The Beginning (Part 2), Looking with Curiosity.

I see that when the protagonist is just beginning, the drama still speaks through them, especially when the familiar dances kick up in their lives. You hear them enact well-worn ways they turn resentfully away or fearfully choke down their words or give themselves permission to lash out You hear the same excuses, the same protective strategies, the old wounds on stage.

It’s a confusing time and dangerous period for couples when one partner is not aligned sufficiently to Inspiration, yet they think they have radically changed.

Don’t you dare doubt their account.

Don’t you dare point out how they still seem to be enacting drama.

When you hear Transactional. games like Look How Hard I’ve Tried or Look What You Made Me Do, it’s obvious that they are still immersed in the Fallen World. The mirror of who they are in the world is distorted. Relationships still become courtrooms. They still use contempt gestures. Eye-rolling. There is a flicker of a snarl, gallows laugh.

In this time, which is early in the Work, if we believe our Abnormal Persona’s own press, then we can fool selves and we can be robbed of the determination to continue our Work because, clearly, “I am the victim here chained to a partner who is obviously deliberately triggering me, making my compassion and openness impossible.”

Poor me. And if our partner is willing to believe our Abnormal soliloquies, justification, mystification, masquerades, or are too nervous to challenge the self-serving story of our great triumph, then they will feel blamed, gaslighted, and crazy. And ever more hopeless.

After one such an encounter between partners, a woman sent me a text, “I know he is really trying hard, but I don’t seem to know how to be what he wants. Is there any way you can hypnotize me out of my feelings?”