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Communication, Emotional Intelligence, Relationships

Well, okay then… last week’s post on “Unmaking Love” apparently hit a nerve, resulting in some of the highest traffic we’ve seen since I started posting content regularly. I guess if I’ve depressed people by charting the slow erosion process that’s evident in many clients seeking counselling for relational issues, I should maybe turn things around and offer something positive for those who are ready to embrace the work of change. [Note: this wound up being an exceptionally LONG post, even by my wordy standards, so I’m posting it in two parts. Part 2 will autopost next week at the usual time.]

So the question: how do we remake love? What repairs intimacy damaged by slow detachments and myriad tiny, unintended hurts?

The good news is, yes, it *IS* possible to correct that slow “death by a thousand cuts.” It’s not easy, because it means recovering vulnerability and emotional rawness that we buried BECAUSE it had become too much to bear on a day-to-day basis. But with commitment and willingness to be brave from all parties involved (including the therapist), then yes, we can certainly encourage and support things shifting back towards connection. The big question becomes… HOW?

The Roles of Hope and Faith in Remaking Love

My second question (after the very provocative, “marriage counselling, or marriage cancelling” inquiry of last week) is generally along the lines of exploring whether the client(s) are approaching the change process in the spirit of hope or faith, because there can be a huge difference in engagement levels when we look closely at the difference between those two states (this is a great introduction to the lexicon-building process, BTW).

Bennet Wong and Jock McKeen, Canadian therapists and authors of “The Relationship Garden”, distinguish terminology this way:

“Hope and faith are different. Whereas faith is self-affirming and acceptance of life as it is, hope involves a dissatisfaction with self and present circumstance, and is dependent upon external events or people to provide change. People hope that life will be different, or better, or fuller; their hoping involves a lack of acceptance and a thrust toward change. In the Romance phase, hope is a common underlying theme. Dissatisfied with their basic insecurities, people commonly hope that a newfound partner will solve their problems, and that life will become better.

Hope involves a basic lack of acceptance of self and other. Indeed, in the Romance stage, awareness of the self and other are so clouded by the romantic dreams and projections that people have insufficient information to actually accept anyone or anything with any validity.

Disappointment is the other face of hope; like hope, disappointment is based in a discontentment with the present. The Romance phase is generally destined for disappointment, because the things people are trying to change probably will not alter at all; once they emerge from the swoon of Romance, they are once again faced with their basic insecurities, and their hoping flips into disappointment.” – Bennet Wong & Jock McKeen, The Relationship Garden, p. 61.

“To be in a state of hope interferes with intimacy. Hope anticipates a better circumstance in the future; hence it is rooted in a dissatisfaction and non-acceptance of the present situation. In relationships, to hope for something different is to fail to contend with the situation as it is. By contrast, faith has a profound acceptance of how things are. In faith, people acknowledge and accept themselves and their partners, and are open to interchange.

When a relationship reaches an impasse, as it frequently does, people who rely on hope will focus on the future when things will be different. Too often, such people become passive and helpless, tending to freeze action while waiting for a favourable turn of events On the other hand, when people in relationship have faith, they stay present to address themselves to the issues at hand with the assumption that they can make some positive adjustments; they know that no matter what happens, they have confidence in their abilities to handle all difficulties.” – pg. 113

It has been my experience that many clients manage to have some combination of the two, but by the time they get to someone like me, they’re likely more in the HOPE stage than the FAITH stage. Terry Real doesn’t see hope as an intrinsically problematic state:

“I have a name for this,” I tell [clients], “this dropping into the old wounds then having the capacity for difference, for healing. It’s called hope.” – Terry Real, How Can I Get Through to You, pg. 180

I prefer making the distinction between the two states; from a therapeutic position, it offers me a way to gauge whether or not a fixation on a desired future-state is acting as a motivator or as a passivity-inducing deterrent the way Jock & McKeen describe. Having both present can be a helpful thing, so long as the future fixation does NOT manifest as a lack of involvement or investment in the present moment. Therefore the first stage of the work involves, as Terry Real says, bringing the relationship members back into connection by getting them to “sit in the fire of their discomforts”, as Pema Chodron says, and actually HEAR each other’s pain. Terry Real calls this the process of learning to hold on:

“If the healthy rhythm of relationship is one of harmony, disharmony, and repair, if disillusionment is a kind of relational purgatory leading back to resolution, even transformation, most of the couples that contact me have not found the means to push all the way through. Devoid of the skills necessary to hold on, incapable of connection in the face of disconnection, instead of the healing phase of repair, these couples deteriorate. […] Couples who don’t make it through disillusionment tend to get snared by one or all of three phases of intimacy’s erosion–control, retaliation, and resignation.” – Real, pg.186

How we get to an even partially-restored connection depends entirely on the participants’ own tolerance for both the change process, and the painful things they will have to sit with while in it. Once we open the door to the accumulated detritus of a painful connection, we have to work on clearing line noise for a cleaner signal in communications. This is, on a broad scale, what John Gottman calls a repair attempt. While this can reintroduce power struggles within the relationship as each partner potentially struggles to be right more than repaired, we open the door to more effective connection bids and develop more clearly understood and articulated expectations. We aim to develop compassionate understandings around what happens when connection succeeds AND fails. This exchange has happened in my own office more times than I can count:

Me: Would you rather be right in this moment, or be repaired and connected?
Client: Why can’t I be both?
Me: You can be, just not while you’re entrenched behind your righteous NEED to be right and lobbing grenades over the wall at the enemy. When are you going to let your partner out of the doghouse, and trust they’re here in the shit WITH you?

There are a LOT of different ways to do this reparative work. Emotionally-focused therapy is a great tool for getting past the noise to the signal of core needs being flagged for attention. Working to subdue and eliminate Gottman’s “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” – Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling (emotional shut-down/detachment) – makes it easier to stay present for difficult conversations. But on a more fundamental level, in order to stay present we have to work on redeveloping Trust (along with a shared understanding of what that word means in all its nuanced glory to every person in the room). We start with the most basic of questions:
Do you trust that your partner is NOT in this relationship to hurt you?

To see what we do with that question, stay tuned for part 2, coming next week.

Communication, Language, Relationships

Some communities I support live and die by the tenet that all problems can be resolved if you just, “communicate, communicate, communicate!” But I can tell in no uncertain terms, rooted in both professional and personal experience, that we can talk among ourselves until the cows come home, but it’s less about simply communicating, and entirely about communicating *effectively*, that makes or breaks successful information management within intimate relationships. And the number one culprit I have witnessed time and again is the fact that partners assume they know what each other means when using certain words… and when those assumptions prove faulty and come back to bite our arses, things get messy in a hurry. We all use the same *words*, but what we lack is a shared lexicon of understanding what those words mean to our partners. Trust me when I say that even the most subtle of differences in interpretations can have the biggest of impacts on relationship stability.

When partners in particular come in together, one of the most common things I (and probably other relationship therapists) hear is, “We want to work on/improve our communication”. There are entire cases of relationship and self-help books in any bookstore, pages and pages of recommendations on Amazon, and probably numerous books in every therapist’s office on this subject. I prefer to start with a simple question, though admittedly I’m surprised (even after seven years in private practice) by how often it catches people off-guard:

“What do you mean by, ‘communicate’?”

As soon as I get a blank stare from even one of them, I know we’re in trouble.

Partners often assume in therapy they will work out their problems, but it’s kind of hard to even figure out what the problem might be when we’re not using the same words in the same ways to identify the perceived issues Clients will use words like, “communication”, “trust”, “intimacy”, and even “love” (and when we get into the poly and kink communities, we even have to add “sex” to the list), and assume that as long as they are using the same word, that they must be on the same page meaning-wise. One or two questions further into the conversation, it becomes painfully apparent when they’re not even in the same ballpark. Personally, I like to be subtle and ask sneaky questions like, “So, when YOU use that word, what does it mean to YOU?” of each partner. Once in a while I hit the jackpot and they are in agreement, at least until/unless we encounter incongruencies in actions that suggest there’s a deeper point at which interpretations stray.

You keep using that word.

Words like those listed above, I refer to as “umbrella terms”, words that can encompass a mind-boggling array of definitions. Our default personal interpretations are often based in an intricate combination of early models and personal experiences, so there is absolutely NO WAY to guarantee that your partner’s informing biases are going to be 100% identical to your own, no matter how similarly you view the rest of the world. And yet, we assume, to our detriment, that anyone we’re going to love and connect our lives with, will be Just Like Us… until we learn they are NOT.

In many relationship styles, I have to start with conversations like this:

Client 1: We’re having intimacy issues.
Me: How are you defining intimacy? Are we talking about sex here, or emotional vulnerability, or something else?
Client 2 (awkwardly): Sex.
Me: Okay, so let’s label “sex” as “sex”, just to be very clear from the outset what we’re talking about here.

Or:
Client 1: We’re having intimacy issues.
Me: How are you defining intimacy? Are we talking about sex here, or emotional vulnerability, or something else?
Client 2 (angrily): We never talk to each other.
Me: Never at all? Or never about certain topics? Or never in certain desired ways?
Client 1: Oh, we talk all the time, we just never resolve anything, so we’re always angry or silent.
Me: So, what we’re discussing here sounds like an unclear set of expectations and processes around resolutions, that might be getting in the way of feeling emotionally closer to each other?
Client 2: No, it’s not that; I feel emotionally close most of the time; if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be so angry and hurt. But every time I try to get him to tell me how he’s feeling, he just yells about feeling nagged and how he’s doing all of these things I don’t seem to appreciate, then he shuts down.
Me: So you chase him to talk to you about feelings, and it seems like he retreats from you somehow?
Clients: We don’t really know. / I guess so.

Both of these experiences are being filed under “intimacy” in the partners’ starting lexicon, but based on how they are describing “intimacy issues” (and this is in no way an unusual or rare conversation in my office, though the variations are numerous), it’s apparent that they both expect “intimacy” to be part of the relationship equation but don’t have the same definition of what that entails, and the definition is usually more clearly defined in their minds by the problems that occur when “intimacy” isn’t working like they expect it should.

In the poly/swinger and kink communities, it’s surprising (in a no-not-really kind of way) how often we find partners running aground on different definitions of “sex”. In a monogamous culture, intimacy and sex are often inextricably intertwined, usually until someone like a therapist questions whether there’s a difference between physical intimacy (sex) and emotional intimacy, and if sex with other people is strictly forbidden by monogamous relationship boundaries, is *emotional* vulnerability with others likewise verboten? But in communities where sexual interactions with others are permissible, we often find ourselves having to have the discussion around, “How are you defining sex?” For some, that means any kind of genital contact in either direction, for others it’s limited to specific actions (like standard genital intercourse or masturbation). I’ve had clients trying to define sex by the intent to orgasm, which leads to such lexiconically-important questions like, “So, if orgasm doesn’t occur, is it still defined as ‘sex’?”

As you might imagine, getting into word-level definitions can get us all down a rabbit-hole very quickly. So as the therapist in the room, it’s my job to make sure we focus on two things: (a) deterring partner judgment about each other’s default definitions, and (b) only pursuing them to understand where the expectations tied to each respective, differing definition is leading the relationship into tension. For therapists who use narrative approaches to relational challenges (including individual identity within a relational system, be it intimate partnership, family, or collegial systems), language is a KEY factor to understanding the client’s perspective. I also have an added layer of interest in words stemming from being a writer all my life, including professionally in high tech for the better part of twenty-five years. I’m keenly aware that words have power, so terminology we use in our private spheres sheds a great deal of insight on the values that inform the expectations tied to our language use. But when many of us can’t get past, “we’re using the same words, so why are we still arguing about [X]?”, it sometimes requires some outside perspective and guidance to help us peel past the sense that for all the communicating we do in relationship, we sometimes feel like we just don’t get anywhere, or at least nowhere good.

This is why a relationship’s success is often less about, “communicate, communicate, communicate!”, and more about understanding WHAT we’re saying to each other when we do have conversations on important topics. The words we use are important, not just as a marker against which to measure actions for congruent intentions, but in and of themselves when they contain markers to what lies underneath the words. I often tell my clients that words are important, but the real meat of most matters is buried under the words, and that’s what we have to dig for. We can’t simply take for granted that my word means the same as your word, when your experiences are going to shape a different set of values and expectations than mine probably did, and we need to consider and respect those differences… even when we can’t see them initially, just the disturbance caused when we run aground on them.