Getting stuck is all too common for many couples. We want things to move forward smoothly and consistently. The truth is, having problems isn’t the problem. Getting stuck and not being able to solve problems … that’s the problem.
If you’ve ever played a musical instrument you know the experience of practicing a piece, making a mistake, stopping and starting over again only to make the same mistake again. The spot where things go bad can acquire an energy that’s difficult to overcome. Each time you approach that spot there’s a tendency to anticipate a mistake and therefore an increased likelihood that the mistake will actually occur. Because relationships operate in patterns or cycles, couples experience this phenomenon often. The persistence of the stuck places can be incredibly frustrating. Here are five tips for what to do when you’re feeling that familiar and frustrating stuck spot in your relationship. 1. Take a “revolutionary pause.” The revolutionary pause is more than just stepping back and counting to ten. It’s all about what you do when you’ve stepped back. It isn’t a passive waiting. It’s very active. Taking a revolutionary pause means giving yourself an opportunity to take in the big picture of what is happening. Feeling stuck inspires a natural inclination to focus intently on the specific circumstances of your “stuckness.” In that moment it can be very helpful to locate yourself in the larger pattern of your relationship. Once you’ve located yourself in the pattern, you can more easily say, “Oh, this is just a particular spot in our relationship. It isn’t the whole of the relationship. By noticing that it’s only a spot, you give yourself a chance to gain a different, more productive, perspective. 2. Shake it off. Much of how we are in relationships is physical. Most of us are inclined to forget that. We tend to think thoughts are the primary source of information. Actually, our bodies inform us all the time. Tension, for example, clearly shows up in the body. And, getting stuck usually brings on tension. If you’ve ever watched a nature program where the cheetah is chasing the gazelle you will know that on those occasions when the gazelle escapes the cheetah, the gazelle does an interesting thing. As soon as she knows she’s safe, she does a massive body shrug. She literally shakes off the trauma that her body is holding. So, the next time you find yourself in a standoff with your partner, consider taking a moment to retreat to a private space and shake it off. From head to toe, move your body as if you were shrugging off something unwanted. 3. Cultivate curiosity. Problems are not solved by repeatedly applying a familiar “solution.” The hallmark of a good scientist/researcher/inventor is curiosity. When we allow “stuckness” to take hold, it typically has a paralyzing effect. Introducing curiosity can loosen things up remarkably. Ask yourself things like, “What am I really trying to accomplish?” Or, “I wonder what I’m doing that makes my partner so defensive.” Or, “Who does my partner remind me of when we get to this stuck place?” Questioning yourself in an open and curious way can lead to a different stance that can, in turn, lead to a different outcome. 4. Pay attention to the choreography of the moment. People aren’t just stuck emotionally or intellectually. They are also stuck in space and time. Instead of standing your ground, walking away, or closing in for the “kill,” consider moving toward your partner with openness and acceptance. Sometimes the notion of taking a “time out” and leaving the scene becomes just another predictable feature in the pattern of “stuckness.” So, think about not leaving. Instead take on an open posture. Make eye contact in a softer way. Pay attention to how facial expression might be contributing to the impasse you’re experiencing. 5. Consider the relationship you have with your own emotions. In any interaction, you have two relationships occurring simultaneously. There’s the relationship you have with the person opposite you and the relationship you have with your own emotions. If your relationship with your emotions is a bad one, in all likelihood it will negatively affect your relationship with the person opposite you. When you have a good relationship with your emotions, they are neither in charge nor ignored. Emotions are an alarm system that appropriately warns you that something needs your attention. They are like a smoke alarm. When the alarm sounds it’s important to determine if it’s just the toast that’s burning or if your drapes are on fire. It’s not OK to take the battery out of the alarm any more than it’s OK to call 911 ever time it goes off. Feeling stuck is most often the result of having a bad relationship with heightened emotions. We wind up calling 911 when, in fact, it’s just a case of burnt toast. When it comes to getting unstuck, the most important thing to remember is that more of the same is never a good idea. In fact, the definition of being stuck is doing the same thing over and over without experiencing progress.
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The eleventh window is aesthetic morality. Aesthetic refers to our experience of beauty. Morality speaks to our experience of goodness. This window contains the polarities of ugliness and evil as well. There are critical experiences in humans, particularly in the developing experience of the child, in which the person learns to see beauty as good and goodness as beautiful. That connection seems to be vital to the subsequent emergence and personal growth of self in adults. It is further reinforced by the antithesis, experiencing ugliness as evil, and evil as ugly. Such a connection seems to better assure that the person will stay responsible for self, will remain congruent, will live out of his or her own self-discipline, and will maintain a constancy of personal choices.
Psychologist Carol Gulligan, in A Different Voice, wrote the the "essence of moral decision is the experience of choice and the willingness to accept responsibility for that choice." Such choice comes most reliably out of an aesthetic sense. Experiencing evil as ugly seems to be an incomparably more powerful motivation to choice or change than any social feeling that something is wrong. And an inner sense of the beauty of goodness appears to be a far stronger reinforcement of personal morality than the usual religious or social reinforcement . Perhaps we see this power more vividly because both are such deeply personal and inner experiences. Goodness and beauty resonate with self while evil and ugliness both seem almost synonymous with nonexperience. Taken from The Windows of Experience by Malone and Malone The tenth window is play. Children, of course, are natural players. They frolic if given half a chance. Play is a natural capacity of enormous intensity and vital energy that often is diminished through unrelenting socialization. Nonetheless, it remains the most powerful window to growth experience for the developing child, and continues as such for the adult. It is as the Chinese philosopher Mencius said, "The great man is he who does not lose his child's heart." Through play, we explore our external and internal worlds.
Language (like most of our fundamental nonverbal communicative sensitivities) is learned through play. The books used to teach the three- or four-year-old child to read are almost always literature of play. Dr. Suess's books are a wonderful example. Our basic moral and personal ethical values are by and large learned in play, usually in the play of children with each other. Thus, play is the experience in which we most readily learn to be both intimate and close. This is why it is a striking paradox that most adults come to believe that being intimate means being serious. Nothing could be further from the truth. Being serious in our sexual experiences provides sex therapists with more of their clients than all other reasons combined! If we were able to observe and tabulate all of the genuine and meaningful intimate experiences between couples, the majority would be playful, and the very best would be more like frolic. Lose the capacity for play, and we make self-diminishment not only likely, but almost a certainty. Taken from The Windows of Experience by Malone and Malone The ninth window is attentiveness, the ability to easily and constantly use our environment to nourish ourselves. It is clear when we think of our breathing and air, our energy and food, our survival and mutual protection, that we do not live alone in the world...albeit how we deal wth our ecology and nutrition suggest that our awareness of this fact is not very clear. We tend to forget that we rely on others in general to help nourish our self-being. Other persons, other beauty, other truth, other life...the rest of nature nurtures us. "Everything that lives," wrote William Blake in The Book of Thel, "lives not alone, nor for itself." Our being has to attend as well as be attended to, just as do other's being; otherwise, all beings shrivel and die. Our early years must concretize that attentiveness, an important precursor of subsequent self-being. Without it we are at risk.
Taken from The Windows of Experience by Malone and Malone The eighth window is making do or personal surrender. Making do has to do with our capacity to fit together with others. It has to do with the learned ability to be in the world, to commingle with that world while at the same time maintaining our own being. Making do is a major relational component of one's self. Simply being ourselves in our world as it is. We must live in our relationships with other people as they are. We must live where we are, with whom we are, doing what we are doing together, when we are doing it. We must make do. We surrender our own special needs in order to maximize the experience available to us. Those developmental experiences that teach the value of making do, without suggesting either passivity or rebellion, increase our capacity for self-being.
Taken from The Windows of Experience by Malone and Malone. The seventh window is freedom or freedom of choice. We tend to think of freedom as being free from someone or something. Free from debt. Free from disease. Free from obligation. In its original meaning, however, the word had much more to do with being free to be someone. Freedom is an inner capacity to bbe who we are, free from inner personal constraints, even though there can be external restraints on our being. In that sense as Nelson Mandela demonstrated, one can be free even if one is in jail, or living under a dictatorship, or, more immediately, living with a controlling spouse or lover. "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing," wrote psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl. "The last of human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances--to choose one's own way.
Freedom describes one's ability to choose, not simply where to be, or what to do, or when to do it (for sometimes the choices are restrained), but rather to choose to be, to think our own thoughts, to feel our own feelings, and to choose how we live within the confines of the realities of the world we live in--even if that world is confining and arbitrary. To be peaceful, loving and passionately present in the presence of another who is trying to control us is our true freedom. Not to be free in this sense--to cease making personal choices--leads to the loss of our full self-being. Taken from The Windows of Experience by Malone and Malone. The sixth window of experience is presence, which means being there, in the world. We see presence dramatically in young children before they are socialized by the world in general and the educational system in particular. I recently sat with a depressed mother and her seven-year-old son. The mother was complaining in a rambling way, and I was simply looking at her. The boy was looking at a comic book he had brought with him. The mother was silent for a moment, and then asked, "Why are you looking at me?" Without looking up, the son answered for me, "Because you are more important than the telephone." That was a clear experiential description of presence.
The child is likely to lose much of that direct insight into presence. Most of us do as we are socialized. But one hopes he will regain enough of it in his adult life to make self-being possible. Absence characterizes selficide--either the absence of our being or the absence of our relationship to the world we live in. Thomas Wolfe was speaking about such absence in Of Time and the River: "We get together and talk, and say we think and feel and believe in such a way, and yet what we really think and feel and believe we never say at all." Unlike children, most adults are seldom present. Taken from The Windows of Experience by Malone and Malone You never know what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you've never seen before. A pair of somebody's old shoes can do it. Almost any movie made before the great sadness that came over the world after the Second World War, a horse cantering across a meadow, the high school basketball team running out onto the gym floor at the start of a game. You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.
They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next. Frederick Buechner The fifth window of experience is congruence. It is an essential quality of self. Congruence means personal harmony. More concretely it refers to the harmonious integration of a person's thoughts, feelings and behaviors. The absence of such harmony characterizes all forms of self-diminishment. If our thinking is different from our feeling, then our personalities are literally split. If we are angry at our lover about doing something for him, but we do it because we think we are being helpful to him, we are diminished as persons. If our behavior does not honestly reflect how we think and feel, then we are not really ourselves. These incongruences or disharmonies in people are a substrate of all personal psychological "illnesses." The experience of living in the harmony of thought, feeling and behavior is essential to the healthy self. It is the true being of being in the world in good faith. Congruence is most commonly referred to as integrity.
Taken from The Windows of Experience by Malone and Malone The fourth window of experience is self-discipline or participation. "The notion of looking on at life, " wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupery in Flight to Arras, "has always been hateful to me. What am I if I am not a participant? In order to be, I must participate." Young children accept the authority of their parents. They listen for a variety of reasons, perhaps out of fear, but just as likely out of respect. Either way, children listen with deference, and thus the voice of conscience is established. Such a voice, though necessary, leaves growing persons with the subsequent labor of establishing their own voices. Yet only through that process can they determine how they will participate in the world. They may well adopt many of their parents' values. But by first questioning them and then finally choosing them, they make the values their own.
They will then be listening to themselves with self-discipline and becoming their own persons. That is literally what self-discipline means: to follow ourselves out of love and respect for ourselves. It is not enough to simply listen to ourselves; we must follow ourselves because we love ourselves. This ensures that love will be included in all our behavior, so that we are more apt to do what we will like and respect ourselves for doing. Being self-full is the best guardian against being selfish. The opposite of self-discipline is abject subservience to some other--a voice from outside of ourselves--as the basis of our conscience. Someone other than ourselves decides how we are to be in the world. Our commitment in life becomes rote, a robotic compliance to external dictates from, for example, a rigid church, a totalitarian state, a nationalistic fervor, a corporate culture, or more directly, a needy spouse or lover. Such living is self-diminishing. The opposite of self-discipline is fearful, or dutiful, obedience to another. Only when the choice is freely ours--even when our choice is no different from what the other said it should be--are we being in the world in good faith. Only then do we participate in life as ourselves. Taken from The Windows of Experience by Malone and Malone |
Jake Thiessen, PhDI've been working with couples for a very long time. And, I love it! This blog is my attempt to communicate some of the things I've learned over the past 40 years. Archives
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