Introduction to Mastering Crucial Conversation
The crucial conversations we’re referring to are interactions that happen to everyone. They are the day-to-day conversations that affect your life. The inability to work through tough issues devastates individuals, ruins family, and poisons communities.
When you ask the average person person what causes couples to break up, he or she usually suggests that it’s due to differences of opinion. In truth, everyone argues about important issues. But not everyone split up. It’s how you argue that matters.
Individuals who are the most influential – who can get things done, and at the same time build on relationships – are those who master their crucial conversations. They are more skilled in crucial conversation and they are who really get things done.
One of the opinion leaders we are particularly interested in meeting was Kevin. He was the only one of eight vice presidents in his company to be identified as exceedingly influential. We wanted to know why. So we watch him at work.
At first, Kevin didn’t do anything remarkable. In truth, he looked like every other VP. He answered his phone, talked to his direct reports, and continued about his pleasant, but routine, routine.
After trailing Kevin for almost a week, we began to wonder if he really did act in ways that set him apart from others or if his influence was simply a matter of popularity. And then we followed Kevin into a meeting.
Kevin, his peers, and their boss were deciding on a new location for their offices – would they move across town, across the state, or across the country? The first execs presented their arguments for their top choices, and as expected, their points were greeted by penetrating questions from the full team. No vague claim went unclarified, no unsupported reasoning unquestioned.
Then Chris, the CEO, pitched his preference – one that was both unpopular and potentially disastrous. However, when people tried to disagree or push back on Chris, he responded poorly. Since he was the big boss, he didn’t exactly have to browbeat people to get what he wanted. Instead, he became slightly defensive. First, he raised an eyebrow. Then he raised his finger. Finally he raised his voice – just a little. It wasn’t long until people stopped questioning him, and Chris’s inadequate proposal was quietly accepted.
Well almost. That’s when Kevin spoke up. His words were simple enough – something like, “Hey Chris, can I check something out with you?”
The reaction was stunning – everyone in the room stopped breathing. But Kevin ignored the apparent terror of his colleagues and plunged on ahead.
In the few minutes he in essence told the CEO that he appeared to be violating his own decision-making guidelines. He was subtly using his power to move the new offices to his hometown.
Kevin continued to explain what he saw happening, and when he finished the first crucial minutes of this delicate exchange, Chris was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded his head, “You’re absolutely right,” he finally concluded. “I have been trying to force my opinion on you. Let’s back up and try again.”
This was a crucial conversation, and Kevin played no games whatsoever. He didn’t resort to silence like colleagues, nor did he try to force his arguments on others. As a result, the team chose a far more reasonable location and Kevin’s boss appreciated his candor.
When Kevin was done, one of his peers turned on to us and said, “Did you see how he did that? If you want to know how he gets things done, figure out what he just did.”
What typically set Kevin and people like him apart from the rest of the pack was their ability to deal with crucial conversations. When taking turned tough and stakes were high, they excelled.
At the core of every successful conversation lies the free flow of relevant information. People openly and honestly express their opinions, share their feelings, and articulate their theories. They willingly and capably share their views, even when their ideas are controversial or unpopular. It’s the one thing, it’s precisely what Kevin and the other extremely effective communicators we studied were routinely able to achieve.
Each of us enters conversations with our own opinions, feelings, theories, and experiences about the topic at hand. This unique combination of thoughts and feelings makes up our personal pool of meaning. This pool not only informs us but also propels our every action.
When two or more of us enter crucial conversations, by definition we don’t share the same pool. Our opinions differ. I believe one thing, you another. I have one history, you another.
People who are skilled at dialogue do their best to make it safe for everyone to add their meaning to the shared pool – even ideas that at first glance appear controversial, wrong, or at odds with their own beliefs. Now, obviously they don’t agree with every idea; they simply do their best to ensure that all ideas find their way into the open.
As the Pool of Shared Meaning grows, it helps people in two ways. First, as individuals are exposed to more accurate and relevant information, they make better choices. What starts as a doomed discussion ends up with a healthy resolution.
In a very real sense, the Pool of Shared Meaning is a measure of a group’s IQ. The larger the shared pool, the smarter the decisions. And even though many people may be involved in a choice, when people openly and freely share ideas, the increased time investment is more offset by the quality of the decision.
Meaning didn’t freely flow because people were afraid to speak up. In every instance where bosses are smart, highly paid, confident, and outspoken, people tend to hold back their opinions rather than risk angering someone in a position of power.
On the other hand, when people feel comfortable speaking up and meaning does flow freely, the shared pool can dramatically increase a group’s ability to make better decisions. Consider what happened to Kevin’s group. As everyone on the team began to explain his or her opinion, people formed a more clear and complete picture of the circumstances.
As they began to understand the whys and wherefores of different proposals, they built off one another. Eventually, as one idea led to the next, and then to the next, they came up with an alternative what no one had originally thought of and that all wholeheartedly supported. As a result of the free flow of meaning, the whole (final choice) was truly greater than the sum of the original parts. In short:
Not only does a shared pool help individuals make better choices, but since the meaning is shared, people willingly act on whatever decisions they make. As people sit through an open discussion where ideas are shared, they take part in the free flow of meaning. Eventually they understand why the shared solution is the best solution, and they’re committed to act. For, example, Kevin and the other VPs didn’t buy into their final choice simply because involved; they bought in because they understood.
Conversely, when people aren’t involved, when they sit back quietly during touchy conversations, they’re rarely committed to the final decision. Since their ideas remain in their heads and their opinions never make it into the pool, they end up quietly criticizing and passively resisting. Worse still, when others force their ideas into the pool, people have a harder time accepting the information. They may say they’re on board, but then walk away and follow through halfheartedly. To quote Samuel Butler, “He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still.”
The time you spend up front establishing a shared pool of meaning is more than paid for by faster, more committed action later on. The greater the shared meaning in the pool, the better the choice – whoever makes it.
In a nation state, power comes from inside. In a democratic society, power is distributed in a way that keeps checks and balances and avoids autocratic concentration of power. Admittedly, decision-taking is slow and frustrating, yet these countries are more enduring and flourishing than any dictatorship.
Every time we find ourselves arguing, debating, running away or otherwise acting in an ineffective way, it’s because we don’t know how to share meaning. Instead of engaging in healthy dialogue, we play silly and costly games.
And then we use every manner of force to get our way. We borrow power from the boss; we hit people with biased monologues. The goal, of course, is always the same – to compel others to our point of view.
Now, here’s how the various elements fit together. When stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong, we’re often at our worst. In order to move to our best, we have to find a way to explain what is in each of our personal pools of meaning – especially our high-stakes, sensitive, and controversial opinions, feelings, and ideas – and to get others to share their pools. We have to make it safe for us to discuss these issues and to come to a shared pool of meaning. And when we do our lives change.
Start with Heart
When conversations become crucial you’ll resort to the form of communication that you’ve grown up with - debate, silent treatment, manipulation, and so on.
More often than not, we do something to contribute to the problems we’re experiencing. People who are best at dialogue understand this simple fact and turn it into the principle “Work on me first.”
They realize that not only are they likely to benefit by improving their own approach, but also that they’re the only person they can work on anyway. As much as others need to change, or we may want them to change, the only person we can continually inspire, prod, and shape – with any degree of success – is the person in the mirror.
There is a certain irony embedded in this fact. People who believe they need to start with themselves do just that. As they work on themselves, they also become the most skilled at dialogue. So here’s the irony. It’s the most talented, not the least talented, who are continually trying to improve their dialogue skills. As is often the case, the rich get richer.
Although it’s difficult to describe the specific order of events in an interaction as fluid as a crucial conversation, we do know one thing for certain: Skilled people Start with Heart. That is, they begin high-risk discussion with the right motives, and they stay focused on the right motives no matter what happens.
They maintain this focus in two ways:
First, they’re steely-eyed smart when it comes to knowing what they want. Despite constant invitations to slip away from their goals, they stick with them.
Second, skilled people don’t make Sucker’s Choices (either/or choices).
Unlike others who justify their unhealthy behavior by explaining that they had no choice but to fight or take a flight, the dialogue-smart believe that dialogue, no matter the circumstances, is always an option.
To see how the desires of our hearts can affect our ability to stay in dialogue, let’s take a look at a real-life example.
Greta, the CEO of a mid-sized corporation, is two hours into a rather tense meeting with her top leaders. For the past six months she has been on a personal campaign to reduce costs. Little has been accomplished to date, so Greta calls the meeting. Surely people will tell her why they haven’t started cutting costs. After all, she has take great pains to foster candor.
Greta has just opened the meeting to questions when a manager haltingly rises his feet, fidgets, stares at the floor, and then nervously asks if he can ask a very tough question. The way the fellow emphasizes the word very makes it sound as if he’s about to accuse Greta of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby.
The frightened manager continues.
“Greta, you’ve been at us for six months to find out ways to cut costs. I’d be but lying if I said that we’ve given you much more than a lukewarm response. If you don’t mind, I’d like to tell you about one thing that’s making it tough for us to push for cost cuts.”
“Great. Fire away.” Greta says as she smiles in response.
“Well, while you’ve been asking us to use both sides of our paper and forego improvements, you’re having a second office built.”
Greta freezes and turns bright red. Everyone looks to see what will happen next. The manager plunges on ahead.
“The rumor is that the furniture alone will cost $150,000. Is that right?”
So there we have it. The conversation just turns crucial. Someone has just poured a rather ugly tidbit into the pool of meaning. Will Greta continue to encourage honest feedback, or will she shut the fellow down?
We call this a crucial conversation because how Greta acts during the next few moments will not only set people’s attitudes toward the proposed cost cutting, but will also have a huge impact on what the other leaders think about her. Does she walk the talk of openness and honesty? Or is she a raging hypocrite – like so many of the senior executives who came before her?
How Greta behaves during this crucial conversation depends a great deal on how she handles her emotions while under attack.
If she is like most of us, Greta will defense herself. When we’re in the throes of high-stakes conversations, new (and less healthy) motives often supplant our original, more noble ones. If you are standing in front of a potentially hostile crowd, it’s a good bet you will change your original goal to the new goal of protecting your public image.
“Excuse me,” you might response. “I don’t think that my new office is an appropriate topic for this forum.”
Bang. You’re dead. In one fell swoop you’ve lost buy-in, destroyed any hope for candor in this particular conversation, and confirmed everyone’s suspicion that you want honesty – but as long as it makes you look good.
Later that day we asked Greta how she had been able to keep her composure under fire. We wanted to know exactly what had been going on in her head. What had helped her move from embarrassment and anger to gratitude?
“It was easy,” Greta explained.” At first I did feel attacked, and I wanted to strike back. To be honest, I wanted to put that guy in his place. He was accusing me in public and he was wrong.”
“And then it struck me,” she continued. “Despite the fact that I had four hundred eyeballs pinned to me, a rather important question hit me like a ton of bricks: “What do I really want?”
Asking this question had a powerful effect on Greta’s thinking. As she focused on this far more important question, she quickly realized that her goal was to encourage these two hundred managers to embrace the cost-reduction efforts – and to thereby influence thousands of others to do the same.
As Greta contemplated this goal, she realized that the biggest barrier she faced was the widespread belief that she was a hypocrite. On one hand, she was calling for others to sacrifice. On the other hand, she appeared to be spending discretionary funds for her own comfort. It was at that moment that she was no longer ashamed or angry, but grateful. She couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity to influence these leaders than the one offered up by this penetrating question. And so she moves to dialogue.
Refocus your brain. Now, let’s move to a situation you might face. You’re speaking with someone who completely disagrees with you on a hot issue. How does all of this goal stuff apply? As you begin the discussion, start by examining your motives. Going in, ask yourself what you really want.
In order to move back to motives that allow for dialogue, you must step away from the interaction and look at yourself – much like an outsider. Ask yourself: “What am I doing, and if I had to guess, what does it tell me about my underlying motive?”
As you make an honest effort to discover your motive, you might conclude: “Let’s see. I am pushing hard, making the argument stronger than I actually believe, and doing anything to win an argument.”
Once you call into question the shifting desires of your heart, you can make conscious choices to change them. “What I really want is to genuinely try to find solution rather than try to win people over to my ideas.” Put succinctly, when you name the game, you can stop playing it. Do what Greta did. Stop and ask yourself some questions that return you to dialogue. Here are some great ones:
· What do I really want for myself?
· What do I really want for others?
· What do I really want for the relationship?
· How would I behave if I really wanted these results?
Asking questions about what we really want serves two important purposes:
First, it reminds us of our goal.
Second, it juices our brain in a way that helps us keep focused.
Wanting to win
This particular dialogue killer sits at the top of many of our lists. Heaven only knows that we come by this deadly passion naturally enough. Half of the TV programs we watch make heroes out of people who win at sports or game shows. Ten minutes into kindergarten we learnt hat if we want to get the teachers’ attention, we have to spout the right answer. That means we have to beat our fellow students at the same game. This desire to win is built into our very fiber before we’re old enough to know what’s going on. Unfortunately, as we grow older, most of us don’t realize that this desire to win is continually driving us away from healthy dialogue.
Hoping to remain safe
Of course, we don’t always fix mistakes, aggressively discredit others, or heartlessly try to make them suffer. Sometimes we choose personal safety over dialogue. Rather than add to the pool of meaning, and possibly make waves along the way, we go to silence. We’re so uncomfortable with the immediate conflict that we accept the certainty of bad results to avoid the possibility of uncomfortable conversation. We choose (at least in our minds) peace over conflict. Had this happened in Greta’s case, nobody would have raised concerns over the new office, Greta never would have learned the real issue, and people would have continued to drag their feet.
The best at dialogue present themselves with questions that turn either/or choice into a search for the all important and ever-elusive and. Here’s how it works.
First, clarify what you really want. If you know what you want for yourself, for others, and for the relationship, then you’re in position to break out of the Sucker’s Choice.
Second, clarify what you really don’t want, add it to what you want. This is the key to framing and question. Ask your mind to start searching for healthy options to bring you to dialogue.
“What I don’t want is to have useless and heated conversation that creates bad feelings and doesn’t lead to change.”
Third, present your brain with a more complex problem.
Finally, combine the two into an and question that forces you to search for more creative and productive options than silence and violence.
“How can I have a candid conversation with my husband about being more dependable and avoid creating bad feelings or wasting our time?”
It’s interesting to watch what happens when people are presented with and questions after being stuck with Sucker’s Choice. Their faces become reflective, their eyes open wider, and they begin to think.
Summary - Start with Heart
Work on Me First
· Remember that the only person you can directly control is yourself.
Focus on What You Really Want
· When you find yourself moving toward silence or violence, stop and pay attention to your motives.
o Ask yourself: “What does my behavior tell me about what my motives are?”
o Then, clarify what you really want. Ask yourself: “What do I want for myself? For others? For the relationship?”
o And finally, ask: “How would I behave if this were what I really wanted?”
Refuse the Sucker’s Choice
· Clarify what you don’t want, add it to what you do want, and ask your mind to start searching for healthy options to bring you to dialogue.
Learn to Look
When it’s safe, you can say anything. Here’s why gifted communicators keep a close eye on safety. Dialogue calls for the free flow of meaning – period. And nothing kills the flow of meaning like fear. When you fear that people aren’t buying into your ideas, you start pushing too hard. When you fear that you may be harmed in some way, you start withdrawing and hiding. Both these reactions – to fight and to take flight – are motivated by the same emotion: fear. On the other hand, if you make it safe enough, you can talk about almost anything and people will listen. If you don’t fear that you’re being attacked or humiliated, you yourself can hear almost anything and not become defensive.
Think about your own experience. Can you remember receiving really blistering feedback from someone at some point in your life, but in this instance you didn’t become defensive? Instead, you absorbed the feedback. You reflected in it. You allowed it to influence you. If so, ask yourself why. Why in this instance were you able to absorb potentially threatening feedback so well? If you are like the rest of us, it’s because you believed that the other person had your best interest in mind. In addition, you respected the other person’s opinion. You felt safe receiving the feedback because you trusted the motives and ability of the other person.
Safety allows us to share meaning and keeps us from moving into silence or violence. When conversations become crucial, safety must be strong.
Perhaps the most difficult element to watch closely is your own behavior. The truth is, we all have trouble monitoring our own behavior at times. We usually lose any semblance of social sensitivity when we become so consumed with ideas and causes that we lose track of what we’re doing. We try to bully our way through. We speak when shouldn’t. We do things that don’t work – all in the name of a cause. When a discussion starts to become stressful, we often end up doing the exact opposite of what works. When you’re in the middle of a crucial conversation, you can be more conscious of what to watch for by identifying your own style under stress.
Make It Safe for Dialogue
To get started, let’s examine a situation where safety is at risk. We’ll eavesdrop on a couple as they try to discuss one of the most delicate of topics - physical intimacy.
First a little background. Jotham thinks he and Yvonne are intimate with each other far too seldom. Yvonne is satisfied with their relationship. For years the two have acted out rather than talked out their concern. When Jotham wants to be amorous and Yvonne doesn’t respond, he goes to silence. He pouts almost nothing, and avoids Yvonne for the next few days.
Yvonne knows what’s going on with Jotham. Occasionally she’ll go along with him even when she’s not feeling particularly romantic. She does this in hopes of avoiding Jotham’s pouting. Unfortunately, she then feels resentful toward Jotham, and it’s much longer before she feels genuinely romantic toward him.
So here’s the game. The more Jotham insists and pouts, the less attractive and interesting he is to Yvonne. The more Yvonne succumbs and then resents, the less she is interested in the entire relationship. The more both of them act out rather than talk out this crucial conversation, the more likely they are to end up going their separate ways. Yvonne has decided to broach the subject with Jotham. Rather than waiting until they’ve both upset, she’s picked a time when they’re relaxing on the couch. Here goes.
Yvonne: “Jotham, can you talk about what happened last night – you know, when I told you that I was tired?”
Jotham: “I don’t know if I’m in the mood.”
Yvonne: “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Jotham: “I’m sick and tired of you deciding when we do what!”
Yvonne: (walk out).
Okay, let’s look at Yvonne. She tried to tackle a tough topic. Good for her. She was already uncomfortable and her partner took a cheap shot at her. Some help he was. Now what should she do? How can she get back to honest and healthy dialogue? What do you do when you don’t feel like it’s safe to share what’s on your mind?
The key is to step out of the content of the conversation. Don’t stay stuck in what’s being said. Yvonne existed because she was focused on what Jotham was saying. If she had been looking at Jotham’s behavior, she would have spotted his use of sarcasm – a form of masking. Rather than talking out his concern, he’s taking a potshot. Why would he do that? Because he doesn’t feel safe using dialogue. But Yvonne missed this point.
Now, we’re not suggesting that Jotham’s behavior is acceptable or that Yvonne should put up with it. But first things first. Start with Heart.
Start with Heart: Here’s how people who are skilled at dialogue stay focused on their goals – particularly when the going gets tough. Work on yourself first. Remember that the only person you can directly control is yourself. Focus on what you really want. When find yourself moving toward silence or violence, stop and pay attention to your motives, clarify what you really want.
The first question is: “What do I really want?” If you really want to have a healthy conversation about a topic that will make or break your relationship, then for a moment or two you may have to set aside confronting the current issue - for example, Jotham’s sarcasm.
Yvonne’s challenge here is to build safety – enough so that she can talk about their physical relationship, about the way Jotham is dealing with it, or about any other concerns. But if she doesn’t make it safe, all she’s going to get is a continuation of the silence and violence game. So, what should she do?
The best conversationalists don’t play game. They know that dialogue is the free flow of meaning – with no pretending, sugarcoating, or faking. So they do something completely different. They step out of the content of the conversation, make it safe, and then step back in. By stepping out of the content and building enough safety that almost anything becomes discussable.
For example: “It would be good if we could both share what’s working and what isn’t. My goal isn’t to make you feel guilty, and I certainly don’t want to become defensive. What I’d really love is for us to come up with a solution that makes us both satisfied in our relationship.”
Let’s go back to Yvonne and Jotham. Yvonne is trying to get the conversation going, and Jotham suspects her motives. Let’s see how Contrasting might help her.
Contrast to Fix Misunderstanding: When other misunderstands either your purpose or your intent, use Contrasting. Start with what you don’t intend or mean. Then explain what you do intend or mean.
Yvonne: “I think it makes things worse when you withdraw and won’t talk to me for days at a time.”
Jotham: “So you expect me not only to put up with regular rejection, but also to be sociable and happy when I do?”
Jotham appears to believe that Yvonne’s motive is to reshape him. It’s unsafe. Mutual Purpose is at risk. Rather than responding to his sarcasm, she should step out of the content and clarify her real motives.
Yvonne: “I don’t want to suggest that this problem is yours. The truth is, I think it’s ours. I’m not trying to put the burden on you. I don’t even know what the solution is. What I do want is to be able to talk so that we can understand each other better. Perhaps that will help me change how I’m responding to you, too.”
Jotham: “I know where this is going. We talk, I continue to get rejected, but you get to feel good about yourself because “we’ve communicated.” Have you been watching Talk Show again?”
Obviously Jotham still believes that Yvonne merely wants to confirm that their existing relationship is okay and if she does, she’ll be able to continue to reject Jotham – but feel good about it. Jotham still feels unsafe. So Yvonne continues to step out and build safety, using Contrasting.
Yvonne: “Seriously. I’m not interested in discussing why our current relationship is really okay. I can see that it isn’t. I merely want to talk about what each of us likes and doesn’t like. That way we’ll be able to see what we need to improve and why. My only goal is to come up with some ideas that will make both of us happy.
Jotham: (Changing tone and demeanor) “Really? I’m sorry to be so insecure about this. I know I’m being a bit selfish about things, but I don’t know how to make myself feel differently.”
Once Yvonne clarified her genuine goals, Jotham feels safer acknowledging his own contribution, and the two were back in dialogue.
When people misunderstand and you start arguing over the misunderstanding, stop. Use Contrasting. Explain what don’t mean until you’ve restored safety. Then return to the conversation. Safety first.
Yvonne is going to try to move to dialogue with Jotham. Let’s see how she does at making it safe in her crucial conversation. First, she’ll use Contrasting to prevent misunderstanding of her purpose.
Yvonne: “Jotham, I’d like to talk about our physical relationship. I’m not doing it to put you on the spot or to suggest the problem yours. I’m completely clear that it’s as much my problem as yours. I’d really like to talk about it so we can make things better for both of us.”
Jotham: “What’s there is to talk about? You don’t want it. I want it. I’ll try to deal with it.”
Yvonne: “I think it’s more complicated than that. The way you act sometimes makes me want to be with you even less.”
Yvonne: “If that’s how you feel, why are we pretending we have a relationship at all?”
Okay, what happened? Remember, we’re exploring Yvonne’s side of the conversation. She’s the one initiating the talk. Clearly there is a lot Jotham could be doing to make things go better. But she’s not Jotham. What should Yvonne do? Consequently, she shouldn’t respond to the content of Jotham’s discouraging statement. Rather, she should look at the safety issue behind it. Why is Jotham starting to withdraw from the conversation? Two reasons:
· The way Yvonne made her point sounded to him like she was blaming him for everything.
· He believes her concern in one small area reflects her total feelings toward him.
So she’ll apologize and use Contrasting to rebuild safety.
Apologize When Appropriate: When you’ve clearly violated respect, apologize.
Yvonne: “I’m sorry I said it that way. I’m not blaming you for how I feel or act. That’s my problem. I don’t see this as your problem. I see it as our problem. Both of us may be acting in ways that make things worse. I know I am at least.”
Jotham: “I probably am too. Sometimes I pout because I’m hurting. And I also do it hoping it’ll make you feel bad. I’m sorry about that, too.”
Notice what just happened. Since Yvonne dealt well with the safety issue and kept focused on what she really wanted out of this conversation, Jotham returned to the conversation. This is far more effective than if Yvonne had gone into blaming.
Let’s continue.
Jotham: “I just don’t see how we can work this out. I’m wired for more passion than you are – it seems like the only solution is for me to put up with it the way it is or for you to feel like a sex slave.”
Decide Which Condition of Safety Is at Risk:
· Mutual Purpose: Do others believe you care about their goals in this conversation? Do they trust your motives?
· Mutual Respect. Do others believe you respect them?
The problem now is one of Mutual Purpose. Jotham thinks he and Yvonne are at cross-purposes. In his mind, there is no possibility of a mutually satisfactory solution. Rather than move to compromise or fight for her way, Yvonne will step out of the issue and CRIB to get to Mutual Purpose.
CRIB to get to Mutual Purpose: When you are at cross-purpose, use four skills to get back to Mutual Purpose.
· (C)ommit to seek Mutual Purpose.
· (R)ecognize the purpose behind the strategy.
· (I)nvent a Mutual Purpose.
· (B)rainstorm new strategies.
Yvonne: (Commit to seek Mutual Purpose.) “No, that isn’t what I want at all. I don’t want anything with you that isn’t great for both of us. I just want to find a way to have us both feel close, appreciated, and loved.”
Jotham: “That’s what I want, too. It just seems like we get those feelings in different ways.
(Notice how Jotham is leaving the game behind and joining the dialogue. Safety – especially Mutual Purpose - is making this possible.)
Yvonne: (Recognize the purpose behind the strategy.) “Maybe not. What makes you feel loved and appreciated?”
Jotham: “Making love with you when you really want to makes me feel loved and appreciated. And you?”
Yvonne: “When you do thoughtful things for me. And when you hold me – but not always sexually.”
Jotham: “You mean, if we’re just cuddling that makes you feel loved?”
Yvonne: “Yes, and sometimes – when I think you’re doing it because you love me – sex does that for me, too.”
Jotham: (Invent a Mutual Purpose.) So we need to find ways to be together that make both of us feel loved and appreciated. Is that what we’re looking for here?”
Yvonne: “Yes, I really want that, too.”
Jotham: (Brainstorm new strategies.) . . . .
Before a crucial conversation begins, think about which skills will help you most. Remember, when it comes to these high-stakes conversations, a little progress can produce a lot of benefit. But don’t aim for perfection. Aim for progress.
Summary - Make It Safe for Dialogue
When others move to silence or violence, step out of the conversation and Make It Safe. When safety is restored, go back to the issue at hand and continue the dialogue.
Decide Which Condition of Safety Is at Risk:
· Mutual Purpose: Do others believe you care about their goals in this conversation? Do they trust your motives?
· Mutual Respect. Do others believe you respect them?
Apologize When Appropriate
· When you’ve clearly violated respect, apologize.
Contrast to Fix Misunderstanding
· When other misunderstands either your purpose or your intent, use Contrasting. Start with what you don’t intend or mean. Then explain what you do intend or mean.
CRIB to get to Mutual Purpose
· When you are at cross-purpose, use four skills to get back to Mutual Purpose.
o (C)ommit to seek Mutual Purpose.
o (R)ecognize the purpose behind the strategy.
o (I)nvent a Mutual Purpose.
o (B)rainstorm new strategies.
Master My Stories
This article explores how to gain control of crucial conversations by learning how to take charge of your emotions.
Consider Maria, a copywriter who is currently hostage to some pretty strong emotions. She and her colleague Louis just reviewed the latest draft of a proposal with their boss. During the meeting, they were supposed to be jointly presenting their latest ideas. But when Maria paused to take a breath, Louis took over the presentation, making almost all the points they had come up with together. When the boss turned to Maria for input, there was nothing left for her to say.
Maria has been feeling humiliated and angry throughout this project. First, Louis took their suggestions to the boss and discussed them behind her back. Second, he completely monopolized the presentation. Consequently, Maria believes that Louis is downplaying her contribution because she’s the only woman on the team.
She’s getting fed up with his “boys’ club” mentality. So what does she do? She doesn’t want to appear “oversensitive,” so most of the time she says nothing and just does her job. However, she does manage to assert herself by occasionally getting in sarcastic jabs about the way she’s being treated.
“Sure I can get that printout for you. Should I just get your coffee and whip up a Bundt cake while I’m at it?” She mutters and tolls her eyes as she exits the room.
Louis, in turn, finds Maria’s cheap shots and sarcasm puzzling. He’s not sure what has Maria upset but is beginning to despise her smug attitude and hostile reaction to most everything he does. As a result, when the two work together, you could cut the tension with a knife.
People who are the worst at dialogue fall into the trap Maria has fallen into. Maria is completely unaware of a dangerous assumption she’s making. She’s upset at being overlooked and is keeping a professional silence. She’s assuming that her emotions and behavior are the only right and reasonable reactions under the circumstances. She’s convinced that anyone in her place would feel the same way.
Here is the problem. Maria is treating her emotions as if they are the only valid response. Since, in her mind, they are both justified and accurate, she makes no effort to question them. In fact, in her view, Louis caused them. Ultimately, her actions (saying nothing and taking cheap shots) are being driven by these very emotions. Since she’s not acting on her emotions, her emotions are acting on her – controlling her behavior and driving her deteriorating relationship with Louis, and she doesn’t even know it.
People who are the best at dialogue do something completely different. They act on their emotions. That is, when they have strong feelings, they influence and often change their emotions by thinking them out. As a result, they choose their emotions, and by so doing, make it possible to choose behaviors that create better results.
This, of course, is easier said than done. How do you rethink yourself from an emotional and dangerous state into one that puts you back in control?
Where should Maria start? To help rethink or gain control of our emotions, let’s see where our feelings come from in the first place. Let’s look at a model that helps us first examine and then gain control of our own emotions.
Feel (hurt, worried) => Act (silence, cheap shots)
Consider Maria. She’s feeling hurt but is worried that if she says something to Louis, she’ll look too emotional, so she alternates between holding her feelings inside (avoiding) and taking cheap shots (masking).
Maria actions stem from her feelings. First she feels and then she acts. That’s easy enough, but it bags the question: What’s causing Maria’s feelings in the first place?
Is it Louis’s behavior? As was the case with the nacho-mother-in-law, did Louis make Maria feel insulted and hurt?
Maria heard and saw Louis do something, she generated an emotion, and then she acted out her feelings – using forms of masking and avoiding.
So here is the big question:
What happens between Louis acting and Maria feeling?
Is there an intermediate step that turns someone else’s actions into our feelings?
If not, then it has to be true that others make us feel the way we do.
As it turn out, there is an intermediate step between what others do and how we feel. That’s why, when faced with the same circumstances, ten people may have ten different emotional responses. For instance, with a coworker like Louis, some might feel insulted whereas others merely feel curious. Some become angry and others feel concern or even sympathy.
What is this intermediate step? Just after we observe what others do and just before we feel some emotion about it, we tell ourselves a story. That is, we interpret or add meaning to the action we observed. To the simple behavior we add motive.
Why were they doing that?
We also add judgment – is good or bad?
And then, based on these thoughts or stories or interpretations, our body responds with an emotion.
See/Hear ==> Interpret/Tell a Story ==> Feel ==> Act
We call the process above our Path to Action because it explains how emotions, thoughts, and experiences lead to our actions. We observe, we interpret or tell a story, and then we feel. Since we and only we are telling the story or doing the interpretation, we can take back control of our own emotions by telling a different story. If we can find a way to control the stories we tell, by rethinking or retelling them, we can master our emotions and, therefore, master our crucial conversations.
Stories explain what’s going on. Exactly what are our stories. They are our interpretations of the facts. They are theories we use to explain why, how, and what.
For instance, Maria asks: “Why does Louis take over?”
And then she interprets or tell herself the stories:
“He doesn’t trust my ability to communicate. Louis thinks I’m incompetent, and this is bad. He thinks that because I’m a woman, people won’t listen to me. What should I do about all this? If I say something, he’ll think I’m a whiner or oversensitive or militant, so it’s best to clam up.”
As we come up with our own meaning or stories, it isn’t long until our body responds with strong feelings or emotions – they’re directly linked to our judgments of right or wrong, good or bad, kind or selfish, fair or unfair, etc.
Maria’s story yields anger and frustration. These feelings, in turn, drive Maria to her actions – toggling back and forth between clamming up and taking an occasional cheap shot.
See/Hear ==> Interpret/Tell a Story ==> Feel ==> Act
See/Hear: Louis makes all the points, meets privately with the boss.
Interpret/Tell a Story: He doesn’t trust me and thinks I’m weak. If I’ll speak up I’ll look too emotional.
Feel: hurt and worried.
Act: silence, cheap shots.
Even if you don’t realize it, you are telling yourself stories. It’s our interpretations or stories that drive our emotions and not other people’s actions.
Our interpretation or storytelling typically happens blindly fast. When we believe we’re at risk, we tell ourselves a story so quickly that we don’t even know we’re doing it.
If you don’t believe this is true, ask yourself whether you always become angry when someone laughs at you. If sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t (It depends on your interpretations or stories you tell to yourself), then your response isn’t hardwired. That means something goes between others laughing at you (what you see/hear) and you feeling, that is your interpretations or stories. In truth, you interpret or tell yourself a story. You may not remember it, but you tell a story.
See/Hear ==> Interpret/Tell a Story ==> Feel ==> Act
Any set of fact can be used to tell an infinite number of stories. These fabrications could be told in any of thousands of different ways, almost unlimited. For instance,
- Maria could just as easily have decided that Louis didn’t realize she cared so much about the project.
- She could have concluded that Louis was feeling unimportant and this was a way of showing he was valuable.
- Or maybe he had been burned in the past because he hadn’t personally seen through every detail of a project.
Any of these stories would have fit the facts and would have created very different emotions.
If we take control of our stories, they won’t control us. People who are excel at dialogue are able to influence their emotions during crucial conversations. They recognize that while it’s true that at first we are in control of the stories we tell – after all, we do make them up of our own accord – once they’re told, the stories control us. They control how we feel and how we act. And as a result, they control the results we get from our crucial conversations.
People who are the best at dialogue find a way to first slow down and then take charge of their Path to Action. Here’s how.
To slow down the lightning-quick storytelling process and the subsequent flow of adrenaline, retrace your Path to Action – one element at a time. This calls for a bit of mental gymnastics.
First, you have to stop what you’re currently doing.
Then, you have to get in touch with why you’re doing it.
Here’s how to retrace your path:
· Notice your behavior. Ask: Am I in some form of silence or violence?
· Get in touch with your feelings. Ask: What emotions are encouraging me to act this way?
· Analyze your stories. Ask: What story or interpretation is creating these emotions?
· Get back to the fact. Ask: What evidence do I have to support this story or interpretation?
By retracing your path one element at a time, you put yourself in a position to think about, question, and change any one or more of the elements.
Notice your behavior. Ask: Am I in some form of silence or violence?
If you learn to look at yourself and notice that you yourself are slipping into silence and violence, you have a good reason to stop and take stock. But looking isn’t enough. You must take an honest look at what you’re doing. Stop and review what you are doing and avoid justifying your actions.
Not only do those who are best at crucial conversations notice when they’re slipping into silence or violence, but they are also able to admit it. They don’t wallow in self-doubt, of course, but they do recognize the problem and begin to take corrective action. The moment they realize that they’re killing dialogue, they review their own Path to Action.
Get in touch with your feelings. Ask: What emotions are encouraging me to act this way?
As skilled individuals begin to retrace their own Path to Action, they immediately move from examining their own unhealthy behavior to exploring their feelings or emotions.
Actually identifying your emotions is more difficult than you might think. In fact, many people are emotionally illiterate.
Many people say they’re angry, in fact, they’re feeling a mix of embarrassment and surprise.
Or they suggest they’re unhappy when they are feeling violated.
Perhaps they suggest they’re upset when they’re really feeling humiliated and cheated.
Since life doesn’t consist of a series of vocabulary tests, you might wonder what difference words can make. But words do matter.
Knowing what you’re really feeling helps you take a more accurate look at what is going on and why.
How about you? When experiencing strong emotions, do you stop and think about your feelings?
If so, first, do you use a rich vocabulary or do you mostly draw from terms such as “bummed out” and “furious”?
Second, do you talk openly with others about how you feel? Do you willingly talk with loved ones about what’s going on inside of you?
Third, in so doing, is your vocabulary robust and accurate? For example, are you admitting you’re feeling both embarrassed and surprised than simply angry?
It’s important to get in touch with your feelings, and to do so, you may want to expand your emotional vocabulary.
Analyze your stories. Ask: What story or interpretation is creating these emotions?
Question your feeling and stories. Once you’ve identified what you’re feeling, you have to stop and ask, given the circumstances, is it the right feeling or interpretation? Meaning, of course, are you telling the right story? After all, feelings come from stories (interpretations), and stories are our own invention.
The first step to regaining emotional control is to challenge the illusion that what you’re feeling is the only right emotion under the circumstances. This may be the hardest step, but it’s also the most important one.
By questioning our feelings, we open ourselves up to question our stories or interpretations. We challenge the comfortable conclusion that our story or interpretation is right or true. We willingly question whether our emotions (very real), and the story or interpretation behind them are accurate.
For instance, what were the facts in Maria’s story?
She saw Louis give the whole presentation. She heard the boss talk about meeting with Louis to discuss the project when she wasn’t present.
Don’t confuse stories with facts. Sometimes you fail to question your stories because you see them as immutable facts.
When you generate stories in the blink of an eye, you can get so caught up in the moment that you begin to believe your stories are facts. They feel like facts.
You confuse subjective conclusions or invented stories with hard facts. For example, in trying to ferret out facts from story, Maria might say, “He’s male chauvinist pig. That’s fact!” Ask anyone who has seen how he treats me!”
“He’s male chauvinist pig” is not a fact. It’s story or interpretation Maria created to give meaning to the facts. As we say earlier, others could watch Maria’s interactions with Louis and walk away with different stories or interpretations.
Get back to the fact. Ask: What evidence do I have to support this story or interpretation?
Separate fact from story by focusing on behavior. To separate fact from story, get back to the genuine source of your feelings.
Test your ideas against a simple criterion: Can you see or hear this thing you’re calling a fact? Was is an actual behavior?
For example, it is a fact that Louis gave 95 percent of the presentation and answered all but one question.” This is specific, objective and verifiable. Any two people watching the meeting would make the same observation.
However, the statement “He doesn’t trust me” is a conclusion. It explains what Maria thinks and not what Louis did. Conclusions are subjective.
Do what it takes to tell a useful story. A useful story, by definition, creates emotions that lead to healthy action – such as dialogue.
To see how this all fits together, let’s circle back to Maria. Let’s assume she’s retraced her Path to Action and separated the facts from the stories. Doing this has helped her realize that the story or interpretation she told was incomplete, defensive, and hurtful. So she asks herself:
· Am I pretending not to notice my role in the problem?
“When I found out that Louis was holding project meetings without me, I felt like I should ask him about why I wasn’t included. I believed that if I did, I could open a dialogue that would help us work better together. But then I didn’t, and as my resentment grew, I was even less interested in broaching the subject.”
If you notice that you’re talking about yourself as an innocent victim (and you weren’t held up at gunpoint), ask: Am I pretending not to notice my role in the problem? This question jars you into facing up to the fact that maybe, just maybe, you did something to help cause the problem. Instead of being a victim, you were an actor.
· Why would a reasonable, rational, and decent person do what Louis is doing?
“He really cares about producing good-quality work. Maybe he doesn’t realize that I’m as committed to the success of the project as he is.”
When you find yourself labeling or otherwise vilifying others, stop and ask: Why would a reasonable, rational, and decent person do what this person is doing? This particular question humanizes others. As we search for plausible answer to it, our emotions soften. Empathy often replaces judgment, and depending upon how we’ve treated others, personal accountability replaces self-justification.
Our purpose for asking why a reasonable, rational, and decent person might be acting a certain way is not to excuse others for any bad things they may be doing. If they are, indeed, guilty, we’ll have time to deal with that later.
The purpose of the humanizing question is to deal with our own stories or interpretations and emotions by providing a variety of possible reasons for the other person’s behavior.
In fact, with experience and maturity we learn to worry less about others’ intent and more about the effect others’ actions are having on us. No longer are we in the game of rooting out unhealthy motives. And here’s the good news.
When we reflect on alternative motives, not only do we soften our emotions, but equally important, we relax our absolute certainty long enough to allow for dialogue – the only reliable way of discovering others’ genuine motives.
· What do I really want?
“I want a respectful relationship with Louis. And I want recognition for the work I do.”
Make an honest effort to discover your motive.
Asking questions about what we really want serves two important purposes:
First, it remind us of our goal.
Second, it juices up our brain in a way that helps us keep focused on our goal.
· What would I do right now if I really wanted these results?
“I’d make an appointment to sit down with Louis and talk about how we work together.”
When you refuse to make yourself helpless, you’re forced to hold yourself accountable for using your dialogue skills rather than bemoaning your weakness. You are forced to openly, honestly, and effectively discussing the problem – not taking potshots and then justifying yourself.
As we go thorough this process we free ourselves from the poisoning effect of unhealthy emotions. Best of all, as we regain control and move back to dialogue, we become masters of our own emotions rather than hostages.
And what about Maria? What did she actually do?
She scheduled a meeting with Louis. As she prepared for the meeting, she refused to feed her ugly and incomplete stories or interpretations, admitted her own role in the problem, and entered the conversation with an open mind.
As Maria sat down with Louis, she found a way to tentatively share what she had observed. While engaging in healthy dialogue, Louis apologized for not including her in meetings with the boss. He explained that he was trying to give the boss a heads-up on some controversial parts of the presentation – and realized in retrospect that he shouldn’t have done this without her. He also apologized for dominating during the presentation.
Maria learned from the conversation that Louis tends to talk more when he gets nervous. He suggested that they each be responsible for either the first or second half of the presentation and stick to their assignments so he would be less likely to crowd her out.
The discussion ended with both of them understanding the others’ perspective and Louis promising to be more sensitive in the future.
Summary:
If strong emotions are keeping you stuck in silence or violence, try this.
Retrace your path:
Ask yourself what you’re really doing:
· Am I in some form of silence or violence? Get in touch with your feeling. Learn to accurately identify the emotions behind your story or interpretation.
· What emotions are encouraging me to act this way? Analyze your stories or interpretations. Questions your conclusions and look for other possible explanations behind your story.
· What story or interpretation is creating these emotions? Get back to the facts. Abandon your absolute certainty by distinguishing between hard facts and your invented stories.
· What evidence do I have to support this story? By retracing your path one element at a time, you put yourself in a position to think about, question, and change any one or more of the elements.
To get to the useful story, ask:
· Am I pretending not to notice my role in the problem?
· Why would a reasonable, rational, and decent person do this?
· What do I really want?
· What would I do right now if I really wanted these results?
STATE My Path – Speak Persuasively, Not Abrasively
Adding information to the pool of meaning can be quite difficult when the ideas we’re about to dump into the collective consciousness contain delicate, unattractive, or controversial opinions.
It’s one thing to argue that your company need to shift from green to red packaging; it’s quite another to tell a person that he or she is offensive or unlikable or has a controlling leadership style. When the topic turns from things to people, it’s always more difficult.
The best people at dialogue speak their minds completely and do it in a way that makes it safe for others to hear what they have to say and respond to it as well. They are both totally frank and completely respectful.
To speak honestly when honesty could easily offend others, we have to find a way to maintain safety. How can we speak the unspeakable and still maintain respect? Actually, it can be done if you know how to carefully blend three ingredients – confidence, humility, and skill.
Confidence
Most people simply won’t hold delicate conversations – well, at least not with the right person. For instance, your colleague Brian goes home at night and tells his wife that his boss, Fernando, is micromanaging him to within an inch of his life. He says the same thing over lunch when talking with his pals. Everyone knows what Brian thinks about Fernando – except, of course, Fernando. People who are skilled at dialogue have the confidence to say what needs to be said to the person who needs to hear it.
Humility
Skilled people are confident that they have something to say, but also realize that others have valuable input. They are humble enough to realize that they don’t have a monopoly on the truth. Their opinions provide a starting point but not the final word. They may currently believe something but realize that with new information they may change their minds. This means they’re willing to both express their opinions and encourage others to do the same.
Skill
People who are willingly share delicate issue are good at doing it. That’s why they are confident in the first place. They speak the unspeakable, and people are grateful for their honesty.
To see how to discuss sensitive issues, let’s look at an enormously difficult problem. Bob has just walked in the door, and his wife Carole, looks upset. He can tell from her swollen eyes that she’s been crying. Only when he walks in the door, Carole doesn’t turn to him for comfort. Instead, she looks at him with an expression that says, “How could you?” Bob doesn’t know it yet, but Carole thinks he’s having an affair. He’s not.
How did Carole come to this dangerous and wrong conclusion? Earlier that day she had been going over the credit card statement when she noticed a charge from the Good Night Motel – a cheap place located not more than a mile from their home. “Why would he stay in a motel so close to home?” she wonders. “And why didn’t I know about it?” Then it hits her – “That unfaithful jerk!”
Now what’s the worst way Carole might handle this? What’s the worst way of talking about the problem? Most people agree that jumping in with an ugly accusation followed by a threat is a good candidate for that distinction. It’s also what most people do, and Carole is no exception.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me,” she says in a painful tone.
“Doing what?” Bob asks – not knowing what she’s talking about but figuring that whatever it is, it can’t be good.
“You know what I’m talking about,” she says, continuing to keep Bob on edge.
(Do I need to apologize for missing her birthday? Bob wonders to himself. No, it’s not even summer and her birthday is on . . . . well, it’s sweltering on her birthday.)
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he responds, taken aback.
“You’re having an affair, and I have proof right here!” Carole explains holding up a piece of crumpled paper.
“What’s on that paper that says I’m having an affair?” he asks, completely befuddled because (1) he is not having an affair and (2) the paper contains not a single compromising photo.
“It’s motel bill, you jerk. You take some woman to a motel, and you put it on the credit card?! I can’t believe you’re doing this to me!”
Now if Carole were certain that Bob was having an affair, perhaps this kind of talk would be warranted. It may not be the best way to work through the issue, but Bob would at least understand why Carole made the accusations and hurled threats. But, in truth, she only has a piece of paper with some number on it. This tangible piece of evidence has made her suspicious. How should she talk about this nasty hunch in a way that leads to dialogue?
If Carole’s goal is to have a healthy conversation about a tough topic, her only hope is to stay in dialogue. That holds true for anybody with any crucial conversation. That means that despite your worst suspicions, you shouldn’t violate respect. In similar vein, you shouldn’t kill safety with threats and accusations.
So what should you do? Start with Heart. Think about what you really want and how dialogue can help you get it. And master your story (interpretation about the fact). The best way to find out the true story is not to act out the worst story you can generate. This will lead to self-destructive silence and violence games.
Once you have worked on yourself to create the right conditions for dialogue, you can then draw upon five distinct skills that can help you talk about even the most sensitive topics. These five tools can be easily remembered with the acronym STATE. It stands for:
· (S)hare your facts
· (T)ell your story
· (A)sk for others’ paths
· (T)alk tentatively
· (E)ncourage testing
Share your facts
If you retrace your Path to Action to the source, you eventually arrive at the facts.
See/Hear ==> Interpret/Tell a Story ==> Feel ==> Act
For example, Carole found the credit card invoice. That’s a fact. She then told a story – Bob is having an affair. Next, she felt betrayed and horrified. Finally, she attacked Bob – “I should never have married you!” The whole interaction was fast, predictable, and very ugly.
What if Carole took a different route – one that started with facts? What if she were able to suspend the ugly story she told herself and then start her conversation with the fact? Wouldn’t that be a safer way to go?
“Maybe,” she musses, “there is a good reason behind all of this. Why don’t I start with the suspicious bill and then go from there?” If she started there, she’d be right.
Unfortunately, when we’re drunk on adrenaline, our tendency is to do precisely the opposite. Since we’re obsessing on our emotions and stories, that’s what we start with. Of course, this is the most controversial, least influential, and most insulting way we could begin. To make matters worse, this strategy creates still another self-fulfilling prophecy. We’re so anxious to blurt out our ugly stories that we says things in extremely ineffective ways. Then, when we get bad results (and we’re going to get bad results), we tell ourselves that we just can’t share risky views without creating problems.
So the next time we’ve got something sticky to say, we’re even more reluctant to say it. We hold it inside where the story builds up steam, and when we do eventually share our horrific story, we do so with a vengeance. The cycle starts all over again.
Facts are the least controversial. Facts provide a safe beginning. Facts are the most persuasive. In addition to being less controversial, facts are also more persuasive than subjective conclusions. So if you want to persuade others, don’t start with your stories. Start with your observations. Take time to sort out facts from conclusions. Gathering the facts is the homework required for crucial conversation. For example:
Carole: “I was checking our credit card bill, and I noticed a charge of forty-eight dollar for the Good Night Motel down the street.”
Tell your story
Earn the right to share your story by starting with your facts. Facts lay the groundwork for all delicate conversations. To be honest, it can be difficult to share negative conclusions and unattractive judgments. It takes confidence to share such a potentially inflammatory story. However, if you’ve done your homework by thinking through the facts behind your story you’ll realize that you are drawing a reasonable, rational, and decent conclusion. One that deserves hearing. For example:
Carole: “You know that’s how my sister found out that Phil was having an affair. She found a suspicious motel bill.” [Share story - tentatively]
Look for safety problems.
As you share your story, watch for sign that safety is deteriorating. If people start becoming defensive or appear to be insulted, step out of the conversation and rebuild safety by Contrasting. For example:
Carole: “I know that you’ve given me no reason to question your fidelity. I don’t really believe that you’re having an affair.”
Be careful not to apologize for your views. Remember, the goal of Contrasting is not to water down your message, but to be sure that people don’t hear more than you intend. Be confident enough to share what you really want to express.
Ask for others’ paths
So once you’ve shared your point of view – facts and stories alike – invite others to do the same. If your goal is to learn rather than to be right, to make the best decision rather than to get your way, then you’ll be willing to hear other views. By being open to learning we are demonstrating humility at its best. For example:
Carole: “I don’t have anything to worry about do I?”
Talk tentatively
Talking tentatively simply means that we tell our story as a story rather than disguising it as a fact. For examples:
“I’m starting to feel like you don’t trust me. Is that what’s going on here? If, so I’d like to know what I did to lose your trust.”
“I don’t think you’re intending this, but I’m beginning to feel rejected.”
Why soften the message? Because we’re trying to add meaning to the pool, not force it down other people’s throats. Besides, with both facts and stories, we’re not absolutely certain they’re true. Our observation could be faulty. Our stories – well, they’re only educated guesses.
In addition, when we use tentative language, not only does it accurately portray our uncertain view, but it also helps reduce defensiveness and makes it safe for others to offer differing opinions.
One of the ironies of dialogue is that when we’re sharing controversial ideas with potentially resistant people, the more forceful we are, the less persuasive we are. In short, talking tentatively can actually increase our influence.
Encouraging testing
When you ask others to share their paths, how you phrase your invitation makes a big difference. Not only should you invite others to talk, but you have to do so in a way that makes it clear that no matter how controversial their ideas are, you want to hear them. Others need to feel safe sharing their observations and stories – even if they differ. Otherwise, they don’t speak up and you can’t test the accuracy and relevance of your views. For example:
Carole: “It’s just that it might help put my mind to rest if we were to check on this right now. Would that bother you?”
To see how all of the STATE skills fit together in a touchy conversation, let’s return to the motel bill. Only this time, Carole does a far better job of bringing up a delicate issue.
Bob: “Hi Carole, how was your day?”
Carole: “Not so good.”
Bob: “Why’s that?”
Carole: “I was checking our credit card bill, and I noticed a charge of forty-eight dollar for the Good Night Motel down the street.” [Share facts]
Bob: “Boy, that sounds wrong.”
Carole: “It sure does.”
Bob: “Well, don’t worry. I’ll check into it one day when I’m going by.”
Carole: “I’d feel better if we checked right now.”
Bob: “Really? It’s less than fifty bucks. It can wait.”
Carole: “It’s not the money that has me worried.”
Bob: “You’re worried?”
Carole: “It’s the motel down the street. You know that’s how my sister found out that Phil was having an affair. She found a suspicious motel bill.” [Share story - tentatively]
I don’t have anything to worry about do I?” [Ask for other’s path]
Bob: “I don’t know, but you certainly don’t have to worry about me.”
Carole: “I know that you’ve given me no reason to question your fidelity. I don’t really believe that you’re having an affair.” [Contrasting]
It’s just that it might help put my mind to rest if we were to check on this right now. Would that bother you? [Encourage testing]
Bob: “Not at all. Let’s give them a call and find out what’s going on.”
When this conversation actually did take place, it sounded exactly like the one portrayed above. The suspicious spouse avoided nasty accusations and ugly stories, shared facts, and then tentatively shared a possible conclusion. As it turns out, the couple had gone out to a Chinese restaurant earlier that month. The owner of the restaurant also owned the motel and used the same credit card imprinting machine at both establishments. Oops.
By tentatively sharing a story rather than attacking, name-calling, and threatening, the worried spouse averted a huge battle, and the couple’s relationship was strengthened at a time when it could easily have been damaged.
Summary - STATE My Path
When you have tough message to share, or when you are so convinced of your own rightness that you may push too hard, remember to STATE your path:
· (S)hare your facts. Start with the least controversial, most persuasive elements from your Path to Action.
· (T)ell your story. Explain what you’re beginning to conclude.
· (A)sk for others’ paths. Encourage others to share both their facts and their stories.
· (T)alk tentatively. State your story as a story – don’t disguise it as a fact.
· (E)ncourage testing. Make it safe for others to express differing or even opposing views.
Explore Others’ Paths
Over the past view months your daughter Wendy has started to date a guy who looks like he’s about ten minutes away from felony arrest. After only a few weeks of dating this fellow. Wendy’s clothing preference is now far too suggestive for your taste, and she routinely punctuates her language with expletives. When you carefully try to talk to her about these recent changes, she shouts accusations and insults and then withdraws to her room where she sulks for hours on end.
Now what? Should you do something given that you’re not the one going to silence or violence? When others clam up (refusing to speak their minds) or blow up (communicating in a way that is abusive and insulting), is there something you can do to get them to dialogue?
And while it’s true that you can’t force others to dialogue, you can take steps to make it safer for them to do so. After all, that’s why they’ve sought the security of silence or violence in the first place. They’re afraid that dialogue will make them vulnerable. Somehow they believe that if they engage in real conversation with you, bad things will happen. Your daughter, for instance, believes that if she talks with you, she’ll be lectured, grounded, and cut off from the only guy who seems to care about her. Restoring safety is your greatest hope to get your relationship back on track.
Whenever you notice safety is at risk, you should step out of the conversation and restore it. When you have offended others through a thoughtless act, apologize. Or if someone has misunderstood your intent, use Contrasting. Explain what you do and don’t intent. Finally, if you’re simply at odds, find a Mutual Purpose.
If we can find a way to let others know that it’s okay to share their Path to Action – their facts, and yes even their nasty story und ugly feelings – then they’ll be more likely to open up. But what does it take?
Be sincere. To get at others’ facts and stories, we have to invite them to share what’s on their minds. When you do invite people to share their views, you must meant it. When you ask people to open up, be prepare to listen.
Be curious. When you do want to hear from others (and you should because it adds to the pool of meaning), the best way to get at the truth is by making it safe for them to express the stories that are moving them to either silence or violence. This means that at the very moment when most people become furious, we need to become curious. Rather than respond in kind, we need to wonder what’s behind the ruckus.
Getting to the source of fear and discomfort is the best way to return to dialogue. Do your best to get at the person’s source of fear or anger. Look for chances to turn on your curiosity rather than kick-start your adrenaline.
To avoid overreacting to others’ stories, stay curious. Give your brain a problem to stay focused on. Ask: “Why would a reasonable, rational, and decent person say that?” This question keep you retracing the other person’s Path to Action until you see how it all fits together. And in most cases, you end up seeing that under the circumstances, the individual in question drew a fairly reasonable conclusion.
Be patient. Once the chemicals that fuel emotions are released, they hang around in the bloodstream for a time – in some cases, long after thoughts have changed. So be patient when exploring how others think and feel. Encourage them to share their path and then wait for their emotions to catch up with the safety that you’ve created.
We are joining the conversation at the end of their Path to Action. They’ve seen and heard things, told themselves a story or two, generated a feeling (possibly a mix of fear and anger or disappointment), and now they’re starting to act out their story. That’s where you joined in. What happened before you joined in?
Crucial conversations can be equally mysterious and frustrating. When others are in either silence or violence, we’re actually joining their Path to Action already in progress. Consequently, we’ve already missed the foundation of the story and we’re confused. If we’re not careful, we can become defensive.
Break the Cycle. And then guess what happens? When were on the receiving end of someone’s retributions, accusations, and cheap shots, rarely do we think: “My, what an interesting story he or she must have told. What do you supposed led to that?” Instead, we match this unhealthy behavior. Our defense mechanism kick in, and we create our own hasty and ugly Path to Action.
People who know better cut this dangerous cycle by stepping out of the interaction and making it safe for the other person to talk about his or her Path to Action. They perform this feat by encouraging him or her to move away from harsh feelings and knee-jerk reactions and toward the root cause. In essence, they retrace the other person’s Path to Action together.
When we help others retrace their path to its origin, not only do we help curb our reaction, but we also return to the place where the feeling can be resolved – at the source, or the facts and the story behind the emotion. We can see that if we don’t get at the source of their feelings, we’ll end up suffering the effect of the feelings.
Whatever we do to invite the other person to open up and share his or her path, our invitation must be sincere. In order for the people to move from acting their feelings to talking about their conclusions and observations, we must listen in a way that makes it safe for others to share their intimate thoughts. They must believe that when they share their thoughts, they won’t offend or be punished for speaking frankly.
To encourage others to share their paths we’ll use four listening tools: Ask, Mirror, Paraphrase, and Prime (AMPP).
Ask
All it takes to break an impasse is to seek to understand other’s views. When we show genuine interest, people feel less compelled to use silence or violence. For example:
You: “Can we talk about that?”
You: “I really would like to hear what makes you think I’m trying to control your life.”
Invite the other person to talk about what’s really going on, it can go along way toward breaking the downward spiral and getting to the source of the problem.
Mirror
Mirroring can help build more safety. Although we may not understand others’ stories or facts, we can see their actions and get clues about their feelings. Mirroring is most useful when another person’s tone of voice or gestures are inconsistent with his or her words. For example:
Wendy: “It’s not a big deal (sounding angry). You’re the parent, right?”
You: “From the way you say that, it sounds like it is a big deal.” [Mirror]
We explain that while the person may be saying one thing, his or her tone of voice or body posture suggests something else. So we describe what we see, we have to do so calmly. In doing so, we show respect and concern for him or her.
The most important element of mirroring is our tone of voice. We create safety when our tone of voice says we’re okay with them feeling the way they’re feeling. If we do this well, they may conclude that rather than acting out their emotions, they can confidently talk them out with us instead.
Paraphrase
When you get a clue about why the person is feeling as he or she does, you can build additional safety by paraphrasing what you’ve heard. For example:
You: “So you feel like I don’t approve of you, and your friend is one person who does?”
You: “I can see how you’d feel badly when others are getting attention from boys and you aren’t. I’d probably feel the same way.”
The key to paraphrasing, as with mirroring, is to remain calm and collected. Our goal is to make it safe. Stay focused on figuring out how a reasonable, rational, and decent person could have created this Path to Action. This will help you keep from becoming angry and defensive.
Prime
The term priming comes from the expression “priming the pump.” If you’ve ever worked an old-fashioned hand pump, you understand the metaphor. With a pump, you often have to pour some water into it to get running. Then it works just fine.
Sometimes you have to offer your best guess at what the other person is thinking or feeling. You have to pour some meaning into the pool before the other person will do the same. You really want to hear from others, and you have a very strong idea of what they’re probably thinking. For example:
You: “I wonder if part of the reason you’ve started dressing differently and hanging out with different friends is because you’re not feeling cared about and valued by boys, by your parents, and by others right now. Is that part of it?”
Now let’s put the several skills together in a single interaction. We return to Wendy. She has just come home from a date with the guy who has you frightened. You yank the door open, pull Wendy into the house, and double-bolt your entrance. Then you talk, sort of.
Wendy: “How could you embarrass me like that! I get one boy to like me, and now he’ll never talk to me again! I hate you!”
You: “That wasn’t a boy. That was a future inmate. You’re worth more than that. Why are you wasting your time with him?”
Wendy: “You’re ruining my life. Leave me alone!”
After Wendy’s bedroom door slams shut, your drop down into a chair in the living room. Your emotions are running wild. You are terrified about what could happen if Wendy continues to see this guy. You’re hurt that she said she hated you. You feel that your relationship with her is spiraling out of control.
So you ask yourself, “What do I really want?” As you mull this question over, your motives change. The goals of controlling Wendy and defending your pride drop from the top to the bottom of your list.
The goal that is now at the top looks a bit more inspiring: “I want to understand what she’s feeling. I want a good relationship with Wendy. And I want her to make choices that will make her happy.
You’re not sure if tonight is the best or worst time to talk, but you know that talking is the only path forward. So you give it a shot.
You: (Tapping the door) “Wendy? May I talk with you please?”
Wendy: “Whatever.”
(You enter her room and sit on her bed.)
You: I’m really sorry for embarrassing you like that. That was a bad way to handle it. [Apologize to build safety]
Wendy: “It’s just that you do that a lot. It’s like you want to control everything in my life.”
You: “Can we talk about that?”
Wendy: “It’s not a big deal (sounding angry). You’re the parent, right?”
You: “From the way you say that, it sounds like it is a big deal.” [Mirror].
“I really would like to hear what makes you think I’m trying to control your life.” [Ask]
Wendy: “What, so you can tell me more ways that I’m screwed up? I’ve finally got one friend who accepts me, and you’re trying to chase him away!”
You: “So you feel like I don’t approve of you, and your friend is one person who does?” [Paraphrase]
Wendy: “It’s not just you. All my friends have lots of boys who like them. Doug’s the first guy who’s even called me. I don’t know – never mind.”
You: “I can see how you’d feel badly when others are getting attention from boys and you aren’t. I’d probably feel the same way.” [Paraphrase]
Wendy: “Then how could you embarrass me like that?!”
You: “I wonder if part of the reason you’ve started dressing differently and hanging out with different friends is because you’re not feeling cared about and valued by boys, by your parents, and by others right now. Is that part of it?” [Prime]
Wendy: (Sits quietly for a long time) I really work on how I look but . . . .
From here, the conversation goes to the real issues, parent and daughter discuss what’s really going on, and both come to a better understanding of each other.
Let’s say you did your level best to make it safe for the other person to talk. After asking, mirroring, paraphrasing, and eventually priming, the other person opened up and shared his or her path. As you begin to share your views, remember:
Agree. Agree when you do.
Build. Build if others leave something out, point out areas of agreement and then add elements that were left out of the discussion.
Compare. When you differ significantly, don’t suggest others are wrong. Compare two views. So instead of pronouncing “Wrong!” start with a tentative but candid opening such as “I think I see things differently. Let me describe how.” Don’t turn differences into debates that lead to unhealthy relationships and bad results.
Summary - Explore Others' Paths
Start with an attitude of curiosity and patience. This helps restore safety. Then use four listening skills (Ask, Mirror, Paraphrase, and Prime) to retrace the other person’s Path to Action to its origins.
· Ask. Start by simply expressing interest in the other person’s views.
· Mirror. Increase safety by respectfully acknowledging the emotions people appear to be feeling.
· Paraphrase. As others begin to share part of their story, restate what you’ve heard to show not just that you understand, but also that it’s safe for them to share what they’re thinking.
· Prime. If others continue to hold back, prime. Take your best guess at what they may be thinking and feeling.
As you begin to share your views, remember:
· Agree. Agree when you do.
· Build. Build if others leave something out, point out areas of agreement and then add elements that were left out of the discussion.
· Compare. When you differ significantly, don’t suggest others are wrong. Compare two views. So instead of pronouncing “Wrong!” start with a tentative but candid opening such as “I think I see things differently. Let me describe how.” Don’t turn differences into debates that lead to unhealthy relationships and bad results.
Challenges of Romantic Love
Romantic love is for grown ups; it is not for children. It is not for children in a literal sense, and also in a psychological sense; not for those who, regardless of age, still experience themselves as children.
Sometimes when people speak about romantic love they are really speaking about infatuation, which is quite another story. While love embraces the person as a whole, infatuation is the results of focusing on one or two aspects and reacting as if that were the whole. You see a beautiful face and assume it is the image of a beautiful soul. You see that this person treats you kindly and you assume the two of you have significant affinities. You discover that you have important values in one area and conclude you must be soul mates. When you awaken from the dream, it is hard to remember where your mind could have been.
The first love affair we must consummate successfully is the love affair with ourselves. Only then are we ready for other love relationships. If we do not love ourselves, it is almost impossible to believe fully that we are loved by someone else. It is almost impossible to accept love. It is almost impossible to receive love. No matter what our partner does to show that he or she cares, we do not experience the devotion as convincing because we do not feel lovable to ourselves.
If you enjoy a fundamental sense of efficacy and worth, and if, as a consequence, you feel lovable as a human being, you have a basis for appreciating and loving others. You are not trapped in feelings of deficiency. You have a surplus of life within you, an emotional wealth that you can channel into loving.
Without respect for and enjoyment of who you are, you have very little to give emotionally. You tend to see others primarily as sources of approval or disapproval. You do not appreciate them in their own right. But if you can learn to do so - and this is something that can be learned - you grow in self-esteem. And you begin to feel less needy. People with high self-esteem long to feel admiration; people low in self-esteem long to feel accepted.
There are reasons why love grows and there are reasons why love dies. We may not know everything on the subject but we know a great deal. Of the various factors that are vital for the success of romantic love, none is more important than self-esteem. Different persons experience different levels of self-esteem. The level of our self-esteem has a profound impact on our life and experience.
We cannot understand the tragedy of most relationship if we do not understand that the overwhelming majority of human beings suffer from some feelings of self-esteem deficiency. This means, among other things, that deep in their psyche they do not feel they are enough. They do not feel lovable as they are; they do no feel it is natural or normal for others to love them. They do not necessary hold these attitudes consciously. Self-concept determines destiny. Or to speak with greater restraint and precision, there is a strong tendency for self-concept to determine destiny.
Imagine that an individual feels, perhaps beneath the level of conscious awareness that he or she significantly lacks worth, is not lovable, and is not a person who can inspire devotion for any sustained length of time. Simultaneously, this individual desires love, pursues love, hopes and dreams to find love. He finds a woman he cares for, she seems to care for him, they are happy, excited, and stimulated in each others’ experience - and for a time it seems that his dream is to be fulfilled. But deep in his psyche a time bomb is ticking away - the belief that he is inherently unlovable.
This time bomb provokes him to destroy his relationship. He may do this in any number of ways. He may endlessly demand reassurance. He may become excessively possessive and jealous. He may behave cruelly to test the depth of her devotion to him. He may make self-depreciating comments and wait for her to correct him. He may tell her he does not deserve her and tell her again and again and again. He may tell her that no woman can be trusted and that all women are fickle. He may find endless excuses to criticize her, to reject her before she can reject him. He may attempt to control and manipulate her by making her feel guilty, thereby hoping to bind her to him. He may become silent, withdrawn, preoccupied; throwing up barriers she cannot penetrate. Nothing she could ever do is enough to make him feel loved. Whatever she offered, he wanted more. Whatever she said, he wondered if she meant it.
After a while, perhaps, she has had enough; she is exhausted; he has worn her out. She leaves him. He feels desolate, depressed, crushed, and devastated.
Suppose that, despite his best efforts, he cannot drive her away. Perhaps she believes in him, sees his potential. Or perhaps she is a masochistic streak that requires that she be involved with such a man. She clings to him; she keeps reassuring him. Her devotion grows stronger, no matter what he does. She simply does not understand the nature of life as he perceives it. She does not grasp that no one can love him. In continuing to love him, she presents him with a problem: She confounds his view of reality. He needs a solution. He needs a way out. He finds it. His response is to begin wondering whether he had set his own standards too low. More and more he questions whether she was good enough for him. “How can I love this woman who is inferior even to me, who has been so easily supped onto loving me?”. Or he tells himself that she bores him. Or he tells himself that he is now in love with someone else. Or he tells himself that love does not interest him. The particular choice does not matter; the net effect is the same: in the end, he is alone again – the way he always knew he would be.
Then, once more, he can dream of finding love - he can look for a new woman so that he can play the drama all over again.
It is not essential, of course, that his relationship ends so conclusively. A literal separation may not be necessary. He may be willing to allow a relationship to continue, providing both he and his partner are unhappy. This is a compromise he can live with. It is as good as being alone and abandoned - almost.
Suppose, to give another example, that a woman decides a man could not possibly prefer her to other women. Her self-concept cannot accommodate such a possibility. At the same time, being human, she longs for love. When she finds it, what does she typically proceed to do?
She may continually compare herself unfavorably to other women. She may go out of her way to make absurd presentations at superiority, denying and disowning her feelings of insecurity. She may keep pointing out attractive women to see how he will respond. She may torment him with her doubts and suspicious. One way or the other, she creates a situation that results in her lover’s becoming involved with someone else. Of course she suffers acutely. She is desolate. But her situation is gratifying beyond words. She has creating the very state of affairs she always knew would come out. By making that which she most feared happens she had retained a sense of being in control.
If self-esteem is confidence in one’ appropriateness to life, then we can readily understand why men and women of high self-esteem tend to expect success and happiness and why, as a consequence, they are likely to create these conditions for themselves. Men and women of low self-esteem tend to expect defeat and suffering, and their lives are shaped accordingly. No one can understand the course of his or her life who does not understand the power of self-fulfilling prophecies. They are the central dynamic of our existence.
If we hold a negative self-concept of which we are unaware, if we hold self-sabotaging beliefs of which we are unconscious, we are their prisoner. Only when we become conscious of our self-sabotaging beliefs do we become able to change our behavior.
As we see ourselves, so do we act. And our actions tend to produce results that continually support our self-concept. With a positive self-concept, this principle can work in our favor. With a negative self-concept, it results in disaster.
When we feel rejected, when we look at past relationships and see nothing but a string of disappointments, frustrations, and defeats, it is often illuminating to ask: Do I feel it is natural or normal for someone to love me? Or does it feel like an impossible miracle that could not happen? Or could not last?
The first requirement of happiness in romantic love is a vision of ourselves that contains the rightness of being loved, the naturalness of being loved, the appropriateness of being loved.
People who know how to make themselves happy in love relationships are people who are open to accepting love. And in order to accept love, they must love themselves. People who love themselves do not find it incomprehensible that others should love them. They are able to allow others to love them. Their love has ease and grace.
As we proceed we shall see more and more clearly how essential an accomplished self-esteem is in this aspect of life. To enjoy our own being, to be happy in a profound sense with who we are, to experience the self as worthy of being valued and loved by others – this is the first requirement for the growth of romantic love.
Contained in the experience of self-esteem is the sense of our right to assert our own interests, needs, and wants: the experience of feelings worthy of happiness. Many an individual feel that they do not deserve happiness, that they are not entitled to the fulfillment of their wants. Often there is the feeling that if they are happy either happiness will be taken away from them or something terrible will happen to counterbalance it, some unspeakable punishment or tragedy. Happiness, for such people, is a potential source of anxiety. While they may long for it on one level of consciousness, they dread it on another.
Many an individual, particularly if raised in a religious home, has been taught that suffering represent a passport to salvation, whereas enjoyment is almost certainly proof that one has strayed from the proper path. Or a child has been encouraged to feel, “Don’t be so excited. Happiness doesn’t last. When you grow up, you’ll realize how grim life is.” For such people, to experience themselves as happy may be to experience themselves as, in effect, out of step with reality, therefore in danger.
Now suppose that a man and a woman who share this orientation meet and fall in love. In the beginning, focused on each other and on the excitement of their relationship, they are not thinking of these matters; they are simply happy. But inside, the time bomb is ticking. It began ticking at the moment of their first meeting. Facing one another across a dinner table, feeling joyful and contented, one of them suddenly can’t stand it and starts a quarrel over nothing or withdraws and becomes mysteriously depressed.
They cannot allow happiness just to be there; they cannot leave it alone; they cannot simply enjoy the fact that they have found each other. Their sense of who they are, and of what their proper destiny is, cannot accommodate happiness. The impulse to make trouble arises, seemingly from nowhere, acutely from ‘the deep recess of the psyche,’ where antihappiness programming resides.
Their view of self, and of life, allows them, perhaps, to struggle for happiness - ‘sometimes in the future’ - perhaps next year or the year after. But not now. Not at this moment. Not here. Here and now is too terrifyingly immediate.
Right now, in the moment of their joy, happiness is not a dream but a reality. That is unbearable. First of all, they don’t deserve it. Second, it can’t last. Third, if it does last, something else terrible will happen. This is one of the commonest responses of people who suffer from a significant lack of self-esteem, of confidence in their right to be happy.
How many people have had the experience of waking up one morning and noticing that in spite of all sorts of problems, difficulties, worries, you feel wonderful, you feel happy, you feel delighted to be alive? And after a while, you can’t stand it, you have to do something. So you manage to fling yourself back into a state of misery. Or perhaps you are with someone you really care about and you’re feeling very contented, very fulfilled, and then feelings of anxiety or disorientation arise and you feel the impulse to stir up conflict, to make trouble. You can’t keep out of the way and allow happiness to happen. You feel the need to throw a little ‘drama’ into your life. The evidence is clear: for great many people happiness-anxiety is a very real problem - and a powerful barrier to romantic love.
Happiness-anxiety is itself not an uncommon consequence of the failure to achieve adequate separation and individuation. Poor self-esteem and inadequate separation and individuation go hand in hand; they are intimately linked. Without successful separation and individuation I do not sufficiently discover my own strengths; I can very easily persist in the belief that my survival depends on protecting my relationship with my mother and father, at the expense of enjoying the rest of my life.
Suppose that a woman has witnessed the unhappy marriage/life of her parents. It is not uncommon for a child to internalize a subtle message from mother or father to the effect, “You are not to be any happier in your marriage/life than I was in mine.” A woman with inadequate self-esteem, a woman who wants to be a ‘good girl,’ who feel the need to retain mother’s or father’s love at all costs, often proceeds very obediently either to select a husband with whom happiness is clearly impossible or to manufacture unhappiness in a marriage where happiness might have been possible. “I couldn’t bear to let mother see that I was happy in my relationship with a man. She would feel betrayed, she would feel humiliated. I might cause her to feel overwhelmed by her own sense of inadequacy and failure. And I couldn’t do that to her. But beneath this statements are other, clearly evident, feelings, “Mother might become angry at me. Mother might repudiates me, I might lose mother’s love.”
To be as unhappy as mother and father were, is to belong. To be happy may mean to stand alone against mother and father, perhaps against the whole family - and that prospect may be terrifying. For many persons, to be happy romantically means no longer to be a ‘good girl’ or ‘good boy.’ To be happy romantically means to separate from one’s family. This demands a level of independence that many individuals do not achieve.
If we feel that our relationships always seems to be unhappy, always seems to be frustrating, it is relevant to inquire:
Am I allowed to be happy?
Does my view of the life permit it?
Does my childhood programming permit it?
Does my life scenario permit it?
The growth of love in romantic relationships requires an appreciation of the fact that happiness is our human birthright.
If happiness feels natural to me, feels normal, I can allow it, can be open to it, can flow with it; I do not feel the impulse to sabotage and self-destruct. When there is an accepting attitude toward happiness, romantic love grows. When there is a fearful attitude toward happiness, romantic love tends to die. For some individuals, the simple act of allowing themselves to be happy, with the independence and self-responsibility that implies, may be the most heroic act life will ever require of them. How are they to proceed? How are they to do if happiness triggers anxiety?
When we feel happy, and that happiness triggers anxiety and disorientation, we must learn to do nothing, that is, to breathe into our feelings, to allow them, to watch our own process, to enter into the depths of our own experience while at the same time being a conscious witness to it and not be manipulated into behaving self-destructively. Then across time, we can build a tolerance for happiness; we can increase our ability to handle joy without panicking. Slowly, in this manner, we discover that a new way of being is possible. We discover that being happy is far less complicated than we had believed. We discover that, given half a chance, joy is our natural state. Then . . . romantic love is allowed to grow.
Autonomous individual understand that other people do not exist merely to satisfy their needs. They have accepted the fact that no matter how much love and caring may exist between persons, we are each of us, in an ultimate sense, responsible for ourselves.
Autonomous individuals have grown beyond the need to prove to anyone that they are a good boy or a good girl, just as they have outgrown the need for their spouse or romantic partner to be their mother or father.
They are ready for romantic love because they have grown up, because they do not experience themselves as waifs waiting to be rescued or saved; they do not require anyone else’s permission to be who they are, and their egos are not continually ‘on the line.’
An autonomous individual is one who does not experience his or her self-esteem as continually in question or in jeopardy. His or her worth is not a matter of continuing doubt. The source of approval resides within the self. It is not at the mercy of every encounter with another person.
In the best of relationships there are occasional frictions, unavoidable hurts, times when individuals ‘miss’ one another in their responses. The tendency of non-autonomous, immature individuals is to translate such incidents into evidence of rejection, evidence of not really being loved, so small frictions or failures of communication are easily escalated into major conflicts.
Autonomous individuals have a great capacity to ‘roll with the punches,’ to see the normal frictions of everyday life in realistic perspective, not to get their feelings hurt over trivia, or, even if they are hurt occasionally, not to catastrophize such moments.
Further, autonomous individuals respect their partner’s need to follow his or her own destiny, to be alone sometimes, to be preoccupied sometimes, not to be thinking about the relationship sometimes, but rather about other vital matters that may not even involve the partner in any direct sense, such as work, personal developmental needs. So autonomous individuals do not always need to be focus of attention, do not panic when the partner is mentally preoccupied elsewhere. Autonomous individuals give this freedom to themselves as well as to those they love. This is the reason why between autonomous men and women, romantic love can grow.
No matter how passionate the commitment and devotion autonomous men and women may feel toward the one they love, there is still the recognition that space must exist, freedom must exist, sometimes aloneness must exist. There is the recognition that no matter how intensely we love, we are none of us ‘only’ lovers - we are also, in a broader sense, evolving human beings.
Autonomous individuals have assimilated and integrated the ultimate fact of human aloneness. Not resisting it, not denying it, they do not experience it as a burning pain or a tragedy in their lives. Therefore they are not constantly engaged in the effort to achieve, through their relationships, the illusion that such aloneness does not exist. They understand that it is the fact of aloneness that gives romantic love its unique intensity. Their harmony with aloneness is what makes them uniquely competent to participate in romantic love.
When two self-responsible human beings find each other, when they fall in love, they are able, to a degree far above the average, to appreciate each other, to enjoy each other, to see each other for what he or she is, precisely because the other is not viewed as the means of avoiding the fact that each must be responsible for him- or herself. Then they can fall into each other’s arms, then they can love each other, then sometimes one can play the child and the other the parent - and it doesn’t matter, because it is only a game, it is only a moment’s rest; each knows the ultimate truth and is not afraid of it, has made peace with it, has understood the essence of our humanity.
Perhaps the essence of our evolution as human beings is to keep answering, on deeper and deeper levels, the basic question: “Who am I?” We answer that question, we define ourselves, through the acts of thinking, of feeling, and of doing - of learning to take more and more responsibility for our existence and well-being - and of expressing through our work and trough our relationships more and more of who we are. This is the wider meaning of the concept of individuation; it represents a lifelong task.
In the course of our life, our values, goals, and ambitions are first conceived in our mind; that is, they exist as data of consciousness, and then - to the extent that our life is successful - are translated into action and objective reality. They became part of the “out there,” of the world that we perceive. They achieve expression and reality in material form. This is the proper and necessary pattern of human existence. To live successfully is to put ourselves into the world, to give expression to our thoughts, values, and goals. Our life is unlived precisely to the extent that this process fails to occur.
It is a fact of reality that we human beings must live long-range, that we must project our goals into the future and work to achieve them, and that this demands of us the ability and willingness, when and if necessary, to defer immediate pleasures and to endure unavoidable frustrations.
Innovators and creators are persons who can to a higher degree than average accept the condition of aloneness. They are more willing to follow their own vision, even when it takes them far from the mainland of the human community. Unexplored spaces do not frighten them – or not, at any rate, as much as they frighten those around them. This is one of the secrets of their power.
As human beings, we are linked to all other member of the human community. As living beings, we are linked to all other forms of life. As inhabitants of the universe, we are linked to everything that exists. We stand within an endless network of relationships. Separation and connectedness are polarities, with each entailing the other.
We are all parts of one universe, true enough. But within that universe we are each of us a single point of consciousness, a unique event, a private, unrepeatable world. Of course we interact: we learn from others; we speak a common language, we express our thoughts, describe our desires, communicate about our feelings; we influence and effect one another. But consciousness by its nature is immutably private. We are each of us, in the last analysis, a single point of consciousness - and that is the root of our aloneness.
No one can think for us, no one can feel for us, no one can live our life for us, and no one can give meaning to our existence except ourselves. Aloneness entails self-responsibility.
When we have not matured to the point of being able to accept the fact of our ultimate aloneness, when we are frightened of it, when we try to deny it, we tend to overburden our relationships with an unhealthy dependence that stifles and suffocates them. We do not embrace, we cling. Without air and open space, love cannot breathe. This is the paradox: Only when we stop fighting the fact of our aloneness are we ready for romantic love.
Without an “I” who loves, what is the meaning of love? First, there must be a self - then, the exquisite joy of one self encountering another. In love, the self is celebrated, not denied, abandoned, or sacrificed. For “I” to become “we” and yet remain “I,” is one of the great challenges of marriage.
There is tendency of immature persons to view others primarily, if not exclusively, as sources for the gratification of their own wants and needs, not as human beings in their own right, much as an infant views a parent. So their relationships tend to be dependent and manipulative. It’s encounter of two incomplete beings who look to love to solve the problem of their internal deficiencies, to finish magically the unfinished business of childhood, to fill the holes in their personality, to make of ‘love’ a substitute for evolution to maturity and self-responsibility.
In seeking to be completed by other one generally neglects the development of one’s own wholeness. This is a grievous error: the transformative experience comes from other person. We need to work toward wholeness that we wish the other person would fulfill in us. And we need to focus on the works that need to be done in the areas of our life and live as though our life is our soul mate.
There are many substitutes for wholeness - wealth, power, religion, chemical substances - any of which may momentarily distract us. But the real hunger underlying them is neither known nor satisfied - the hunger for an integrated wholeness. To heal - to integrate the disowned younger self - is to make us whole.
Once we realize what we truly need, we can begin to purposely create wholeness for ourselves and then seek relationships that will celebrate that wholeness. We must elevate the quality of functioning within ourselves to draw the mate suited to us at any particular time. That is to say, we receive what we need, based on what we are.
Perhaps one of the clearest requirements for a successful romantic relationship is that it be based on a foundation of realism. This is the ability and willingness to see our partner as he or she is, with shortcomings as well as virtues, rather than attempting to carry on a romance with a fantasy.
To deal first with the negative case: If I do not see and love my partner as a real person in the real world, instead I elaborate a fantasy about him or her, using the person merely as a springboard for my imagination and my wishes, then I am doomed sooner or later to resent the actual person for not living up to my fantasies. If I choose to pretend that my partner does not have the shortcomings he or she has, if I refuse to include the knowledge of those shortcomings in the overall picture of my partner, later I am likely not only to feel hurt, outraged, and betrayed, but also to cast myself in the role of a bewildered victim. “How can you do this to me?”
The truth is, of course, that on a deeper level, as we have already seen, we know whom we choose - but it is easy enough to deny and disown this knowledge when it seems desirable to do so.
One reason why so many men and women seems to fall in love with a fantasy rather than with the actual person they profess to love is that they have a great many disowned longings, disowned desires, disowned needs, disowned hurts, which they are consciously not aware of, while subconsciously seeking to satisfy, resolve, or heal.
A person unaware of his or her own deepest needs can respond to another on the basis of fairly superficial characteristics if some of those characteristics trigger the hope or belief that in the present relationship those needs can be fulfilled.
For example, a sensitive, intelligent man who was not popular with girls during his teenage years - perhaps he was too serious or too shy - may in his twenties meet a beautiful young woman who is in type and manner just the kind of girl that he never could have had in adolescence. He is fascinated, he is enchanted, and subconsciously he entertains the hope and expectation that if he can win her it would somehow heal the hurt and the loneliness of his adolescence; it would wipe away all the past rejections; it would fulfill all the unrealized dreams of those painful, lonely years. Such are consideration operating within him. It is easy for him to overlook the fact that he and this woman have nothing in common, neither values nor interests nor sense of life nor outlook on important matters, and that if he were somehow to win her, it would not be very long before she would bore him to death. If she does respond to him, if a relationship forms, there may be a great deal of passion and intensity in the beginning; but there is very little mystery as to why such ‘love’ will die.
What would it mean to say, “I love you,” if I neither see you nor know who you are nor exhibit any desire to do so? It can only mean, “Please don’t distract me with the reality of who you are. I am preoccupied with the dream of you.” Many people have an affair with or marry not a person but a fantasy – then resent the person for not being like their fantasy. They do not examine the mental processes that led to their selection of a partner. One of the ways I know you is by observing the ways you affect me. One of the ways I discover who you are is by identifying the ways I experienced myself in our interactions. If we’re willing to look without blinders, if we’re willing to see everything that’s there to be seen, shortcomings as well as strengths – and we still love passionately – that’s what it called mature, romantic love. If I do not know my own values, I am unlikely to be able to articulate what I value in you. If we are strangers to ourselves, others will be strangers to us.
To love a human being is to know and love his or her person. This communion presupposes the ability to see, and with reasonable clarity. Love without sight is not love but self-deception.
On the other hand, when and if we choose to see our partner realistically, not deceiving ourselves, love, if it is real in the first place, has the best of all opportunities to grow. We know whom we are choosing and we are not shocked when our partner acts in character. A very happy married woman said, “An hour after I met the man I married I could have given you a lecture on ways he would be difficult to live with. I think he’s the most exciting man I’ve ever known, but I’ve never kidded myself about the fact that he’s also one of the most self-absorbed. Often he’s like an absence minded professor. He spends a great deal of time in a private world of his own. I had to know that going in, or else I would have been very upset later. He never made any pretenses about the kind of man he was. I can’t understand people who profess to be hurt or shocked at the way their mates turn out. It’s so obvious what people are if you’ll just pay attention. I’ve never been happier in my whole life than I am right now in the marriage. But not because I tell myself my husband is ‘perfect.’ I think that’s why I feel so appreciative of his strength and virtues. I’m willing to see everything.” This is realistic romanticism, not fairy-tale romanticism. When passion and sight are integrated, love can flourish.
One of the characteristic of love relationships that flower is a relatively high degree of mutual self-disclosure - a willingness to let our partner enter into the interior of our private world and a genuine interest in the private world of that partner. This implies that we have created an atmosphere of trust and acceptance, but it implies more than that. It implies first and foremost, that each is willing to know and encounter him- or herself. This is the necessary precondition of the willingness for mutual self-disclosure. One of the greatest obstacles to the sustaining of romantic love: The widespread problem of human self-alienation. Self-alienation tends to make self-disclosure impossible.
The source of this self-alienation - or, as it might better be described, this unconsciousness - springs form several factors. To begin with the most simplest and most obvious:
Many parents ‘teach’ children to repress their feelings. They teach unconsciousness as a positive value, as one of the costs of being loved, found acceptable, regarded as ‘grown up.’ A little boy falls and hurts himself and is told sternly by his father, “Men don’t cry.” A little girl expresses anger at her brother, or perhaps shows dislike toward an older relative, and is told by the mother, “It’s terrible to feel that way. You don’t really feel it.” A child burst into the house, full of joy and excitement, and is told by an irritated parent, “What’s wrong with you? Why do you make so much noise?”
Children also learn to repress their feelings by example. Emotionally remote and inhibited parents tend to produce emotionally remote and inhibited children, not only through their overt communications but also by their own behavior, which proclaims to the child what is ‘proper,’ ‘appropriate,’ ‘socially acceptable.’
Those problems above, which originate in childhood, becomes built into the personality, built into an individual’s manner of being and of coping with life, so that, by the time he or she is an adult, a condition of self-alienation feels ‘normal.’ Yet that which is disowned and repressed does not ease to exist. On another level, it continues to operate within us. Only it is not integrated. So, to the extent that we suffer from self-disowning, we are in a chronic state of disharmony with ourselves. Yet in romantic love it is precisely the self that we wish to make visible and to share. Here what needs to be recognized is that the primary issue is not between me and the other. It is between me and myself.
If we are free to know honestly what we feel and to experience it, then we can decide with whom and in what context it is appropriate to share our inner life. But if we ourselves do not know, if we are forbidden to know, if we are afraid to know, if we ourselves have never encountered who we are - if we are self-alienated - then we are crippled and incapacitated for romantic love.
So much of the joy of love - so much that nurtures love has to do with showing and sharing who we are. Self-disclosure enhances the experience of visibility, makes possible support and validation, stimulates growth. Mutual sell-disclosure opens the door to many of the most precious values that we seek in romantic love.
If we have learned to lecture and reproach ourselves for ‘inappropriate’ feelings, emotions, and reactions, we almost certainly will treat others the same way. We will lecture and reproach our partner, we will lecture and reproach our children. We will encourage the person we love to practice the same self-disowning, the same self-alienation that we practice. This is one of the ways we kill love. This is one of the ways we kill passion. So we must ask ourselves:
· Do I create a context in which my partner can feel free to share feelings, emotions, thoughts, desires, without the fear that I will condemn, attack, launch into a lecture, or simply withdraw?
· And does my partner create such a context for me?
If we cannot answer these questions in the affirmative, we need not wonder at the failure of our relationship. If we can answer in the affirmative, we understand a great deal about its success. When a man and a woman feel free to share their desires, to express their wants, acknowledge their feelings, and communicate concerning their thoughts, with each confident of the other’s interest and engagement in the process, then they are masters of one of the most essential elements in fulfilled romantic love.
Romantic love relationships are made or broken by the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of communication. The essence of mutual self-disclosure is communication. And no element of communication is more important to romantic love than that of feelings and emotions.
Sometimes we feel hurt, we are in pain. We experience a desire to express our state to the person we love. We experience a need to talk about it, to express whatever is happening within us. What we want from our partner is interest, the desire and willingness to listen. We want our emotions to be taken seriously, to be respected. We do not wish to be told, “You shouldn’t feel that.” Or “It’s foolish to feel that.” We do not wish to be lectured. Very often the healing is achieved, or the solution is found through the simple act of expressing our pain. Nothing more is needed. We want our partner to understand that. And our partner needs the same understanding from us. When each can give the same understanding to the other, the bond of love is strengthened.
In fact, by talking about pain, by seeking to express it, a man or woman may activate disowned and denied pain in the partner, which first appear, very often, in the form of anxiety. Out of the wish to escape anxiety, the person cuts the speaker off. The partner does not intend to be cruel, does not really understand what is happening. But communication has failed, and the other may feel abandoned.
The greatest gift we can give a person we love is just to listen, just to be there, just to be available, without any obligation to say something brilliant, or to find a solution, or to cheer our partner up. But to be able to give that to another, we must be able to give it to ourselves. If we are harsh and moralistically judgmental toward our self, we will not treat our partner any better. Self-acceptance is the foundation of acceptance of others. The acceptance of our own feelings is the foundation of our acceptance of the feelings of others.
But suppose it is we ourselves who have somehow contributed to the pain our partner is experiencing. Nothing changes; the principle is the same. The appropriate response is to listen, to give our partner the experience of being heard, to show that we care, to acknowledge our error honestly if we have made one, and to take whatever corrective action seems appropriate. But first - to listen, to accept - not necessarily to agree with, but to accept our partner’s feelings for what they are, and in any event, not to turn into a punitive parent.
Sometimes we experience fear, our partner experiences fear. It helps to be able to express this fear, to talk about it, but often this is very difficult. Most of us have been taught that fear is an emotions to be hidden, to be concealed. We associate being afraid with humiliation. We associate it with ‘the loss of face.’ We associate ‘strength’ with pretending that we do not feel what we feel.
If we can express our fear with honesty and dignity, or listen to our partner’s expression of fear with respect and acceptance, something beautiful can happen. Two people can draw closer. The fear itself, through being accepted and expressed, through being discharged, can disappear.
But here again, we deal with the problem of self-acceptance: How much better can we respond to the fear in our partner than we respond to the fear in ourselves? Can we give our partner permission to feel that which we cannot give ourselves permission to feel? Kindness always begins at home - with kindness to the self.
If communication is to be successful, if love is to be successful, if relationships are to be successful, we must give up the absurd notion that there is something ‘heroic’ or ‘strong’ about lying, about faking what we feel. We must learn that if heroism and strength mean anything, to respect the facts, to accept that that which is, is.
Sometimes we are angry with our partner, or our partner is angry with us. This is entirely normal: it is part of life; it does not mean love has gone. To express anger honestly, to express feelings honestly, to describe what we see, or what we have observed, or what we think has happened, and to describe how we feel about it - clears the air, opens the door to productive communication.
This is entirely different from attacking our partner’s character (character assassination): “You’re always impossible!” “You did this only to hurt me!” “You’re arrogant!” Such expressions are intended not to communicate but to cause pain and in inspiring counteract but they do not succeed in achieving productive communication or conflict resolution.
There is an art to expressing anger. The art does not consist of denying or disowning anger. The art does not consist of smiling while inwardly burning. The art consists of being honest. Honest about what? About one’s own feelings.
If we wish to be in love relationship, we owe to our partner the freedom for him or her to express anger. We owe it to our partner to listen, not to interrupt, not to fight back, but to listen. After our partner is finished, after he or she feels satisfied about having said everything, then and only then is it appropriate to respond. Then, if we believe our partner has misinterpreted the facts, we can point that out. If it is clear that we are in the wrong, the solution is to acknowledge that.
Relationships are not destroyed by honest expressions of anger. But relationship dies every day as a consequence of anger that is not expressed. The repression of anger kills love, kills sex, and kills passion.
It is to our self-interest to know that if our partner is angry at us, he or she will tell us so. It is not to our self-interest to have one who never complains about things that hurt or anger him or her.
The willingness to share our pain, our fear, and our anger serves the growth of romantic love. Unwillingness to do so subverts its growth. So we must ask ourselves:
· To what extent do I create a context in which my partner feels comfortable sharing such feelings with me?
· To what extent do I feel comfortable sharing such feelings with him or her?
If you do not know how to deal sensitively and intelligently with your lover, taking a second lover will probably not enhance your wisdom. It will merely expand the area of your incompetence. Grown-ups carry their own weight – at work and in marriage.
Communication is the lifeblood of a relationship, and this includes, of course, not merely the communication of unhappy feelings, such as those we have just discussed, but also the communication of love, of joy, of excitement, not only the communication of emotions but also the communication of perceptions, thoughts, desires - in other words, the full range of our mental and emotional world.
To ‘share a life’ means far more than merely to live in the same house or to ‘keep company’ with someone; it means to share our inner processes, our inner experience, all that pertains to the self.
Expressing feelings of love and appreciation and desire is vital to the sustaining of a passionate relationship. And yet very often we observe that people are afraid to express such feelings, afraid, to put their feelings into words, afraid to show how much they care, how deeply they feel, so they invent transparently absurd rationalizations to explain their lack of communications. “I married you, didn’t I? What’s more is necessary? Doesn’t that show I love you?”
And stranger still, perhaps, there is often fear of being the recipient of expression of love or appreciation or desire. Often the person feels uncomfortable. Perhaps he or she feels undeserving. In fact, all that is required is to listen, to accept, and to be there.
But what should we do if we experience fear of such intimacy? The solution, as always, is to accept our feelings, to own the fear, to admit it honestly, to allow it to be experienced and expressed, so that it then becomes possible to move beyond it, not to be forever imprisoned by it. We need to ask ourselves:
· Can I accept my partner’s expressions of love? Of joy? Of excitement?
· Can I allow my partner to feel, to experience, and to convey such states, whether or not I am always fully able to share them? Or do I turn my partner off, as others once turned me off, as, perhaps, I have learned to turn myself off?
Small wonder that people who cannot handle the realm of emotion - either happy emotions or unhappy ones - complain that inevitably ‘passion dies.’
If I am afraid to know what I want or to express what I want unambiguously, then too often, rather than own the fear, I blame my partner; I feel hurt and resentment over the fact that my partner has failed to provide that which I have not taken responsibility for knowing what I want, let alone communicating it.
If you are afraid to know what you want or to express it unambiguously to your partner, to take responsibility for it, you might end up blaming your partner. You might feel hurt and resentment over your partner’s lack of ‘sensitivity.’ You aren’t a mind reader? Neither is your partner.
Often there is a great fear of knowing what we want and a greater fear that our partner will not care, will not respond. There is fear that we will put ourselves in his or her hands, to give the partner too much ‘power’ through letting the partner see our naked feelings and desires. There is a fear of self-alienation and there is fear of surrendering to love. There is fear of self-expression. Instead of communication, there is silence, and hurt, and resentment, and self-created loneliness.
We can readily understand how such a situation arises, we can readily understand why it is so common, when we realize how rare it is for a child to be taught that his or her wants matter, how rare it is for a child, even a child who is loved, to have the experience of being taken seriously as a human being, to have his or her feelings taken seriously. If we wish to succeed in romantic love, we need to be aware of the question:
· Do I know what I want?
· Am I willing to express what I want?
· And do I accept the fact that another person may not always be able to give me what I want? Can I allow for that? But no good purpose is served by being afraid to discover the truth.
It needs to be stressed, of course, that no one can always give us what we want, no one can always respond to us just as we would like and just at the moment we would like. No one else exists for the satisfaction of our desires. Honest communication, therefore, has a great deal to do with our willingness and courage to be who we are, to show who we are, to own our thoughts, feelings, and desires - to give up self-concealment as a survival strategy. But we cannot relinquish an error we are unwilling to recognize. So what is needed is a leap into honesty. Just as romantic love is not for children, so it is not for liars, or for cowards. Honesty and courage serve the growth of romantic love. Dishonesty and cowardice inevitably subvert it.
I am thinking of couples who have succeeded in sustaining love over long periods of time. Very commonly the two people will ask each other, “What do you think? What do you feel?” They will watch each other with genuine interest; they will lean forward with excitement, their eyes sparking with awareness. They enjoy communicating what they see or sense about the other. The excitement in their relationship is the reflection of an excitement existing within each of them as individuals.
We stay alive, psychologically, by staying in touch with our feelings, with our emotions, with our thoughts and longings and desires and judgments - with everything that pertains to the world of our inner experience. And we keep our relationship alive by sharing this inner world, by exploring it, by expressing it, by making it part of the lived reality of our existence. And this includes, as an essential feature, remaining sensitive to what we see in our partner and to how he or she affects us, the feelings and thoughts our partner inspires in us, all of which pertain to the issue of psychological visibility.
The desire for visibility is by no means an expression of a weak or uncertain ego, or low self-esteem. On contrary, the lower the self-esteem, the more we feel the need to hide, the more ambivalent our feelings toward visibility are likely to be: we both long for and are terrified by it. The more we take pride in who we are, the more transparent we are willing to be. The more transparent we are eager to be.
In successful romantic love, there is a unique depth of absorption by and fascination with the being and personality of the partner. Hence for each there can be a powerful experience of visibility which creates a powerful bond. It is supremely important to know how to make your partner feel visible: seen, understood, and appreciated.
Your desire for love from others is inseparable from your desire for visibility. Think about it. If someone professed love for you but when talking about what he or she found loveable named characteristics you did not think you possessed, did not especially admire, and could not personally relate to, you would hardly feel nourished or loved. You do not merely wish to be loved; you wished to be loved for reasons that are personally meaningful to you and that are congruent with your perception of yourself. Celebrities and beautiful people in general often feel invisible in spite of having numerous admirers precisely because they recognize that their fans are in love with their own fantasy of the person, not the real person.
We are told constantly that we must love everyone: Leaders of some religious movements declare that they ‘love’ followers they have never met. Enthusiasts of personal growth workshops and encounter-groups emerge from such experiences announcing that they ‘love’ all people, everywhere. I do not think their words and perception of their feelings are congruent. It is possible to feel benevolence and goodwill toward human beings one does not know or does not know very well. It is not possible to feel love. Love by its very nature entails a process of selection, of discrimination. Love is our response to that which represents our highest values. Love is a response to distinctive characteristics possessed by some beings but not by all.
Relationship can starve to death through silence, the absence of this flow of energy between two people, the absence of exchanging the experience of visibility. This is one of the reasons why it is so important to express one’s feelings when we are hurt or angry. If we fail to do so, after a time we bury more than hurt and anger; love and appreciation tend to be submerged as well. We become silent, withdrawn, and remote. In suppressing negative feelings, we also disown positive ones, building a protective wall of indifference. Our partner is now experienced not as a source of pleasure but as sources of pain against which we protect ourselves by numbness, we ‘shut down,’ refuse to give our partner the pleasure of feeling visible and appreciated. But then where does our relationship go from there? It becomes a dead end.
We all know that nothing gives us the experience of being loved as much as when we feel that we are a source of joy to our partner. The smile of pleasure on our partner’s face when we enter the room, a glance of admiration aimed at something we have done, an expression of sexual desire or excitement, an interest in what we are thinking or feeling even when we have not explained, a conveyed sense of joy from being in contact with us or simply from watching us – these are the means by which the experience of visibility and of being loved are created. And these are the means by which we create the experience for our partner.
One of the pleasures of romantic love that nurtures the relationship is talking about what you enjoy and appreciate in each other. When your lover conveys that you are a source of pleasure, you feel loved.
Among the many rewards of love is the opportunity to share your excitement and be nourished by the excitement of another.
There are many complex reasons for falling in love with someone. Not all of them are self-evident. One of the pleasures of lovers is seeking to identify on deeper and deeper levels the traits that inspire and excite them in each other. The process can go on for years and can be a source of increasing pleasure and intimacy.
The foundation of a relationship lies in basic similarities. The excitement of a relationship lies, to an important extent, in complementary differences. The two together constitute the context in which romantic love is born. When a man and a woman experience differences as complementary, they experience them as stimulating, challenging, exciting - a dynamic force that enhances feelings of aliveness, expansion, and growth.
In fact, one way we gain deeper insight into a love relationship is to ask ourselves:
What parts of myself does my lover bring me into fresh contact with?
How do I experience myself in this relationship?
What feels most alive within me in the presence of this person?
In what ways are we alike?
In what ways that we enjoy and are stimulated by – are we different?
In answering these questions, we can come to appreciate some of the most important reasons why we have fallen in love with a particular person.
Can anything be more inspiring than to allow our partner to see the excitement that he or she stimulates in us? Unfortunately, many of us were raised to conceal such excitement, to subdue and submerge it, to extinguish it in order to appear grown up - so we are afraid to let our partner see how much we feel, how much love radiates through us, how much pleasure our mate can inspire.
Or perhaps we want to express our excitement, we want to communicate it, and it is our partner who withdraws, who turns us off, who signals that such messages are better left un-communicated, even by the excitement that he or she ignites. But fear of excitement kills romantic love. If our partner is not comfortable with excitement, in the end he or she will not be comfortable with love, even the love we feel for him or her. And if we do not feel that our partner is the friend of our excitement, then no matter how much he or she may profess to love us, we cannot feel fully visible, we cannot feel fully loved, we cannot feel fully accepted - and we cannot even feel that our love for our partner is fully accepted.
Our partner manner of treating us is only a reflection of the manner of treating him- or herself, just as our manner of treating our partner is only a reflection of our manner of treating ourselves. If we cannot accept the excitement within ourselves, if we do not feel free to show it, how can we hope to do better by the excitement in anyone else?
Interlude: An Experiment in Intimacy
A homework assignment – an experiment in intimacy: A couple was to spend twelve hours together in the same room, entirely alone. No book, no television, no phone calls; not even any walks outside. No distractions of any kind. And no naps during this twelve-hour session, either. They were to arrange for someone to take care of their children for the day.
Ideally, the experiment should be conducted in a hotel room where they could get room service, so no time would be spent on preparing meals. Except for going to the bathroom, they were to remain together at all times.
They must agree that no matter what either of them says, nether will leave the room. They could sit for several hours in absolute silence if they chose to, but they must remain together.
They would be free, during these twelve hours, to talk about anything they wished, provided it was personal. It could be about themselves or about their relationship. But no talk of work, the children’s schoolwork, or any such subject. Their focus must remain on themselves.
The premise behind this assignment is that, when all avenues of escape are closed off, people will often experience real breakthroughs in communication. As the hours pass, they find themselves talking from a deeper and deeper place within themselves. The results are often a breakthrough in their understanding of each other. They have probably spent hundreds of hours talking in restaurants, but never talked about things they talk during those twelve hours.
A twelve-hour session of this kind, participated in at least once a month, can produce the most radical changes in the quality of the relationship. One of the changes is the unexpected discovery of communication skills they did not even dream they could possess. And the results are often far more powerful than those achieved through marriage counseling.
There is no aphrodisiac in the world so powerful and, in the end, so reliable, as authentic communication that flows from the core of one being to the core of another.
I am reminded of a famous actress-singer I once saw being interviewed on television. The interviewer commented on the astonishing number of projects and engagements in which she had been involved during the past several years. “I like to keep busy,” she smiled. The interviewer sighed gravely, “I’m the same way - always running from one project to another, always juggling twelve balls in the air. Why do we do it?” Her smile vanished, and she said slowly, thoughtfully, a little sadly, “For myself . . . I’m afraid that if I ever stop running, if I ever stop doing things all the time, if I ever get off the treadmill and allow myself to look inside . . . I’ll find out there’s nothing there.” Nodding in silence, eloquent understanding, the interviewer responded, “Yeah.” What made the interview significant was the subject willingness to articulate explicitly what millions feel but do not name.
If a human being is always on the run, always engaged in ‘doing something,’ he or she has little or no chance for self-encounter and self-exploration. We need time of stillness to enter into ourselves, to experience who we are, to revitalize ourselves. The same thing is true of two people in a relationship. A relationship needs time, it needs leisure.
A couple may run from the tennis court to the bridge table to the Saturday night dance at their club, and insist that they are truly sharing life, and not notice that they spend no time encountering each other. They are together, but they never meet.
You may ask, “How do you find the time for that intimacy?”
The answer is, “How do you find the time for your work?”
You may answer back, “That’s important.”
“Well, when and if you decide that love really matters to you as much as your work, when success in your relationship with the woman you love becomes as much imperative as success in your career, you won’t ask: How does one find time? As much as you won’t ask: How does one find time for work?
It is generally recognized that creativity requires leisure, an absence of rush, time for the mind and imagination to float and wander and roam, time for the individual to descend into the depths of his or her psyche, to be available to the barely audible signals rustling for attention. Space must be created in the mind to leap out of its accumulated ruts, to part from the mechanical, the known, the standard, and generate a leap into the new.
A person who schedules every moment of the day out of fear of ever being bored or having nothing to do is condemned to living on the surface of his or her mind, living superficially, living mechanically, living off the known and the familiar, because the new resides in the depths and, for entry into the depths, time without activity is needed.
Virtually all of the qualities and attitudes needed for the fulfillment of romantic love require maturity.
To nurture another human being, in the sense meant here, is to accept him or her unreservedly; to respect his or her sovereignty and integrity; to support his or her growth and self-actualization needs; and to care, on the deepest and most intimate level, about his or her thoughts, feelings, and wants. It is to create a context and environment in which a person can live and flourish.
To nurture another human being means to accept that person as he or she is, and yet to believe in the possibilities within that person still unrealized. It is to be honest with that person about our own needs and wants, and always to remember that the other person does not exist merely to satisfy our needs and wants. It means to express confidence in the person’s strengths and internal resources, and yet be available to offer help when it is asked for (and sometimes to recognize that it might be needed even when it is not being asked for). It is to create a context in which the person can experience that he or she matters, that the expression of thoughts and feelings will be welcomed, and yet to understand that there are times when what our partner needs is silence and aloneness.
Without any implication of immaturity, there exists in each one of us the child we once were, and there are times when that child too needs nurturing. We need to be aware of the child in ourselves and in our partner. We need to be in good relationship with that child. To nurture someone we love is to nurture the child as a valid part of who that person is. To nurture is to love not only our partner’s strength but also his or her fragility, not only that within our partner which is powerful but also that which is delicate.
It is this pattern of mutual caring and nurturing that we can observe between men and women who love each other and who know how to love. Out of the fullness of their own being comes their ability to nurture. Out of their sensitivity to their needs, they are sensitive to the needs of their partner. It is easy enough to understand why for such persons love grows. And it is also easy to understand why, in the absence of such understanding and such nurturing love tends to diminish, dry up, and die.
To be nurtured is to experience that I am cared for. Not to be nurtured is to be deprived of the experience that I am cared for.
Of all the nonsense written about love, none is more absurd than the notion that ideal love is selfless. What we love is the embodiment of our values in another person; properly understood, love is profound act of self-assertion. When we love, our concept of our self-interest expands to embrace the well-being of our partner. That is the great compliment of love: to declare to another human being that his or her happiness is of selfish importance to us. It would hardly be a compliment to tell a person we love that his or her well-being and happiness are not of selfish interest to us.
To help us understand this, let us ask ourselves whether we want our lover to caress us unselfishly, with no personal gratification in doing so, or do we want our lover to caress us because it is a joy and a pleasure for him or her to do so?
And let us ask ourselves whether we want our partner to spend time with us, alone together, and to experience the doing as an act of self-sacrifice? Or do we want our partner to experience such time as glory?
Even in the most intimate and loving relationships, we need to be aware of and to respect our own needs and wants. Not that compromise and accommodation have no place in a love relationship; obviously they have. But if too often I ignore or sacrifice my own needs and wants in order to please or satisfy you, I commit a crime against both of us: against myself because of the treason I commit to my own values - and to you, because in allowing you to be the collector of my sacrificial offerings I am allowing you to become someone I will resent. It is not self-sacrifice that romantic love requires, but a grown-up’s understanding of selfishness - rational or enlightened selfishness.
Our sexual responses are always an expression of the self, always an expression of who we are, but that is not necessarily how we experience them. It is generally recognized that anti sexual messages absorbed in childhood from parents and religious teachers encourage and exacerbate sexual self-alienation. The tendency then is to view sex as the darker and least acceptable side of the self.
When we enjoy healthy self-esteem, when we feel love of ourselves and in harmony with ourselves, then sex is a natural and spontaneous expression of our feelings for our partner, for ourselves, and for life. If we are not divided against ourselves, if we are not engaged in a constant struggle to ‘prove’ our worth or to ‘prove’ anything, then we are free to enjoy our own being, to enjoy the state of being alive, to enjoy and appreciate our partner; we do not experience a split between mind and body, between spirit and flesh, between admiration and passion. Then we truly think and feel that our partner is wonderful; we take pride in the direction of our sexual desires. When sex is experienced as an expression of our aliveness, of our joy in being, then a major road has been opened to the fulfillment of romantic love. Through the giving and receiving of sexual pleasure lovers continually reaffirm that they are a source of joy to each other. Joy is a nutrient of love: it makes love grow.
If sex involves an act of self-celebration; if, in sex, you desire the freedom to be spontaneous, to be emotionally open and uninhibited, to assert your right to pleasure, and to flaunt your pleasure in your own being - then the person you most desire is the person with whom you feel freest to be who you are, the person who you regard as an appropriate psychological mirror, the person who reflects your deepest view of yourself and of life. The essence of romantic love is this: I see you as a person, and because you are what you are, I love and desire you - for my happiness in general and my sexual happiness in particular.
When we love passionately, the act of sex is experienced as anything but ‘merely a physical act,’ because it is such a powerful vehicle for our expression of love. It is not only our bodies that meet in bed, it is our souls. Indeed, soulful relationship - the spiritual bonds between two people is a true joy and it brings fulfillment.
The admiration between two people is the most powerful support system a relationship can have, the most powerful foundation. Consequently there is the greatest likelihood that the couple will be able to handle the pressures and weather the storms that inevitably are a part of life and, therefore, sooner or later part of every relationship. This is important question to ask, “Do I admire my partner?”
In receiving admiration we feel visible, appreciated, loved, and thus reinforced in our love for our partner. In experiencing and expressing admiration, we feel pride in our choice of mate, confirmed in our judgment, and strengthened in our feelings of love. Two lovers who profoundly admire each other know a form of delight that is a continuing source of fuel to romantic love. When high-self-esteem people fall in love, admiration is most likely to be at the core of their relationship. They are most likely to admire and be admired. Small wonder that when a man and woman admire each other, love tends to grow.
A great deal of so-called war of the sexes is a result of a fear of rejection, abandonment, or loss. Often, men and women experience great resistance to owning how much they need each other, how important the opposite sex is for the enjoyment of life and the fulfillment of their own masculine or feminine potentialities. Often there is almost hatred of the fact that we need the opposite sex as much as we do.
Since people have already experienced painful feelings of rejection in childhood they are, in effect, ‘primed’ for catastrophe, ‘primed’ for tragedy when, as adults, they fall in love. They ‘know’ that love means pain, hurt, non-acceptance, and loss. In addition to childhood experiences they may have been emotionally bruised or battered in earlier love affairs. So they ‘know’ that love means torment.
Men and women need each other. That should make them friends. Instead, too often, it makes them enemies because of the fear and anticipation of being hurt. It is not the fear as such that causes the damage, but the denial of the fear, the refusal to own it and to deal with it honestly. Each senses this hostility in the other, and his or her own fear and hostility are subsequently reinforced. If it is a love affair, it is a love affair between two fortresses. When there is trouble between them the man or woman does not say, “I love you and I am frightened of losing you.” He or she says, “I am no longer so sure I love you.” It takes courage to say, “I’m afraid.” It is precisely men and women who are self-assured and self-confident who exhibit least anxiety in surrendering to love. It requires a high level of self-esteem and a strong sense of personal autonomy to express vulnerability.
We have recognized that change and growth are of the very essence of life. Two human beings, each pursuing separate paths of development, can encounter each other at a point in time where their wants and needs are congruent and can share their journey over a period of years with great joy and nourishment for both. But a time can come when their paths diverge, where urgent needs and values impel them in different directions.
There is an example of a romance between a twenty-two year old woman and a forty-one year old man. Looking at the older man, she saw a maturity she had never experienced in a man, combined with an excitement for life that seemed to match her own; looking at her, he saw in her eyes an appreciation of his excitement and a radiant excitement of her own that he had not experienced before. They fell in love; for a while they were ecstatically happy together. Time passed and frictions slowly and subtly developed between them. She wanted to be free, to play, to experiment - in a word, to be young; he wanted the stability of a firm commitment. Gradually they saw how different were their respective stages of development and, consequently, many of their wants and needs. They felt compelled to say good-bye. But was their relationship a failure? I do not think they would say so. Each one of them gave the other something beautiful, something nourishing and memorable.
We have heard so much about the gratifications and rewards of raising a family. Those gratifications can be very real. Who can deny the joy of creating a new life and watching it grow? But it is the other side of the story that now needs more attention.
Let us begin with the observation that, as recent studies reveal, many mothers, if given a second chance, would choose not to have children. This is hardly surprising. Of course once children are born they normally become attached to them and love them. This does not alter the fact, that, looking back over their lives, many women feel, “From what I know today, I see that I could have had a very different life and a more rewarding one had I chosen not to have children.”
And yet women are raised with the view that they are to achieve their destiny through the role of wife and mother. They are educated to define themselves solely in terms of their relationships - to a man and to children. In both cases, ‘femininity’ is associated with ‘service.’ The most important thing a woman has to learn in this context is that she has the right to exist. This is the core issue. She has the right to exist and she is responsible for her own life. She is a human being, not a breeding machine whose destiny is to serve others. In other words, women have to learn intelligent and honorable selfishness. There is nothing beautiful or noble about self-annihilation.
A great many women in recent studies have confessed that they struggled very hard to persuade themselves that they had ‘a maternal instinct’ in order to feel that they were ‘truly feminine.’ Then they go on to acknowledge that after having had three or four children they have to confront the fact that the notion is absurd and has no basis in their own immediate, honest experiences.
Life consists of making choices. Whatever choice we make, there will be consequences. Every choice creates its own problems and generates its own difficulties. “Take what you want, and pay for it.” Mature people project consequences in advance - and take responsibility for their actions. Sometimes, it is true, we cannot foresee all the consequences of an action; but if we choose to take it anyway, we need to be clear about our uncertainty and about the fact that consequences we may not like will follow.
Each one of us has many more potentialities and many more impulses than we are ever going to be able to actualize. Even if there are certain inherent impulses to become a mother, this does not mean that those impulses must be followed.
For example, we all probably experience sexual attraction for a great many people across the course of our lifetime. We do not make love to them all, we discriminate. We choose. We evaluate our responses and our inclinations in the light of our long-term goals and interests or we should. So it is essential to ask ourselves: In the total context of what I want from my life, how will children affect those goals? Am I prepared to give that which the proper raising of children requires?
Further, in considering the impact of children on a man/woman relationship, consider this: Couples are able to take a great many risks, in the interests of advancing their growth and development, that are far more difficult when they have children. For example, one can throw over a boring, unrewarding job and take a chance on some new ventures more easily if no one is involved but two adult individuals who are quite capable of taking care of themselves. But with children? The whole situation becomes different. How many great opportunities are passed by, how many chances are not taken, how much growth is stifled because a man or woman is afraid to make a move that might threaten the well-being of children? And if, because we have allowed too many opportunities to pass us by, our lives feel more and more weighted, more and more colorless, it is foolish to imagine that romantic love will remain unaffected.
Studies clearly indicate that contrary to the popular myth, children do not help a marriage but tend to make it harder for the marriage to proceed happily. Studies reveal that friction between couples tends to increase with the birth of the first child and the relationship between the couple begins to improve when the last child leaves home.
Another kind of problem is presented to romantic love when one member of a couple desires to have children and the other does not. Obviously this is an issue that is best resolved before marriage. A couple planning to get married should visualize where they see themselves being in five years, how they see their life, and then share their image of the future with each other. Sometimes they discover in this manner that they have very different goals, very different dreams. Care and thought must be given to negotiating those differences; otherwise it is almost inevitable that romantic love will be a casualty.
It is not hard to understand why two people who love each other would want to share the adventure of creating a new human being. I am hardly arguing that no one should have children. My argument is against having children as a matter of routine, or blind social tradition, or out of a sense of duty, or out of the need to prove one’s femininity or masculinity.
Particularly to be admired are those men and women who, choosing thoughtfully and responsibly to have children, know how to preserve the integrity of their love relationship against the demands of parenthood. To accomplish this is no easy task.
Sometimes couples fight; sometimes they feel alienated. Sometimes our partner may do something that hurts or exasperates us. Sometimes we or our partner want passionately to be alone for awhile. None of this is unusual or abnormal. None of it is inherently a threat to romantic love.
One of the characteristic of mature love is the ability to know that we can love our partner deeply and nonetheless know moments of feeling enraged, bored, alienated, and that the validity and value of our relationship is not to be judged by moment-to-moment, day-to-day, or even week–to-week fluctuations in feeling. There is a fundamental equanimity, an equanimity born of the knowledge that we have a history with our partner, we have a context, and we do not drop that context under the pressure of immediate vicissitudes. We retain the ability to see the whole picture. We do not reduce our partner to his or her last bit of behavior and define him or her solely by means of it.
In contrast, one of the manifestations of immaturity is an inability to tolerate temporary discord, temporary frustration, temporary alienation, and to assume in the face of distressing conflicts or difficulties that the relationship is finished.
We need the ability to remain in contact with the essence of our relationship in the face of temporary mishaps, conflicts, hurts, or estrangement. We need the ability to see the essence of our partner, past what our partner may be doing at this moment. We need not to step outside the moment but to see the essence of our relationship and our partner in the moment, even when the moment is not a happy one. Then, even our times of struggle can in the end strengthen love.
A man very much in love with his wife said, “No matter how upset she sometimes get with me - and believe me sometimes her eyes are really blazing - her face always shows that she loves me and that she knows it, even at that moment. I feel very good because the other day she said the same is true of me; she said my eyes always show that I love her, no matter what else I’m feeling.” Clearly this is one of the secrets of self-rejuvenating relationships.
When men and women embark on a career in their twenties or thirties that they intend to pursue across a lifetime, they rarely assume that the next forty or fifty years will be one smooth flight from triumph to triumph. If they have any maturity at all, they know there will be high points and low points, unexpected detours, unforeseeable problems and challenges, occasional crisis, and days when they will wake up in the morning wondering why they chose this particular career and whether they are really suited for it.
But when men and women embark on that journey called marriage (or any serous relationship), they tend to do so with far less realistic appreciation of the challenges and vicissitudes that awaits them. The decision to marry is, rationally, the decision to share a journey, to share an adventure, not to lock oneself away in some womblike, unchanging paradise. No such paradise exists.
It is sometimes argued that since so many couples suffer feelings of disenchantment shortly after marriage, the experience of romantic love must be a delusion. Yet many people experience disenchantment during their careers somewhere along the line, but it is not commonly suggested that the pursuit of a fulfilling career is a mistake. Many people experience some degree of enchantment in their children, but it is not commonly supposed that the desire to have children and to be happy about them is inherently immature and neurotic. Instead it is generally recognized that achieving happiness in one’s career or success in child-rearing is more difficult than is ordinarily supposed. Precisely the same should be drawn about romantic love.
Being romantic means treating the relationship as important, behaving in ways that underscore its importance. The fact that you and your partner love each other does not guarantee that you will be able to create a joyful and rewarding relationship. Love per se does not ensure maturity and wisdom; yet without these qualities love is in jeopardy. Love does not automatically teach communication skills, effective methods of conflict resolution, or the art of integrating your love into the rest of your existence; yet the absence of such knowledge can lead to the death of love. Love does not produce self-esteem; it may reinforce and nurture it, but it cannot create it; still, without self-esteem love is difficult or impossible to sustain.
The desire for permanence, especially when we are deeply happy, the desire to hold the moment forever, may be thoroughly understandable; but such an arrangement cannot be had. Stillness is impossible. The moment can be lived, but it cannot be captured. Not because love is impermanent - love can be the most permanent thing in our lives - but because change and motion are the most natural things in this universe. We must be in the moment, feel it, experience it, then let go, then move on - to the next moment and the next adventure.
Just as human being does not remain immutable but evolves through stages of development, so do relationships. And in each case, different stages have their own challenges and their own distinctive gratifications. When a new relationship is forming there is the excitement and stimulation of novelty; there is also the anxiety of not knowing whether or not the relationship will grow and prevail. Later, with greater security and stability, there is some loss of the excitement and novelty; there is the serenity of problems solved, of understanding achieved, and the joy of discovering that harmony contains its own excitement.
Sometimes, especially when problems that need to be faced and solved arise in a relationship, there is a turning away from the present and a longing for the past, a yearning for what cannot possibly recur.
Sometimes a couple break up, not because their growth and development require it, as they may tell themselves, but because one of them fought and resisted the process of the other’s evolution. One of them tried to freeze a moment that had already vanished. One of them lacked the flexibility and inner security to allow the emerging change to happen, to flow with it, to learn what new possibilities might open for both of them.
A man may have held the same job for fifteen years; suddenly or not so suddenly he is dissatisfied, he is bored, he feels unfulfilled, he wants a new challenges. His wife is bewildered and frightened. What will happen? Will they be as financially secure as they were in the past? Why is he losing interest in their friends? Why has he taken to reading so much? Is he going to become interested in other woman next? She panics. When he tries to explain his feelings, she does not listen. She is terrified of losing what she has. And out of her terror she proceeds to lose it.
Another example, a husband complains that his wife is scatterbrained that she cannot even balance her checkbook. He loves her, he says, but how he wishes she were more mature! Something happens; through some mysterious process of growth he had not noticed, she becomes more responsible. She takes an interest in his business. She asks intelligent questions. She decides to start a business of her own. He is devastated; what has happened to the wonderful little girl he was so happy with? She looks into his eyes and see the enemy of her self-realization. She wants his love, she wants their marriage, but she wants to be a human being too. Shall she revert to being a little girl again and hate her husband for the rest of her life? Shall she continue to fight for her own development and drive her husband away? These are the kind of hard and painful choices that many a couples has to face.
Every relationship has a system. And in a system when one part or component changes, the other parts and components must changes also or else equilibrium is lost. If one partner grows and the other partner resists growth, disequilibrium arises, then a crisis, then a resolution, or a divorce, or worse than a divorce: a long, slow process of disintegration made of dying love, bewildered anguish, and hatred. A waste of two lives in an empty marriage or relationship is a tragedy.
If we have the self-confidence and the wisdom to be the friend of our partner’s growth, then that growth need not be a danger or a threat. But if we set ourselves against it, we only invite tragedy. And by the same token, if we attempt to protect our relationship by aborting our own growth and evolution, again we invite tragedy. We deprive ourselves and our relationship aliveness. Life is motion. Not to move forward is to move backward. If I am not evolving, I am decaying. If my relationship is not getting better, it is getting worse. If my partner and I are not growing together, we are dying together.
Here again we can see the important of self-esteem to the success of romantic love. It is self-esteem that gives us the courage not to fight change, not to fight growth, not to fight the next moment of our existence. And the exercise of that courage in turn strengthens our self-esteem.
Our greatest chance at permanence lies in our ability to handle change. Love has the greatest chance to endure when it does not fight the flow of life but learns to join with it. If my partner and I feel that we are truly the friends of each other’s growth, then that is one more bond between us, one more force to support and strengthen our love. If we do have the wisdom and courage to be the friend of our partner’s dreams and aspiration, then we have the very best chance that our love will indeed be ‘forever.’
When a man and woman with significant spiritual and psychological affinities encounter each other and fall in love, if they have evolved beyond the level of problems and difficulties described in this study if they are beyond the level of merely struggling to make their relationship ‘work,’ then romantic love becomes the pathway not only to sexual and emotional happiness but also to the higher reaches of human growth. It becomes the context for a continuing encounter with the self, through the process of interaction with another self. Two consciousnesses, each dedicated to personal evolution, can provide an extraordinary stimulus and challenge to the other. The ecstasy can become a way of life.
