What is “harmless”?

    There are a lot of definitions of marriage out there.  The meaning of that commitment seems to mean different things to different people, and the details of the contract vary.  I have a first row seat to that truth as a performer – the world of theater, especially of touring theater, seems to be a sort of petri dish for marriage experimentation.  It’s a world in which the line between personal and professional is blurry beyond recognition, where people are extroverted, emotionally driven, and flirtatious, and where being away from one’s spouse is as common (if not more) as being with them.  And I have to admit that the judge and jury in me want to come out sometimes on this issue.  How ok is it to push the boundaries of behavior on the road in the absence of one’s spouse?  Where are the boundaries and what does it mean to push them?  What is actually “harmless”, and what is not only inappropriate, but a dangerous emotional set-up?  Can there be different definitions of what’s ok in marriage, or are there some basic psychological truths about what will and will not work for marital success?

     A strong argument can be made for “harmless flirtations”.  But I guess for me the answer is partly to be found in the question of why we flirt in the first place.  We flirt because it makes us feel good.  It makes us feel attractive, desirable, of interest to someone.  And I can see where, when you have your spouse within reach, this can actually be of some benefit to keeping the fires stoked in marriage – as long as you can always reconnect those feelings to your spouse.  The problem is that we are highly associative creatures.  When we experience certain emotions repeatedly in a certain set of circumstances, or related to a specific person or thing, those emotions become tied tightly to those circumstances, person or thing.  Simply put, having someone other than your spouse be the source of this good feeling is dangerous.  And when your spouse isn’t around to be the ultimate associated release of those feelings, the person with whom you continually act those feelings out, it is exponentially more dangerous.

     I’m trying not to be moralistic about it.  The fact is that moral beliefs have very little power over this very human experience.  It’s hard, though.  For me, I’d love to know that my husband was always behaving in ways I would be comfortable with if I were in the room, and so I try to always use that as a measure of my own behavior – how comfortable would my husband be with my behavior right now if he were able to see me?  This seems right and reasonable to me, and has built into it the idea that different people’s spouses would be comfortable with different things.  In the end, though, I think the more delicate and often overlooked issue isn’t whether our spouses would be ok with what we are doing, but whether we are subjecting ourselves to an unnecessary and painful psychological battle for the sake of feeling good in the moment. 

You can take it (her/him) with you.

     In many ways, we come to know about ourselves by the choices we make, both on a large scale and in the small interactions of our daily lives. We see how we are behaving, and we identify ourselves as someone who behaves that way. That is why the way one relationship ends has so much resonance for the next one. The baggage we carry with us from one relationship to the next has less to do with what has happened to us than with how we have come to define ourselves through the experience. The fact is, if we truly trust ourselves to handle any situation with self-love, dignity, strength and compassion, we carry no baggage.

     If we leave a relationship as a resentful person, we enter the next relationship looking for a problem. If we leave a relationship as someone who is betrayed or taken advantage of, we enter the next relationship without trust. If we leave a relationship as someone who lacks understanding, we enter the next relationship unable to hear or know our partner. But if we can leave a relationship as someone who hears, understands, and acts out of compassion for both ourselves and our partners, we enter the next relationship ready for love.

     If we can use the challenges of the dissolution of a relationship to define ourselves this way, we can move on freely. If that is not possible (and sometimes it’s not), we can expect to have to use the next one to find that ideal version of ourselves, and be prepared to do the work. So be mindful of who you are being as you end your relationship – you take her with you.

Easier said than done, but something to consider.

There’s a fine line between wanting to be right and wanting to be understood in any argument and they can often look like very much the same thing.  We push and push and push to get our point across, relentlessly pursuing a concession.  A concession, yes, but of what kind, exactly? 

 

I push because I assume you don’t understand my point.  After all, I think, if you truly understood, you couldn’t possibly still believe I was wrong and you were right.  But then what if you demonstrated you absolutely understood?  What if you took a moment to not only acknowledge what I was saying, but that you understood why I was saying it, why it made sense to me?  What if you did all that, and then told me why you STILL disagree?  I suppose I would have to listen to what you were saying, or at least stop pushing my point.

 

And who knows, maybe if I truly understood what you were saying, if I took the time to demonstrate I absolutely understood, maybe I wouldn’t still believe I was right.  Or maybe I just wouldn’t care so much about being right anymore.  Either way, it’s worth a try. 

Time heals…nothing. By itself.

     I am having occasion to check in (yet again) on a process of forgiveness that seems to be taking forever.  The hurt involves betrayal, manipulation, depletion and humiliation.  The forgiveness is two-fold, as it tends to be.  I have to forgive him, and I have to forgive me for allowing him.  And I am seeing that time alone heals nothing.  In time, the universe tends to give you opportunities to heal through experience, but if you are failing to see the opportunity, you may have to create one.   

      In the process of forgiving, I let time go by, waiting for myself to simply let it go.  I felt that if I were the kind of person I wanted to be, I would just let it go and move forward.  Then I woke up 3 years later and realized that I was, simply, NOT letting it go, despite my best intentions.  And worse, that I had come to define myself by the experience, so it was contaminating my new and potentially joyful experiences with distrust.  I needed an experience that would help me redefine myself.  So I invited the past back in, so that I could at least write a slightly different “last” chapter.  So I could finally take some action.  And there was definitely some healing.

     But now there is a new occasion to examine how far I have come regarding this long-ago hurt.  The past is making an appearance in the present.  And I see that it no longer has any power over my new experiences, that is, my experiences that have no ties to the old ones.  But having been given the possibility of experiences that bridge the two, I see that I still feel the sting of humiliation and anger.  And I see the opportunity the universe is giving me.  There is a reason the past is working it’s way into my present.  There is more to my process of forgiveness and letting go, and healing is to be found in the new choices I can make, in the person I can now choose to be.  I’m nervous about it, but ready to see how far forward I can move.

     It’s interesting, though – now that I have come to see this Personal Evolution aspect of the marriage relationship, I am seeing all of my relationships in this light. 

     Maybe it’s because I’ve never been good at casual friendships.  I’ve never been the popular type – capable of chatting without intruding on people’s personal experiences, joking casually and cleverly, good for a good time.  Not that I’m a total bore.  I’m very capable of laughing and having a good time, and I’m a terrific audience for the clever.  I like to play, do, and try.  But my sense of humor has always come out most strongly in the process of exploring the depths – I am very good at finding the funny in what is deeply personal and deeply TRUE.  So my friendships have always had an element of this kind of exploration, of grasping for understanding, of trying to learn from it all. 

     So that’s ok.  I struggled with that for a long time in junior high and high school when that was a source of some real self-esteem issues, but as an adult, I have learned to embrace it and focus on the richness those relationships provide me.  And as an adult I am seeing that if my friendships are going to be about this, then they can be about so much more than a friend who is loyal and understanding, and who seems to like me.  I can choose my friends for what they inspire me to reach for.  I can choose them for my own Personal Evolution.

      And then I can look at my other relationships – the one’s I haven’t chosen, the one’s I am stuck with - and I can see them the same way.  These relationships, too, provide me with opportunities to be better than I am currently being.  Every interaction is a scene in which I have a part to play, and I chose who I will be in it – will I be a good listener, will I be compassionate, will I be self-respecting, will I be honest, will I be curious… will I handle this the way I’d like to handle this?  And hopefully, in this way, I will become more and more joyful in my life, as the gap between who I am being and who I’d like to be closes, as I become my best version of myself. 

Why would anyone want to promise THAT?

     So then how does that apply in the case of a marriage, where walking away is not supposed to be an option?  That’s the whole point of my last entry, isn’t it, that it’s easier to love and respect yourself and your partner equally when walking away is a viable option.  You can negotiate towards your mutual happiness, or you can decide it’s not possible and let the relationship go.  Does that mean it is only possible to sustain this level of mutual love and respect outside of marriage?  Does it necessarily all fall apart once we say “I do”?

     This is the challenge that marriage presents us.  It is (or at least can be) a voluntary promise to consistently work towards yours and your spouse’s mutual happiness, NO MATTER WHAT, for walking away is no longer an option.  But why on earth would anyone want to promise THAT? 

    Personally, I saw it as a tremendous opportunity for Personal Evolution.  Marriage creates an imperative for stretching yourself as a person to include this other person you have chosen.  It requires you to strive to equally consider your own needs with the needs of another.  And, in theory, marriage provides you with a safe place to try, fail and grow, because your partner has made the same promise to you.  The reward, in addition to your personal and spiritual growth, is the benefit of everything this other person brings to the table.  A partner in this world.

     So for me, much of the question of my readiness for marriage was about two things. 

     First, how ready am I to equally consider my needs with the needs of another?  For a long time, I struggled to consider my own needs.  I had a tendency to give it away.  Some I know struggle more to consider the needs of another, they tend to hold it too tight.  The truth is that this is an erroneous dichotomy, it is not actually an either/or prospect.  So I needed to feel confident in my size as a human being, to understand my capacity for simultaneous and infinite generosity. 

     And second, have I met a man who will make this process a joyful one?  I needed to feel confident that I had found a partner with whom it might actually be POSSIBLE to always find the win/win in any given situation.  And I needed a man who deeply inspired me with everything he brought to the table; who therefore made the “work” of growing together a happy career. 

     I consider myself truly lucky that I was able to make this decision so consciously, and truly blessed with a marriage in which I never think of questioning why anyone would want to promise “THAT”.

The trouble with evidence is…

     Happy New Year, everyone.  I wanted to pick up close to where I left off with the story of how my husband and I met.  I was talking about how timid my previous online dating profile was when it came to asking for what I wanted.  And I briefly explained that I probably didn’t believe I could actually get what I wanted.  Well, why would I think that?  What was I basing this very limiting belief on?  Evidence.

     I had a horrible relationship history.  A history involving men with substance abuse issues, sexual preference issues, and lying and stealing issues.  A history of getting less than I deserved from my relationships, and a history of putting up with it.  Add to that one failed engagement and the fact that the statistics on women my age finding a mate were disheartening at best, and it was easy to come to the conclusion that there weren’t any good guys out there, and that, even if there were, he probably wouldn’t be finding his way to me. 

     Fact was, I felt like a victim.  And I was playing that role to it’s fullest.  But these weren’t just things that had HAPPENED to me.  I was the one who held on to painful situations too long – long enough to do damage to my self-esteem and outlook.  And I was the one who accepted less than what I said I wanted, what I said I deserved, until it was hard to even know what that was.  It was time to admit – it was insanity to take my willingness to hold onto pain as an indication of my readiness for joy.  It was lunacy to consider my willingness to accept less as a sign of my readiness for more.  There was work to be done, and it started with me. 

     It started with me realizing the malignance of making the opposite sex my enemy.  It started with opening myself to the possibility that I didn’t know what was out there, but I knew what I wanted and what I deserved.  And it started with trusting myself not to accept less.  There was nothing anyone could do to me that I simply didn’t allow.  “Evidence” was holding me hostage because I bought into its power.  But there was nothing in my past experience or understanding of “how things are” that could account for my personal potential for growth and change.

     The trouble with evidence is that it doesn’t speak to who you can be, and how that can change everything.

Choosing Happiness

 We have all heard, at some point, the idea that we are responsible for our feelings, that no one can “make” us feel anything.  But what does that really mean, when our experience is that the behavior of someone else seems to be the cause of our feelings?  How can we, therefore, be “responsible” for them? 

We are responsible for our feelings simply because they belong to us.  Though our feelings are always valid and sometimes may even be considered “normal”, the fact is that someone else may have different feelings in response to the same thing.  Why would one person feel one way, and someone else another?  Because of the different thoughts in each person’s head.  The question of why we are feeling something can certainly be explored in terms of what has happened to “make” us feel that way.  But this inevitably leads to blaming our feelings on something outside of ourselves, and takes away our power to do anything about them.  It is more productive to explore our feelings for what they are telling us about ourselves – our thoughts, our beliefs, our values.  Once we do that, we can actively make responsible choices around those feelings. 

It is true that we are never in control of things outside of ourselves, but that we can control who we choose to be in response to them.  Everyone we relate with provides us an opportunity to get information about who we are being, and to make adjustments towards who we want to be.  Our feelings are the key to getting that information.   We make choices of thought and behavior based on our feelings constantly.  But it’s dangerous to make choices based solely on feelings which we haven’t fully recognized nor taken ownership of.  To do so places us at the whim of those feelings and of the people or things we perceive to cause them.  It makes us victims.  It is how conscious we are of our feelings and what they tell us about ourselves that determines to what degree our choices will reflect who we really want to be. And the more our choices reflect who we want to be, the closer those choices can bring us to happiness.     

   

Authenticity. What the #%!@ does that mean?

     I had a very interesting conversation with a coachee last week about being authentic.  Specifically, about whether being concerned with someone’s response to you automatically makes you inauthentic.  And, in asserting my opinion that it did, I was caught in a possible contradiction.  In my first post, I mentioned the importance to our personal growth of the feedback we get from our interactions with others.  But if we are concerned with that feedback, are we able to be authentic?

     In my opinion, any time we concern ourselves primarily with the response we are getting or going to get, we are doomed to perpetrate a manipulation.  And a futile one at that, since we can very rarely predict another’s response or even accurately interpret it.  Plus, many people can tell when we are concerned about or trying to get a response from them , and then we are definitely not going to get the response we are looking for. 

     To what extent, then, should we consider the feedback we get from others?  To the extent that it is useful information in determining a much more important concern.  Who do I want to be in this moment?  The deeper my level of awareness, the more equipped I am to answer this question.  The effect or possible effect of my actions on, for instance, the feelings of another may be very useful – given this information, who do I want to be in this moment?  Maybe in some cases the information doesn’t ultimately bear on the answer at all.  Either way, it comes back to me – to the kind of person I want to be, the kind of wife I want to be, the kind of daughter I want to be, the kind of friend I want to be.  It is a deepening level of awareness, coupled with this kind of conscious behavior, that leads to true authenticity.

Hello world!

     Thank God for a husband with a sense of the current and cool.  I was going to do a Newsletter.  A newsletter, baby?  Really?  How about a Blog?  Right!  Of course!  So here we are. 

     As some of you know, I graduated from a Life Coaching program this past summer, and have been struggling with what direction I would take things ever since.  To be honest, I have conflicting feelings about the title “Life Coach”.  Despite my deeply held belief that we can all benefit from the kind of support offered by a Life Coach, there is a little voice in my head that says, “What does that even MEAN?”  LIFE Coach?  What, exactly, am I getting coached on here?

     There are three primary ways we change and grow in life;  through the journey of achievement/creation, through the changing of circumstances, and through our interactions with others.  Most coaching sort of works in that order.  We set goals to create something or to change something about our circumstances.  And then, in the course of implementing these goals, we address the issues that come up with any human we may encounter on route.  But this is problematic for me, because it is a reverse of the way in which I would prioritize these values.

     In my opinion, our relationships provide us with the most powerful opportunities to discover our character strengths and our values – the things about ourselves that give us the power to move forward in life. And they give us powerful opportunities to work through things about ourselves that stand in the way of what we want and who we want to be.  The feedback we can observe from our relationships is rich, immediate, and particularly worthy of our consideration because of where it comes from – another human being.  A dynamic and direct reflection of ourselves. 

      In addition, more than our jobs, hobbies, or material possessions, it is the quality of our relationships – the knowledge that we are understood, supported and, most importantly, appreciated, and the availability of positive interaction – that most determines the quality of our lives.

     And so here I am…a Relationship Coach.  A coach whose passion is to assist people in transforming their relationships into healthy and inspiring opportunities for growth and joy.  So my intention for this blog is to take a relationship issue each month and discuss some aspect that seems important or interesting to consider.  And we can talk about any relationship – girlfriend, husband, ex, Mom, brother, teengage kid, boss, coworker, busdriver. 

     ForwardMotionCoaching.  It was a name created based on my original intention to be a Life Coach.  When I decided to focus on relationships, I considered changing the name – at first sight, it didn’t seem to apply.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was exactly the message I wanted to send about what I do.