Did you ever wonder why we become so dramatic when we are sharing our feelings? What we do with our emotions has a lot to do with the degree to which we failed to receive support or acknowledgment of our suffering. It is paradoxical that the bigger the drama the less we are able to feel our own suffering and the more our ability to be comforted by others is diminished. Drama is unsupported by breath, and is accompanied by a sense that we are not worthy to be recognized for our pain. Drama is also connected to our brain’s ability to substitute some amount of relief for not getting what we really need. From drama we gain a spike of energy, a momentary relief, but when it is done we are left feeling alone, empty and exhausted. This is because the act of dramatizing is very much like acting — we must tense our muscles or bones, stop our breath, over extend our energy in order to throw ourselves into chaos – I call this a form of self-sacrifice to show others. But if there are others present, they either become fellow actors and offer us advice to calm us down, or they become audience – distant and uninvolved.
 
Drama is a call to the other, but it is never heard as such. It is an attempt to express what is painfully missing from our sense of ourselves, and the suffering of our losses not being seen or believed. But the very thing that would heal us, bring fulfillment, the empathic witness to our pain has the least chance of occurring. In a dramatic mode we are not in contact with either ourselves or another. No one really gets it. The expression of our pain is as if we are calling out to the past, to a story, to those who are not here, and the person who is here whether friend or enemy cannot feel us, resonate with us, attune to us.
 
The presence of drama is an indication that the past is present. Rarely can we get up that much steam for a single incident, a single betrayal, a single abandonment – the energy is cumulative and the first time we met the need to call out we were likely a child or teen. The voice that calls out is doing what no one did for us – righteously exposing our helplessness in a social or family structure in which we had neither power, respect nor control. Those first experiences of powerlessness, are great teachers of our vulnerability as humans. When the past is present it is difficult to realize they will never happen to us in that way again.
 
“Reality is bad enough” – I say this to my clients and friends. Gestalt is a sober art. It means that what happens to you or to me now – disrespect, bullying, assumptions and lack of being heard, being ignored or snubbed – is serious enough that it doesn’t have to be shouted or displayed. Shouting and drama are the only power children can use in a vain attempt to wake up adults to the need for greater care. If, in a quiet voice, we ask another adult to not abuse us, and they do not listen, then we need to take this very very seriously.
 
There are among us people whose way of being with others we often name as sociopathic, psychopathic, narcissistic and for some of us who have been abused these forms of contact are like a flame to a moth. We keep returning to people whose intense self-focus keeps them from intimacy. Some of the people in our formative years were like that, so we have underestimated the seriousness of these forms of contact. We screamed for a reason – and now we have lost our own sensitive skin that tells us who is able to provide intimacy, caring, listening, empathy and who is not. Speaking the reality of the situation, the facts, makes room for genuinely feeling the pain and loss. Gestalt teaches dialog and hanging in with the other, but also when to let go. A dialog looks like this:
Me: I feel abandoned when you don’t call after you said you would.
Answer: I forget to call when I am with my friends.
Me: That hurts. I would rather then you didn’t promise to call.
Answer: I don’t want to hurt your feelings, you get so upset when I say I won’t call.
Me: I realize that it is very important to me. I don’t feel sure of you. How can we solve this together?
Answer: I don’t know. I think I feel suffocated sometimes.
Me: That hurts to hear, how do I do that to you?
 
This is what I mean by Reality is bad enough. We may have dreams of the perfect other but we are limited by the capacity of the other. No one is likely to know how to make us secure or feel loved, or to even know how crazy we get when they don’t pick up after ourselves. We don’t come into relationship to change the other, so disappointment is part of the learning, and so is knowing what is so important that we cannot live without it no matter how much we love.
 
I had a teacher who used to say that when he falls in love all senses go on high alert, because his willingness to see reality as it is becomes compromised. Our childhood prepared us for injustice and inconsistency, but did not prepare us for dialogue about the hard things. Dialogue about the hard things never ends as long as the other is willing. Creativity then takes the place of drama. Drama is a closed door much as on stage when the outcome is inevitable and all the action leads toward it. Creativity means all doors are open and what I do next depends on how long you and me can keep offering new solutions. This is to truly live.
 
Each time we take a lack of respect seriously, and respond from our own truth, while taking breath and feeling our feet on the ground, our self-worth increases. Each time we have a genuine dialogue around how to be with each other with respect, we are more able to live on this moving ship called earth and feel able to face reality as it is.