Relationships

It’s not like this interbeing thing is easy for me. I did a pretty good job of isolating myself in separation early in life, so frankly it’s a long road home. Of course it is for all of us. The point is to just start walking. Those first steps look a lot more like watching than they do moving though. It’s enough to start by noticing what might be off about how we are processing and doing life. 

This past week I have been reading The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible by Charles Eisenstein. Again, I highly recommend this book for this particular moment in time. It is helping me to think through relationships in particular. This has very much been a process for me, and one that has been unfolding over a long time with input from various sources as well as direct life experiences and experimentation. What I know for sure at this point is that I have a long way to go yet. So deeply ingrained is our Story of Separation. 

My current point of contemplation is surrounding a certain response that seems to have become common in our relationships these days. I have personally gotten this one more than once from more than one person in recent years. The words are almost always exactly the same: “That’s on you.” This has become a typical response to feedback from somebody that indicates that something that we did or said resulted in that person feeling this way or that way (notice that I said resulted, not caused, just in case your dukes are already up to start defending the comment). I have to admit here that I am usually at the receiving end of this response rather than the giving, but truth be told I have been on both ends of it. Being at the giving end of the comment, I understand completely where it is coming from and the impulse to set healthy boundaries that it originates from. I get it. On the receiving end of it, however, what always crosses my mind is, “yes and no.” And I think that response gets a little more at the complexity of relationship than the hardline border of “that’s on you” does. So let’s dig in. 

First, yes, we have learned a lot from the vaults of codependency. We have learned that it isn’t actually healthy to take responsibility for others. We have learned that it is not only unhealthy for us, but it is in fact disempowering to another person to try to “fix” or “heal” him/her/they. I agree wholeheartedly with this assessment. I also believe that codependency comes from an incorrect understanding of what is what, in other words from a faulty worldview. And, yes, I have been more than guilty of this one in my life. So by all means, we should not try to take over anyone else’s life process or self-realization. In this sense, whatever anyone is experiencing at any given moment in time is first and foremost “on them.”

Only it’s not quite that simple. Let’s deepen the discussion by bringing Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Five Agreements or Byron Katie’s The Work into the equation. They provide deep insights into what messes up our relationships. And that is largely that we take things personally that are not actually personal. I don’t know about you, but I am guilty as charged on this one too. Take it from a sensitive, I quite naturally take just about everything personally! And I also tend to take personal responsibility for just about everything, which is at the root of the aforementioned codependency. All of this leads to a painful experience. So maybe it is no surprise to hear that I also wholeheartedly agree with the insights that both of them have afforded us, as the wisdom they have brought forth helps to relax our triggers and get over our inflated sense of self.

Ah, our triggers. That is what this all boils down to in the end, isn’t it? In a nutshell, our triggers are the buttons that activate our childhood wounds. Touch one and the whole wound relives itself in real time (which almost always is an exaggerated response to whatever actually just happened). Anytime we are upset about something, we are triggered. We are remembering the original wound, the original moment when the experience of the harshness of separation shocked and hurt us. It is nobody’s fault. It is not the triggering person’s fault (the person who put his/her/they finger on the button) any more than it is the triggered person’s fault. It’s just a reality of our experience from within the Story of Separation. It can’t be helped. But it can be understood, and that understanding is what will start to shift us out of that story and into one in which such things don’t occur. Hard to imagine, right? 

As I said in the beginning, we have a ways to go yet. So let’s just try to keep working on the understanding. So far, nothing that I have said contradicts the assertion “that’s on you.” So why is it that I sense that it doesn’t tell the full story? At issue is the true nature, the reality or lack thereof, of the separate self. To cut to the chase, the separate self doesn’t really exist. That is to say that the truth of the matter is that there is nowhere that we can draw a clear line of distinction between where you end and where I begin. Now what? Now who is it on? See what I mean?

Delving further into this separate self business, I often take my students through a thought experiment to help them to lift the veil on the self. It goes something like this. Think about the food that you eat. When it comes into your body and is digested, some of it gets metabolized into the energy that fuels you, some of it gets discarded as waste back out into your environment, and some of it actually becomes you… which is to say that it is utilized to replace dying cells in your body which are also then discarded back out into the environment as waste. The question is, when does the matter that starts out as food start being you (or your actions) and when does it end being you? Can you draw that line? 

For those of you who may still be operating under the belief that you are not one with your body, the same line of questioning can also be applied to all of the non-material inputs that you are metabolizing and which constitute who you are. Those ideas in your head did not originate in your head. They were given to you by someone or something outside of yourself. For example, we weren’t born with our worldview. It was given to us by our culture. When, then, does an idea start being yours and once you put it back out into the world, when does it stop being yours? Can you draw that line?

What I am getting at is that we are not actually separate selves in an objective world. Our very being is relational. That is to say that who we are is defined by our relationships with everything and everyone in our environment. Eisenstein refers to the well-proven theory from social psychology called “situationism” to explain this phenomenon. Situationism indicates that who we are is actually the sum total of all of our experiences (aka relationships). Not only are we the sum total of our relationships, but we actually don’t and can’t exist absent them. 

So back to my question… who is it on? Who is responsible for who we are and how we are responding? It isn’t quite so clear now, is it? Maybe the sensitive in me is right. Maybe the sensitive in me understands that interbeing is the truth. Maybe. I won’t take it quite that far as I think that the truth is paradoxical. It always is. That is to say it is a case of both/and. In this case, there are some deep truths to be integrated from learning to say “that’s on you.” There are. I would like to suggest, however, that it would be a mistake to simply leave it at that. That would be to miss the whole other side of the coin.

So here is my evolving theory on this front. In the above diagram, the “you” and “me” bubbles represent the illusion of our separate selves. Incidentally, I do not mean to malign these illusions or our sense of self. We have to have one in order to be here. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with perceiving a self. Nor is there anything whatsoever wrong with drawing a boundary around this self. In fact we have to. It is absolutely necessary that we do so in order to exist in the relative realm. Good boundaries are part of maintaining a healthy, functioning, value-adding self that can participate in the larger whole of which it is a part.

That said, if we understand the self to be a truly separate, independently originated, and fixed self, then we reduce the possibility of our interactions with one another down to simple transactions. That is to say that the interaction between you and me is nothing more than a value exchange, where we give this for that, and the this for that had better be equal if balance is to be maintained. Otherwise one of us, either you or I, will end up depleted. We all have experienced this one, haven’t we? This is another inescapable experience of the Story of Separation. 

When we understand ourselves to be relational beings, a completely different picture emerges. Rather than separate you and separate me merely transacting with one another, when we truly relate with one another we begin to experience not just our interdependency, but our interbeing. In essence, a third energetic being is born. In my diagram above her name is YouMe. I would argue this is what always happens when we enter into relationship (any relationship of any kind) with somebody, but since we don’t conceptualize it this way we tend to make a complete and utter mess of it. From this perspective, “that’s on you” completely misses the mark. It becomes like saying to a hungry five year old “that’s on you, the kitchen is over there.” Who is responsible for the five year old? 

Well, in the end, if we want that five year old to grow into her full potential and contribute her own unique perspective and gifts to the world, then our best bet is find a way to hold space for her in her own self-realization. This is tricky business as any parent knows. It requires constantly navigating thin lines between nurture vs. smothering, interdependence vs. dependence, and so on. Sometimes we do have to say “that’s on you.” Yet at the same time we have to know that this thought is only one small slip away from gaslighting another person. Isn’t it? I don’t think it is any small coincidence that “that’s on you” has emerged at the same time that gaslighting has become a thing. Again, this is in no way meant to negate setting healthy boundaries and learning to properly allow others their own process of self-realization. Those are critical. 

The truth is much more complex than any simple prescription for how to show up to a relationship. That’s all I’m saying. For me, I am contemplating what is required of me to foster a healthy YouMe while also fostering a healthy Me. I can’t promise anyone that I am going to master it any time soon. All I can say is that I am committed to getting better and better at it. I imagine that if we were all working from such a framework, our relationships would become a whole lot healthier, more loving, and more joyful. If that isn’t motivation enough, then how about the realization that YouMe is a whole lot more powerful than either You or Me alone. Not just twice as powerful, but exponentially more powerful in imagining and creating the world which we inhabit. Add a third person to the energetic mix and we discover the truth of what God meant by “when three or more gather in my name.” We discover the infinite power of interbeing. I don’t know about you, but I’m game.