Bridging Social Distancing Part 2: Making Our Experience Whole – Transition to an Online Community

There are four personality modalities where we gather experience. They are called sensations, feelings, emotions and thoughts. Repression of these modalities creates defensive distortions and establishes our level of defensive reactiveness to others. This is why it is critical to clear out any repression, not only because we do not want our partner to use these weaknesses to hurt us, but because open (un-repressed) expression increases our mutual capacity to creatively contribute. Each of us has a particular mix of the modalities that optimizes the expression of who we are. When people imprint us and create doubts around our expression, we lose parts of our being and our access to pleasure, power and passion for living. This is how we become entangled and defined by our defensive beliefs and limitations.

Learning how to express our sensations, feelings, emotions and thoughts is both an internal and external process. We need to tune into our own experience and see how it connects across the full spectrum of modalities before we can contribute anything that will make a difference in life. Any truth comes from the completion and proportional integration of all of our modalities. It is this self-reflection of our experience that allows us to weed out the incongruent and misleading parts that reflect areas of repression. When we release these knots in our experience, modalities will resonate with each other and help us process and integrate the experiences. This completion can be easily communicated without impacting others on any level.

The truth of one partner may be disturbing in a co-dependent relationship. Conscious individuals connect creatively and always embrace their partner’s truth, or at least consider it. Even a co-dependent partner (with their reactions) coupled with a more conscious partner will learn not to personalize their experiences. When we communicate with someone based on internal imbalances, we end up seeking their affirmation, acknowledgement and acceptance because of the problems we are personally experiencing. We want and expect them to fix us, or at least be supportive. This creates co-dependent chaos, where our need for our partner’s attention becomes increasingly frustrated by their need for our attention.

Over time, we react by controlling, isolating, separating and insulating ourselves from their needs, which becomes increasingly intrusive. What we do share is an idealized notion that we can help each other by being sympathetic when actually, what happens is a self-pity party. Co-Creative relationships that manifest a common ground allow each person to take responsibility for their own processing and not interfere with it. When we share this experience in the common relationship space our partners have a choice about how much they invest in helping to clarify our circumstances or whether there are other opportunities for growth that are larger.