Kuba: Hi Vineeto,
I will go in bits because there is a lot in your message which clicks.
I really like how you wrote this – “intimacy is not assertive but inclusive, enticing, friendly, benevolent”.
And with authority ‘I’ am doing exactly that – asserting ‘myself’. Asserting ‘myself’ immediately cuts the possibility of intimacy at the root, this is exactly the ‘edge’ I was talking about.
Richard: Unless one can live with just one other person, in peace and harmony twenty four hours of the day, nothing is ever going to work on any other scale’. (Richard, AF List, No. 25b, 19 Jul 2003).
This clicked in such an obvious way, I think it’s because of what you wrote about intimacy not being assertive. In that when I allow intimacy with another then I cannot help but take them into consideration, whereas when I assert myself there is an absence of caring and consideration. But I never saw this before, that by asserting myself I am getting in the way of intimacy and therefore peace and harmony. It can be such a small step too that I missed it in the past, where I assert myself and turn the situation into my way vs their way, now it’s a battle and peace and harmony is nowhere to be found.
Hi Kuba,
It’s cute because you yourself gave me the clue –
Kuba: In that there is the ‘me’ that ‘I’ assert ‘myself’ to be in relation to ‘others’ – this I can see is an immediate obstacle in the way of intimacy.
I can see that in my life I invested into becoming a ‘someone in relation to others’, this is ‘my’ apparent individuality. So initially when allowing intimacy it seems as if I am giving up my very individuality, yet when I look at just what this ‘individuality’ consists of, it is based in separation. (link)
Remember, whenever you are confronted with two (affective) non-reconcilable alternatives – in this case being assertive or powerless as a male identity – there is always a third alternative which you usually only discover when you are back to feeling good. This particular third alternative now allows you to discover more of imitating actuality – consideration, caring, closeness, naiveté (first experienced as vulnerability) and, of course, sensuousness.
As such it is not “my way vs their way” but the way which enables intimacy for both of you.
Kuba: I never thought to question assertiveness, in fact I even remember as a kid in school being taught how it is so very important…
Also to tie it into Richard’s quote about preference, if I am asserting myself it means that I have already made it serious, which means it is no longer a self-less inclination, it is now a self-centred urge. This is exactly how I have observed conversations turn into arguments too.
Yes, you will be surprised how much effect it has on your whole outlook in life when you deliberately and consistently replace any self-centred urge which occurs with what is to happen as just being a preference. This quote from Richard might give you encouragement –
Richard: An anecdote might best illustrate what I mean: many years ago my then-companion Devika would oft-times say to me that I should stand up for myself and not let peoples (such as you describe) push me around … indeed, it was one of the reasons she created a psychic force-field in her psyche (which is, of course, the human psyche) so as to protect what she saw, experientially, back then as innocence personified.
(She was wont to exclaim, on occasion, how ‘Richard brings something marvellous – something absolutely wonderful – into the world and yet everyone deposits ordure on it’ … albeit not expressed quite so politely as that).
What she did not realise – except during a PCE of course – is that innocence itself (the genuine article and not the so-called innocence of children) requires no affective vibe/ psychic current protection whatsoever and, therefore, in vain would I explain to her that, in everyday situations such as you report (where the whole point of the exercise is to walk out the door with the goodies which those in a position of power and control can either dispense or withhold), I had no interest whatsoever in futilely striving to win a puny ego-battle with some officious power-tripper but, instead, walk away with the said goodies each time. (Richard, List D, No. 32, 7 Jul 2013).
Richard: … the counsel I consistently offered to Devika – vis-à-vis her insistence on ‘standing up for oneself’ to all and sundry – came from feeling-being ‘Richard’ (i.e., from ‘his’ success) and not from this flesh-and-blood body typing these words. (Richard, List D, Srid2, 14 Jan 2016).
Kuba: I can’t believe I’ve never seen this, that the very action of asserting myself is rotten.
It was obviously the perfect time to see it, now that you are ready to put it into action.
Kuba: It makes sense now, there is a seriousness and a forcefulness to it, it has aggression at its root. (link)
Indeed and a ‘man’ has to be aggressive or so you are taught. You discovered the way to channel the affective energy of aggression into affective felicitous and innocuous action.
It’s all so marvellous.
Cheers Vineeto