How to Get into Trouble
Transcript:
One of the areas of my work is talking to couples who are planning to marry. Most people getting married don't expect things will change after the wedding, especially if they've been together for a long time, or if they've already spent some time living together. But people who are married will tell you that something unexpected happens in marriage.
What's interesting, is that where marriage is the most challenging, it can also be the most rewarding. Marriage experts who hold marriage in such high regard also speak very candidly about the trouble of marriage. Family therapist Salvador Minuchin says: every marriage is a mistake some people just cope with their mistakes better than others.
Couples psychologist David Schnarr says: no one is ready for marriage, marriage makes you ready for marriage.
Marriage therapist team and married couple John and Julia Gottman write: we teach couples that they'll never solve most of their problems, and it's a myth that if you solve your problems you'll automatically be happy.
Now, these are not cynical voices. These are voices who revere the sacred institute of marriage. These are voices who have incredible experience to help married couples with what they may experience as life's single greatest challenge, and also single greatest reward.
Pre-marriage counseling helps you to get an early start on the challenge and the reward.
Dating is hard
I have recommended this book often to clients struggling to understand their relationship and partner. Attachment science sheds new light on common relational conceptions.
Available at Amazon.ca and Chapters/Indigo
Why does he/she move away from me when I am upset?!
He/she just needs to calm down!
I have never felt more alone than in this relationship!
Maybe he/she isn't the one.
He/she doesn’t seem to care.
I think the problem is that he/she is crazy. Maybe it’s that he/she is depressed.
Our relationship somehow just got boring.
Our sensitivities to our partners are often about “attachment styles”. In this book, take an attachment style questionnaire. Learn about yourself, your partner, and common attachments reactions and relational patterns. Learn how to be there for your partner and to build your relationship around a more compassionate understanding of each other.
It’s available on Kindle, Audiobook, and Paperback!
Or, come into the clinic and we’ll lend you our copy.
This Attitude Hurts Your Relationship
Sometimes relationships get too polite and generous.
“What do you want to eat?“
“Whatever you’d like honey.”
”What show do you want to watch?”
“I doesn’t matter to me. You choose.“
“Where do you want to go out?”
“Whatever you want, dear.”
At first, this is considerate, but notice what happens when you keep this up for too long. When one person is continually deferring to the other, it is now conflict avoidance. You’ll know that you’ve reached this point when your partner is no longer happy with your generous answers. Now your conflict avoidance has create a new conflict, and this conflict is one that waits to be resolved at your end.
At some point, if you continue to defer your desire (ie. what you want), your partner will experience your lack of desire and it will hurt. They will sense that something is missing (ie. your desire for them), but it may be difficult for them to see what is missing behind your polite gestures. A part of them, will remember something missing from the beginning of the relationship -a feeling of desirability. That when was when you knew what you wanted and you went after it. It was your favourite food, a fascinating show, an adventure to go on …it was them.
Watch the video below on deferring dynamics and see that “a happy wife” is NOT the recipe for a happy life.
How to Have Conflict with your Partner
Transcript:
Some of my clients tell me that they never fight with their partner. Which sounds incredible, but a lot of times what this means is that the relationship at some point stop growing closer. If two people are getting closer there is always conflict, but if you can manage it well and come up with constructive solutions when you fight through conflict then you get a deeper experience of closeness.
Maybe you need more conflict in your relationship and that's where I can help.
I help individuals and couples to to put contentious differences forward and and to hold them in a constructive tension until a sensitive resolution arises. Now conflict can be an intimidating and scary experience and so it's no wonder that we avoid it. We've all had experiences where conflict has gone badly and we definitely don't want more of that. It hurt more than helped or maybe didn't help at all.
The conflict is absolutely essential in the bonding process it's in these moments when we hurt and we see our partner hurt that we we also develop we grow in our sensitivity to each other it's where the emotional bonding takes place and couples feel closer than they ever were before maintaining a healthy measure of conflict in relationships is what couples need in order to build a closer relationship one of my couple's clients reflected therapy “made it worse”. It brought out all sorts of conflict
It made it worse.
Until it was so much better.
Why Your Partner Needs Therapy, But You Don't.
Transcript:
When a couple's relationship is going well, differences are affirmed and celebrated. one partner brings an excitement; the other brings a calm. One brings a closeness for intimate bonding; the other creates space for renewing desire. Partners move back and forth with each other in a dance, and find a way to make differences work for the relationship.
But under stress those same differences end up splitting and taking sides in each partner. Now, excitement feels like a neediness to the other and calm feels like a an indifference or a disregard. Closeness feels like a suffocating pressure, and and space feels like an abandonment.
This isn't a problem with one of the partners but a split involving both. One is anxious and outwardly upset; the other is anxious but inwardly overwhelmed. One is angry and shouting; the other is expressionless and quiet. One seems to overreact; the other seems to under react. One expresses their emotion trying to bring back a connection or a closeness; the other disconnects from emotion trying to bring back a calm or peacefulness.
Now, on the surface it appears that one partner is upset and out of control, and the other is calm and in control. But both partners are anxious. One experiences it outwardly and the other experiences it inwardly. And the the more one partner goes up in emotion, the more the second partner goes down in emotion. The more the first person partner gets angry and shouts and criticizes, the more the second person withdraws is quiet and shuts down. And the more the second partner shuts down the more it feels like a rejection to the first partner and the more upset they become. The more upset they become, the more overwhelming it is to the to the second partner, and the more they withdraw.
Each partner is reacting to the other, and things escalate. Now here's the thing: If only one partner shows up for therapy it tends to be the one who's angry and shouting, the one who seems to overreact, the one who expresses their emotion outwardly, the one who appears to be out of control, and anxious.
But the other partners inner anxiety may be causing just as much stress to the relationship. Because it's inward it's hard to see this difference.
May be why it appears that your partner needs therapy but you don't
All too often, it seems that it's just one partner that's responsible for stress in the relationship. But in dynamics like this, therapy serves the relationship best when both partners show up for the work.
Years ago i showed up to couples therapy thinking that i was mostly there to support my anxious partner. I was more surprised than she was to find out why there was so much stress in our relationship.
You had me at “hell no”!
Transcript:
(Scene from Jerry Maguire)
Jerry:
“I love you. You complete me. And if I just had...”
Dorothy:
“Shut up. Just shut up.....You had me at hello. You had me at hello.”
I think this scene captures well our aspirations for romantic love. Someone to love us and complete us, someone to make us whole.
But is this picture of love reality?
The psychoanalyst Lacan challenges this notion of love offering. Love is giving what you don't have to someone who doesn't want it. At first this sounds horribly pessimistic and even cynical, but I think there's something for us romantics to aspire to here.
He's saying that we all show up to relationships with holes, with flaws, with pieces that are missing. He calls it a “lack”. We tend to not even know about these holes until someone else is allowed to get up close and personal.
Our unsuspecting lover.
They thought we were going to be the perfect partner and we were just as surprised as they were to find something repulsive.
What's possible now in this relationship when this flaw can't be hidden again, it can't be fixed, it can't be ignored, and the possibility of love suggested by Lacan, our partner, rather than despising us because of this flaw, might stick around and stay with us in our disappointment. They might comfort us in our distress over this newfound flaw and we might also comfort them in their distress. In an extraordinary irony our flaw becomes the very sight of endearment. The very sight of secure love, and over time comforting love gives way to a secure bond.
Love is giving what you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.
Your partner will eventually bring you face to face with what's missing and it will be upsetting for both of you. They won't complete you and you won't complete them, but instead you might bring each other a deeply securing comfort.
It's not a perfect relationship, but it might be much better than that.
Two Demands that Ruin Relationships
“It’s calm under the waves in the blue of my oblivion”
THE NEED FOR “CLOSE” CAN SOUND LIKE:
“Don’t you walk away from me!”
“I feel alone in this relationship.”
“All he/she does is shutdown.”
“It feels like I don’t even matter to him/her anymore.”
THEE NEED FOR “CALM” CAN SOUND LIKE:
“Will you just calm down!”
“I just don’t know what to do when he/she is so angry.”
“All he/she does is criticize me.”
“No matter what I do, I never get it right for him/her.”
Maybe we’re just not compatible.
There’s another possibility …what if my demand is fuelling my partners anger and aversion? And what if instead of asserting my demand, I understood and waited on my partner’s vulnerable need? What if instead of explaining and defending my justified response, it was safe simply to hurt? And what if, at my most vulnerable, I knew that I was safe and at home?
VULNERABILITY CAN SOUND LIKE:
“When I shut down,
it must seem like I don’t care about you
and that you don’t matter.
You must feel very alone when I walk away.
It must feel like I’m rejecting you.
That must really hurt.
Tell me more.
I really do care”.
“When I’m upset,
it must seem like I am always making it your fault.
You must feel beat up by my criticism.
It must be overwhelming for you
when nothing you do or say will calm me down.
You must feel like an idiot around me.
That must be really exhausting.
Take your time.
I miss you.”
There emerges a new possibility in the ease of demands and in the persistence of safety and vulnerability. Here the goal is not the dismissal of pain but the it’s welcome …and comfort. And in a relationship where comfort is the priority, calm and close are seldom far behind.
Love Conflict
The comedian Dylan Moran suggests that war represents the inability of conflict. War means to eliminate the enemy, while conflict aims at working towards a solution.
Dr. John Gottman, in his conceptualization of the 4 Apocalypse Horsemen, demonstrates how war tactics (ie. defensiveness, criticism, contempt, and stonewalling) will effectively eliminate (with 93% probability) marital opponents.
The alternative?
Dr. Gottman suggests disarming your relationship with 4 antidotes which instead nurture healthy conflict:
take responsibility rather than act defensively
complain (“I” statements) rather than criticise (“you” statements)
build on appreciation rather than contempt
use distance to self-soothe rather than to stonewall
It’s not too late to learn to fight right with your espoused adversary.
“If we don’t end war, war will end us”
You Complete Me
“You complete me.”
We have this desire …to be complete. And what a wonder it might be to find this in another. We romance our partners with the promise of wholeness.
Why then does there linger an emptiness? My partner lacks the resource to fill my need. What now?
Now …love. You gave yourself to fill their lack.
Now give your partner your emptiness, your insufficiency, your imperfection …your lack.
Though it is refused, your gift is not denied. You are also held in their troublesome want. They did not complete you. They lacked the resource to fill your need …and their own. You have not found wholeness, but another through which you might have courage to confront your own lack.
In time, may you celebrate, “We are incomplete”.
“Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.”