“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your stomach bothers you at various times for different reasons. The reasons, however, always have a particular base, so to speak. Parents sometimes express love by concern, though children seldom understand this. I have mentioned this before: the parent saying “Brush your teeth,” means “Your teeth are beautiful and healthy. I want you to keep them that way.”

Many parents find it difficult to express love verbally in a positive, open, unabashed manner. The child, however, according to circumstances, may hear only the order “Brush your teeth.”

Ruburt is verbal. He loves to talk. He likes to hear you talk. Oftentimes your stomach upsets you because your love for Ruburt makes you concerned, and in most instances the stimulus is money. An occasion will arise, or a period of time, in which your love for him wants to find expression. You do this by expressing your concern that his work is not being duly appreciated in monetary terms (as I did this evening).

You might feel he is being taken advantage of. You do not say “I love you. I admire your work so that I want to see it duly appreciated.” Verbally oriented, Ruburt hears only an implied order, or criticism. The conflict with the stomach always involves money, however—taxes sometimes, for example—and implies a period or situation in which you think he is being taken advantage of.

You are particularly sensitive here because of the male beliefs of your culture, and the feeling that Ruburt’s books are his rather than, say, yours. You want to show him that you appreciate that by your concern, but you do not express the love verbally half as much. Period.

Ruburt’s work straddles all these issues—that is, it involves all of them at different times. Your stomach problem is basically the result of your feelings about what you consider to be a lack of communication, a blocking of your natural love. From your background, regardless of your intellectual beliefs, now, you learned to mask your expressions of love or exuberance, lest they be misunderstood. You learned to express love through worry or concern.

This is because those expressions were natural in your family. Love would never be clearly expressed through a clear channel. It might be expressed through action that did not, however, directly involve love’s expression. Your father might make things for you, for example. But after your childhood state he avoided caresses or verbal expressions.

Your mother’s verbal expressions were often aggressive tools used against your father—that is, when your mother expressed love to you verbally, the words were so chosen that they became verbal assaults against your father.

(10:43.) Your stance with the world is involved. Behind it all, however, is the feeling that you do not express your love verbally, or through touch, to Ruburt, so that instead you look out for ways that feel he is being taken advantage of; and through that concern, you express your love. He does not understand this.

Intellectually he accepts it, but emotionally he yearns for that direct expression. The child may think “My teeth are fine, why yell at me to brush them?” Ruburt thinks “What is there that allows you to speak your concern more actively than your love?” He is verbally oriented. Words have rhythm—emotional rhythms, to which he is acutely attuned. You are saying “I love you. My art is, for whatever reasons, private. I respect it. It involves a method of expression, and a primary stance of my life, regardless of what it brings or does not bring. I am sorry that somehow I cannot use it in the way that you use your writing, and even in the way that I can use mine. When I think that others take advantage of you in monetary terms—government, publisher, or public—it makes me wonder why. I wish that my painting could bring you abundance in social ways also. I feel guilty sometimes when I paint for that reason. I know that you understand on deep levels. I wish I could express my love verbally, but if not, I will express it is this fashion.”

Now if you can understand this, and express your love more directly, your stomach will not bother you.

You say, as in tonight’s episode (before the session) that you must express your feelings—of dissatisfaction and concern—and that is true. The difficulty is that you only express part of your feelings—not the love that originally initiated those feelings that you do express.

You identified fairly strongly with your father as a boy. He seldom expressed love verbally toward your mother. He felt that the worst would happen in any given set of circumstances. You long believed emotionally that it was unrealistic to express love or hope, for circumstances would surely prove such expectations to be foolish.

Your father expected the worst of the world. You have not seriously, with determination, examined those beliefs. If they were true the world simply would not have lasted this long. Nuclear destruction has little to do with it. If anything, it adds to my argument—for if those theories really held sway, one nation or another by now would have already destroyed your world. Hence, you do not make any simple, joyful remarks, like “The book will be out in England or Germany,” and indeed, you take little pleasure from that, but leap ahead to the imagined threats. A man protects his family because he loves it—but in his love he can see threats all around.

Your father expressed his love in his garage. Objectively speaking, you have of course exactly what you want, each of you. Give us a moment....

He reacts practically, then, by avoiding what he thinks of as conflict, and you do not help in that regard, for by temperament you are not particularly attracted to the world. He feels he is so attracted, temperamentally, and so puts on physical guards. The bridge here involves the natural world, his love of nature, the connections between poetry, strolling the natural world as opposed to the social one.

He felt that the female was not temperamentally equipped to naturally handle such problems, and so adopted the symptoms. Because you so often expressed your concerns rather than your love, your fears rather than your hopes, and because of his own nature, the outside world appeared more threatening. He is by nature rather optimistic. From you he believed he learned that optimism was shallow, unrealistic, and that people were not to be trusted. He never believed in conflict. He is not abject, but he believes heartily in having nothing to do with an arena of activity in which he feels he might meet ridicule or criticism.

Your own inclinations and your beliefs did not reinforce his sense of security. The exuberant expression of your love, for your love for him is exuberant, found no expression in the overall of an active, direct, clear route, but was diverted through concern, and through mention of the threats you felt might surround him.

He became extremely frightened when he went to the dentist (last month, 6 weeks), and when you again expressed your concern, but not your love: “I’m afraid you’ve had it,” you said. He was of course afraid of the same thing. But he interpreted your remark verbally as you made it, knowing you love him, but having to search through the concern.

Your love since then has found more direct expression, and I am not obviously saying that that indirectness of expression is responsible for Ruburt’s symptoms—but only to state that your expressed concern in many instances, without the direct expression of love, reinforces the idea of threat or insecurity.

The fibers are more elastic in his legs, but his confidence is still poor, nor have you made any attempts to encourage him in that direction. The key here is encouragement. The expression of your love saw threats, so that both of you together reiterate those beliefs.