What we put up with...
Do certain things immediately turn you off to a prospective new partner? Perhaps you find out that a person to whom you are initially attracted is a smoker? Or that the person is bipolar? Or uses drugs? Or perhaps you find out that he or she doesn't do drugs! These examples of what we simply won't tolerate in a potential partner are quite personal and may well differ for you and others.

Lately, I have been curious to think about what it means to consider the things that we do put up with in a partner and the things that we don't. Does it reveal anything interesting about you that you are willing to engage in certain dynamics that others would determine are an instant turn-off.

Let's suppose that when you start dating somebody, you find out after your initial courtship that your dating partner is perpetually late. Repeatedly, he shows up 20 minutes late to plans that you make. He doesn't call you to tell you beforehand that he will not make the appointment. You express frustration, and he apologizes, saying that he was caught up with something important at work or got a phone call from a family member. He always has a reason for his tardiness.

For some people, this would fall in the category of instantly turning them off. They would decide that it is simply unacceptable that they would forge a relationship with somebody who cannot keep basic promises with their schedule. They would see this behavior as a sign of something basically incompatible with how they live their lives.

For you, though, you are frustrated by these continual disappointments, and you mention your irritation, but you also communicate, on some level, that lateness does not break the deal for you. It just annoys you, but you will eventually put it aside and create an implicit rule in your relationship that lateness is annoying, but it is tolerated.

Again, I am not trying to imply that you should or should not tolerate lateness. I'm pointing out that we all have different senses of what it means for our partner to be late. If you are in the first category where it simply is a deal breaker, the relationship won't move forward without immediate shift of the perpetually late partner. In the second category, lateness will prevail.

What guesses might we make about the person who sees lateness as absolutely unacceptable? I can certainly imagine that this person might have come from a family where people talked about being on time and holding to commitments as paramount. If people didn't show up on time, this person's family might have communicated norms about how lateness is not something to tolerate. The family might have looked down on people who couldn't hold to a schedule or would view it as self-centered that somebody would ignore their social obligations.

You might also imagine that somebody could get to an absolute around lateness in nearly the opposite family system. Perhaps being around a perpetually late parent who left you waiting at school pickup would teach you firsthand that you don't want to deal with such behaviors. You might have decided that you will never let yourself be treated the way that you saw others in your life get treated. This position is trickier. You may still have contact with the late people in your life. Adopting norms in your new family that differ from your old family takes additional effort.

If you are more in the camp that you tolerate lateness, you might have learned that demanding compliance to commitments is not something that you can reasonably attain in your relationships and so you are not willing to lose a relationship for the sake of this "right" that you never had in the first place. It's possible that you might even see lateness as a valid choice and accept a credo that people should not depend on the timely arrival of others. You may see schedules as a rigid constraint placed on creative people. If this is so, the issue of lateness might not even arise in your relationship as a point of tension.

When we enter into relationships, we are often exposed to our own tolerances and our own presumptions about what values and norms matter in a family. We all struggle to assert our own sense of what is right as we define a new family system. And we all will see something important about ourselves as we notice which rights we can easily claim and which rights we struggle to defend.

Labels: intimacy, relationships, tolerance

- posted by Eric @ 4:03 PM

 
Sorting Out Jealousy
If you are finding yourself jealous of your partner--afraid that your partner will leave you or cheat on you--how do you find peace? You feel crazy imagining all of the things that could go wrong, and yet you cannot shut off the thoughts that make you feel you have a right to your suspicions. You get even more confusing data when your partner won't take your concerns seriously and gets angry that you are imagining these outcomes.

If your partner is jealous of you--assuming that you will cheat on your partner and sneak in some illicit encounters--how do you find peace? You know what you are doing, and you know that there is not a legitimate concern about your behaviors, and yet you feel powerless to say anything that will set your partner at ease. In fact, you see how your attempts to calm things down actually can be used as evidence that you are doing something wrong. You might take it personally that your partner can't take your word at face value.

Was your relationship always like this? Did you, the jealous person, begin suspecting that your new partner was looking for opportunities to sneak off on you? Almost certainly, you did not. In fact, you probably started the relationship with the belief that you finally found somebody who would never leave you, would never betray you, would always be loyal. You imagined that your new love would get her needs met by you and you would be completely satisfying such that there would be no reason to look for anything else beyond this new relationship.

And, as the person who is accused of having her eye on other interests, you probably felt the allure of this initial optimism from your new love. You felt that this person appreciated you as a rare find and saw you as trustworthy (either because you are trustworthy or because you wish you were).

Jealousy only starts to surface when the initial fantasies of a perfect relationship break down. At some point, you start seeing the truth that your partner will not be completely satisfied with you. Your partner will start to want things that you cannot provide. This breakdown will happen even in the best of relationships. Even the best of relationships would have elements of disappointment and partial satisfaction.

When this transition starts to occur, suddenly the safety of your relationship feels threatened. If you could see it as a normal transition--that of course this notion that you could satisfy all needs alluring but wrong--and if you could imagine that the partner you have chosen also understands and accepts that there will be disappointments from the ideal--you might both tolerate the loss that is occurring. You might start to transition to a different relationship in which you and your partner accept the ways in which you want your relationship to evolve to make it more satisfying and to struggle with accepting the imperfection of coupling.

Instead, you may both try to keep the initial fantasy alive. Your jealousy picks up on the truth that you are disappointment to your partner, but you cannot tolerate that idea. So, you signal to your partner that you want absolute commitment. Your partner sees that you are insecure about being seen as disappointing in any way, and so tries to reassure you that a) they have no desires for anything more (which you know is not true because it is not true in any relationship) and b) they are not capable of cheating on you anyway (which you know is not technically true either because you believe that people are not good at tolerating their disappointments).

So begins the spiral of jealousy that you and your partner will co-create. You will insist on being fully satisfying. Your partner will assure you that nothing else could be the case. Meanwhile, your partner is starting to see how needy you are, and you are starting to see how naive your partner and it just leads to more escalation and more crazy-making demands and assurances.

Can you escape this cycle? If you are the jealous partner, you might have to unilaterally accept the following:

• You are not the perfect partner
• Your partner will realize that you are not the perfect partner
• Your partner may still choose you and tolerate your imperfections
• You are not going to get what you want by monitoring your partner
• You are not going to get what you want by acting possessive
• You, too, are not fully satisfied, and there are things you want to improve with your partner

Labels: couples therapy, intimacy, jealousy, marriage, relationships

- posted by Eric @ 10:58 AM

 
Regime Change
Many of us imagine making changes in our relationships. We may feel fervently that things need to change in our relationships for us to remain within them.

But, how likely are you to bring about a fundamental change in the dynamic  with your marital partner or in your family? I would make the claim that making such changes is a fairly rare occurrence. We often blame professionals (like myself--marriage counselors) because they often fail to bring about the change that would be required to make a relationship more satisfying. In reality, it takes rare people to take the risks and sustain the pressures to bring about the change in a family/couple dynamic that truly endure.

In recent months, I have found it interesting to think about what changes the world on a greater societal level and to imagine what ways such change mirrors the private changes in our personal worlds. What does it take to get fundamentally new rights for people who are oppressed? What would it entail to reform the way we educate students? What does it take to overthrow a regime and bring about wholesale reform in the values of a group of people.

Perhaps it is too extreme to make such comparisons. After all, you probably think of these changes as well beyond anything you might be capable of bringing about. And yet, the complexity of these changes stems from the way in which they require shaking loose from a deeply entrenched paradigm. Such paradigms are often foundational to whole subgroups of citizens and the ways they believe the world works. They form the bedrock of so many comfortable ideals and rituals.

I would make the claim that many marital issues stem from very similar foundational systemic realities and that getting a different paradigm to prevail will take similar upheaval and strength.

I remember watching SELMA, the recent documentary about Martin Luther King, Jr. The courage that it took for African American citizens to go into a restaurant at which they were not welcome and to stand up to the existing regime, only to get beaten down brutally, again and again, was almost painful to watch. These people were breaking laws. They had government officials literally beating them up. And yet they persevered. They stayed organized and focused against great personal threat. They required intense support and leadership. And even with all this effort, you might even agree that there is still work to do to really change the civil rights for African Americans today.

Often in relationships, the person who wants to make a change faces similar opposition. Usually one person in a relationship becomes uncomfortable with the status quo and while a potential change could make life better for that one person, there is often another person who has similar motivations to keep things as they have always been. That person feels comfort in the original arrangement and the evolution of that original arrangement almost certainly lines up nicely with the arrangement that both people came from in their pasts.

How many of us have the strength to see the wrongness of our current relationship AND stick with the inevitable opposition that will arise when we try to bring about something different? We might try and fail and the cost to our own stability if that occurs is often quite high (we might destroy the relationship in the process of trying and then have to face financial and psychological realities of being on our own). So many forces will try to revert things to the way that we have originally set things up. We will likely alienate our support system as we try to make changes--after all, some of the ways we established our relationship comes from our support system.

If you are demoralized about your relationship, one way to think about your frustration is to question what rights you want to fight for that you don't really have today. Be careful about assuming that rights that exist in the broader world also exist in the privacy of your own home. To really change your relationship often requires a deeper understanding of the "regime" under which you currently live. When you start to understand that regime, sometimes you might be horrified to see what you have co-created with a partner whom you "love". And when you think about what it will take to change the regime to give you rights you think you might desire, you might see even more darkness about your partner and yourself. In the face of that revelation, are you willing to stick with your convictions, organize yourself for the long haul, strategize and hold yourself to a plan?

Don't expect relationship change to come easily to you. People talk about how relationships are hard, but I think we don't realize the degree to which fundamentally changing any system--even a system that consists of just two people--requires nearly heroic effort that will push us to the limit of what we think we can reasonably handle. Given these demands, we should have some reverence for people who struggle with such changes--even if they fail--and recognize that the odds are quite low, albeit worth a lifetime of work for those who care enough to try.
- posted by Eric @ 2:38 PM

 
Do you hate your partner?
If you are reading this, there is a very good chance that you are not satisfied in your romantic relationship. You might feel that the problems between you and your partner are insurmountable and feel frustrated with the way that these problems seem to stick around.

But, would you go so far as to say that you hate your partner?

Hate is a very strong word, but then again, love relationships are very emotional places. If you are likely to hate anybody, your marital partner is not entirely a bad candidate to place some of these feelings. After all, there is no other person in your life that has as much of an influence on how you live your life than the person with whom you share it.

For all the talk about love in intimate relationships, we are quite a bit less comfortable with the idea that most of us feel some hatred to our partners. But, when we are honest with ourselves, most of us can connect to some of these feelings.

And the good news is that it is not necessarily a sign that something is going wrong.

What are some of the reasons that you rightfully hate your partner:

• Your partner controls aspects of your life where you don't get what you want
• Your partner does things that ignore your stated preferences
• Your partner acts selfishly and doesn't show remorse
• Your partner withholds intimacy and affection from you
• Your partner refuses to confront weaknesses and limitations that annoy you
• Your partner hides behind forgetfulness or lack of attention that impact your life
• Your partner abuses drugs and alcohol
• Your partner partakes in extramarital affairs
• Your partner takes away your choices while keeping choices for him/herself

- posted by Eric @ 3:25 PM

 
Confronting Family and Antwone Fisher
Among the topics that bring people into therapy, one of the most prevalent motivations involves the client's wish to seek closure with issues they face with their parents and other family members. Typically, the client feels wronged by a parent (often for legitimate reasons) and wants to finally tell the parent what a lousy job they have done in rearing them.

As a therapist, I feel very good about client's who would like to resolve issues with their family. I believe that in order for us to move on to other challenges in our growth as an adult, we need to confront our pasts and to discharge the energy that they take from us. All of us--regardless of the health of our relationships in our families while growing up--have some issues to clear up (in fact, given the complexity of family relationships, it would indicate a problem to me if a client told me that he or she did not have some lingering issues with their parents or siblings).

So, confrontation is good. But, the form that this confrontation takes requires some delicate thought and planning. In general, while clients often know that they want to take some steps in approaching their families, they also don't have ideas about what will produce results.

I recently watched Antwone Fisher, a Denzel Washington film from 2002. In the true story film, the title character (played by Derek Luke) must grapple with how he can approach his family and confront childhood experiences of abandonment and abuse. In doing so, he sets a fine example for how a character can succeed at achieving closure with his family.



Shortly after meeting Fisher, we see him running into problems serving in the Navy when he repeatedly becomes violent with other soldiers in his unit. As a result, his commanding officer sends him to a Navy psychologist (played by Denzel Washington) to evaluate his worthiness to stay enlisted in the armed services. Fisher builds a relationship with his psychologist and winds up confronting some of his experiences from his past, including physical abuse by his foster mother and questions about why his parents failed to play a role in his upbringing.

In the work that Fisher does with his psychologist, he demonstrates the first step in confronting one's family: he confronts himself. By revisiting his past and describing it to somebody else, he makes the his first move in confronting other people. To succeed in this step, we need to bring to awareness what realistically happened to us. We also need to come to grips with how these events effected us in our ability to live our lives as adults.

Frequently clients face difficulties with their evaluation of the effects of these past events on their current lives. They believe that they have been damaged by these events and that it holds them back. In some cases, prior events have indeed impeded my client's life, but more often, I find myself impressed with how my clients have already gotten beyond some of the pain that they experienced while growing up. Admitting to this progress feels risky. It seems to exonerate the people who caused this pain. Thus, a second facet of work in the phase of working with a therapist involves seeing oneself as strong and normal and intact (despite the things that have happened in the past). This healing occurs through the positive relationship formed with the therapist, and Antwone Fisher demonstrates this phase quite well.

After Antwone Fisher begins to accept himself and his experiences, he moves to a second phase of approaching people from his past. Again, Fisher sets a great example in some of the appropriate steps for succeeding in this phase. Two details stand out in his discussion with his foster mother, as a way of example. First, he does not hide that he has overcome his pain. He, in fact, declares that he is strong and has grown to be a good person. Second, he separates his discussion with his foster mother from a sign that he forgives her. Nor, for that matter does he try to get any form of apology (this relates to the first point, in that he does not feel that she owes him some compensation).

I have noticed, among my clients, that initial confrontations with family members fail because they do not follow Antwone Fisher's approach. First, they emphasize how their brokenness. Second, they demand an apology and an acknowlegement of the evil things that their family thrust upon them while growing up. It makes sense that clients will want to take such an approach. They define their goal in confrotation as getting retribution and punishing the people who hurt them in the past. Coming across as whole and functioning undermines the message that the prior pain had an effect. And, the desire for an apology allows the client to rightfully claim a role as a victim of their parent's hurtful behaviors.

Such an approach, however, rarely produces a positive result. When we see somebody as broken or as a victim (trying to pin their brokenness on us), we can put the blame back on the victim and free ourselves from feeling responsibility. Particularly when we, ourselves, feel like victims, we don't have a lot of sympathy for victimhood as an excuse for poor behaviors. So, a key aspect of confrontation involves come across as worthy of respect.

Finally, in Antwone Fisher's confrontations, he refrained from showing anger. Admittedly, he felt a lot of anger to his family for the troubled youth they created for him. However, at the time he confronts them, he does not come across as angry. He is honest and not willing to tolerate twisting of facts by his family, but he does not approach his family members to show that he's enraged with them.

This too, seems like a common pitfall of the confrontations that I see in my practice. Clients want to unleash their anger in their communicatin with their family. Once again, this has a counterintuitive effect. I consider anger a "hostile" emotion. Thus, when we show people our anger, we give them a message that we want to overpower them. We want to win. And, we want them to see us as capable of winning. Antwone Fisher demonstrated that he didn't care about winning. He had already won in accepting himself as a good person and he no longer needed his family members to confirm this for him.

In working with clients as they plan confrontations of family members, I encourage them to tone down their expressed anger to their family members. Instead, I help them to experience and communicate some of the more vulnerable emotions like sadness and shame. These emotions better reflect the actual experience of living with hurtful behaviors of people who are supposed to love us.

If you have issues that you would like to address with your family, I highly encourage you to see Antwone Fisher. It's both entertaining and exemplary in its handling of human relationships and the role of therapy in healing family pain. After viewing it, I'd be happy to talk with you about your particular situation or to set up therapy in Seattle for your particular issues. If you don't live in Seattle, we can arrange a phone conversation or an online chat as well. You can find my contact information on my website (see links at left).
- posted by Eric @ 5:05 PM

 
Hatred
I've been finding myself thinking a lot about hatred and how it applies to my clients lately. As a Couples Counselor in Seattle, I frequently wind up confronting my partnered clients about whether they experience hatred of each other. Most people have difficulty acknowledging that they do, at times, feel such intense negative feelings.

The issue of hatred has also come up in my practice as an individual therapist in Seattle regarding the hatred that some adult clients feel towards their parents. Many of these clients struggle with their hatred and deny its existence. Quite often, they do not realize that their parents may have them, too.

Part of accepting hatred as a healthy component in our significant relationships involves the acceptance of the paradox that both love and hate can exist at the same time. I might even argue love and hate must exist together in order for a relationship to thrive. Martin Buber writes eloquently on the mutual needs for both independence and together in a philosophical piece entitled "Distance and Relation". In his writing, he points out the unique quality of humans in their need for both distance from others--a sense of uniqueness--as well as the conscious need for affiliation. Given these dual needs and the obvious contradictions that they make, it seems quite reasonable that the very person who might invoke feelings of communion on some accounts might also invoke intense odious feelings in others.

We tend to deny this truth for various reasons, but perhaps the most important is the desire that somebody will love us unconditionally and will see all the good in us. Most relationships start in the euphoric state that denies that the other person has faults and, in the process, allows us to deny our flaws as well. In other words, initial love (whether romantic or parental) focuses on a sense of innocence and perfection. We develop in a way that initially accepts this idea of somebody being all good or all bad. Yet, over time, we know that as we get to know somebody else, we learn of their imperfections and their differences from ourselves. These differences highlight our own shortcomings and the initial ideals of unconditional love begin to fade.

As much as most people accept this notion of love fading, they do not accept the legitimacy of hating their loved ones in response to their disappointment and frustrations. I believe that we redirect those feelings in a number of unhealthy ways that may explain many of our psychological diagnoses and relationship failures.

For example, I see in my counseling in Seattle quite a few couples who feel that they cannot sustain their relationships because of the level of anger and hate they experience. Usually, one partner will declare this hatred from the other unacceptable and say that if it does not stop, he or she will leave the relationship. Because of the views of hatred as incompatible with love, this often resonates with the hating partner, who feels that (s)he must tone down the hatred in order to function as a reasonable partner. In a sense, the couple colludes to reduce the reality that hatred exists.

I believe that hatred may also explain some forms of depression. Often people talk about depression as anger turned inward or directed at oneself. In my practice, I have found that people often turn their anger inward because hating someone (especially a parent whom they view as loving) feels too dangerous and so they cut off their hating feelings and keep them inside. In these cases, I suspect that the client received overt and covert messages about the inappropriateness of hatred. Parents may have verbally condemned it. Or, in cases where children tried to express their hatred, the effect on the parent (who him or herself hoped for unconditional love from a child) proves to threatening to the child as the parent withdraws.

Anxiety sometimes seems to result from the fear of hatred. The anxious patient tends to fear the hatred of a parent and therefore feels an overwelming pressure to control his or her environment to reduce the chance of becoming the object of another person's hatred. Again, this effect might become enhanced by parents who themselves express their hatred but cannot tolerate the coexistence of that hatred with love.

Substance abuse and alcoholism seem to creep up around hatred issues. People drink (or use) to soothe their own feelings of being hated. They also rely on substances when they feel ashamed about their hatred. Because hatred has a taboo feeling to it, the cause of the seemingly hateful behaviors becomes the drugs. In other words, the excuse becomes "I don't hate you; I just act that way when I'm drunk". Coupled with our societal acceptance that addiction is a disease over which we have limited control, clients whose parents drank accept this notion that face value. Unfortunately, they also assume that they, too, will inherit the same lack of control. The result is a sense of powerlessness that helps to explain their parents hateful behaviors without acknowledging the actual hatred.

Through the discussion of hatred and the challenging of clients about their abilities to hate and tolerate hatred, people often find a deeper sense of meaning and explanation in their lives. Relationships that felt untenable become more acceptable when hatred can exist with love.

For more information on Marriage Counseling in Seattle, Couples Counseling in Seattle, or Therapy in Seattle, please visit my website at www.candell.org.

For an interesting read about Hatred, you might check out a book called Hatred by Willard Gaylin. Click on the link below to purchase it from Amazon.



- posted by Eric @ 9:24 AM

 
A Wasted Life?
Quite frequently, my clients seek therapy because they feel a sense of remorse about how they live their life. They feel as if they are wasting their life, not living it to its full potential.

Exactly what does it mean to waste one's life? I've found that it can translate to a number of interpretations. First, one wastes life if he has some particular skill talent and fails to utilize it to its full powers. Second, clients feel that they are wasting their life when they don't feel as if they are "changing the world" or "leaving the world a better place". Finally, some clients equate wasting life with feeling that they're being lazy or enjoying themselves too much.

It does not surprise me that I frequently hear about wasted life in my practice. In the modern world, we put an extraordinary emphasis on measuring the utility of our actions. We talk about establishing personal visions and attainable goals that we seek to systematically achieve. With the incredible technologies at our disposal, we actually do achieve a lot of these goals in reasonably short periods of time. And, we equate our achieving of these goals as a mark that we make the world better somehow. Our technologies of communication and transportation allow the impacts of our actions to have universal impacts--effecting not just the people near us but countless strangers around the world. In our competition to stand out, we equate the import of our achievements with the broadness of their direct impact. A person who sells software to millions of users globally has more impact than an account who helps a handful of people with their tax return.

Strangely, the achievement of the goals that people set often does not alleviate their sense of wasting life. With each goal ticked off the list, we feel a sense of longing for the next goal that will continue to make our life meaningful, lest we grow complacent or rest on our laurels. Furthermore, even after achieving a world-changing goal, we realize that we cannot really see the huge change that we thought we would bring on. Our achievements lead to our feeling empty and pursuit of something bigger and more grand.

Thinking about this dilemma--this need for life to make a difference yet feeling empty when you achieve the things you thought would make that difference--I have come to the conclusion that we have an inflated estimation of how much we can control how we change the world. Sure, I believe that virtually everything we do does change the world. I just suggest that the ways in which our actions translate to changes in the world go well beyond our ability to predict. What seems like an important contribution to the world of science might have untold consequences as people use or misuse its implications. Or, what seems like a small gesture to a friend might have profound impacts as its domino effect ripples through the network of people who that person touches in turn.

I also think that we've inadvertently made an error in focusing so much on achievable goals as a source of progress in our lives. Ironically, if we can identify an unachievable goal, we will always have our work cut out for ourselves--and a sense that we have not wasted our lives.

So, what does this suggest we do to make sure that we don't waste our lives? I believe that it all comes down to pursuing the things that selfishly motivate us, picking projects that give our own lives individual meaning. Where possible, we should attempt to understand why we derive meaning from these activities. What do they have in common? What clues does this give us about what future activities we should persue to achieve this personal satisfaction in the future?

By looking at the things that we most enjoy (and being honest with ourselves about what those things are), we can often find a sense of coherence that suggests a pursuit that we might never fully achieve. A goal that is larger than we are but that guides us in our future activities. This grandness and unconquerable aspect of our goal actually provides comfort because we know we will always have things to do in our quest. At the same time, we must have faith that in our pursuit of our passions, we will still manage to touch the world in many varied and unpredictable ways.

We will not waste our life if we pursue activities that appeal to our personal sense of meaning. In practice as a therapist in Seattle I help my clients to find the common links between the activities that they most enjoy and to frame them in a pursuit that they will never fully achieve (and hence will keep them engaged for a long time to come). Often, getting to these personal sources of meaning requires examining the impact that our families and friends have had on our values for what we ought to do. But, for my clients who have a sense that they are in the process of wasting their lives, the identification of a life long and selfish curiosity often lifts the depression that comes from feeling hopeless about how they can impact their world.
- posted by Eric @ 5:51 PM