Jan Geurtz: 'Long live the relationship crisis!'

Has your relationship just hit the rocks or is it in dire straits? Congratulations! According to author and spiritual teacher Jan Geurtz, a major love crisis is the chance to be freed from all the patterns that torment you. Why this is so, he describes in his new book On love and letting go.

Even if you have been engaged in self-development and spirituality for years, you can overlook certain fixed, obstructive patterns in yourself. Just as a therapist sometimes has to go into therapy himself, writer Jan Geurtz (66), known for books such as Addicted to love and Liberated by love, needed a solid relationship crisis to arrive at certain self-insights. A life crisis, while not fun, is more or less a gift, he writes in the book On love and letting go. Life crisis as spiritual breakthrough.

Crisis as breakthrough

You argue that a major crisis is actually the best thing that can happen to you. Why?

'We have all learned a strategy to live, to achieve happiness and avoid suffering. A crisis means getting stuck in that survival mechanism, and that offers insight into what you are doing wrong. I myself have a nice guy-pattern: a strategy where you avoid conflict. I was the youngest in a large family, and my brother and four sisters were all years older than me. I lost every conflict; if I ever got angry, I was laughed at.'

'This is how I subconsciously developed the strategy of being sweet and pleas to achieve things. I taught myself not to feel like the weaker one, but the thing about such a pattern is that it perpetuates the very negative core belief that underlies it. Because I never stood up for myself, I unconsciously kept feeling like the lesser. There are numerous patterns like this. Perfectionism, for example. Or the 'helpaholic' syndrome, common among eldest children; they have been taught from an early age not to be a burden, to be the wisest, to help in the family. They only feel valuable if they are useful to someone else.'

The crisis helps see through that pattern of behaviour?

'If you use it to look at yourself, yes. You can experience a crisis time after time and keep blaming it on circumstances or others. But if you have been fired for the third time because of a conflict with your boss, you could also ask yourself if there is something wrong with the way you deal with authority. If you have fallen for the umpteenth time on a wrong man, the question is why you keep falling for such types. A crisis offers a moment to ask questions about your learned identity.'

Egos

Is a love crisis more 'appropriate' for this than any other kind of crisis?

'Every crisis is good, but some hit you deeper than others. For most people, a relationship crisis is more intense than losing a job. A relationship pushes buttons of deep love, and therefore also buttons of deep fear. Moreover, in a relationship, you are dealing with an intense fusion of two egos, as I call our learned self-image which includes those false beliefs. Incidentally, it is not so much the ego that is the problem. You cannot do without ego, and it is therefore not something you need to unlearn. The problem is the complete identification with it. The misconception that those beliefs are true.'

Your book Liberated by love revolved around the question of how to establish a love relationship that does not bog down in crisis. So you failed to do that?

'In most relationships, people hold the other person responsible for their happiness or unhappiness. My girlfriend and I have what I call a spiritual relationship: we try not to lay claim to each other's love and presence. We try to keep acknowledging that the other person is an adult human being, not an extension of yourself, and that you are each responsible for your own suffering and happiness. Yet an ego clash had developed with us too. When we started having differences of opinion on a number of issues, it triggered great separation anxiety in both of us. 'Help, we are growing apart, this is going to go wrong!'

Illusion

'Normally you would then reassure each other, but we actually let each other be more free. We didn't cover up that deepest fear with sex or all kinds of promises, which brought our patterns and entanglements to the surface. Our egos broke apart, so to speak, while love remained. That creates a sense of insecurity, but also of space.'

Has your separation anxiety diminished?

'Yes, which is why I also see this as a fantastic development. Separation anxiety, something that almost everyone suffers from deep inside, is one of the first emotions a human being experiences: right after birth, when we are completely dependent on someone else. That feeling runs very deep, but you don't usually experience it consciously. Until someone you have attached yourself to threatens to lose you. However, the feeling that you cannot live without that other person does not make sense. You are an adult human being and can take care of yourself. In saying this, I am not saying: don't act like that. But by experiencing and exploring those feelings deeply, you discover that the suffering they produce is an illusion.'

Is all suffering an illusion?

'Yes, in principle it does. However, you have to distinguish between physical or mental pain and physical or mental suffering. Pain is real, but your resistance to the situation - I don't want to experience this, this sucks, I want it to go away - is what causes suffering. Suffering occurs because you fight what you are experiencing in the moment, because you don't want to experience it. That produces stress hormones in the body.

Release

So giving up resistance does not mean that you no longer have pain or grief, that there would be no grieving process. It only means that you experience the pain without adding suffering to it. Nor does it mean that you should never try to change anything about an experience. Buddhists sometimes fall into that trap: that you should just accept everything. I've let myself be walked all over for years. No, it's about letting go of resistance to situations you can no longer change.

Why is it that you have only now come to these insights?

'If there is such a thing as final enlightenment, I haven't reached it yet. Life is a growth process, and in every moment you face new challenges that make you more aware and help you move forward. Or to use the Buddha's wonderful quote: 'There are no obstacles on the path, obstacles ARE the path'.'