The truth about intimate relationships is that they can never be any better than our relationship with ourselves.

James Hollis

Categorized in : Intimate Relationships Intimate Our Relationship

To become a person does not necessarily mean to be well adjusted, well adapted, approved of by others. It means to become who you are. We are meant to become more eccentric, more peculiar, more odd. We are not meant just to fit in. We are here to be different. We are here to be the individual.

being-yourself differences mean

The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes.

voice knowing hero

In the second half of life, the questions become: 'Who, apart from the roles you play, are you? What does the soul ask of you? Do you have the wherewithal to shift course, to deconstruct your painfully achieved identity, risking failure, marginalization and loss of collective approval?' No small task.

What I refuse to face within myself will meet me in the exterior world through you, not as you are, but as I have so construed you.

refuse faces world

How many of those who are insecure seek power over others as a compensation for inadequacy and wind up bringing consequences down upon their heads and those around them? How many hide out in their lives, resist the summons to show up, or live fugitive lives, jealous, projecting onto others, and then wonder why nothing ever really feels quite right. How many proffer compliance with the other, buying peace at the price of soul, and wind up with neither?

insecure jealous wind

We are not here to fit in...we are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being...we are here to become more and more ourselves.

mosaics different self

We are all meaning-seeking, meaning creating creatures and when we experience the loss of meaning, we suffer.

creating suffering loss

We serve the world by finding out what feeds us, and, having been fed, then share our gifts with others.

feds share world

In the end, we are only tiny frightened animals, doing our best to survive amid other tiny frightened animals.

tiny ends animal

We best serve intimate relationship by becoming sufficiently developed in ourselves that we do not need to feed off others.

becoming intimate-relationships needs

Today, as we have seen, fascism and communism are discredited, but are replaced by a paraphilic consumer culture driven by fantasy, desperately in search of distractions and escalating sensations, and a fundamentalist culture wherein the rigors of a private journey are shunned in favor of an ideology that, at the expense of the paradoxes and complexities of truth, favors one-sided resolutions, black-and-white values, and a privileging of one's own complexes as the norm for others.

black-and-white journey today

To experience some healing within yourself, and to contribute healing to the world, you are summoned to wade through the muck from time to time.

wade healing world

The purpose of therapy is not to remove suffering but to move through it to an enlarged consciousness that can sustain the polarity of painful opposites.

opposites inspirational moving

The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young.

able simple world

A neurosis is wherever we are allied against our true nature.

true-nature neurosis

Learning to live with ambiguity is learning to live with how life really is, full of complexities and strange surprises.

ambiguity surprise strange

The capacity for growth depends on one's ability to internalize and to take personal responsibility. If we forever see our life as a problem caused by others, a problem to be 'solved,' then no change will occur.

growth responsibility forever

Doubt is a profound and effective spiritual motivation. Without doubt, no truism is transcended, no new knowledge found, no expansion of the imagination possible. Doubt is unsettling to the ego and those who are drawn to ideologies that promise the dispelling of doubt by preferring certainties never grow.

motivation imagination spiritual

One of the most powerful shocks of the Middle Passage is the collapse of our tacit contract with the universe-the assumption that if we act correctly, if we are of good heart and good intentions, things will work out. We assume a reciprocity with the universe. If we do our part, the universe will comply. Many ancient stories, including the Book of Job, painfully reveal the fact that there is no such contract, and everyone who goes through the Middle Passage is made aware of it.

powerful jobs book

The only requisite to entry into the Middle Passage is to have discovered that one does not know who one is, that there are no rescuers, no Mommy or Daddy, and that one's fellow travelers will do well to survive themselves.

daddy middle doe