Joel Rachelson, Ph.D.
Founder, Conscious Singles: The Network for Professional Connections

 Being single is not easy.  This is how I usually introduce the Conscious Single gatherings that we have sponsored over the last two years.  Being a conscious single presents even more challenges as mentioned in an article of that title.   This present article about the healing potential of being single is first about the stance to take when facing bumps in our journey—about the importance of knowing how to respond to life’s difficulties.  Secondly, there is the suggestion that being single is a call to become better with ourselves when ourselves are experiencing bumps—that the kinds of difficulties we may experience because we are single prompt us to enhance our relationship with ourselves.  And lastly this article mentions that being single gives us a chance to face and redecorate some of our most profound internal and personal issues—“Oh Boy!”

Stance is important.  If this being single is what’s in front of us in our lives at this time and we are struggling with it, then there is a mandate of sorts to find some healing in it. There is a potential gift here.   Having a stance of seeing this as a positive potential, as opposed to one of bemoanment, is a much more productive way to look at it.  And as I mention to my clients many times you cannot control what happens in life, only the way you perceive/react to it. Many times, your reaction/perception is pivotal as to whether a bump gets smoothed out or gets bigger.

 So what’s perfect about being single—or what’s the potential healing gift. 

 First, as mentioned above the gift is the opportunity to learn how to celebrate bumps or not be too attached to not having bumps.  Bumps happen.  We are gonna get upset in life.  The goal here is to have a part of ourselves be on the case with a more detached, curious, and even grateful stance towards our slips and falls. 

 Secondly, the difficulty we have about being single is so full of potential because it represents major focus point in our relationship with ourselves.  Implicit here is that this is an opportunity for us to become more internally competent and hence agile/resilient.  There needs to be a part of us that can accept that bumps happen and that can keep track of them so they can be anticipated/avoided. This internal therapist can also coordinate and/or do the internal work necessary so that bumps become little blips or eventually not there. 

 This is perhaps one of the best gifts here in that it represents a call to develop the part of us who can face bumps and falls/upsets with grace and can accept our internal wounds, problems and imperfections.  We may not have gotten much early training for the inevitability of falling and having grace about it.  We may have gotten even less training in how to accept all of ourselves, warts and all.  This parent or therapist part of ourselves needed instruction from our primary caretakers in how to handle bumps and upsets and how to be self-accepting.  Unfortunately, this early instruction either through modeling or overt interactions likely wasn’t all it needed to be. So this gift of being single may very well be call or opportunity to become better with ourselves in regards to external bumps and internal wounds and imperfections than we experienced.

 Also the bumps we are called on to face when we are single reflect some of the most profound internal issues.  We get to examine/work on something happening in our life that is undesirable or at times makes us unhappy.  The importance of the issues we singles face is that it seems to represent major personal internal intersections between being alone and wanting something we don’t have.  Either of these issues/realities usually are very important avenues of our interior.

 Generally speaking, whenever we examine the difficulties inside of us, we get to face aspects of our personalities.  One of our life’s mission’s is to do the interior redecorating needed to have a happier more user-friendly insides.  I struggle with the some of the new thought systems calling our personalities ego based and therefore “bad.”  It may be true that much of our interior fits the description of ego.  And that many of our problems originate and reside in the more regressed or primitive aspects of ourselves.  But the idea of destroying the ego or just stepping away from these aspects of ourselves seems unrealistic, unhealthy and literally self-defeating.  (This issue is important enough to me to merit a future article)

 As Emanuel in the book Emanuel Speaks (1998), so eloquently states about our imperfections. 

 Our less evolved areas have a right to be.
They whisper of things past.
They whisper of confusion, of unfulfillment
and of the pain of the soul separated from its God
and the longing for that Oneness again.

Realize too that you do not need to be perfect
to be loved.  Love each other in your imperfections,
tenderly and completely.  Be gentle with yourselves.

The demand for perfection on the physical plane
can be your worst enemy.  

To insist on perfection precludes growth.
To accept imperfection as part of your humanness is to grow.
If you can love the part of you that you think is imperfect
then the act of transformation can begin.

 One does not release through rejection.
One releases through love.  

Be comfortable but not complacent
with your imperfections.  

 With my clients, I call this process of taking an internal loving stance Principle One because it is so primary.  The only way to change something about ourselves is to accept it not destroy it or avoid it.  And again it is in our more primitive or young parts of ourselves that hold the difficulties about being single.  These young parts of ourselves are the carriers of old wounds that form our feelings and negative beliefs about being single.  They need first and foremost the right to be.

 After acceptance then how do we go about changing, redecorating these archaic, problematic interior places.  The formula for change is awareness, self-intervention, external changes and time.  With a detached awareness we can be a loving witness who gives acceptance, understanding and compassion.  With a wise, loving inner therapist/assistant we can intervene using personal growth methods for clearing old feelings and shifting decisions/beliefs. 

 Psychotherapy and personal growth is usually simple, although not so easy.  It is usually fairly easy to analyze or figure out what the problem is.  Unfortunately, understanding alone doesn’t do it.  If it did, then psychoanalysis and its variants would have been the only therapy because it worked so well.  But because the younger parts of ourselves hold the difficulties and because these parts of ourselves are not very amenable to rationality then we have the curvy sometimes blocked paths entailed in personal growing. 

 However, not growing is like giving up on yourself, hence the wonderfulness in the opportunity of having problems with being single. 

 Psychotherapy and personal growth, it seems to me, needs to be multimodal or multifaceted.  That resolving issues, healing old wounds, or getting beyond a difficulty usually takes coming at it from a number of different directions.  I am skeptical of an approach that bills itself as the solution or offering an immediate solution.  Psychotherapy or any therapy is cumulative not instantaneous.  The transformations that just happen most often have been building for a while.  One of the characteristics of most every spiritual tradition is cultivating patience and non-attachment to outcomes.  This is also a very helpful stance when it comes to healing ourselves and changing.

 Within the Self Parenting approach that I use with my clients I explain that interventions for personal growth can be approached from a top down, bottom up, or middle perspective.  The top down is behavioral change, middle is self parenting, redecision work (which comes from Transactional Analysis theory), sometimes working the 12 steps, or spiritual approaches.  Bottom up involves family of origin expressive work that Psychomotor Therapy and group interaction does best (from my perspective.)  And of course there are many other approaches, including support from friends on a formal or informal basis, that can and may need to be used.

 Again, the bottom line here is that learning how to be effective in redecorating our interior and doing the internal shifting to have more positive reactions to bumps is a long term proposition.  Yet what more important mission is there?  Utilizing all our resources there is the opportunity to celebrate where we are and make effort to stay in grateful places especially while we are working through our gunkier recesses. 

 Towards this end, Conscious Singles is starting an online support group in the Conscious Forum Area of the website.  Please come by and visit.  Hopefully you will decide to register for a free membership and become part of this growing conscious community.

Joel Rachelson, Ph.D. is a Clinical Psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia and the founder/founder of Conscious Singles

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