Recreating Trust Part 1: The Honeymoon
Trust is one of the most critical components to experiencing deep, profound and lasting connections with others. The word trust comes from the Old German word, troost, which means comfort or consolation. When you have trust, you sense that you can lean into another person with 100% confidence; you can be at ease; you can completely be who we essentially are.
Without a Shadow of Doubt
And when you sense trust in another human being, you can’t help but give them permission to tell you the whole truth and nothing but the truth; to call out your self-sabotaging voices and behaviors; to let you know when you are lying, manipulating, cheating, and justifying your actions; and to ensure that you shine as brightly in your life as you possibly can. All because you know without a shadow of doubt that they have your best interest at heart.
'Without a shadow of doubt' is critical. If there is even a hint of doubt, a hint of distrust, that distrust is like a slow-growing cancer that if not honestly acknowledge will eventually destroy the relationship
For example, if I can trust my wife 100% and know that she has my best interest at heart, I am going to be more willing to take risks and to be honest about my shortcomings. If I experience a shadow of doubt in a certain part of our relationship, I am going to sugar-coat certain things I share with her.
Most of us don’t live in a world of intimacy and trust. We don’t use that as the glue within our relationships. Learning how to create and recreate trust is the most critical step to being connected with others. What follows below is a description and path to recreating trust when it has broken down in a relationship. And, by the way, if you’ve been in a relationship romantically or non-romantically for longer than two months, then you’ve inadvertently experienced breakdown.
The Honeymoon
All relationships start the same way. You meet someone and they meet you. Oftentimes, not always, people experience an initial honeymoon stage. Everyone seems to be happy, and it looks like things will work. But what do we know about all honeymoons? They are usually all too brief and eventually end.
This is predictable and inevitable, because human beings have expectations. We produce expectations so fast that if you could actually see it happening, it would make your head spin. We have expectations about what the person will be like, how the person will react, what kind of a father they will be, what kind of a wife she will be, what life would be like with that person, and on and on. And, especially in relationships that are romantic, human beings have intentions. We intend something to happen, either we will be with this person for the rest of our lives or we won't. More often than not, we never state the true expectations and intentions, and we generate new ones on a daily basis. The fact that this happens is not bad or wrong; it just happens. And it is entirely human.
Recreating Trust Series
This is one part in a six-part series that explores how trust and intimacy breaks down in relationships and how to recreate it.
- Part 1—The Honeymooon
- Part 2—The Letdown
- Part 3—Storing Our Resentments
- Part 4—File Emptying
- Part 5—Take an Inventory
- Part 6—Expressing the File and Listening
[jbox color="blue" vgradient="#fdfeff|#bae3ff" title="Complimentary Relationship Rescue Coaching Session"]If you are ready to make a shift in your relationships and want help developing a game plan, I offer a complimentary 60-minute Relationship Rescue coaching session. There's no obligation; I love doing these and hope you'll get in touch.
[/jbox]
Transforming the Sacred Wound Part 9: Integration
Once the pain of the emotion has passed, once we have completely and compassionately descended down to the bottom of the rock, we experience a sense of relief. We begin to widen, deepen, and expand to include the wound. It isn’t that the wound has disappeared. The point is not to disappear the wound, and it isn’t a one-time-fix. This is a lifelong journey of compassionately holding the wound so that wisdom, love, generosity, and goodness can emerge. The point is to transform it, to make good on it. This descent into the direct experience of it actually does that.Instead of holding the wound as something that needs to be masked, the compassionate, body-centered, present-moment descent allows us to begin including the wound into our being. Once the wound is included, we have a lot more space to become more of something.That ‘more’ can only be expressed by the wound. I often notice with my clients that if they’ve been regarding themselves as unintelligent, the pull of the self-sabotaging voices not only becomes less strong, but my clients begin to have compassion for the parts of themselves that they’ve previously disowned. In a way that 'more' is your genius.
Your Genius
Genius has two etymological understandings. In one sense, your genius is considered to be your “guardian deity or spirit that watches over you from birth,” as in genie. It’s also you power to produce, since gen- means to “produce.” Your genius is the energy that resides behind your generative capacity. I am not asking you to consider your genius literally as a “deity within.” Instead, I am asking you to consider your genius “as if” it is a deity within. This isn’t about creating a new belief system complete with gods and goddesses. What I am referring to is not that, but it’s about finding access to these latent energies within your being and learning to relate to them, as if they are a god so that you can start to activate your capacity to produce or create something new.
Sacred wound work is about learning to suffer with (com- with passion- suffer) our pain with a quality of patience and unconditional friendliness. As a result, something new emerges, something that is expansive, innocent, generative, forgiving, and playful. Our wound is calling us into a deeper alignment with our bodies, our hearts, and our minds.
Exercise in Learning to Stay
For the next hour, you will silently contemplate/meditate on one or two things you’ve been unwilling to be with. I encourage you not to distract yourself. If you notice that your mind is wandering in a million other directions, just bring it back to the task at hand, meeting the wound of what you haven’t-- up until now—been willing to be with. Please do not write in your notebook, speak to anyone, or do anything other than be with your wound. You can take a meditative posture, you can lie down—as long as you don’t fall asleep—you can take a walk outside or just sit on a park bench.The point is to reestablish a relationship with the genie within, that generative power within, to begin listening to it in a new way.
Transforming the Sacred Wound Series
This is one part in a nine-part series that explores ways to heal and transform your sacred wound. Be sure to check out the other posts!
Transforming the Sacred Wound Part 8: Cultivating Compassion
The real gift we have to offer to others is our compassion. Likewise, the real gift we have to offer ourselves is compassion. The place we often go to when we feel the pain of our wound is "beat-up." We often let our self-sabotaging voices run the show. We think, I feel this pain and then decide, "Indeed, I am stupid, ugly, or worthless." The etymology of the word compassion is 'com-' with or together 'passion-' to suffer. So when we feel compassion, we suffer together.We’re all taught that we should feel compassion for others. And if we had any religious training, we’re taught to feel compassion for others’ suffering. For many of us, feeling compassion for others’ pain is relatively easy. The compassion, we’re talking about here, though, is not compassion for another’s suffering. We’re talking about compassion for our own suffering. The way we do this is by offering ourselves compassion, warmth, goodwill, and kindness.
When we begin to have compassion for our own suffering, we short-circuit the self-sabotaging voices. How could we possibly agree with them when we offer ourselves a kind of warmth or a quality of kindness. That’s what compassion for self is. It’s a positive regard for self. When we offer ourselves compassion, on some level we are saying, “Yes, I have pain, but that pain isn’t me. It’s simply the pain that gets to be transformed into genius." And what's required is simply meeting it.
Making Friends with the Wound
Compassion for ourselves is really a sort of unconditional friendship with ourselves. It is much more common that we disapprove of our wound and denigrate it. It is about beginning to make friends with the wound. It’s not about thinking that it will come from the outside, from other people, from spiritual practice, from meditation, jogging. We look all over the place to make us feel good about ourselves. Affirmations are all about that. You proclaim, “I am smart.” “I am worthy of being loved.” And part of you says, “Yeah, sure.” How is this relationship created? It has a lot to do with the way we meet our pain and difficulty. The Buddha had a revolutionary teaching. He said that in human life, there is pain and that pain is inevitable. We all grow old, get ill, and die. The more that you love, and loving brings wellbeing, then the more sadness and grief there is at the loss of that person. If you put your hand in fire, it burns. There is a lot of discomfort in life. The fundamental teaching is not to struggle against the pain in life but, instead, to become intimate with comfort and discomfort, with pleasure and pain, with shame and success. Happiness is beginning to live your life in a way that opens up: your mind and heart opens. It includes victory and defeat, praise and blame, loss and gain. Happiness is about being able to embrace it all. That is the root of it all. Struggling against the wound and getting it to come out “perfect” doesn’t add up to a sort of compassion for ourselves.
The point is to discover your own human-ness. This is your connection with all people. This is the shared-ness of the human condition. It is about becoming intimate with that awful feeling of losing something that is dear to you, that part of you that wants to shut down. It is to be intimate with what it feels like to be intimate with the whole catastrophe. Our
Exercise
In the exercises that follow, we will learn how to regard our wound with compassion. The word compassion is regarded in two senses in the Western and Eastern perspectives. In the Western perspective compassion means to suffer with. In the Eastern sense, compassion is translated as loving-kindness. These two are very different, but both offer instructive ways to hold or regard our wound.
In the first Western sense, to be compassionate is to feel the wound. It is essentially what we did earlier today when we met the wound directly, unadulterated by storyline. We just felt it. We just noticed it. Nothing was added. We experienced a direct relating and relationship with the wound. The Eastern sense of the word compassion guides us into the notion of bringing a quality of kindness that is wide open, gentle, warm, and healing to our wound.
For many of us, feeling compassion for others’ pain is relatively easy. But what is it to bring loving kindness to ourselves, to our own wound? That’s what this next activity is all about.
Exercise
Click on this recording to learn how to bring some healing to your wound:
[gravityform id=5 name=Healingthe Sacred Wound title=false description=false]
Click on this recording to learn to how to bring loving kindness or unconditional friendliness to your wound.
[gravityform id=10 name=LovingKindness Meditation title=false description=false]
Transforming the Sacred Wound Series
This is one part in a nine-part series that explores ways to heal and transform your sacred wound. Be sure to check out the other posts!
Transforming the Sacred Wound Part 7: Practicing Presence
However unnerving the experience, we need to bring a moment-to-moment awareness to the wound. It’s important that we not get lured too much into the past or future storylines until we have completed the descent. A bit of past or future thinking can heighten and deepen the feelings so that the descent can take place; however, the descent into the wound is not a story-based experience. The story can help deliver us into the energy of the wound, but it won’t, in fact, heal the wound. Mostly, our stories just numb us from the wound. So, it’s important that we not go to our heads in this process. This is a kinesthetic, feeling experience that requires a presence, an awareness of the here and now.
Being here and now is really a practice in learning to stay. Because this is a lifelong process, you want to bring a quality of kindness and compassion to the process, kind of like training a puppy. If you’ve ever trained one, you'll know that beating them can make them obedient yet inflexible. They can become easily confused if everything doesn’t go a certain way. But if you train the puppy with kindness and clarity, it can be flexible and have a sense of humor. It can role with changes. Which kind of puppy do you want to be?
When the mind goes off, don’t hit yourself. Just come back. It’s like being very naïve. There is no big deal about it. Whatever arises, just acknowledge that its there, and just come back to the wound, here in the present moment. With that simplicity you just keep coming back. You are just training in staying with yourself.
Transforming the Sacred Wound Series
This is one part in a nine-part series that explores ways to heal and transform your sacred wound. Be sure to check out the other posts!
Transforming the Sacred Wound Part 6: Descending into the Wound
The transformational shift that can occur around the sacred wound feels a whole lot like a descent. It has a downward quality to it. It often feels heavier, stickier, thicker, and more difficult before it ever starts to feel better. In 12-step programs, they often say that one has to hit 'rock-bottom' before any real change can take place. When we acknowledge the emotion around the wound in a deliberate, conscious way, we take ourselves to a 'rock-bottom' place.
We expect and seek to create a sort of descent. At the bottom of the descent is both an acknowledgement and acceptance of the wound. People often report a sigh of relief. What they recognize is that those aspects of the wound that they’ve disowned becomes included into who they are. There is a very clear sense of widening, deepening, and expanding at the moment in which the descent has completed itself.
For many of us, this descent is unnerving. It has us feeling like we are going to head into a depression or it will just reawaken a wounding and there won’t be a resolution of it. For some of us, we’ve already done some sort of descent but didn’t complete the process, and, as a result, the descent only left us feeling more wounded. What’s important about this is that once the ride begins that we not get off of it until the ride is completely over. And as described above, the over process does feel like expansion or completion. When it happens, it’s clear as day. Before the emotion has completed, it feels half-baked.
Transforming the Sacred Wound Series
This is one part in a nine-part series that explores ways to heal and transform your sacred wound. Be sure to check out the other posts!
Transforming the Sacred Wound Part 10: The Genius
The Genius
And so what emerges from the initial aversion, resistance, and pain of the wound is something generative creative, playful, and sometimes even luminous or numinous. Marianne Williamson writes in her book A Return to Love that "our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us."
If we patiently and persistently relate to the wound in a compassionate and mindful way, what naturally emerges is our light. I often wonder why we have been told to hide our wounds and to pretend that they don't exist. And since I am in the self-help world, we're also taught that you can overcome them, master them, or fix them.
The sacred wound doesn't need to be fixed. It is perfect the way it is. What's required is a big dose of patience, some kindness, and awareness. What emerges over years--not days--is our light. And it is the transformation of darkness into light that Williamson is referring to. That's why society keeps teaching us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, to stop focusing on the negative. However, when we give room to be with our wound, what naturally arises is our powerful, innate genius.
Transforming the Sacred Wound Part 5: Handling Numbness
Oftentimes the starting point is just numbness, like there is nothing there to access. We can’t feel ANY emotion. We just sense a wall or a barrier. Instead of regarding numbness as bad or something to breakthrough or overcome, if we can regard the numbness as "good news," and be with it, it can start to unravel. Usually, the numbness is there as a defense, something that we unconsciously put in place in order to defend or protect ourselves. What we are defending is the sense of vulnerability we feel when we come into direct contact with the wound. In the past, having access to the wound only left us feeling defenseless and, ultimately, hopeless. So the numbness, the ‘no-feeling’ is just protection that was previously useful.
If we apply aggression or hatred to the numbness, we may have an initial breakthrough, but ultimately, we create a sort of aversion to it, which prolongs it. One way we could apply aggression to the numbness is to yell, scream, beat a pillow, do whatever we do to get the latent energy to start moving. Most research shows that these cathartic acts only prolong the emotion. They give an initial relief, but the emotion doesn’t actually transform.
Transforming the Sacred Wound Series
This is one part in a nine-part series that explores ways to heal and transform your sacred wound. Be sure to check out the other posts!
Transforming the Sacred Wound Part 4: Go to the Body
In order to identify the sacred wound, it helps to feel into the body for an emotional reaction. People often report a tightness in the chest, a nausea, a blockage in the throat. Our habitual reaction is to ignore the sensation, but if we will identify it, not in the intellectual sense but in the kinesthetic--by feeling into our bodies--we can start to distinguish ourselves from the wound. Mostly, we’re used to brushing over this pain when a pattern gets set off. We usually are so unconscious of this process, that we lose touch with the direct experience. So part of feeling into the body requires a slowing down. By slowing down, the emotion can begin to emerge.
Emotion = Energy In Motion
Emotion here is defined as ‘energy in motion.’ Allowing the energy of the wound to emerge allows the energy to move through us, rather than get stuck. When we allow some of the pent up stuck energy of anger, frustration, or anxiety to move, not only do we feel and experience less aversion to the wound, but we can start to have a dialogue and be in relationship to it. So it is at this junction in the process of being in the body that we connect to the energy or emotion that lies on the surface. To find the energy go to:
- Where the emotion is located in the body. Often times the emotion or the energy seems to come from a broad, general area, but if we place our awareness on the area, we can start to notice that the area is diffusely spread over a broad area and dense in a very narrow area. In other words, it may be located in the throat area and upper chest, but if we really pay attention, we will find that the densest area is the chest and there is a sort of bleed-over into the throat.
- What it feels like. Here it can help immensely to use metaphors. For example, it may feel like a wall. It can help to put some imaginary hands up to the wall to feel the temperature, shape, and texture of the wall.
- How it changes over time. If we begin to pay attention to the energy, we will notice that it changes. After all, emotion is energy in motion. We may notice that the change occurs rapidly and dramatically or we may notice that it occurs slowly. It can sometimes take days for the energy to shift. Grief is often like this. And we may also notice that the energy or emotion goes away altogether.
Just Notice
What’s required is just steady, clean awareness, as opposed to thinking aboutwhat's coming up. Another way of saying this is to ‘just notice.’ Being with an experience slows things down and gives direct access. Thinking or talking about experience has us hovering above an experience. It keeps the experience in our heads, and it keeps us in avoidance of the wound altogether.
I have clients who get anxious any time they notice their wounds. They start a plan of attack long before they've ever experienced them. Intellectualization, strategizing, or trying to understand is just another form of avoidance and actually prevents the transformation of the wounding. Our capacity to be with the wound, to give it space, and even to embrace it is what creates transformation.
Body-Centered Meditation
This is a meditation that will give you a direct, body-centered access to sensing your wound such that you can begin to transform into you genius
[gravityform id=7 name=Sensingthe Wound title=false description=false].
Transforming the Sacred Wound Series
This is one part in a nine-part series that explores ways to heal and transform your sacred wound. Be sure to check out the other posts!
Transforming the Sacred Wound Part 3: Stop Scratching
Few of us relate to our wound like it’s a form of genius in any sense of the word. We relate to it like we have to get rid of it. I have a friend whose father left her mother, and sisters when she was five years old. She has incredible wounding around this event. The wound continually makes her feel invaluable. In order to be valued by the men in her life, she’s become both incredibly smart and incredibly empathic. Now that’s the genius that lives in her. She has an incredible gift with people.
But up until recently, she’s been relating to the wounding of feeling unworthy due to her father’s abandonment as something she loathes. It’s an ache in her being that she’s been looking to get rid of. One way she tried to eliminate the wound is by seeking out men to tell her that she’s smart, beautiful, and needed. And each time a man complimented her, she wondered, “If they knew how screwed up I really am, would they say those nice things?” In each man, she was looking and hoping for a reflection that will heal the wound of abandonment. Recently, she's begun to recognize that no man or men will ever completely heal that wound. The real healing of that wound is an inside job.
Stop Scratching Even Though It Itches
Her whole orientation has been outer-focused. And because her orientation is outward in that she seeks men to fill the void, she keeps getting re-wounded. Each time she is brought face-to-face with the realization that a man won’t heal her, she is horribly disappointed not only with the man, but, especially with herself. So on top of being angry with the man, she’s angrier with herself for getting herself into more drama. And then it becomes a never-ending cycle of wounding, hurt, more wounding, and then more drama. This is what makes it addictive behavior.
At the base of all addictions is what Pema Chodron, a renowned Buddhist teacher, calls an itch that we long to scratch. Chodron likens our wounds to scabies. When you have scabies, and you see your doctor, the prescription is not to scratch it even though it itches, that as you continue to scratch, not only does it fester, but it spreads, too. As my friend continues to seek validation from a man, her rash keeps spreading. Like all itchiness, we sometimes don’t even notice that it’s itchy until we’ve scratched at it for quite some time. So in order to emerge from the wound or the rash, we first need to notice that we are scratching and to stop scratching. It is the scratching that is the habit pattern. And the more we scratch the more the wound grows. And what’s required is an inward gazing, a capacity for introspection.
We scratch the wound when we buy the storyline of our pain rather than meeting the energy of it. Behind the story is just a mood, tone or energy. Where we usually go is to the storyline instead of the energy behind the storyline. And so we tend to create drama out in the world in order to resolve the storyline. However, resolving the storyline doesn’t actually resolve or relieve the sense of wounding.
Inquiry
Spend 10 minutes with a pen and paper, noting all the places you've created drama in your life as a result of your wound. Look to:
- relationships that you avoid or cling to
- people and situations you won't be with
- missed opportunities
- addictions or habits that effect your health and sense of wellbeing
- ways that you avoid change
- belief systems that keep you stuck
- crises you constantly create
- relationships that take from you rather than nurture you
- avoidance of intimate, loving connections
Transforming the Sacred Wound Series
This is one part in a nine-part series that explores ways to heal and transform your sacred wound. Be sure to check out the other posts!
Transforming the Sacred Wound Part 2: Identifying the Wound
In my previous blog post, I began a discussion about the sacred wound. The essence of the message was that when we regard the wounding we experience in our lives as good news rather than something that we need to hide from, destroy, or numb, then we have an opportunity to transform pain into genius. It's actually our wounding and our pain that causes us to grow and transform. The people, situations, and things we come into contact with in the process of healing our wounds help us to discover our innate gifts. These gifts are our contribution to others.
The Promises of Sacred Wound Work
The point of this work is to establish a relating and relationship with the wound. The point is NOT to get rid of the wound. You may never feel wound-free. That's not the point. The point is to begin relating to it. Instead of trying to sweep it under the rug by pretending it doesn’t exist or by trying to “overcome” or “master” your pain, this work will teach you how to establish a loving and compassionate relationship with your wound. When you can find love and compassion for your wound, you can actually begin to transform it and in so doing, discover your genius.
Identifying the Wound
So for starters, it is important to be able to identify the wound or wounds. Below a recording that will help you uncover aspects of your wound or wounds. In order to really identify the wound, though, it can help to just look at the breakdown or discomfort that comes up in relationship to an individuals, groups or situations. These breakdowns can be used as entryways back to the wound. Each time you notice yourself angry, scared, hurt, sad, or shut down, follow the path of the pain back to your own experience. For the sake of sacred wound work, each and every experience can be used an access to a deeper relationship and relating with the wound. Once you have identified a breakdown or the sense that something is not quite right, start to feel into your body, into your emotional experience in order to develop a relationship to the sense of pain, to the sense of that something that is disowned, that hurts. You might notice shame come up or anxiety. Whatever the experience, just know that it is an entryway into the sacred wound.
Free Recording
Please download this Sacred Wound Meditation. On it, you will be guided through a 10 minute recording that will connect you and give you access to your unique and sacred wound.
Transforming the Sacred Wound Series
This is one part in a nine-part series that explores ways to heal and transform your sacred wound. Be sure to check out the other posts!
The Sacred Wound: A Doorway to Your Genius
Everyone carries a wound. No one is exempt.
The word makes it sound like one event, and sometimes it is. More often it's an accumulation. All the moments you set some part of yourself aside to stay connected to the people you needed. Each moment was small. You noticed what was welcome and what wasn't, and you adjusted. Most of them you wouldn't remember now. Together they left a mark.
Most of what we're taught about a wound like this is how to manage ourselves so we don't have to feel it. Get past it. Build on top of it. Put it to work. The wound doesn't cooperate with any of that.
My brother killed himself when I was a young man. That's one part of my wound. I can wish it away. I can ignore it for a few days. Then it's there again, and my work is to meet it: to feel the pain and, at the same time, some compassion for myself and for him. Not compassion instead of the pain. Both at once. When I can hold both, the pain lessens a little, and a little more of me is present than was before.
I want to be careful with the word sacred. I don't mean the wound is a gift. Losing my brother was not a gift, and I won't call it one. I mean the wound deserves attention rather than management. Every place you set yourself aside is held there, so it's also a fairly precise record of what you left behind.
Which is what the title means by genius. Not magic, and not some hidden talent the wound was guarding. Just this: the effort that goes into keeping a wound covered is enormous, and you've been paying it so long it feels like nothing. When the wound gets real attention, some of that effort is freed, and what you set aside to stay connected starts to become available again. Slowly, in my experience.
Mine is still coming back.
I wrote a book about that. The first chapter is twenty-eight minutes, read in my own voice. Enter your name and email and I'll send it to you.
Fifteen minutes with one moment of your own.
Creating Authentic Relationships
For the most part, people take relationships for granted. We assume we know what the other person wants and needs, and they assume we know what we need. The main source of relationship breakdown is because we assume that they should know how we want to be treated. In order to have authentic relationships, it helps immensely to design them, both in the beginning and throughout. It doesn’t work to leave relationships to chance. When we design our relationships, we ask our friends, family, co-workers, superiors, subordinates, and community at large who they need us to be; what we need from them; what to expect from us; and what we can expect from them. This alliance creates the foundation for an authentic, real ongoing relationship. It gives the relationship freedom, responsibility, and commitment. It gives both people the freedom to speak to whatever is needed in the moment and to ask for what is wanted 100% of the time. It empowers both people to take responsibility for honoring the relationship, its growth, upkeep, and cleanliness. It asks that both people not skip over hard-truths, and that they wake up when they’ve gone unconscious. Finally, it creates a commitment not to tolerate or endure; to tell the truth; and to tap into and speak from authenticity without filtering.
It may seem a bit artificial, at first, to sit down with someone in the beginning or even in the middle of an ongoing relationship, however, the results are powerful, magical, and pivotal to a powerful and enduring relationships. People with emotional intelligence naturally do this. They also understand that once this conversation has ended, that the design is never over. In order for relationships to endure and for both people to experience one another in new and fresh ways, relationships are constantly being redesigned. In other words, the design doesn’t end after the first conversation. It is constantly being re-negotiated. That way relationship remain flexible.
Below are some questions that may give you a sense of how to design an alliance in your life.
1. What exactly do you need and want from our friendship, in our working relationship, and/or from this project(s)? What I need and want is… 2. How do you want me to be with you when you’re shut down, hurt, angry, and/or sad? How I want you to be is… 3. How do you do with saying, “no?” How I do at saying, “no” is… 4. What will really support you? What will really support me is… 5. How do you want me to handle you when you have taken a risk and failed? How I want you to handle me when I have taken a risk and failed is… 6. If our relationship were to have a huge impact in your life-personal and/or professional- what would it look like? What it would look like to me is… 7. What do you want contribute to our personal/professional relationship that is unique? What I want to contribute is…. 8. How do you get evasive? How do you want me to be when you do? How I get evasive is... How I want you to be when I do get evasive is… 9. How are you about doing what you say you will do? How I am is… 10. Where do you usually get stuck? When you are stuck, what can I say that will return you to action? Where I usually get stuck is… What you can say to return me to action is…
[jbox color="blue" vgradient="#fdfeff|#bae3ff" title="Complimentary Relationship Rescue Coaching Session"]If you are ready to make a shift in your relationships and want help developing a game plan, I offer a complimentary 60-minute Relationship Rescue coaching session. There's no obligation; I love doing these and hope you'll get in touch.
[/jbox]
Getting Real
I was working with a coaching client this morning, and he was pretty anxious. As we started to explore the anxiety, what we discovered was that he wasn't being real with himself. He wasn't being honest about certain things that were happening in his life. In addition, he was waiting for and anticipating a different period of time. He's not alone. All of us get stuck in the waiting game. We are waiting for the raise, for that special moments when someone says the perfect thing. Whatever it is that we wait for is what stop us. Waiting is a big fat lie. And most of the time we won't be real with ourselves about the fact that we are waiting.
What's important here is is that we stop waiting it's almost as if we have to create an artificial death sentence for ourselves to wake up. We need to create our own wake up calls. That's one reason people hire a coach. A coach is trained to see ways in which we won't be real with ourselves. It's only when we get real that we can actually start to make change.
So often we try to make change on top of what we already have. We don't see how we've actually been being. We just try to change. The change doesn't happen until we get real can. Getting real just means being honest. Seeing what's actually so and also seeing what's not so. It means giving up the lie, whatever lie that you're telling yourself about the current situation you're in. More often than not we blame our circumstances, someone or something else for our current situation. When you can get real, when we can get honest that, in fact, our circumstances are your own choice, then we can actually start to create change.
Stop “Should-ing” on Yourself
Below is a quote from the section of a book that I’m reading by Claudia Naranjo. Naranjo was a student of Fritz Perls, the well-known gestalt psychotherapist that led encounter groups at Esalen Institute in the late 60s. What I like about this quote is the distinction Naranjo makes around the subject of achieving goals. He describes how we often “should” ourselves when we have a particular goal or target in mind. Our “shoulds” really only act as self-punishing games. Moving forward on something important to us doesn’t require the “should” game. What it requires is simple, pure awareness. Read on...
A “should” is different from either a call or an ideal; “shoulds” constitute a way of being at odds with reality that cannot be other than what it is. When we blame ourselves for something already passed, for instance, we are indulging in a feeling that neither improves the wrongness we incurred in the past, nor provides anything necessary to do better in the future. Perhaps the only benefit of our guilt is that, at some level, it makes us feel “better.”The same may be said of our stance toward the present area our experiences and actions here and now are what they are and could not possibly be otherwise. Self–blame or self–praise do not make them more or less. And they certainly did not make us better. If there is a way towards the fulfillment of ideals, it is clearly not the practice of turning them into shoulds.
Yet, “shoulds” exist to the extent to which we do not believe the foregoing statement. We believe that we must “push the river”––that if we do not make things right, they will certainly be catastrophic. In this sense, shoulds are an expression of our control madness... Our catastrophic expectations usually takes the form, “what would become of me ( or the world) if it were not for my (our) trying?” People should, to keep out of trouble.
Awareness is enough... If we have a conception of the desirable, and we know where we stand, that is all we need for our movement to perceive in the desired direction. Perhaps a good analogy is that of a child learning to walk or to climb. Warnings of danger and criticism, however accurate, will only detract from his attention to the task at hand and make contents areas if chronic, such “help” will make him less secure and not more skilled. Just as the adult in overprotecting the child lacks trust in the child’s potential for learning and developing, we, in ourselves–manipulation, through prodding or blaming, lack trust in our psycho–physical organism.
-- Claudia Naranjo, M.D., Gestalt therapy: The Attitude and Practice of an Atheoretical Experientialism, Gateways Publishing, pp. 64-65
Hoping and Waiting, Waiting and Hoping
I just got off the phone with a potential client. He was feeling stuck in terms of his work. He’s transitioning from a service oriented job to an investment field. After a bit of exploring his ‘stuck feelings,’ he came to the realization that he’s been so busy learning and preparing for this transition that he hasn’t actually stepped into the actual act of being in his new career. He’s been waiting for that ‘perfect moment’ when he has all the information. That way, if he speaks to a potential employer or client, he has all the information.
The desire to have all the information before we step forward is the equivalent of hoping. We’re all told never to give up hope, hope that something better might come along, but the only power hope gives us is to wait…and to continue to hope…and to wait. What are we waiting for?
We’re waiting for Santa Claus to come down the chimney, for the day of judgement, for prince charming to wake us from our slumber, for the pill or the regimen to make it all better. I am not saying that none of these will happen--except maybe Santa Claus. I am suggesting that hope is no more than a waiting game.
Looking for signs of hope is like walking through an unknown house in the dark. Each step in the dark requires a degree of hope that we will get to where we want to go. We have to grope our way through the darkness and try not to trip. One step in the wrong direction may leave us in peril. So we start looking for signs that we are going in the right or wrong direction. When it feels good, we assume we are heading in the right direction, and when it feels bad, we assume that we are going in the wrong direction. Our prognosticators are our feelings.
The tricky thing about our feelings and our emotions is that they are great reactors and terrible prognosticators. I am not referencing our gut reactions, this is a different topic altogether. However, most of us cannot distinguish our gut reactions from our emotional roller coaster rides. The only thing you can be sure about your emotions is that they are never consistent. And yet when we are at the whim of life’s circumstances, hoping for great things to happen, we use the pleasant feelings to mean that we are on track and we use the painful or negative feelings to mean that we are off track. Frankly speaking, our emotions are a pretty shoddy radar systems.
There is only one method to turn on the lights in this mysterious house of darkness, stop looking for signs of hope. In fact the best methodology I know is to give up hope, altogether. Hope leaves each of us powerless to the circumstances of life. Hope rarely ferries us through the rapids of our lives. Hope cannot nurse us back to health. Hope cannot settle the debt. Hope cannot resolve the conflict we experience with another.
I am not suggesting that we just pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. Instead, I am positing that hope is the unwillingness to take responsibility for how life goes and how it does not go. When we won’t captain our own lives, we are left in the hands of fate, karma, self-help books, rising or falling incomes, pleasant feelings, and unpleasant feelings. When we take on our lives as the opportunity to fulfill commitments, we become the captain and source of all that occurs, we live from a very unusual space.
Our commitments arise out of a very separate space than our need to succeed in life. They arise out of the space of inspiration. When we are committed to something, that something breathes life into us. It regenerates us and continues to regenerate us. It makes life worth living. It brings meaning to our lives. It is our sense of purpose. Our commitments are what drive what we do and what we have in life.
Whether it feels good or doesn’t feel good, living life from our commitments, is a place stand in life that is unique and distinct from that of hope. Living from hope is like waiting to win the lottery. It happens only sometimes. Living life from the commitments that breathe new life into us is no easy task. It requires letting go of Santa Claus. It requires that we profoundly appreciate our responsibility for the way life goes down. In one sense, we stop waiting to win the lottery, for prince charming, for someone else to do it for us. And if we crash, hit another, or are hit by someone, we get to take responsibility for the impact.
Meta-View
My wife, Melissa, friend, Peter, and I were on Mt. Tam early this morning having a great conversation. Nature has a funny way of giving you a fresh perspective. At one point, we were discussing the notion of lifetimes. While we all agreed that the idea of having many lifetimes was hard to rationally accept, we all liked it as a lens to see our lives differently from.
To get the paradigm of lifetimes, consider the time it took the Buddha to attain enlightenment. According to Buddhist scripture, it took the same amount of time it takes for a bird to wear away at a mountain six miles long, six miles wide, and six miles high. This bird flies over the mountain once every hundred years with a silk scarf in its beak brushing the tip of the mountain with it. The amount of time it takes for the scarf to wear away at the mountain is how long it took the Buddha in lifetimes to attain enlightenment.
Peter and Melissa had an interesting perspective on lifetimes. If we have multiple opportunities to learn from our many lifetimes, then we can really of give ourselves a break and not take each experience as if we NEED to overcome it, achieve it, or transcend it. In other words, if you and I live multiple lifetimes, we need not be so hard on ourselves. After all, what’s the rush?
I, personally, would give myself much more of a break. That’s not something I am particularly skilled at. One thing I am in the early, early learning of is to both take it easy on myself and, in addition, to be sweet to myself. I suppose that this kindness that I am learning also need not happen overnight. Who knows, maybe in several thousand lifetimes, I will master it.
In coaching, we call this grand view on life a meta-view. We use it to help our clients to see the big picture and what’s really important. Often my clients get so preoccupied with the most minute of particles that they rarely look at the space in which the particles exist. This is what’s at the heart of a coaching conversation. As a coach, I am always encouraging forward movement, but only as long as it is in service to the big picture of my clients life.
In the end, we don’t want to look back on our lives and say, “Boy I did a bunch of stuff.” We want to say, “I did some stuff that meant a lot to me.” And that’s what’s important about being connected to the meta-view. It’s about staying connected to the deeper meaning we’re all looking for in our lives.
Remembering the Basics
When my clients are down, I notice that they often forget the basics. They’re often searching and searching for the ‘reasons why’ they’re not feeling right. And in the search for ‘why’ they overlook some really basic things that help.
First, it often isn’t the ‘why’ that solves the problem. It can sometimes help to know the root cause of things. If you can do something about the cause, that can be useful. If there are dietary changes that need to be made, then you can make them. If there are apologies that need to me made, you can make them.
A lot of times, though, we cannot do something about the cause of why were down. If, for example, we need to forgive someone, but we just cannot get rid of a grudge, we have to find gentleness, for ourselves and others. This is where the 12-step Serenity Prayer can be useful:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
The main thing that my clients forget to do that ACTUALLY they can do something about is take simple steps to take care. The most important is sleep. We often forget how rejuvenating 6-8 hours of sleep can be. Rest is another form of rejuvenation. Oh yeah, and then there’s that really, really basic thing that we HAVE to do but often forget, eat. Just sitting down and enjoying 2 or 3 nutritious meals a day can be very healing. Oh, yes, then there’s the bit about meditation or prayer. Whatever that is to you, it’s really helpful to connect inward. Whatever form of meditation or prayer that you use, this can often be the most significant source of healing when we’re down.
Then there are things that are just additive:
- Going to a yoga class can be extremely helpful. Moving the body, stretching, and connecting with group support and the support of a good teacher can help a lot.
- Getting acupuncture can also be helpful because it increases serotonin and endorphins in the brain. These neurotransmitters are known to boost the mood
- Spending time with a good friend who can really listen to you can also be extremely healing. You may have a friend who is a great listener, and if you don’t it can be very helpful to hire a professional, like a coach or a psychologist.
- Herbal medicine and homeopathy are very, very useful mood enhancers. Saint John’s Wort, for example has been shown to be just as effective as SSRI’s but without the side effects. You can find it at an health food store. A good herbalist can help find just the right medicine that is specific for your needs.
- Connecting with nature is extremely healing. Why that is is a mystery, but it is just a known fact that getting out into nature just FEELS GOOD.
When it really boils down to it, though, good sleep, some relaxation, and solid eating can make a world of difference when we have the blues. Instead of getting lost into trying to figure out why you’re down, when you are, why not just commit to taking care of the basics and see what happens.