woman, affronted by the depth of Alan’s reaction to the disappearance of a wife whom he had all along characterized as “cold,” and with whom he had claimed to have almost no relationship, vanished as well.

Alan spun into a state of shock and terror the likes of which he had never known before (he thought). He jumped at loud noises, he was overcome by waves of disbelief, punctuated by lurid images of them together; he couldn’t eat or sleep. His mind wasn’t able to grasp what was happening to him, but his body knew: it was reliving a memory of a time long before the three-year-old’s escape into bifurcated loving. His body remembered the newborn’s wail in the unresponsive dark.

As a jumble of lost feelings and memories rose up to hit him, Alan fell to pieces: his wife’s “act of betrayal” forced its way past the defenses guarding those early emotional secrets and opened up circuitries of terror, fury, and helplessness that started firing at the sight of almost everything in his environment—a coffee cup, a sweater, signs of an unfinished project—anything that was remotely connected to her. Alan’s mantra, “Love in Secret,” had functioned as a giant resistance to the feelings surrounding the endangerment he experienced in infancy. Like so many of us who undergo crises, he hadn’t a clue that what he had braced against all those years lived only in his memory. The baby had once been in mortal danger of losing his sense of connection to the living world, but the memory of that terror is not life threatening to the adult. Because Alan was unaware of the deeply grooved avoidance pattern he impulsively followed to save himself from reexperiencing that terror, he ended up like Oedipus, walking blindly into what became truly a major loss for his adult life.

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