“We need in love to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily–we do not need to learn it.” ~Rainer Maria Rilke

My parent’s marriage ended when my mother told my father she didn’t love him anymore and that she was not sure she ever did. Years later, after all of the ugliness of the divorce was done, something at my father’s core was never the same again.  His belief in love was soured and distilled into an experience of abandonment that morphed to fit every ending that followed.  Over the years of my loveology practice, I have heard many versions of this traumatic end-of-love story and have witnessed the wreckage of families and lives left in its wake. I know how the residual shame turns to suffering and sticks in us as an abandoned child long after the end of love.   These stories have always left me wondering where does the love go?  How does love end up disappearing from a heart so completely that you can’t be sure it ever existed at all? Is it really possible to lose your capacity to feel the love you have lived and shared? 

I know that love is an action verb that weakens when we take it for granted and we don’t nourish it with our time and attention.  I have seen love erode with unkind words; even those uttered in the form of a sarcastic joke.  I have witnessed love wither in proportion to the breaking of promises and lack of truth in words.   We know that love is fragile and is ultimately breakable, and when it breaks, everyone is in on it. Both people let go of love’s hold and the proclamation of love’s end is understood and mutually recognized.  In fact, it often comes as a relief with the permission to finally let go.   Releasing relationships that are done is painful for what is lost, but honest endings do not provoke shame.

The proclamation of love ended has less to do with the state of the relationship, than the person leaving.  These breaks catch us off guard and shatter our faith in our ability to trust our reality and how we relate.  When we endure personal failures, it is easy to feel cut off from ourselves and to lose our ability to love ourselves.  Rather than tending to our inner brokenness, we blame the relationships closest to us.  Our internal abandonment spreads like a contagion to everyone we have loved.  We deny the good around us as a way to balance the awful weight inside of us.  When our internal connections shred, we are unable to remember how to love.

Lacking emotional intelligence is the norm in our culture and it is common behavior to hold our relationships hostage to our internal dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Tragically it is too easy to buy into rejection and accept the blame. The shock of being told we are not loved, makes us believe we are not loveable, too flawed to be worthy of love.  We get too lost in our pain to see the story for what it is,  a projection of a broken spirit and an inability to feel our own heart.  We don’t have the insight to decipher our own abandonment from that of our loved one, and we lack the language to call things by their true name.

Lucky for us, author Laura Munson, a new friend I had the privilege to interview, had the courage to face this end of love story in her own life and named it accurately and compassionately, ‘This Is Not The Story You Think It Is: A season of unlikely happiness.”   After years of writing rejections and the loss of her father, taught her how to not rely on outer circumstances for her happiness.  When her husband proclaimed his disaffection for her, she had the guts to let go of the story line. This allowed her to understand her husband’s pronouncement for the real inner pain that it was.

Letting each other go through our own dark night of the soul without taking on the story line that we use to protect and defend ourselves is the height of courage in love.   We simultaneously have to embrace the groundlessness that comes with surrendering to not knowing the outcome, while holding onto our own internal center of trusting our capacity to love and be loved.  It is odd that we are more willing to hang onto a story line, even one that we don’t want, than give ourselves over to the freedom and possibilities that can only happen moment by moment.

This practice of surrendering our idea of controlling the outcome in life, as in love is both terrifying and exhilarating because it is a true portal of gratitude.  It is a practice that works by simply letting life be what it is, which is the only place where we are open enough to forgive, to let go, and to receive the goodness right in front of us.

I have been thinking a lot about healing lately, partly because it is happening on my face.  My bee sting of last weekend has dominated my energy and focus as I have witnessed changes in color, swelling and sensation.   It was another timely reminder that life on earth is first and foremost an experience in the body.  Dealing with the wounds of life on both a physical and emotional level is our first occupation.

Wounds to the body and heart consume the lion’s share of the energy and nutrients that the body produces while healing.  Taking care of yourself with extra sleep and consciously consuming healthy foods is not only a no brainer, but also explains why so many people carry around wounds that don’t heal.

The healing process is in many profound ways similar to that of building relationships.  It requires our undivided attention and happens slowly.  Rushing it in both cases backfires.  You can’t hurry wellness anymore than you can hurry love without failing at both.

My son recuperated for an entire year from a traumatic brain injury.  He didn’t grow an inch during that time, and each time he intermittently hurt himself again because he ran out of patience for the process, he experienced the full weight of his previous injury.   I learned about an entire field of medicine devoted to dealing with wounds that won’t heal from my recent radio guest, Dr David Knighton.  Interestingly, regardless of whether the injury is physical or emotional, what keeps us from healing is that all wounds that don’t heal are burdened with a foreign body that needs to be cleaned out, at the root of the problem.

This is easy to visualize in the physical body,  where wounds that won’t heal have some foreign debris or infection left in the wound that is visibly festering and needs to be cleaned out usually very deep in the wound.  I remember one time when I had a chicken bone sliver lodge under a fingernail.  The sliver was so deep and the  pain was so sharp that my entire hand throbbed.  The intensity of the pain kept me from probing for the culprit.  Eventually, my finger got so swollen and purple that I was determined to get out whatever it was.  The agony and ecstasy of the relief in that extraction remains a vivid memory for me.   It is easy to try to avoid the pain that you have to endure to get to the bottom of the problem.

This is even more true when it comes to our emotional wounding. We often don’t have the language or emotional intelligence to fully experience our traumas  when they occur, especially those we endure in childhood.  This is how sexual abuse and other childhood forms of neglect and abuse often end up becoming a chronic physical ailment.   More often than not, unresolved wounds live in us both physically and emotionally.   They become the basis of a story line that dominates our lives.

Shame, guilt, rage, and resentment are all foreign bodies to our natural state of emotional wellbeing.  When they take up residence as the residual part of our wounded-ness, we resort to various forms of denial to cover up the original source of the wound.  Our emotional bodies need the same care as our physical body, but because these wounds are invisible, we mistakenly believe that they will disappear by ignoring them.  Emotional problems only grow in the darkness of our avoidance.  They cannot heal without our loving attention, instead they fester and grow into lives we would not choose and do not deserve.

One could argue, healing our long standing emotional wounds takes even more courage because we have to trust our inner experience.  Often we don’t have the luxury of an outside medical expert to verify our wound. Emotional healing requires the courage to call something by its right name, and to identify its true source.   Finding the courage to extricate the shame, guilt, or other emotional baggage from our hearts is where healing begins and we open to the potential of our life.

“We expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship.” 

-Sherry Turkle

A couple of years ago, not long after I won the Angel Conference I got a text message from a successful local businessman who had agreed to become our CEO and probably had a lot to do with my winning the conference.  He resigned over a text message, not even using the 160 characters allotted, “it wasn’t going to work for him at this time” was all I got.   It was devastating, almost a surreal moment where I had to go back and read the message again.   Did this just end- like that- over a text message?  I felt it physically, a hearty dose of adrenaline mixed with old, deep fears of worthlessness and abandonment.  Although this break up was in the business realm, we all know at least one person who has who had their heart broken over text message.

We resort to text and email messages for our bad news increasingly frequently. Using technology to escape the heart and difficult communications of our lives is the embodiment of adding insult to injury.  In part, we do this because text and email messages give us the illusion of control.  We believe we can present the self we want to be by our edits and even by our deletes.   In actuality what we communicate is that we are unwilling to give our time or attention to the complex and messy conversation that human relationships deserve.

Just this past week,  I got an email cancellation from a very well known author who I had arranged a radio interview over a month prior.  That message too, was brief with little explanation.   The cursory apology that does not feel truly felt because it arrives within five characters…sorry.   Whether deliberate or not, we are increasingly relying on technology as a retreat from the real and demanding work of showing up for one another.  We erroneously believe that our technology can clean up our loose ends, our unexplained departures, our unwillingness to be accountable.   The reverse is true, the technology can easily and almost invisibly turn your emotional life into an empty shell.   The irony and the tragedy is that the more we rely on our technology to substitute for the real conversations in our lives, the more we shortchange ourselves.  We learn to stop caring because we forget that there is a deep and profound difference.

Face to face conversations require us to attend to one another.  The root of the word conversation is to associate with or turn around.  Human conversation is how we perceive from another’s point of view and what’s more it is the way we initially learn to converse with ourselves.   This is why kids who have people speaking to them in their infancy and early childhood have such a leg up on their counterparts who sit in front of a television.   Conversation is how we learn who we are and how we learn to read the nuances of the people around us.    The art of conversation is how self reflection is born and without it,  the continuous social media query of what’s on your mind has less and less chance of being answered.

In Sherry Turkle’s eloquent description of Our Flight from Conversation, she shares poignant stories of teenagers who aspire one day to learn to have a conversation, students who want dating advice from artificial intelligence or those who look forward to computer based psychiatry.   She comments that these stories demonstrate “how much we have confused conversation with connection and collectively seem to have embraced a new kind of delusion that accepts the simulation of compassion as sufficient unto the day. And why would we want to talk about love and loss with a machine that has no experience of the arc of human life? Have we so lost confidence that we will be there for one another?”

If anything deserves our human attention it is our departures in this brief interlude that we call life.  Having the courage and compassion to leave someone with their dignity intact is worth every pound of effort we need to muster to do it.   Technology was designed to make life easier to manage, not easier to avoid.   Use it to set up a place and time to meet someone for a good bye.   Don’t be fooled that the good bye is sent with a text.

 “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” ~Marshall McLuhan

It is hard to imagine that we have already come full circle in our relationship to technology. The relentless drive for more access, smaller devices and ever increasing speed is hitting a wall for many of us. Yet, it isn’t so surprising that the wonder has worn thin when you consider the sheer number of hours that Americans spend in front of a screen. Between 2005 and 2009, our time spent in front of a screen doubled to include at least 8.5 hours per day. Television viewing, likewise, has also steadily increased Nicolas Carr, in his revelatory best-seller; “The Shallows” has documented how these technological trends are shaping not only our days, but the very wiring of our minds.

I have witnessed this burnout in my relationship toward my own technology devices. Many a Friday night, I leave my computer bag by the door, often untouched until Sunday evening. It isn’t for lack of work or even a waning desire to write, but rather a visceral need to unplug and live more in real time, focus on the people around me, or do the stuff of real life. Daily tasks that were once tedious chores, such as stocking the pantry, cleaning, or taking long walks with the dogs are rejuvenating.  I remember again what it feels like to follow a slow train of thought as it meanders through my head on a hazy afternoon. These moments of discovery often disappear when one is constantly immersed in an endless stream of information and digital stimulus. When faced with hundreds of emails and texts a day, the beauty of solitude is lost.

I think about this topic often since reading the New York Times article, The Joy of Quiet, which I have been carrying around with me ever since it was published on New Year’s Day. It is the only essential re-thinking of my life that I have held onto since the New Year and now in retrospect has become a kind of un-stated New Year’s resolution.  I intend to live more fully in the amazing and beautiful world we inhabit.  I am happy to know, from the article, that I am in good company, as this is also the new trend of the very wealthy as they now search for “black hole” resorts, destinations where you pay more to get unconnected. Who knew that the power of inner stillness was what the most original and ingenious designers today credit their innovative creativity and pride themselves on the unconnected and uncluttered lives they lead.

Even Intel has come to realize that the relentless pace of high-speed technology comes at a high cost. It is amazing to have a computer company experiment with creating a mandatory weekly block of four hours of uninterrupted quiet for their engineers. Not surprisingly, the majority of the 300 in the control group recommended extending this program company-wide. It is good to note that most workers routinely get no more than three minutes at a time without digital interruption.

The human brain needs quiet time and still space to process and hear its own thoughts. As Carr points out in ‘The Shallows,’ extensive neuroscience research has demonstrated that our neural processes, which involve deep thinking, developing empathy and building relationships, are inherently slow. To relinquish the depth of our human experience in exchange for the constant distractions coming at us makes the gains of computer technology worth considerably less.

Our technology was built to serve humanity, and yet, as Einstein noted, “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” The paradox in all technology is that it comes without an instruction manual. Increased access to information does not equate to wisdom. Faster communication does not necessarily create connection. We need our innately human capacity of emotional interpretation and moral clarity to discern the best use of our technology.

The best way to come back into yourself is to find quiet green space with someone you love.  Give yourself a day, maybe even Earth Day, to live screen-free. Dive deep into your natural surroundings and listen for birds or to the wind. Follow your train of thought to the end of its meandering stream and soak for a minute in silence.  Be a kid for a couple of hours and practice the old skills of play and wonder. Let your curiosity go unquenched without a Google response. Heck, just mow the lawn and remember the first time you smelled fresh cut spring grass.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”  ~Henry David Thoreau, “Economy,” Walden, 1854

Our time is our life.  How we spend the hours of our days is the truest measure of what we create, what we value and how we invest our life energy.  This is why the recent statistics regarding the social takeover of Internet gaming and social media should give us pause for wonder and concern. Facebook, the leader in social media reportedly consumes over 8 Billion minutes of time for its collected membership every single day.  It is hard to imagine what that amount of time represents, so I recalculated it in terms of years- each and every day we give Facebook equates to more than 15,000 years of our collective human attention. Gaming statistics are equally disturbing, Angry Birds, one of the most popular web games of all time has been downloaded 300 million times and is expected to hit one billion downloads. Every hour of every day, we collectively give this game 200 million minutes, or 16 years of our attention. While individually these statistics break down to 20 to 60 minutes, the equation for each of us is more complex than the math. We look to our Internet applications to fill us, to calm us, to entertain us, to connect us in a virtual world, but they somehow also leave us increasingly lonely.

Without waxing nostalgic about the days before our lives became dominated by our current technology diversions, it is worth speculating about what has been lost and replaced.  Before the mini screens, we watched television and went to movies. Prior to iPods, there were stereos and walk-men. Before posting a status online was imagined, people spent many more of their hours in face-to-face social situations watching, listening and sharing all the things we can now do on a hand-held screen. We were forced to connect in 3D because that was all there was. Work, both paid and unpaid were contexts for relationships. We lived within a network of familiar faces that recognized us and shaped our daily routines.

Before the digital games, we played in real time, against real opponents who had a heartbeat. We planned our days around games that used our whole bodies and to which we applied our full attention.  We moved real objects through space and time together.  Our play had a natural rhythm with a beginning, middle and end.  It was what we looked forward to on waking and became the stuff of our life memory.  This kind of real play is fundamentally a different activity that truly connects, entertains and fills us, unlike the ambivalent and compulsive screen time today, which is often more a compulsion than a planned excursion. Today’s empty, time-sucking gaming does not hold a candle to the way we used to play with intention, because they are designed expressly to distract us from the real time events of our lives.

Technology and all of its bells and whistles has its place. I have connected with people I haven’t seen in years on Facebook and met other interesting people in my field of work that I may likely have never known.  I communicate with my high school student club members and I hear about birthdays. I play my son’s and their friends on Words with Friends, which helps me, keep my mind strong. I write and think out loud on my Apple devices.  I would never argue for the disappearance of technology, but I do think we should begin considering using technology, rather than being controlled by it.

Because what is lost at the core of all the time consecrated to our various Internet addictions is the power of our attention.  It is the single most significant aspect of our life force that is required for learning, for loving, for connecting to anyone or anything.   Real relationships like real games are built first on our intention and are nourished by time.  You can’t hurry a game or rush the development of a relationship; these threads of connection are sewn moment by moment every time we bring our whole attention to the person or activity in front of you.  This is why “time stands still” when you are fully present to where you are and who you are with.

The time we have taken out of our real lives and offered up to the multibillion dollar Internet consortium of distraction is ours for the retrieval.  Even sitting in silent reverie, or re-learning the art of wondering will surprise you with a payback that another round of Angry Birds will never match. Recognize the golden potential of your attention as the vehicle to spending the most valuable resource you have in this life, your time. Choose wisely.  Love someone in real time.  It is worth at least a thousand years of Facebook time.

“There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it hardly becomes any of us to talk about the rest of us.” ~Edward Wallis Hoch

My teenage daughter has removed herself from Facebook. Her cold-turkey drop of a technology that had dominated many of her free hours caught my attention. “I noticed how anxious it makes me,” she replied simply when I asked why. “I just want to see what its like; to see if I miss it.” There was surprisingly little withdrawal she said enthusiastically, back to re-reading her favorite books.   “I feel so much better not doing it. I don’t miss it at all.”

As the days passed, she shared a little more of what happened when she would be on Facebook that made her anxious. The ultimate life voyeur, many people post profoundly intimate details of their life, seemingly without understanding that it is now a broadcast medium. Teens make their plans and share their after-party stories for all those who are excluded to watch in despair.  Even many adults revisit their teen angst witnessing where they are excluded among their peers.

The anxiety-producing quality of Facebook was in fact deliberate. Founder Mark Zuckerberg, a social outcast at Harvard as well as a brilliant young programmer, designed the first Facebook in retaliation of all the girls that spurned him and for all the frat parties he was excluded from. It became popular overnight because, in our deepest and most vulnerable place what we are all trying to achieve is a sense of belonging. We all need a tribe.

Our need to belong is matched only by our need to be seen. This isn’t new. Gossip and voyeurism have influenced history and society at every level since recorded time. We study each other’s lives, comparing ourselves and talking about each other because there is nothing more interesting or instructive than our human stories. Tragically, combining these two needs in a fast, glossy digital form like Facebook is a sure recipe for not only losing touch with the very needs that pulled you in to begin with, but walking away with less than you entered.

It is no wonder that Facebook, which is nothing more than a screen destination that has been loaded voluntarily with our most precious photographs, epitaphs and stories of our personal lives  is one of the most valued stock offerings in history. A nerdy, social reject tapped into the most highly prized, yet simultaneously vulnerable need of humanity to feel accepted into the tribe of other humans. Facebook is nothing except what we give it of ourselves and yet we all give the wealth of our intimate lives to the sales and marketing mechanism of digital advertisers to sell us what they think we want.

Facebook friends are different from real friends. Real friends are the ones who know your number and have usually been to your home at least once. Real friends have seen you laugh and cry about things that actually happened to you in your daily life. They didn’t need to read about it on your page. Real friends have real time for you. They help you move or drop your old couch off at the dump, or sit with you in a yard sale. By all means, grief  is a reasonable response when a real friend lets you down, but not when Facebook friends don’t invite you to their random margarita event that might not even have happened except on a Facebook wall.

So next time you think about going on Facebook to update your status, call a real friend instead. Take my daughter’s lead- take a Facebook Fast and see if you don’t feel better.

“The finest thing in the world is knowing how to belong to oneself.” -Michel de Montaigne

I am convinced that the most significant and meaningful change we can make within all of our relationships begins with our foundational ability to relate to our selves. This teaching is ancient and lies at the heart of every spiritual discipline.  The Buddha summed it up saying:  “You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.” Not only is our capacity for self-love the most challenging healing for most of us to master, but our inattention to this critical inner struggle is often the silent and invisible root of what goes wrong in our other personal and intimate relationships.

I know that I am not alone in my misinterpretation of life’s painful events as something wrong with me. I sometimes wonder if there is not some universal weak link in the human genetic code that predisposes us to the long and sticky tendrils of self-doubt and unworthiness that seem to catch us in our most difficult moments or in our most challenging relationships. We routinely abandon ourselves in our moments of need as we fall for the false and erroneous belief that we are separate, unworthy and unlovable. We witness the falsehood of this thinking for those we love, but often miss it in ourselves.

I am not advocating for more self-esteem here. In many ways, our drive towards self esteem is one of the trap doors we slip through, in a constant effort to measure up to some external standard, or worse still, a comparison with someone else’s digital profile. Real self love and acceptance comes through striving for self compassion. It begins with simple practices like giving yourself the opportunity to accept life experiences without having to like it. Instead, we often resist what life is giving us and make up elaborate stories that justify our resistance yet unknowingly get us stuck.

What we resist persists. It is easy to give up our story lines when we recognize that a deep part of our identity gets attached to what we refuse to accept in life and the more we push something away or try to run from it, the more our sense of self is linked to the experience or relationship.

Many people cannot tease out the pain of the experience from the resistance they have to it. We confuse the judgments we make about ourselves and the situation with the experience itself. The emotional layers melt together and what gets sacrificed is our ability to hold onto ourselves. Learning to release our storyline of judgments for a practice of mindful attention opens us to an ability to relate to our own pain. This practice enlarges our sense of self and the overwhelming story line turns into feelings that are manageable. We find that life and relationships are workable when we are not trying to escape from painful feelings, but want to create the internal space to experience them, which allows them to change.

The work of cultivating enough self-love to create and sustain healthy intimate relationships is directly proportional to your ability to have compassion for yourself and your life. Giving up our resistance to the way things are and the aspects of ourselves that have yet to evolve is a mighty first step.  It opens the door where life changes by itself and gives us a soft place to come home. Healing your life and relationships begins in your own heart. No one deserves it more than you.

“Most people are slow to champion love because they fear the transformation it brings into their lives. And make no mistake about it: love does take over and transform the schemes and operations of our egos in a very mighty way.”   -Aberjhani

One of the most common ways that we leave each other while staying together is to remove sex from our relationship. This is not a new topic. In recent years the concept of the Sexless marriage has made the cover of Newsweek and other major publications, which reported that as many as 15- 20% of married couples have had no sex in the last 6-12 months. While some may argue the definitions of a sexless relationship, no one is arguing the fact that our ability to show up sexually is an essential foundation for the health and wellbeing of relationships.

Indeed, research consistently shows clear correlations between couple’s happiness and having sex. Happy couples have more sex, and the more sex a couple has, the happier they report being. Couples who don’t have sex contemplate divorce and get divorced more than their counterparts. It is unfortunate that in our culture, we require research to prove this point. What is even more perplexing is that we don’t recognize the sexless relationship for what it is. We refuse to call it by its true nature- a shell of a promise, and an exit without the guts to actually leave.

The real issue about static sex lives is that it is almost never about that. I have long said to thousands of people who have mourned their dying sex life that our capacity for physical intimacy is almost never the cause of our sexual demise. The truth is that we leave each other in so many other ways before the axe comes down on our sex life. Many, if not most, couples first leave emotionally. They live side by side with someone without ever feeling safe enough to truly disclose who they are.

Our insufficient communication skills and our inattention to listening to the people we love leaves little room for laying the ground work of deep intimacy. Instead, we live with our conflicts, increasing space between us, but never having the courage to argue. We stand by silently and watch our career aspirations and work commitments swallow up the time that intimate connection demands. Many couples move into a rote physical intimacy during this phase of declining connection. They try to have sex, but neither one feels safe enough to be vulnerable, to experiment, to expose their curiosity and shame that makes us all uniquely sexual.  Usually the initiation argument, of who wants who more or less is all that is left to talk about before the declaration of no more sex is made.

We also leave each other physically while staying in a relationship; our relationships whither when we don’t show up for the person we promised to love. At best, our intimacy is confused with increasing distance, when we are distracted by easier or more accessible relationships.  Whether it is our extensive work hours, addictions to computer sex of a million varieties, or full- on extramarital affairs, we often slip into co-habitating without really being present. Our sex lives get held hostage.

I remember when my husband’s business partner’s ex-wife told me she moved out of her bedroom. She was going through menopause and nursing her anger at the emotional disconnect she felt between them. She felt no obligation to his sexual needs, she told me. I don’t know exactly when in the cycle his affair started. Did her refusal cause him to wander or did his wandering cause her to pull away? Maybe it doesn’t really matter, because when couples choose a sex-less relationship, both share the responsibility and the consequences of the most significant leaving we can do.

Our sexual selves offer the most adhesive glue that two hearts can manifest in the messy and demanding business of loving over time. Agreeing to a sexless relationship is the low road for the many ways that you are not willing to acknowledge leaving each other. The cure is not actually agreeing to more sex. The cure is choosing to stay for love’s sake.

“There is no life as complete as the life that is lived by choice.”  -Unknown

The problem with many relationships is that we don’t trust our own choices. For many couples this lack of trust starts early in the relationship, when we first encounter the difficulties of the relationship or, more challenging still, the foibles of our chosen partner. We question whether we have made a mistake in choosing our partner, and often this question comes in the form of pulling ourselves part way out of the relationship. Look around and notice how many relationships you are in or that you are witness to which are qualified by one or sometimes both partners having one or sometimes both feet out the door.

The surprising irony in this lethal trend of relating is that more often than not, we choose well in relationships. If you consider your relationships as the most gentle and thorough education available for growing up and becoming your best self, even the most challenging dynamics in a relationship have something deep and transformative to offer us. This is often an emotionally wrenching process. Our identity markers, our unresolved past pains and our often, inarticulate aspirations all mingle with that of our partners. It is easy for this messy process to feel like a mistake. We are forced to let go of things that we thought were essential and we are slowly taught how to hold things that seemed impossible.

We can’t do this work justice with only half our presence. And the part that is hanging back is not usually a cheerleader. The part that pulls away from the work often shows up as the small silent voice in your head that says it is impossible, it should be easier… confirming the mistake you fear. The piece of our heart that remains is torn before the work begins and is unable to bring your full courage to this essential work of growing up. I have engaged in this futility for years myself. I was indignant and at times even belligerent about having to deal with my in-law dynamics. It was too painful to bear with only half of me holding it. It took me years, and it is something that I am still coming to understand that choosing it fully is what changes the experience inside.

The often unseen oxymoron of successful relating is that our tendency towards self -protection is better served by subjugating our individual needs to the needs of the relationship. The more that we focus on what the container of our love needs, the more our own needs get met. Conversely, when standing with one foot out the door, assessing our ability to meet our own needs in the relationship- we create a hole, through which all of the good intention for the relationship leaks out. It is an invisible, slow leak that will undoubtedly drain the relationship’s potential.

The degree to which you hold yourself out of your relationship is proportional to what you are able to get out of it. This is true not only with intimate partners, but all of our relationships- to our work, our family, even our hobbies. It is a tendency that easily and invisibly replicates itself, because remaining comfortably disengaged evolves into a mental habit and before long is a personality characteristic.

Moreover, this habitual way of halfway relating often leaves us stuck in the no man’s land of not being able to truly choose when to leave or how to stay. Like the holding pattern of a jet over a landing strip, you are stuck, waiting for a message from the tower, outer clearance that will let you take off or land.

The wisest choice we can make in any circumstance is having the courage to trust our choices and give ourselves fully to the life we have chosen. This practice will transform all of your relationships, beginning with the one to yourself. There is no half way in matters of the heart, and living from this space cheats you out of the best life has to offer. Shakespeare, of course, said it best when he wrote, “See first that the design is wise and just; that ascertained, pursue it resolutely.”

“There are times when the actual experience of leaving something makes you wish desperately that you could stay, and then there are times when the leaving reminds you a hundred times over why exactly you had to leave in the first place.”  -Shauna Niequist

Leaving is bittersweet. Knowing when to leave is not always a simple equation. Even the departing itself  is rarely an experience of simple relief; generally, it is weighted by what is lost, even if the loss is only lives in our imaginings of what was possible. Often when we leave, we lose not only our hopes for the relationship that has ended, but more deeply, for our concept of a future that defined us. I grew up  amidst a long series of leaving and being left. I imagine that this has a lot to do with why I am now usually the last one to leave, hanging onto any vestige of hope that things can turn around. Being left so often as a child is qualitatively different than choosing to leave, and creates odd associations to most endings.  Your history of relationship endings is the foundation of your tendency toward leaving or staying.

Early in my marriage, I used to threaten leaving and divorce a lot as that was what I grew up watching. Finally, one day, my husband shouted back, “There’s the door. Either go or stop saying you are going to.” Our words are powerful, and threats of leaving take root deep in a relationship in ways that I didn’t understand.  They create the proverbial one-foot-out-the-door syndrome, where no one is really all in and the relationship is essentially stuck in a no-mans land of existing without intention. I am grateful that we had the wisdom to move beyond this stage of our marriage and have focused most of our energy since on learning how to stay.

Recently though, in some business relationships, I have come to a new admiration for the skills of identifying and having the courage to leave toxic relationships. The truth is that you can get lost in trying so hard to make it work that you can’t see the truth of the damage being done. Discerning the difference between truly unhealthy relationships and general fatigue over relationship work is not always easy. Our own unfinished personal issues can cloud our judgment about our partner. If we are not really doing our own work to learn to receive love, it can come off looking like there isn’t any coming at us.

But there are also some indisputable signs that a relationship is too toxic to merit any more of your efforts. Your body is a true barometer for your relationships, so start by listening to what it is telling you. If the idea of interacting in your relationship brings you consistent dread because you leave every encounter feeling disrespected, undermined or belittled, consider this a legitimate red flag. All healthy relationship containers encourages the best in you. If your relationship consistently makes you feel worse about yourself, there is nothing to be gained.

Sometimes relationships don’t work for other reasons that are not emotional dynamite but are dead ends just the same. If two people don’t have some shared vision for their future, you both end up biding time, and usually one person has to overcompensate for the drag of the other. The red flag that waves in this scenario  is that one partner in the relationship consistently refuses to take responsibility for their own mess.

Finally, and perhaps the most difficult to recognize, is when a relationship is not trustworthy. Often this ends up looking like one partner refusing to give the other partner the benefit of the doubt. Essentially, the relationship is held hostage to forgiveness being withheld. Remember forgiveness sets the forgiver free perhaps even more than the person who transgressed. Any relationship without it is inherently untrustworthy and both people look for ways to hide. Not surprisingly, this degenerates into creating more to hide. Relationships are fluid bodies, and if they are forced to stagnate in the pain of the past, they generate their reality from that space.

My business relationship that I am now walking away from has all of these characteristics. Finally, I am glad that I am not staying. I celebrate the freedom of leaving toxic relationships and have great compassion for all those who had the courage and insight to leave before me. Bringing wisdom to leaving is actually another way of learning to stay with yourself.