“… if you think true love looks like Romeo and Juliet, you’ll overlook a great relationship that grows slowly.” Revolution – in business and in life – often starts with a small step.” Derek Sivers

I have enjoyed probably more than my fair share of relationships in my life. In fact, I REALLY squeezed the juice out of most of my relational experiences over the years which is undoubtedly why I have made relationship counseling such a significant part of my career. Yes, I have trained and studied the various theories and approaches with regard to relationship optimization however none of this (expensive is an understatement) professional tutoring has come close to the level of utility as my own forays into coupling, tripling and well, you get the point.

When I coach a couple who is struggling to make heads or tails of their committed partnership, it is rarely a text book I refer to in my mind as I encourage certain approaches over others. It is typically a personal experience that I rely on to support my encouragement for a particular route that individuals can take in order to make lemonade from the sour fruit they are sucking on. Is this clinically sound? Should I pull the books down off the shelf in order to substantiate my advice? If I could, there would be an author out there making billions of dollars.

The truth of the matter is that what makes me a good relationship counselor is the simple fact that I have used my own relationships as learning experiences from which to teach others what works and what miserably fails. For better of for worse, the brilliant scientist typically first injects herself with the serum, serving as ones own guinea pig before unleashing some solution onto the world. Well, that’s me. Remember, the line between brilliant and “mad” is the stuff of great stories!

“All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today.” ~ Swedish Proverb

So, in reality, all you need to do in order to have a fantastic relationship is what I do: build a database regarding your relationship choices, track healthy outcomes and learn from your less supportive decisions! You’re already well on your way to your own relational revolution!

“The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several millions of human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche. C.G. Jung

It was a fascinating synchronicity in my life. As my house was pelted by thundering winds and layers of thick, unrelenting snow last week, rocks, bottles and bullets flew in Cairo. The inundation I experienced here in Chicago felt in some ways to be overshadowed by the revolution taking place in Egypt, and yet, in other ways the two events felt strangely aligned. I skipped back and forth between CNN and the Weather Channel, watching for a break in both relentless storms.

While elements of change ebbed and flowed from the heartland of the United States to the ancient sands of the Middle East, I couldn’t help but ponder the significance of an apparent web of momentous physical and psychic events occurring on our planet and in our consciousness.

I suppose I unconsciously took it for granted that folks in the Middle East were not willing to fight for their rights. Regime after controlling, oppressive regime in the Arab world seemed to have taken advantage of a few convenient scapegoats (the U.S., Israel, capitalism, Hollywood, “The West”) through the years, conveniently overshadowing their own horrible human rights violations, the economic rape and pillaging of their common citizens and the general manipulation of hearts and minds.

Over shadow is truly at the core of it, too. It takes a lot to blur the deep human longing for wholeness, joy and love and it relies upon an overarching, bloated shadow that swaddles our essential love for life in rags of doubt and resentment. The greatest tragedies in human history have typically occurred as a result of similarly monolithic entities who have successfully brainwashed the collective consciousness with a tribal cool-aid aimed at using our inherent desire to protect against ourselves.

Not dissimilar has been the environmental snow job on the planet…

The only thing that matters is our advancement. You want to protect our evolution as a species, don’t you? Then who cares about strip mining? Who cares about aerosol cans and light bulbs? Who cares about sucking the earth dry in a matter of a few hundred years what took millions to create? You want to be the best nation, don’t you? The strongest power? Drink, drink, it tastes like fruit punch…

The archetype of the wounded healer is one that has long resonated for me. The notion that in order to truly help others heal one must have done his or her own fair share of suffering and grown from it, i.e. placed the pain and near death experiences (physically and/or emotionally) into a constructive context, is probably the most potent response to “why bad things happen to good people.”

However, when an archetype is not expressed in a meaningful, transformative, dynamic way, it “loads up with energy and becomes inhuman” (Marie-Louise von Franz). I believe that is the situation we are facing on our planet these days.

Without transforming our collective suffering thus creating a sacred wisdom of the heart borne from pain, we risk the creation of something terrible and ugly in its place.

Without choosing to learn from our arrogance, immaturity and selfishness as a society we don’t really grow up as a species and end up retarding our psycho-spiritual development as well.