“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your relationship is a good one, compared to most an excellent one, but you know your inner potentials, and the potentials of that relationship, and how much you have to some degree failed it. Obviously you have not entirely failed by any means, and you have always maintained an underground basis of loyalty and love; but you are each deeply disappointed with that relationship compared to what you know it can be.

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. 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.

Gradually he inhibited the love and joy, and you the negatives until your lives lacked those natural rises and falls in feelings in tone. You set yourself against your feelings, allowing them release in certain areas only under certain conditions, and in largely impersonal as opposed to intimate areas.