|
|
By Jennifer Lehr, on December 5th, 2010 I had a hard few days, which in this case for me means that I was in workaholic mode, feeling frustrated and somewhat overwhelmed and being unrealistic about what I could and could not get done. I was pushing myself around ‘doing’ and not accepting the ‘being’ aspect of life. Luckily, a friend stopped over and we had a conversation. The conversation was the beginning of me getting myself back in balance, back to a realistic perception of what life is.
We all have what could be called ‘default places.’ These are emotional and visceral experiences we have when we get triggered. There are default emotions, default actions and default beliefs; for some a default emotion might be a strong sense numbness or aloneness accompanied by sadness. It might be a sense of panic, an out of control desperate feeling or a sense of being trapped. Our default actions might be an internal dialogue where we tell ourselves something about ourselves, or a move to have a drink when we feel stressed. A default belief often drives these emotions and actions. Whatever it is, it is a ‘place’ we ‘fall’ into. It is an experience where we lose perspective. I tend to have the default belief that I cannot waste time: that I have to be productive. I also have the default belief that help is not readily available. So if I am in over my head with something I am working on, I can get triggered and move into feelings of overwhelm.
What drives my default place has a lot to do with how I was raised. One of the family beliefs that existed as an underground current in my childhood, was that all of us didn’t intrinsically deserve to be here, but had to earn our keep, or prove our value. I was raised to believe that productivity was god. Yet there was no assistance in this. For example, when I was applying to art school and needed to put together a portfolio, my father, who was a very successful illustrator, promised he would help me do that. But he didn’t want to let me use his brushes, his paint, or spend his time teaching me. So he dragged his feet. And I waited and waited and waited, as time ticked by. I wanted to get out of the house. I needed to get the portfolio done, and all the help was there, but just out of reach. I couldn’t do it by myself, and the person who was capable of helping me, and said he would, kept putting my needs on the back burner. I felt trapped. Consequently, I learned to strive endlessly, while also ending up in situations where the support I needed wasn’t there.
My ‘falling’ into a default place also has a lot to do with current triggers in my life. I’m working on a project so huge, that I cannot see the entire thing at once, a project that continually tests the limits of what I am capable of. And I need help with it. But because I grew up in a family where the help was not there, where promises were made that were not kept, and I was left stranded and without support, I tend to be very sensitive to this kind of ‘abandonment.’ The recapitulation of this triggers a variety of feelings. I am off to the races, doing my default behaviors, because of my default beliefs and feeling my default emotions, and none of this serves me or anybody else.
As I was talking to my friend, in addition to talking about me, we discussed his struggles, his therapy, and his wife’s difficulty with going to therapy. He said to me, “she doesn’t really want to go, she thinks it is all me.” Unfortunately, that is a really common attitude. I’ve been there myself. I asked more questions and found that this person’s wife claims, “My childhood was fine.” Oh boy – that opens a can of worms. Many of us had ‘fine’ childhoods and most of us had parents who loved us – at least to the best of their ability, and yet many of us had times as children when we wished we could be adopted, or suspected that the stork dropped us off at the wrong house. Or where we cried ourselves to sleep because we didn’t feel understood or we hid in a closet because we were scared. It doesn’t matter exactly what. What matters is that this world, and life is a place where difficult and painful things happen, and as children we absolutely do not have the skills to deal with them alone, and yet, we often have to. This matters because once we decide that our childhoods were ‘fine,’ we have nothing to look at and aren’t taking responsibility for our complexity. We don’t have the opportunity to do what I depicted above, that is to look at our default places and link them to past events thereby creating the ability to ‘unhook’ them. This means saying, ‘when I was little I was raised to believe this, and to not expect help, and these are the feelings I fall into as a consequence given this situation, but I can now recognize what is happening. I can change that belief and ask for help now, or walk away from a situation that isn’t going to support me.’ Instead of being able to do that, the past forever colors our perceptions. We remain trapped in a default place.
The way we change is to get to know ourselves. Ask yourself, where the feeling places are that you get stuck in. What do they feel like? Examples could be, “I feel like I am down a well,” or “I feel as if I can’t breath.” What are some of the thoughts? How about, “The world is passing me by,” or “Nobody cares about me,” or “I hate myself.” Do you know what the underlying beliefs are? Some could be, “I’m not capable of a relationship,” or “I don’t have a right to put myself first,” or “I don’t deserve to be here.” Do you know what your triggers are? Maybe, “I feel like you never put me first.” Can you recognize your underlying feelings, thoughts and beliefs and how they influence each other?
Where did that default place come from in your history? How did it develop? Default places are emotional and experiential places we fall into over and over again. They are familiar. Often they interact (usually badly) with our partner’s default place. They came into being because they are a response to not feeling supported, to feeling alone, abandoned or disappointed. If you tell yourself that your past was ‘fine’, then you will never start to unwind this in yourself. You will never have the ability to say, “Gee, I fell into my default place. What is going on? What do I need right now? How much of this is about now and how much of this is about my past? Who am I impacting? Can I get the support I need now?”
Do you work with, or defend against your default places? Freedom isn’t an absence of limitations. It is what we do with our limitations; how we come to understand them and the dialogue we develop with ourselves about them and with them. Rather than creating an internal cut off, we can really get to know our own complexity and use that to create more personal awareness and freedom.
Podcast: Play in new window
| Download
By Jennifer Lehr, on November 9th, 2010
By Jennifer Lehr, on November 5th, 2010 Emotions are intense. They rock us. We have to deal with them. Someone says something the wrong way, or we are in a difficult situation and all of a sudden we might find ourselves in a fury, or in deep grief, or perhaps an awful sense of embarrassment and shame as if we are ‘bad’. When we are in these feeling places we usually don’t have any perspective, or not much. It is like we got dropped off and lost in some horrible bad place and we cannot get ourselves out. We have no control. We don’t know what happened to us. And on top of that, we often judge ourselves for having these lapses of control, or even worse, deny they ever happened. (This last one is sure to wreck havoc on your relationships.) And it is scary. What if our out of control feelings cause someone to judge us or reject us?
One way around this is to prevent ourselves from having feelings. When I run into this in my practice, I generally refer to the ‘basement’ with all the feelings that are locked in and can’t get out. You have to disconnect from yourself to do this. You may feel more in control, but it is a disastrous state for a human being who has to know his or herself and relate to others. We end up depressed, or detached and shut down, or having reactions way out of proportion to events that jump out and ambush whoever is unlucky enough to trigger us.
Recently for me, I had some very large feelings come up. They just pushed their way through and I let myself experience them. Meanwhile I felt confused, ashamed, and small, wondering what was wrong with me. Pretty interesting as I’m somebody who is extremely good at unearthing and processing the hard stuff. It made me realize how primal these feelings were and how hard it is for all of us as emotional beings to let the emotions take over and just experience them without judgment and without control.
The fear I think, is that either we are crazy, or that these feelings will pummel us for the rest of our lives and we won’t be able to live with ourselves, be adult, logical, and rational. And yes, this can be part of the process of somebody with a major mood disorder, but that means they don’t have the other piece of solid ground they can hold onto and use as an anchor. Instead it is a place they live in. But this isn’t true for most of us.
I realized something else too. The only way I was going to transcend what I was struggling with was by allowing the feelings to come through. So, lying on my yoga mat during savasana, I just let the tears come up and I let myself completely feel the shame and grief that was moving though me. Then it got clearer. I could see a piece of my past differently than ever before. I could see a very specific negative message I had gotten and how it had hindered me. And I could see that by allowing myself to feel, I was processing and letting go of this belief. I couldn’t change the belief until I experienced and released all the feelings that were connected to it. I couldn’t transcend the old me until I let myself go and really experienced what these feelings were. This type of change is not a mental decision, but an emotional process.
This is the part of therapy that people who haven’t had therapy don’t understand. Yes, we talk about things and make sense of them, but often, for many of us, there is a very emotional piece that must occur. It is like a tidal wave coming through, taking whatever is not solid with it, so that after it retracts the landscape is different. Who we are has been changed permanently.
Yes, it is scary to descend into the depths of our feelings where the logical rational world isn’t present. But it is also a very important aspect of healing. We do survive these lapses. And we have to tell ourselves, “these are just feelings”. “I am not crazy.” Experiencing feelings in this way is important. They are telling us something we need to know, something about how our reality has been constructed. This is the releasing process that occurs when we are making big changes in who we are. It is part of what must happen when we have core beliefs that need to shift.
Experiencing feelings is part of being human. It is also part of the process of healing. Reacting out of our feelings is very different than feeling these feelings. For instance, snapping at somebody and blaming him or her for something is very different than experiencing the grief of being disappointed and hurt. Once you allow yourself to descend into the disappointment and hurt, you can find the part of you that wasn’t valued at another point in your life. You can explore and come to understand how that has impacted you. You can get to know that grief and then you can heal from it.
How do you deal with your feelings?
Do you recognize them as a valuable part of living?
Do you try to avoid them?
Do they jump out at inopportune moments and sabotage you?
Do you allow yourself to have them and process them?
Do you get stuck in them, or can you understand their message and release them?
Subscribe to the Healing Tips Podcast with iTunes
Guided Meditation
Audio version of blog post
Podcast: Play in new window
| Download
By Jennifer Lehr, on October 17th, 2010 (The material in this article comes from understanding gained by training in Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples)
1) The dimension of attachment: attachment is a framework that underlies all intimate connection even if we are not aware of it. Most of us aren’t. It is a term more used by psychologists, therapists and people working with infants than the general public and many people don’t know anything about it. Attachment means that we look at important connections through a lens that asks questions like, “Am I important to you?” or “Do you really care about me?” or “Am I enough for you?” etc. It is hard wired into us. As babies, connection means life. Disconnection is death. Attachment is about relationship and it brings with it questions about safety, belonging and meaning. It asks, “What do I mean to you?” “Am I safe with you?” “Do I belong?” It is through an attachment lens that we interpret the actions of our partner. Events that are upsetting to us bring up attachment related questions. We are often not aware of these attachment related questions, and when they get activated by a lack of connection or another attachment threat, they get translated into negative thoughts like, “You don’t care about me” or “You never put me first” and actions like yelling or withdrawing. We react because we are afraid that we are losing our connection or being overwhelmed by it. Our fears that we are not enough, or not important or valued enough emerge. What we aren’t aware of is that our partner is responding to his or her own attachment fears and isn’t yet conscious or, or doesn’t know how to sort through this. The screaming partner is screaming for closeness. The withdrawing partner is withdrawing because the distance is how he or she maintains the relationship when he or she feels criticized, not understood, or not good enough. When we learn this lens and practice seeing through it, we will be able to re-interpret what is going on and understand it in a new and much more constructive way. Without this lens, it is very difficult to develop empathy for our partners when they are behaving in hurtful ways. But once we see that they are struggling with their own attachment issues, it is possible to feel less threatened and have more empathy. This is important because we want to change our stance so we can reconnect more easily.
2) The dimension of emotions: when we feel emotion, we feel it in our bodies. It is visceral – we shake, cry, ‘see red’, hunch over, look away etc. The dimension of our emotions is about feeling. Exploring our feelings helps us understand more about ourselves, about our reactions, about old feelings that we are still trying to avoid. Many people are uncomfortable with their feelings. Some people don’t have a very good vocabulary developed to describe their feelings, or their feelings have been compressed, pushed down and aren’t an active part of their reality. This can change. We can and need to get to know our feelings better if we want to expand our ability to relate. The dimension of emotions can be experienced more deeply, navigated more easily and articulated more clearly. When our attachment questions get activated our feelings also get activated. And when our feelings get triggered, so do our attachment questions. But as we understand our feelings more and experience them more fully, we can learn to witness them and talk about them rather than react from them. This helps calm down the dimension of cycles.
3) The dimension of cycles: cycles occur in all relationships. If we are struggling in our relationship, our cycle will be contributing to our difficulties. Our cycle is what occurs between us over and over again. I feel disappointed and cry, you get frustrated and yell or withdraw. I cry harder. You withdraw more. The dimension of feelings and the dimension of attachment both interrelate with the dimension of cycles. If I experience my relationship as unsafe because of a disconnect, I might feel sad and cry, while thinking, “nobody loves me” and as I do this, you withdraw because you think that you can never make me happy and this feels bad, shameful, scary to you. I feel abandoned and sad. You feel alone and inadequate. We both want to be close. We cope by crying or withdrawing. Gaining control over our cycle is important. First, we must develop a conceptual picture of what our cycle looks like, of what actually occurs. As we understand our cycle, and see how it relates to attachment issues and feelings, we aren’t so threatened by it and our reactivity goes down. We understand how it gets fueled, and that it doesn’t need to go on forever. As we gain control of our cycle and understand that we can influence it, we start to feel even safer.
Copyright 2010 Jennifer Lehr
By Jennifer Lehr, on October 8th, 2010 Can you set a boundary (say no) to somebody when you are not angry? Often, we can set a boundary if we are angry, but cannot if we are not angry. We use anger to assist us because saying no isn’t so easy (for some of us). Saying no when we are so mad we don’t care isn’t so hard. Caring and saying no at the same time is more difficult. The other person might get mad, their feelings could get hurt, or they might reject us. To set a non-angry boundary, we have to be willing to have the other be mad at us or have whatever reaction they have. We have to take the position that something is not acceptable to us and we simply are not going to allow it. Can you say no without being angry? If you can’t, is it because your safety is endangered? If that is the case, why are you in this relationship? (And get help.) If that is not the case, you have some work to do around your fear of the other’s reactions. What are you afraid of? Why? What part of yourself needs support so that you can overcome this fear?
By Jennifer Lehr, on September 14th, 2010 One of the things I enjoy doing is reading a book with new perspectives and then applying those ideas to my own field. I just finished reading Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. It’s one of those books that allow us to see the world differently. Of the many ideas it describes, one is that as humans, we are creative and seek autonomy, mastery and purpose among other things. We don’t need to be controlled, managed or manipulated. The use of the carrot and the stick as motivators actually reduce our productivity. If we have our basic requirements met (food, shelter, adequate money) we will seek to fulfill ourselves through meaning making activities. The old model of motivation, that we need to be managed, works with simple logical tasks, but our world is changing and these repetitive tasks are being outsourced or taken over by computers. This model doesn’t work with the duties of our current day, which tend to be the more creative and right-brained, rather than the more routine and left brained. Another striking idea is the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. To be intrinsically motivated is to care about mastery, agency and purpose. A focus on external success actual hinders motivation and ultimately success because you get caught up in the goal (making money, becoming famous etc), rather than the process of developing mastery, giving back to the world, or having a purpose. People who tend to be external focused (Type X) can learn to become more intrinsically focused (Type I). This is all very good news. Not only is our understanding of our world and ourselves changing, but our world itself and we as part of it are also evolving and developing.
Can these ideas be applied to self-growth? Can they be applied to relationships? You bet! The last thing a therapist wants is to work with someone who isn’t self-motivated or interested in exploring who they are and creating purpose for themselves. Or someone who thinks the world (and their self and life) is static and that it cannot, or isn’t going to change. That would be akin to dragging a bag of rocks up a hill. There are people (mostly not on the west coast, thankfully) who find therapy shameful or stupid. This has always bothered me. How can you possibly understand yourself, develop new parts of yourself and work towards mastery of your life, if you aren’t willing to look at yourself? What is going on in our culture that this occurs? Somehow feelings have gotten a bad rap, both experiencing them and developing our ability to “language” them and be aware of them. But, back to the task at hand: as someone interested in helping people in this process of self-understanding and the development of self-mastery, these ideas are exciting. They mean that we want to grow, gain autonomy and mastery and that given half a chance, we will. And yet we have many “failures” in the creation of our lives: trauma, depression, anxiety, broken relationships. How can we use these ideas to create more success in our lives? How do we apply these ideas to therapy, both the practice of and also the client’s ability to metabolize it?
First, I think it is important to recognize that the human race is not static but growing and evolving. Our relationships are one of those things that are bearing the brunt of this evolution, for we have not yet caught up to who we are becoming. As we evolve, we need to develop new capacities. As we develop new capacities, we need to learn to give them significance. One of these capacities is in the area of relating. Relating involves many things including accessing and sharing feelings, understanding needs, and gaining control of destructive behaviors. Lets look at couple therapy, which is a pretty complex process. As a client in couples therapy, we must learn enough about ourselves (among other things) that we can untangle a bunch of behavior that simply does not get us what we want: an accessible and responsive relationship. We supply the courage and tenacity on the road to mastery of this challenge, but we need more than motivation, creativity and desire for this purpose. We also need a map. This is new and for us, uncharted territory. We will need assistance in this undertaking as well as an understanding how a specific and possibly uncomfortable challenge relates to this goal.
Our symptoms (relationship dysfunction) are like the tip of an iceberg. It is the part we see. In the cold icy water below this symptom we have a number of tasks, which include:
1 Understand the intricacies of the negative cycle
2 Experience (not just understand) the deeper (not surface) feelings that feed our ‘cycle’.
3 Become aware of the needs that fuel the feelings and how
4 Understand the interrelationship between all of this
This could translate to: I have to experience some pretty painful feelings that I am not usually in contact with so that I can access parts of myself that I don’t really know and expand who I am to a more feeling based being, as well as understand how these parts are influencing my behavior, what it is that I really need, and (eventually) use that to be vulnerable and connect.
Here’s a short sample story of a couple fabricated from a number of people:
When you get mad, I feel unsafe, I feel as if I am completely alone, caught in a trap, whatever I do will be wrong and I am scared. I hate that feeling and I will do anything not to experience it, including not tell you the whole truth, cut off parts of myself, blame you, push you away, try to control you…. And I get mad at you for being mad and seeming mean…. It reminds me of when I was little and my neighbor was a bully. I decided then that being mean wasn’t okay, so now I take care of other people’s feelings and it embarrasses me when you don’t. I get confused. I love you, but you have this side of you that is so hard and I cannot stand it and I am afraid of it and so we end up in a fight over how I behave… and because you feel like I don’t respect your feelings and don’t support you and underneath you feel abandoned too…. Because you never had anybody put you first or stand up for you…. I want you to not be mean so that you are somebody I can love all the time and so that you feel safe to me…. You want me to stop standing up for other people; because it that means that I can’t stand up for you or myself…. I need to feel like you are safe and responsive and loving to me and when you act ‘hard’ you don’t feel safe to me …and then you need to feel like I am safe and responsive and loving for you, but when this cycle occurs you don’t feel as if I am there for you either. So we get stuck and we don’t have a good way to talk about it, because we don’t even see this yet. It’s all underneath and it just happens and takes over our relationship. Our relationship is held hostage to this pattern and this is an area where it cannot breath.
This is how we get trapped in the cycle. What’s the solution? The only way out is to understand ourselves: emotions, needs, behavior, the way a surgeon understand how the muscles and bones and ligaments and blood vessels interconnect and populate a section of the body. We have to have that level of self-understanding. And we have to be able to experience our feelings the way a poet experiences the world expressed through language. Our curiosity about ourselves has to come to the forefront, as well as our ability to tolerate pain, to step deep into our feelings, to make our own development and growth, our own attainment of mastery paramount. As we continue to evolve and to develop ways to support our evolution, we find new ways to think, experience and be in our lives and relationships. As we do this, who we are changes in ways we cannot even imagine.
By Jennifer Lehr, on August 16th, 2010 This past week, some very specific events brought up a lot of pain and grief for me. The first event was when I read an article about a 17month old boy who was beaten to death. The perpetrator stated “I didn’t hit him that hard.” Later in the week, I saw the Time magazine cover of the18 year old Afghan girl who had her ears and nose cut off by her husband and his brother. The third event was that my cat got sick and was uncomfortable despite numerous visits to the vet. Finally, I attended a therapy session with my partner with his therapist, which I do on occasion, and we both ended up triggered, feeling trapped and confronted by old wounds. Those images, stories, and situations have been rumbling through my psyche and were juxtaposed with 2 others. In yoga class, the instructor said, “Can you be your highest self?” And later that day my mind flashed upon the Dalai Lama’s statement that he feels compassion towards the Chinese who have killed and tortured the Tibetans. As I reflect on all of this (and more) I feel both grief and am also thoughtful and curious. How do we hold onto a healthy perspective and not get lost in negativity and pain? How do we stay positive and uplifted? How do we attend to the pain of others? How do we bring our best selves into our relationships?
The child who was beaten to death and the 18 year old who was disfigured and left for dead leave me questioning humanity. My cat’s illness triggers for me, the grief of how painful life can be for all of us, despite our best efforts. The issue with my boyfriend showed me how easy it can be to slip into old perceptions and wounds. Then I hear the two positive voices that stand with these painful events, “Can you be your best self?” “I have compassion for those who kill and torture others”. I ponder a compassion so large that it can see into the darkness of those psyches and care for their limitations, for the state of being that they reside in. And yet, I have my own constrictions. I am not always my best self.
In that therapy session, I was talking about a fear I had and my boyfriend moved into his own fear of being trapped by someone else’s negativity. Because he expressed it through anger, I didn’t actually see his fear. And he didn’t see mine. That didn’t get figured out till later. He moved into frustration and panic that he would be trapped with someone who he could never please. The ghost of his horrific father came up and got him. And my sensation of feeling trapped was almost suffocating. My own internal voice of “there isn’t enough room for me to be me,” got triggered, which goes back to a childhood of living with a rage-aholic (among other things). My fear of not being considered was also very much about the past, and not really about the present.
Do these things all tie together? For me they do. They speak of finding a centered place in relation to the pain that continually confronts us, to the possibility of transcendence, of being part of the solution, despite where we may find ourselves. And they speak to the ability to respond to another being, not an “it”, not a receptacle of our fears or ideas. A relationship is an ongoing dialogue. What kind of dialogues are we capable of, do we strive for? If we defend, overpower, destroy, punish etc., we cannot respond to the other, instead we are reacting AT the other. Respond-Ability means that we have the capacity to be responsive to and have a dialogue with another and ourselves. The other is seen and treated as someone with integrity in his or her own right, not simply there to fulfill our needs (and vice versa).
My partner and I were able to recover fairly quickly and figure out what was hard for both of us. We were able to help each other identify the wounds we triggered for each other and talk about them. We were able to stay connected in the process. When humans cannot do that, do not even know it is a possibility; we live in a constricted world of right and wrong, of punishment and blame, of me versus you. There is no “we”. When I imagine that reality, it feels hard and angular, not soft, loving and responsive. It is not a state of being that anybody would chose if they had an experience of what is possible.
I use my own process continually to understand others and myself. Everything I live is grist for the mill. As I juxtapose those 2 higher voices against those more painful incidents, I ask myself, can I step out of my small limited self in the moment of a “trigger” and have compassion for his fear? This doesn’t mean that I don’t set boundaries or that I accept bad treatment, it means that I look for a place to stand, and a way to understand, so that I have compassion for the other, for the unending pain that we all experience. It means that I don’t reside in the limited perspective of my own wounds.
When I work with individuals and couples, I help them find their wounds. These wounds must be articulated in order that we can transcend them. I have to be able to say, “I grew up not being allowed any space and that was so painful that it is hard to re-experience it,” before I can step out of it and beyond it. I have to say to myself, I don’t want to get trapped in those feelings. I don’t want to live from that old reality. I don’t want to be on the continuum of those who see the other as an “it,” making it okay to react against them and thereby diminish them, and diminish myself. Instead, I want to be able to stand in a place of compassion for myself, for the other. That we will experience pain is guaranteed, but we can also learn to dialogue with ourselves, and with the other, finding compassion, healing and love to help soothe the pain.
By Jennifer Lehr, on July 26th, 2010 Sometimes we stand at the foot of a task and get stuck because we are telling ourselves that we shouldn’t have to do this thing. The task is there. There is no way around it. We have a choice. Our choice is to sit there, stuck, or to tackle the task. This is a choice about freedom and power. To sit there is to give away our power and our freedom. To attend to the task at hand, allows us to claim our power and ultimately produces freedom in our lives. Do you stop yourself with the word “shouldn’t?”
By Jennifer Lehr, on July 18th, 2010 I watched Alice in Wonderland recently. As Alice was questioning the social customs and values of her time, she was advised to “follow the path,” to which she replied, “I make the path.” Alice spoke to the importance of knowing ourselves, of holding onto our dreams and fighting our demons in the process.
Dreams are important for they guide us, and we have all kinds of dreams; who we are going to be “when we grow up,” dreams of saving the planet, rescuing the underprivileged, meeting our prince and raising our children, etc. But sometimes we embark upon the path of our dream and lose our way. We do not necessarily have to tools to make our dreams manifest.
What happens when we have a dream, but fail at it? We become failed heroes, initiates who do not pass the test. Culturally, marriage is one of those precarious paths that many embark upon, but not so many navigate successfully. And yet relationships and the experience of love are so important.
I attended a “Hold Me Tight” couples workshop run by Sue Johnson recently. Sue talked of research that had been done around POW’s who got through their difficult circumstances psychologically intact, versus those who did not. Those who survived had done so by holding onto an image of a beloved. They had pulled into their experience, memories of people and times of love. As they focused on those memories over and over, they used those memories to sustain them. They brought the experience of being loved into their present and often horrific circumstances and it allowed them to survive.
Our fairytales and stories present the dream of the happily ever after relationship. Yet the tools we have are about as adequate as taking a 5-day hike with no food or water. We follow our dreams blindly, with inadequate resources to make the journey successfully. Recently, I saw a TV personality, “The Bachelor” being interviewed with his fiancée, except he was yelling, “Stop interrupting me!” and she crying bitterly, stood up and raced away. Their blissful union fell apart so quickly. What were they thinking? They believed the dream with no understanding of what it would take to make it work.
We need different maps with different tools for different journeys. The journey of a successful relationship requires more than just a dream; it requires a multitude of abilities and skills, as well as an understanding of what will sabotage us. Do you have the map you need to successfully navigate a relationship? I recommend, “Hold Me Tight,” by Sue Johnson, to start with, although there are also other good books and workshops available.
Here are some questions to ask yourself: When I was young, how did I sooth myself when I was upset? Did I go to anybody to talk? Did I fight for what I wanted? Did I retreat? How does that tendency still occur? What did my partner do when he or she was young? Now look at those two tendencies. How do they interact? What pattern emerges out of them? Can you and your partner talk about the pattern, or do you get stuck in blaming each other? If you can’t talk about the pattern that you both get caught in, you will need to learn to do this, whether by seeing a therapist, attending a workshop or reading a book. Good relationships don’t just happen: they are made. We live in a world filled with endless information. Educate yourself wherever you wish to have mastery. There is no reason anybody should not achieve his or her dreams.
By Jennifer Lehr, on July 5th, 2010 The other day, I heard enlightenment defined as a radical change in perspective.
What is enlightenment? Why would we want it? Is it not to gain deep revelation or insight into the meaning and purpose of things, to be removed from our everyday perspectives that cause us so much angst and pain?
I not only work with many people who are struggling with the parts of their lives and relationships that are painful, but have my own struggles as well. Nobody wants pain or heartache. If my world flows out of who I am – out of my perspective, then if I am sour, my world is sour. If I am scared, I cling. I would much prefer to find a way to be in relationship to others, the world and myself that has perspective, balance and an open heart.
How does a radical change in perspective occur? What is the work we must do to move from an unclear and difficult place to one that is more open, even enlightened?
I think of the couples’ work I do, of our wounds and raw spots that emerge to be tended to in our relationships. Our wounds are where we do NOT have perspective. It is where we have reactive behaviors and unproductive thoughts. It is where we shut down, or carry resentment or judgment. It is where we do not love and where we need love the most.
When does your heart shut?
What happens?
Will you be curious about the qualities in another that cause you to reject them?
What would be different for you, if they were different?
What are they keeping you from?
If you dig down deep enough, you will probably find that you are rejecting the aspects of another that actually cost you or seem to cost you love, peace or safety. In relational work where we grow by being in contact with another, it is important to find how we blame each other, how we protect ourselves, how our defenses, which seemly make sense, can be outgrown and cause others and ourselves pain. For love to really work, we have to untangle this part of ourselves from and sometimes with the other. Unlike the blessing of an enlightened flash, this is the slow steady work leading to a radical change in perspective, and a radical new self, and world.
Blog Archive
|
|
Recent Comments