- Deliver your own news – good or bad. Don’t use others as carrier pigeons.
- Try not to keep people waiting. While it is sometimes unavoidable, effort on your part to be punctual will speak volumes about you.
- Find a way to remember people’s names. You’ll be surprised how much it will do for you.
- Spend less than you earn, and save some money every month. Nothing kills enduring happiness as efficiently as debt.
- Get out of the middle of other people’s relationships. Avoid being triangled. Remember Piggy in the Middle is not much fun for Piggy.
- Tell the truth as kindly and as efficiently as possible.
- Do something dangerous or scary every day.
- Say yes more than you say no.
- Write. There’s a novel within you awaiting an escape.
- Read.
- Err on the side of trusting too much than on the side of trusting too little.
- Say please and thank you as often as possible.
December 12, 2007
Brief notes to improve your relational environment:
November 3, 2007
When counseling will be most effective….
I am listening....
1. Neither client nor therapist exaggerates therapist’s abilities or the client’s condition.
2. Therapist sees role as helping client steer toward a more productive, healthy future.
3. Client sees the “big picture” over the “long haul” rather than immediate relief in the “here and now.” (Patience, patience, patience).
4. Client and therapist maintain a sense of humor (a sure indication of health) while facing life’s inevitable challenges. Not everything can or will be better no matter how much therapy you throw at it!
5. Client and therapist call forth the client’s strengths and the innate human desire for adventure, rather than engage in the seemingly endless pursuit to understand a client’s pathological history, weaknesses, parents’ weaknesses, and debilitating reasonable, and unreasonable fears.
6. Therapist and client understand the limited benefits of empathy in exchange for the overwhelming benefits of challenge and adventure.
7. Client realizes that psychological insight without action (acting upon the insight) is a waste of money, time and useful therapeutic process. Sometimes a person has to actually DO something rather than be filled with insight about what needs to be done.
8. Client is willing to increase the ability to tolerate necessary pain (both within self and within others) and resist the understandable pressure to alleviate the very pain essential for growth to occur.
9. Therapist challenges the client repeatedly toward self-definition (to grow up!) in the face of life’s natural obstacles.
Conditions under which counseling or therapy will be of little or no value…
Time and again I hear “If I could just get him/her to see a counselor” as if a counselor can work magic to heal and solve all personal and relationship problems. Few trained counselors would see themselves as possessing such unrealistic powers. Here are some conditions (there are others) under which even counseling will be of little or no value:
1. When a person is forced, or cornered, or manipulated into seeing a counselor.
2. When a person has no motivation for change.
3. When a person agrees to see a counselor because he/she believes counseling will “fix” someone else in the family.
4. When the person’s mind is already made up over and issue (a pending divorce, continued involvement in an affair) and goes to counseling so he/she can say he/she tried it and it was no help.
5. When a person is resistant to getting help (doesn’t see the need for help) and offers counselors little or no respect in the first place.
6. When the person is combative from the outset and sees the therapeutic hour as time to show how clever (or funny, or morose, or argumentative, or stubborn, or intellectual) he/she can be.
7. When the person has already made up his/her mind that there’s no hope (”we’ve tried it all before”) or that counseling is a waste of time and money.
October 2, 2007
Our counselor used your columns in pre-marital work and it seemed cold…
“Three years ago our pre-marriage counselor used a few of your columns to get us talking. I was annoyed because they made our engagement seem so business-like and so un-romantic. It seemed very cold to discuss money when you feel so in love. Now I can see how important it was to talk about money and children and faith as if I was entering a business relationship. Thanks. You have helped us a lot.” (Edited)
Perceiving a marriage as having many elements of a business contract will enhance, and not detract, from a marriage relationship. The absence of money (fights over money, the misuse of money) in a marriage can quickly kill any feelings of romance and goodwill. “Cold” talks during an engagement can help warm a home for many years to come. He or she, who, during marriage preparation refuses to engage in such talk, is declaring loudly and clearly that he or she is not quite ready for marriage. I am most honored your counselor used some of my work to assist you in you marriage.
May 18, 2007
How to love and respect your wife:
Chime in, please...
2. Develop a network of diverse and supportive friends both on your own and with your wife.
3. Challenge your wife to be a mutual, respectful, and equal partner in every aspect of your relationship. If you have an urge to be in charge and think being in charge makes you more of a man, seek professional help.
4. Resist any forms of intimacy you or your wife find uncomfortable.
5. Believe in your wife’s honesty and integrity by refusing to lie or cover for her no matter how seemingly justifiable the lie or a cover-up might be.
6. Applaud and support your wife’s desire and her attempts to be close to her extended family.
7. Talk to your wife about what you see, think, and feel regarding matters that are important to you, and offer her opportunities to do the same with you.
8. Resist “shutting down” or playing the silent game or the “hurt puppy” when you do not get what you want.
9. Take full responsibility for your children by spending large blocks of time (three-day weekends) with your children. Do not recruit any help from you wife or extended family to do this.
10. Be as interdependent as possible. Find fulfillment both within your marriage as a husband, and as an individual. Enjoy being husband and dad without losing your capacity to enjoy life outside of each of these wonderful roles.
March 31, 2006
Responsive people can help heal relationships
Are you a responsive person (as opposed to a reactive person)?
1. Responsive people can function within life’s many tensions without becoming overwhelmed.
2. They can see possibilities within problems.
3. They are extraordinarily flexible and they can be very playful.
4. They shape their emotional environment, bringing calm and creativity to their context, rather than assuming the anxieties of those around them.
5. They initiate creatively rather than react defensively and can be objective and consider implications for everybody involved.
6. They see the immediate and the long-term effects of decisions.
7. They see the whole picture and how the whole moves and changes; they do not see only parts, but also how parts influence and impact each other.
8. They do not recruit others to be on their side when conflict occurs.
9. They are not “either / or” or “black and white” thinkers but can see many alternative options and possibilities when reactive people think there is none.
10. They place thinking above feeling: feeling is consequent to the thinking, not the reverse.
January 22, 2006
The myth of love at first sight
Love requires knowledge and experience
Authentic love is about effort, decisions, actions, attitudes, and commitment spread over many years.
Loving someone is about seeking his or her highest interests while, at the same time, not ignoring your own highest interests. It is impossible to love someone more than you love yourself. It is impossible to know someone more deeply and more intensely than you know yourself. Pseudo-love can masquerade as authentic love and, at first, feel very good. In its early stages, manipulation can be confused with caring, intimidation with a “watchful eye” and domination with “strong commitment.” These are the love’s poisons and distorted love follows. True love’s hallmark is freedom for both and a respected, acknowledged voice for each. Anything less is not love.
When a couple, say Anne and Bob, are both healthy people who develop a lasting and loving relationship, she is able to focus on him without losing or compromising herself. They don’t become each other nor are they glued together. Being apart does not mean falling apart or the undermining of the relationship; being together does not deny individuality. She’s decided to love him. Bob has decided to love Anne. It has nothing to do with the performance of either. The love lives inside each one for the other.
Anne and Bob focus on what they can give to each other without giving up themselves. They know a mature loving relationship is about total equality. They desire mutuality in every respect and both work very hard toward it. There is a palpable freedom between them and a team attitude even when they are involved in unrelated or separate activities. They inspire each other toward separate and shared goals. Neither is threatened by the other’s willingness to grow and achieve and both heartily applaud and encourage the success of the other.
They are willing to hear things from each other they would prefer not to hear. Neither changes what they think, feel, experience or believe to accommodate what they believe the other might prefer to hear. Truth is told with kindness. Anne and Bob share a sacred trust. Questions are born out of a desire to participate in each other’s lives and not from suspicion about each other’s activities. They know and often experience that love casts out fear.
Ann and Bob are faithful to each other because faithfulness builds healthy, sound friendships with all people. Ann is faithful to Bob because even if she did not know Bob, she’d be a faithful person. He is faithful to her because he already is a faithful man. In a sense, their faithfulness has nothing to do with each other.
An absolutely private world, holy territory, lies between them. They go to places together in this world that each has never been before. Here, they touch the heart of God through commitment, mutuality, freedom and respect. In this private place of communion, the depth they know in this sacred intimacy is never equaled with another or devalued or soiled through compromise with another. It is highly valued, a protected place for them both, and, like very expensive art, is defended, enjoyed and treasured by each of them.
difficultrelationships.com 