[written 1980 when I was 28]
In brief, the double-bind situation consists of the following: the communicating persons are in a relationship in which at least one is dependent on the continuation of the relationship. This person cannot break out, it would be a violation of the rules of the game (e.g. suicide). The dependent person is now exposed to at least two messages or orders which contradict each other but are contained in the same communication. For example, the mother says to the child: 'Come my darling' and with her body she expresses hatred - the exact opposite - or 'be spontaneous'
The only possible solution is to break the rules of the game by, for example, running away from home, but a small child cannot do that. It is handed to the parents. Not to mention that it may be either impossible or associated with the greatest guilt for the child to start thinking on a higher level (meta-level). My experience - which may sound surprising - is that all of us who have survived this paradoxical game have been aware of it on a more or less unconscious level, but we have kept it secret and perhaps forgotten or repressed it. This is my experience from therapy.
Perhaps the most important thing about double-bind is that it only exists when there is a dependency relationship. Whether it is imagined is immaterial. The point is that it is experienced as an addictive relationship.
In AAO, we understood a priori a human being as a being who needed love from others. We did not define man as a being who could also give love to others. In advance, before the study had begun, we had decided to consider man mainly from that point of view. And this meant that we worked mostly with the need for love and considerably less with man's capacity to give or share with others. And our results became a self-fulfilling prophecy: in therapy we all turned out to need love, reinforced by the childhood lack of love. That in practice we often have to go through many of the pains and double-binds of childhood to become more loving and compassionate is another matter. The important thing was that we had settled on a particular view beforehand, and our therapeutic methods were geared to this a priori definition, so the result could not but confirm the assumption.
But this assumption acted as a double-bind. The rule of the game was: 'You need others, therefore you need the group.' Meditation is a means of reversing this process, and significantly, self-empowerment groups still do not work with meditation. Indeed, it could call into question one of the rules of the game. Although in our Danish group it was not conscious, this was probably one of the reasons why we dissolved the group and sought new ways, including meditation.
The most difficult childhood double-bind for me to get out of so far is the following: after a few years of marriage (I was born around the beginning of the marriage), my father and mother had no love relationship, but stayed together due to norms and anxiety. They both thought it would benefit the children. My mother was not allowed by her foster parents to get the education she wanted. After graduating from high school, she was forced by her foster parents to earn money, even though the school principal tried to convince them that she had the ability to graduate. In short, she was not allowed to live the life she wanted.
Fortunately, she was intelligent enough not to have forgotten this and thus to have passed on her parents' neurosis to her children in revenge, as so often happens. She did everything possible to allow me and my sister to choose what we wanted. She set very few standards and restrictions for us, which unfortunately also led to us having to make our own choices in some cases, where we could have used some positive authority. In short, she sacrificed herself with all her love right up to her death.
My father was almost the opposite: an old, mostly intellectual and emotionless wimp. I don't remember much of my connection to my father, so I often looked for a positive father more or less unconsciously, but I guess most people do until they find him in themselves.
To put it briefly, my mother was now trying to live her own misspent youth through her children. What she had not experienced and been given the opportunity to do, we now had to live for her. And in her zeal, it could not go fast enough. Already when I was about eight years old I was going to be a man or a young man, as they call it. I was far from finished being a boy, and in the raising to be a 'real' man my father was probably able to help a little. When I was only six years old, for example, I could play both chess and contract bridge! My parents and a friend of theirs needed a feathered husband, so it was me. Now we're approaching double-tie.
My mother wanted me to become a 'real' man as soon as possible, so that her hopes could come true. My father gave my mother nothing, and she could not afford to get love from another man. So I had to replace my father in his position, but I could only do that if I became a man quickly.
At eight years old, I needed to be loved as a little boy and not as a man, and now I was put in a double bind, even if my mother meant it well enough: my mother said to me indirectly and symbolically: 'I love you only if you are a man.' Now if I chose to be a little boy, I would get no love. If I chose to play a man, then I would not get the love and acceptance that I really wanted, namely the acceptance and love of being a boy.
I chose to play man since my 8th year until about 25, when I began to show that I needed love like the little boy I had hidden away to survive. I chose the option that at least gave me some love. It cost me on the other hand that I skipped puberty by a mighty long jump, and my puberty I had to go through slowly much later and is not finished yet.
In therapy I have repeatedly encountered this double-bind with my mother: I have raged, cried and all sorts of other things, lived out many of the repressed feelings until I found that I had to accept as it has been and that I cannot change the past but must accept and understand it. Although I don't feel that I am finished with it, at least I have been able to turn my attention to it when it appears in reality, where before I couldn't see it.
Only now after many relationships with more or less love from the heart (usually mostly the need for love) can I slowly 'see' how this double-bind created by my mother has affected me.
In the first relationships I did not dare to show emotionally, i.e. non-verbally, that I needed the other for fear of being rejected. After I had started with psychotherapy and life in the self-expression group I slowly dared to show it. And as I accepted that I needed others, I dared more and more to show the little boy in me. And at the same time I have become more aware of the game I am playing and have played to avoid this.
In short, the game is this: I am attracted to a woman, I sense that she is attracted to me, but I must somehow create a situation where I am not the first to express her need for love. If she has first expressed her need for love to me, then I can, without risk of rejection, express mine to her as well. If I can make her believe that I am or have something that she is not or has and needs, without communicating it directly (this happens in the situation itself on my part unconsciously, but it is me who does it and only afterwards can I possibly see it), then I have fixed her or made her dependent on me, i.e. I have power over her. The fact that she may be playing a similar game is ignored here.
I have played this game countless times by playing the therapist role, i.e. the one who is or knows more. Often I have played it for a long time into a relationship (sometimes throughout the relationship) until I felt comfortable enough to show who I was behind my therapist mask.
She is forbidden to communicate on a meta level as this would reveal my game as game. The difficulty for her in our love-poor atomized nuclear family-structured society is that in order to expose my game she has to break both her own internalized taboos and external taboos in society (which are two sides of the same coin).
She could say, 'I need love, but it doesn't necessarily have to be from you. You are taking advantage of my need for love and the difficulty of finding love in this society. You know very well that it is taboo to break into an existing relationship, you know that I am afraid to say this for fear of being rejected by you, etc.'
And if she said this, I could start a backlash: 'Well, you don't love me, then?' and put her in a new double bind. It's not enough for her to say she loves me. This is not love. Love is spontaneous and must be shown in practice. And if, contrary to all expectations (people who know this situation will probably agree with me), she manages to show love spontaneously, I could say: 'Now you're just showing it because I expect it, and then it's not spontaneous.' And so the game can go on and you get nowhere. And there are countless variations of this relationship game.
The AAO tried to solve this paradox and taboo by declaring the taboo of relationships dissolved, went to the diametrically opposite extreme by both declaring relationships taboo and introducing - not free love - but free sexuality, thereby throwing the baby (love) out with the bathwater at the beginning of the development. As described earlier, love became more and more prominent and people accepted ideologically - because of experience - both relationships, love and free sexuality. I have recently talked to one of my friends from Friedrichshof and have had it confirmed that love is coming out more and more. So the question is not relationships or not, but how relationships.
The theoretical problem arose from the practical difficulty of distinguishing between love from the heart and attraction due to unconscious projections. The AAO tackled this problem by initially 'banning' relationships in order to work therapeutically with anxiety, jealousy etc. and this was a hard road, admittedly. Once these emotions have become more conscious and integrated, it is possible to find the middle ground, i.e. to find out at any point what is right for me.
What is interesting to me is that the same trend is seen in Bhagwan's commune in Poona, i.e. love is the essential thing and there is no taboo about it being given to only one person. Each person has to choose for himself. Therefore it is possible to have several love relationships together with or without sexuality. The problem is jealousy, and it is one of the most unpleasant emotions to be confronted with, but it is possible to get rid of it so much or possibly completely (I am not) that it does not overpower you completely.
And this is one of the points of psychic development. The feeling of jealousy is, among other things, that you are afraid of tomorrow, i.e. you are afraid of living here and now, but when you become more capable of this, you love the person you are with here and now without thinking or being afraid of whether A will reject you because of this.
As far as my experience and information goes, both Friedrichshof and the now about 20 other self-expression groups in Europe and the municipality of Poona, in terms of love, relationships, sexuality, etc. and before reaching the final goal, the liberation from the ego, each individual must choose whether he or she wants to live in parallel in time in one or more love relationships, have sexual relations with one or more, etc.
In the AAO we took the 'hard' way by voluntarily throwing ourselves violently into the jealousy feeling, worked with it therapeutically in order to be free of it as quickly as possible, and this means again that the group functioned better, the more who could free themselves as quickly as possible. Furthermore, we decided not to have sexual relations outside the group, which was therapeutically a good remedy, but in my opinion humanly not good. this rule still exists I do not know.
In Poona, where there is no closed group in the same sense as in the self-expression groups, there are no rules or taboos about communication and it is up to the individual how he or she wants to work with therapy, meditation, etc., together with the freedom about partners. Compared to the self-empowerment groups, the process of freeing oneself from jealousy is probably slower, but takes place in a more loving atmosphere. From my presentation it is probably clear which way I now prefer. But when I met AAO, I knew too little about Poona and dismissed it further as 'mystical', 'religious flip' etc.
From my earlier account of the AAO it is clear that we had to deal a lot with the double-bind games in relationships, jealousy etc. and on this point the therapists at Friedrichshof are absolutely competent.
To avoid misunderstandings: therapy, meditation etc. about e.g. jealousy does not cause this feeling to disappear from one's psychic system. At the beginning of therapy, for example, you express all the repressed jealousy that you have not expressed for, say, 30 years, and then it is necessarily strong. By being able to accept that one contains an emotion like jealousy, one can come to a state where without repressing it one lets it come out, i.e. either yogically for oneself or tantrically for others as well. The point is that one does not suppress it, but accepts it each time, and thereby it loses its 'overpowering' character and intensity.
Now back to my description of play in relationships and my own play: If this sounds uncomfortable to anyone, I can only say that it is. And it is just as - if not more ! - unpleasant to have to admit that I have played and partly still play this game. It hurts, but so does all development, but just becoming aware of it is a great help instead of 'sleeping' through life.
Regarding the so-called patient-therapist relationship (as Watts has described in 'Psychotherapy and Society' - not entirely 'true' in my opinion), I have only once experienced patient and therapist being in the same boat. After she ('the therapist') had helped me to express my repressed need for love in the form of a deep cry, her own tears slowly began to trickle down her cheeks and she cried as intensely as I had done.
Suddenly the whole situation changed: 'patient' and 'therapist' disappeared and what remained were two human beings. There was no question of my now being 'therapist' and her 'patient' - this had been possible - but it was as if we were both not there as persons, as separate individuals. We were not communicating, but were in unity. Our hearts were the same.
This perception taught me what therapy really is or should be: love, not patient and therapist, but two whole people not trying to prove the illusion of being one ego separate from other egos. Two people (not just the so-called patient) who dare to be themselves. The 'therapist' referred to is also the sannyasin of Bhagwan, who has spoken beautifully about the difference between 'communication' (between two minds or egos) and 'communion' (between two hearts). Lovers do not need to talk to 'reach' each other.
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