Bradshaw - Creating Love: A New Way of Understanding Our Most Important Relationships

My original pain workdescribed in Homecomingculminated in a deeper and more loving relationship with myself. But it left me with a great uncertainty about how to be intimate and loving with others. I had to admit that even after years of recovery and working on myself I still felt a baffling despair about love and fulfillment.

The reclaiming of my inner child was the beginning of learning to love, not the end.

I found that many others were in the same quandary. At my workshops, people flooded me with questions and statements like:

What does it take to have a good relationship?

After all the changes Ive made, how come my marriage is still a mess?

Ive left my rigid religious upbringing and now Im left with nothing. How do I find my Higher Power?

Im getting my own life together, but my kids are totally screwed up.

My job is driving me crazy. Im in recovery, but my boss isnt. He shames me every day.

The unsolved mystery in recovery was about loving relationships. This book is the fruit of my own struggle with these issues.

CREATING LOVE
A Bantam Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published December 1992
Bantam trade paperback edition / February 1994

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint from the following:

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Copyright 1929 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi; copyrightrenewed 1957 by Mary L. Hampson. By permission of Little, Brown and Company. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Uncommon Therapy by Jay Haley. Copyright 1987 by W. W. Norton & Co., Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Phoenix: Therapeutic Patterns of Milton H. Erickson by David Gordon and Maribeth Meyers-Anderson. Copyright 1981 by META Publications. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

All rights reserved.
Copyright1992 by John Bradshaw
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-23230
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eISBN: 978-0-8041-5039-2

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In the evening of life, we will be judged on love alone.

S AINT J OHN OF THE C ROSS

Wanting to please my lady friend was the only reason I bought two ridiculously expensive tickets to see Miss Saigon. I am not fond of serious musicalsand Miss Saigon was purported to be a tearjerker. I have had enough sadness in my life. I do a lot of work helping folks grieve their unresolved childhood pain. I hate sad shows, especially on my vacation.

But my lady wanted to go, so here I was in the theater, trying to make the best of it. One thing for sure, I was not going to cry!

The story is an adaptation of Madama Butterfly, set during the war in Vietnam. In the first act, a Vietnamese bar girl falls in love with a GI. They get married and vow eternal love. He is forced to leave her but he promises to return from the States when the war is over. She is simple, innocent, and endearing. Her love is intense and unconditional. Unknown to him, she bears their child, a boy. She hides and fiercely protects the child while she endures a dehumanizing life in a brothel.

At the intermission, I started fantasizing about the sad stuff that might be coming. I imagined Miss Saigon dying as she gives up her child to Communist authorities. I can handle that, I thought! I fantasized the GI coming back for her and getting killed. I can handle that too! Nothing could get to me tonight.

The second act introduces an agency devoted to finding the GIs who fathered children by Vietnamese mothers. As the story unfolds, our GI has married again. Although he dreams of Miss Saigon, he is basically happy. Then the agency finds him. He must tell his wife about Miss Saigon and the child. He and his wife go to Vietnam in order to handle the matter honorably. In a cross up, Miss Saigon meets the GIs wife. She is crushed beyond words. (Im losing it! Tears are running down my cheeks.) Miss Saigon begs the new wife to take the child and give him the life she cannot give him. (Sobs! I am now trying to hold back audible sobs.)

In the last scene, Miss Saigon dresses her son (the most adorable child youve ever seen), preparing him to be given to his father and stepmother. In the tenderest of moments she kisses her son and tells him that he will understand later and asks that he not forget her. (I have given way to unobstructed abdominal sobbing.) The child walks out; his father and stepmother open their arms to him. Miss Saigon disappears behind the curtain. Bang! A gunshot is fired. She has killed herself; the GI rushes in and holds her, moaning his lamentations.

The entire audience is crying profusely. I am a mess. I am thinking that I am glad she killed herself. I could not have handled her standing there in her poverty and degradation while her husband walks away with their child. Her suicide somehow eases the pain.

Suddenly, Im moving into my own story of love and hate, my parents broken marriage, my childhood pain. I am identifying with the innocent child caught in the fateful vagaries of his parents love. I think of my own passionate lovesthe woman I loved and left, the one who left me. Especially the one who left me! I remember that pain. It was like someone had hammered a huge iron nail in the middle of my chest. Just for a moment I feel the traumatic shortness of breath I felt during my rejection. I remember how I obsessed about her, how I cried, raged, felt incredible remorse.

I think of my mother. How at twenty-six she was raising three children all alone. She labored for a pittance to support us. She is a devout Catholic. Her faith would not allow her to remarry. From the time my dad left her, she never touched another man. What an incredible faith! What commitment to ones beliefs.

My mother is human. She had her unconscious rage over all of this. I have often written off her love as being severely codependent. But tonight I long to hold her and tell her I love her. Tonight I want her to know that I honor the tragic and heroic sense of her life. Tonight I see its terrible dailiness and seeming triviality redeemed by the courage and passionate tenacity of her commitment to her children.

The question I ask myself as I dry my eyes is, what is this mysterious power of love and why can it be so overwhelming? Is a mothers love innate? If so, why do some mothers leave their children on someones doorstep, or beat their children to death, or sell them into prostitution? Is giving up ones life for another always an act of love? Could it be an act of selfishnessa way of being elevated to the grandiose heights of saintliness in order to