Awareness leads to
consciousness
Let me quote
Deborah Anapol from her book, The Seven
Natural Laws of Love. This is from the chapter on “Law of Truth”:
The conditioning
which most of us have gotten is the exact opposite of the law of truth. The
man-made version could be stated like this: If you want to be loved you must
project an image of perfection and never say anything, which might hurt
someone’s feelings. Never show weakness and never be impolite. Never reveal
family secrets. Lie if you need to in order to make a good impression, and keep
quiet about anything controversial. If you have been trained to lie about your
real feelings and needs from an early age, being truly intimate maybe a
challenge for you.
The aversion to
truth-telling is partly habit, but it persists for two reasons: First, in order
to speak the truth, you have to know the truth. Second, you have to give up trying
to control the outcome of speaking the truth.
And Anapol adds so poignantly:
The best way to lie
to others is to lie to oneself. After many years of lying to yourself, you may
no longer know your true feelings and thoughts...You want to be authentic but
you’ve forgotten how.
This really makes
so much sense in my own experience and in the experiences of so many of my
abused clients.
I have been accused
of talking too much about sex and of being addicted to sex. What I do want is
for readers to learn that there are other ways of having relationships that our
Western culture keeps a lid on. In my opinion, much of our Western
consciousness through years of religious indoctrination and “Victorian
morality” has forced us to keep secrets and not be truthful.
How does our
culture see polyamory?
Counselors and
therapists often know very little about polyamory (I certainly did not until I
started to read books like Dr. Anapols’s book Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy with Multiple Partners.
I also attended a polyamory workshop in Greece.)
Many people may fall back on considering
polyamory to be an aberration, a pathology to be avoided or “cured” (as people
used to consider homosexuality). I quote from The Polyamory Handbook by Peter Benson:
A common myth in our
predominantly Judeo-Christian culture in the Western hemisphere … has been
there is only one traditional or “standard” way, one valid and healthy and
right way, for people to conduct their loving relationships and that is a pairing
of one man and one woman.
