LONGING

 What is your heart’s deepest longing?

Over the last couple of years many of us have longed to connect with friends, to have the freedom to visit them, to travel overseas and resume a natural rhythm and autonomy. Our longing has many faces. It tries to get our attention, and yet we often push it to the recesses of our heart, trying to rationalise it away. Yet the more we try to banish it from our hearts the more it returns.

What You Want, Wants You.

Have you ever contemplated why we long for something in particular, why it doesn’t let go of you?

Our deepest longing comes from a movement in the soul beyond the ego, often an unconscious invite from our psyche, and if denied one’s soul finds a myriad of ways to get our attention. It can be a systemic longing, whereby the family soul longs for resolution or acknowledgement. Or it can be an unfulfilled part of ourselves longing to come into fruition more in our life. Longing for the truth, understanding, to be seen, heard or have a particular need being fully met. Or it could be a longing to connect with someone in particular as a way of soothing that part in oneself.

However our longing, it simply connects us from what has been banished.

One might ask oneself:

• What are the barriers I have built up against longing to avoid disappointment, hurt, grief, heartbreak?
• What story have I employed to protect myself from connecting?
• How have I packaged up my longing and stored it away?
• What won’t I give myself permission to live?
• What kind of life am I living keeping this deep longing at bay?

Our Longing Connects Us

What if our difficult behaviour was trying to get a need met?

I recently found myself dealing with values collisions conflict when reconnecting with family again after years of separation. My longing to connect with family after such a long time apart was immense, yet disguised as independence, sadness, lack of motivation, depression, exhaustion and the like. I needed the nourishment of family connection.

Longing for connection can be packaged up in challenging behaviour, strategies, a myriad of bids for connection, which can be hard to decipher. At times these behaviours trigger nervous systems, old wounds, beliefs that are loyal to sub-groups in families, yet the need for connection is fundamental in the behaviour.

Even our judgements about one another keep us connected!.

For example ‘in my hatred I remain connected to you’. It takes a lot of energy to keep another at a distance, to recycle the same disdainful story of hurt about the other, which in turn keeps us connected. We all have a need trying to be met in challenging behaviour.

Resistance empowers what is being resisted.

Feelings of disappointment point to longing unfulfilled, often appearing as a result of our connection cues not being decoded in a way that meets our needs. Our old attachment injuries become mobilised. We reject, isolate, withdraw and/or punish displaying ambivalent-anxiously attached traits. We are quite creative in our responses!

Our unmet longing can be painful, yet the key is to find the fundamental underlying need that is trying to be met, and in turn a new way of communicating that need to ourself and then others. There is never a conflict of needs, only a conflict of solutions!

Stories About Each Other Cause Suffering

Over time the inability to identify our needs trying to be met and to communicate these to ourself and others creates stories about others that support our inability to reach out, to ask for what we need, to discuss heart break. Our unquestioned beliefs cause suffering and more longing. To simply ask the questions: Is it true? Can I absolutely know this thought about the other to be true? Whilst answering from your heart.

Stories about each other can be created from generations of disappointment. Take a moment to look at the disappointment you carry for your gender in your family towards the opposite sex.

• What did your mother long for? Was she disappointed and enraged with your father? If so, what stories were adopted from her about the opposite sex?
• What did your father long for? Was he disappointed and enraged towards your mother? If so, what stories were adopted from him about the opposite sex?
• Who are you loyal to? How does this play out in your relationships?
• What sub-groups were formed in your family? Whose longing did they fulfil? What was the unfulfilled need that was trying to be met?

Who would you be without these stressful stories? What connections would you make without them?

We Inherent Our Nervous System

Whose longing is it?

Not only do we at times inherit our longing but we also inherit our nervous system. Imagine our parents being brought up in war times, food scarcity, and the anxiety created from those experiences they carried that we responded to as children. Systemic trauma alters how we parent. What happened to our parents and what happened to their parents is told in our body. Our bodies are the family story. In turn how we were parented creates survival strategies, known as attachment styles endeavouring to get our needs met, yet each comes with a longing embedded deeply within it.

Attachment styles are created many generations back.

For an ambivalent-anxiously attached person, systemic trauma is often the theme in the family lineage. For someone who is more avoidant-anxiously attached, loss, grief appears in the family lineage.

Ambivalent-anxiously attached, are external regulators, ie ‘you do me’, yet will reject the other, blame and punish. Their greatest fear is they will be rejected and abandoned so they get in before anyone else does, yet their greatest longing is for the needy part to be fully met and held, to be completely got. Getting those needs met for a ‘wave’ as we colloquially address these styles, can be quite dramatic at times. They fear there needs are ‘too much’ for others to hold. The longing is simply to be held and met in the depth of the need.

An Avoidant-anxious person are internal regulators, ie ‘you do you’ and I do me’. They separate, withdraw and isolate themself as they long for space, fearing being swamped by other’s needs, yet cannot fully regulate themself independently. Yet in truth longing for connection and someone to come and get them by gently inviting them off their self-imposed island.

Securely attached individuals have enough secure interactions with parents where their needs were met that they are capable of going and getting their needs met, by talking about it, inviting the other into connection having developed an intrapersonal intelligence that can be communicated easily with themselves and others.

Looking Longing in the Eyes

“The bigger the judgement, the bigger the longing” Bertold Ulsamer

Contemplating Bertold Ulsamer’s quote whilst reflecting on a Family Constellation workshop I took a couple of months ago, I was reminded how we are strengthened by looking at longing in the eyes, inviting it in, opening to it, surrendering to the feelings, rather than quashing them. Workshop participants were invited to look deeply in the eyes of longing. Longing revealed its true nature, it came alive in them, strengthened them as they stopped running from it and expanded their hearts. We build walls around our longing and judge anything, or anyone that comes close at times.

• What would happen if you stopped running away from your longing to connect?
• What if you were honest with yourself about all the strategies you have employed to keep yourself safe from connecting?

As Richard Schwartz highlights in Internal Family Systems Therapy, we have an internal ecology of parts, each doing different jobs, some of these are overly protective and get in the way of our longing and of reaching out.

In acknowledging this, the invite is to look where the most judgement is and look at it in the eyes.

• How does that protective strategy work within you?
• What happens within you when you thank those parts who have guarded you from getting disappointed in unmet longing?
• What does this part protect you from?

What happens when you give that part, that was being protected room space within you, to feel, breathe, be seen, be understood, come alive in oneself. Let it tell its story through your own body. Opening to the feelings, yearning, hurt, fears simply letting your whole being experience the array of feelings inherent in this moment in your life revealed.

• What does it need from you now that it didn’t get back then?
• What happens to that part of you that was being protected, when that need is offered?
• What changes in your being in relation to the world? 
• What quietens and opens in you when you soothe that part calling?

Our longing is a pull to connect to parts of ourself calling, to life in its fullness and to each other.

What would happen if you fully opened to your longing?