“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

What neither of you sufficiently (underlined) understood was the strong interrelationship between your personal lives and your work. You were aware of it but you did not understand, generally speaking, that your relationship must be actively and positively enjoyable on a daily basis, if both of you are to produce the work that you want.

He would have become instantly alarmed had you not then begun to retreat. This has been a highly formal, ritualized behavior pattern, a psychological dance, so formalized on a subconscious level that it left little leeway for spontaneity, and threatened to freeze you both in highly unconscious regimented behavior. He was to keep you from getting too far apart. You were to keep you from getting too close, and when certain automatic points were approached you both went into your act. For some time the behavior worked. The spontaneity was gradually squeezed out to such a degree that it lost its workability, and both of you were beginning to consider making adjustments. You did not understand the pattern, however. You ran into the invisible danger points and reacted in the old ways.

Within that area you will both find greater freedom, warmth and creativity. Your work will show great advantage, and the energy that has been bottled up can be released. Understanding the issues will automatically help you form this center. It should be flexible enough now for both of you, and not the formation of one rigid point. (Laugh.)

Because of this role, adopted rather early on both of your parts in your married life, and because of his dim, distorted and hidden perception of it, he was vastly astonished at your permissive attitude when our sessions began.

The early remarks by the young psychologist had thoroughly frightened him, and he was not ready to go into the deeper implications. He was quite simply terrified. He felt also then that you would give or withhold physical love according to his performance on the tests. But as foolish as that sounds, you see, it was based on these roles that you both accepted.

You had always counted upon him to be freely spontaneous, and could not understand his reactions. When you told him to be spontaneous he was all the more confused. Earlier in both of your minds, Ruburt was the spontaneous part of the relationship, hence for many reasons the unpredictable element. You were the discipline element, the reasoning part. Neither of you were fully willing to work out these seemingly (underlined) contradictory elements of your own personalities. For of course your personality has some strongly spontaneous and intuitive elements, as you now know, and Ruburt also has very definite, now too definite, tendencies toward discipline.

You may take your break. One small point: you both would have denied yourselves strong possibilities of growth had you kept up; do you follow me?

For a while then you were willing, comparatively speaking, to let Ruburt express the spontaneous, strongly spontaneous, elements of both of your personalities; with the joys and perils involved, and denying him the responsibility of learning how to temper and use spontaneity. He was willing to let you express the reasoning, deliberate qualities of both of your personalities—the deliberating elements, and to that extent not permitting you to fully express your own spontaneity. You would not learn to use and enjoy it while he did it for you.

Ruburt is apt to be more adjusting in that area, but here also you see, you have set certain unconscious points, boundaries on either side between what you consider too close contact, and too little. The tendencies operate in all areas, and they provide very constructive guidelines, and are beneficial when they are not carried to extremes, and when the focus is on maintaining the balance between. Because of your fears, both of you had your eyes out instead for the danger points.

Then we will close the session. You have both learned a lot this week. My heartiest regards to you both.