Careers and companies succeed or fail, gradually then suddenly, one conversation at a time. Susan Scott
2.0 Clear thinking
Time to think saves time.
The clear thinking that precedes effective action, depends on another having listened well.
Yet, quality attention to each other's thinking is one of the rarest things in a busy life.
'What do you think?' is not usually followed by an open, generous attention from the one who has asked. To give that quality of attention is like a fresh, sea breeze on a stifling hot day. Like sitting in front of a fire as it snows outside. It is sweet time being heard and understood.
In a time poor life it is tempting to put aside these relationships and our inner most self until later, when we tell ourselves there will be plenty of time. We don't make the time to explore the mental map of our own or of each other's worlds, until we have to.
We run down self-care and relationship capital in order to build financial capital one conversation at a time - ending up owning but unbalanced and in empty raincoats. The only thing we ever truly own are our actions.
In the rush we overlook the predictable imbalance inherent in life - the 80:20 rule. In almost every endeavour, 20% of effort delivers 80% of the result. The tendency is to spend 80% of our time on inessentials that deliver 20% of the bottom line. Consider that applied to enterprise, self-care and to intimacy.
National health, energy and water policies similarly conflict with common sense - 'whenever a group is about to do the wrong thing, despite knowing it is the wrong thing, it is a group'. Visit this link about other witness-inhibiting behaviours in work groups and families.
2.1 Mid Life
It is still a question of what matters at the end of our life versus what I want now? The mid or late life crisis often described as natural events, are a direct result of this kind of self neglect. Most of us follow our immediate concerns and wait until the question crashes into our 40s or 50's with a crisis. Late in the game, we then appear desperate to catch up on the essentials.
Issues of aging are age old dilemmas and still they require fierce conversations and time to think. Those phone calls from 9/11 passengers and our Bali survivors say it again and again as do those in the middle of catastrophic illness - at the end of the day truth is it's how well we have loved and cared for each other that matters.
Finally, that is all we own - not the house, the job, the money, not even our bright future. The time is now.
Truth works but many of the schools and organizations in which we live 8 or more hours a day, 5 or 6 days a week are built on both inauthenticity and lack of time to think for ourselves. We are encouraged to think what others are thinking. Some of us grow up to expect the same of family and even of an inner life. End result is a sense that we are somehow faking it, our lives more like a movie cliche than the lived experience of an authentic self.
One way to think about an alternative to these crazy-making patterns is an intentional or a conscious, mindful relationship both with our self, our life and with our loved ones. A relationship that is both planful and playful.
Yet, suspecting the truth of this this we can still be distracted by more pressing commitments, until it is too late and often too late for just one of the partners. Or in relationship to ourselves, just one of our organ systems decides to fail. A business goes bust in similar ways.
This page, 'the saga continues' has an amusing angle on the mid life crisis, growing old isn't for sissies, or visit the midlife club.
2.2 Exits from intimacy
‘Australia is still a largely Anglo-Saxon country, and the inherent stoicism of that race has been shaped and hardened through successive generations until it lodges in most men like some mineral deposit. Australian men don’t talk, except at the pub, and they share little, if anything, of themselves. The story of Bali, 12 October 2002, and the Kingsley Football Club is that this trait has been dissolved, because no man who came back, or lost someone there, could possibly keep that pain to himself.'
In Australia, the majority of the decisions to end a heterosexual relationship are made by the women. Increasingly I am meeting men, some with their mate's (both girl and guy mates) and others with on-line support, unilaterally deciding to end a relationship.
The skeptic in me says that a unilateral decision to end a relationship does not occur without someone in their head or in their bed. Sometimes the deciding partner has lost interest or passion for the relationship (for any number of reasons). Some believe they can fix it on their own without a meaningful conversation about that belief, and so don't put up a red flag to signal their intended silence. This conveys no warning of the inevitable crisis that follows a withdrawal from collaborative problem solving.
More on mending a broken relationship, fixing a troubled one on site.
Sometimes the deciding partner approaches the other to come for help and are greeted and/or perceive they are greeted by a variety of No's like withholding; angry denials; blame; cynicism; proud self-sufficiency or self-righteousness. They eventually give up asking. Then give up hoping and then may come for help as a last resort, after the horse horse has bolted.
Meeting clients at this point in their power struggle, I hear a retrospective scream in my head - please get pre-marriage coaching and regular relationship check ups before you get in this totally predictable mess.
Partners who are left in this way can feel completely baffled by the other's decision. Both grab at emotional and off the shelf explanations like hormone imbalance, mid-life crisis or affairs. 'Good people in good relationships are having affairs'. More on affairs on site.
Here are ten rules to avoid intimacy.
2.30 Get help
To one degree or another, most couples in a power struggle structure their lives in such a way that true intimacy is virtually impossible. The differing ways couples find to do this is often ingenious. Sometimes the things they do seem "natural" or unavoidable because couples are frequently in denial about why they don't spend time with one another. Most often, however, couples are not really conscious about why they do what they do. From an exercise on exits from intimacy on site.
2.31 Even late in the game?
Here's a fictional example: Ed agreed to do anything to save his marriage following a penultimate crisis with Dena saying, 'I give up, it's over' whilst she calmly packed some clothes, her laptop and walked out of the house.
This followed another blow up and her previous attempts 'trying to get through to him'. Ed was rattled, this time she had got through to him and finally out in the car, they sat down and really talked.
For months he had been thinking of hanging himself in the garage. She felt both responsible and disgusted with this revelation and exploded with 'where the kids would find you, you b...?!' Ed was suffering depression and neither knew it though both knew of depression - the wall to wall media coverage had not escaped them. Applying it to themselves had.
He came, or perhaps was dragged into our first session unwilling to take a seat for the first five minutes, suspended between fight, flight and despair. Both had survived ghastly childhoods and then wild young adulthoods, acting out the damage of their parents legacy, and making it worse. Over time they had done an incredible job mending the mess of their lives, building a business and managing a family of seven kids - two and three from previous marriages and two babes of their own.
They were successful, intelligent, articulate, fiercely independent and aware - contradicting the myths about people who seek help from shrinks.
Yet incredibly, neither had sought help during the breakdowns of previous relationships nor in forming this one - they used the go it alone strategy. They came with Ed defined as 'having the problem' even though each knew they were in trouble in themselves. From reading my web site Dena had understood that couple's therapy was one of the most effective treatments for depression and better than medication:
The research project has affirmed our perception of the complex interweaving of contexts - social, political, economic, cultural, gender, class, individual - interactions that shape the experience labeled as depression. During the second year, without any treatment, the depressed individuals who had taken part in couple therapy remained less depressed than those who had taken antidepressant drugs. London Depression Intervention Trial. More from the UK on the biopsychosocial jigsaw.
Ed and Dena's story could be Jane and John's, with Jane dragged to the session after another crisis having considered taking pills to end it. It is a hell of a way for couples to get help and occasionally it even works, mending decades old impasses.
Previous attempts to get help in these situations can replay the competitive or finger pointing or control issues that have dogged a relationship for years e.g. 'we need help because you won't listen!' This pattern could describe a couple polarized into the extremes of gender or role driven behaviour and the 'I'm right, you're wrong' stonewalling of competitive argument.
Sometimes the deciding partner's approach to get help seems to move the goal posts, having already decided to leave the relationship but waiting for the partner to accept their decision or the kids to be a bit older, the mortgage to be smaller or the affair partner to leave their own marriage.
This frustrates the other's attempts to comply with the immediate complaint or to remedy the issues that decided the fate of their relationship. It stifles spontaneity and honesty because the partner about to be left, feels scared to say or do anything that might prove to be the wrong thing when faced with the partner's next goal post. Catch 22.
These are crazy-making strategies. Both people contribute with predictable, separation engendering behaviours in an otherwise functional relationship. Often there is no shortage of intelligence, love and commitment! Some of the troubled relationships who consult me are perceived by friends as an ideal couple. How is this possible?
What people think they do in relationships and what they actually do are two different things. Most of our actions and inactions are decided in the back of our mind before we become aware of them. Then the public self, the private self and the secret self make for a number of versions of reality or explanations, both within and between two people. Not all of those selves are mapped accurately, and most of the immediate decisions are made out of awareness.
Too often we only hear what we assume the other is going to say in response to our concerns, not what they actually think or even have said. This cascades quickly into arguing about one's assumptions of what is in the other's head or what the other really meant. Both end up not feeling heard.
In my view of those situations, it is more effective to admit at the outset, 'I assume you are going to say/think this in response to what I am about to say', than to short circuit their response with a pre-emptive response to what you had already assumed they would say. It can get so normal, that one will swear on the bible that the other did say or think what they had assumed they would say or think before they even said or thought anything.
Sounds crazy? You would not believe dear reader, how common an argument pattern this is, usually quite nuanced and subtle.
2.32 Following ill health
Another fictional example, Jackie and Bill, a couple of 25 years with three kids, asked 'is this as good as it gets? How long can this go on'?
Jackie early 50's, had been ill with a debilitating pancreatitis for the last year. Recently she had viral pneumonia. There was no clear diagnosis though one physician suspected rheumatic fever. As we dug around listening for the meaning of her illness, Bill wondered about her pattern of protecting him from knowledge of the kid's illnesses. She claimed he worried too much. Jackie knew this pattern was at work at the moment in her own illness, not wanting to burden Bill.
Jackie had assumed Bill would leave her if she became ill. True she had always shielded him from the kids illnesses but she rarely allowed herself to show ill health to him. She thought this came from overhearing her parent's arguing when she was a kid. Her father had suffered a series of strokes (TIA's only diagnosed years later) when she was pre-teen and her mother had become increasingly agitated by his then inexplicable confusion, agitation and forgetfulness. She had threatened to leave him because she couldn't cope.
Jackie remembers this clearly, though her parents later denied it, claiming they had always known it was due to dad's stroke from having TIA's.
As she spoke, from the back of her mind Jackie was suddenly confronted by a fear, something she had not ever admitted to herself - that she might leave Bill if he became sick. And then she said her craziest fear was that she would leave him if she didn't get well, assuming he couldn't cope, thereby continuing to protect him. A powerful and unacknowledged fear that had been leading their relationship over a cliff. Once spoken, their problem solving could begin. It was the unspoken fear that had blocked them.
2.33 Crazy patterns void the remedies
Another pattern is the quick fix approach to listening, which leaves all parties feeling not heard. Another is relationship bullying. There may also be family of origin issues, chronic personality problems. May be depression, anxiety or trauma and even the ideas of a female or male brain. There are as many ways to exit from intimacy as there are people to invent them.
But here are 161 ways to spend quality time with your partner for those without a romantic bone in their body and an article on exits from intimacy.
2.40 Prevention and risk management
A self-care or a relationship health check respects these patterns and exits from intimacy, softens the approach of trouble and invites unexpected change to be less catastrophic. It may even avoid that tyranny of privacy, which some folk endure until they can no longer postpone life or the truth.
As a risk management strategy, we take our cars in for regular service, our teeth to the dentist each year, so why not our relationships for a health check. Blaming the car for its faults or complaining about your gums doesn't fix it. Biting on decay can hurt, but blanking out on a troubled relationship feeds old patterns and ultimately can break hearts.
When we are afraid of the risk of failure in intimate relationships, both genders can dumb down to denial. They forget what works elsewhere in their lives.
Denial is a form of willful ignorance, a refusal to see with the heart. However, the experience of rejection itself, interferes with a person's self control. They become impulsive and self destructive. Rejection drops a person's IQ by about 25%, reduces their ability to reason and increases aggression. The same applies to being bullied. For more on ostracism and the silent treatment.
2.41 Gender roles
Australian men tend to be more solution focused than feeling focused. We are more often a well trained provider than a house trained, woman's best friend. Blokes with more 'feminine' characteristics, however, are more often found in happy marriages than ones that are just stoic, great providers.
In their day to day work men are interested in risk management and systemic thinking - because it saves time, injury and repetition. They generally do not want to become rule driven automatons at work or in their relationships. But too many are baffled by what some women don't say,
Women might bitch and moan day and night about everything else in their lives, yet never confess the most essential things, the things their lovers really need to know. Source.
The verbal and emotional ascendancy of most girls over most boys early in most of their development in Australia, sets in concrete the stereotype of 'boys fix it girls feel it'. Just hang out at a co-ed school to get a sense of the enormity of this gender disjunction and allow your heart to come alive when you notice an exception.
The unexceptional result is the impasse that leads to so much marital misery: if she doesn't tell me what she's not saying I can't fix it. To which she replies or thinks, I don't want you to fix it, I just want you to hear me and/or feel what I'm not saying.
This grows into the common domestic squabble called Uproar where insinuations of worthlessness are tossed back and forth like a hot potato with escalating vehemence in order to avoid intimacy. Source: Frogs and Princes.
These are gender roles that require vulnerability on each side to share the responsibility for both feeling and fixing in a relationship.
With effort and introspection we can come to feel content enough to let go of desperate striving and angry scrambling for ascendancy and concentrate instead on controlling the one thing we can ever really have power over: ourselves. Source.
Men usually welcome the possibility of animated peer review and a collaborative, blame free fix for the crap in their lives. They prefer those methods at work and teach those methods to their children in play. Visit manhood online and XYonline and mensline for some positive views on 'men's business'. Read the battered husbands book on line, and access information about men who were sexually abused as children and who move on from survivors to thrivers.
2.5 Endurance
The average relationship waits six years before seeking help with a known problem that both people contribute to.
There is wisdom in endurance. Issues take time to cook. Reciprocal patterns take time to nail. However, in this game the early bird does catch the worm: marriage education and relationship coaching are always going to be superior to therapy.
Usually the 'problems' were present and a source of conflict or avoidance of conflict in some form at the outset of the relationship. Paradoxically arising from the very attributes, which first attracted the partners but later became a problem e.g. one with a good career becomes a workaholic; another close to family of origin ends up having no space from the in-laws; one desirably independent later is perceived as self-centred; one a total extravert and charmer later unable to entertain themselves; the charming street angel later reveals a home devil and one, captivatingly vulnerable later becomes toxic and wounding.
Anticipating this upside down and left field quality of a late awakening to 'relationship problems' on your doorstep ('this-happens-to-other-people-not-to-us' syndrome) - some folk make a pre-nuptial agreement for regular sessions with a relationship coach, facilitator or therapist. They do this especially during the first three years when new relationships are most available to terminal mistakes.
Though prevention is always superior to cure, people offering those services deserve to be carefully assessed. Word of mouth from former clients is a good starting point.
A study commissioned by the Institute for American Values affirms their belief in the endurance ethic of stubbornly outlasting marital problems.
Of 645 unhappily married couples, it showed that most people in that sample who stuck it out did not end up feeling trapped in an unhappy marriage five years later. Of 645 unhappily married couples, 167 had divorced in the five year period. Only half of those were then happy. Whereas, two thirds of those who hung in an unhappy marriage were better off than before.
On most measures of psychological well being the stayers showed more gains than the divorced group. For them there were three successful ways of making the turnaround to a happier marriage 1. marital endurance 2. working on it and 3. improving one's own happiness through personal development. The three common causes of their unhappiness were:
- (a) everyday stresses
- (b) 'men behaving badly' (possibly their agenda item but for a contrasting agenda try women behaving disgracefully)
- (c) chronic conflict, poor communication and emotional neglect.
Caution is required in reading these results. For example you can't infer what would have happened to the divorced group had they stayed together by comparing them to those who stayed.
Links to 12 qualities of 'successful' marriage; how to mend one in trouble and how to start one on sound footings.
2.6 Brief bio and mini-world view
- 'Happy people are most often characterized by a kind of uncalculating and outgoing generosity' John Kay.
- 'Happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life ... but this end is only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.' from John Stuart Mill's autobiography, on line.
'The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.' Anne Morrow Lindbergh b. 1906 - 2001
I have worked as a clinical psychologist and a trauma therapist for the last 35 years and as a relationship coach. I consider myself an agnostic Buddhist and humanist psychologist. With my wife Avinashi I guide meditation in our gourmet yoga meditation retreats. The model I most identify with is process work. It arises from Taoism and from the physics of SQ - the spiritual quotient.
I believe we live in the peace our celebration of diversity affords us. Intractable conflict limits this possibility. A totalitarean regime and a consumer society both depend on the impoverished inner life of its captives, which in turn robs them of democratic relationships and sustainable community. That is why realism can be revolutionary.
My 3 wishes after 30+ years in the business are: 1. self-care and relationship check ups become as normal as dental. 2. That we are taught early to age gracefully and to cultivate a culture of awareness in all our relationships. 3. that I continue to teach what I need to learn.
© 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 ZPJ Fox All Rights Reserved www.peterfox.com.au
