The problem is all inside your head, she said to me
The answer is easy if you take it logically
I’d like to help you in your struggle to be free
There must be fifty ways to leave your lover
50 Ways to Leave Your Lover – Paul Simon

What’s the message we’re giving here? Aren’t we interested in improving relationships, in staying closer? Why do we recommend you leave your lover?

When we are ready to hear that there is a way in which this might be true then we can be open to change. And as with many truths, it’s paradoxical. If we have the option of leaving then we have the possibility of truly staying, and staying in a new way. Let us explain.

The Unconscious Deal

Many of us have felt incomplete in our lives, and many of us continue to do so. Starting from our early days, we began to look outside ourselves for what it is we thought could complete us.

This is such a valiant search, there’s such a deep desire to be whole, to heal wounds engendered possibly by family and by our world in general.

But it’s a hard search, leading often to addictive behaviours, to drugs, disconnected sex, self-hate, self-aggrandisement, depression, over work, over emphasis on money. The list is endless. And one key element of the search can be our relationship to our lover, our intimate partner. We ask (often without even realising we are asking) “How can this person heal me, how can they fill the yawning hole within me, the ache of emptiness and wounding?” or “How can they represent something for me, something that reflects back my wholeness?”

So our lover becomes the attempted salve for a problem that’s a terror we hide even from ourselves. What does this do to our relationship? Well, the relationship can’t be free, if it comes with deep conditions placed upon it, conditions that distort our interactions with our lover despite our insistence that all is well.

And no matter how much we struggle with this and deny it, the truth is it’s a conditional love; one in which an unconscious “deal” has been made with our partner. Despite how much we might both say “No, the relationship’s fine, let’s get on with life”, cracks can’t help but show. Paint them over, buy the next house or car, go on the next holiday… but the wound remains.

Another Way

Another way is to begin to look at this set-up. Learn to withdraw our attachments from our intimate partner. Although it’s true that some couples need to actually split, in many cases, instead, this withdrawal from unconscious enmeshment is the “leaving” that’s needed.

Dive deep into the wound of incompleteness, worthlessness, lack, and see this as the path to becoming whole. Discover for ourselves that what we lacked could never have been found outside ourselves, it was always waiting for us, deep within.

And in rediscovering this truth (which we may have never consciously known) – that what we sought was in the depths of ourselves – we then have the possibility of re-connecting with our partner in a new way, free from conditions. True intimacy can come only with freedom, when we are not driven by the addictive need for the other.

(Unexamined conditions are very different from conscious agreements that we might make with our partner. It’s the unexamined conditions that are the pollutants.)

Leave But Stay

So, to paraphrase, consider this possibility: “Leave But Stay”. Do the work, and when we’ve “left” the relationship, learn to “stay” in a completely new way.

Most of us know that hormones play a big role in how we feel, but we don’t know how or why. We know that men have testosterone and we know about women having their monthly moods… but there is obviously much more to it than that.

We want to share a little about how our interactions are influenced by our stress hormones. This can have an impact on how we relate to others and in particular you might recognise some of this playing out in your couple relationship.

The world has changed. Imagine a time when men protected the community, went out and hunted and fought. They used their stress hormone, testosterone, and would come back depleted. The women would nurture and use their oxytocin (female stress hormone). Nurturing for a woman is a stress relieving activity. Oxytocin has that effect, it’s relaxing to give but then the woman needs to be replenished. This happened, then, by spending time with the other women; being listened to, talking and pampering each other and working together when the men were out hunting etc.

Now very often both men and women go out to work, both using their respective stress hormones and then quite likely come home depleted. This is where we can get into trouble. We need to understand the differences at this point. Men and women replenish their stress hormones in different ways.

Men need 30 times more testosterone than women. Testosterone is replenished by “zoning out”. There are many ways to do it: meditating, watching TV, playing in the shed. The point here is that the man needs to shut out all stressing factors to fill back up again. It may only take 30 minutes or so but he has to shut out all things he finds stressful… that means even his partner if he finds her “demands” stressful. Have you ever wondered how a man can just sit down and “relax” when there is so much that needs to be done? This is why. He has to!

If the woman has had a stressful day of doing, listening, giving and not receiving she may well have used all of her oxytocin and needs to feel she is important, her needs are being met, that she is cared for and pampered to replenish her stress hormone. She literally “has nothing left to give”.

So let’s paint a picture. It’s the end of the day. You both arrive home. The rubbish needs to go out, the food needs to be cooked and you are both ready for a rest but things have to be done. What happens? Do you notice this difference playing out? As a woman do you feel shut out or hurt if your partner “disappears” to do other things when you want to connect or have help with something? As a man do you feel “nagged” if your partner wants to talk or needs something as soon as you walk in the door?

Understanding the differences in the ways we replenish our stress hormones can help us understand each other’s needs and not take them so personally. It is normal for a guy after a stressful day to need some down time before he gets back up and is able to interact and help. It helps if a man’s need to replenish is respected and understood. It helps too if men can talk about what is happening when they need “space”.

Women need to receive attention for oxytocin to be replenished. Although women feel a relief in giving, they need to be aware that being nurtured, pampered and listened to is essential for building up what is needed to be able to give again. So a chat to a girlfriend on the phone (if the friends a good listener) or going to get your hair done makes more sense!

These needs can be fulfilled in the relationship too – listening to one another and nurturing each other’s needs. The work for the couple is to recognise each other’s needs and express them so the partners can support each another in replenishing stress hormones – this helps create a feeling of peace at home.

(For more on this topic, see John Gray’s new book Venus on Fire, Mars on Ice: Hormonal Balance – The Key to Life, Love and Energy.)

In the article Bert Hoff on MenWeb and Fathers we shared Bert’s process around reconnecting to a father we possibly never had or didn’t want. Later in the same talk Bert gave a great summary of a psychological truth that’s been both well and badly described – that being the shadow.

So here’s Bert on the shadow (again interviewed by Lion Goodman).

Bert: There’s another aspect of the Men’s movement that needs to be brought out in the short time we have left. Robert Bly worked a lot with Marion Woodman, and one of the tapes that we have on MenWeb is Facing the Shadow in Men and Women. They did a fabulous workshop on Men and Women…

Lion Goodman: When you refer to the shadow, could you say what that is for you?

B: The side of ourselves that we don’t want to admit that we have, and if you repress it it’s going to come out and bite you in the rear end.

L: Oh yeah, that part of me, that part I know!

B: I didn’t say that… Think of a person who drives you up the wall. And when you think of that person think of the qualities that drive you up the wall. Now look at yourself. See, John can be sitting there picking his nose in public, but that’s just John being John. But Joe throwing that racquet down, that really pisses me off… You know, sometimes we’re ready to accept anyone, that’s just the way they are, but sometimes something somebody does just really gets to us. Well, that’s your shadow. You don’t want to admit that that’s what you have in yourself.

L: Good, so that’s another part of the Men’s movement, looking down at the parts of ourselves that we don’t want to talk about, don’t want to admit, don’t want to even look at or admit that that’s a part of our deeper inner selves.

B: And it works beautifully with [an earlier presenter who’d admitted that due to his advanced age he might not remember some facts]. He was doing straight shadow work with you when he said “I’m 90 and my memory might be slipping”. When he brings out the shadow that he doesn’t want to admit, and openly acknowledges it before you can even be thinking of it, then he’s done his shadow work.

L: He can admit to what he doesn’t want to be known as, and then suddenly it’s not hidden any more.

So here’s another facet of telling the truth in relationships: being prepared to dig for our shadow and bring into the light whatever is revealed – either so-called “bad” or so-called “good” aspects. For example, you might hide anger – or it might be joy that you keep hidden.

When these aspects are repressed, it’s energy that’s being repressed – which in being released becomes available for creative expression in our relationships.

Here’s a fantastic resource we’ve just discovered, primarily for and about men, but likely of interest to women as well: MenWeb. It’s a sprawling and quirky repository of writings and speakings from over the years, by such original thinkers in the Men’s movement as Robert Bly, Robert A. Johnson, James Hillman, Marion Woodman, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Robert Moore and Sam Keen.

Bert Hoff has been the driving force behind this site, and here he is in interview with Lion Goodman on the recent Ultimate Men’s Summit. It’s a piece where he speaks gently of a powerful technique available to any of us with fathers, for clearing unfinished business:

L: Let’s talk about fathers for a minute Bert… a lot of men I know either had violent fathers that they pushed away from, or they had absent fathers that they yearned for, or they had mysterious fathers that where there but were cold and incommunicative. Do you have any suggestions for the men in this conference and who somehow want to reconnect to the father that they never had or didn’t want?

B: I have an example that they might like.

L: Is this something you can lead us through now?

B: … I can lead you part way through it now…
[speaks slowly with long pauses]… Sit back and take a deep breath… close your eyes and take another deep breath… now visualise a chair opposite you… your father walks in… and he sits down in the chair… you look into his eyes… and you tell him what you need to tell him… [long pause]… you’re telling him about all the feelings that you have… [very long pause]… reach down inside yourself… find those feelings, and express those feelings to him… he does not make any replies, this is your opportunity to tell him what you need to tell him… [long pause] Now thank him for his time, and tell him “I love you, I know you did the best you could with what you had”… [pause] Thank him, rise from the chair and leave the room.

Now return from the space you’re in into the real world… five, four, three, two, one… we’re now in the real world. Now when you’re in the real world, write a letter. You don’t need to mail it… take the time to write a letter, and then when you’re complete with writing the letter, do something with it ritualistically. You can mail it, you can burn it, you can send your thoughts into the universe… whatever ritual will help you close with your father. And I hope that that is a lot of help to a lot of men.

L: That was great Bert, thank you. And probably to women too, we have women on the line as well, and women have issues with their fathers in the same way as men do of course, women have also experienced the absent fathers, the violent fathers, the unknowable fathers, and we all have that father wound.

We highly recommend the wealth of knowledge and understanding on MenWeb. And of course, we recommend the process of psychotherapy in working through family of origin issues, around our fathers and our mothers, issues that if unaddressed can keep us locked in unconscious patterns of defence and pain.

We recently posted an article on the trio of Attention, Appreciation and Affection from the recent Art of Love 2011 online series. And here’s another snippet from the series that also caught our eyes, from an interview with Gay and Kathleen Hendricks on a common issue for couples: how to break potentially endless cycles of conflict.

Gay:

The adrenaline that’s roaring around in your system is a powerfully addictive drug, and many people are actually addicted to the adrenaline of conflict so that they depend on it kind of for a fix and to keep the relationship interesting. And we call that having a wargasm. It’s a big energy experience you have in yourself, but not a very positive one.

And so what needs to happen there is you need to shift out of that state of consciousness. One good way to do that, that we teach couples, is to drop out of words at that point and just make sounds. Because it’s more to the point because you’re actually functioning kind of in gorilla consciousness at that moment.

And so you might as well just drop out of human language and just growl. And we’ve had couples that tried that and about ten seconds into it they dissolve into laughter. They can’t keep the conflict state of consciousness anymore.
So that would be one of the quickest recommendations I could make, is just drop the words out, make some sounds and kind of blow the energy of it out so that you’re not kind of sitting on a whole bunch of pent up energy.

And then try to talk about what’s going on in some kind of way that you’re feeling sad about something, or you’re scared about something.

To get out of that anger state of consciousness, it’s good to shift to talking about something you feel sad about or something you feel scared about. Because that takes you down out of the super riled-up state of consciousness with anger.

Katie:

One of the things you can add to dropping the words out, is noticing what you’re doing in your body. Because always when people are in a conflict, they’re doing some gesture, some repeated thing.

It could be poking your finger at your partner, it could be folding your arms and standing there like a sentinel. And we find that people exaggerate what they’re doing. It seems counter-intuitive, but it actually works really well.

If you exaggerate what you’re doing and drop the words out, you can actually get some insight into what filter you’re speaking out of. Or what trance you’re in, or what role you’ve taken on in that moment, that has you seeing your partner as the enemy. And so we have people begin to play with that and it works really quickly.

What a way to turn a really tense and painful situation into an illuminating and even humorous experience!

We’ve started listening to the online series Art of Love 2011 and highly recommend our email readers follow along while it’s still happening.

A segment that really caught our attention was in the Kick-off Webinar, where the presenters speak with Deepak Chopra on his three important “A”s of relationships. We share these here as they’re all ones that arise as issues in our practice.

Attention

Attention means deep listening, being totally present, having empathy, trying to see from our partner’s perspective. It means we’re not in a hurry to give advice and react; not in a hurry to interrupt. Our body language actually shows we are deeply listening.

Chopra reports that, according to neuroscientists, when we practice deep listening the amygdala of the person speaking and the hippocampus of the listener start to “cool down” (show less activity). The amygdala is the place in the brain where we process fear and anxiety. So we’re actually cooling down those primitive parts of the speaker’s brain just by listening attentively to them. We’re changing not only their brain activity but the actual structure of the brain, which depends on proteins being laid down and that requires gene modulation. We’re influencing the on-off switches of another person’s genes in their neurons by deep listening.

Appreciation

Appreciating our partner has a direct effect on their health and well-being. Recent interesting data from Gallop shows the following statistics:

• If a manager criticises his or her subordinates then disengagement grows to 25% and people who work for that manager get sick
• If the manager ignores them, disengagement grows to 45%
• But if a manager notices a single strength and appreciates that strength, disengagement falls to less than 1% and people stay healthy.

(Aside from the disastrous effects on the couple relationship, which is our focus here, economically this is said to cost $280 billion to the U.S. economy.)

Affection

Affection is deep caring and knowing that we are there for the other person.

In the language of neuroplasticity, we can say this kind of engagement in relationship rewires the brain in a direction where love actually becomes a healing force. It influences hormones, cell repair, homeostasis (biological self-regulation and self-repair).

So it turns out that love is the most powerful healing that can happen. And this is so through a phenomenon called limbic resonance. When people are in love their brains are resonating, their hormones are resonating and they are healing each other and monitoring each other’s biology and moving each other in the direction of healing.

We recently posted The Golden Rules of Relationships which highlighted the importance of feeling our feelings.

Another way to say this is “Stop the violence within ourselves”. What violence? That caused by the self-imposed requirement, based on our experience in the world, to push down how we really feel, how we would naturally react.

Soldier’s Heart

We listened to a compelling audio piece (part of the recent Ultimate Mens Summit) in which Edward Tick of the U.S Soldier’s Heart talked passionately about the urgent need to provide tools to re-humanise returned service people and those who have been living in traumatic situations:

The crusaders of the Middle Ages were considered, even after they came back from war, even though the wars were considered holy and blessed by the church … the crusaders were considered soiled and that they had fallen from grace, and that they had to perform penance for three years, non-violent penance, rebuilding the world, before they were able to take communion again and be considered to have worked their way back into holiness. We absolutely need to retrain people, to re-humanise people when they’ve been trained to kill, whether it’s in the military or the inner city or in prison … we do de-humanise people systematically and they ache to be re-humanised.

What Ed’s taking about is an extreme case of what’s being played out in some relationships: people so hurt by trauma that a war continues to be played out. And here is where “Feel You Feelings” becomes an imperative, and also a task of some proportion.

Rehumanising the Relationship

We need to remember that the relationship that has become a battle ground needs to be rehumanised, and that there often needs to be some kind of ritual (non-violent penance) to enable that to occur.

Some couples do this by daily recommitment to the process of change; some are helped in couples therapy to take this path of non-violent transformation.

We’re excited to hear about a new book From Illness to Stillness due out soon, by Michael Harrington.

From the Introduction

Uncovering your innermost being releases a wondrous diamond. Once it begins to emerge from the layers of conditioning, a realization dawns: you are ageless and timeless. When every free instant goes into this quest, you will no longer experience grace as the happenstance of a unique experience. It will be seen as the constant presence of all that is.

Illness is a blessing that offers a great opportunity. Sickness and dis-ease are catalysts, divine karmas that offer us a chance to pull up our wheelchair, prop up the hospital bed, lounge on the couch and rest under the tree of good tidings. An illness has oriented us towards the inner quest, highlighting the only reality.

A chronic illness was certainly not anything I thought would be part of my journey. I’m the health coach, the guy who climbed the Casaval Ridge of Mount Shasta, rode century bike rides and helped people restore and optimize their health. Besides, it wouldn’t look good on my resume:

‘Health Coach with chronic, undiagnosed illness now accepting new clients’. No, it wasn’t supposed to go this way. I believed that optimal health was in my control. If I took good care of myself, exercised, practiced hatha yoga, did Chinese energetic exercises, ate organic foods & drank organic juices, ingested high-grade super supplements- I’d be well.

After two years of chronic illness, I realized that sickness just happens, like everything else in life. Maybe it stays a day, maybe weeks or months, or it lasts the rest of your life. What if it did last the rest of my life?! Did it really matter if a mass of intense sensations, thoughts and feelings, turned into a story called illness, continued to be part of experience?

When chronic illness hit ‘my body’, it was originally interpreted as a disabling force. It was actually a fire demanding a deeper sincerity. As I began to include and acknowledge everything, witnessing the simplicity of what is, through eyes unclouded with right and wrong, this or that, a more complete recognition came to the fore. From this illuminating, but entirely natural perspective, life cannot be seen as a malicious force holding you down. Instead it is a magnificent orchestration unfolding in the most beautiful ways, helping you to unveil your own authentic, human design. I uncovered and released anger patterns, protective defenses, family & intimate relationship issues, covert and overt depression—all of the things that I had hidden from, spiritually-bypassed and separated from ‘all the rest’. The illness, at first seen as a robber who had kicked the door in and stolen my life, was in fact uncovering what was most dear. The greatest sickness, the only true llness, is forgetting what we are. Whether we are conscious of it or not, our entire lives we are attempting to ‘remember’ what we are. This ‘remembering doesn’t happen through the filter of mind but via the clear space of our innermost being.

Today millions of people are living with chronic illness. A large portion of that group are so debilitated they cannot work and have full time caregivers. Some are on the street, homeless ‘throwaways’, labeled drug addicts, dragging themselves around like zombies in ‘Night of the Living Dead’. One of the main reasons this illness epidemic has come about: We are being systematically and purposefully bombarded with chemical pollutants and toxins- in astronomical proportions. Our bodies are being forced to cope with some of the most deadly poisons man has ever known: through our water, food, aerial spraying, industry and just about everywhere we turn.

It is my sincere hope that if you or someone in your sphere has been given a disease label by the Medical Establishment, undergone a gauntlet of procedures, tests and surgeries, or inhaled pharmaceutical medications that have left you feeling even more depleted and sick, that I may be able to point you towards potential alternatives that are more in alignment with nature, remedies that actually treat the underlying toxicities.

Like a tree in the forest during a storm our body, when sick, is undergoing a transformation. It might have been knocked to the ground but the root is alive. The tree-body has been forced to turn all its energies in a renewed focus- towards the essential –and must find a way to reach the sunlight. We don’t know what is going to happen to our body (the tree); the old form is being rearranged. If you have ever been in a forest at the end of a storm, right after the intensity, there is an unfathomable stillness. It was always there but now you really notice it; that deep recognition is the opportunity encapsulated in illness.

Let’s talk about the Golden Rules of Relationships.

These are the “make or break” rules for increasing intimacy. We either embrace them, or the relationship stagnates (or worse). So here they are.

Feel Your Feelings

Feel your feelings is about checking in with ourselves, finding out what is really going on inside emotionally. This might at first be experienced as a physical feeling (“I feel heat as I notice I am getting angry”). Or it might be getting in touch with an underlying sadness or depression.

These experiences can be explored and then be spoken of truthfully to our partner (see Tell The Truth below).

Tell The Truth

We were recently listening to an audio piece by Neale Donald Walsch on relationships where, in his inimitable style, he speaks of his top three rules for relationships. In no particular order, these turn out to be:

1. Tell the Truth.
2. Tell the Truth.
3. Tell the Truth (Neale’s now shouting).

It’s that simple really, the relationship can’t move unless truth-telling gets to this level of importance.

And truth-telling, to be really effective, is about our feelings. To tell the truth about our feelings is to be willing to show who we are, to be vulnerable, and this is the key to increasing intimacy.

Keep Your Commitments

Last year we posted an article The Hendricks and the Essential Co-Commitments We want to ask, How are you going with these? That’s because we know how important they are, and how effective they can be (in our own experience, in our own relationship).

And to gently ask, if they don’t seem so important, what’s standing in the way to them being stated in your relationship, in being a regular topic of conversation with your partner?

If you’d like support with these Golden Rules, please give us a call.

Well, it can be! The theme of this post comes from After the Honeymoon: How Conflict Can Improve Your Relationship , a book which, among other things, investigates how conflict can be transformed to improve relationships. Daniel Wile starts with some basic, important rules about talking in couple relationships, which we’ve summarised below.

Rules for Good Communication

• Make “I” statements rather than “you” statements. (For example, “I feel… “, rather than “You shouldn’t have…”)
• Don’t use “always” and “never”. (“You’re always saying that!”)
• Don’t interrupt the other
• Use reflective listening. (“I hear you saying …. Is this right?”)
• Don’t assume what the other’s doing. (“You’re just trying to annoy me.”)
• Stay on one topic
• Don’t rake over resentments from the past
• Leave out the irrelevant details. (“No, it was Tuesday that happened, not Monday”)
• Don’t name-call. (”You’re stupid”)
• Don’t compound statements with old complaints. (“And while we’re talking about this, what about when you…”).

Starting Points

These are all great pointers to making talking in couple relationships less dangerous. They’re starting points.

For Daniel Wile however, it’s important to remember that they’re just that – starting points. As we work with couples, we can get much further when we consider why these rules continually get broken. In so doing, we’re dropping down to the level of the feelings and truths below these behaviours.

In other words, we’re asking: what do the hearts want, of these two individuals, locked in such hurtful and draining interactions? These are the kinds of inquiry we can conduct in the safe, supportive space of couples therapy.