Archive for ‘Love’

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May 31, 2006

Divorced dads – living without blame and loving your children

by Rod Smith

Children will, at various times, blame both parents for a family’s breakup, no matter who is to blame. Don’t try to get your children to be on your side even if your wife was wrong on every count and you, in your perfection, sprouted angel wings. Two people marry and both contribute to the need for a divorce when it becomes necessary.

I’ve met men (and women) who claim to be innocent victims of divorce but I hardly ever buy it.

Look a little deeper at what you did or did not do in the marriage. Get your focus off your ex-wife and ask yourself what your role was in the deterioration that necessitated dissolution of the marriage. Growth, and healing in your relationships with your children will elude you until you assume full responsibility for your part of the family’s breakup.

Until then, until you are cognizant of your role and take responsibility for it, any strategy you employ to more effectively love your children will serve only to create a further wedge between you and seem to “push” the children further from your urgent love. Until you stop all blame and victim thinking, your toxicity will permeate all your relationships, especially the one you want with your children.

Posted in Divorce, High maintenance relationships, Love, Manipulation, Marriage, Victims | 4 Comments »

May 25, 2006

I am attracted to a married man…

by Rod Smith

I am a single woman attracted to a married man. We work for the same company. I can see he is lonely and I want to be his friend. He makes eye contact with me but he is uncomfortable about talking to me. Should I meet him where I know he has lunch? (Question submitted online)

You are a relationship piranha. Find ways to address your own loneliness that are not at the expense of a man, his wife and children. The loneliness you perceive within this person is a projection of your very selfish motives. Even if he is lonely, his emotional well-being is absolutely none of your business. You are employed to do your job, not meet the emotional needs of strangers, and not wreck marriages.

Stay away from this man who is (thankfully) uncomfortable with your deceitful advances. Even if you did run into him for lunch, and even if you did alleviate his apparent loneliness, and even if you did start an on-going relationship with him, it would all be based on lies and deception. Since you have already established that you are a dishonest woman I question whether this would be important to you.

Posted in Affairs, Attraction, Family, Love, Spousal abuse | 27 Comments »

May 18, 2006

Difficult or “high maintenance” people

by Rod Smith

(Published in The Mercury – 05/19/06)

Several years ago you wrote about “high maintenance” people and described my then-girlfriend to a T. Please publish it again. It was hard to believe a person who had never met my girlfriend at the time was able to describe her with such accuracy.

Comments come to me as Emails. I will make time if you want to talk.

Comments come to me as Emails. I will make time if you want to talk.

High maintenance people require constant attention and approval. They crave to be the center of almost every conversation and will often become symptomatic (moody, resentful, loud, threatening) when they are not. They analyze every move, thought, word and action of others, and then read more meaning into things (statements, looks, sighs, attitudes) than was ever intended. They are easily hurt, quickly offended, quick to rebuke when they do not get the kind of attention they think they deserve. Threats of withdrawal or desertion become a way of life.

High maintenance people are difficult, sometimes impossible, even in the most relaxed of circumstances. They pick fights, find fault, and personalize almost everything. They argue with people who are closest to them for no apparent reason. They often pick on strangers (waiters, helpers). They often live in a world of cut-off relationships where others are idiots and no one understands.

What can you do if you are in a relationship with a high maintenance person? You can do very little that will not hurt, offend, or get a reaction – but you must make a stand. High maintenance people seldom benefit from pity or patience or empathy. They will only benefit from being constantly challenged to grow up.

Posted in Anger, High maintenance relationships, Love, Manipulation, Voice | 11 Comments »

May 6, 2006

Costly dating errors

by Rod Smith

When you first meet someone and decide to have a first date don’t:

1. Get too close too quickly.
2. Get physical.
3. Give or lend money.
4. Tell everything.
5. Allow the person to move in with you.
6. Let them use your credit cards.
7. Let them use your car.
8. Let them sign or use your name on anything.
9. Let them use your address.
10. Let them baby-sit your children.
11. Modify your values or your morals to impress him/her.
12. Go against the advice of people who have loved you for a long time.

There is no love at first sight! Exercise cautious wisdom in all new relationships. While thinking readers might find this list absurdly unnecessary, I have had bright, thinking clients who have done one (or a few) of these things on a first date. Their errors have been very costly to some clients.

Posted in Love, Manipulation, Sex matters, Sexual abuse | 1 Comment »

April 30, 2006

Love, because you are human

by Rod Smith

It is in us to love. It’s human. We have the capacity for it. Even hurt and rejected people can love. Once a person accepts that love has more than romantic connotations, as powerful and valid as these of course are, he or she will be able to see its broader power.

Love is unleashed through simple, but not easy, human acts of seeking the highest good both for oneself and for others. Acts of offering unearned forgiveness, of reaching out to the estranged, of welcoming a stranger, of letting go of all prejudice, of rejecting dishonesty – all begin within the individual human heart.

When a person intentionally facilitates others toward finding and enjoying and exercising the full range of their humanity, he or she will know and see and experience the powerhouse love is.

Even people with reason to reject others, having themselves been rejected or treated inhumanely, have it in them to love, if they dare to muster the courage for it. It comes quite naturally to the courageous person, and when it is unleashed, the purposes and the meaning of life surge into the heart of all who have the courage to hear and respond to its powerful call.

Posted in Love, Meditation | 6 Comments »

April 19, 2006

A person who loves you…….

by Rod Smith

1. Does not intentionally embarrass you in private or in public by what he/she says or does. Partners sometimes use scornful humor and cutting sarcasm in private and in public. Love does all it can to avoid such behavior. (Parents who intentionally embarrass their children may well love their children, but their behavior is not loving).
2. Listens attentively to what you have to say to others even if he/she has heard what you are saying many times.
3. Stands up for you when you are right and stands up to you when you are not.
4. Will refuse to be a pushover within the relationship.
5. Does not offer you unquestioned support no matter what you want to do. Unquestioned support comes, arises not from love, but from idiocy. Blind support is no sign of love, not even in a marriage.
6. Is not afraid to ask tough questions. He/she who knows he/she is loved will welcome tough questions.
7. Does not try to cut you off from your community, monitor what you read or to whom you talk.
8. Does not tell you how to dress, speak, think or feel.
9. Gives you regular uninterrupted, eye-to-eye contact time in order to hear what is occurring in your life and about what is important to you and to similarly reflect about his/her life. This means time without television, radio, music, and cellular phones, pagers, computers, Email, or children invading the holy territory between you.
10. Regards your shared private life with absolute and undiluted respect.

Posted in Love, Marriage | 2 Comments »

April 16, 2006

A love story

by Rod Smith

Steve and Ann Reynolds, my neighbors, have been married for 25 years.

Some years ago, Steve and Ann were each aware that Ann deeply wanted to return to university to pursue a Masters Degree. Having four teenagers, careers, and a home, the prospects of one parent assuming a heavy schedule of university classes was not too daunting for Steve or Ann.

Steve told Ann he’d take care of the children’s complicated lives of school, sport and extra-curiccular activities. He agreed to run the home, cook, do the shopping and manage the mass of laundry generated by six people. Steve, apart from working, agreed facilitate all their domestic responsibilities so Ann could focus on her studies – for the next four years!

They did it! With remarkable cooperation from the children, Steve did all he said he’d do (no maid, no yard help) while Ann completed her degree achieving high honors.

It was a pleasure to sit near the family in a packed auditorium and watch a husband, three sons and a daughter, enthusiastically applaud a wife and mother as she walked across the stage at her graduation ceremony. Such enduring cooperation between equal adults, each doing what was best for all concerned, makes a fine demonstration of what being in love is all about.

Posted in Love, Marriage, Space, Voice | Leave a Comment »

April 2, 2006

How to know love is real love?

by Rod Smith

Love is not possessive. It does not try to keep you from other important relationships. A person who tries to restrict your freedom does not love despite what he or she might say. Sometimes a possessive person will say, “I am just this way because we are not yet committed,” or “because you are so beautiful.” The truth is that possessive people seldom become less so. Their hold will only increase as you permit it.

Love is not jealous. A person who loves you will celebrate your strengths and successes. A person who loves also applauds you when others do. They work to enhance your popularity with others. Sometimes a jealous person will say, “I am jealous of you because I love you,” or “my jealousy shows I care.” Nonsense. People are jealous for many reasons and it is never a sign of love.

Love is not only a feeling. It is measured in financial, spiritual, and sexual fidelity. The loving person does not play games with your feelings, spend your resources, or keep as a secret from you, matters that pertain to your friendship. Love seeks the highest good of all the people in your family. It has no desire to exclude or separate you from you family.

Posted in Differentiation, Love, Voice | 21 Comments »

February 27, 2006

Peacekeeping / Peacemaking — there is a difference

by Rod Smith

Call me... 317 694 8669 (USA)

Call me... 317 694 8669 (USA)

There is a big difference between keeping peace (peacekeeping) and making peace (peacemaking). In a troubled emotional environment peacekeeping takes a lot of work, saps energy, and is usually a never-ending task.

Peacemaking lays groundwork for authentic peace to rule.

Peacekeepers work hard to keep the tensions from rising. They work hard at pretending that nothing is wrong and nothing is bothering them.

Jesus was a peacemaker (the cross is one evidence that he did not avoid conflict) and he calls his followers to be peacemakers. (See The Beatitudes, Matthew 5). Peacemakers allow tensions to surface, even encourage tensions to be aired. They might even precipitate conflict.

Peacekeepers avoid conflict at any cost. Their reward is the semblance of peace and tranquility and the slow demise of their integrity.

Peacemakers invite necessary conflict because they know there is no other pathway to increasing of understanding between warring people and groups.

Peacekeepers can endure fake peace for decades while the tensions erode at their well being and it often leads to feelings of being “called” or anointed. Peacekeepers often have high levels of martyrdom. How else would they rationalize the stress that accompanies the effort of trying to hide the proverbial elephant in the room? Peacekeepers are often portrayed a deeply spiritual because they can endure so much without “saying anything.” They often see their suffering, not as an expression of being misguided or of stupidity, but as a product of faithfulness to being “Christian.”

d-is-for-differentiation1Peacemakers value authentic peace more than its distorted parody. The peace that exists between people with the courage to endure conflict, for the sake of lasting peace, is like gold when compared with its counterfeit cousin.

In your family, at your work place, at your place of worship, move toward lasting peace with courage. Assume your legitimate role as a peacemaker rather than avoid conflict in order to keep a semblance of peace that is not worth having.

Call Rod now…..

Posted in Divorce, Family, Love | 11 Comments »

February 22, 2006

I’m married to a pessimist…..

by Rod Smith

“There is an expression that says ‘Two men looked out of the prison bars and one saw mud and the other saw stars.’ Please give me your opinion on ‘negative people’ and how to handle them. I have been married to one for many years and at times it gets me down.”

It is a matter of perspective as “negative people” usually see themselves, not as pessimists, but as “grounded” realists

While it might be hard to believe, your sense of optimism might be as tiring for your spouse as is your spouse’s pessimism is for you.

I’d suggest you avoid the attempt to change a negative person into a positive one. This will meet great resistance and you will unnecessarily corner (or trap) each other over matters that are not worth fighting over.

Try to accept that you are married to a person whom you regard as being negative just as you spouse will have to accept that he or she is married to an optimist. Do not allow your spouse to infect you with negativity (to change you) anymore than you want to try change what they are. Surrender control.

No matter what attitudes surround you, remember that it is you alone, who determines your mood on any given day.

Posted in Love, Marriage | Leave a Comment »

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