Category: relationships

This Week’s Relationship Circle – Starting Over

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Do we ever really start over, after a fight with our partner, after a break-up, after getting our feelings hurt?

We think we do, but how much of that last incident and all other incidents that have happened to us in our relationships (mommy, daddy, authority figures, past loves) are we carrying around with us? Is there ever a true reset, where we give ourselves cleanly and openly to the next person who comes into our lives?

We want to, but most of us don’t see how much of the disempowering parts of our past that we are “gifting” to the next boss, the next romantic partner. We relate to ourselves as formerly hurt, as the victim, and unconsciously look for someone to heal us, to “complete” us. Like the line in Jerry Maguire, the idea of another completing us can be romantic, it can feel euphoric, like the right person will take all our hurt away, but this is not the case.

Our natural state is on guard, leery of the next person to resemble the threats of our past and we are looking out for anything that carries even a whiff of resemblance. Eventually, we will find what we are looking for. From then forward, our relationship partner is moving closer and closer to threat status. This can take so much life out of our relationships, so much time and energy and when we fill the space of our relationships with fear based energy, love seems to get scarce.

We’re normally reacting to this pattern in our partners, so they’re reacting o the pattern in us, and on and on.

OK, enough of the gloom and doom, because in actuality this blog post is about getting more out of and freely contributing more to our relationships than ever before. At the last circle, I asked what the experience of our relationships would be if we didn’t have to be on our guard any more, if we were living beyond our former threats to love, relationship and our feelings. The response was that we would feel like a child. Bingo!

Beyond our past hurts lies our freedom, our chance at providing unconditional love, our life beyond feeling like we need to have such a heightened concern for our own emotional well-being. In other words, freedom, and resiliency without even trying. If someone gave you this gift, if this is who your partner was being with you, what would that bring to the relationship?

This is my suggestion,that you be the gift, that you take responsibility for learning how to live beyond your past hurts. Once you give this gift, you will be training your partner, your boss to let go of their own, over time, and a spaciousness, where joy, love, camaraderie, partnership and intimacy can truly grow. This is the true source material for starting over.

And as I know people love to sit in the “how” department of Target, I’ll put a few items on the shelves.

This is my favorite article on understanding the physiology of our own reactions in relationships. I’ve shared it with everyone I know: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/me-first-we-first/201203/how-threat-emotions-cause-us-misread-our-partner-4

Second, practice acknowledging all of your reactions. Get in the habit of knowing when they are happening and get out of the habit of making them right. By all means, get out of the way of oncoming buses, but when you notice an emotion when your mother’s number flashes on your caller ID, just admire the reaction, acknowledge the powerful body sensations and the thoughts that race through your mind and start practicing dis-identification with the reaction. These thoughts ARE HAPPENING, these feelings ARE PRESENT, and they are not YOU. Over time, you won’t take your own reactions so seriously and personally. It will cease to be his or her fault for making you feel a certain way. The engine is inside of YOU, you created how it feels right now and you can also allow it to pass. When it does, you’ll have more of your heart, intellect, compassion and love available for yourself and everyone else.

Next, try just walking away. Sometimes our reactions are so strong, we just can’t help but say or do some pretty ill-advised things. I learned this one from my mother. When I was a kid, my mom would get upset at some of the frustrating things I would do and she just took herself away until she could give me the version of her that she really wanted for our relationship. This was a gift because she explained it and took responsibility. She said she was doing that for me, not because of me.

Another suggestion is completion work. Completion is a process you undertake with ontological coaches who are specially trained for the work. The goal of completion is to leave the client with no energy that disempowers him/her in an area of life. It’s a process because completion is basically infinite. As we take our completion deeper and deeper, more of the essence of who we are comes out and our fears and automatic ways of being (fight, withdraw, injure, avoid, looking for sympathy and agreement as an unconscious need, etc.) start to disappear. We can handle life more powerfully.

Feel free to contact me about completion work and any other questions you have as you live and learn in your relationships.

You Want to be Heard?

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There is no responsibility in speaking. Anyone can do it, it requires no special skills other than learning a language. There are a myriad of possible ways things can go once you’ve spoken.

Being heard is an entirely different story. If what you’re committed to is being heard, you want a 100% clean interaction. What you are giving is what has been received and that’s it and it is the speaker’s responsibility if that intention is his or her goal. Again today I did not take responsibility for being heard. I’m working on it, too.

To ensure being heard, we need to get behind the reality (interpretations, based on their own personal experiences) that other people bring to the table. It also takes an understanding of what we are bringing in addition to our intention (imbedded reactions and emotions, mostly), because your listener may get taken out by something other than your intention that is present in your communication, verbally, through body language, tone or way of being.

Here’s what I mean. If you are committed to being heard, if you have chosen that your sole intention is to make a contribution to another or to vent or to share or to brainstorm, unless it is made explicitly clear, the listener could hear it as something completely different. Contributions are often heard as criticism, venting is often heard as blame, sharing is often heard as a request for someone to do something about what has come up and on and on. If you want to have more than one intention met, then separate them for yourself and introduce them separately.

If you want it to come off as how you intend it, consider making it clear at the outset. Let the listener know that you noticed something about them that you wanted to share with them and find out if they are open to hearing it, let them know you just want them to listen to you vent. Even then, it is likely that your intention will be misconstrued, because we hold fast to our reactions and emotional triggers, so if we want to be heard, we can check in, by asking questions like, “How did that occur to you?” and then showing understanding that they could see it that way.

We also frequently bring our upset to other people, we want them to know that we are upset with something they did and we also think we are trying to help them. The thing is, it’s more likely than not that the listener will respond to the upset and get triggered themselves. The value of what you were trying to bring is then lost.

I understand completely that what Im suggesting is hard work, but if you want to be heard, these are some things to consider. People’s listening is what it is. They may reliably look for the threat in other’s words, tone and way of being. We can’t fix or change that unless they see for themselves that it’s getting in the way. As speakers, we take people for where they are and be responsible for our reactions and emotions or we deal with the dissonance and not meeting the goal we set out on by choosing to speak in the first place.

Relationship Mastery

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I am offering one free relationship coaching session for you or someone you know this month. We’ll look together at one relationship in your life, business or personal, where you want things to go differently. Jump in.

In relationships, we’re given no manual, we usually follow flawed guides and the sheer amount of desires, interests and concerns we bring into them are so daunting to satisfy, let alone working with our partner on theirs. No wonder we are rarely truly satisfied over the long term.

It’s time to raise our games and take this as the awesome and possibility-filled undertaking it is. If we take on relationship mastery, imagine the benefits. Imagine hearing and accepting others as they truly are and feeling understood, empowered and supported.

Relationship mastery as some ultimate destination is impossible, or course, but it’s the commitment to learning, practicing and deciding that this is an area of life where you choose to always grow and thrive that will reap benefits.

Let’s have our relationships resemble the world we want to live in. All of them. It’s absolutely possible.

If you want to start down this road or know someone that can benefit from it, contact me and let’s get started.

Listening and Following Directions

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So much of what people who love us want for us to change is incredibly useful, but our common reaction is to defend and accuse the speaker. Sure, the speaker is often one or more of these things: upset, exasperated, an authority figure, guilty of similar (or, in our minds, worse) infractions, angry and always imperfect. We look for perfect teachers, our bar for trust is so high and we lose the power of the feedback that’s all around us.

When we take on transformation, we learn that those who love us have already been telling us the same things we now relate to as breakthroughs or insights. We just wouldn’t hear them when they said them. I don’t say couldn’t, because there’s a part of us that wants to be right so much that we will not allow ourselves to hear. We feel threatened and go right into survival behavior instead of listening and considering the words. What we need to hear is right there, potentially saving us years of anguish or lackluster results.

Today, my wife told me she thought we weren’t connecting well over the last few days. What did I do? I immediately looked at the things I know she does that gets in the way. I was defensive, not listening, being right. Everything I had to say may have been useful, but I made no use of her simple observation. If I took responsibility for our gap in connection, I would be learning a lesson I clearly was not getting and I’d have much more possibility in all my relationships. It took a few hours and a swim in the pool with the boys, but then I finally heard her simple message, apologized and told her I loved her. Her immediate response was to apologize to me and give up what she was holding. She saw who she was being the minute I stopped defending and took responsibility.

Transformation requires us to follow directions, take cues and surrender beyond our normal reactions. In the end, it’s the only way, because everything else is just another version of the behaviors, reactions and patterns we’re looking to leave behind. People in our lives may be sick of our stuff and showing it, but the message is still vital for us to hear, because in the end, we’ll see our stuff that’s making them sick. If we were all willing to take on listening following directions and leaving our reactions behind, imagine where we’d be.

Unprotected Partnership

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I saw a movie a few weeks ago that taught me more about relating than any course or book I’ve ever spent time with. It’s called “Buck” and it’s about a horse trainer named Buck Brannaman, who calls himself a natural horse trainer.

http://www.buckthefilm.com/

By watching Buck train a horse and train people, I learned about where I fall short in relating to others. To watch him with a horse is to see a master of owning his space, connecting without fear and leaving the luxury of one’s own reactions at the door for the sake of relating to another being. These horses tame themselves by choice. Buck creates a magnetic space that attracts their partnership, their union. It’s as if the horses see access to their own greatness through Buck and then as the horse’s owners follow Buck’s path, through human beings.

The striking thing for me was to see how Buck accepted the animal fully without making the story of where they had been important. He saw through it right to the center of the horse and all he saw was goodness and exhibited the patience required for the horse to follow suit and surrender it’s own story about life. To feel safe to connect with Buck and create unprotected partnership. He wasn’t trying to fix anything. He was an invitation for the horse to let go and remained that way, steadfastly.

I try to support people’s greatness, but I never understood the responsibility to own my reactions in such a deep way. To drop being right, to stand for the power and possibility of relating first, as access to the most impactful relationship possible with another human being.

Our fear sends others into theirs. Our righteousness about our fear (anger, disappointment, etc.) keeps us separate, in a place where we cannot possibly help or support others effectively. Truth is, we can barely get along without prioritizing relating in an on purpose way.

Since seeing the film, I have taken it on with my family, friends, clients, waitresses, strangers and found it to be energy providing and the source of miraculous possibility. Please support the film. It’s available on Netflix and showing the next two months on Showtime. There’s a lesson for every viewer.

Getting Off It

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Every relationship suffers from parties choosing to be right.  The problem with being right is that  we become nearly impenetrable.  When you’re right, you don’t need anyone, any new ideas, any curiosity…When we need to be right, we’re always making someone else wrong.  How does it go for you when you feel made wrong?

I’ve been learning this the hard way, noticing every step as I learn, how important it was to be right and the damage it has done in relationships with those closest to me.  It’s been as rewarding to clean these up as it was to hold my beliefs over people.  Just this time, there’s a win-win at the end of it, not just my domination or upset from feeling dominated by their “no”.  Finally, I can appreciate the points of view of the group, of my friends, of those that love me and learn from them.

Being right usually comes from fear.  The fear of things not going your way.  The fear of living in an unpredictable world.  The fear of possibility.  In relationships, we hurt each other with our rightness, we demand agreement, because without it, we’re letting go of the safety of our own reality.

Being right has nothing to do with relating to people.  It’s a dead end.  Just because you don’t agree with someone, you’re going to create yourself as opposing them, just to defend your worldview.

We insist upon being right the most in the relationships where we have experienced the most pain.  Just look at sibling or parent relationships.  If you’re married, look at how you need to be right with your spouse.  If you’re divorced, see how it affected the ending of the relationship.  If you look closely, you’ll see your health, sleep, weight and other life issues are negatively affected by prolonged periods of needing to be right.  Being right takes vigilance, energy, all out defense to keep it alive and we suffer for it.  The more right we need to be, the more alone we find ourselves.

We can either be right or be in relationship.  Inside relationship, that static concept of ourselves, our reality, starts to bend, shift, detach, it becomes malleable.  It’s difficult to put your finger on, because it is truly an experience of aliveness. Like love, laughter and joy, it’s the uncertainty of what will happen,living in the unknown for just a moment, that fills our soul.

Sure, we may have something valuable for others, but we must surrender to their reality, listen to our partners and truly enroll them if we have a hope of keeping our good advice from becoming the next thing to separate ourselves from each other.

Try it on.