Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Stefania Betti
Have you ever tried not to be able to define
an intimate relationship, let's call it like this?
Have you had the experience of failing to recognize
the person you have been with for a long time
and now you see as a stranger?
Or have you ever wondered
whether you're in a relationship with somebody
that really interests you, or out of boredom, out of habit?
Have you ever thought, or tried to have
more than one partnership at the same time?
These are critical questions, in our society,
that concern not only intimate relationships
but also social relations.
I am a psychologist, Gestalt psychotherapist,
I've done psychotherapy training for 40 years, both in Italy and abroad.
I will dissert partnership from my point of view,
according to an important and still neglected aspect:
synchrony.
The way of being in a couple as a dance, with reciprocity.
I will talk you about couple's reciprocity.
What is synchrony?
Synchrony is the ability to respond to the other
in a short enough time to create a rhythm of one with the other,
to create a dance.
Synchrony is something that is important today
and is already born in primary relationships.
Already in the first relationships between the parents and the child,
in the newborn's first days,
an imprinting is given to what will be
the synchrony of the child's relationships.
The more there is synchrony,
the more the child is able to regulate arousal,
or the growth of excitement for what he does.
Whether they are accompanied by fear or joy.
Mother's vocals soothe the child,
and they also make the baby rooted in the relationship.
The more the synchrony,
the stronger the sense of alliance in a relationship.
The more there is synchrony, the stronger the sense of self-confidence.
Therefore, synchrony allows us to be more confident and self-centered,
and to be able to face the stressful situations of life,
independently.
All these years' psychological and neuro-scientific research
lead us to describe relationships
as relationships in which our self
is born and grows within meaningful relationships.
Our brain is made in and for the relationship.
In particular,
our brain seems to be sensitive to the movement of the other.
The child, for example, recognises the mother
not from the single details of her face,
but from the set of details that are harmonized into a movement.
So, we're sensitive to each other's moving harmony.
And we also respond to the movement of the other
with our movement:
we tend towards each other in a creative way,
creating a unique dance
made by the movement of the other and by our movement.
This movement
is the nest of the couple's dance, of its reciprocity:
and the birth of the self.
We are born, and the sense of who we are is born,
within meaningful relationships;
also, we can say it is born within the movement,
the movement that is learned within the relationship.
What does this change in how we look at the couple?
The main change is,
we are not interested in the meanings
related to the couple's past experiences when the couple is in distress,
we are more interested in understanding
what the couple is experiencing in the present, right now.
So if one says for example to the other "I hate you, you are the ruin of my life",
we are interested in knowing how this sentence is said,
what is the person's experience and the person's body experience.
What the person feels physically while telling the other this thing.
This is what we call the phenomenological attitude.
But there is also an aesthetic attitude, following what I told you before.
That is looking at the other like it was a work of art.
If we try to look at the other who's telling us this thing,
as they were a work of art,
we put aside our wounds, what hooks us.
We look at the other with aesthetic objectivity
and let ourselves be fascinated by something that strikes us.
What charms us in the other?
Perhaps a glance that can tell us something particular
about the pain, and also about the desire of the other.
Then, we should all be more trained
to look at each other in an aesthetic way,
to be able to understand the depth of the experience of the other
that words do not say.
Something that says the synthesis, the Gestalt, of the movement.
Another thing that changes,
is to look at the interaction of couples
as a field, as something that the two create together.
The presence of the other is like a stone
that falls into water and causes concentric circles in the water.
Much like water, we are shaped by the other,
we react to the other
and resound with what the other does and says
with our past experiences
whether they're of failure or success.
A game is created between them of backgrounds and figures.
The backgrounds are made by our past experiences
which then come together and meet in the present contact border
of the “here and now” which is a desire game played by the two.
The presence of the contact border isn't always clear, well defined.
Sometimes we get desensitized.
Sometimes we do not see the other clearly.
Desensitization is something that concerns our society:
ours is a desensitized society.
What does it mean?
It means, we must raise the threshold of our sensitivity
because feeling things becomes unbearable.
Where does this difficulty come from?
Largely, from the conditions we grew up in.
Today the conditions are not what they used to be.
The presence of parents is less than it was years ago.
So the child has less the gaze of the parent,
the parent's containment,
there are many stimuli the child must cope with,
but little chance of closing the experiences.
We're zapping a lot from one experience to another
but the experiences cannot close,
so it's like the child remains in a state of perennial excitement
that cannot be released.
This is unpleasant,
and for creative adaptation the child becomes desensitized:
raises the threshold of their sensitivity.
This also happens to adults; we live in a desensitized world.
What happens then?
What does it mean, when the adult
has to manage the desire of the other, and falls in love?
It's hard, because it is hard to feel your own body.
It's hard to stay together for a long time
because the contact with the other becomes stressful.
It is hard also to have a solid ground, a solid sense of the self,
in order to dive with the other into something new.
So that's why couple relationships are hard to manage.
To answer the initial questions,
sometimes we wonder
if a relationship is such or not,
because it's hard to feel the body.
We wonder if being with othe other
is something that comes from our desire or not.
Since there is no sense of rooting in the relationship,
we do not ask for a single relationship
and we have more of them at the same time.
Now, this is the situation; how can we improve it?
In the institution I run with some colleagues,
we are studying the couple's reciprocity,
or what the couple already does that works well,
how is it synchronous,
and how can we support these aspects that work well together.
How can we support reciprocity and dance.
When a couple works, they are doing right three things.
One is to recognize the other as another, the otherness of the other.
Recognizing that the other is different without trying to change them:
being with the otherness.
The second thing is successfully separate
the effect that what the other says to us has on us, from their intention.
When the other person does hurt us, they don't always mean to.
So being able to separate what we feel
from what the other actually wants to do with us
is an important quality.
The third thing is being able to make a leap into the void,
being able to put our wounds aside
to see the other and do something that the other likes.
These are the three characteristics
of a couple's wealth,
of recognizing the otherness of the other person.
What to do then in practice, in everyday life?
I would like to invite you to think of a person you love
and the typical movement of the person you love:
What's that movement?
Think of it;
and when you have time, draw it.
Another thing you can do
to understand your couple's synchrony,
is asking a friend to watch you while you decide something together,
like where to go on holiday.
Then ask them to describe how they see your relationship,
how they see your “dance”,
how they would describe it aesthetically.
Another thing
is to find together two, three things that you know how to do well
and ask yourself what you feel
when you do this thing well, with the other?
Grocery shopping for example, a very trivial thing.
When I go shopping with him, I do it well because I feel free,
I think I can choose everything I want.
Now think about the difficult moment:
what the other should do so that you can feel good, free.
For example,
the other should smile at you,
or tell you that sentence that makes you feel free.
If you can spot this magical thing,
that the partner can do with you,
it's a big help.
And another thing you can do
is to think of the other as someone you love and never hurt you.
Think of the other as they never hurt you,
and tell them what made you fall in love.
What was the thing, the pain that the person has forged
and that makes you strong, gives you strength and courage
to reach them with your love,
as if they were two intertwined works of art.
The important thing to learn in a relationship
is reciprocity.
Reciprocity is something that goes beyond individual meanings.
It can greatly help the relationship,
and is made of many things:
personal reactions,
but above all of the vitality of the two people that are good together.
So, a couple problem is never due to oneof the twio individually,
but to something that happens in the dance of their reciprocity.
As a consequence,
if each of us sees their wounds as a work of art,
then the other can vibrate in front of our wounds
as if they were a work of art,
and weave the masterpiece of their life with the life of the other.
Thank you.
(Applause)