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The Gift of Disillusionment
(click for podcast) (8:19 min.)

“Sometimes it’s not the people who change, it’s the mask that falls off.” –Haruki Murakami (“The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” 1994)

It sounds pretty weird to call something as painful as disillusionment a gift. At the time, and for a while afterward, it sure doesn’t seem like a gift. The truth is that at its core, disillusionment is one of the most powerful triggers for transformation and growth. This impacts us on both a large scale and personally, so I’ll start with the big picture, then focus in on our personal relationships.

As we know, we can’t solve a problem until we admit there is one. This creates another problem: seeing that living in an illusion is a problem in itself. The very nature of illusion is to fool us into thinking it’s reality. This alternate reality is what we respond and react to, rather than actual reality. There’s our problem.

This way of being in the world can be seen as being in a kind of “dream,” and I’ve often used the phrase “sleepworking” to describe the kind of autopilot mode we tend to live within. In that mode, we don’t see illusion for illusion. It looks perfectly real. This is why many traditions from yoga to Sufism promote the concept of Awakening. This was brought to us on the big screen with “The Matrix” (Lilly & Lana Wachowski, 1999, Warner Bros.) in no uncertain terms. Everything we thought was real was an illusion and we had a choice: stay in the illusion or Awaken from it.

In our lives, it’s not that simple. We create the illusions. We’re on both the transmitting and receiving end of them. On the transmitting side, we present our best selves. We rarely share our fallible, messy, human side; which is just the tip of the iceberg; as the massive subconscious is out of our own sight as well. On the receiving side, others are doing the same thing. We end up with masks meeting masks and narratives meeting narratives.

Over time, illusions get eroded like writing in sand by the ocean. Reality is like the pounding waves coming into shore. At some point, the disillusionment comes in, and hits us hard. It’s a kind of betrayal. We’re deeply hurt, angry, and confused. We thought we had a certain relationship with someone and discover we were wrong. Somehow we missed it.

This is a crucial beginning of our Awakening. The most common sequence of emotions is to first be hurt and angry at the other person, who seems to have been “lying all this time,” and yes, in quotation marks, as this is just stage one. The next stage is where we start asking how we missed it, and turn our attention to ourselves. If we don’t go to stage two, we’ll stay angry at them, and likely make similar choices in the future.

Turning our attention to ourselves, and how we contributed to this situation is imperative to Awakening. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles and podcasts, everything is part of a system, including relationships. I personally see relationships as systems with emotional components.

So what part do we play in this system of illusion? We look at each other through a complex set of lenses and filters we’ve developed over our lives. None of us can really see totally objectively; removing all of our experiences, biases, likes, and dislikes. Some people are adept at reading these, and present themselves accordingly.

Sometimes we see the other person’s potential, who they are deep inside, maybe even feel we can see their soul. That’s the person we want to be in relationship with, and we mentally and emotionally jump in to that swimming pool. Here’s the issue: it’s very hard to see red flags when we’re wearing rose-colored glasses. We project who we want them to be over who they are at the time.

Even when we do see red flags, we’re often so committed to the illusion that we rationalize ignoring them. “They’ll grow out of this. They’re just dealing with old trauma. It’s not that bad,” and so on. This can last years, which makes the earthquake of disillusionment that much more painful.

After the initial shock, and the aftershocks, stage two kicks in and we start looking at ourselves. Rather than “what’s wrong with me? Why didn’t I see it?” we can look at our “mechanism of perception” (nothing wrong with you; it’s the mechanism.)

A better question might be, “what was my criteria in choosing this person?” Liking the same activities only speaks to compatibility while doing activities. Physical things change over time. We age, get sick or hurt, lose our high-paying jobs, and so on. Even fantastic chemistry isn’t enough for the long haul.

This is why we see familiar “breaking points” in relationships, depending on the levels of illusion and disillusionment. Over time, working with clients, I’ve seen a pattern emerge. It seems that generally there are 3-month, 6-month, 1, 3, and 5-year “break points.” Most illusions and projections don’t last past 5 years, so other things come into the equation after that.

In our Awakened state, we see that who we truly are is the embodiment of our values, just as ignoring them or compromising them had us living in the illusion. This values embodiment is who the other person truly is as well, so now we have criteria that works sustainably.

As long as we share values, we’ll be able to work other things out, especially when those values include authenticity and honesty. Those dissolve illusion and open the channels for real communication and connection. As much as disillusionment hurts, we can look at the Awakening as breaking free of the cocoon of illusion to spread our new wings and fly.

Want to learn more about how to become the best you possible? How your communication can hold you back or catapult you forward? Come visit the web site, or better yet, contact me and see how we can design a program to fit your needs and desired outcomes.

     - Ian J. Blei

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Resource Links:

The Integram - the podcast series

Kind Ambition - 3rd Edition
 

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