Choicefulness

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?”

Fresh Faces

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.

Did You Marry a Friend or Foe?

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.

PhillyNVC joins Occupy Philly to form Occupy Philly with Compassion!

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).

You Are a Self-Satisfying Needs Machine

When any situation falls short of satisfying you deeply, there is a fork in the road:
- The low road first asks and then demands that the other person change (regardless of how this might affect their satisfaction) so that you can feel okay.
- The high road steps outside the feeling of dissatisfaction and traces it back to its real origins: what this means to you: discovering what the missing satisfaction is about. Somehow, touching into the satisfaction which exists within you, even just momentarily frees you from the victim role - the idea that drives so much of our unhappiness - that other people are boorishly withholding our only chance at happiness.

Thus freed from the blind-puppy-lapping-at-its-bitch's-teat-for-survival view of relationship, two changes miraculously happen:

1.    We become not only relaxed and stress-free, we suddenly become amazingly articulate about what it is we actually want; and…
2.    The other person appears before us, as if by magic, with their own desires and needs, which we now have the resource and curiosity and actual desire to include in the conversation.

That conversation, by the way, is not only fun to have; it creates connection and intimacy, even if none of the issues are resolved!

Because although your mind would refuse to accept this thought anywhere along the low road - the issue (the laundry, the tooth-paste tube, whatever) that you were convinced needed to be resolved and were further convinced that only the resolution of that issue would bring about your happiness - was never what this was about at all.

Satisfaction, serenity, stresslessness - are available without the outside world changing one iota. You are a self-satisfying machine.

And as such, you can be a delight to be around for other self-satisfying machines.

Violently Using Non-Violent Communication

Anything which can be used can be misused, and therefore anything powerful can be powerfully misused.

It's important to avoid the trap of using Non-Violent Communication as weapons instead of as tools. For instance, knowing that your partner (or anyone) has just spoken a judgment is not a license to judge them! That will just create an unmet need in them, which they will likely throw back at you as a judgment, and the only benefit you'll have gotten out of NVC is using it to have arguments at a higher level - about process instead of about content. But they're still arguments, and they will leave everyone's needs just as unmet.

And eventually you'll get the "You're doing that thing again, that NVC thing. Stop doing that to me!"

If you hear this or some phrase like it - sometimes the person says, "You’re not my therapist," what they are communicating is that you are using the techniques of nonjudgment from a judgmental place. The idea here is not to change your words or to change your partner. The idea is to change where you stand in the world, so you really see your partner as your equal and on the same side as you, and to communicate FROM there. All the techniques are aimed at helping YOU notice where  YOU are.

So if you notice your partner talking in judgments, you haven't caught them in a mistake, you've just noticed they have an unmet need and so now you're in a position to help them get it met.

If Marriage Mediation is Right for You

So you've been reading my blog for a while, and you're wondering, "How can I get help?"

When my book, "Tired Of Having the Same Old Argument" comes out, it will be designed as a self-help process so many more of you can take advantage of the Teamwork Marriage Mediation Process.

Until then, here are some things you can do:

First, see if NVC, which is a major component of our work, helps you:

- Read Marshall Rosenberg's "NVC: A Language of Life." We learned NVC from this book. It's got short chapters, and exercises at the end of each chapter.

- Find an NVC Class. If you're in Philly, check out
PhillyNVC.org. We publish all the NVC classes we know about in the greater Delaware Valley area, as well as NY and DC.

- Go to CNVC.org, the international NVC web site, and see if you can find a teacher or trainer or workshop.

- Take online NVC courses at NVC Academy

Find a way to work with us:

- Go to our web site: TheMarriageMediator.net and see what’s available.

- If you’re in the Greater Philly area, contact Max and set up an appointment at TwoRiversMediation@aol.com

- If you live further away, contact Max about doing sessions via Skype.

Finally, if we can’t help you, try Googling “Marriage Mediation” and find someone near you.

Anger is a tricky emotion.

Anger is what I call a “you-focused, tertiary (meaning third-level) emotion.”

“You-focused” because the message of anger is that they did something to you that you didn’t deserve, and so they deserve your anger (meaning the punishment that your anger doles out). But other people don’t cause our feelings - our needs cause our feelings. So you’re punishing them for feelings which you created.

“Tertiary Feeling” because anger isn’t the feeling that your need created, since it’s about others and wrong-doing, and needs aren’t about other people.

Needs are about you, and your satisfaction and desire.

So if the situation stimulated a need, and the feelings that are generated by unmet needs are ones like sadness or loss:

How did you get to anger?

The answer is,

First, you had those softer feelings.

Then you felt uncomfortable about them

(that’s the secondary-feeling) and

Then you talked to yourself about it.

 (“They shouldn’t have done that to me, I was only trying to help!”) and…

Then you had the tertiary feeling of anger.

So once again, you generated the anger - first from the need, second from the discomfort, and thirdly from your thinking.

The good news is…

Since all of this is you-generated,

you can do something about it. There are lots of places for interventions, so…

Let’s focus on the very first one: your fuse.

Since all interactions are about trying to get needs met, and since…

All needs are life-affirming, and positive in their intention.

The basic premise of anger: that other people are out to hurt you; is simply false.

I’m not saying that in the process of trying to actualize those positive intentions that everyone always chooses so wisely the positivity makes it all the way out to the other person every time. Some people make such bad choices, even they don’t experience the positive impact themselves (take drug addiction, for instance).

Those instances where the choices fall short are where good communication, mediation, negotiation and empathy play a role.

But before we get to setting the situation aright…

We have to get you back into a compassionate pose.

The time to start that is now, when you’re not angry.

Imagine someone you’re habitually angry at.

Notice the fuse you shove at them every time you even think about them. You probably think of them as a bad or difficult person.

But the truth is:

It’s just difficult for you to get your needs met around them.

Take that in. It’s not them.

It’s your needs that are the real fuse.

Now there’s nothing wrong with your needs.

They’re those positive, life-affirming satisfiers.

So feel the positivity of that truth in your body.

Then from that place of compassion for yourself…

Look out at the other person and feel the same thing for them.

Mediators say that we start at a “level table.” This means that everyone is equal, the same.

All are deserving of respect, even those we disagree with.

Feel your body relax into that truth.

Q4U: So are you able to de-fuse using this technique? Having trouble with it? Leave your successes and challenges as comments and I’ll help you with your situation.

When Is a Car, Not a Car?

A few months before Elise and I started developing Teamwork Mediation, I started to “get it” about being a mediator. Up until that point, I was doing the process, but I never quite knew if I was doing it right or not.

I remember the case which changed all that. I remember that the case involved a couple who were separating.
“This is a simple case,” he said. (They all thought that -  open and shut - finding for their side, of course.) “I bought the car before I met Janet, we have since broken up, and I want my car back.”

I turned to Janet. “And what is the issue for you?”

“Well,” she said, “first of all, it’s not a car.”

That was the moment I knew I had become a mediator. To a non-mediator, this probably sounds like a Zen koan: “When is a car not a car.” But to my mediator’s ears, this was exactly what I expected: difference.

Before I became a mediator, like most other people, I went around believing that while there were plenty of disagreements happening all the time, basically, there was a pretty good agreement about what Reality was.

But at this point we had been mediating for about six months, and that belief had been shattered so many times, I noticed that I had developed the ability to suspend my belief so completely, that even this didn’t phase me. I had become a mediator - unflappable by the relativity of reality. Einstein found it at the speed of light, I found it in small claims court: relativity.

Difference is such a double edged sword! We invite it into our life to make sure we get the benefit of all the different points of view, and then we cut ourselves on its sharp-edged difficulty. We want it all and we want it simple.

But to get it all, we have to deal with the complexity and contradictions. If you like the quiet life, and revel in your aloneness, who do you think you’ll be attracted to? Another hermit? Ney! (You’d probably never even cross their path, much less be attracted to them.) No, you’ll fall for some gad-about who swoops you out of your nest and teaches you to fly. It’s terrifying and exhilarating at first. And then you can’t get enough.

And then, although you love the soaring, and can’t imagine living without it, you also miss the quiet and the calm, and there begins the struggle: which of way is the RIGHT way?

And so whether you end up in small claims court, or divorce court, or just the court of public opinion, the clash of swords can be heard as you externalize the struggle which we all face within: the simple small life, or the large complex one?

Is difference a good thing, or bad?

I had become so comfortable with difference, I almost hated to ask, but this was small claims court, so ask I must: “Not a car?”

“No!” she spat. “A car has wheels, and this one is up on blocks. As car goes places and he just lives in this one in my driveway. He can have his ‘car’ back when he pays me his back rent for living on my property!”

There’s an old saying: “If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a trolley car.” It came to mind in that moment, but I didn’t think it would help, so I kept it to myself.

The Story of Max, Elise and Teamwork Mediation

Although born fifteen years apart, Elise and I had very similar lives before we met.  We had both had done a lot of personal growth work, had done a lot of education, and although both of us had very rich and fun single lives, neither of us had married by the time we met at 35 and 50 years of age respectively.

The roots of Teamwork Mediation began before we’d even moved in together. In the wake of 9/11, I noticed that in just a few weeks, the rest of the world went from total support and concern for the people of the U.S. to turning their back on us, just because of the strident way the U.S. government spoke about its fear and hurt. This struck me as so analogous to what happens to individuals who go from infatuation and love to seeing each other as enemies. But what to do about it?

I found a weekend mediation program that I wanted to take as a way of learning better skills for dealing with conflict, both personal and political. Elise decided to take the training too.

Our Lawnmower Story (Everyone had one, right?)

After the training, Elise and I did more than a year apprenticing in a Small Claims Court to practice our skills, and it was here that we began to develop what we eventually named “Teamwork Mediation,” which we talk about in our book. 

The case that started us on this path involved two old neighbors who were also best friends. One of them had loaned the other his beat up, old lawn mower, and it had been returned broken so he was suing his friend! 

“We’ve been best friends for over 30 years, but I’ll never speak to him again!” said the borrower. Our training taught us how to help the disputants focus on the issues, so we could help them decide on the fair value of the item, and settle the case. And I started to do just that.

But Elise is a kind-hearted being, and her focus was elsewhere. “You’re willing to let a 30 year friendship go? For a lawnmower? Thirty years?” We three men could actually feel the lawnmower begin to recede from the room as Elise’s compassion helped us focus on the deeper need: the value of human connection.

They were sacrificing their life-long relationship for a broken-down power-tool.  Elise began to apply the soothing techniques of mediation to the relationship, instead of focusing on resolving the legal issue. Once the relationship was healed, the lawnmower and the legal issue were summarily dismissed by both parties.

That was the first in a long string of cases, in which we began to mediate the relationship instead of the issues. At first the judge would call us on our method, “This isn’t couple’s counseling! It’s small claims court!” But we were having amazing success with our new method, and after a while, even the other mediators began to notice that instead of randomly assigning cases, any case which involved an ongoing relationship got assigned to us.

After some time, Elise and I wanted to teach our clients the skills of conflict resolution. After all, it had only taken us 30 hours to learn to be mediators, and it was really changing the way she and I communicated with each other.  Since most of our clients had ongoing relationships, we wanted to share this new information with them, so we started doing what we called “teaching points.” 

The problem was, mediators are neutral – not involved in the conflict. Our clients were involved, and so the mediator skill set wasn’t quite right.

One of the other mediators came to us one day and said, “You want to be teaching them NVC – Non-Violent Communication.” It’s like mediation, but designed for regular people to use in their conversations and conflicts.

He was right.  NVC was exactly what we were looking for. So we began to create a hybrid form of mediation. We’d use our skills to demonstrate that the dispute could be resolved, and then we’d teach the clients the applicable NVC concept so they could do it themselves.

And Teamwork Mediation was born. 

Is there a “lawn mower” issue you’re dealing with? Have you lost sight of the value of one of your precious relationships over whether the toilet seat is down, or the top is back on the tooth paste tube? Tell us about it…

 

Same Old, Same Old

So, you're arguing.
Not just arguing, but arguing repeatedly.

Like so many couples, like so many families, like so many lovers, you were seeking love, peace and fun. But you got fighting instead, with frustration and, upset thrown in.

It's a sad thing. Or, at least it was.

There's a story about a guy who falls into an open manhole. People walk by and look down, and offer suggestions, and then go on their way. Finally his best friend happens by, and he calls up to him for help. In response, his friends jumps down into the hole with him!

"Why did you do that?" the man shouts.

"Because I've been here myself, and I know the way out. And because I have faith, that with my support, you can find your way out."

I'm a mediator, and I've spent the last ten years jumping down into the hole with couples, and supporting them in their efforts to  find their way out.

This is a blog about that journey, and about the book my wife and I are writing about it.

 I also want this to be a place to  talk about the new things I learning as they happen, because I do learn something from each couple almost every session.  Obviously, I'll need to protect my clients' privacy, so I'll either be describing the new concepts I learn, or I'll change enough of the details so even they wouldn't recognize themselves.

I'm excited about getting the bulk of what we've learned down in the book, because my wife and I have co-created a skill set (on top of the huge pile of wisdom we've inherited from others - which we will also share here) that can take a couple, even one that has done years of couples counseling and are still on the brink of divorce, back into the intimacy and love that brought them together in the first place. And we can do this in just six sessions.

In fact, that's how we're writing the book - in six sections to coincide with our six sessions. So it will be just like being on our couch with us in our home/office. We realized we weren't going to be able to get all of you who need our little process onto our couch, or even into our office so we decided to bring our couch to you.  Try not to spill anything on it.

I'll also answer questions about those same old arguments, if you leave them here as comments.

So, if you were going to sit down on my couch, with or without your partner, what would you want to know about your Same Old Arguments?