Several of my friends seem to be enrolled in the “Relationship Path to Personal Growth.” They seem to go from one relationship to the next, and by the end of each one, they hope to have learned at least one thing that they don’t want in their life again and at least one thing about themselves they didn’t know before.

The Gestalt approach to relationship encourages us to go beyond the desire for comfort and an easy flow with the other, and draws our attention to what is uncomfortable, irritating, confusing, and difficult about the other as our greatest chance for personal growth. Gestalt suggests that the other is a mirror to aspects of ourselves that we don’t accept, offering us the best chance to expand our own self acceptance. This unawares seeking for our hidden other self, is why we are attracted to people so unlike ourselves, why we love the difference in the beginning and grow to loathe it later even in the best of circumstances.

The gift of Gestalt is that we have never “done life” alone. Even in the womb we are adjusting and expressing our relationship to space and time, to acceptance and non-acceptance. We have been relating to others our entire lives. In fact there is nothing about you or me that was not developed in response to how others saw or responded to us. That voice in our head that we listen to or reject is the voice of relationship. Our pride as well as our sorrow is with someone even when they are not physically present. We are in a way born to be experts in relationship, if only our first guides — parents, friends and mentors – had been guided themselves.

We were taught to desire relationship but no one ever taught us how to relate. We notice the symptoms, neurotic or unbearable behaviors in our beloved, without asking the reason they express themselves in that way. The reason is to reach out in the only way we know. Exploring what lies under the behavior is one of our Gestalt ways. The other is to learn from our impact on the other whether or not our intention is understood – and if not, to experiment until that almost mystical Gestalt experience we call contact is felt like an electrical charge from the heart of being.

All of our workshops focus on this – our human desire to be seen and felt and heard by someone who “gets us.” We do this through movement, through song, through therapy, through experiences together.

In these ways there is a turnaround to the way we have learned to relate. The turnaround is this: that the key to relating is not in our ability to love, which most of us have strongly, but rather in the ability to be open to love, which is the greatest stretch. Most of us want to be heard but we lack the ability to be heard, substituting explaining or defensiveness for simple honesty of feeling. Most of us want to listen to the other, but cannot seem to listen to another’s view without defensiveness of our own self.

The most painful lesson that the Path of Relationship eventually teaches is that our ability to achieve our goals within relationship is directly related to the capacity of the other. Because life taught us to be “armies of one”, we lay our expectations and our disappointments on the other, and we know where that leads. There is a faster road to personal evolution and that is to accept the joyful act of creating something that never was before out of differences that seem at first to have no bridge.

I hope to see you at the GIT in October taking next steps together in the Path of Relating. When people meet there is always excitement of the next step – not in looking in one another’s eyes for the answer but in turning our combined gazes towards something new, something that will be created – with support for the process, that is what is possible.

© Jay Tropianskaia, July 2016