The Power of Coincidence (7 page)

The opposite of the five
As
is shaming. This is why the more ashamed we are about ourselves, the less self-respect do we tend to have. Shame was installed where respect belonged. Shame is self-abandonment. We are wounded in ways that someday it will be our work to heal. Hopefully, we will feel compassion for the same wounds in others. This will be the synchronicity of our wounds and our compassion. In this same psychological synchronicity, selfrespect is self-mirroring and leads to love in return toward those who mirror us.

Some of our feelings are felt as dangerous to others and their mirroring powers are then limited. People may, for instance, mirror our grief when our partner dies or leaves. They mirror the immediate sadness, anger, and fear that grief evokes. But a few months later, as we delve into the deeper and much more threatening depths of our grief, we may feel isolated because no one wants to go down there with us. Only very true and strong friends or therapists may be willing to be awake with us in that garden of the agony. Having them lined up for this mirroring enterprise is the synchronicity of forming friendships and relationships that will someday come through for us just as we need them to.
Who has accompanied me all the way to the bottom of the pit of myself? Have I ever thanked him/her? Have I been willing to make that trip with others?

Because of mirroring, I succeed in seeing myself through another’s empathic attunement to me. This gives me a sense of validation, of effectiveness and competence and my sense of self-coherence increases. Accurate mirroring of feelings in early life—and later—leads to a comfortable body image and a strong sense of myself. A clear, cohesive, stable sense of self is thus formed by a series of mirroring experiences. Such experiences are subtle forms of synchronicity glimpsed in words like attunement, mirroring, empathy. We find what we need from those who can provide it, and that is a meaningful coincidence.

It sounds something like this: “If the original mirroring bond was lacking, I can find the missing psychic structures later in life because synchronicity will lead me to new persons who help me shore up or rebuild my own crumbling structures. This is how relationships vitalize me. The depleted is filled; the fragmented is unified; the broken is repaired. The resultant sense of mastery also increases my self-esteem and gives me a sense of continuity and power. In healthy development, I increase my capacity to internalize nurturance and it forms reliable and ineradicable structures in my psyche that replace the marred or damaged ones. The ultimate purpose and outcome of mirroring is to develop self-mirroring skills. This shows us the depth of the synchronous self-empathy that expands into compassion for others.

When we are synchronously mirrored, the circuits for our emotions are reinforced, since the brain uses the same pathways to generate an emotion as to respond to one. To reciprocate an emotion is to reinforce the capacity to feel it again—and safely, too. This is why once we are free to feel, we can feel more deeply for others. Our destiny is given a boost when we have received healthy mothering or have found a mirroring dialogue with other adults later. The bond between mother and child is the synchronicity of resource and need as are the bonds between friends.

Personal human evolution occurs in the transition from the restricted nurturance of our original family members to a new support system of enriching people found in the wider world, a new family. A healthy person is never without such a set of ties, established through a series of synchronous meetings and relationships. Adult psychological health is not independence but interdependence, a re-satellizing of ourselves around healthy providers of mirroring. Usually, for this port to be reached, we have to embark upon our own work on ourselves first.

A person’s power to fascinate or engage us may be in the perfect fit he provides for us to see where our own wounds—and/or potentialities—are. This is double synchronicity. “I may find hidden corners of my psychic house in you. I may see the deeper lineaments of my own unfaced face. Some people hit the target of who I am and of where my work is. Some hit the bull’s eye and my attachment grows accordingly.” A liberation happens when the other is not taken literally but as a synchronous metaphor of our own past and our deep-buried yearnings for wholeness. Others can exhume us; it is up to us to rise again.

Sometimes we feel unsupported by others. An image in nature sheds light on this condition: alder bushes grow on rocky ledges around glaciers, unsupported by soil. They fertilize themselves from air with nitrogen. Each leaf that falls in autumn richly fertilizes the ground with this nitrogen and lays the groundwork for an alder forest that will appear in the future. When our environment offers no nourishment we have to have this same skill of finding what we need from thin air. To find it is the grace of synchronicity. Emily Dickinson describes it: “Something (in us) adjusts itself to midnight.” Our very identity is a synchronous cycle of seasons, a dawn following a darkness, a high tide following a low ebb, a rainbow following a storm, a getting up following a falling down. Our human enterprise has just such elegance.

I look long and honestly at my childhood and at the relationships that have been important to me throughout my life and ask myself which ones mirrored me. Is the relationship I am in now one that mirrors me? Have I and am I mirroring others and my partner? Do I show love by an unconditional acceptance, affection, attention, appreciation, and allowing the other to be herself?

I take an inventory of all my relationships: What do I appreciate in each of them? What is still unresolved? Do I owe amends to anyone? If so, I choose to make them if it seems appropriate and would not cause harm. How has each relationship shown me how to love more? How has each one opened my heart? Do I keep my heart closed now and blame it on anyone? A heart that is opening rivals in loveliness any flower that blooms.

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Synchronicity occurs in the delicate balance between effort and aspiration. This balance is especially evident when we give up our attachment to outcomes and we notice the sudden arrival of serendipitous grace, as in this humorous story:

Maria was frustrated that at age thirty she still had not met the man of her dreams. She asked a priest for advice about how to find a suitable man to marry. “Your name tells you whom to pray to. It is Saint Joseph, spouse of Mary and patron of women who want to find a good husband.” Maria bought a statue of Saint Joseph and prayed to him each morning and night for three months with no luck. Even more frustrated and now in despair, she became angry one day and threw the statue out of the window. Within a few minutes, there was a knock on her door and she opened to a man rubbing his head and holding a broken statue. This was how Maria met the man she would marry a year later. No one was surprised at the name of their first son.

There is synchronicity in how our parents met:

My mother told me how she met my father. She was in a relationship with Angelo for five years but never felt comfortable with the fact that he made his living by gambling. Mother gave him an ultimatum, either get a legitimate job or break up with her. She would not go on any more dates with him, she said, until he chose to find a new career. One night, she and her girlfriend Anna were coming out of the school where they were taking a weekly sewing class and Angelo was waiting in his car to give them both a ride home. She refused to get in the car and he followed her and Anna, slowly, stopping at every corner and pleading with them to get into the car. Anna suggested that they go to the diner nearby where her boyfriend, Ralph, a short-order cook, would soon be off work, and he would drive them home. While they were sitting in the diner having coffee, a stranger to them, but a friend of Ralph’s, walked in and stared with interest at my mother. He asked Ralph to introduce him to the girl sitting with Anna. That is how my parents met and where my origins are. Our home during all my childhood was on Bradley Street. The school on Bradley and Orange streets in New Haven was my high school.

It is synchronicity when an image that has remained dormant in our imagination over the years suddenly and unexpectedly presents us with a meaning that appears at precisely the moment when it is most useful:

Here in California I have a fig tree outside my bedroom window. One morning, some years ago, in early fall, I was awakened by the ubiquitous crows that haunt my yard. They were squawking about the fact that the figs were all gone since I had picked the final fruits the day before. As I lay in bed, I suddenly remembered something from my childhood in Connecticut. At precisely this season, the Italian fathers in my neighborhood carefully, indeed tenderly, wrapped the branches of their fig trees with cloths and covered the trees with blankets and tar paper so that they could survive the harsh winter. I thought spontaneously, “If only they had shown that kind of caring to us kids!” The image of the wrapped tree had never crossed my mind until this moment, let alone this significance.

My own father, now dead, left us in Connecticut when I was two and moved to California, never to contact us again. I was the one to find my father and initiate contact when I moved west as an adult. Later that day, I suddenly remembered that it was my father who had planted the fig tree in my yard with detailed instructions about how to care for it here in California in the age-old Italian tradition.

This happened during the time that I was in therapy working on my feelings about my father. The whole event gave me so much to explore and gain from in my next therapy session. That same day that all this began, I happened to read that the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha was enlightened was a fig tree.

Synchronicity appears when a symbol that has been personally meaningful suddenly proves—or acts in accord with—its significance:

Rosalind and her fiancé chose a beautiful engagement ring for her. The large diamond symbolized the indestructible brightness of their love for each other and their commitment to a lifelong bond. On their wedding day, they confirmed this in their vows. But sadly, things did not work out as they had hoped. Four years later, they were divorced. On the day the divorce was final, Rosalind was walking from the home of her new boyfriend back to her apartment. She was on a sandy road near the beach, still wearing the ring. From the corner of her eye, she saw something bright fall to the ground. Rosalind knew instantly it was the diamond. It had suddenly fallen from its setting and sunk deep into the thick, fine sand. Rosalind looked carefully for it. Though she searched for a long time, it was nowhere or ever to be found.

Synchronicity is the essence of timing, that mysterious readiness that occurs to defy our hesitation or control. It is the moment that can become momentum:

Irene did not communicate with her sister Betty since she believed that Betty had acted unfairly regarding her mother’s will. During the time of the estrangement, Irene refused all contact with Betty even though Betty had admitted her betrayal, lamented hurting her, and offered to make financial and personal amends. Irene’s friends encouraged her to respond to this offer. But Irene was still feeling injured and crushed deep within. She worked on this in therapy but the release from it did not come. One day, she was walking alone along the beach when suddenly, out of nowhere, she suddenly experienced her hurt drop away and she instantaneously knew that something in her wounded ego had let go and that the time for contact had come. Irene went straight home and wrote her sister a letter, and soon they were friends again. Irene never regretted remaining true to her own timing, however, no matter what people thought of her. No one could have made her move a day earlier; no one could have stopped her a moment after.

Synchronicity can appear as a string of similar experiences that show us where we may be one-sided and where our work on ourselves may be:

Within one week, Roland ran into a great deal trouble with the women in his life. His girlfriend left him; his female boss became angry at him; his sister did not acknowledge his birthday; two women did not return his phone calls. All this happened to the man whose mother abandoned him again and again in childhood. This series of rejections/abandonments by women in such a short time threw Roland into a depression. The depression softened him and brought him into contact with his anima, that is, his feminine side. He found himself looking at and soon dealing with these issues: his abandonment of his own feminine side, his manner with women, and his fear of showing his softness. Roland made up for the lost females in his life from within himself and found his other side. This increased his appeal to women, who now found him more open and more available for intimacy.

Synchronicity is in the sudden remembrance of a personal history or series of events that reveal you to yourself or point to the next step of a path you are contemplating:

George was left by Martha on the grounds that he was not committed enough in their six-year relationship. A year later, George found himself wondering if he really was ever cut out for a live-in intimate relationship. He was ruminating about this when suddenly the whole history of his relationships flashed before him. George was astounded to realize, for the first time, that every partner of his had the same complaint that Martha had: his fear of closeness and his need for ever more space away from his partner. At the same time, he found himself admitting that intimate bonding did not quite match up with what he really wanted. The configuration of lighter relationships and deeper friendships felt more appropriate to who he was. George gradually realized that he had been following society’s imposed ideal by default rather than a preferred reality by personal choice. George might now examine other areas of his life and ask, “Am I acting in accord with the reality of me or am I just doing what I always did or what everyone else does or what I am supposed to do? Does this form of relationship represent my deepest needs and wishes?” The arrival into George’s mind of the two cogent pointers—his historical record and his new realization—precisely as he was facing his dilemma became the spur of the moment and was thus synchronicity.