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.
How to Negotiate with Terrorists and Kids
Why are kids so unreasonable?! It is because they are also emotional. And so are you and I! This is a wonderful reality, until it seems that emotions have achieved a hostile takeover. A crucial exercise in our human experience is to balance our practical and emotional parts of self.
One of the crucial roles of a parent is that of emotional guide. And what makes the task such a challenge is that at the beginning of parenting we are not fully equipped for the task. We are still in the process of emotional formation …now under the stress of parenting!
Get it on Amazon.ca or Chapters/Indigo
Perhaps rather than blaming parenting for stress, we should credit parenting for the completion of our own emotional formation. Yes, we take on stress for a child’s emotional growth, but it is just as true that the same stress catalyzes our own growth.
If you are looking for elaboration on this perspective, I recommend Dr. Shefali Tsabary’s The Conscious Parent (Transforming Ourselves and Empowering our Children).
Perhaps you’ll find that these priorities are also the very ones that you feel are under personal threat when your child is upset …and now you are upset.
Transcript:
Chris Voss, former lead international hostage negotiator for the FBI explained: the terrorist demand - the money, the helicopter, the window for escape - the demand is not the highest order demand. The highest order objective is control. After that, it's an emotional validation a feeling that they're respected and understood and somewhere below that sits the demand.
Now, this is important to keep in mind when it comes to parenting children and adolescents. Not so that we can strategize to outwit with them, but so that we can discharge some of the upsetting energy that's hidden behind the demand. For children and adolescents the demand is not always as high a priority as it may appear. It doesn't seem like that because all we hear is the demand:
“I want to stay up later.”
“I want more screen time.”
“I want something else to to eat.”
But at the top of the list for every growing and healthy individual is a need to establish a sense of personal control, or autonomy. They're growing into an increased level of responsibility. And when this ability to choose feels threatened, it can send anyone into a panic.
Second on the list for a demanding child or adolescent is emotional validation:
Are my feelings valid? Is it normal to feel this way inside? Is it normal for me to feel upset when I'm not getting what I want or when it may seem that my power to choose is under threat? And if it's not normal, or if my experience feels under question, then I begin to wonder if I'm normal, or if I'm okay, or if I'm valid.
And this can be really terrifying
Now, validating emotion is not a permissive resignation. It's not saying that it's okay to scream at someone else, or lock yourself in your room, or to treat others without respect. But it's normalizing this overwhelmingly upset inner emotional experience. It's saying:
What you're feeling inside makes sense. It's normal. It's so frustrating to not get what you want. I feel upset inside when I don't get what I want and I don't expect I'll ever grow out of that.
Now as far as the demand goes, I have four boys from elementary age to college age. It's tough being a parent, and it's so important to be able to deliver a no when we have to. But if we can offer an unqualified yes to the top two concerns, a sense of personal control, or autonomy, or emotional validation, feeling respected and understood, then you have the difference between a conversation with someone who's terrified and struggling for emotional survival, and someone who simply has an exhaustively demanding enthusiasm for life.
Both are demanding, but one is ready to negotiate
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.
Virus d-STRESS: How to PROJECT Yourself
Transcript:
I hope you're doing well out there through this viral crisis, and with all the prevention measures that are in place. And if you are sick on top of feeling awful, this must be very scary. I wish you well, and I hope for your recovery.
In a situation like this it's interesting to see how we react to distress. Our evolutionary genetics kick in, and we find our primal tendencies are working to get us through the crisis. So what is your destress tendency? Is it distress or is it de-stress? Here's what I mean:
Distress is like an emergency alarm. Do you signal an urgency for everyone to acknowledge the severity of the crisis? Does the expression on your face reflect the very real distress of our present reality? This is an important stress reaction, because if the house is on fire, the alarm needs to go off, everyone in the house needs to know that there's distress.
On the other hand do you de-stress?
Are you sensitive to panic that might spoil a thoughtful response? Do you destress, moving into your head, amidst the panic, and call others back to their destressed logical senses? This is also an important stress reaction, because if the house is on fire we're going to have to be able to follow a thoughtful plan so that everyone can get out.
These stress reactions are both important survival projections. We need to get them out there. We need to hear the distressing alarm, and we need to de-stress and stay calm. But over the difference instead of listening to each other, and hearing each other, and responding affirmingly to each other. Under stress, we might instead argue over the difference, and invalidate each other; One side yelling: if you don't care we're all in trouble, the other side yelling back: stop panicking and calm down. I think the tug of war has its place, sometimes. We need one more than the other, depending on the situation, but in every situation survival favors the consideration of both. We need both.
We need each other. We need to hear the distressing alarm, and we need to de-stress and stay calm. So what if this is what we projected forward in crisis? We need each other. Not: my way or your way, but we need each other. I think we'd see the difference when it comes to getting us through this matter and any and every matter as partners, and parents, and co-workers, and friends, and neighbors, everything.
So let's start here: during this distressing crisis consider this projective measure: we need each other. I think we'll find out this was the best way for us to project ourselves and protect ourselves.
Hell is Other People
“Hell is other people”
We assume that Sartre means that everyone else is awful. We should set our expectations low and keep our distance. But for Sartre, hell is established by none other than our very self, captive to and captivated by the objectifying impulse of others. Hell is other people insomuch as we inhabit judgment.
And Sartre warns, there is “no exit”. We are subject to judgment.
We will try to escape. And yet, in our determination to rid ourselves of the problematic other, we only find ourselves an accomplice to the very hell we contest.
“I can’t live with or without you”
Will this hell be our end? Or might this fiery domain of judgement bare forth new potentials. Mercy? Forgiveness? Understanding? … those prospects which conceive meaning and worth in the very places of suffering, and which finally bring us into contact with a most dreadful but nonetheless beloved “other” …our inmost self.
Hell is other people … but it is also salvation … and you are worth the journey.
“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”