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

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.

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.

The Mirror You Married

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

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

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

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

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

How do we come so easily unhooked from something as powerful as love? And by what? A dirty dish? A few minutes late? An errant thought about what I was thinking that you were thinking 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 go so easily?

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

Married But No Longer Friends

The couple I started working with last night asked me this touching question: “How do we become friends again?”

After all the fighting, the busyness of raising kids and work, this couple, like so many others, has become roommates who don’t really even have a friendship anymore. A gap has opened up between them which they don’t know how to bridge.

What would you suggest?

See my next blog entry for my answer.

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.

Marrying My Wife's Needs

A few months ago, I decided to marry my wife's needs. I had been seeing my needs as good (okay, a pain when they were unmet, but mostly good) & hers as a pain (except when I met them, & then they were fun for me). I realized that as my skill for meeting needs increased, BOTH of our needs were becoming increasingly more fun for me. So I married hers, & now I have twice as many opportunities for satisfaction!

 

THe Slippery Slope

Here's a quick test for how your relationship is doing. If love and peace and intimacy were moving forward, and conflict and judgment is moving backward, answer this question truthfully:

What direction is your relationship moving in, and at what speed?

When couples come to see us, they are often moving backward, in a viscous cycle. In this stage, communication easily slips into reactions to reactions to reactions. Each party sincerely believes that "as soon as the other person stops, I will." This is what seems fair because each party can name an incident which predates their reaction, that the other party did something wrong earlier.

Basically, the relationship has been reduced to the "he started it!" that parents and teachers hear from children so often.

But it does feel real. How can you respond lovingly to repeated affronts? Each partner can even name moments when they did try to forgive and forget, and got slammed anyway, so better to hold out for justice.

Of course, this strategy accounts for the backward motion of the relationship. Both parties are driving their part of the relationship looking only in the rearview mirror, waiting for their partner to rectify the past, before they feel safe to move on to new territory. But since both parties are using this same strategy, the relationship just keeps backing up over the same painful turf.

There comes a time when this backward motion develops a momentum. Even without trying, even little things seem to just slide back the wrong way. Worse, even when both parties decide to turn things around, it seems like the relationship is already careening down an incline too steep to stop, and so kicking and screaming, the whole family keeps sliding backwards down into chaos and conflict.

When I'm with a couple in this state, I can see the topography of their relationship like a hill that just keeps getting steeper and steeper. After a while it doesn't seem like it has anything to do with them, it is just the shape of the terrain.

And it is the shape of the terrain, but the surprising fact is that this particular terrain responds to us, even though it feels the other way around.

When you stop speaking in judgments and reactions, the ground levels out immediately.

Often by the end of the very first session (when I am translating their judgments into expressions of universal needs for them) both parties can feel the ground beneath them level out. Often during that first week at home they slide back down into their old strategy and blame the OTHER PERSON and the terrain slants back down again.

So let me make it really clear: when you feel the earth begin to slant away from your partner, when you feel yourself moving inexorably away from them, it's your point of view of the situation which is causing that.

The Oak Tree’s Lover

We live in a hundred year old house, with a hundred year old oak tree out front. I often find myself pointing out the window at the tree to teach clients how to have a happy marriage.

I tell them about the other oak tree which used to be right next to ours, in our neighbor's yard. They stood for a century, with only a thin, split-rail fence between them, their limbs forming a huge, green gumdrop that could be seen for blocks.

Last winter, my neighbor's tree fell in a storm, so now my tree stands alone, and I can see, for the first time, how unbalanced it is: all the limbs face towards my house. The other tree was so close my tree didn't bother, or didn't have the room, to grow in that direction. It wasn't obvious when the other tree was there, but now my tree looks misshapen, like it may fall at any moment.

Across the street is another oak tree, planted at about the same time. For a hundred years it has reached towards my tree, and mine has stretched and grown towards it. They are just about to touch. A hundred years of desire, about to be consummated.

That tree looks strong and balanced, full and healthy.

Perhaps our culture's model of relationship: two people pressed up against each other, isn't the best configuration for a long and healthy love.