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Weathering the Storm – How to Survive Stressful Times Together

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Life doesn’t always go smoothly, have you noticed that?

It’s easy to feel in love and happy with your partner during times of success and relative calm.  But times like that don’t come along all that often.

My husband and I figure we have had one year that was relatively free of stress. Fortunately it was the second year of our marriage. We had weathered the normal “sturm and drang” of the first year and had established a warm, trusting connection between us. We had one year to enjoy that state of marital bliss before life came along to stir things up.

Change is Inevitable

The old saying goes there are two things certain in life, “taxes and death”.  I would go on to add a third, change.  Change happens continually and most of the time unpredictably.  Humans don’t really like change, for the most part. We would prefer to have our routines and daily lives remain stable and secure so that we can know what to expect.  Unfortunately, this is not true to life.  Life has a way of shaking things up, sometimes at the worst possible times.

Marriages, if they are to last, have to change as well.  They have to adapt to the flow of change in life and become more than they originally were, if they are to succeed. Most of us don’t handle it that well and the result is the amazingly high rate of divorce.  The popular belief is that we are “serial monogamists” and that it’s normal to be divorced in the 22nd Century.  But if you are like me and ever experienced a divorce,  you know there is nothing “normal” about it and it causes damage to anyone touched by it, whether you have kids or not.

So how are we to surf successfully through the storms of life and remain connected as a couple?

I am sure there are books on that particular topic, though I have to admit to never having read one.  There are lots of books on communication and deepening intimacy, but I don’t think I’ve seen any that directly address the topic of managing stressful times together as a couple.  It’s easy to feel connected to another person when things are going well, its something else altogether to stay connected when things are not going well.

Human Nature is to Find Someone to Blame for Our Unhappiness

This is because knowing who is to blame helps us solve the problem.  If we know where the problem is we can do whatever it needs to be done to fix it.  But, in the case of marriage, that often looks like divorce.  We figure, we are unhappy, so it must because of my partner.  “Just look at (him/her) (he/she) is so (fat, addicted, mean, selfish, whatever) and obviously doesn’t care about (him/her) self or me. How can I be happy with a partner like that?”

Ah, we have solved the problem!

Now we know what to do, we can get a divorce and it will be all better.

I can honestly tell you that two divorces did not make the difference in my happiness. My happiness or unhappiness resides inside of me! This need to find blame is so difficult to overcome that it can easily convince us that the one we love is responsible for our feelings of unhappiness.  We so desperately want to find an answer that we will abandon our beloved when we think they are the cause of our despair.

Stress and Change are a Normal Part of Life

The stressful and difficult things that happen throughout our lives are a normal part of life.  Learning to weather it without blaming someone for our difficulties is a challenge.  But getting to an understanding of how we project the cause of our unhappiness onto our spouse can actually help you find happiness within yourself.

If you are looking for the cause of a stink in your kitchen and your focus is on the rotten wood under the sink, but the source of it is the garbage, replacing the wood won’t fix your problem.  You have to figure out where your garbage is and clean it out.

Releasing your partner from the stress of your blame can do wonders for your relationship just by itself.

When you are under stress from the normal things that happen in life: lost jobs, job insecurity, financial problems, children who are having problems, legal problems, deaths, caring for an elderly parent – whatever  – it will cause stress on your marriage. You will want to blame your unhappiness on your spouse. “Why won’t he get a better job?” “Can’t she figure out somewhere else for her parent to live?” “She’s the reason the boy is having such a hard time, she wasn’t hard enough on him.” “If he just didn’t spend so much.”

You see? All of the above are reasonable explanations for stressful situations, but they don’t really solve the problem.  Blame never does.  It seems like it will, but all it does is creates problems of it’s own.

Your Unhappiness Resides in You

The next time you want to blame your spouse for your unhappiness, remember that your unhappiness resides in you.  It’s your job to change how you feel, not your spouses! If you are unhappy, choose to talk to your spouse about it. If you can do it without blaming him/her, they will share their concern and help you try to figure out what you need to do to make things different.  But if you, even subtly convey that you think your unhappiness is because of them, what you will get instead is anger, resentment and arguing.  Partners will naturally feel defensive and try to protect themselves against attack.

It is natural to respond to blame with anger. People so often get upset when someone suddenly lashes out in anger, in what appears to be an unprovoked attack, when what happened was that the person lashing out felt subtly blamed.  When your partner startles you with what feels like an unprovoked angry response, notice whether or not something you just said may have led them to believe you were blaming them for something.  Chances are you were subtly blaming them, or at least, they thought you were.  When people are going through stressful times, they are even more sensitive to the possibility that they are being blamed.

Let go of Blame and Anger

Stressful times are a time to pull together, to look for solutions and give each other a sense of support. Yet it’s very hard to accomplish, even in the best of marriages.  Knowing that the stress itself will cause you to look to your partner for blame can help you let it go.  It’s the stress causing the sense of blame, not the blamed one causing the stress. Learning to notice how you use blame subtly can ease the strain of stressful times. Lean on each other; don’t push each other away by blaming the other for your unhappiness. Your partner can be your best resource.

How Therapy Can Actually Destroy Your Marriage

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Generally speaking we choose to go into therapy when we can’t figure out how to make our lives work by ourselves. Maybe we’ve been aware of underlying sadness that doesn’t seem to go away no matter what we do. Or perhaps we have started having panic attacks for no noticeable reason that we cannot contain on our own. We could be tearful much of the time and don’t understand what is causing it.

On the other hand, we could enter therapy because we are unhappy with our marriage and we can’t get ourselves to leave or figure out how to change it.

When we go into therapy for any reason, and we are married, the odds of ending up divorced actually increase. I suspect this is because when we enter therapy we are looking at things solely from our own perspective. We go into therapy hoping to get a different perspective, but often what happens is that we get support in our perspective.  Most therapists are kind, care giving types of people who have gone into the profession in hopes of helping people.  So when you enter their office they give you support and encouragement, they help you feel better about yourself and your position.  If you have a partner and you are unhappy with them, the therapist encourages you to stand up for yourself and assert your needs.

The downside of their doing this is that while it may make you feel better in the short run, it runs the risk of destroying your marriage in the long run. This is because what has happened is that you have gotten help in making you stronger, at the cost of the connection between you and your partner.

In supervision early in my career I remember my supervisor saying that once a person brings their spouse into therapy you become the marriage’s counselor and not the individual’s counselor.  This made sense to me at the time.

Since then I have come to realize that when someone comes to me their relationships are as much a part of the therapy as they.  This means that I do not take positions against the other parties.  I support the person in discovering more about themselves and exploring how their current relationships are impacted by their past experiences. I do not make judgments about my client needing to end their relationships just because my client is unhappy in the situation.

One of my past supervisors habitually demanded that her clients cut off connections with their families.  Now, at the time this made sense to me since some of those family connections were with parents that continued to be abusive.  And, sometimes, this it can be important to take time-outs in these situations until the clients are strong enough to protect themselves.  But most of the time what my clients need is to be able to develop a different kind of relationship with these important people in their lives by developing compassion for both themselves, and for their parents.

To do this the therapist has to themselves be… coming from a place of recognizing that there are no “ bad guys”; only people who are “doing the best they can” given their circumstances.  We do a great injustice to our clients and to the families of our clients when we take the position of naming someone as the “bad guy” and someone else as the “victim.” Yet often this is exactly what takes place in therapy.

How can we stay married to someone who we think of as our enemy, as  “the bad guy”? The difficult thing is figuring out that this is happening. When we are in therapy and we are being supported in our position and our partner is behaving badly, it is easy to think that we are indeed “the victim”.  Maybe we even are actually “the victim” of their bad behavior.  But to remain there without making the effort to embrace the humanity of the other person is doing them and ourselves a terrible disservice.

If you are in therapy and have found yourself thinking of divorce, please pay attention.  Are you finding yourself thinking a lot about how your partner is treating you badly and that you “don’t deserve it”?  Are you keeping your thoughts and feelings to yourself, or just sharing them with your therapist or your friends and not your partner?  Has the trust between you and your partner disintegrated since entering therapy?

Have you brought your partner into therapy only to have them storm out? This tends to happen when our therapist has taken on the position of “the rescuer” and is now ganging up with you on your partner.  The result then is that your partner feels defensive and angry in the therapy session because they know that you have been talking about them and are unhappy with them.

Often this happens to husbands. Then men get the bad rap of not wanting to participate in therapy.  Who would want to go into a situation in which they know that they are going to be criticized? That’s what these brave guys do when they attend even one session. When they get overwhelmed and storm out then we label them as uncooperative.

The bottom line is this: when you go into therapy, take your partner. It will bring you closer together if from the beginning you work on your issues with them present. It will allow your partner to learn how to respond to your emotional needs by watching the therapist. It will allow you both to discover things about yourselves that you did not know. It will bring you closer, and it may also save your marriage.

Are YOU Dating a Narcissist? Find Out Here…

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“I’m In Love – With Myself!”

This past month one of my dearest friends fell into a familiar trap. She found herself head over heels in love with someone who was even more in love with himself.  It took several weeks of bending her mind around the idea that what he loved was not her, but his version of her.

Actually, most of us do this to one degree or another. We find someone we think is “perfect” for us because of certain things that we think we see in them.  This is not generally a bad thing.  The problem is that sometimes our image of what we want is very far from the truth of the person we are projecting all this on. Most of us can sort that out as we go along and begin to see who the person really is and not just our projections.  Narcissists can’t do that. They only see what fulfills their own wish of what the person they are with is like.

My friend’s guy was a very attractive, intelligent and savvy 40 something man whom had never been married, he said, because he kept meeting women who were “not available”.  When he met my friend, he was very excited because she was very available, and quite lovely.  My friend is open, intelligent, and sensitive, and quite sensual.  He was easily able to draw her into his illusion of himself, because he seemed to be what she wanted.  He had many years of practicing the illusion that he himself had fallen prey to believing. By profession he was a women’s “Coach” and offered workshops on achieving goals to women of the community.  He talked the talk of being someone emotionally aware, and spiritually attuned.

Here was my friends’ biggest mistake; she opened her heart before she had enough information. She committed her love to him before she had spent enough time with him to gather the information as to whether he was really a good potential partner.  But, in her defense, she was taken in by a master at the craft of seducing women. He knew that he needed her to commit her heart quickly in order for him to be free to behave in accordance with his true nature.

You see, once she had committed to him he knew it would be difficult for her to back out. Human beings have a hard time changing our idea of what we think of someone once we have committed publicly to our view.  To have to say we were wrong about someone means admitting that we used poor judgment.  None of us wants to admit to that!

So, even though my friend pretty quickly got a lot of information about him that indicated he was a poor partner choice, she could not easily say so without losing face.

Fortunately for my friend, she had good advisors close at hand who could see through what was happening and help her regain her boundaries long enough to tell him she was through with him.  This wasn’t easy, because people who are in love with themselves have a hard time admitting defeat.  His response was to insist that he would not give up on her and begged her to marry him.  Fortunately my friend had become strong enough at that point to resist his overt efforts at getting her to conform to his wishes; never mind what hers were.

How do you know if you’re dating a narcissist?

I can tell you this, it’s difficult to determine if a person is a narcissist very quickly because they initially are very intent on your perceiving them with the same allure that they perceive themselves. They will not want to show their true colors until they have a commitment. They tend to stay in pursuit mode, which means they want you to see them as wonderful as they see themselves and will go to great lengths to prove it.  That can be difficult for a romanticist to resist.

They will send you roses, buy you gifts, go out of their way to help you, do nice things for you and say nice things about you to you and to others.  Of course, the guy that you want will do and say similar things, as well, so it can be hard to separate the froth from the cream.

Here are some hints that you may be dating a narcissist:

  1. They spend the better part of most conversations talking about themselves.
  2. They are more concerned with what you think of them than how you feel.
  3. They cannot explain past relationship difficulties without blaming the other person or circumstances, and can’t describe their part in the problems.
  4. They respond to your complaints by telling you that they love you, and how beautiful (attractive) you are.
  5. When they get upset with you they are upset because you didn’t consider their feelings, but dismiss your feelings entirely.
  6. They have a pattern of behaving in thoughtless ways in regard to your needs (forgetting what you asked them to do, not asking you if you want a drink when they get up for one, not offering to repay you if you have paid for something for them)
  7. Responding to your feelings by becoming loving, affectionate and sexual with you to calm you down and divert attention from your feelings.
  8. Their behavior indicates that their wishes should take precedence over anything anyone else wants, they don’t back down, but escalate their attempts to get you to do what they want, in spite of your feelings.

If you figure out that you are dating a narcissist the best thing you can do for yourself is to break up with them.  Now, I know your heart will tell you all the great things about them that you adore.  But being in a relationship with a narcissist is an extremely painful and lonely experience because, to a narcissist, you don’t really exist.  If you love a narcissist the best gift you can give them, and yourself, is to break up with them and suggest that they get some help to understand why someone like you would break up with someone as wonderful as they.

Want More Sex? Here’s how…

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Regardless of what you may think. Sex happens in the brain.  Our ability to feel desire, the things that turn us on, the things that make us reach climax all happen in the brain. So, if you want more sex, it’s reasonable to assume you should know more about the brain. I’ll give you the primer version.

Our brains are hard wired to respond to perceived threat in ways that will preserve our ability to survive.  These automatic reactions are called “Survival mechanisms”.  Our brain fires off chemicals that provoke us into feelings of fear for our survival.  Then we have biologically programmed ways to react to fear that aid us in surviving whatever it is that is threatening our survival.  You don’t really have a choice about what you are feeling when you perceive yourself to be in a threatening situation.  Your brain takes over.  Our brains are very powerful in affecting how we feel and how we respond.

You see our brains have been programmed through biology and culture to respond in ways that will insure our survival in primitive situations. Your brain doesn’t really get it that if you perceive your job is being threatened you will not die.  It really feels like you will.  Your brain doesn’t know that if your husband/wife/partner is angry with you and you think they might leave you that you won’t die.  Your brain doesn’t know that when a friend calls your character into question, that you won’t die.  Your brain doesn’t discriminate between actual threat for your survival and emotional threat.

Our brains are divided into sections.  As we evolved as a species we went from depending on simple functions to the very complex brain that we now have as human beings. Our reptilian ancestors brains comprised of three cleanly defined sections: the front part allows for smell, the middle for vision, and the rear allows us balance and coordination. And those basic survival instincts were cordoned off in a space between the smell and vision sections, a kind of command post with the scientific name of “diencephalon”.  This part of the brain holds our drives for food, our  “fight-or-flight” aggression reactions, and of course, sex.

Our brains further evolved into what is known as the “mammalian” brain when our left and right cerebral hemispheres developed.  More and more circuits had to be added to process the more complex functions of the life and culture of our mammalian ancestors and our brains grew in size.  But we still rely on that command post to assist us in our primary need: survival. This relic of the past fights our evolved brains more flexible reactions and tends to take over when we perceive that we need them.

This very powerful tiny walnut sized part of our brain, set inside our brain stem, is called our “hypothalamus”. It injects our system with electrical stimulus evoking anger, anxiety and acute fear.  Most of the time, we are able to maintain mastery over this part of our brain. But now and again our animal senses tell us that our survival or our well-being is being challenged and that package of survival programs, called “emotions” erupt.

It’s like you have two brains in one body. Your emotional states that evolved to help you survive; and the other which is ruled by reason.  The old brain; and the new brain in one package: your skull.

Okay, now, back to sex…

When we feel emotional threat, we respond with this primitive part of our brain.  We feel scared, and our defenses go on autopilot.  We feel angry and protective and either withdraw or go into attack mode to regain a sense of control.  While it is possible to feel a need to have sex from this place, it’s more of a desire for dominance than it is the kind of intimacy that we most need and want.

Women tend to be turned off by men who display the need for this type of sexual encounter, if they aren’t it’s because they have never experienced the other kind.   And even if they will put up with it for a while, eventually they will stop wanting to participate because it just doesn’t feel good.  It feels scary and unsafe.

Safety is what leads to continued, warm intimate and frequent sex. When we feel safe with our partner our brains kick into a mode that allows us to drop our boundaries and allow ourselves to feel the vulnerability we need to feel in order to experience deep sexual intimacy.  Being afraid triggers the old brain into survival mode and sets up firm boundaries that keep distance between us. ant More Sex

So, if you want more sex, work toward more emotional safety in your relationship.  Emotional safety is accomplished by awareness of and sensitivity to what our partner is feeling.  It means being aware that when our partner feels threatened and is yelling or acting angry toward us, we listen to what is underneath their angry behavior. We ask them for more information about what may have hurt them and own up to our part in whatever occurred.  This doesn’t mean passively letting them have their way, it means sharing about what we honestly feel and negotiating a result that works for both of you.

Our old brain is tricky.  It can make us think that something is threatening when it’s not. It can make us think we are being attacked when we are not.  Being sensitive to what may trigger our partner into feeling they are being attacked helps us be more aware of what might be standing in the way of more intimacy (i.e. more sex).

Who Are You And What Have You Done With My Partner?

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When I got married I was such a happy person. My husband was gentle, kind, giving, and such a great dad.  It came as a complete shock to me the first time he got angry with me.

You see, I am an anger phobic from way back.  I will never forget cringing as my grandmother screamed at my mentally retarded uncle.  She would go on tirades that filled the house with angry blasts of her voice (this was no small task as the house was a 3 story boarding house).  I was never comfortable with anger (especially not my own!) and I would do just about anything to avoid it.  Additionally, when anyone was angry I had huge judgments regarding them.  Anger, in my opinion meant ugliness, abusiveness and there just wasn’t any excuse for it.

So marrying someone human enough to get angry startled me. I didn’t understand where my loving, gentle husband had disappeared to and who was this person in my bedroom anyway?  After all, I didn’t see that I could possible have done anything to have brought on his wrath.  I never did anything to deliberately hurt anyone, especially him, my most beloved.  The anger that I felt as a response separated us.  I felt totally disconnected from him. I couldn’t understand where he got off being so angry with me for nothing I could comprehend.  Who was this angry monster and why did he seem to hate me?

That’s how it felt to me. If someone was that angry with you they had to hate you, right? Consciously I knew that was wrong, but it definitely felt that way. The little kid inside cringed at every angry word he spoke.

I was fearful of his getting angry so I started editing what I told him.  In other words, controlling him by not giving him all the information.  That always backfired of course, because eventually he would discover what I had not told him and it would make him even angrier.

I don’t recall how long it took for me to realize that underneath the raging exterior of my formerly loving partner was a lot of fear and hurt.  What’s more, what he was angry about was never really about what I thought it was about, it wasn’t really about what I had said or done, it was about something far bigger, and older.

His anger was what I call a “Self-Protective” stance that he took to manage his hurt and fear. Often when someone is hurt they will become larger than life. They will raise their voice, puff up their physical self to maximum capacity and try to look as threatening as possible in an effort to appear more powerful than they feel (Imagine a puffer fish here).  They appear large and loud and scary so that you will be intimidated into stopping whatever it is you are doing that is hurting or scaring them. Underneath there is a kind of desperation and terror.  But that is not what they show; they show an overpowering, larger than life toughness to attempt to force change.

The person that had been so frightening to me was in fact scared and hurt.  Now, for some of you that might not be new information, but for me it was a huge newsflash.  Knowing this changed everything.  It empowered me to respond differently than I ever had to an angry person.

Instead of responding as a helpless victim and cringing, trying to control them by placating them with platitudes, running around trying to fix the problem that upset them, or worse, reacting with anger in return – I learned to give them empathy.  All of the old ways of responding, I discovered, created more resentment and anger.

Empathy, I was thrilled to realize, created a whole new kind of relationship and helped me find my kind, gentle husband again.  He had always been there, inside the attitude that had scared me so badly.  His Self-Protector stance had left me fearful and confused.  But once I figured out that I could change everything by changing how I viewed his anger, our relationship was transformed.

Our anger is a survival mechanism that kicks in when we are threatened in some way.  It throws us into a Self-Protector position in order to keep ourselves alive. Now, in most cases in today’s world, we are not really going to die, but on a brain level, that’s how it feels.  If our partner responds to our hurt and fear with empathy for our feelings, then we can slowly let go of our need for our Self-Protective reactivity and let ourselves be vulnerable again.

The next time your partner is angry with you. Stop. Don’t do what you always have done. This time, notice the hurt or fear and say something to indicate that you noticed they are hurting, like “I’m sorry, I can see there is something I did that hurt you. Can you tell me what’s going on?”  or something similar in your own words.  Give her some indication that you understand she is hurting.  Let him know that you care that he is hurt.  Odds are you will find out that the upset wasn’t really about you, but about something from your partner’s history. So be open, be curious and empathetic.  This will allow their anger to bring you closer instead of pushing you further apart.