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Sep 10
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Sep 03
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“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
Daniel J. Boorstin, PhD – Author, Historian, Attorney
Unlike learning to drive a car, which you were not born knowing how to do, relationship success seems like it should just come naturally. After all, you were born into relationship and were raised in relationships. You’ve been in relationships of one kind or another your entire life. What could be more natural?
Unfortunately, what comes naturally to many people is not always the wisest choice. For most of us our relationships school was watching how the grownups did it. We modeled our parents for good or ill and our childhood modeling is a force to be reckoned with if we choose to learn to consciously create our own version of happily ever after.
Some of you may not know we still have a private practice. We’ve had a private practice for 30 years and it’s still one of the most satisfying parts of our professional life together. We work with young couples just starting out in life who want to learn what it takes to create a fulfilling relationship. And we work with couples in trouble who have tried everything, and yet the same old problems keep recycling themselves with slight variations.
John and Alice got married right out of college almost twenty years ago. When they came to us Alice was in her early forties and John a few years older. They had three children, two still at home and the oldest was leaving for college.
When they contacted us for help they complained that the romance and feeling connected had long since gone out of their marriage. They had been to a couple of therapists which hadn’t worked out as well as they had hoped. “All we did was keep talking about the same stuff over and over again. And it never really went anywhere.” They had gotten just enough insight to move from the “ignorance is bliss stage” to the “Yikes! I’m not very good at this stage.”
The four stages of learning apply to creating relationships, just as they do to learning to be consistently good at just about anything.
John and Alice were stuck between stages one and two, Unconscious Incompetence and Conscious Incompetence. They would get a burst of enthusiasm to “improve their relationship” and then after they started practicing some new things they would feel frustrated and lose interest, or so it seemed.
What was actually causing the frustration was an unacknowledged judgment that they “shouldn’t” have to be learning at all – they should already know how to do it “right.” They loved each other – why was there any problem?
It’s a mindset they had absorbed from their culture without noticing, and it was getting in the way of being deeply honest with themselves and declaring themselves “beginners” at relationships.
Once they moved beyond that prideful place and allowed themselves to become learners with a beginner’s mind, they felt freer to make mistakes in their practice and then learn from those mistakes. That’s what happens in stage two; you make mistakes because you are growing beyond your comfort zone. You are supposed to make mistakes in stage two. If you aren’t making mistakes you aren’t doing it right.
They developed a new patience with one another and stopped judging themselves for not being as far along as they thought they “should” be. It was a tender moment that day they stopped judging their relationship and decided to love it AND help one another learn.
They decided to make it an adventure rather then something to get through. They had a new determination to practice their new skills regularly and find some new ways of solving old problems.
Pretty soon after that, the silent resignation they had been living with disappeared and they were “lit up from the inside,” as they put it. Of course, it was deeply gratifying for us to watch them let their love for one another take them down a new path of invigorating discovery.
They were actually having a good time with it. Their sessions with us were filled with a new and refreshing good natured humor, the kind that comes from not taking things too seriously. We all laughed a lot and they grew to stage three – Conscious Competence.
The spark of romance was back. The energy of discovery and fun was doing its magic and a renewed vitality was becoming the norm.
And so, they all lived happily ever after, right? You bet, as a matter of fact! Even while the ink was still drying as they kept applying their new skills to rewriting the old script.
There aren’t enough stories of what happily ever after really looks like. We all grew up thinking our love was supposed to be enough. But truly great relationships in these busy and demanding times require extraordinary means.
Essentially, what we really helped John and Alice to do was to create a new future on a path different from the one they had been on their entire lives. They hadn’t known they could do that . . . and then they learned.
Questions to ponder for comment:
- What was new for you in this post?
- What was validated for you in this post?
- How can you use what you learned in this post?
- Do you have any questions about this post?
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Mar 18
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If you are anything like we are, you may have the feeling that the world is moving faster and faster. It may feel like more is being required of you than you than ever before. Perhaps you feel challenged in your capacity to pay attention to what is going on in front of you.
In this kind of dynamic, patience and simple kindness are often in short supply as we find ourselves speaking to and treating others, especially those we love most, in ways we don’t really intend.
We share with you here a short, profound little film (5:31) that touched us deeply. We believe, we hope, it will touch your heart, as well. It is entitled What Is That? by Constantin Pilavios. It reminded us of one of the most poetic passages in the Bible from which we took the title for this post. We have included the entire verse below the film.
See what kinds of thoughts and feelings it elicits in you. We would love to read your comments.
What Is That? by Constantin Pilavios
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
“Love never fails. . . And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
1 Corinthians 13:1-8 and 13
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Mar 09
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We want to share a thought provoking piece by our friend and colleague, author and teacher Raphael Cushnir.
This article was originally published in the Detroit Free Press, as well as Psychology Today and the Huffington Post.
Please enjoy . . .
Our Economic Crisis Is an Emotional Problem
A provocative documentary made in 2003 asked the question, if a corporation were an actual person, not just accorded the legal rights of one, what kind of person would it be? The answer, based on the maniacal corporate pursuit of quarterly profits at the expense of all other values, was a sociopath.
At such a crucial time in our nation’s history, it seems relevant to ask a similar question. If America were a person, with its recent cycles of destructive boom and bust, and its almost slavish dependence upon consumption, what kind of person would the country be? The answer, inescapably, is an addict.
The key feature of an addict is emotional denial. An addict enlists substances and activities to help mask and suppress emotions festering within. When no such emotions are festering within, people don’t become, or remain, addicted.
While it’s tempting to argue about what we’re nationally addicted to – money, oil, perhaps entertainment – the more important pursuit is identifying which resisted emotions are at the source of our disease. Not only will this help us understand how we got into our current mess, but it’s also essential if we’re ever going to get out of it.
The first obvious culprit is envy. Americans have a hard time watching others prosper while life seems to pass them by. When everyone else was trading up for a bigger house, or flipping second and third homes, many people found it impossible to refuse the too-good-to-be-true mortgages that were dangled before them. Only if one’s envy isn’t intolerable is it possible to say, “No, thank you, I like the house I’m living in just fine.”
The second culprit, related to the first, is entitlement. Most Americans don’t merely believe in the dream of prosperity for all, they also consider themselves entitled to it. It doesn’t much matter than most of the world lives on less than five dollars a day. It also doesn’t matter that most of us are only Americans by luck of birth. We want what we want, when we want it, and we’re firm in the conviction that we’ve each got it coming to us.
When it does come, we have no problem feeling entitled. But when it doesn’t, the disparity between what we want and what we have makes our entitlement feel like a slap in the face. The sting of that slap takes the form of the third culprit – deprivation. Feeling deprived fuels the motivation to reach beyond our means, and to ignore all the possible consequences of doing so.
What about plain old greed? It could go on the list, but the urge for more, more, more seems universal rather than specifically American. While greed may have been a big factor in the creation of shiny new financial instruments like mortgage backed securities and credit default swaps, it doesn’t appear to be the driving force behind most of those Americans now saddled with “underwater” houses and mountains of credit card debt. Of course envy, entitlement and deprivation are also universal, yet together they form a trident that’s as American as a home makeover.
So what if we hadn’t been engaged in our collective denial of these three emotions? What might’ve been different? For starters, we would have been able to feel their actual sensations in our physical bodies, which is where all emotions arise. Next, since felt emotions dissipate quickly, we would have been cleansed of their pain and left with a greater sense of well being, along with a brain re-set for peak performance. Finally, with the insight and vision that are natural by-products of a high functioning brain, we would have easily seen right through the housing bubble early on, and popped it intentionally, rather than engorging it for years until it inevitably collapsed all over us.
The latest neuro-scientific research confirms that feeling our emotions directly, rather than repressing them with addictions or compulsions, is precisely what leads to optimal thinking. And we need to do that feeling first, before trying to solve our problems with reason, despite an entrenched cultural bias that pits the supreme virtue of rationality against all those messy, primitive, infantile emotional urges.
In other words, a little “touchy feely” goes a long way.
Which naturally leads us to wonder what emotions we need to be feeling right now, in order to end the financial nightmare that’s terrorizing millions. Tops on that list, not surprisingly, is terror. When F.D.R said “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he didn’t mean not to feel it. He meant that we should refrain from acting it out in the form of rash decisions, a rare form of wisdom that is only possible after fear has been fully felt.
Another emotion just waiting for our attention and receptivity is despair. Many of us beat ourselves up for experiencing despair, even though like most emotions it arises unbidden, completely on its own. We’re often admonished that we can’t afford to despair, and instead must cling to hope at all costs.
This advice is terrible. It presumes that one emotion is the enemy of another, when all emotions want the same thing – simply to be felt. In fact, the fastest road to hope runs right through despair, or any other emotion we’re currently feeling. Hope, just like insight and vision, is the natural outcome of a body with no emotional backlog.
Finally, there’s grief. For all we’ve lost and may yet still lose. Unfelt grief turns to bitterness, rage, and most of all depression. In the process it saps the very energy we need to surmount our daunting obstacles.
To heal our national addiction in time, before the American dream becomes quaint nostalgia, we’ll need to welcome fear, despair and grief with the same vehemence we brought to our previous denial of envy, entitlement, and deprivation.
Those emotions won’t feel good, but they won’t last long either. In their wake, along with hope, will reemerge the can-do spirit that marks our country at its healthiest. So join with me, my fellow Americans, or tarry at your peril. If you truly want to stave off foreclosure, get your emotional house in order.
(c) Raphael Cushnir 2009 – LivingtheQuestions.org
Raphael’s latest book is entitled, The One Thing Holding You Back – Unleashing the Power of Emotional Connection
This short video of author, scientist and consciousness researcher Gregg Braden sheds light on how we can apply ancient teachings to rise above and move beyond fear and anxiety and take control of our own future and destiny.
The Union of Thought and Emotion with Gregg Braden
