Issue #1 Article#9
Games People Play by
Pietro Abela
In 1979 when I was in a
New-Wave rock band I had to travel four times a week from Cambridge to Toronto
Ontario for rehearsal. The drive was two hours each way. To counteract the
boring monotony of the highway I played games. There is a switch that turns on
for me whenever boredom looms. One that came into effect sometime in my
childhood when as a creative child I was lacking in challenge. If I ever felt
lonely or bored I would invent a game and play it on my own. On one of these
travel days I was set to break my all time record of managing to drive through
thirty-three consecutive green lights. I remember my grandmother telling the
family she was convinced I could will the lights to change. I was at the end of this particular trip,
driving on the strip in Cambridge, with my thirty-fourth consecutive green
light in sight about half a mile away. I was speeding at over 100 kph (60 mph)
in a 60 kph (36 mph) zone, with a cop car, lights blazing, siren screaming six
inches on my tail, and nothing – not even the threat of jail – was going to get
in the way of this thirty-fourth green light. I passed through the light, let
out a whoop and pulled over. The policeman was totally bewildered as to why I
ignored him. I mumbled something about being tired and anxious to get home. He
took my driver’s license and I waited, resigned to a big fine at a time when I
couldn’t afford big fines, but pumped with adrenaline and feeling really high.
Next thing I knew my license was thrown into my car, the policeman yells,
“Gotta go. An emergency!” And he’s off. And I’m free, with money still in the
bank and a record breaker to boot.
I have written enough articles for this newsletter, other newspapers and
magazines to know that grappling with inspiration is part of the challenge of
starting an article. My reason for relating this rather long story (which I
think is worth the telling) is to make the point that I still construct games
and aim for records in all aspects of my life. As to how these transpire is for
another article. However, since my beginning years as a practitioner I have had
a personal ambition to give treatments to a day full of men clients. Unless
there is an unexpected cancellation, that ambition will be realized tomorrow. I
have been in private practice now for almost fifteen years and I would
speculate that the amount of men at any one time in my practice, as opposed to
women, pets and alien life forms has always been below the 5% mark. Now I would
say it is hovering securely at 15% - and rising.
Why
this change? Well let’s start with the fact that beneath the fantasy of
becoming the alpha male of the herd that almost every man entertains, men are
scared. They are scared to show that they are scared. Men don’t really know how
to do intimacy. I don’t speak for every man here, because the men reading this
article may have likely moved beyond this, but I would wager that many of you
men, like me, have been there and know at some level experientially what I am
talking about. So many times in my practitioner life I have witnessed the
sadness, tears and frustrations of women telling me their personal stories of
how the man in their life does not, has not and shows no signs of ever meeting
their emotional needs.
Something
changed for women after the burning the bra, sexual liberation days of the
sixties. I think it can be best described as being unprepared to take anymore
crap. Thus, the divorce rate skyrocketed. In the seventies and eighties you
entered marriage with a doubt in the back of your head – one that would never
go away – wondering if you and your partner would end up on the
one-of-every-two-marriages-that-failed heap. The relationship of the eighties
could be summarized down to women rightfully wanting more intimacy from their partners
and refusing to slot into the mother role. Men, as a result, no longer had a
clue what to do.
So
men drew on instinct and formed herds again. And the men’s group was born. Now
I’m sure many men would argue with me that there was tremendous value and
learning from these regular group occasions, and there had to have been. From
my perspective, in many of the bigger groups, there seemed to be a lot of noise
and channeling of aggression, but little discussion of how to do relationship
and meeting our partner’s needs in ways beyond the sexual. The problem was,
even if men did receive the benefit of this education, there would still remain
the question, what prevented them from doing relationship more consciously.
There
is an emotional condition that is rampant, that in my practice I have found to
be present in an enormous percentage of men. It is a kind of variation of the
Freudian oedipal complex. In most cases, in
particular for the parents of the baby boom generation, the emotional
needs of our mothers were not met by their husbands. Unconsciously, and without
the intent to harm, the mother transferred her needs onto the son, usually more
so, towards the eldest son. This resulted in there being greater emotional
reliance on the son than there should have been. The son then finds himself in
any one of these roles: protector, rescuer, confidant, advisor, being
responsible for his mother, nurturer and comforter. These are not roles a young
child is equipped to handle. When assuming these roles, the boy looses out on
part of his childhood and sometimes all of it.
It is
common for a boy, who has to go through this mother reliance to feel
energetically sucked dry by the needy mother. Energetically this is what is
happening. The mother draws on the energy of the son, and the son has little
knowledge of replenishing himself let alone knowing how to create the
boundaries to hold on to what energy he has. So then a push-pull relationship
occurs, where the son feels compelled to meet his mother’s needs. He moves towards
the mother, feels resentful and angry to be in what he feels to be an unnatural
role, moves away from her then feels guilty that he is letting her down by not
being there for her. The result: in relationships the grown man feels deathly
scared of intimacy with his partner, preferring emotional isolation to the
prospect of feeling his anger when he experiences “this kind of closeness
again.” Yes, it is mother transference
onto his partner. This is because there is an unresolved part inside him that still
does not know the difference between mother-son relationship and adult
partnership. He is not prepared to take the risk either. This is because the
original experience was so traumatic.
In
extreme cases I have known adult men whose whole lives are tied to their
mother. Where, on some unconscious level the mother knows that if she becomes
sick or needy the son will leave his job, his relationship, indeed his whole
life behind to fly to the other end of the country to be there for her. Believe
me I’ve seen it happen. Yet there is another part of him who hates sacrificing
himself in this way. The inability to see his mother suffer alone is greater,
and so his mother addiction wins.
How many
times have I heard on my session table, the emotional torment of the committed
partner, who sees the heart of her male partner and his potential for intimacy,
but who is incapable of opening up, wanting to get to know her, share her
spiritual interests or grow with her? Instead, he distracts himself, usually
with work or work related projects, sports or intellectual pursuits. There are
a lot of lonely women out there who find themselves forced to find alternative
intimate connections, usually with like-minded women, or in some cases,
like-minded men.
Consequently,
within the family, it is normally the woman who is the first to experience
growth and inner change, her passion and the emergence of her intrinsic power.
When this happens it causes a crisis in the family. The contract has changed.
The new family contract is very individual but usually it involves the woman
the need to be seen, appreciated, respected and not taken advantage of. This
calls for the family members to pull their own weight and basically growing up.
The spouse is asked to take measures to catch up, in his own self-growth. This
new contract puts all family members into a spin and their usual response is
fear. Fear speaks in a variety of ways: the kids act up, get angry more, are less
disciplined at school, are more belligerent and rebellious at home. I say the
kids and include the husband in this set up. Men are not good at declaring
their fear. If they fear, they generally get angry or withdraw.
This
is invariably a temporary phase that does blow over once the members concerned
get it that this change is safer and more self-satisfying than the previous
arrangement. The male spouse does go through a reassessment process. He is
often not too conscious of it. Inside he says this is not the woman I married,
she is not meeting my needs in the way I expected her to, is this what I want?
To be honest there is potential for him here to say “no this is not what I
want” and then find the same type of woman he had and marry her pretty quick. However,
the good news from my observations, is that a very high percentage of
bewildered husbands pull through in the best way they can and life goes on,
usually better than before, though he is often loath to admit it!
This
is a sign of the times. I believe this shake up is happening more and more
around us and will continue. This is the Age of Aquarius and we are well beyond
the dawning of it. There is a lecture I used to give in the Advanced Etheric
healing class where we broadly looked at the development of mankind through the
eyes of the chakras. I tell the class that Neanderthal man was operating
primarily from the first chakra. Notice his bent-knee stance and how close his
torso and therefore his first chakra is to the ground. Like the interests of the
first chakra he was concerned about survival, and as a nomad his main concern
was the time and location of his next meal, where he was to sleep and
procreational sex. The second chakra phase came into vogue when mankind formed
village communities. The nomad no longer had to hunt day after day for his
food; he could store it since they were now living in one place. This allowed
for specialization. The artist no longer had to hunt; he could create art and
develop utensils for the betterment of the community. The spiritually inclined
could concentrate on the health of the community, come to know the herbs and
medicines in the surrounding terrain, and develop ceremony to heal the sick.
Thus mankind came into relationship with his creativity, one of the prime interests
of the second chakra.
We
have been in the phase of the third chakra since the Renaissance. While the
second chakra is predominantly a feminine energetic area, the third is male.
And if you think of history since the Renaissance our world has been dominated
by male rulers, female queens, presidents or prime ministers - who have used
the largely aggressive approach of their male counterparts - the scientific
perspective and the development of the intellect. It has been the age of the
patriarchy that, for most of the last century in our society, resigned women to
second class citizens void even of voting privileges. It remains this way still
in much of the world. Sometime in this last decade the world reached the realm
of the heart chakra. It is this that qualified this age as being the new age or
the Age of Aquarius. The heart chakra is a feminine chakra, but it is also the
transformer centre. It is responsible for transforming the energies of the
physical into the energies of the spiritual so that the heart felt desires and
passions of the individual and the world may manifest. It is responsible for
spiritual energies to become physical, so that heaven may rest on earth, so
that we may experience spirit in all there is. There is an age dawning where we
will see a closer communion of physical and spiritual. The heart of the world
has to open. And the main requirement for this, unlike previous ages, is the
communion of the male and female of the world.
I believe for the last forty years the women of our society have been telling our men, “How you are is no longer working for me, you need to grow up and catch up.” When I look at my private practice and see that out of the last group of new clients I have received most of them have been men, I take heart with the feeling all is happening as it should. My hope is that a trend is occurring where more and more of our menfolk will continue to hear and honour the appeals from our womenfolk—for greater intimacy and fulfillment.