A couple fights over something small, and both of them know the small thing is not the point. Tension between two people accumulates from several sources at once, and tonight is the least significant of them. Peruquois gathers those sources into one diagram she calls the cross of pain. How it is built was explained by Peruquois, a top World Music performer in Australia, musician, composer, author and facilitator of self-development trainings for women.
Why pain does not clear on its own
“All the experiences of our life, including the pain we go through in life, all of it gets sealed into our body,” says Peruquois.
Then she describes what that pain does inside a relationship: “And this pain seeps into love, and if we are not aware of it, it starts to parasitize on our love.”
If a couple does not know how to handle the pain of their shared experience, it seals itself into the body and into the relationship itself, into the way the two of them interact. A few years pass and neither of them remembers when the conversation turned careful.
A woman's role in a loving relationship Peruquois names in one phrase: to be the keeper of love. A keeper needs to know what destroys the thing she keeps.
Above: the outside world
The first arm of the cross sits above the couple. It is everything that happens to two people beyond the family.
“All of us have a life, we live in the world, and this life in the world, outside the family, affects us,” says Peruquois. And that life can produce a great deal of pain.
It is easiest to see through work. He works and she is home with the children, or both of them work, and each spends the day in a separate world.
“You come home to each other filled with that mental energy of work,” says Peruquois. They arrive carrying projections, disappointments, stress, worry and unresolved questions from the outside world.
Then comes what nearly every couple knows. “We met in the evening in this apartment, in this house, but in reality we are not with each other, because we are still living inside the memories of the pain, the pressure, the stress of the day we have just lived,” says Peruquois.
One of them wants to unload, the other wants to switch off from the world. The meeting does not happen, though both are physically home.
Below: personal history
The second arm sits beneath the woman and belongs only to her.
This is pain carried over from previous relationships, from her relationship with her parents, from everything that came before this man. She brought it into this life, and it has nothing to do with him.
Peruquois calls that history a virus that gets into every aspect of communication and interaction with a man, and is especially active in vulnerable moments. A sentence spoken today lands in a wound left twenty years ago, and the reaction comes out the size of that wound.
She notes separately the case where a previous man continues to be present energetically or even physically in a woman's consciousness, her field and her body. That is her own inner work, and it has to be done before she takes on the current relationship.
To the right: the pain he caused
The third arm is everything that has accumulated in a woman's psyche from the things her man has done.
Usually it gets packed down deep so she does not meet it daily. That works right up until the moment the whole stack comes up.
Peruquois describes the movement precisely: it leaps up like a cobra, rises and strikes, to bite and to show him what pain he caused. To show, with no explanation attached.
That is the difference. Pain that is spoken calls for an answer and leads to a conversation. Pain that was never lived through looks for the bite and leads to another round.
To the left: guilt for the pain you caused
The fourth arm is the quietest and therefore the most durable.
It is the pain of the pain a woman caused her man herself. Peruquois lists what it is made of: “the things you knew and did not do, where you feel guilty, where your guilt toward him lives, where you went along with a compromise.”
This part is packed down inside as well and behaves unlike the others. A woman carrying unspoken guilt turns either excessively accommodating or sharp for no visible reason, and does not connect it to her own old history.
What looking at the cross gives you
“So we end up with a cross above us, a cross of pain,” says Peruquois.
The use of the diagram is that it separates what had been mixed. The evening fight stops being one lump and breaks into four different sources, each with its own history and its own age.
Above lies what was brought in from the outside world, and that clears by recovering before meeting each other. Below lies personal history, and that is the woman's inner work. To the right lies what was never said to him, and that is a conversation. To the left lies guilt, and that is a conversation too, a harder one.
While all four stay mixed, every attempt to work things out runs into two people arguing about different things. Once the arms are named, it becomes clear which one this particular evening started from.
Peruquois suggests drawing this cross inside yourself and looking at the pain that has touched the woman, her man, their relationship and their children. The drawing takes a few minutes and shows considerably more than a long stretch of thinking about it.
The love is not gone through any of this, it is pinned down. Women who work through these four arms often find exactly that feeling underneath, the one the whole thing started with.
If you want to work through guilt that reaches in from the past and blocks closeness today, take the Peruquois course Free Yourself from Guilt, available on her website under Courses.
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