“When in doubt who will win, be neutral.” –Swiss Proverb

One of my husband’s most reliable responses to my often high level of emotionality is: “Can you just be neutral?” He is a psychiatrist, so he has a lot more practice at finding a neutral objective view.  Yet, even before we each chose our respective professions, he would often find his way back to center with more ease than I. Over the years, as I have learned to lean towards this middle space of witnessing reality without the storm of emotions that literally cloud my view, I have witnessed how my relationship has grown up to not only withstand conflicts, but has given each of us the room to really listen to opposing points of view.  Actively seeking a neutral perspective moves relating beyond the knee jerk reactions of right and wrong and adds real time to the challenging exchanges that make or break a relationship.

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“When something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren’t grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.”  -Cynthia Ozick

Our communication is the currency of our relationships, literally the energetic equivalent and the substance that drives us towards or away from the people in our lives.  Couple that with the fundamental and universal needs we all share for being seen and valued and you get a glimpse of the powerful alteration that happens in the world when you express gratitude. Unleashing the energy of gratitude in your life is all about re-focusing our attention and perfecting the art of appreciation.

What we focus on multiplies. To the degree that we keep our focus on what is wrong, we often entirely overlook what is right. In this same vein, our shared fixation on the how of getting things done, often overlooks the much more crucial question of why. Allowing the why of our lives and our relationships more focus, is a place of gratitude and clear intention. Focusing our attention on the why of what we love or the why we persist with a problem that won’t quite resolve opens you up to receiving, which is at once the prerequisite and the reward of feeling gratitude.

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Relationship Bootcamp: Week 3

“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t being said.” -Anonymous

The strength and endurance training in any and all relationships starts and ends with the capacity for communication. I have often called our communication skills the currency of a relationship, because it is literally the air that lives between people that makes their relationship vital or suffocating. It is perhaps the most complex set of skills that healthy relationships require because it is close to impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood. This is not only because our spoken words make up only a small fraction of the myriad ways we communicate. We also communicate through our tone of voice, facial expressions and body language.

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“Make the most of yourself, for that is all there  is of you.”  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

It has been just over two months since I spent a  couple of nights with my son in the hospital, wondering if life would ever be the same.  It was a miracle, and remains one- even now 60 days later that life could be so much back to normal.  For all outward appearances, except  for a significant scab on the back of his head,  my son is pretty much back to life as usual. But when I watch him compete at his favorite sport now,  I witness  a tentativeness in him that wasn’t there before.  He recognizes it too, and knows that playing scared is not really playing at all.   ”This is normal,” I tell him as he boils with frustration.  “Recovery is a path.”

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“There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.” -Arnold Bennett

I married into a family whose primary operating principle was “If something is wrong, don’t talk about it.” Even as a young woman in my early twenties, I knew instinctively that silence in the face of difficult emotions is a mistake. In the years of therapy that I undertook during adolescence to deal with my own family’s dysfunction whose version was “If something is wrong -scream about it,” I learned the power of giving language to emotions.

Talking about feelings requires learning the nuances of first identifying them. Many children grow up not knowing the difference between basic emotions like fear, sadness and anger. Anger is the easiest emotion for most people to express, whether inward or outward, and many grow up without the emotional support to experience these other more vulnerable and painful emotions.

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“Whatever you are willing to put up with, is exactly what you will have.”-Anonymous

It is never too late to learn about your boundaries. I am coming to believe that it is perhaps one of the aspects of living that most defines our maturity and facility for accomplishing our goals. Boundary issues are common to most of us; in fact, our personal boundaries are the basic, yet often invisible rulebook that guides all of our relationships.   Our boundaries define how and what we communicate, what we give and receive, and even, in the most basic sense, provide the parameters for what we expect from others and life itself.

Boundaries reflect how we love ourselves and what we value most deeply. They impact our capacity at work, with authority, with our money and our sexuality. Knowing when we want to say yes, when we want to say no, what feels like self-respect and where our own needs start and end are the foundations that build the sense of boundaries that control our lives. Mine have long been porous, which is a generous way of admitting that my lines between myself and others, in family and even more so at work, have been fuzzy.

An old friend once told me that our boundaries are the truest measure of how we love ourselves. I thought I understood the meaning at the time. Raising four children should have bestowed on me a mastery of setting limits and protecting my personal space over the last two decades. It hasn’t. I am not alone in my struggle for healthy boundaries. Learning to define our boundaries is challenging for many people because they are fluid and change with our sense of ourselves.

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“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” ~Albert Einstein

My kids taught me to text. They all have cell phones that they rarely answer except if I am calling, the condition that I set for paying for all their texting. But if I want an immediate response I know better, I text. Texting is actually quite convenient for taking care of the mundane details that can often jam up the works between all the kids and their various schedules. Increasingly I hear about their sorrows and joys over text too, although usually those exchanges put me into autodial on the phone. Come to think of it, most of the “love u’s” come through text now, too.

Our basic need to connect and communicate is in the process of another significant face lift. The endless hours that I stretched the cord from the kitchen wall around the dining room table for some privacy and spoke endlessly to a couple of my closest friends is folklore now. Most people don’t even have phones in their kitchens. We still do, just for old time’s sake, but my kids rarely pick it up anyway. They know that no one would call them at that number. They have their own.

The shift to personal phones was just the beginning of cell phone technology, although I am still partial to real voice exchanges. In my memory and my mind, hearing a voice, even when I am far away connects me to that person and gives me a chance to hear an inflection. I can hear my children’s mood on the phone, harder to decipher in a text. Emoticons choices are only a small piece of the communication I have learned, the subtlety of text relationships is being invented among our youth and there is some reasons for concern.

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“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts…” –William Shakespeare

The distance between our public persona and our private selves defines our lives and relationships in ways that everyone experiences, but cannot always name. The truth of this was written large at the middle school talent show that I attended where I watched my son and his friends impersonate a teen rock star and dance team. They pulled it off big time after hours of practice and some great costume finds. Amidst the middle school crowd there was no impersonation, they are stars at school. They boast to me sometimes on our way home from practice how they will spread out to fill a hallway, just to watch the kids get out of their way. The boys are funny, smart, and athletic and they know it.

Other kids are not so lucky to land in such a sweet spot in school as I witnessed at the show. Of the many kids who aspire to land on American Idol came and went, my heart cracked open when a girl had the courage to get up and sing a song about the rejection and pain of her middle school years. I was overcome by a deep compassion for her courage, the painful memories from my own past on the edge of middle school favor and the intensity that happens when the private self emerges under bright lights into the public sphere.

Most of us learn early to separate our personal dreams and visions from the scrutiny of public view. You only need to be mortified once to learn how to avoid the humiliation of sharing too much with the wrong people. Sometimes the injury is so great that the break between our public and private selves becomes so complete that we divorce our insides from what people see so completely that we can be left unable to see who we are, so busy at constructing who we think we should be.

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Many people have trouble talking about sexual topics, including me. Thinking about how to recognize and overcome some of the following obstacles might help you develop an ease and vocabulary for having meaningful sexual conversations in your relationship or with your kids.

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‘We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other — male in female, female in male�. We are a part of each other.’ -James Baldwin

The discrepancy between the male and female forms of communication is the topic of hundreds if not thousands of books. Since John Gray’s, ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus,’ the discussion and awareness of the biological imperatives that drive human communication has been dissected and examined over and over again. We know, for instance, that conversation serves different purposes for the male and the female. We also know that men and women have different comfort levels with personal conversations. Finally, we also know that conversation does not equal intimacy for both men and women.

Despite these findings being expounded upon in new books and magazine articles every month, the biological experience of falling in love continuously tricks us. We believe that loving someone should or will make them communicate, behave and think like us. This is one of those erroneous beliefs we can’t seem to let go of. We insist, to the point of destruction of the relationships that we cherish, to expect our partner to be us. Partly this is because the mirroring and connection that we share in the early phases of falling for someone diminishes the space between two people. For a brief and euphoric time you feel totally together, united. It is a sad awakening to the reality of living and loving someone after that initial connection fades. Many relationships don’t survive it.

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