“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You avoided meaningful (underlined) emotional encounters with each other often as a result. Neither of your ideas were tempered by the ideas of the other, therefore, nor were your feelings about these life problems. The rich emotional contact and encounters that are possible between you became clogged by inhibition and fears. Because of his particular nature, these agreements on your part to avoid such issues, and the resulting lack of positive encounters, was more damaging to Ruburt.

The breaking of schedules is extremely beneficial for you also and would have made your outside job less burdensome in the past. It serves to give you a feeling of freedom, and open the way to unstructured emotional release. This, with the information given in the last session, if followed, can help you greatly, and clear Ruburt’s symptoms; but not if the advice is not followed.

Now. To the both of you, unconsciously, an emotional encounter means an encounter with unpleasant emotions. You have both done a job of hiding your emotions from each other, even more than your thoughts.

Reasons have been given to you in the past, but you can break the habit now by expressing your emotions to each other, and so indeed you must. One of the deep disappointments that neither of you have faced is the difference between what your personal relationship is and what it could and should be.

The sexual aspect is but a symptom of this. You were both afraid in varying degrees of emotional contact of a strong nature. In the early days or years of your relationship these patterns were submerged largely. Your tendency to avoid such encounters was much more apparent then than Ruburt’s.

Your habits both became extremely sloppy in that regard, and it was easy for both of you to justify the lack of increasingly rewarding emotional interaction by saying it went into your separate work, and into our work.

As repressions built up then emotional encounters did seem to be unpleasant, for only when one of you became thoroughly uncomfortable and desperate did you really open emotionally to the other. It is a testament to the strength of your love and mutual commitment that you did not run into far greater problems.

Now Ruburt took this out physically, and blocked emotions, not from the distant past but a current life-habit, now shows these blocked emotions. Again, he suffers more from the lack of rich emotional interaction than you; he is less able to take it.

Whenever you begin to interact, often the negative emotions show first. Each of you become frightened, and clap a lid down upon the whole affair. Ruburt shows some improvement, and then goes back until you try again.

Your relationship and your lives in general, you see, follow certain definite patterns set by you. Your work and your relationship are interwoven. You have not allowed yourselves the leeway, or the excuses either, that people do with families or a large number of interests. If you do not find emotional satisfaction with each other you do not find it, in other words. The whole problem however involves your work also, and solving one problem solves the other. Finding release in one gives you release in the other, and both of you chose therefore a life situation and framework in which precisely those problems you have tired to ignore should serve as challenges and impetuses.

You have not given each other, now, the ever-growing, ever-more-rewarding emotional interactions and encounters that you need as individuals and as creators.

You can break the pattern then at any time. This should help you do so, by present, current action. Often you are so involved with feelings you had in the past that you do not know what you are feeling in the present. There are richly creative emotional founts within you both. Each of you know this and sense it.

You would do far better by trying to bring these out into the open on your own parts and encourage them on the part of your mate; the angers or aggressions or misunderstandings, when you let them out and discuss them and feel them. You try to be, both of you, too mental and intellectual about your emotions, thinking them away if possible rather than freely admitting them.

Now I am telling you this: Ruburt is emotionally deprived, and that is what his physical body does when it knows it. He managed to go ahead creatively despite this, though at great difficulty.

Your symptoms lay in a different area, and I am sure you know where. They show up in your creative work, for otherwise you would have been far freer. Your creative work therefore shows the emotional depriving aspects. You have not been able to let yourself go fully in them, as Ruburt has not been able to go freely with his body.

Now, this is the basic problem. The basic reasons for both Ruburt’s symptoms and the holdback in your own work, and the answer to both lies in learning how to release yourselves to yourselves, to let your own emotional natures relate to each other. You must get over the hump therefore of being afraid of your emotions, both of you.

The show of any emotion between you should be considered an advance. You will soon find joy and spontaneity therefore quite automatically and freely.

Now. In your relationship you inhibited the expression of joyful and loving emotions first. You were not afraid as much of negative emotions, briefly, because in your family your father found safety in negative emotions. By the denial of hope and the inhibition of joyful emotions he tried to protect himself against disappointment or defeat.

The same feeling often pervades your own attitude when you think of Ruburt’s symptoms. You think you are being realistic. You are instead giving into old patterns of emotion, and you can break this habit. You are afraid then not of the negative emotional release—which meant, to the degree mentioned, safety—but of the joyful loving emotions. Part of this had to do with your father’s disappointment in business, and his (underlined) reaction to it.

Part of it had to do with your distrust of such emotion when it was displayed by your mother. You felt it could be smothering, for you sensed the reasons behind her smothering love for her sons. When you begin to sense you might be getting somewhere then you become suspicious instantly, inhibit the feeling in the name of realism.

Now Ruburt inhibited the negative emotions, so-called, first of all because of his own background—the fear of arguments, of hurting someone, as explained clearly in other sessions. The end result however on both of your parts was the inhibition of emotional expression in your relationship, precisely in those most important areas where it was most needed.

You must forget the ideas you have about each other, and look at the living emotional selves upon which you have built and projected. Ruburt’s health, your work, the Artistic Card aspect and all others will fall into line.

Now this session was not practically possible until each of you were ready to hear it, for these facts were made on both of your parts. There is no other answer. The entire affair must (underlined) be considered as a creative emotional venture and challenge.

(Pause at 11 PM.) One footnote to make sure you understand. You hid your warmth from each other, and denied each other the life-giving, rich emotional interaction that you need as individuals and as creators.