Stepping Into The Puddle

    According to research, partners who are attuned to one another have stronger, healthier marriages.  Being attuned means feeling felt, feeling known by one's partner, feeling understood.  Another word for attunement is empathy. When someone is upset or anxious about something, the last thing he or she wants to hear is advice and the last thing he or she wants to feel is ignored or dismissed.  Empathy is a form of compassion that includes identifying with what another person is feeling.  Empathy soothes us and makes us feel safe.  Neuro scientists have discovered that the brain is actually wired with mirror neurons that can mirror the emotional state of another.  We feel with the other, for good and for bad.  When I work with couples I often refer to empathy as stepping into the puddle with you partner.

   "Stepping into the puddle" is not original with me.  I first read about it in How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It (Pat Love, Steven Stosny). The authors declare that if there is a cure-all for emotional disconnection in a marriage, it would be conscious emotional attunement: tuning into the emotional state of another.  So I talk about stepping into the puddle with most of the couples I counsel.

    It's understandable that you might be reluctant to step into the puddle with your partner; after all, no one wants to sit with negative emotions even for a short time.  I am not stating that it is always possible to be "attuned" to your partner.  But there are three compelling reasons why stepping into the puddle is important.  The first is that it forges a closer connection--you do far more to build intimacy and trust by helping each other with negative emotions than by sharing only positive ones.  Second, failing to connect with your sad or distressed partner actually makes it harder for him or her to transform negative emotions than if you weren't there at all.  The third reason that stepping into the puddle is necessary in intimate relationships is that you promised to do it!  When you got married your implicit promise was that you would always care when the other feels bad.

    So the bottom line is this:  be there with your partner's feelings.  Don't ignore them, or try to fix them. Or try to drag him or her out of it.  Many times stepping into the puddle with the man in your life involves simply noticing his discomfort, gently touching him and honoring his space with silence and support.  And many times, it is just sympathetic eye contact with the woman in your life to let her know that you "get" her. Stepping into the puddle means "being present"without judgment with your partner when he or she is distressed or sad. And remember, it is a puddle, not an ocean!  Whatever form it takes in your relationship, if you model stepping into the puddle for your partner, you will most likely get the same in return.

Lessons in Domestic Policy

THE THREE-MINUTE RULE :      My wife has a habit of suing for peace too quickly in disputes. This usually leaves me frustrated: “Wait, I have seven more points I want to make.” Not surprisingly, her instincts are right. John Gottman of the University of Washington has found that the most important points in any argument can be found in the opening minutes. After that, people repeat themselves at higher and higher decibels. Just as boxers fight for only three minutes per round, couples can do the same. Say your piece, then heed Mr. Ury’s advice: call for a five-minute break or take a short walk.

THE ONE WORD YOU SHOULD NEVER SAY:    While hurrying through a fight may be good, steer clear of certain words, or at least one word. Pronouns are the canary in the coal mine of conflict. James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas, has found that within couples, using first-person pronouns (“I” or “we”) is a sign of a healthy relationship. By contrast, using lots of second-person pronouns — “You always say that” or “You never do this” — is a mark of poor problem-solving. To stop fighting, stop saying “you.”

THE ONE WORD YOU SHOULD ALWAYS SAY :  I’ve heard different opinions about forcing people to apologize, especially children. Some say it’s necessary; others think it’s just piling on. Sheila Heen, an author of “Difficult Conversations,” told me that in her household, she favors contrition. “Saying you’re sorry has two meanings,” she said. “One is to describe how you actually feel. The other is to take responsibility for the impact you’ve had on somebody else. I’m really more interested in the second meaning: accepting accountability for your choices even if you don’t genuinely feel apologetic.” Later, she said, when you’re less amped up, feeling sorry will come.

 

 

 

Move Toward Your Partner With Love

If you are trying to take a firm position, express your disappointment and anger, or voice the final stand in your relationship, you may not feel like moving toward your partner in a loving and respectful way.

But if you can't warm your partner's heart, you won't get anywhere crossing your arms over your chest and making all kinds of "I statements" about what you won't tolerate anymore.

If your motivation is to give your relationship the best chance of succeeding--or simply to be heard--the first order of business is this:

• Pay attention to your relationship and nurture it.
• Move toward your partner in a loving and generous way.
• Avoid distancing or disconnecting emotionally.

I know: what I am telling you sounds nuts.  Counter-intuitive. Maybe even offensive. But I'm telling you, if you want to have a successful, healthy marriage you can learn to do this and still express your wants, expectations, limits and bottom line.  

Whether the subject is divorce or the dirty dishes, you don't need to voice your bottom line in somber, heavy, or angry tones.  Clarity of voice comes from deeply held values and self-respect. To be heard, you may need to lower the volume and intensity, rather than raise it. You may need some help, but you can do it.

When the emotional climate of marriage is predominantly negative, you have some groundwork to do before clarifying a bottom line.  No one will listen or speak well if the overriding sentiment of the relationship is hostile, critical, or distant. Nor will you get anywhere taking a position about a hot issue if you're coming from a place of angry reactivity, self-righteousness, or criticism.  Instead, you need to be a model of the kind of behavior you want from your partner, not a critic.   You need to treat your partner the way you'd like to feel about him or her, in order to evoke the positive feelings you've lost touch with.

Taking such positive action is incredibly difficult when a relationship has become a source of chronic anger or dissatisfaction.  But before you rush in to declare your bottom line or to find a divorce attorney, it's a good idea to first test out what's possible by giving voice to the positive. What do you think?    Jim Covington

How Pornography Can Impact Marriages

There has been a lot of writing recently in the media about pornography and sexual addiction and their affect on marital relationships. I have been hesitant to write about it in my blog, but I have decided it is important. Unfortunately, porn use is also becoming a more frequent problem in marriages, primarily because the Internet has greatly stimulated the rise in porn use. Pornography is an industry that generates more than 97 billion dollars a year worldwide.  There are more than 500 million pages of porn on the Internet, most of it directed toward men.  Most of the fantasies depicted in pornography involve the degradation and humiliation of women.

Alarmingly, youth under the age of 18 have become one of the largest groups of porn users.  How will this affect the future of our youth's sexual intimacy in committed relationships? While some sexually explicit material may help with sexual desire, because of its addictive quality, I am now wondering if all porn should be banned on the Internet.

Pornography is all about impersonal, unromantic, unemotional, casual sex. It literally sexually objectifies people and often becomes an addiction.

Furthermore, even if the habitual and compulsive use of porn does not become an addiction, it can affect the inner life of the user and can have serious consequences for an ongoing relationship. Porn often serves as a ladder to actual infidelity.  It goes like this: viewing photos, then videos, chatting online with someone with a compatible obsession(or perhaps a prostitute), fantasizing about meeting in real life and the giving yourself permission to cross boundaries to infidelity.

In addition, porn use may lead to a gradual decline in real sex with one's partner.  It is reported that among 70% of couples in which there was cybersex addiction, one or both partners lost interest in relationship sex.

Two thirds of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers reported that compulsive pornography use had played a significant role in well over 50% of the divorce cases.  Most porn users feel they must hide this deep fascination from their partners.  The secret itself creates distance and diminishes intimacy.  Ultimately, porn addiction is an act of betrayal.

Apparently the activity of porn on the Internet induces a drug-like euphoria that involves "feel good" chemicals and neurochemical cascades such as adrenaline, endorphin, dopamine, and serotonin.  The chemicals associated with arousal lead to cravings and preoccupation with pornographic images, and deprivation when they are missing.,

Patrick Carnes's book Out of the Shadows, is probably the most influential work on understanding and treating sexual addiction.  In Carnes' view, the sexual-addiction cycle involves: (1) Preoccupation--addicts become hostages to their own preoccupation (2) Ritualization--the creation of routines that foster the addiction (3) Compulsive sexual behavior--involvement with the final sexual act and an inability to stop or control this behavior (4) Despair--feeling powerless and hopeless to be able to change. Carnes believes that the sexual addiction has replaced all meaningful relationships in the addict's life.

If porn is undermining your relationship, or you fear it might, there are things you can do. There are 12 step programs now available for porn-sex addiction, which like AA, help the addict to recover from the addiction.  They can be very helpful and I highly recommend them. Also, individual psychotherapy can be quite helpful in helping the person explore the underlying issues of the problem.  And finally and importantly, working with your partner in couples therapy can help you open up about personal issues in your life that can help restore trust and intimacy.   Jim Covington

INTENTIONAL MARRIAGE

We fall in love through rituals of connection and intimacy: courtship rituals like romantic dinners, long talks, dancing together at a favorite place, romantic passion, talking every day on the phone.  We mostly do these rituals alone as a couple.  In addition our passion is fueled by anxiety about whether the relationship will last.  And then we get married.

It seems that when we get married, and particularly after we have children, things reverse.  Other things--the children, our work, our hobbies, become central and the marriage recedes to the background. Why do we give up what made us so happy at the beginning? Well, real life happens.  And often times, marriage then becomes a "consumer marriage." (See my blog entry on Feb. 5).

What do I mean by an intentional marriage:  It's one where the partners are conscious, deliberate, and planful about maintaining and building their commitment and connections over the years. They see themselves as active citizens of their marriage, not just passive consumers.  A lot goes into being intentional about marriage.  I place special emphasis on four aspects: 1) A rock solid commitment to the marriage vs a tentative commitment. A tentative commitment is one that lasts as long as a couple gets along, as long as they don't fight too much, as long as the sex is good, as long as the relationship meets their needs and helps them grow as people.  The bottom line is to stay together, not as long as we both shall live, but as long as things are working out for me. In these marriages. the word "divorce" is often tossed about when things go wrong.

The other kind of commitment is not tentative.  It is a "commitment-no-matter-what." This is a long view of marriage where you don't balance the ledgers every month to see if you are getting an adequate return on your investment.  It must be said, however, that there are tragic, painful exceptions(abuse, ongoing infidelity, addictions) when commitment-no-matter-what must be withdrawn.  But that does not deter us from making the commitment anyway.  Commitment no-matter-what is a commitment that intentionally works to make the marriage work.

2) The 2nd aspect of intentional marriage:  A reservoir of marital rituals of connection and intimacy.  This includes making time to enjoy the things you did together in the early days of your courtship.  It includes paying attention to each other, expressing appreciation, learning to respond to each other in ways that make each feel loved.  One of the ironies of contemporary family life is that many people who are good at intentional parenting are lousy at intentional marriage.  We evolve good parent-child rituals over the years, but we lose our marriage rituals.  If you need more rituals I suggest you construct a "talk ritual" 15 minutes a day, just for you and your mate.

3/ Developing good communication skills and constructive way to argue and deal with conflict, rather than making your partner feel that he or she is always wrong, which only make matters worse.  If necessary seek some professional help with this.

4) And finally, create a supportive community for yourselves by connecting with other couples with whom you can share your marital journey.  You can do this on your own, or through a church or through other organizations that offer the kind of marriage/relationship support that will feel right for you.

Simply stated, the intentional couple thinks about their relationship, plans for their relationship, and acts for their relationship, mostly in conscious, simple, cooperative everyday ways and occasionally in big, splashy ways.

Watching the Couples Go By

Amour, Amour! Watching the Couples Go By! If you haven't seen the movie Amour, I highly recommend it.  It's a great movie about the depths and challenges of love as experienced by an octogenarian couple...And whether you have seen the movie or not, I also recommend this article: Watching the Couples Go by...which beautifully defines the real meaning of love in committed relationships.  It's a great reading to follow after the movie.....But read it anyway.

Why is this basic woman so valuable to the man whose hand or arm she is holding...(or vice versa)? Read the article Watching the Couples Go By and find out:

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/it_seems_to_me/1997/06/watching_the_couples_go_by.html

Happy marriages begin when we marry the ones we love, and they blossom when we love the ones we marry. 

Consumer Marriage

We live in a consumer culture.  Consumer culture has always been based on individuals pursuing their personal desires.  But in the late twentieth century, advertisers began to emphasize desire for desire's sake.  An example is a Toyota ad campaign which has a voice-over saying to a father, "your kids always get what they want; now it's your turn!"

I am not against markets and consumption.  Consumer spending is the primary fuel of a free-market democratic system.  Mass advertising is the only way that new businesses and new products an get the attentions of consumers.

My concern is less with consumer culture in the marketplace than with what it is teaching us about our family relationships.  Consumer culture tells us that we never have enough of anything we want.  It teaches us not to be loyal to anything or anyone that does not continue to meet our needs at the right price.  It is not surprising that in this new consumer world, we are less loyal to our mates, to our marriages. 

Reasons people give for getting a divorce reveal how they think about marital commitment.  Sometimes a spouse is forced into pulling the plug on the marriage because the other partner has reneged on his or her marital commitment through infidelity, chronic irresponsibility or physical abuse.  Other times the overt problems are not this serious, but the other spouse, sometimes coming from a sense of consumer entitlement, wages a steady emotional war until what had been an unnecessary and preventable divorce now becomes necessary and unavoidable.

Nowadays many people explain their reasons for divorce in the form of disappointment in what they are getting from their marriage, rather than in the form of an unconscionable breakdown of marital responsibilities.  Here are the phrases I hear from some couples:

The relationship wasn't working for me anymore.........Our needs were just too different...........
I wasn't happy............ We just grew apart.............I grew and he didn't............ I deserve more.........
The relationship became stale...........My spouse was nice, but boring.........We had no real intimacy.
What kind of role model is that for the kids?

Here's the point: There may be some legitimacy to some of the above complaints, which can be worked on in a positive way.  But you can work your way out of a reasonably good marriage by focusing on what you are not getting out of it and turning negative toward your mate, who will in turn give you even less and thereby help justify your leaving.

Has consumer thinking slipped into your marriage?  William Doherty, founder of Marriage Friendly Therapists, has come up with a Consumer Marriage Quiz:

   1. I (often, sometimes, rarely) compare my spouse unfavorably to others.
   2. In relation to our problems, I (often, sometimes, rarely) dwell on my spouse's deficiencies; not my own.
   3. I (often, sometimes, rarely) concentrate on how my spouse is not meeting my needs rather than how I am not meeting my spouse's needs.
   4. I (often, sometimes, rarely) keep score:  I add up when I do good things or when I think my spouse does something bad.
   5. I (often, sometimes, rarely) think that my spouse is getting a better deal in this marriage than I am.
   6. I (often, sometimes, rarely) focus on my spouse's defects rather than on his or her strengths.
   7. I (often, sometimes, rarely) wonder if I should have held out for someone better when I chose a mate.
   8.  When we have hard times, I (often, sometimes, rarely ) ask myself whether the effort I am putting in this marriage is worth it.

If most of your answers are "rarely," congratulations.  If most of your answers are "sometimes," ask yourself if things that you want are disguising themselves as things that you absolutely need.  If three or more of your answers are "often", consumerism has severely infected your view of marriage.  Do you want to be a "citizen" of your marriage, or take a "tourist visa" to travel the way of fantasy? **
                         ** From Take Back Your Marriage, William Doherty, PhD