Opposites
Esther Perel probably needs no introduction. On paper, she is a psychotherapist, known for her book Mating in Captivity and most importantly, she works with couples on their marriage or relationship issues. She has an amazing podcast called Where Should We Begin. And this is where you can really tell she understands fundamentally what it means to be human.
In the Master and His Emissary, there is this section that discusses paradoxes and opposites. Rightfully so, the two hemispheres of the brain can be seen as opposites in many ways. He says:
Heidegger was not alone in seeing that beauty lies in the coming to rest of opposites, that have been sharply distinguished, in the connectedness of a harmonious unity. The need for ultimate unification of division with union is an important principle in all areas of life; it reflects the need not just for two opposing principles, but for opposition ultimately to be harmonised. (McGilchrist, 2019)
With the advent of Romanticism, paradox became once more not a sign of error, but, as it had been seen by Western philosophers before Plato, and by all the major schools of thought in the East before and since, as a sign of the necessary limitation of our customary modes of language and thought, to be welcomed, rather than rejected, on the path towards truth. (McGilchrist, 2019)
Time and time again, I see this in Perel’s podcast episodes. In one episode, she is talking with a woman about grief. The woman had experienced the passing of her father and then, most surprisingly, the passing of her little sister by suicide. Near the end of the episode, Esther discusses commemorating her sister and how they can do it as a large family. The woman expresses that it’s awkward to bring her sister up during big functions. In her heart, she wants to bring her up more and wishes that her family would do the same. Esther replies:
There needs to be room for each person. Those who want to speak. Those who don’t. Those who want to cry. Those who don’t. Those who cry with others. Those who cry alone … Each one highlighting different ways to experience and express grief. The most common one is those who say let’s remember and those who say we don’t have to bring it up each time. Those who say let’s move on and those who say how can you. They seem to all cancel each other out when in fact, both of these exist inside each of us. But in a family, sometimes instead of holding them inside of us, holding the tension and the polarities, they get outsourced onto other people. So one brother becomes the one that says let’s only talk about the children – the little ones, the future. And the other one says but what about the past. But in fact, they absolutely need each other. They are part of the holistic experience: holding on, letting go, remembering, forgetting, the past, the future, her strength, her illness.
How poignant and perceptive of Perel to express it like this. It is so beautifully said and there is so much truth to all of this. I believe this is what McGilchrist means when he says that two opposites must ultimately be harmonized and welcomed in our lives. I think that we live in a time where black and white thinking not only dominate our society but we have a discomfort around holding two opposites in our minds for a long period of time. We often want to pick a side or analyze which one is right when really, they are both right, they are both needed, and it is the tension of the two that holds both.
I recently devoured a book called We Are the Luckiest by Laura McKowen, which is a memoir about her sobriety journey. I’m not sure what it is about sobriety stories that makes them so relatable to me. I’m not going through any sort of alcohol addiction but I feel a connection to these men and women. Their feelings about themselves before getting sober and the realizations after have a similar ring to what I went through with my own identity. There’s a part in her book when she realizes that something in her was changing. She understood more about her addiction and drinking but she also couldn’t stop drinking. My identity shifted in a similar way. In my bones, I knew that I can no longer keep up this facade of going to a white collar job everyday and striving to become some executive. I could no longer lie to myself about wanting that. But I was scared of what I would become if I didn’t have that to fall back on. Who would I be? How would I support myself? I had no idea what it looked like for me to pursue something different. Similarly and perhaps in a much more difficult way, McKowen had to shift her entire identity and find what that looks like for her during parties, birthdays, dates, and happy hours.
Towards the end of her book, she writes about this poem called “The Holy Longing” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
And so long as you haven’t experience
This: to die and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest
On the dark earth.
She explains that before getting sober, her mentality was that she tried to be good and then hated herself when she was bad. She was only a troubled guest on this earth. She couldn’t see another way to be. But after her journey with addiction, she writes:
So much of what I’d perceived to be courageous or successful or important or interesting had been such a joke up until then. I hadn’t known anything about life at all: what it meant to meet your limitations or the depths of your capacity for pain, or how hard it was to actually change. …
But those early [AA] meetings, and the daily struggle of that first year or so, stripped away most of my illusions. It was like being introduced to an underworld, a much deeper layer of the human experience, and it didn’t take me long to see that it was the place I’d always been chasing. It just looked a hell of a lot different than I’d thought it would, and the price I had to pay to get there was far more than I expected.
In this world, my mistakes are as sacred as my triumphs. In this world, the ugly and the dazzling are the same. In this world, there is room for both joy and terror, pleasure and pain. In this world, nothing is too shameful to speak of. Nothing counts you out.
The bad becomes the good because through the bad, she was able to accept so much of herself instead of kicking it away. Through the unification of both the good and the bad and understanding both sides, she was able to transcend the black and white thinking of “I was irresponsible when I drank so I’m bad” or “I didn’t drink tonight so I’m good”. It not about that.
This dichotomy of the opposites that McGilchrist talks about lives in so many stories that I’ve read. It seems as if it’s through this tension of opposites that something entirely new is born. It is sacred and lovely and beautiful.
Mcgilchrist, I. (2019). The Master and His Emissary : The Divided brain and The Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.
Mckowen, L. (2022). WE ARE THE LUCKIEST : the surprising magic of a sober life. New World Library.