“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now. I would like to give you some more personal material. Incidentally, Ruburt read the chapter on which we are working, and was newly astonished. (Chapter 15 of Seth’s own book, Seth Speaks.)

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.

You were apt to put the personal relationship last, or rather to let it go, so that often it seemed to come after everything else. Now it is true that withheld sexual energy can be diverted to creative aims, but in your cases it was the feeling of daily emotional nourishment that was sometimes lacking.

When you closed off and retreated to compensate, you came closer to the people with whom you work, enjoying their safer emotional contact. It was not threatening, you see. At the same time you adopted a more hard line in your relationship with those in the family, trying to avoid all emotional situations which might trigger a release of the repressed feelings.

You would be grateful then when Ruburt did originate such a crisis, simply because the pressure behind the repressed feelings was more painful then, so that it was defeating its own purpose. You helped initiate these crises in your own way then, by intensifying the noncontact behavior that you knew would cause Ruburt to take steps. On occasion you increased your own noncontact behavior when he did not react when you thought he should.

This would cause considerable panic on your part. On the other hand of course Ruburt also expected you to come up with and initiate the noncontact behavior when he felt that your relationship was getting too close for comfort, that his physical love for you might lead him some time to neglect consciously or unconsciously proper contraceptive behavior.

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.

Ruburt began to overreact more and more, and felt the invisible pull physically. The near and too-far boundaries were uncompromising and arbitrary. A division of responsibility for your relationship was far less satisfactory. The two of you instead now should concentrate your efforts upon forming a generalized, comfortable center, and maintaining that. This will put the concentration of attention in constructive areas, upon warmth and mutual understanding rather than putting the burden of the relationship first on one and then on the other.

At the risk of repeating myself, your in quotes “role” to one extent was restrictive in the sexual and emotional area; you were the one who drew the line. It was partially a distorted, unconscious understanding of this that led Ruburt to the exaggerated projection of that restrictive role to those other areas of your life.

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.

You were therefore expected by him to keep the sessions from getting out of hand, to help in quotes “police” his spontaneous self here, as you did in the sexual area and in your personal relationship. To him this was logical, if subconscious, expectation.

Instead you see, you felt with some considerable exceptions that in this particular area spontaneity could be safely followed. When you encouraged the sessions in the beginning so strongly, he was taken back for to him you were not fulfilling the implied role. When you urged him onward then he felt that he might be on dangerous ground, for you had been counted upon in the personal area to stop spontaneity, emotionally and sexually.

He mistrusted your permissiveness then. It frightened him. If you could not be counted upon, who could? So he began to build up restrictive tendencies of his own. Before you had handled the spontaneity for him. It was your role. He had handled the other end.

He was unused to setting himself up against his own spontaneity so strongly, yet when you did show signs of drawing the line, say, at fear of spontaneous sessions fairly early in the game, he felt on the one hand relieved, and on the other angry at giving up this new prerogative.

Your inner feelings toward each other have been projected onto your feelings toward the sessions, and psychic work also, then. You became annoyed at him, wondering why the spontaneous woman had suddenly turned so restrictive. You did not understand that this was because you had not carried through the personal pattern into the session pattern.

He of course reacted to the annoyance on your part. The tests from this standpoint were highly explosive, for he did not understand the situation, and found himself in a position highly ambiguous. You were encouraging him to even further spontaneity on the one hand, to intuitional freedom, and yet to his point of view requiring him to exert all kinds of discipline, which he felt was your role—to follow the intuitions so far, know when to stop at the proper target, and it was here that he first deeply felt you as a taskmaster.

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.

He then got into the habit of checking the spontaneous self at every point, and setting up opposing muscular reactions and tensions. It was simply not possible for me to give you more information at that time than I could. It was precisely, you see, the relationship between spontaneity and discipline operating between yourselves, that was projected upon the sessions, and inhibited any spontaneous comments I could make.

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.

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.

One more sentence: this arrangement automatically sets up artificial barriers between spontaneity and discipline, and colorations that were sexual in nature, leading to deductions such as: spontaneity was dangerous, obviously, since it needed such controls.

Now. The division was actually an exaggerated projection of the predominating tendencies of your present personalities.

(In addition, my writing hand was so cramped I could hardly form intelligible words, etc.)