Who Are You Dancing With
Tango, “Dirty Dancing”, even the awkward box-style slow dances of awkward pre-teens in a middle school gym have the opportunity to draw us into their moving metaphor. Human dance is an opportunity to watch bodies shift and contort in a rhythmic expression of the interpersonal realm, the politics of human connection. We love to dance and to watch dance because it is a hypnotic expression of who we are. Bodies touching and not touching, leaning in and pulling apart tell us a story about how we touch, how we move and and most importantly , how we love. It is an art form of the most visceral kind. It has the power to mesmorize us by showing us in physical form what we often cannot say with words.
But what if we worked backwards, what if we used the metaphor of the dance to tell us something about how we are trying to “dance” with those we love in real terms. Are we clumsily bouncing off one another, tripping over each other’s feat in an awkward display of our inability to connect? Are we seamlessly binding our emotional bodies around one another, wrapped in one another’s arms in a demonstration of deep connection or even co-dependance? Have you ever thought about it?
We are always looking for dance partners. On an unconscious level (or at least at speeds moving so fast that it is nearly impossible to perceive the process) we are scanning our interpersonal environment looking for clues to our comfort, our compatibility and ultimately our happiness. Ans while on the surface that may seem a harmless enough process, if we dig a little deeper, we often find that what we are scanning for may not be in our best interest.
Over the decades that scholars in the fields of psychotherapy and psychology have been studying the processes involved in interpersonal relationships and numerous theories of why people repeat stale and painful relationship patterns have emerged to help us understand why it is that so many of us find ourselves repeating patterns. And while the jury is still out (or is at least having a complicated deliberation) one thing is clear, human beings have a knack for repeating their trauma. In an instant, we seem to be able to play out the whole script and choose a partner who is likely to bring us back to group zero regardless of how painful that space is.
In an upcoming entry, I will talk about how Mindfulness can help us move on from these painful patterns, but for now, a few questions. Do you find yourself repeating old relationship tropes? Are you being hurt again and again? Are you taken in by passionate excitement in the first days and weeks of your relationships? If so, you may be inadvertently playing a role in your own trauma by unconsciously selecting for familiar experiences. In your search for excitement, you may be searching for familiarity without knowing it. While we would all like to believe in love at first sight, experience tells us that this might be the receipt for future pain.
For now, take some time to study your mind. When you quietly take the opportunity to notice the thoughts, feelings and other phenomena that float across your inner world during your interpersonal moments. Do you notice any instincts to move toward or away from certain thoughts or feelings? Do certain elements of your experience pull you in while others cause you to retract? If we can learn to quietly and without effort or judgement increase our awareness of these experiences all happening within our mind, we can begin to notice the subtle ebbs and flow of emotion that can be determining who we are choosing to love and who we are choosing to avoid. It is here that the key to changing our dance card begins to emerge.