Counselor, Author, and Reflective Eclectic
Are you focused on abundance or scarcity? The choices or the limits? The opportunities or the barriers? Life or Death? It makes a difference.
There will always be one who is more strict with the kids, open to in-laws, careful with money, adventurous in bed, ambitious about career, social, self confident, flirty, interested in a clean house, closer to family, better at math, permissive, more sharing of feelings, horny, generous to others, and on, and on, and on.
The fact that one is always more (Insert Characteristic) than the other does not necessarily indicate there’s a pathology. Just because your wife is hornier than you are, does not mean she has a sexual addiction. Just because your husband likes to clean house, does not mean he is obsessive. Pathology exists at the edges of the bell curve, where a person is rigid about their qualities, beyond all reason.
Natural variation within a couple can be an obvious source of strength, wonder, and appreciation. Two heads are better than one because they can see in both directions. Variation offers differing perspectives and skill sets.
Natural variation can also lead to discord and polarization if the couple doesn’t practice respect for their differences. Let’s just say that one partner is more strict with the kids and the other is more permissive. This will be the case with every couple with kids. Every one. If they lose respect for each other they will begin to compensate for each other by being more and more extreme. The permissive one will let the kids get away with more because they think the partner is too strict. The strict one will lay down the law to compensate for the lenience of the other. In this way, they will get further and further apart, each undoing the other, with the kids in the middle, often helping to drive a wedge between them.
Schisms widen whenever an individual identifies more strongly with their way, than they identify with the alliance with their partner. It’s unnecessary, though. It’s easily remedied when you begin to appreciate your partner’s ways and understand how they can serve as a natural check for the excesses of your own ways.
If you’ve done the last few exercises, you may have squirmed a little, and maybe you have not been totally honest. When answering some of the questions on the Newlywed game or even when just telling about your day, you might have noticed telling your partner some things is easier than telling her others. Maybe there are kinks you are ashamed of, a bad day at the office that would worry her, or something you did that he might not understand. These are your secrets. Your secrets, as you may have heard, can make your marriage sick.
So, this guy has a female friend at work. They spend a lot of time in each others’ offices. They text constantly. They tell each other everything. She’s going through a lot and he can be a support. She understands him. There is nothing sexual going on, but still, he doesn’t tell his wife about his friend. He’s afraid his wife would just get needlessly jealous. Besides, there’s nothing to tell because nothing happened.
You can imagine how this scenario might play out. His wife might see a text message and say, If there’s nothing going on, why haven’t you told me? His wife will be unable to trust him. Even if the woman and the guy never had sex, the wife would call it an emotional affair. He might just get so close to the woman at work that he falls in love and divorces his wife.
That fellow is in a bind. On one hand, he clearly desires having an intimate relationship with someone. He’s lonely and likes there to be no secrets. He likes to be known and valued for who he is. He has that kind of relationship with his female friend. Why can’t he have it with his wife?
He can be real with the woman at work because it doesn’t matter so much if she disapproves. He has less to lose. Ironically, this secret destroys the marriage because the man attempts to preserve it. He is so intent on keeping his marriage safe that he creates this giant wall between himself and his wife.
There is a general, ironic principle at work here. In order to keep your relationship alive, you have to be willing to put it to the test. You have to court conflict, not avoid it. To save a union, you have to be willing to risk it.
Most of us know this question as the desperate conversation opener our parents tried on us when they picked us up from school; as in:
“How was your day, Billy?” said Mother as she surreptitiously checked in the rear view mirror for some clue of emotion.
“Fine,” said Billy, rolling his eyes and plugging into his iPod.
Nonetheless, I believe the question to be an important one, especially between life partners, and deserving of a serious, well considered reply.
A few posts ago, I wrote about the necessity of having an accurate map of the inside of your partner’s mind. I meant it. It’s a necessity. All too often we rely on what we learned about him or her when we were first dating. Well, he might have been trying to impress you then. She may not know the things she knows now. He might have changed his mind.
If google maps came out with a new version, you’d download it, right? You’d like to know that the bridge is out lest you end up in the drink; you need to find your friend who just moved to a new street. The same thing goes with your map of the inside of your partner’s mind. Ask her how her day was. You might be surprised at what you hear.
There are lots of ways of downloading a map of the inside of your partner’s mind. You could ask him what his values, worries, and expectations are and maybe he would have them sorted out enough to tell you. What’s better is to see it in action in the way he treats his secretary, how he talks about his coworkers, and what he does with his boss’s demands.
In order to work best, the question might have to be re-worded. How was your day? may invite one word responses. Tell me about your day is more open-ended, but you may have to be prepared to listen for a while. Tell me about the best and the worse part of your day, strikes a balance.
Ask at a sensible time, like when you would be likely to listen. Asking it at the breakfast table is just weird; the day hasn’t started, yet. Asking in bed at night, when you’re about to drop off doesn’t go well. Asking when the kids are hanging on her gives you a curt response. Asking when friends or family are around gives you the PR version.
Take turns. It’s as important for your partner to download a new version of the map of your mind as it was for you.
How was your day? Ask, listen, and tell. Repeating on a regular basis might, just might, be the most important thing you do to keep you together.
You might not be old enough to remember the Newlywed Game on TV. Well, I am. Couples competed to demonstrate their knowledge of each other. Hilarity, and a few fights, ensued. It’s often surprising how much new couples don’t know about each other. It’s sobering to see how little old couples know.
No matter how long you’ve been together, it’s time you got caught up. Sit down with each other sometime and ask the following questions. You might be surprised about the answers:
Lisa Kudrow demonstrates how not to be a therapist on Web Therapy.
It’s difficult to know what goes on in another person’s mind, often we don’t even know our own mind; but that doesn’t mean we won’t try. Being able to predict the behavior of others is vital in so many things, it’s impossible to resist attempting to do so, even though we are often wrong.
More often we are right. The human mind is exquisitely sensitive to detecting changes in emotion, attention, attitude, and mood. We constantly scan the faces of people we are with for this information. We are often accurate, even though we may not be able to verbalize why or what led us to that conclusion. However, what we get from all this ceaseless scanning is broad strokes and few details. Often we are dead wrong about the reasons people have.
Undifferentiated, dependent people will scrutinize your reactions to determine how they think and feel. They will want to go for Chinese, as opposed to Italian food, because they see you have more interest in General Tso and want to please you. Maybe you had another reason to perk up when the General’s chicken was mentioned. Regardless of the actual reason and their own desires, soon you will be eating with chopsticks.
Undifferentiated, dependent people use this ability to make you responsible for the choices made, but we all need to be able to enter the mind of others. When I am teaching, I am always watching faces to see if I lose anyone. I won’t know why I lose them, maybe they’re worried about something at home, maybe they don’t feel well, maybe they have ADD, or maybe I’m not explaining well. I’d better be watching, because if I start to lose someone, I can make corrections, repeat myself, or explain differently.
We call this ability mind mapping. A map does not contain all there is to know about a territory, but a good map gives you enough information to get around. We need accurate maps of the inside of another’s mind. This is especially true in the case of someone we are intimate with. Married people need an accurate map of the inside of their partner’s mind. In order to get one, it is not enough to scan faces; you have to talk.
You need to know what matters to your partner, why it does, and what barriers they face. You need to know what their work is like, what it’s like to stay home with the kids, who their friends are, and whether they are planning on playing golf all day Saturday. If you don’t know: if you don’t care, or if you aren’t paying attention, or if they don’t tell you, problems will ensue.
When we all lived down on the farm and rarely left home, it was not too hard to know your partner’s mind. However, most of us don’t live this way. Couples go to separate places during the day, and often at night, too, they often have different circles of friends, or may be absorbed by their own family of origin. It is very easy for couples living a modern life to get disconnected and lose each other.
Downloading a new mind map needs to be something you do daily. It has to be a priority, or you will lose each other. In my next posts, I’ll show you a couple of exercises that will help you.
We all have to have them. Many avoid them. Many screw them up by being too aggressive. There’s a book that tells you how to have a productive difficult conversation. This link summarizes the book.
You know the drill. You start dating someone and they seem like the most wonderful person in the world. Then you become familiar with each other and, all of a sudden, they are the spawn of the devil.
You know the reasons. People are polite on their first dates. They’re putting their best feet forward. They want you to like them. And you are doing the same thing. When you begin to date, you are not getting to know the real person, you are getting to know that person’s masks. And they are only seeing yours.
I believe that the masks you choose are as authentic a part of your self as what lies beneath. Appearances do matter. The fact that you select, for instance, a bragging, audacious persona versus a reserved, deferential one says something, even though both may hide a fragile ego.
However, the mask is not the whole story. Sooner or later, in any meaningful relationship, the hidden person shows up. Then you have a choice. You can:
Number 4 is a common choice that people make. It leads to trouble. In the next post, I will show you how.
Keith Wilson - Counseling