Hopcke - There Are No Accidents in Love and Relationships

I picked up Hopcke’s book, There are No Accidents In Love and Relationships (2018), because Nancy Schlossberg recommended it in her book that I recently reviewed. Hopcke noted the origin of the way he views synchronicity as coming from Carl Jung’s Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1950). Many stories are woven throughout Hopcke’s book, including clients with whom he worked in counseling and his own life experience.

Jung and Hopcke view synchronicity as a principle of psychological connection. Synchronicity occurs when we strive to connect our unconscious and conscious lives, when our present informs our future, and when our deepest internal reflections reach up and out to bond with others. Deeper awareness of our present circumstances then surfaces the opportunity to connect with family and loved ones at a deeper level, and by doing this we discover the ways our experiences relate and mirror those who are closest to us. Four important aspects of synchronistic experiences include acausality, emotional impact, symbolic nature, and transitional times around which synchronistic occurrences tend to cluster (locator 294 in Kindle version). In simplest terms, synchronistic events are coincidences that are beyond the ordinary and therefore have a dimension of subjective meaningfulness to those involved.

Some may describe synchronous experiences as uncanny. What is meant by this is that the event brings to our awareness something that we may have already known unconsciously. Two examples in my life occurred in anticipation of job changes that I would eventually make; in both cases I spoke with colleagues who could not have known, and I myself did not know, that I would be drawn to a job change. Yet, the conversations seemed to anticipate rather dramatic changes in my career. Hopcke indicated that uncanny circumstances occur more often among family and I have found this as well.

One of the possibilities that captivated me about synchronicity is that being more aware of our experiences opens a window to a larger self, one previously hidden as a result of inattention or unconsciousness. This larger self emerges unintentionally, without really trying, and offers the possibility of achieving a “Supra-ordinate Self, as Jung put it, that capacity for wholeness – to see how all is connected in the universe around us and to see how we ourselves fit into that infinity of completion” (locator 849 in Kindle version). Hopcke noted that this fuller self and resulting deeper meaning in life often occurs during times of transition and may occur “when we are pulling away from one way of being and have not yet found our way forward to the next” (locator 2158 in Kindle version).

Reading There are no accidents in love and relationships felt somewhat like reading a memoir but in other cases it felt like a psychology textbook. The essential message, whether personal or intellectual, is that striving to be more aware, watching for connections, and seeking meaning in life’s experiences deepens our life’s work and is likely to foster more meaningfully relationships with others.