Mediation Has Ruined Me

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!

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.

How Open Should a Healer Be to the Suffering?

How open should I keep myself to the suffering of others as their healer?

Each new man comes in unable to breath, chest reified into stone with their certainty about how wrong their wife is. 

They bluster their fear at these women who love them, thinking they are solving the thing they are creating.

The little girl in their wife looks out of the outraged woman's eyes, so sad and bewildered at the betrayal. Both girl and woman convinced by the silly mask the terrified man wears, writing epoch poems of injustice which are justified and just as off the mark as is his "logic.”

I watch them take pot-shots at each other, only half trying to hurt - really trying to help the other back to a better time.

Time. So much of it lost in the snake biting its own tail and rolling down the years.

I feel the weight of that lost time, and its heaviness feels like sadness in my heart. But perhaps it's just weight.

Maybe I'm misreading my feelings. Maybe the weight is just the love I feel: for the scared boy, for the betrayed girl, for the little bits of man-flesh that haven't yet turned to stone, for the angry woman fighting for her life; for myself, who volunteers to go into this nuclear reactor of relationships, over and over, with the tools to collect the radiating energy, and cool the fires down to one man and one woman who love each other but don't know how.

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.

The Sock Puppet Argument

Several years ago, a couple came in, and the wife brought with her a 300 page notebook full of all of her husband's wrong doings. She didn't really need the notebook, she had all of his transgressions so committed to memory all I had to do was mention a problem, like "dishes" and she could find all the pages describing each of the instances involving dishes and what he had done 'wrong'.

Okay, so it's an extreme example, but essentially every person who comes in to see us has a log of their spouse's transgressions. They may not write them down on paper, they just know them by heart, but that may actually be worse!

Once you've logged enough of your partner's transgressions, you start to believe you not only know what your partner has done wrong, you also feel certain you know what they are going to do wrong! When it gets to that point, you don't really even need your partner there to have a fight.

Elise and I call this the "Sock Puppet" argument. Once she wanted me to do something which she thought I wouldn't want to do, so she said, "I want you to [whatever it was]" and then, before I had a chance to respond, she said, "I know what you're going to say, you're going to say, '[Her imagined counter argument of mine.]'" and then she said, "But, [and then she countered 'my' counter argument." And before I could speak, she countered her counter of her counter. I finally said, "Call me when this argument is over, and let me know how I did."

The image of putting a sock on your hand, and turning it back on yourself and arguing with it is so ridiculous; it often stops these kinds of arguments in their tracks.

The solution to a Sock Puppet argument is to let go of the idea that you know what the other person is thinking, and actually risk asking them for what you want. One of the first lessons they taught us as mediators was to be excitedly curious about the other person. This was also called the "dumb mediator" because even though you may think you know what the other person is thinking (it's obvious because you know what you would be thinking in that situation) you let go of what you 'know' and get curious about them.

It's amazing how often they surprise you.


Q4U: Watch for Sock Puppet arguments this week, and tell us about the ones you see - or better still, the times you caught yourself being the ventriloquist!

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?