Tired of Having the Same Old Argument

Moving Blog to TheMarriageMediator

2012-02-11T09:00:00.000-08:00

I've been unable to get "The Same Old Argument" blog to let people join and comment.

So I'm moving to a new blog spot: TheMarriageMediator.blogspot.com

In the new site:

On Monday's, I'll be vlogging: uploading a video.
On Wednesday's I'll be reblogging the best of this blog
On Friday's, I'll be writing new logs about my newest learning.

See you at the new site!

Choicefulness

2012-01-23T07:00:00.000-08:00

I have a new client who feels stuck under the burden of obligation. I let her complain for a couple of weeks about being the victim of her family’s traditions, but this week I let her have it. The very first time she said the word “obligation” I broke into her tirade and said, “Yes, you did choose obligation.”

She looked up confused. It seemed I was agreeing with her, but there was something off with the way I did it. “Chose?” she said. “I didn’t chose it, that’s the point.”

“That’s true, once you chose choicelessness, there don’t seem to be any choices left, but then, you can always unchose that choice, and then there will be lots of choices.”

NVC says that every moment is choiceful. And the only thing that keeps us from experiencing that, is when we use choiceless language to describe our choiceful existence.

“I didn’t have a choice, I didn’t chose all this obligation! It‘s a family thing.”

“Well your brothers have moved away, and have chosen not to live inside these obligations, so not everyone in your family chose choicelessness. Only you did. And what would your life look like, if you chose differently, rigth now?”

Permission

2012-01-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

My latest client came, as so many do, feeling overwhelmed, and wanting me to help them “get rid of” some part of their lives, some part of themselves.

That’s not how I work. I’ve found it works better to add lost parts back in. The stress of life is more about one, lonely part of you, usually the ego/conscious mind trying to run (read control) everything. Since it is really only good at a few little things (like math and linear time management) it begins to spin and stress as it tries to do the multi-tasking that relationships, feelings and joy require.

In the last couple of sessions, I have been contradicting his limiting beliefs, and teaching him how to reaquire the permissions that at first it seems other people or society “took away.” It turns out, I’ve found, that permission is actually ours to keep or forbid to ourselves. When Rosa Parks Refused to sit in the back of the bus, “they” were still refusing her permission, but she found the permission inside herself, and when she acted from that place, others who had lost it were reminded it was theirs to give to themselves.

I sent this client to Meetup.com. Find a group that scares you, one which is full of people who clearly have permission where you do not. Go to sit in a room with them and watch your internal dialog. Don’t be surprised if you are shocked or repulsed. These are signs you may want to go back.

He left a little dazed. This is NOT what his ego came to hear me say. Still, each week he does what I suggest, and comes back less and less stressed, and more and more happy and relaxed.

“I seem to have more energy these days,” he said. “Sure,” I thought, “you’re not wasting energy holding yourself down!”

Fresh Faces

2012-01-17T07:00:00.000-08:00

Ten new students in my winter NVC course this year. Ten fresh faces, ten open minds. Each group has its own personality, and I really like this group. They introduced themselves to each other as people arrived, people stood and shook hands, and asked each other questions. A room full of people, three-dimensional and ready. They laugh and groan to my stories and examples. And I could feel them changing, as a group, as I unfolded the world of NVC to them.

It felt like reading a story book to a child. Each new page, exciting and new, with beautiful, magical pictures and the hieroglyphs that I translate for them into a tale which we stop each week, as I close the book, and pick up where we left off next time.

As is always the case, each one has a situation they came in with to solve. Even in this first class, their long-standing complex tangles of relationships start to unfold before us. I can’t really resolve their deepest, hardest issues this first class, with the tiny bit they know. But they ask, and I try to answer the part of their question which illuminates the topic at hand.

As a mediator, I don’t think much of compromise

2012-01-16T07:00:00.000-08:00

I’m working with a young couple, still new enough to love, a new baby son, new home, new life. They were sensitive enough to their own happiness to notice that there was something wrong. “Marriage” was somehow taking them down. Down a path of compromise and frustration, so they came to me, as so many couples do, to help them put on the brakes, to fix the problem, to make the compromise tolerable.

As a mediator, I don’t think much of compromise. It turns out to be a fancy word for “giving up what you want.” While it may stave off a few tussles in the short term, in the long run, it ensures discontentment and fights which make no sense because those future issues which it uses to surface aren’t really the issue at all, and since the compromise is long forgotten, the fights are simply incomprehensible, and so unsolvable.

Instead I follow my model, and bring the conversation back to the present and what Universal Human Needs are up for both parties.

The newness of this couple’s love stimulates my optimism (which never is far away, I’m happy to say) and I keep reframing their “problems” as yet another opportunity to use marriage for one of its major purposes (as I see it) to heal the wound of not getting certain needs of ours met in previous relationships - especially in our first relationship with our parents.

Time and again, we slow their current arguments down, and drop down into the needs just below the surface (because they haven’t been together long enough to bury them very deep) and there, in the present, they find their love for each other.

Like most couples, they started out sitting on opposite sides of the couch, and this last session, number three, they sat together in the middle, legs or arms touching. And as we found the needs beneath each tiff, they found each others eyes, and held each others hands, as if showing with their bodies what I have always believed: needs are where we meet.

Mothering and Fathering, in Politics and at Home

2012-01-13T07:00:00.001-08:00

This morning, listening to NPR, in defense of Mitt Romney’s firing thousands of people to preserve his profit, a support said, “Well in capitalism there are winners and losers, and I don’t fault him for being a winner.”

I was trying to let my judgment of this position go, this “How could she be so cold and cruel?” and what I got in touch with was the difference I often have to mediate between what I have come to call Mothering and Fathering in the married couples I mediate.

Regardless of the sex of the person, the partner who “mothers” supports the child’s internal world. They want to shield their child from the world’s cruelty so that the child may grow strong, with good self-confidence, and they want their child to be safe.

Fathering sees the downside of this “coddling” (a judgment) as creating a child who may become a “wimp” with no courage. They advocate for consequences as the best teacher. “Let him climb the jungle gym, and if he falls, he’ll learn.” And lessons learned this way are never forgotten.

It occurred to me, that at their best, this is exactly the difference between the Democratic and Republican sentiments. The Democrats want to protect the weak and as any mother would, to see that all god’s children survive and thrive. Republicans focus on autonomy and independence. They like capitalism because it fathers us with real-world consequences.

All children benefit from having both these points of view in their upbringing, especially if they are negotiated well so they child gets the benefit of each, and not, as so often is the case, conflicting messages about which is best.

I’ve been thinking for a while that what we need in the political arena is a Mediation Party, one which represents both Mothering and Fathering energy. Having read his books, I believe that Obama had this potential, but it can’t really be done alone, and he didn’t have a Mediation Party to back him, so like so many families, we ended up with a polarization between the two existing parties and so deadlock.

I like to image what might happen if the Mediation Party did exist. Business and personal spheres all flourishing, government supporting our internal and external needs.

Occupy 2012!

2012-01-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

Last night winter finally arrived. After a balmy December here in Philly, the temperatures dropped below 20, and even the late afternoon darkness crept in cold and angry.

Elise and I snuggled down under our comforter, with heating pads and hot bean bags, and took warmth and comfort from each other, our softness and our love. Outside, the year ticked on, like an odometer, the numbers change again.

This time, it feels like the world is not only one year older, it is sadder, somehow. Outside our windows governments grinds to a halt, economies the world over sag and collapse from the weight of the corruption and selfishness, and compassion seems to have become the rarest of metals.

Elise and I have kept all this out up til now, but like the cold, it seems to be seeping into even our world.

I was thinking this morning that politicians have changed in my mind from “our representatives” to just another bank of lawyers hired by the rich to squeeze the last tenth of pennies out of the rest of us, now that they’ve gotten our dollars, our land, the fruit of our labors.

I heard several media people talking about the best thing about 2011, and although it surprised them to say so, each of them, for different reasons, ended up saying “Occupy Wall Street” was it for them. For some of them it was just such a good story to report, for others a passion of content. For me, it was one ray of hope in an otherwise broken system.

Actually, I saw a video of “Occupy Philly’s best moments in 2011” and one image was of a sign held up in a protest which said, “The system isn’t broken, it was designed this way.”

I think that is true. What I love about the Occupy Movement is that they are willing to start over. They don’t want old media coverage. They are not trying to get the current corrupt form of government to pass some minor change. They are brave enough to shake the Etch-a-Sketch of our society and start with a clean, blank slate.

I look forward to Occupying 2012, progress with no limits.

Conflict, Lock and Key

2012-01-06T07:00:00.000-08:00

Conflict is like a gate, it is both the opening into the walled off garden of love, and the obstacle which keeps us out.

Which of these it is depends on whether you have the key or not.

Conflict is the smoke that points out the fire - the passion in your life. It also burns your life up with destruction. It depends on whether you know fire-craft or not.

Conflict reveals the hidden truth in both parties, or it broadcasts the lies far and wide. It depends on where you look: inside yourself for truth, or at the other person for blame.

If you avoid conflict, your life shallows out. It becomes calm in appearance it is mirror smooth, but then it just reflects your inner turmoil.

If you become habituated to the anger and blame, your life becomes a series of eruptions punctuated by tense terror, and things just seem to get worse and worse.

There is a third path, where conflict resolves into respectful differences. Sitting quietly, the calm hands you the two keys: the first unlocks your own truth; the second unlocks your curiosity about the other person’s truth.

OWS: Leaderless or Leaderful?

2012-01-04T07:00:00.000-08:00

The “Theater of the Oppressed” did several theater games with Occupy Together (a gathering of Occupies from all over New England) last weekend. I want to tell you about them because they explain something about the Occupy Movement that has a lot of people confused.

They had all hundred of us stand in a circle with our eyes closed. The director walked all around the circle, and told us that she whoever she touched would be the leader. The leader’s job was to lead, but to do so subtly so the cops wouldn’t be able to pick them out. The rest of us were to mill about once we opened our eyes, and find and follow the leader.

After a few minutes of milling, we went back into our circle, closed our eyes, and the director walked around us again, selecting the leadership for the next round. This time, everyone behaved really differently, much more action and movement, and lots more touching and laughter.

When we got back in the circle, someone asked, “Who was the leader each time?”

“The first time,” the director said, “I didn’t pick anyone. The second time, I picked everyone.”

I was immediately struck by how “Occupified” these two choices were: on the one hand, Occupy has no leader. On the other, in the “participatory democracy” which is the form of governance in the Occupy Movement, everyone is empowered to lead.

Some people call this “leaderless”, but that isn’t really a good description of the way it feels or works. In the Men’s Movement of the 1970’s, we used to call this kind of governance: “Leaderful.”

Did You Marry a Friend or Foe?

2012-01-02T09:00:00.000-08:00

I did a session this week with a couple who have learned the language of NVC, but were missing the starting point of the violence: the assumption that the person you are talking to is an enemy.

Obviously, we marry people we feel friendly towards. That happens to also be the starting assumption of any non-violent, compassionate communication.

It creates tons of slack - we listen using what I call the “Best Possible Interpretation.” If your new love says, “Jeeze, you’re such a bitch!” you assume they mean your are really assertive and you feel appreciated and respected. If they say, “I’m gonna take you out an buy you a new shirt” you think, “Oh goodie, a gift!”

The whole time you use LOVE as your guiding assumption of their motives, it’s really fun no matter what they say or do. We call this the Infatuation Stage - it’s stage one.

Then, when your relationship transitions into stage two, the Conflict Stage; you switch more and more of your motivation from LOVE to FEAR, and eventually, imperceptibly, your significant-other shifts from friend to competitor to enemy. This is accompanied by a shift from “Best Possible Interpretation” to “Worst.”

Suddenly, black becomes white, and white black. Now, if your love calls you a bitch, you assume they are being really, really mean. And if they say, “I’m gonna take you out an buy you a new shirt” you think, “They hate the way I dress!”

Each of the parties in the couple I was working with had pretty much changed everything that they were going to change to suit their partner. What was left was the actual difference that they had invited into their lives by picking this particular person. The other change they had made, was from lovers to competitors, and when things got heated, they made it all the way to enemies.

They both now know enough NVC to know that when their partner is angry, that’s just the frustration that comes when one of your needs isn’t getting met. But they couldn’t figure out what to do about that, because when your enemy is angry, it’s just a drag; it doesn’t seem like it would be fun to help them out.

So I took a turn “being” each of their partners. I said the same thing that their partner said that consistently made them angry, and when they responded angrily, I opened my heart and let my concern for my friend to spread through my body, and express itself through my words.

Same anger, same relationship, same issues. I just modeled what it feels like to be received as a friend, instead of an enemy.

They turned and looked at each other with renewed interest. Instead of issues and anger, the relationship suddenly came back into relief.

The relief that comes from relating with a friend.

Speaking Quiet Truths

2011-12-30T07:00:00.000-08:00

I took a painting class over the last month. It has changed the way I see.

What used to be a “red box” is now at first one of a million shades of red, and then as the quiet looking deepens, becomes a gradation of purple-reds in the shadows, and a rainbow of yellow-reds where the sunlight etches into the painted wood grain. Colors have temperature now, and texture, thickness and contrast. A walk in the woods is like going to the Louvre. We live in a world painted by god in a pallet that changes even as we look.

Ayurveda has done the same thing for me to food. Fruit was sweet or tangy. Vegetables where bitter. Now that I eat for health, balance and energy, everything I eat is a piece of the life-force of the universe. It has color, and texture, properties which it will bring or remove from me, or add to my life. My hunger for food is now more like my hunger for truth or beauty. It is not about making the pain go away, it is a way to connect to my own essence.

The same is true about NVC. It has changed my relationship to thought and speech. I used to use words to carry my meaning, but that is like carrying fish from the market in a Rembrant. NVC has shown me that we live in a deep web of interconnectedness and although we can choose to just react to the situations we stumble into, the real gift is know how our deepest truth creates the very situations that many of us feel victim to. Knowing my part in creation empowers me to shape my life as perfectly as possible at my current level of self-truth-telling.

I worked with a couple yesterday that had a fight about their baby’s crying. They each reacted to the situation as though it was not a baby crying, but some creation of their spouse made just to annoy them. As we worked the moments through, slowly, sinking deeper and deeper through the layers of each of their internal truths, we came to the place where they could have been creators of connection and intimacy. As is so often the case, at this deeper level, they were in deep agreement about the very thing they had fought about for days.

I’m coming to think of “maturity” as sinking deeper and deeper into the truth of each moment, so that food, color, thought and feelings break apart into their composite parts and reveal the underlying beauty of each moment.

As a mediator, I hate compromise

2011-12-28T07:00:00.000-08:00

I guess it depends on the world view you hold, but I believe in Compassionate Design: that whatever happens to you can lead you right into the heart of love.

When I first heard about this possibility, I was in my 20’s, and I decided to put it to the test. Along with two friends, I set out one winter to hitch-hike across the country on $2. There was a blizzard the day we started, and we considered postponing, but that would have been admitting defeat before we began, so we headed out into the snow. A month later we returned, tired, amazed, intact, and with our original $6; and so much richer for having “proved” the hypothesis.

If you travel in gratitude, you arrive fulfilled.

So it’s no surprise I ended up a mediator. I spend my days in rooms where people have lost their way, and I show them the gate of hope. Not all of them pass through there, even with a guide to help. But most look up from their distress with a sigh of relief and leave with a smile and new hope. Time and again they say a great weight has been lifted.

Last night I had a second session with a couple who married before they found out who each other was. Then they had a son, and now, for his sake, they are trying to get to know who they married.

I did what I do in the first session: I translated their accusations first into statements about the speaker’s truth, and then into requests of their partner’s indulgence. And I switched the description of our work from stopping the fights into finding the love. From less-pain into more-fun.

In their case, they were both mourning their single lives. All that freedom. “Okay,” they seemed to be saying, “teach us how to compromise.”

As a mediator, I hate compromise. It almost always means one or both parties not getting what they want, and that just assures more fighting and discontent.

I told them what my marriage is like. It is a first marriage for both of us, and I was 50 when we met. We both had had long single-lives, and really knew what we each liked. So instead of giving that up, we kept our autonomy and freedom, and added on all the benefits of married life.

I gave them an example. My wife hates standing on lines. She hates being told what to do, especially when it doesn’t make sense to her, or isn’t fun for her. I, on the other hand, don’t mind lines at all. I have a rich inner life, and lines just give me time to think. So anytime we encounter a situation that involves lines, just as Elise is tensing up, I offer to hold her place in line, and suggest she go exploring. I get time alone with my thoughts, and she gets even more freedom that she had when she was single, and had to stand in lines and fume.

Mediation Has Ruined Me

2011-12-26T08:19:00.000-08:00

I’m finding fewer and fewer good reasons to justify being upset. I still get upset, but I’m noticing that in order to maintain it for any length of time, you have to keep giving yourself a pep talk about how wronged you were; and those talks are seeming less and less convincing to me.

I know most people are really good at those. Some people can take a tiny incident (some incidents are actually so tiny nobody notices it but themselves) and keep cheer-leading their hurt for years, decades!

I think being a mediator has ruined me for upset. Over and over I see people resolving their differences, discovering the moment of misunderstanding, uncovering the positive intention which was missed, letting go of the grudge and finding Love right there underneath.

My grudge-muscle is atrophying. Still all these people around me continue begrudging me and others as if it were normal. Well, it may be normal, but it sure ain’t healthy!

Rest

2011-12-23T07:00:00.000-08:00

So many of my clients say they have no time to do the homework I assign them each week. They don’t have time to even talk to each other, sometimes not even once in a whole week.

Of course, they have no time to rest.

I prepare to rest on the next in-breath. I relax on the turn-around between in and out. I rest deeply on the out-breath. I relax again on the turn-around between out and in.

Every breath, therefore, is an opportunity to rest.

Sometimes, between the typing of one letter and the next, I take a breath-vacation, and rest.

The wisdom of the world can arise on one of these breath-vacations. A single one. They are like doorways to the place where serenity is manufactured.

They are always available. Anytime you still have time to breathe.

Occupy Together

2011-12-19T07:00:00.000-08:00

The Occupy Movement took a quantum step this last weekend. You won’t hear about it in the news, because it was too big, too important, and too positive to be “newsworthy.”

There are now “Occupy’s” in so many places: not just cities, but hamlets, parks, places, ideas. And even though the 20-somethings can take action at the tapping of a few thumbs - like the action to move money out of the offending banks - an idea that was spoken at a GA meeting a few weeks ago with no mike to amplify it, but it was tweeted world-wide in seconds, and this weekend they reported that one billion dollars has moved out of the banks in those few weeks.

OT was a gathering of Occupies from all over the North East. We were brainstorming how to network across Occupies, regionally, nationally, globally, so that not only could a good idea for an action (like the bank idea) spread at the speed of light, but the interaction could be two-way, so the kernel of an idea in Philly could be improved upon in Seattle, and honed in Kiev, and refined by individuals and groups until it was ready to be tweeted as an action world-wide.

The Edge

2011-12-16T06:52:00.000-08:00

Elise and I keep moving our relationship to a further edge. How many times have we gone beyond any known horizon with our truth telling? Those quiet conversations, usually in bed late, late at night, or early, early in the predawn morning.

The foundation of my home, is now, therefore, afloat, way out to sea. Grounded, I am, now in the deep waters of the soul. Mated there, soul-mated.

I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. This is the closest locale there is to my own true epicenter. It isn’t a place. You can’t get there, the traveling was done in moments of truth-telling, and now the place I live is no longer a place. I live in Elise’s understand of who I am, and she lives in mine.

If she were to die (first - we will die), I think I would be set adrift. The journey would begin to unravel like my other, mundane memories, and I think all I would know is that I am not home, but I would not know how to get there from here. Half of here would be gone.

Pre-Occupied

2011-12-12T08:50:00.000-08:00

People keep asking me what the Occupy people want, what they expect to change, how do they expect to do it, why they don’t have any leaders or agenda?

Of course none of these people have ever been to a GA (General Assembly) meeting, or gone to any of the thousands of online documents and chats about content. What they are really asking is: Why hasn’t the Occupy movement done anything that is “newsworthy” enough to be reported in the commercial “news.”

I could quote Einstein to them, “No problem has ever been solved by the kind of thinking that caused it.” It is apropos.

Those of us whose political habits are pre-Occupy are so preoccupied with the structures of power and information that got us into this mess, we not only don’t question the process, we have a hard time noticing when change is occurring.

It’s the same with my clients. By the time most of them come to me, their relationship is in the same kind of disarray our society is, these days. They too are about to lose their homes, their dreams are already turning into nightmares.

Still they come to me hoping I will change some “thing” within the existing structure - usually they hope it will either be how their spouse is, or who is their spouse.

Instead I do what the Occupiers are doing, I set up camp beside their “business as usual” processes, and advocate for inclusion, for all the parts of themselves and of their spouse that have been marginalized, downsized, foreclosed, and disenfranchised.

At the macro level that the Occupy movement confronts, I don’t know what the solution is. On the micro level of the family, the solution is just as invisible to the couples I work with as it is to the 99% who keep asking when the Occupy Movement is going to fix everything.

It’s hard to see the answer, when you’re right inside the problem – so close you’re actually part of it. That’s why a marriage mediator is do valuable. I stand just outside their marriages, so I can see the way out. “Follow me.”

The Power of Listening

2011-12-02T05:32:00.000-08:00

Last night, after 10 weeks of discussing the theory of NVC, I sat in front of the class, and had each student sit next to me and let me listen, non-violently, empathetically, to whatever was up for them. It was a revelation to both the participant and the observers. With the subtle touch of a feather, each person’s deepest truth emerged with a whisper, like blowing eraser shards off a drawing and seeing the picture like magic.

So many people are walking around with unspoken, unexamined truths - most people with a lifetime’s worth. Without this inner guidance they don’t even know they don’t know what they do know.

Where My Book Will Be

2011-11-15T14:56:00.000-08:00

I like to go to book stores, and find the exact spot my book will be when it's published.

I believe that imagining it in store after store will help.

It seems to. I have an agent interested!

"Tired of Having the Same Old Argument" is one step closer to taking its rightful place on those shelves...

The Hippocratic Oath of Love

2011-11-07T08:00:00.000-08:00

You know the deal, doctors are supposed to live by this oath: “Do no harm.”

The rest of us have a similar agreement, we call it the Golden Rule: “Do not do unto others what you would not want done to you.”

Here’s my new oath for Love: “I never want my love to make anyone’s life smaller.”

Like the other oaths, it sounds simple, but is stunningly challenging to put into practice.

When the Police Roll In

2011-11-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

First, the sadness. It is as if the rubber bullets buffeted my heart. The LA police’s tank rolled over my happiness.

Okay, what part of me is like the greed that ordered that holocaust; is like the glee that ripped flimsy tents and spewed free food in the mud? When has destruction seemed the only and right course inside of me? When have I seen Truth and vulnerability and compassion, and responded with hatred and anger and violence?

When I am in the throes of terror (wrongly) that the only way I can get the thing I really need is by fighting for it. When my thoughts fall down a bottomless well of despair into my own childhood night terrors. When it seems I’m living a life-and-death primal jungle struggle that can only end with one winner standing.

No matter how much stuff I have piled up in my life, it seems there is a part of myself that is still in that jungle, fighting for his life against some unknown enemy.

It is the “unknown” quality of that enemy which is so insidious.

It allows us to project it on anyone or anything. It strips away the thin veneer of society and tears the fabric of our civilized life, and pulls us all the way back to the primal ooze.

How do we speak our desire for fairness, without scaring the warriors back into fight or flight?

Finding the YES in their NO

2011-10-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

Inside every “No” is a “Yes” waiting to come out.

Here’s how to find it.

Since all communication is an attempt to get needs met, and since all needs are life-affirming and always come from positive intention, when someone says “No” they are communicating something positive and life-affirming: a need of theirs.

Clearly, the thing you asked them to do (your strategy) doesn’t meet their need.

So here’s a multiple choice question about what you can do, given this new understanding:

1. Judge them for being uncooperative
2. Repeat your request louder
3. Explain in greater detail why your strategy is so good at meeting your needs
4. Get curious about what need of theirs is up

If you picked 1, 2 or 3, you’re in the majority. And what you probably will get most of the time is an argument with both people feeling hurt or dissatisfied.

If you picked option 4, you’re likely to hear the “Yes” inside their “No.”

The Peace Patrol at Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-27T09:46:00.000-07:00

Fittingly, the address was right on Wall Street. An “atrium” of marble, ceilings too high to measure. Palm trees in winter. All the signs of wealth.

And fittingly, there were scruffy gatherings of “protesters” earnestly working the real democracy on plastic chairs or sitting on the cold marble floor.

Three generations of Americans: the 20-something “Millennials”, the X-Gens, and my compatriots, the Boomers. Mostly millennials. And aren’t they something: so NEW, so clear, so pure in their intent.

In ‘69, when we marched on Washington, we were idealistic, but back then cops were pigs and we were “experimenting” in a paisley psychedelic confusion of sex and drugs and, oh yeah, politics.

These young radicals got right to work. “I’m X, my preferred pronouns are ‘she’ and ‘hers’ and I’m from the Safer Spaces committee.” “I’m Y, and my preferred pronouns are ‘he’ and ‘his’ and I’m from De-escalation.” Each person introduced themselves and their assignment: “PR,” “Mediation and Non-Violent Communication”, “Medical”.

They have a silent language for meetings. When someone is talking, if you like what is being said, you hold your hands up and shake them back and forth like the a Queen’s waving. If you disagree, your fingers point down when you shake them.

This silent real-time feedback is such an efficient way of getting a sense of the group’s direction. It overlaps the speaking without disruption so takes no time, but directs the topics like wind carrying a kite this way and that. Who made up this language? How have I never seen it before? I learned it in a few minutes without anyone explaining it. It thrills me to witness progress, to learn and grow so effortlessly.

The topic is scary, drug addicts and street people are invading the occupation, and the media is dying to pounce, to use the confusion to misrepresent the whole movement. And the government is one reason away from bringing in its troops, and reasons abound (not that the media or the government actually need the reasons to be real for them to act).

Then, a couple of thrilling hours in, a bunch of cops amass near the doors. One pulls out a bull-horn. I feel the fear, the old fear, the primal fear as the bully saunters onto the playground.

“Now hear this,” he bellows through his electronic amplifier, “It is now 9pm. The Atrium closes at 9:45. Please have all your meetings concluded by then, and finish using the bathrooms as well. Thank you.”

Each of the caucuses stop and a spontaneous applause erupts. He is not the voice of hatred: there was respect and understanding here, and the applause is polite and touching.

The cop does an exaggerated stage bow, and turns to leave, then stops and through the bullhorn asks, “Does anyone have a copy of the ‘Occupy Wall Street Journal’ in English?” Laughter from all corners and several people run over to him with copies.

He takes one and looks up at us looking at him. We all stand suspended in silence, a precious and surprising moment of solidarity. It could have gone so wrong, and with this simple gesture of good will, it is so right.

He starts to leave, then pauses again, puts the bullhorn to his lips again and bellows: “Fuck Goldman Sacks!”

The room erupts in cheers.

(see www.OccupyPolice.org for more stories and video about the cops who acknowledge that they are part of the 99%)

Strong Feelings

2011-10-24T07:30:00.000-07:00

While it is true, according to NVC, that our feelings are created by our needs (not by other people); the sensations that needs create are pretty subtle: warmth, heaviness, weakness, burning; nothing which even rises anywhere near the neighborhood of a toe-jam.

In the ideal case, you'd follow these sensations down to the need, and either experience the satisfaction, or experience the need directly (which inevitably resources you to get it met).

Step 2: Naming the feeling: Instead, we use our brain to come up with a name for that feeling: anger, or hurt or happiness. These names are not created by needs, and they take us one level away from the need itself.

Step 3: Beliefs about the Feeling Name: Many of us have beliefs about these feeling words: "It's dangerous to be angry" or "It's forbidden to be sad" or "I can't control my anger."

Step 4: Feelings as a result of the beliefs: These belief/thoughts often come with very strong feelings: "He had no right to make me angry" or "It's his fault I'm feeling hurt." These feelings about the thoughts about the Names about the sensations caused by our needs are so far away from our needs, they make it nearly impossible to know what we are needing!

And that's why it's so hard to know what you need!

Eat Your Marriage

2011-10-21T09:23:00.000-07:00

Let your love flourish, this week. Okay, how about this weekend? One day?

Take a day off and have the marriage you wanted.

It’s there like a ripe peach. You say you can’t taste it anymore? Of course not. You can’t taste the peach until you bite into it.

Bite your juicy partner in the peach, and let the juices run down your life.

I promise I won’t tell.

PhillyNVC joins Occupy Philly to form Occupy Philly with Compassion!

2011-10-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

PhillyNVC joins Occupy Philly to form Occupy Philly with Compassion!

I’ll be teaching a class on Empathy in Action this Wednesday at the Education Tent at 10am at the Occupy Philly site next to City Hall.

The class is free to all. You’ll learn how to respond non-violently to people who disagree with you.

Let’s keep this protest safe - learn the skills you need!

(Or come to our regular Tuesday night class 7:30-9pm. We’re teaching Speaking NVC in Oct, and Listening using NVC: Empathy every Tuesday in November. See www.PhillyNVC.org for details).

The Mirror You Married

2011-10-17T05:29:00.000-07:00

Stop looking into the mirror which is your spouse, and blaming them for the reflection you see.

You don’t do that in your bathroom cabinet, nor the full length one in the hall, nor even in the huge mirrors in public places.

In those you look and see yourself and you let the mirror be.

So why, when you marry a mirror, do you suddenly become so angry at it? You stay calm, of a summer’s day, when the pond reflects your life. Why not blame the water? Accuse the fish? Blaspheme the muddy bottom?

But put a mirror in pajamas, with admittedly foul morning breath, and you act like your own flaws which show up in your own heart when you see the love in their eyes deserves your derision.

Take a moment and reflect. Be kind to the mirror you married.

Take Note: Have a Happy Marriage

2011-10-13T09:27:00.001-07:00

Spend this week collecting moments of happy coupledom.

Catch a couple as their hands touch when they walk side-by-side.

Notice the look between marrieds over a shopping cart.

Record the tone one of them uses with the other which conveys love, even though the topic is tomato paste.

Pin these around your house like post-it notes.

Knit a sweater of them for the long winter approaching.

For extra credit: try one with your spouse.

Take Your Love for a Walk

2011-10-08T10:59:00.000-07:00

The couple I worked with lastnight love each other. Like so many couples who come to see me.

Like so many couples who cometo see me who are about to divorce.

They come when the fightinggets intolerable. When so much of the space between them is filled with eithershouting, or the silence of the fear of the shouting, that they can’t moveanymore. Then they come to see me, and I sweep it all away, and there, sittingpatiently like an old dog waiting to be taken for a walk, is their love.

How do we come so easilyunhooked from something as powerful as love? And by what? A dirty dish? A fewminutes late? An errant thought about what I was thinking that you werethinking when you didn’t say anything after I was silent?

And when they find it again,their love; there in my office. It makes them so happy. So why do we let it goso easily?

Maybe it’s like being blownaway by a sunset. When you turn your head away, in that next moment, all yousee is your own shadow.

My book proposal is DONE!

2011-10-03T10:51:00.000-07:00

The book, Tired of Having the Same Old Argument,is born. Its infant stage, a book proposal, is DONE!

This week it will take itsfirst step, out of my hands and into the world. Into the literary world ofagents, and then publishers, and then book stores, book mailers, and finally itwill find its new homes, with readers who will translate the pictograms inblack and white first back into sound, and then thought and then finally, backinto understanding - my understanding about love and marriage - and the cyclewill be complete.

This kind of writing, tryingto hand what I understand to another is new to me. It’s not at all like thepoetry or self-reflective prose I’ve written for years in writing groups. Thosegroups let me form words in the moment and pin them down like butterflies, andthen just admire the natural beauty of it all.

This writing is more likestone sculpture. Elise and I went to the AccademiaGallery in Florence that has some of Michelangelo’s unfinished work.You can still see the huge stone block and the heavy hammer blows he used tocut away what was not wanted. In some cases, his chisel made it all the way into where the hand or an elbow should be and unable to resist it, he changed toa lighter hammer and a smaller chisel, and he carved not just flesh, but veinsbeneath the skin appear. So incongruous a quarter inch from rough hewn stone,and yet so completely convincing you can see the pulse if you stare.

Writing non-fiction seemsjust like that to me. You block out ideas, hammer them down to the paper, andfrom time to time, polish some perfect moment right down to the pulsing life ofyour original thought.

Then the polishing begins.Chipping away the not-quite-right, turning a sentence around and round untilthe words recede and the living meaning is all that can be seen.

After months of polishing,the few chapters I have finished say as close to exactly what I wanted to sayas I can imagine. I’m sure the reader will agree. I can feel it.

The question is: will thoseemployed in the business of publishing, agree?

It's Not a book, it's a Nook

2011-09-30T10:32:00.000-07:00

What do you get if you contract the word “Not” and the word “book?” Nook.

We got a Nook as a gift. It wants us to think of it as a new kind of book, but after my first 24 hours with it, it’s more not a book than bookish.

The first thing I miss is sound. If you had asked me to write 10,000 words about reading books, I don’t think I would have ever mentioned hearing the sound of a page turning as one of the essential qualities of reading a book. But with it missing, it trumpets its loss. Reading is such a quiet endeaver, but like libraries, it is not the silence, but the whisper of sound which brings the sacred feel. If I am lost in some ancient past or imagined future, it is never more than two pages before the whisk of a page turning brings me for just a moment back into the only time there really is: now.

The second thing I miss is touch. We hold so much plastic already. Computer mice, keyboards, phones, even our steering wheels. Plastic has an oily lack of presence, and I think it has been important, at least once a day, to hold a book. To wipe the dinosauric smudges from our fingers like napkins at a KFC. To feel the heft of something that used to be a tree, and still loves us. To feel the heft of the words some poor author sweat and strained at. To thumb through pages to find your place. To have to find some little thing to mark where you left off. To have a book be a thing that takes up space on your shelves, in your life, on your bed table. Something to pile high to show you that you think, that you stop working and relax, that you and the real world interact.

It’s sweet that the Nook allows you (in such a limited way!) to change the font. But it does it so sloppily! Firstly, it doesn’t actually ever even see the book itself! It downloads only text. So it comes makes no effort at all at formatting, and certainly pays no attention to design! Its inventors must have grown up in Levittown where “house” is not a different word from “box” and there must be no difference for them between “weed” and “flower” save function. So when you change the font or size to suit yourself, the “book” reformats by throwing the words at the screen like darts: as long as it lands anywhere on the page it scores. It carries a philosophy that space or shape have nothing to say. Basically, all that is allowed are tabs, line feeds and single spaces between the words. Even page feeds are lost in this tumble of letters.

The Nook has a machine’s sensibilities when it comes to literature. “I got all the words, didn’t I?”