Archive for Care & Feeding of the Relationship
Grow Your Love
Posted by: | CommentsWe wanted to give you a head’s up, in case you missed it in the magazine, on a real good article from Yoga Journal entitled Grow Your Love. Lots of wisdom from a solid handful of couples (yours truly included) who share the similarities and useful awarenesses between the practice of Yoga and the journey of Relationship.
Here is a little snippet to whet your appetite:
“It’s no secret that relationships require work, but, as in yoga, you can find a happy balance between effort and ease when you apply your awareness. “A lot of people feel like, ‘If you loved me, we wouldn’t have to work at this,’” Feldman says, but he thinks that’s an unrealistic attitude. The trick,when it feels like too much effort, is to find more ease. To help couples with this, Feldman and his wife help their clients discover “love rituals”—small gestures practiced up to three times a day for two to three minutes at a time—so they can reconnect with the partner as a source of pleasure rather than pain.”
Hope you enjoy!
YOUR LOVING RELATIONSHIP IS GIVING YOU LIFE! or The Neurobiology of Secure Love
Posted by: | CommentsWe humans need safe, loving relationships where we receive support, a deep sense of security and emotional nourishment. The research on attachment and bonding tells us that we feel braver, happier, more confident, and our immune systems are stronger, as a result of secure interdependent connections.
Hardwired into our brain throughout our evolution is the need for warmth, affection, and emotional responsiveness. In 
a word: LOVE. This loving between humans is an enormous key to our survival. We respond to abandonment and isolation as danger. In practical terms this translates into some very basic questions that we, in the western world especially, carry deep inside: “Are you there for me”, “Do I matter to you?” “Do you know how much I love and need you?” “Will you be able to respond to me?”
When the answers to these questions are mostly “I am here; I love you” or “We are in this together” or “I want to hear your needs, and will be here with you”, we respond with a sense of emotional safety. We feel as if we “belong”, we are connected. Our flight and fight response relaxes, and we open our hearts. When we consistently receive a negative or threatening response to our vulnerable questions, we shut down and feel endangered.
Danger and safety are primitive mammalian responses. They are not logical and they are not optional. We can, however, understand them logically and learn to behave in ways that engender more safety and connection in our relationships.
The research on attachment between mothers and infants has a correlation with how lovers behave. When we love someone, and are loved in return, we emotionally tune into one another. When this attunement is satisfying, we help regulate each others’ emotional and physiological lives. We help each other balance, and this supports each of us to function happily and confidently in the world. Read More→
The Miracle of Personal Development by Jim Rohn
Posted by: | CommentsI came across this in my in-box today, and it touched me so deeply that I wanted to share it with all of my friends. Gotta love Jim Rohn! What I believe is that it is also true of relationships, in fact you could just substitute the word “relationship” for either “job” or “income” and it would fit perfectly. I’m interested in your thoughts about this…..what’s your experience?
One day my mentor Mr. Shoaff said, “Jim, if you want to be wealthy and happy, learn this lesson well: Learn to work harder on yourself than you do on your job.” Since that time I’ve been working on my own personal development. And I must admit that this has been the most challenging assignment of all. This business of personal development lasts a lifetime.
You see, what you become is far more important than what you get. The important question to ask on the job is not, “What am I getting?” Instead, you should ask, “What am I becoming?” Getting and becoming are like Siamese twins: What you become directly influences what you get. Think of it this way: Most of what you have today you have attracted by becoming the person you are today.
I’ve also found that income rarely exceeds personal development. Sometimes income takes a lucky jump, but unless you learn to handle the responsibilities that come with it, it will usually shrink back to the amount you can handle. If someone hands you a million dollars, you’d better hurry up and become a millionaire. A very rich man once said, “If you took all the money in the world and divided it equally among everybody, it would soon be back in the same pockets it was before.”
It is hard to keep that which has not been obtained through personal development.
So here’s the great axiom of life: To have more than you’ve got, become more than you are. This is where you should focus most of your attention. Otherwise, you just might have to contend with the axiom of not changing, which is: Unless you change how you are, you’ll always have what you’ve got.
What to Do When You’re Upset With Me ?
Posted by: | CommentsKate and I highly value a skill we call “Self Soothing” because we know that our partners, family members and friends are virtually guaranteed to trigger age-old reactions in us. Of this we can be certain. In order to create a safe space for our closest relations to let us know what happened, we must be willing to listen carefully to “their world” or their perspective on what happened. This is one of what we call the “willful practices” on the path of relationship. When we can’t hold onto ourselves, we are bound to interrupt our partner and usually kick-off another round of defensive behavior that often devolves into the blame game, you know how it goes, “I’m right, you’re wrong, here’s why”.
I was feeling poetic and penned this little self reminder this morning. Hope it’s helpful.
You’re upset…I can breathe and relax…
And let you be upset…And breathe some more….
And try to feel your pain, even if it’s me you’re upset with…
I can relax….And hear about what’s upsetting you…
I don’t need to defend myself…I don’t need to justify my behavior…
I can breathe and just be with you…In your upset….
I may have defensive thoughts from time to time…But you still are not wrong… Read More→
The “Closeness-Distance Dance” of Intimate Relationships
Posted by: | CommentsFrom time to time we receive (and even answer!) questions that seem especially relevant to many of us in committed relationships. Here’s a goodie!
Q. “Is it common for a man to desire more space and freedom than a woman does? I am constantly trying to find the balance of acting from my heart (meaning, if I genuinely want to talk to him then I’ll call him!) and giving him space and not smothering him by waiting for him to reach out to me. It’s hard. My partner has this great need for space, to feel free. I on the other hand, want to feel needed, loved, and shown it a lot! What happens is that I show him what I want -which comes off clingy, and he feels like running away (creating more space). When I feel this ’space’, I feel like running towards him… and thus the cycle.”
A. It’s good to hear from you. Your feelings make quite a bit of sense. All intimate relationships are made up of two people doing the closeness-distance dance. Gender plays a big role because of the ways we are socialized, but it’s not always the man who wants “space” – what we call the natural need for autonomy (as opposed to the natural need for togetherness). Our adult fears of not getting enough of either autonomy or togetherness are a product of several factors: our temperaments, our upbringing, the environment in which we grew up, and some people might even say, karma. In an intimate partnership, each person’s needs tend to trigger the others’ fears, so there is a lot of potential for each person being triggered on a regular basis. This is to be expected!
Our aversion to too much closeness or distance is a fear based on the past. While we will definitely keep acting it out, we always have the choice to work on understanding each person’s different world, and beginning to make space for what we have pushed away in the past.
As always, my main criteria for a successful relationship is the desire of both partners to grow themselves. The biggest opportunity for that growth is in relation to how our partner may frighten us. It is no accident that we are attracted to a person with different (often opposite!) needs and fears, but choosing to dig deeply and change ourselves is what is often missing. Most couples stay stuck in the blame game: “if you loved me, you would behave and love me my way”. This only leads to more of the same which is your case is: the more you pursue, the more he distances, and the more he distances the more you pursue. A vicious cycle, as you know. Read More→
The Business of Relationships (Make Love, Not War!)
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No Agreement
JOEL: Imagine for a moment that, as a couple, navigating the daily tasks of your life together was a new kind of business model. In this, you wouldn’t have any hated meetings, no strategic planning retreats, no 360 degree feedback sessions, no consultants or bosses……sounding pretty sweet, eh?
Well, yes….but, the ensuing chaos could become unsettling for some. Welcome to your life as a couple or family, where the stress of managing (there, I said it) your shared life could be the perfect laboratory for stress researchers, who seem to have multiplied lately. (What were they doing before the recession?) The daily, weekly and seasonal tasks of managing (there it is again) a household, boggle the mind. Who will do what, when, and how, test even the most advanced couples’ communication skills. And landing on “who makes the decision” about any one thing, can create the power struggle from hell.
So what about those “honey-do” lists? If one person is the designated “List Maker” and the other, a grateful and non-complaining “List Taker”, life could start looking pretty grand. Our List Taker dutifully attacks the list, in its proper stacking order and accomplishes said tasks in the declared time allotted. They clearly know their role and accept the List Makers supreme wisdom of “all things listy”. No feedback, no 360’s, no challenge to the LM’s authority. Life is good, right?
Wrong.
KATE: Here’s a story about us that might help. We have learned that we don’t have a right to an expectation of each other unless we have an agreement. That’s right. No agreement, no expectation, no right to get mad, sad or give feedback. We have cats; adorable, loveable, furry, independent pets. They go in and out of the house, they play with each other, they cuddle with us; they are even friendly with our Labrador Retriever, Maggie Mae. They also poop. Who, in our family, is in charge of scooping the kitty litter (or taking out the trash, or emptying the dishwasher, or making/cleaning up dinner, or paying the bills… you can add your own here)? Read More→
Life as Foreplay: Creating Intimacy in Relationship
Posted by: | CommentsOur recent newsletter had an article about Fun and Intimacy. It’s gotten me thinking. For so many years we focused our relationship work primarily on all the hard stuff: Frustrations, Conflict, Deep Process, Relationship Visioning, Learning how to Communicate about Feelings, Needs, Sex, Childhood History…
Now, don’t get me wrong, all those things are very very important. As couples and people growing in life together, we must understand ourselves and we have to learn to be relationally skillful. We must be able to reveal ourselves at deep levels and we must be able to repair conflict with out re-wounding each other. These are important parts of building intimacy.
But recently, I’m into brain science and how we are hardwired for love, empathy, fun and pleasure. We literally have the capacity built into our brains to connect with each other at very deep levels. And this connection, it turns out, is vital for our immune systems, our longevity and our sense of well being.
So I’m thinking a lot about Fun and Intimacy these days.
I remember asking an older married couple what their secret was. They had had such a good life. Here is what they told me. Read More→
Love=Rejoicing in the Otherwise
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Alright, I can wrap my head around the understanding part; we were raised differently, schooled differently, believed differently and all that. I can understand that we’re different. But rejoicing in those differences? That’s another subject altogether! You (Nietzshe) can afford to be philosophical about all that. I mean, after all, you get paid to theorize about such things. I wonder though how you feel when your partner takes your carefully squeezed and rolled tube of toothpaste and utterly destroys all your meticulous work? Read More→
Inch by Inch….the Journey of Relationship
Posted by: | CommentsFalling in love is easy. It happens almost by accident. Building long-term love is no accident. For most of us it takes a whole lot of intentionality and the care that goes into building anything of lasting beauty. When someone undertakes a great journey, climbing Mt. Everest for example, there is a heck of a lot of forethought, preparation and training that goes into it. Just imagine the list you would come up with when considering what you’d need in order to create a mountain of love with your partner. You’d have to consider what would make them feel loved. If you don’t know, you’d have to ask(imagine that!). Then you would go about the task of becoming that person, yes, making attempts to change your good self for the purpose of becoming a better lover. Is this really so different than conquering Everest?
Remember that folks don’t succeed at that great task by themselves. They have guides to show them the best route. Probably a Sherpa or 2 to help lighten their load. Read More→
