Where Love Resides

Sometimes after two people fall in love, they fall out of love.  I have even seen couples who were very much in love at one point become hateful toward each other.  As untrained observers we often cite these break-ups as a “poor match” or that they “grew apart” or had “little in common.”  Let me suggest that the explanation for the demise of a loving relationship may lie elsewhere.

Perhaps it is true that part of falling in love is the desire for more – more closeness, more acceptance, to get married, have more peak adventures, etc.  You may identify with this desire in these or other ways.  The question is where does the desire for MORE come from?

During childhood we want the five A’s: acceptance, affection, attention, allowing and appreciation.  If we do not get adequate amounts of these, we do not develop healthy adult relationship with ourselves and others.  As we enter relationships, our “lack” of adequate amounts of one or more of the five A’s shows up.  As David Richo points out, the adult version of these desires in a healthy person is:

1.  Attention to the present moment; observing, listening, and noticing all the feelings at play in our relationships.
2.  Acceptance of ourselves and others just as we are.
3.  Appreciation of all our gifts, our limits, our longings, and our poignant human predicament.
4.  Affection shown through holding and touching in respectful ways.
5.  Allowing life and love to be just as they are, with all their ecstasy and ache, without trying to take control.

Richo says that love is “not so much a feeling as a way of being present.”  When deeply understood and applied, these five simple concepts—what Richo calls the five A's—form the basis of mature love. They help us to move away from judgment, fear, and blame to a position of openness, compassion, and realism about life and relationships. By giving and receiving these five A's, relationships become deeper and more meaningful, and they become a ground for personal transformation.  An appreciation for all of this can be found in David Richo’s amazing book, “How To Be An Adult In Relationships.”

So when we fall in love and are not present with the love that is right in front of us, we are elsewhere wanting MORE.  We are striving instead of seeing, controlling instead of caring, maneuvering ahead instead of being in the moment and listening to the voice within that says “I deserve MORE!”  Loving relationships go bad because our egos are working hard to achieve MORE.  And when our partner does not meet our needs we judge, resent, criticize and blame because we are not getting the something MORE we think we need.  We grow apart. We lose our commonality. We are no longer a match.  We become needy.  And often, love turns into hate.

While most of us exhibit this type of behavior at times, Richo points out that we can learn to change how we behave and turn back to our partners in life.  If we did not get adequate amounts of each of the five A’s in childhood, our self-esteem might be severely challenged as adults, especially in relationship.  We must train ourselves to work on the five A’s and get back to the present moment -- where love resides – rather than being lost in the stories about what is missing, what we think is “right” and how things need to be different.

Where Neglect Comes From

I ain’t got no book learnin’ about psychology and emotional stuff. I only can relate my own experiences, the experiences of friends, the experiences of those who I have worked with and the people I observe from day-to-day. In my own experience of a failed marriage, I can clearly say, “I didn’t see it coming.” In watching other marriages fail, I sensed that these failures, as well as mine, were due to neglect.
I have been “listening” for a few years for neglect in relationships. I had accumulated a jumble of observations that did not reveal to me the nature of neglect and how it works. The pieces came together for me during an Episcopal Church service. The service had a script – God’s Word – and there was no deviation from it. The Word extolled a single system of belief in Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit and the Father.
As I listened to the service, I became aware of my own past penchant to treat the world as deterministic – understandable and predictable, really. I sense that this belief kept me in a trance, listening only for things that I could make understandable and were predictable from a logical thought pattern I had developed.
I developed this way of thinking so I could get to where I was going – a financially successful person, a good parent, with a home, a wife and a stable, calm existence. I was constantly striving to attain this success, I guess because it was so elusive or because I wanted to maintain the appearance of having it all.
As a result of being elsewhere with my thoughts, I was not aware of the things that were happening around me. I was also not open to making changes or even to recognize change as it occurred around me. By focusing on attaining something not in my grasp (yet sure it was within my reach), I was not in touch with others or with myself.
We don’t choose neglect directly. It happens when we are pre-occupied with being something other than what we are. I now have faith that I am, at my core, a perfectly formed person (in God’s image). I can be anywhere and listen to this part of me that was unavailable when I was in a trance. Awakening from trance is a vital part of the work we do at http://www.thecenterformarriage.com/.
I enjoy the uncertainty of life now because I know I don’t know as yet who I am in my fullness and richness. I am more cognizant of the emotional quality of my life as I take action in the various aspects of it. I am learning about my self in relationship with others and in a special, intimate relationship where my fullness of spirit is readily accessed and revealed to me.
Yet, I can back lapse into the trance – as we all can. Life is about remembering and forgetting. When I start listening again, I can notice neglect and be open to all that might be there right in front of my nose whether understandable or not. It brings me to a place of freedom where I get in touch to that God within. It ends when I forget by tricking myself into believing things are predictable. Then I remember to listen.
As I age, the periods of forgetting diminish in length until I see the beauty in life again.

Listening to Your Spouse

Marital therapists often focus on communication styles when couples need some help, but what is most important in doing this work is where you come from when you are speaking and listening. Listening, really listening, requires curiosity. With practice, you can learn to listen with curiosity and to deal with any blaming, judgmental or defensive thoughts that may arise as your spouse speaks to you. Author and spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle refers to these negative reactions as an unconscious virus eating away at our spirit – our” pain-body.” It is aligned with our “little ego” – the part of our “mind” that developed early in life to protect us from pain. This “mind-pain-body” lurks in all of us and serves to separate us from others, and can interfere with the way we communicate in our relationships.

The first step in effective listening is to become aware of our little ego or mind-pain-body. Spend a few days or weeks noticing how you listen in all your conversations. Continue observing your listening habits until you see the role of your little ego in your listening. Notice what is going through your mind. Are you thinking about the next thing you’ll say? Do you sense some anguish in the speaker and want to make it better? Are you judging the speaker or anyone or anything the speaker is saying to you? Do you conclude there is a clear “right” or “wrong” answer to the situation the speaker is describing as they speak? All these places your mind goes to – interrupting, judging, fixing, evaluating, and many more – arise out of the little ego. It is always working even when someone else is speaking

The result is that you never hear what the other person is saying. You may have an impression of what was said, but it’s only what the little ego wants you to remember. How many times has your spouse admonished you for not hearing what was said? Sometimes there are assumptions and subtle evaluations built into your listening like, “Gee, I’ve heard this before” and “Oh God, I’m in trouble!” Whenever you tap into the vast reservoir of assumptions contained within you, you stop listening. Any time you judge, want to fix or interrupt, evaluate or take sides, you have stopped listening. If you aren’t listening to your spouse, how will you be able to listen to your children, your boss, the news, or a clerk at the grocery store?

It takes practice to get the ego out of the way so you can hear what anyone is saying to you. At first, just become aware of it and practice becoming curious instead. Practice with your spouse, someone who will greatly appreciate your efforts. The most tried and true method of listening is to sit, face-to-face with your spouse and have them tell you about anything, such as what would be their ideal vacation. Let your spouse talk without interrupting them. Then repeat back what they said. Your spouse can then add anything you omitted or correct any misunderstanding you had right then and there. You cannot help but be curious when you need to repeat what someone said back to them.

You may not get the impact of this kind of listening until you reverse places. Have your spouse listen to you and gain understanding of what you think and feel about the same subject. Afterward, notice that you will feel heard, really heard. That’s what went on with your spouse, too. You will also begin to feel safer in saying what is on your mind.

When leading couples in this exercise just to practice the procedure, I notice that the listener often interrupts the speaker (against the instructions) with some type of response prior to the speaker finishing. This can be viewed as an enticement to further revealing your thoughts or a barrier. It can go either way. Avoid any interruption. It’s good practice.

Listening without assuming, fixing, taking sides, judging and evaluating is very hard to do. It is harder the more your mind pain-body controls your life. Become aware of the little ego and consciously move toward curiosity. Listening in this way brings you close to who you really are – a caring, understanding presence in your spouse’s life. Course 1 offered at www.thecenterformarriage.com focuses on listening.

Making a Marriage Great

A marriage is like a garden. Each partner brings many types of seeds to the marriage. The ones that bloom into beautiful flowers are to be nurtured. But there are inevitably weeds there, too. They need to be watched and dealt with – eradicated really -- so that the beauty of the garden can be enjoyed rather than eventually overwhelmed by aggressive weeds. GREAT marriages are like a lovingly tended garden. The attentive gardener sees and handles the weeds long before they take hold and choke out the garden’s beauty.

There are, at least, four flowers to nurture and cultivate in your marriage:

1. Equality
2. Transparency
3. Basic Needs
4. Receiving Love

Equality is where each spouse is as important as the other. It is the acceptance, enjoyment and enthusiasm by both parties for who the other person truly is. It means that neither partner wants to change the other. It is the absence or quick recognition and correction of controlling and manipulative behaviors. It is the absence or quick recognition and correction of judging, blaming and any other thoughts that separate one party from the other. We will see in later posts how to deal with the “weeds” that obscure equality. Please note that complete equality is probably never achieved since new weeds crop up all the time as some of the seeds sewn in earlier years are slow to germinate.

Transparency is the willingness to freely reveal to your partner what you are all about. Openness can be difficult since we have learned during our lifetimes to cover up some things and withhold parts of ourselves in order to protect ourselves from ridicule and criticism. In practice, transparency is the gradual and continuous opening up to our partners – an everlasting blooming, if you will. We, and everything around us, are changing in subtle ways. The challenge is to be open to change and to continue revealing who we are becoming. Consider your partner to be a stranger each day and give them room to reveal who they are becoming. Transparency is a key building block to intimacy. Transparency is a constantly evolving process of digging deeper into who we really are.

Understanding your partner’s basic need to feel loved was discussed in depth in the previous post as a key element of a great relationship. The genuine gift to your spouse of their need to feel loved in their special ways creates a GREAT marriage. While it is unreasonable to expect you to meet your spouse’s basic need for love 100% of the time, the point is to meet that need as often as possible. Sharing freely with one another what makes you each feel loved and giving that to the other as often as possible is a vital part of building intimacy in relationship. If you each feel secure in the fulfillment of your basic needs, you will be free to reveal things that make you feel unloved without blaming, judgment or resentment. The seed of divorce is sewn by withholding love and holding onto blame, judgment and the sense of self-righteousness. A great marriage is characterized by each partner’s ability to understand, communicate and give freely genuine expressions of dissatisfaction and for both the experience of joyful fulfillment of basic needs.

Receiving love that is freely given is the other building block to intimacy. It sounds simple – the act of receiving love – but it is not. You bring your own seeds to relationships that inhibit your ability to recognize and receive love from another person. These seeds look for a certain type of love that you didn’t get earlier in life. When you fall in love, you are sometimes fooled into believing that you can get what you missed out on earlier from your spouse. These are really weeds of expectation. You think these weeds are flowers. In effect, you unconsciously expect your partner to be something they are not and to give you something they cannot. Digging up and disposing of this seed of expectation allows you to plant and cultivate the flower of being curious about the true nature of your partner and not what you project them to be. This knowledge becomes food for thought. You clear the way for a deep, conscious relationship. It also means that you allow your partner to lovingly mirror who you are in those times (and they come often for most of us) when you are not being true to who you really are in your actions and deeds. If you can allow your spouse to influence your life without feeling hurt or seeing their comments as criticism or judgment, then you are receiving love kindly and your marriage can be GREAT!

As all four flowers of GREAT marriages grow, their roots intertwine to support the well-being of the entire garden. I offer courses on all these flower. See www.thecenterformarriage.com for more information.