Making a Mess in Montana

We recently came back from a two week road trip to Montana and Wyoming with two other couples. Well, it was supposed to be a road trip until we realized that three of the six of us didn’t actually relish the thought of sitting in the car for any extended length of time.

After that disclosure, some disappointment, hours of discussion, some more disclosure, a few tears, a lot of hysterical laughter, finally a decision to get on a plane (we recommend Allegiant Air, though until the moment of boarding-with only a little delay-we weren’t too sure such an airline existed).

And so the dance began. Another friend had requested a reality TV kind of movie to be shot on this trip, as if she knew what we forgot to anticipate: how we would be faced, daily, with the impossible task of intimacy. Conflicting needs, clashing attachment styles, personal pacing out of synch with at least three others, and, oh, that too: ancient family dynamics in full bloom, complexified times six.

Fritz Perls once said that contact is the appreciation of difference. Well, we had a lot of contact in those two weeks. The movie title went from Five Therapists and a Lawyer to Making a Mess in Montana to Six Random White People, the last one an expression of everyone’s profound and continuous amazement at how very different each human being is from another. Only because each of us brought on this trip a commitment to the work of intimacy, decades of practice in showing up in our mess and glory, and a willingness not to take ourselves super seriously all the time, we still love the other four white people… and even a bit more than before.

This all reminded us how years ago, during a teaching residency in Maui, we realized that the principles of relating we teach in our workshops are directly applicable to our marriage. Ha! How about practicing what we preach with five others!

You ask us how? Come practice with us. And yes, go ahead and drop in so we can discover more together. To see what to do when all else fails, scroll all the way down.

We look forward to stumbling together toward more or less perfect relating.