When I first read John Welwood’s Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships fifteen years ago, what it essentially helped me do was discover the places where I was still grieving what I didn’t have in the past: love, acceptance and worthiness.
It helped me look deeper at my life and myself, understand why I behaved and related in certain ways, and recognize how easily unresolved hurts from the past can unconsciously influence how we experience our relationships.
One of the things that really stood out to me, and I keep coming back to, is how we don’t take enough time to fully process our grief. We don’t acknowledge and accept what we never received or what we lost in childhood.
And that doesn’t stop when we become adults.
We also carry unprocessed grief about what was never completed, the losses we’ve experienced, and what didn't turn out to be the way we hoped or expected.
We need time and space to actually feel what is there, to move through the sensations and emotions of grief rather than rushing to fix or move past them because the pain is too uncomfortable.
Allowing all the necessary feelings to be fully experienced to completion is part of honoring our wholeness.
In doing so, we make room for something new.
Another important aspect of Welwood’s writing is to pay attention to our longing.
That persistent yearning we can sometimes feel but can’t quite explain is essential information.
We often attach it to another person, believing they are the answer, when it may be pointing toward something deeper within ourselves, something that feels empty, unfulfilled, or disconnected.
Sometimes the longing isn’t really about another person at all, but about what we are seeking within ourselves.
This is something I think Welwood explores beautifully. Desire focused on any given person can never be completely satisfied. Our passion for another can actually stir something that reaches beyond what any one person can fulfill.
We fall in love, pursue, connect, make love, perhaps marry, and still the longing for something more remains.
That longing may not be a sign that we chose the wrong person. It may be pointing toward something infinite within us that no finite relationship can completely resolve.
This is where the book’s psychospiritual approach to relationships becomes important.
It invites us to become more conscious of ourselves, to accept, love, honor, forgive and change what is ours.
From there we can better understand what we bring into our relationships.
Integration requires agency. We have to understand ourselves, take ownership of what is ours, and stop making our past responsible for how we choose to live now.
When we do that, we become less likely to unconsciously bring old dragons, dramas, and unfinished experiences into our relationships and ask someone else to complete what was never theirs to complete in the first place.
These life processes require deep reflection and honesty about what we want and who we want to be, both with ourselves and in our relationships.
It means being honest about what we actually have to give, what we are available to receive, and how we want to grow our capacity for both. We cannot freely give what we do not have within ourselves, and we cannot fully receive what we have not yet learned to give ourselves.
Reflection
Where in your life do you still feel the pull of unresolved grief, or an unexplained longing, and what has kept you from exploring it?
The Integrated SELF approach is about understanding what is happening within us and recognizing how it affects the way we live and love in the outer world. When we understand our thoughts, feelings, grief, and longing, we can become more intentional about how we are being in our relationships.
