The Bliss of Becoming One!
Tony Crisp
Integrating The Feminine into the Male Psyche
I was born into a definite male body and into an era in which there was a powerful line drawn between male and female. Being male was something I never questioned consciously. However, my first marriage was a largely loveless one. Both myself and my wife had been raised in such a way that love had either not entered into our experience as children, or else it had been put to death by the way parents interacted with us. Observing what this led to in my own relationship with our beautiful children pushed me to attempt change.
It was slow and hard, but the body of my dead love was gradually brought to life. As this happened it became a pain to observe how my wife, who had not managed to grow as quickly, was dealing with the children. This led to an extraordinary strategy on my part, one I had no conscious awareness that I was doing at the time. It was only later, through exploring unconscious content through dreams, that an awareness dawned.
I reported this at the time as follows - At this point in the exploring the dream and my responses I suddenly felt myself as a woman. I realised that I have become a woman. It was quite a shock to feel this so clearly, and I didn't want to look at my wife who was with me. There was an impulse to cover it up. I said, to her 'I am the object of my desire'. I could have my own orgasm as I did in the dream with W. This connects with the dream in which I held the young woman and felt her orgasm as my own.
This led on to feeling the powerful drive to guard my eggs. As the woman I feel strong animal urges to protect my unborn young, my eggs, with my life. I felt as if I were crouching over my eggs, guarding them, warding off anything and anybody. I then went through a fantasy, or action replay, that at first I only slightly identified with, but gradually really felt as my own. It was the feeling of conflict over who a baby belonged to. I could experience the deep connection in me with 'my' baby, and the struggle with some other person about whom the baby belonged to. I was saying, this is MY baby. It's mine. Look, you can see the likeness, it even looks like me. It's mine! I really felt as if someone had tried to take my child from me and I felt the torment of that.
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This switched to feelings about my own children, particularly my sons. The odd thought arose in me that they desperately needed a mother. I asked myself, what does it mean they desperately needed a mother? They had a mother. Yes but they wanted somebody they could suckle up to. They needed to be loved by a woman and their actual mother wasn't capable of that. Here I experienced a clear sense of the physical closeness and body contact I wanted to give my children, and they needed from their mother. Then I went through real anger about my wife. I had let her be in the mother role, but in watching her with my son D. I saw how her intense anxiety had made her inadequate. I was desperately frustrated at seeing my woman fucking up my babies. Having been hurt as a baby and child I wanted to keep my children from that sort of harm, and here she was living out the sort of fears that had led my mother to cripple me emotionally and sexually. I was so angry that my rage led to the desperate act of me pushing between her and the children. I supplanted her, putting my body and soul in between the children and her. I was saying to them here is my body, you can eat me. I love you so much I give myself to you completely. Drink my blood, I am yours. I love you. |
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In this way I had deeply taken on the female, mother, role. I had done this not simply in a surface way, but deeply into my psyche. I had undertaken a coup d'etat with my wife, trying to take over her place to avert the harm I felt she was doing. And although I had become deeply feminine, this had been done as a strong male act out of anger and care. I felt it as beehive stuff where one queen usurps another.
As explained, this enormous shift in myself was not at first conscious, and it had happened out of anger and attempts to care for my children. But as it became conscious it began to transform me in quite wonderful ways.
At first it was gradual and strange as my wholly male identity slipped away. It felt as if something was missing, as if I was losing something. But I began to see that it wasn't that I was losing something, I was expanding and gaining something that really had always been mine, but buried. Cultural attitudes and personal ideas and feelings about who I was had pushed my wholeness, my feminine, into the background. As it emerged my life changed. Becoming whole led to an entrance into a wonderful peace, sometimes a bliss that is always in the background. Considering that I had for years suffered depression and constant emotional pain, this was and is extraordinary.
This flower has both female and male sexual organs |
Whereas love had originally been dead in me, it had now come to life. But it was a love that I could see was different to the rather one sided and often emotionally crippled love I had experienced in my early life, and that I witnessed in most of the people around me. Crippled love is grasping. It is constantly searching for someone to make it whole. It is jealous and possessive. It is often enormously dependent, experiences enormous and even crippling pain when a partner dies or is lost. This love from wholeness is much more fully unconditional. I do not need my partner to make me whole. I can love them as an individual and am not dependent on them for my wellbeing. I love them because they are lovable and not out of desperate need. |
I am still heterosexual in my sexual relationships. My love does not express as controlling or exclusive. This puts me in some conflict at times with present day morals and rules, but love is a delight. In whatever state of wholeness I have arrived at, I see much heterosexual and homosexual relationship as expressions of some level of emotional damage and wounded love.
As for those close to me, and I say this only for the record as I don't see myself like this, they tell me they have not been loved like this before. For me in these relationships it is a great joy to feel the full flow of a woman's love and to feel I am not damaging it. After all, I understand it.
I am an old man now, in my seventies, and still capable of sexual love without drugs. But the great blessing is to wake each day bathed in an ocean of peace, and to know that peace in virtually everything I do.
See LifeStream as a guide to how the union of male and female came about.
Tony's in print Books in the UK and USA
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