It took me months to read Riane Eisler’s Sacred Pleasure, trying to absorb as much of her wealth as possible. Sacred Pleasure is actually a continuation of Dr. Eisler’s The Chalice and The Blade. It is an in-depth analysis of historical gender relations in intimate relationships and sexuality. It is not just about the oppression and repression of women and the harm that has been done to them. Dr. Eisler also addresses the harm inflicted on men who are forced to maintain the lopsided, patriarchal, often violent dominator system under which we all live to a greater or lesser degree. This imposed dominator system has left our intimate relationships, to say the least, fractured.
In Western cultures there seems to be a real drive to regain the intimacy and association that nature intended to be the basis of the bond between men and women. But I think the reality is that we have so many patterns to unlearn and so many reconstructions to do that, although we can see the problems clearly, it is far from clear how to deal with them.
I’ve thought about this a lot and one thing I keep coming back to is the importance of the simple ability to identify and communicate your own feelings. Obviously, it also helps to live in a “free” society and since the United States is the only society that I have first-hand knowledge of, you can assume that is the context in which I am working. Of course, if you live in a society where women have restricted personal freedom, then learning to identify and communicate feelings is not the first step in creating a more egalitarian society or improving intimate relationships.
But, to get back to my point, I have noticed that my young son and I in particular refer to and react to a wide range of emotions, uncomfortable and unhappy, such as anger. It seems that our range for identifying emotions is extremely narrow. And more often than not, when I identify my strong negative emotions as anger, I’m not even sure why I’m angry. This leads me to the belief that I am misidentifying some negative emotions, most likely feelings of fear, worry, and frustration, such as anger.
There is a long history of buried emotions in both women and men. In particular, I think that women tend to bury their negative emotions, while men tend to bury their positive feelings. When I was a child, I remember asking my mother what happened to her when she seemed sad, angry, or upset. The common answer I got was “nothing”. So, not to blame, but only for the purpose of identifying my own shortcomings, this dialogue is my basis for identifying and sharing my feelings: “What’s wrong?” “Any.”
A common communication pattern for the men in my family is teasing. In the absence of a more positive way of relating, men generally use teasing as their only means of connecting or relating to family members. Again, this is a way of trying to show positive feelings by communicating negatively. There is nothing more twisted than this!
These are my observations so far towards the goal of cracking the code for harmful relationship patterns. Because, as Dr. Eisler correctly points out, until we restore and recreate healthy ways of interacting in our intimate relationships, there is not much chance of learning nonviolent conflict resolution on a planetary scale.