Most people understand that the major cause of relationship failure is a lack of communication-and they are absolutely correct. Poor communication is the basis of most relationship failure but unfortunately knowing this rarely resolves the issue. As partners who’ve “talked themselves until blue in the face” know-talking is not necessarily communication. Often in an effort to remedy a deteriorating relationships partners make an effort to commit themselves to spending more time expressing themselves, sharing their thoughts and desires and acting kinder and more appreciative to each other. This I strongly recommend, yet this improvement may last only days, weeks or even months. Sooner or later the deeper current of unresolved guilt raises its nasty head, sometimes awkwardly and other times quite subtly. Most of us have watched as a partner did a Jekyll and Hyde – one moment at ease, the next a snarling grizzly bear.

UNRESOLVED GUILT

The real source of tension and conflict in a relationship is guilt. Unhealed guilt from transgressions committed and withheld is like old paint which seeps through a thin top coating masking the corrosion beneath. Transgressions can be real or imagined, it makes no difference. A transgression can be as obvious as infidelity or as subtle as a violation of a picture of perfection or ideal that is in the super ego and used by the ego to judge compatibility. Yet whatever is its root. Slapping a coat of “pink paint” over a sense of guilt and using denial or rationalizations’ “veneer” doesn’t last. The Ego reasserts itself and its need to be right. Painting on rust or corrosion feeds the erosive process already in progress. Eventually criticisms and judgments return and the tranquility lost. Soon there is unconscious projecting or transferring these repressed feelings onto the other in an attempt to deny the sense of guilt and get it “out” of your mind. These are manifested as fault finding begins with your partner. Once you start on the ego’s roller coaster ride of projecting guilt, small idiosyncrasies or minor faults become overwhelming obstacles that cause you to wonder if you should just leave.

Leaving; causing a separation is what the egos purpose is about. Separating, leaving and getting away from the one person who reminds you most of the transgressions which you have committed but have repressed into your unconscious mind/body. Safely buried inside, these denied mistakes are like closing the lid on a jack in the box. The slightest sense you may have been discovered, trips the spring mechanism, causing the repression to spring up and out at the other person, preventing you from looking inside at your hidden guilt.

Transgressions begin as we set up pictures of perfection and unreasonable ideals in our super ego that we believed in childhood we must live up to in order to get our needs met as a child and be loved by our caretakers. Each super ego ideal is a transgression against our true Self that is pure, free and forever. The love we now seek we believe will only be given to us if we live up to this picture of perfection. This traps us in our mind causing us to become caught in the forgetfulness of who we’re not – not good enough, not lovable, not pure and free, not whole or complete as we are.

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‘Healing and Building Relationships ©2006-Brian Sheen C.A.M. - www.spiritgrowth.com