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.

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.

The Mature Relationship

I believe that marriage is a three stage process: Infatuation, Difference and The Mature Relationship.
During infatuation, you both get all your needs met, without having to ask. I think of this as the sampler - you get to actually experience all that is available to you with this person.
It ends when you start to have to ask for what you need. That begins the Difference Stage. If done with the skills available through Teamwork Marriage Mediation, you quickly learn how to negotiate with each other and get the benefit of these differences you brought into your life because you needed them.
If you do it the way most people do, stage two feels more like the Conflict Stage.
Either way you do it, if your relationship survives, you get to stage three: The Mature Relationship. In some ways, it's exactly like the Infatuation Stage, except this time it's real. It's flexible, because both of you can talk about what you need, and negotiate ways to meet both your needs.
So how to say describe this stage, besides "like before only better?"

What comes to mind is that it is like the year or so that I kept the Sabbath according to the Jewish practice.
It often seems like the work week is your Life. Then you choose you take a break from all that, for 24 hours.

After a while, for me it flipped. Suddenly Shabbos became Life. It was like one of those optical illusions where the ground and subject switch and instead of a line drawing of a vase, you see two faces looking at each other in outline.

The silent background of peace is like a blank sheet of paper and the busyness and "to-do" lists are just the words we write on that perfect paper. After a while, if you get really good at it, each time you lift the pen, even during the work week, the peace shines through. So even just lifting it to dot an "I" or cross a "t" gives you a little, mini, Shabbos.

Right relationship is just like that.
Once you've started fighting, the other person shifts from Shabbos, the safe base, into another part of the work-week, stress. And the part of you that longs for rest in another's arms turns against you and blames them for not being the right arms.

So the second stage, the difference stage, where you take back your projections, and relax into the simple truth of your longings and desires, unhooks your other from the trappings of the stress. They float free again. "Hum, I wonder who that is?" you get to ask again. Your curiosity is reignited. And your desire.

Inviting another person into that Shalom, is phase three. 
The teacher in my first class was another butch, drill sargent, and she held her hand up to me in a "stop" motion as she went on with her tirade to the unwashed masses of her class: "Don't chump these speakers," she shouted, "They have jobs! I have a job, your other teachers have jobs! Here's your chance to learn about jobs!"

Then, her sermon done, she rushed out of the room without a word. In my mind's eye, I assumed to get a smoke and wash it down with bourbon.

The class, frozen in an artificial silence of jundgment, all eyes on me like deer caught in headlights (or was it like lions catching the scent of prey) turned to me.

I walked slowly to the front of the room and said, "You're not gonna chump me, are you? I don't quite know what it means, but I don't think I'd like it." They all let out a sigh of relief, and giggled. I wasn't going to be a problem. This might be fun.

Writing a book is hard!

How is it that there are so many? Their sheer numbers make it seem so easy, trivial even, but no! It takes thousands of words, and not just ones thrown at the page. You have to pick and trim each one like a hand made garment.

A book is like a dry cleaner store. Tens of thousands of pieces of loved pieces of cloth, each hung in its own protective bag. Each with its original meaning to its owner, and some different meaning to the publisher, and yet a third to the reading public.

How can I ever get the thin red line of truth through such a process? My thoughts are trimed and dry cleaned and hung out to dry. The blank pages sit by my bed and stare at me while I sleep fitfully. The unwritten words have parties in my head: "Wake up! Write me!" they scream. "Write me, I long to be written."

I love their passion, and I want to write them down, but just as I sit to do their work, they become wild mice, scampering every which way, and jumble their order and laugh at me when I chastise them. "I thought you wanted me to write you down."


"Not down, up" they say, always so contrary at the moment of ink. "You're not doing it right. Not that way, over here!"

My words are so rebellious. They're like the adolescent who refuses to smile as soon as he sees the camera. You can take his picture, hoping he'll see his dour face and repent and smile next time, but like my words, he likes the way he looks in those pictures, they like how unruly they are on the page.

"You can photoshop us later," they say. Easy for them to say. Have you ever tried to use Photoshop? It's not easy.

It takes ten times longer to find the right word in a sentence made up of all the wrong words, then it would have if I could have captured the words as they ran by in my head, like marathon runners. I hold out cups of water, hoping they will stop, but they just tear the cup from my hand, splash it on their heads and dash off. They don't even properly dispose of the cups!

If I leave my computer on a white surface overnight, I'm always afraid it will be stained black by the words which escaped overnight.

And then, once I have most of them pressed into place, more or less, and I show the lot to a friend, they fall into the spaces left between the few correct words, and scrape their chins on the ground or ask questions about the thing they read instead of the thing I was trying to write.

There's an old train station here in Mt Airy which has been taken over by old books, thousands of them. Every spot (and many spots that aren't) are jammed with old books which you can have for a dollar or two.

You can by a miracle for a buck! And instead of a run on the bank, they mold there, words begging to be let loose.

The Invisible Third Party

Sometimes a fight can't be resolved because the person causing the fight isn't in the room. We call that the "Invisible Third Party."

The first time we recognized this phenomenon was when we were mediating in Small Claims court during our apprenticeship as mediators. A 14 year-old boy was suing one of the customers on his paper route for not paying for her papers. I think everyone in the room was a little in awe of the chutzpah of this "child" having an advanced enough sense of justice to have filed the suit in the first place.

The prim and upscale woman he was suing kept slipping into that awe and respect, as she listened to him make his case, and if it weren't for the complete difference in her understanding of the facts, I think she would have just paid him the small sum.

But whenever it was her turn to talk, her facts were so different from his, she would slide back her position: she just didn't owe the money.

It seems she had gone away for the summer, and had called the paper and asked them to turn off delivery while she was gone. The paper said they would take care of it, and she left for several months.

However, that same man she had called, kept her name on the boy's list of papers to deliver, and charged him for those papers. When the boy came "collecting" she was so irate because she knew she had cancelled her subscription and so she thought she was being ripped off. She even confirmed with the paper that they had her cancellation on record, the first time the boy came collecting, so now she assumed he was the one trying to rip her off. But the paper hadn't toll the boy or credited him - he had called the paper and they had confirmed that he owed for the papers.

So neither party in the room held the secret to this problem, or the solution, it was the invisible third party.

This pattern repeats often in Marriage Mediation cases. Mothers-in-laws, bosses, irate neighbors, kindergarten teachers, even dead goldfish and pizza delivery boys can show up in marital conflicts as the "invisible third party" which makes it impossible for the two "disputants" to solve "their" issue.

The solution, as always, is to assume the "best possible interpretation" of your partner. Since we are all trying to just get our Universal Human Needs met, and they are always coming from life-affirming, positive intention; if you can't find the positive intention in your partner's actions, then you are missing something, and you need to check out the assumptions behind your disappointment.

Q4U: Are you holding a grudge against someone right now? Can't find the positive intention in their position? What are you missing?

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.