Stephanie Dowrick - Intimacy and Solitude

Stephanie Dowrick, PhD, is best known as the celebrated author of a number of genuinely original, life-changing books. They include Forgiveness and Other Acts of Love, Creative Journal Writing, The Universal Heart, Choosing Happiness, In the Company of Rilke (a spiritual study of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke), Seeking the Sacred, described by Claire Scobie in the Sydney Morning Herald as a chalice of wisdom, and Heaven on Earth. She has also written fi ction for adults and for children, including her recent picture book, The Moon Shines Out of the Dark.

Stephanie Dowrick has made writing her focus for several decades. During the years she lived in Europe, she worked in publishing and was founder of the prestigious independent publishing house, The Womens Press. Stephanie is also a trained psychotherapist and had a small private practice for many years. She was the Inner Life columnist for Good Weekend from 20012010 and continues to contribute to print and social media, including the online Universal Heart Book Club. Stephanie also off ers retreats and workshops, and speaks publicly on a variety of social, spiritual and ethical issues both in Australia and overseas. She has been leading an interfaith, spiritually inclusive congregation at Pitt Street Uniting Church in Sydney since 2006. Sydney is also the city where she makes her home.

Visit the author online at: www.stephaniedowrick.com

www.facebook.com/StephanieDowrick

ALSO BY STEPHANIE DOWRICK

Fiction

Running Backwards Over Sand

Tasting Salt

Non-fiction

The Intimacy and Solitude Self-therapy Book

Forgiveness and Other Acts of Love

The Universal Heart

Free Thinking

Choosing Happiness

Creative Journal Writing

The Almost-Perfect Marriage

In the Company of Rilke

Seeking the Sacred

Everyday Kindness

Heaven on Earth

This edition published by Allen & Unwin in 2014

First published by The Womens Press in 1991

Revised and expanded by Random House Australia in 2002

Copyright Stephanie Dowrick 1991; Wise Angels Pty Ltd 2002

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

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eISBN 978 1 74343 815 2

F OR L ISA A LTHER AND J OANNA R YAN

To transform the world, we must begin with ourselves. However small may be the world we live in, if we can transform ourselves, bring about a radically different point of view in our daily existence, then perhaps we shall affect the world at large, the extended relationship with others.

J. Krishnamurti

PART ONE
Self: Is that who I am?

PART TWO
Women and men

PART THREE
Solitude: Knowing your self

PART FOUR
Intimacy: Knowing the other

PART FIVE
Desire: The language of your inner space

T his is how it began.

I was a young New Zealand-born publisher working in London during a time of exhilarating social upheaval. Almost everything that had been taken for granted was being re-examined. Economics, history, science, politics, religion, literature were like massive stones that were being lightly overturned, sometimes after centuries. How did they look from the other side?

Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy were also up for radical re-examination. And just when I had the miraculous good fortune to set up the London publishing house, The Womens Press, energetic, dynamic therapy groups and newly formed organisations were simultaneously creating a place where women and men could think about themselves and experience themselvesalso in new ways.

My response to these changes was deeply personal as well as political and professional. At The Womens Press we were able to publish some of the most exciting ideas that were emerging in this fertile time. From the Womens Therapy Centre and from similar enterprises in the USA, in Europe, the Pacific and in other parts of Britain, came an outpouring of ideas that I also found extraordinarily exciting. More than that, they began to change the way that I experienced myself and thought about other people. The world around me and inside me became new and uncharted.

A personal crisis pushed me into psychotherapy. This was far more difficult than theorising. I would spend most of the hour during my twice-weekly analytic sessions locked into an agonising silence, unable to breach the defences against grief that I had unconsciously built up through most of my childhood and early adult life. Yet as hard as those sessions were (and, I now think, unnecessarily hard), I continued to be fascinated by the depth of insight that psychoanalysis could offer. This was something that took me way beyond earlier intellectual excursions. Here my soul was stirred, as well as my mind.

It wasnt enough for me to be a client; I wanted to study too. In fact, for the first time in my life I felt that here was a field (or many fields) of knowledge that truly met the intensity of my questions.

I continued to work as the Managing Director of The Womens Press but my vista broadened. Over a period of several years I took courses, attended workshops and training seminars and read widely in Object Relations Theory (the British School of Psychoanalysis), Gestalt therapy, Jungian dream work and other newer therapies. I also began to study and experience Psychosynthesis, a way of looking at the human condition that is explicitly inclusive of our often unrecognised longings for meaning, depth, purpose; for spiritual good health as well as psychological insight and ease.

All that had its effect on me. But it did not make my life simpler. To my genuine surprise, it gradually became clear to me that my life as a publisher was coming to an end. Increasingly I was pulled towards writing full-time. The workshops and training and personal therapy that I had been doing were preparing me to work as a therapist. For me, though, their principal function was to prepare me to write.

As a publisher, I had no illusions that writing would make for an easy life. Yet when the idea for