Personal House Rules

I think often we have unspoken rules about how we want to conduct our lives. It can be confusing for someone to automatically know that -you-should-take-your-shoes-off-when-you-come-inside-the-door.  Then when the person doesn’t quickly act in the way we are expecting, we are confronted with a choice. We  let the new person know the expectations directly or we sadly can  stay silent and be upset that they didn’t do it right.

This is the same thing that we do with the rules of self, we expect  that everyone will know how to we want to live our lives, what works and what doesn’t, how to treat us, what our boundaries are, and the very best way to show us love. This is mind reading  at its best. It is all so obvious to us.

I have a saying that I use with clients a lot “If it is obvious, then you need to say it out loud.” We are so accustomed to our own mind and beliefs that it seems a given, but if it is that ingrained within us that means it is pretty important. Hence, saying our ideas, expectations, and  boundaries out loud not only makes sense but also creates a much more open dynamic.

The approach of letting others know what your personal house are allows everyone to have a framework of interaction. You get to avoid a lot of the messy parts of stepping on each other’s toes.  Everyone decides if the structure is workable and provides an understanding of the boundaries. It sound so simple but that is exactly what we so often miss, stating that which seems like a default to our own system.

I really love the idea of putting your house rules out for everyone to see  (physically like photo above or state directly). Consider wearing your expectations with a badge of honor that you want others to know about from the start. Be proud of who you are and what you want from yourself and others!

Sick System Identification

 

Often times  people who have experienced trauma and/or abuse get into predictable patterns.  After trauma the mind has to find a way to “become okay” with what has happened otherwise it will just shut down. Hence,the brain will  select, edit, and delete ideas and emotions as necessary to move forward.  From this perspective, it becomes clearer that they will associate interactions with other people in a similar way that they did during the negative experiences.  The mind wires together in a way that creates a system of unhealthy actions and response together with love and care. It is as if the mind got confused along the way (which it did typically based on the abusive situation) and started thinking that being in an interaction that is chaotic and/or manipulative is the way affection is shown.  The how and why this pattern was created makes sense _and_ being able to identify its parts is a crucial part to changing towards healthy dynamics.

There are many therapeutic approaches to working to shift these patterns, but I haven’t often seen a discussion of this within regular conversation. Issendai has thoughtfully expressed how the trauma mind-set can create relationships that are unhealthy. She puts a concrete perspective on what the attributes are that contribute to what she calls a _sick system_.  In reading her thoughts, I would ask you to remember that a person can both create these dynamics directly or respond to them..   One can see they have been in relationships where they were treated in a negatively manipulative way and/or understand they tend to create elements of this pattern in their life.  The point is to look at the patterns and work to shift them into something that is stronger and healthier.

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Sick Systems by Issendai

So you want to keep your lover or your employee close. Bound to you, even. You have a few options. You could be the best lover they’ve ever had, kind, charming, thoughtful, competent, witty, and a tiger in bed. You could be the best workplace they’ve ever had, with challenging work, rewards for talent, initiative, and professional development, an excellent work/life balance, and good pay. But both of those options demand a lot from you. Besides, your lover (or employee) will stay only as long as they want to under those systems, and you want to keep them even when they doesn’t want to stay. How do you pin them to your side, irrevocably and permanently.
You create a sick system.

A sick system has four basic rules:

Rule 1: Keep them too busy to think. Thinking is dangerous. If people can stop and think about their situation logically, they might realize how crazy things are.

Rule 2: Keep them tired. Exhaustion is the perfect defense against any good thinking that might slip through. Fixing the system requires change, and change requires effort, and effort requires energy that just isn’t there. No energy, and your lover’s dangerous epiphany is converted into nothing but a couple of boring fights.

This is also a corollary to keeping them too busy to think. Of course you can’t turn off anyone’s thought processes completely—but you can keep them too tired to do any original thinking. The decision center in the brain tires out just like a muscle, and when it’s exhausted, people start making certain predictable types of logic mistakes. Found a system based on those mistakes, and you’re golden.

Rule 3: Keep them emotionally involved. Make them love you if you can, or if you’re a company, foster a company culture of extreme loyalty. Otherwise, tie their success to yours, so if you do well, they do well, and if you fail, they fail. If you’re working in an industry where failure isn’t a possibility (the government, utilities), establish a status system where workers do better or worse based on seniority.

Also note that if you set up a system in which personal loyalty and devotion are proof of your lover’s worthiness as a person, you can make people love you. Or at least think they love you. In fact, any combination of intermittent rewards plus too much exhaustion to consider other alternatives will induce people to think they love you, even if they hate you as well.

Rule 4: Reward intermittently. Intermittent gratification is the most addictive kind there is. If you know the lever will always produce a pellet, you’ll push it only as often as you need a pellet. If you know it never produces a pellet, you’ll stop pushing. But if the lever sometimes produces a pellet and sometimes doesn’t, you’ll keep pushing forever, even if you have more than enough pellets (because what if there’s a dry run and you have no pellets at all?). It’s the motivation behind gambling, collectible cards, most video games, the Internet itself, and relationships with crazy people.

How do you do all this? It’s incredibly easy:

Keep the crises rolling. Incompetence is a great way to do this: If the office system routinely works badly or the controlling partner routinely makes major mistakes, you’re guaranteed ongoing crises. Poor money management works well, too. So does being in an industry where the clients are guaranteed to be volatile and flaky, or preferring friends who are themselves in perpetual crisis. You can also institutionalize regular crises: Workers in the Sea Org, the elite wing of Scientology, must exceed the previous week’s production every single week or face serious penalties. Because this is impossible, it guarantees regular crises as the deadline approaches.

Regular crises perform two functions: They keep people too busy to think, and they provide intermittent reinforcement. After all, sometimes you win—and when you’ve mostly lost, a taste of success is addictive.

But why wouldn’t people eventually realize that the crises are a permanent state of affairs? Because you’ve explained them away with an explanation that gives them hope.

Things will be better when… I get a new job. I’m mean to you now because I’m so stressed, but I’m sure that will go away when I’m not working at this awful place.

The production schedule is crazy because the client is nuts. We just need to get through this cycle, then we’ll have a new client, and they’ll be much better.

She has a bad temper because she just started with a new therapist. She’ll be better when she settles in.

Now, the first person isn’t actually looking for a job. (They’re too stressed to fill out applications.) The second industry always has another crazy client, because all the clients are crazy. (Or better yet, because the company is set up to destroy the workflow and make the client look crazy.) The third person has been with her “new” therapist for a year. (But not for three years! Or five!) But the explanation sounds plausible, and every now and then the person has a good day or a production cycle goes smoothly. Intermittent reinforcement + hope = “Someday it will always be like this.” Perpetual crises mean the person is too tired to notice that it has never been like this for long.

Keep real rewards distant. The rewards in “Things will be better when…” are usually nonrewards—things will go back to being what they should be when the magical thing happens. Real rewards—happiness, prosperity, career advancement, a new house, children—are far in the distance. They look like they’re on the schedule, but there’s nothing in the To Do column. For example, everything will be better when we move to our own house in the country… but there’s nothing in savings for the house, no plan to save, no house picked out, not even a region of the country settled upon. Or everything will be better when she gets a new job, but she’s not applying anywhere, she’s not checking the classifieds, she has no skills that would get her a new job, she has no concrete plans to learn skills, and she doesn’t know what type of new job she wants to take. Companies have a harder time holding out on rewards, but endlessly delayed raises and promotions, workplace upgrades that are talked about but never get enough budget, and training programs that are canceled for lack of money work well.

Establish one small semi-occasional success. This should be a daily task with a stake attached and a variable chance of success. For example, you need to take your meds at just the right time. Too early and you’re logy the next morning and late to work, too late and you’re insomniac and keep your partner up until you go to sleep, too anything and you develop nausea that interrupts your meal schedule and sets your precariously balanced blood sugar to swinging, sparking tantrums and weeping fits. It’s your partner’s job to get you to take your meds at just the right time. Each time she finds an ideal time, it becomes a point of contention—you’re always busy at that time, or you’re not at home, or you eat too early or too late so the ideal time shifts or vanishes entirely. But every so often you take your meds at just the right time and everything works perfectly, and then your partner gets a jolt of success and the hope that you’ve reached a turning point.

Chop up their time. Perpetually interrupt them with meetings, visits from supervisors, bells and whistles and time clocks and hourly deadlines. Or if you’re partners, be glued to them at the hip, demand their attention at short intervals throughout the day (and make it clear that they aren’t allowed to do the same with you), establish certain essential tasks that you won’t do and then demand that they do them for you, establish certain essential tasks that they aren’t allowed to do for themselves and demand that they rely on you to do it for them (and then do it slowly or badly or on your own schedule). Make sure they have barely enough time to manage both the crisis of the moment and the task of the moment; and if you can’t tire them out physically, drain them emotionally.

Enmesh your success with theirs. Company towns are great at this. Everything, from the workers’ personal social standing to the selection of groceries at the store, depends upon how well they do their jobs and how well the company as a whole is doing. Less enveloping companies try to tie their workers’ self-perceptions in with the public’s perception of their brand. People do it by entangling their successes and failures with their partners’, even when they shouldn’t be entangled. A full-grown adult should be able to take his meds without his partner’s help, and there’s only so much anyone can do to make someone eat at the right time and swallow their pills, but he still puts the responsibility for managing his meds squarely on her shoulders. The classic maneuver is to blame all your bad moods on your partner: If they weren’t so _______ or if they did ______ right, you wouldn’t be so stressed/angry/foul-tempered.

Keep everything on the edge. Make sure there’s never quite enough money, or time, or goods, or status, or anything else people might want. Insufficiency makes sick systems self-perpetuating, because if there’s never enough ______ to fix the system, and never enough time to think of a better solution, everyone has to work on all six cylinders just to keep the system from collapsing.

All of these things work together to make a workplace or a  relationship addictive. You’re run off your feet putting out fires and keeping things going, your own world will collapse if you stop, and every so often you succeed for a moment and create something bigger than yourself. Things will get better soon. You can’t stop believing that. If you stop believing, you won’t be able to go on, and you can’t not go on because everything you have and everything you are is tied into making this thing work. You can’t see any way out because there are always all these things stopping you, and you could try this thing but that would take time and money, and you don’t have either, and you’ve been told that you’ll get both eventually when that other thing happens, and pushing won’t make that thing happen so it’s better to keep your head down and wait. After a while the stress and panic feel normal, so when you’re not riding the edge, you feel twitchy because you know that the lull doesn’t mean things are better, it means you’re not aware yet of what’s going wrong. And the system or the partner always, always obliges with a new crisis.

Eventually you’re so crazy that you can’t interact with anyone who isn’t equally crazy. Normal people have either fled, or told you once too often that you’re being stupid and you need to leave. So now you’ve lost all your reality checks. You’re surrounded by people who also live in the crazy and can’t see a way out. You spend your time telling one another that it’s too bad, but that’s how it is, there’s no fixing it, and everything will get better when ______ happens. If anyone does get a little better and says, “Hey, guys, this is crazy, we can all stop now,” they’ve become a stuck cog in the machine. They quickly realize that there’s nothing they can do, and they pull out, leaving you alone with your crazy friends.

Finally you think it’s ordinary.

You fantasize about being suicidal enough to kill yourself. But that’s not all that bad, because you don’t think that way all the time, and you’re not actually trying to kill yourself. You just wish something would come along and make you dead.

One day you hit rock bottom. Maybe you want so badly to die that stepping out of the sick system looks like a good way to commit suicide, or maybe you’re so depressed that you no longer care. Maybe you catch on before then, and realize, as you’re standing there with the pill in your hand and your partner too busy on WoW to swallow it, that this is crazier than crazy and it’s time to make it stop. Maybe the system makes a mistake, and you look at the pattern of people who got promotions and realize that you will never, never qualify for your promised promotion.

Or maybe a door opens, and something magical happens. The position you’ve dreamed of opens up. The school you want to go to offers a new scholarship for people just like you—and the person who runs the scholarship tells you confidentially that with your qualifications, you’re a shoo-in. Your granduncle dies and leaves you $100,000. You can have exactly what you want—if you walk away from the system you’re enmeshed in.

If you step away, two things happen, one after the other:

PANIC! HORROR! THE SKY IS FALLING! I’VE LOST EVERYTHING I EVER HAD AND I’LL NEVER GET IT BACK AGAIN! There’s not enough stress, something is wrong, something horrible is happening and I’m not there stopping it, oh god what is my ex-boyfriend doing and can I save him from a safe distance? I’m responsible! I have to call the office and make sure they’re okay! I have to make sure everything I left was okay, because it would all fall down without me and now I’m not there and it’s falling down and all those innocent people are being hurt and I have to stop it!

…I feel so much better now.

It’s all gone, like someone stopped pounding me in the head with a hammer. I didn’t even know the hammer was there. Why did I let someone pound me in a hammer all that time? What in hell was I thinking? Why did I think any of that made sense?

Once you’re out of the system, it makes no sense at all. None of the carrots they dangled before you mean anything, and you start to truly comprehend just how much stress you were under. You see things you never would have believed while you were in the system. And the relief is greater than you ever could have imagined while you were enmeshed.

Review: Married Man Sex Life Primer

There is a good chance that you will find sections of The Married Man Sex Life Primer 2011 offensive.  As a therapist, I’m here to bring lots of new points that one may not like at first but that are important for change.  This book falls right into that wheelhouse. The basic premise of how heterosexual couples typically interact can easily sound politically incorrect in our current social context.  However, the science, long term data, and reality pretty much solidify the notion that men and women (that are attracted to one another) often create standardized gender roles.

Hence,  similar stories can be heard from couples in my office on a daily basis.  Many men in long term relationships come in stating  that  they feel taken advantage of,  treated poorly, and do not have the sex life they desire.  All the while, these men dote on their spouses, provide a steady income, parent their children, and are all around good individuals. Or the opposite happens, that a man gets so frustrated with feeling mistreated that he totally disconnects and becomes a full on jerk to his spouse. Either way,  I sit across from them with a heavy heart thinking time and time again about how they confuse turning a woman on sexually with being a good provider.

Here is a bit of generalized truth — most heterosexual women are wired to want a male partner that is great at caring for her (potentially her children as well) AND is dominant enough to sexually excite her. The concepts are NOT mutually exclusive. In fact, Athol Kay’s book explores the nature of how to balance the alpha male parts that often make a woman sexually excited along with the beta qualities that are crucial for a prosperous long term relationship. One doesn’t have to be a cruel person to make his partner want to have sex, just like one doesn’t have to be treated poorly to have a loving romance.

Now before you start assuming I’m advocating men being violent and women being doormats, how about considering that  my profession is to create a context where individuals can locate a pathway towards success   This all brings us back around to Athol Kay.  He wasn’t some guy who naturally was some arrogant bad-boy and his wife was not an ignorant pushover. They were (and are) two regular people with a relationship, mutual respect, careers, children, and life goals. They love each other and seek a long term monogamous relationship. Completely standard for the understanding of heterosexual romance. If you wanted more details, you can read about his ongoing love affair, struggles, and triumphs at his blog at http://www.marriedmansexlife.com

The Married Man Sex Life Primer is a realistic look at how a man within current societal norms (read: a nice-guy-personality) comes to terms with the fact that acting in more “high value” way makes his wife happy and sexually excited.  The book works through the basic science of heterosexual male/female  chemistry, interactions, and expectations that traditionally generate a long term sexual relationship.  At no point does Athol ever pretend that this whole process of becoming more alpha male is easy for him. Consider for a moment your own preconceived notions about what it means to be  a male nurse in our society and add that to the author’s background. Kay’s natural approach to things is from a care-taking mode and he had no intention of being mean to his wife, even if he was going to have a better sex life.  In fact, he was often shocked and confused by his wife’s reactions to his more dominant presentation. However, the book takes you along his journey towards integrating the science, emotion, and results of his balance between high value alpha actions and beta value response for a beautiful shift in romance with his wife.

There are many striking ideas within the book but one of the main themes appears to be that for a heterosexual man to create an erotic context for his wife it requires him to become her lover, with all the under and overtones of what that term means. Just as often as the sad husband sits across from me, his lonely wife tells stories about how she just wants him to pay attention to her.  And truthfully, beyond hormones this is a huge factor in how affairs get started. The female just wants to be heard, flirted with, and treated in a way that desires her presence.  Women obviously play their part in relationship troubles by becoming  unaffectionate and overly demanding.  Still,  like in all things change can only happen within not at another person. Kay puts it like this:  “My approach is that husbands need to find out how to become sexier to their wives and that will trigger her sexual interest. So rather than trying to ask her to change, you need to change for the better. The obvious solution is to step in and act like her lover would.” Sage advice, indeed.

This work is not ground breaking new information (as most of it is evolutionary psychologically based), yet Kay’s ability to cast an honest view on these dynamics is refreshing and important.  If you agree or disagree with his premise on male/female roles within marriage is really besides the point, because he himself advocates not just one approach but whatever it personally takes to make yourself and you relationship better… and I think this is something we can all agree upon.  The Married Man Sex Life Primer can be used as a way to jump-start your intimate relationship again. However, it feels more like a way to generate change within men that have lost their personal focus.  And no matter what gender or sexual relationship you choose to explore, it will always feel sexy to be around a person who is confident within themselves and has a vision for their life ahead.

The Married Man Sex Life Primer 2011 by Athol Kay

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In my next set of posts on evolutionary psychology I’ll be addressing terms like gender and sex roles, high value and dominance.  I’ll discuss at how these ideas can manifest themselves in ways that promote positive growth rather than blindly accepting societal defaults and assumptions.

Companions

“Sharks need friends or they get sick.”

These words came from across a table scattered with plastic toys in the shape of sea creatures.   This precocious youngster has dazzled me with facts about snakes previously. And because he is a Star Wars fan, I can’t help but pay attention! He brought up this idea because he was doing all he could to convince his father that he needed two baby sharks instead of just one in the aquarium.

Sharks at play

I asked follow up questions but the boy was already on to other facts, reading a book on the topic, and playing shark trainer was high on his agenda.  I sat there thinking about how all I could remember was that a shark can be a host to parasite style fish.

So after a bit of research (read: looking around on the net) I learned that indeed if you are going to have sharks in an aquarium that having two is better than one. This is because while other fish can be companions out in the wild waters, it doesn’t work the same way inside a tank. The sharks get grumpy and want to eat the other fish but when there is another shark they work together. Normally sharks are rather solitary but in this fashion they are friends helping one another out.

You probably see where this is going, but this all tumbled around in my brain and I just saw so many ways this applies to relationships. We often  have an approach of being all on our own.  We show our teeth when we need to and sometimes end up on Shark Week  but overall we just move along to live.

However, when things shift into smaller waters we are much more open to being friendly. We do need one another to help us out because we can’t do it all on our own.

What is the point of all this? Well, I’ll make it easy for you: if sharks can figure out how to be kind to one another and that it helps keep them healthy, couldn’t we move a bit further up on the food chain of friendliness?  I’m not suggesting we use people or be nice just to get ahead, but I am suggesting that in the tank the shark does more than just get along.  The two sharks begin to work together and discover that they do more than just provide a cleaning service. They become companions!

It is a great thing  when we move from accepting help, only in the toughest of times, to opening up ourselves to allowing others to nurture us. It is is probably time to let some other people into your life and care for you, it will help you become healthier!

Limerence

Learning how to be vulnerable

Let’s face it, we are all scared of being hurt… and in most cases the physical aspects don’t spook us nearly as much as the emotional ones.  It is hard to trust as it is, but then even if you can start to trust after betrayal, how on earth do you actually allow yourself to be in a place that is vulnerable?  Isn’t the whole point of  protecting yourself to NOT be in a position that makes your feel weak? Well…. like most things the answer is yes and no and it depends.

I know that we all want to think that there is someone out there that won’t hurt us, but the truth is that is lie.  Any two people get together and they are bound to cause some pain to one another, this is part of the human condition. Even if we accept that, there is this notion that we want someone who won’t hurt us intentionally… well I hate to burst that bubble too, but reality shows us differently.  We are not always the strongest, healthiest, or at our most kind and with that means there are for sure times we will feel anger and hurt someone else in return. Fight or flight exists on a daily if not minute to minute basis.

So all this doesn’t sound too good for learning how to be vulnerable. Somehow we are supposed to want to open ourselves up to the most intimate parts and share them with someone who will consciously and unconsciously hurt us at some point in our relationship? Yep, that is exactly what I am saying!!!! Let’s not try to pretend that we are all good or all bad when it comes to how we handle our emotions and actions. We do some crappy things to ourselves and others with intention and unintentionally.

With our reality check firmly in place, this is how and why it takes courage to be vulnerable. The strength of character it takes to risk being fragile, raw, and truly authentic  is outstanding. It is in spite of our past, our fears, and the truth of human interaction, that we still move forward with caring for another. It isn’t easy to come to terms with this truth, but it exists none the less.  If you want to really learn how to be raw and exposed to another person … you do it. You push ahead… you feel the fear AND do it anyway.

It is a curious paradox of sorts this whole being open and strong thing. We are taught that if you allow space for feelings that are raw, you are a weak person. But it actually requires so much more strength to risk the possibility of someone rejecting you. Work with me here… if you are truly a weak person then you will just blindly go ahead in any situation without forethought or caution to your self. Yet, when you are stable and strong you look at all the variables, analyze the risk, and move forward with pursuing your desires.

There is no hidden agenda, being vulnerable is hard work, but life in general is a risky proposition. You are bound to get hurt along the way but it is how you deal with that, that matters. You can make choices based on fear (unearned or not) or you can acknowledge possible hurts existence, in even the best of relationships, and create an opportunity for a very different kind of relationship for yourself and others.   It is your choice, but that is the point isn’t it, you are in control, it is your choice, and I would encourage you to be strong enough to choose risking hurt for the potential of something glorious, like the best relationship of your life!

Choosing a relationship by Franklin Veaux

One of my sweeties has a policy never to get involved with someone who has never had his heart broken. She believes quite strongly that there are certain things about yourself that you can only learn when your heart is broken, and that having your heart broken is the only way to discover whether or not you’re the sort of person who can pick himself up, put himself back together, and move on with courage and joy, or if you’re the sort of person who is destroyed by it.

I think there’s some value to that notion, though I don’t use it as a rule.

A few years back, I had a really painful breakup with a woman I fell very hard for and then, after investing a great deal in the relationship, discovered was a very poor partner for me. That relationship really brought home for me a lesson that I knew intellectually but didn’t know emotionally, which is this:

It is possible to deeply, sincerely love someone and still not be a good partner for that person.

That relationship also caused some nontrivial damage to one of my other relationships, and ended up changing the course of my life in ways that I still feel. I can’t say that if I had to do it over, I would never have gotten involved with that person at all, though I can say that I would have made different choices about what to do with that connection. But I digress.

There’s a socially sanctioned myth that says that love conquers all. It’s a deeply and profoundly silly thing to believe; love is a feeling, and a feeling can no more solve problems than it can refinish the sofa or put a new circuit breaker box in the attic. A feeling can impel action, can influence the way you make choices, but it can’t, of and by itself, do anything on its own. And making a relationship work requires more than just a feeling. It requires that the people involved make choices that are compatible and work toward a common end–which is extraordinarily difficult to do when those people have different goals, different priorities, different expectations, or even different internal templates about what they want their lives to look like. No matter what they feel.

And the feeling of love isn’t the only thing that influences our decisions. Other feelings, like fear or anxiety or anger, have a vote, too, and it’s not always the feeling of love that casts the deciding vote–even when that love is genuine.

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The lesson that I can really, deeply love someone and we can still not be good partners for each other was probably the most expensive relationship lesson I’ve ever learned, and it’s completely rearranged my approach to choosing partners.
The approach I used to use, and I suspect the approach that many people use, was to keep a sort of internal list of “dealbreakers” that I’d refer to whenever I met someone who seemed interesting to me and who seemed interested in me. I’d kind of run down the list– Is she giving me the psycho vibe? Nope. Does she hold conservative  ideas? Nope. All the way down the list, and if I didn’t hit a dealbreaker the answer would be “Cool! We should totally start dating!”

That isn’t the way I work any more. The dealbreaker approach “fails closed;” it assumes that if no dealbreakers are hit, then we should start a relationship, so if something later comes up that I didn’t know was a problem…well, I find out about it after I’ve already started to invest in a relationship with this person.

The approach I use now isn’t to keep a list of dealbreakers. Oh, there are some, to be sure; I’m not likely to date someone with a history of violence against her past partners, for example. But instead of keeping a list of dealbreakers these days, I keep a list of things that I actively look for–things that light me up in another person.

If I meet someone who seems interesting, and seems interested in me, I am more likely to ask the question “Does this person really light me up inside and bring out joy in me?” than “Does this person have some disagreeable trait that I don’t like?” That approach tends to “fail open”–the default is *not* to start a relationship unless there’s something very special about the person, rather than to start a relationship unless there’s something disagreeable about her.

That approach takes care of a lot of “dealbreakers” on its own, because a person who has the qualities that really shine isn’t likely to have the qualities that would be dealbreakers for me. For instance, a person who has demonstrated to me that she favors choices that demonstrate courage and integrity isn’t likely to be a liar.

It’s more than just taking the dealbreakers and flipping them on their heads, though. There are a lot of qualities on my “must have” list that wouldn’t have been reflected on my “dealbreaker” list.

So all of this is kind of a longwinded way to get to the qualities that DO light me up about someone. The things that really attract me to a person, without which I’m unlikely to want to start a relationship with her, include things like:

- Has she done something that shows me she is likely, when faced with a difficult decision, to choose the path of greatest courage?

- Has she done something that shows me that, when faced by a personal fear or insecurity, she is dedicated to dealing with it with grace, and to invest in the effort it takes to confront, understand, and seek to grow beyond it?

- Does she show the traits of intellectual curiosity, intellectual rigor, and intellectual growth?

- Has she dealt with past relationships, including relationships that have failed, with dignity and compassion?

- Is she a joyful person? Does she value personal happiness? Does she make me feel joy?

- Does she seem to be a person who has a continuing commitment to understanding herself?

- Does she seem to be a person who values self-determinism?

- Does she approach the things that light her up, whatever those things may be, with energy and enthusiasm? Does she engage the world and the parts of it that make her happy?

- Does she seem to demonstrate personal integrity?

- Is she open, honest, enthusiastic, and exploratory about sex?

- Does she communicate openly, even when it’s uncomfortable to do so?

There are probably more; the things that attract me to a person are in some ways a lot more nebulous than my old list of dealbreakers used to be.

In some ways, the approach I use now is an approach that relies on a model of relationship that’s based on abundance, not on starvation. A person who holds a starvation model of relationship, in which relationships seem to be rare and difficult to find, is not likely going to want to use an approach that fails open, on the fear that if he doesn’t take a relationship opportunity that presents itself, who knows when another person might express interest? If relationships seem rare, then why not jump at an opportunity if there seem to be no dealbreakers standing in the way?

The approach of seeking positive reasons to start a relationship, rather than looking for reasons NOT to start a relationship, means that I say “no” to opportunities that come by more often than I say “yes.” I have found that, for whatever reason, I tend to have a lot of opportunity for relationship, so there may be something to the notion that I have adopted this model of relationship because I can afford it.

But I do believe that holding an abundance model of relationship tends to make it true. I think that people who hold a starvation model of relationship often seem to be always searching for a partner, and that can really be off-putting; whereas in an abundance model, if you simply live your life with enthusiasm and joy and instead of seeking partners you seek to develop in yourself the qualities that you desire in a partner, then other people will tend to be drawn to you and relationships will be abundant.

Why do they stay …

I was recently reading an amazing post by hilzoy on the topic of why people might stay in a relationship that is abusive. There are so many factors that contribute to this choice, however they are often from a point of view that feels dis-empowering to the person being abused. While there are many valid arguments as to why someone would stay, this is one that explains in real-people-terms why even someone that is smart and rational would continue on even after the first time abuse happens.

If you are in a situation where you need help, support, or information regarding an abusive situation, please call. You will not be judged but rather encouraged to find solutions that work for you.

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In a post on a book about a violent relationship, Linda Hirshman writes:

“It is difficult to understand why she stayed in this awful relationship, given that she was not risking starvation and had no children with her abuser.”

I worked in a battered women’s shelter for five years, four as a volunteer, and one as a full-time staffer, so I might be able to answer this question. Obviously, this will be too general: people stay for lots of reasons. But generalizations might be better than nothing. I will also refer to abusers as ‘he’, and to their victims as ‘she’; this is accurate in the overwhelming majority of cases. (JSJ Therapy acknowledges that anyone can be abused and actively works to support all persons within situations, that they would like to change.)

In some cases, understanding why someone stays is easy. A lot of women are afraid that their abuser would try to harm them if they leave.  Staying in a case like this, at least until you had figured out how to leave safely and cover your tracks, is not mysterious or perplexing.

Moreover, while I think the assumption that battered women stay because they are just dumb, or have staggeringly bad judgment, is wrong and insulting, there are a whole lot of battered women, and it would be very surprising if none of them stayed for such reasons. We asked women who came to our shelter when the abuse had started; one woman told me that her husband had thrown her from a moving car on their first date, at which point I wondered silently why on earth there had been a second date, let alone a subsequent marriage. But in my experience such women were a vanishingly small minority.

What is hard to understand, I take it, is why women who do not have obviously bad judgment, and who do not take themselves to be in serious danger if they leave, stay anyways. So I turn to them.

To start with, it helps to know that (last time I checked) the two most common times for violence to start were the honeymoon and the first pregnancy. By the time you reach either point, you’re already in a pretty serious relationship, and leaving is not something that anyone would do lightly.

Moreover, the violence often comes as a real surprise. It’s not that there aren’t signs: there are. But they are often things like: he falls for you too hard and too fast, or: he wants to be with you all the time. You’d have to be either paranoid or a victim of a previous abusive relationship to leap to the conclusion that either of these things means that abuse might be in your future. (Imagine, in particular, someone whose last relationship was with someone who didn’t seem to care about her: imagine her saying to herself: last time he didn’t care enough; this time he seems to care too much; am I impossible to please?)

So imagine yourself, in love with someone, on your honeymoon or pregnant, when suddenly this guy just goes ballistic, often for very little reason, and hits you. For a lot of women, this is profoundly shocking and disorienting. There are things that are comprehensible parts of the world, even if they’re rare, like having your car stolen; and then there are things that are unexpected in a completely different sense, like having your car turn into an elephant before your eyes: things that make you wonder whether you’re completely crazy. Being beaten up by someone who apparently loves you is one of those things.

What this means is that precisely when a woman needs as much confidence in her own judgment as she can muster, the rug is completely pulled out from under her. And it’s not just that she questions her judgment because she got involved with this guy in the first place; she questions her judgment because something so completely alien to the world she thinks she knows has just happened.

Under the circumstances, it is very, very hard to say: well, OK, I am married and/or pregnant, I am in this serious relationship,  but I will nonetheless decide to leave, now, because I think I have to, and I trust my judgment. Trusting your judgment at that moment is like trusting your sense of balance when someone has just poured a fifth of vodka down your throat.

Besides that, there’s also the Jekyll/Hyde phenomenon. If I had a nickel for every woman who has said to me, “It’s like he was two people! Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde!, I’d be a wealthy woman today. When I first heard this, I didn’t entirely believe it.

Then I encountered Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde myself. One fine evening, a guy I was involved with, a guy who was normally kind and decent and funny, suddenly went nuts. He started accusing me of all sorts of that were truly insane. (You’ll have to trust me on this one: things that there was no reason in our relationship or my character for him to suspect me of, not a scintilla of evidence to support, and that would have been wildly implausible about anyone.) He followed me around the house, screaming and screaming, for about ten hours. (You might wonder, why didn’t I leave the house? Answer: it was on the outskirts of Ankara, at night, and there was nowhere to go and no public transportation.)

In the morning I left to walk around and try to figure out what had happened, in the kind of absolute daze I described above. When I came back, he was appalled by what he had done, and not in the “I am beating up on myself” way I had always imagined, but in the way a normal person would be, if a normal person had somehow done something like this. It was completely baffling. It really was as though he was two people.

I did not leave then. He did it again four days later. After that I thought: right. It is conceivable to me that someone might do this once. But if he felt the way he seemed to afterwards, then having done it, nothing like that would happen again for, oh, at least several decades. The fact that it happened again four days later means that something is going on. I flew home shortly thereafter.

But consider my advantages. While I have the usual run of horrid insecurities, underneath it all I am reasonably self-confident. Nothing in my background or upbringing would in any way make it hard for me to leave. I’m a feminist. Moreover, at this point I had been working in battered women’s shelters for several years. That was crucial: I knew that this was emotional abuse, in a pretty strict sense of that term, and that that meant that it was very, very unlikely to change. I was, therefore, not inclined to second-guess myself, and that was immensely important.

With all that, I did not leave the first time.

***

Imagine someone who stays longer. The longer you stay, the more your confidence and your self-respect are undermined. The first time often comes out of the blue, but it is normally the beginning of a cycle, not a one-time episode. And more or less everything about this cycle is absolutely corrosive to a woman’s self-respect.

Beating someone up is, obviously, itself a gesture of immense disrespect. But there’s generally also verbal abuse: battered women are often told, repeatedly, that no one should listen to them, that they’re ugly, stupid, hateful, bitchy, and in all sorts of ways worthless.

As I said, it’s corrosive. The longer you stay, the worse it gets. And since, as before, the capacity that is under attack is the very one you need in order to get out, this makes it harder and harder to leave. And, of course, the longer you stay, the dumber you feel about staying.

***

There are several more things, though. First, abusers often isolate their victims. At first this can take an apparently benign form: he wants to be with you all the time; he wants to envelop you in a kind of cocoon; there isn’t time for other things. Later, it’s a lot less pleasant. Women who stay often try to keep the peace, and one way to do that is not to insist on seeing your friends and family. That, of course, makes turning to your friends and family a lot tougher later on.

Second, it would be a lot easier if abusers were sneering villains. But they are not. They are often charming on the outside. More importantly, they are often in genuine psychological distress. It often seems like a combination of two things: first, feeling as though if their wife left them, some truly terrifying abyss would open up in their minds and they would fall down into the darkness forever, and second, thinking that to prevent this, they need to keep her from leaving, to control her.

In my judgment, when abusers say things like: I need you, I’d be lost without you, I’d die if you left, many of them are not just kidding or being manipulative. They are serious, and they are often right. If you love someone who is in genuine distress, you normally don’t want to make things worse for them. And that’s what leaving looks like, up until the moment when you say to yourself: he will not change, at least not while he’s involved with me; this will not get better; and that being the case, I am not helping him by staying.

At that point, you can think of leaving as helping him. Until then, it looks like kicking someone you love when he’s down. Your husband or lover is in pain; he needs you; and you are going to leave. For some people, it’s easier to take sacrifices on themselves than to inflict them on others, especially others they love. That is not the worst kind of person to be. But it makes it much, much harder to walk out the door.

Again, consider the example of me. I was not beaten up, and the emotional abuse did not last long before I left. Moreover, I had no doubt at all that I was right to leave, nor was I particularly confused about whose fault this was. But despite knowing perfectly well that I had not done anything wrong, I felt horribly guilty for several months afterwards. It was the oddest thing: emotions that I knew were just completely misguided, but that were, apparently, settling in for the long haul. Getting over it was very tough. I don’t want to imagine what it would have been like if I had not known that I had done the right thing when I left.

I came into this with every advantage in the world. I left quickly. I got off easy. But for all that, it was very, very hard.

Love Rituals

The big American love holiday is right around the corner. If you believe it is all about marketing or you enjoy in the day to remind yourself of your affection for another person, it is really about the ritual. We are habitual by nature and we feel a sense of safety when we can look forward to something positive on a regular basis. Valentine’s day isn’t a negative or a positive, like most things it depends on what it means to you, as to where the emphasis comes from.

I will say this though, around this time of year I start having people talk about a desire for something romantic. Okay, I’m going to generalize here, but usually one person wants a special date and another is looking forward to sex. This too isn’t a positive or negative approach, it simply exists within a system of how people balance out within relationships.

So you have a holiday reminder of love and we approach it perhaps with different meaning and intention. What to do about this situation?  As one might expect, as a therapist, I’m going to tell you to verbalize your emotions, thoughts, and desires on love rituals.

If you are a person that wants to go out and make an occasion out of Vday, then you should. If you are someone that wants your partner to make a big occasion about Vday, then you should tell them. If you are a person that hates the holiday and/or it makes you feel negative, then you should also mention that.  The point here is not to assume that the other people you are dealing with (romantic or otherwise) share your same values.

We so often mind read and just want the other person to magically know what to do. Then when this doesnt’ happen, we are upset. Instead of playing this game, how about directly talking about why such a day like Valentine’s is meaningful or not to you? The people you are exploring this topic with do not have to agree or disagree, but they will begin to understand where you are coming from on the idea.

So for all of those that are single, within a coupled relationship, or are enjoy multiple partners, talk about your desires. Explore what it is about love rituals that matter to you and those that do not. This way everyone knows how to make the day, week, month, and year something to connect with and grow closer.

JSJ Therapy In The Media

By Dickinson
Daily News staff writer

Technology and dating?

Not exactly a seamless combination.

In fact, many of us in the New Boomers generation wonder when to call? When to text and when is it appropriate to send a Facebook message?

Or, perhaps the most important question should be: What happened to old-fashioned face-to-face communication?

“When using other tools such as texting and Facebook, you’re not guaranteed you’re interacting with the person you think you are, and it also doesn’t give you a complete picture of who the individual is,” she said.

In fact, 93 percent of first impressions are based on what you see; just 7 percent is based on words, she said.

For some specific clients in long-term relationships, however, sending a text or a quick e-mail that says “I can’t wait to see you,” has been shown to light the fires of romance or intimacy that perhaps they were missing after being together so long, said Jasmine St. John, who specializes in relationships as a licensed therapist at JSJ Therapy in Madison, Wisconsin.

Also following a prospective suitor on a blog or Facebook can give you insight into how that person communicates and interacts with others, St. John said.

For example, it could be a red flag if the person is mean to someone on Facebook or it be an encouraging sign if you see the person is active in charity.

Instant communication is also a great way to keep in contact during the day for couples in new relationships who are experiencing brain chemicals that are making them crazy in love.

“We also have a bigger network to declare your love,” St. John said. “Before it was just the classic idea of a big airplane in the sky saying ‘I love you.’ Now you can tell the whole world.”

That community aspect where everyone in your Facebook network is updated on your social life can also be a detriment in situations such as when everyone finds out you experienced a break-up.

The constant communication may also be a negative because it can accelerate the relationship too quickly causing couples to burn out on the relationship, especially when the individuals begin to lose the brain chemicals making them infatuated.

Regardless, texting doesn’t make a great first impression because it is so casual and informal.

“But some clients have such anxiety about asking someone out in person that for them and the level they’re at even sending an e-mail or “hug” on Facebook is a step forward,” Jasmine said.

Nevertheless, if frustration ensues from a partner texting or e-mailing too much, Bockman recommends saying, “I enjoy hearing from you, but this isn’t the way I prefer to communicate.”

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