A mother of an eight year old daughter who is having severe emotional problems has come to me for help with the conflicts she is having with the girl’s father.  Their brief marriage ended just after the girl was born. 

There are a couple of upcoming meetings with the daughter’s school and with the clinic which is addressing her emotional problems.  These meetings could be held separately with mom and dad or they could happen together.  It is hard for the parents to be in the same room with each other but Mom wants to work at addressing the issues between her and Dad so that their daughter experiences less stress.

When Mom received an email from school about the plan for separate meetings she hit “reply all” and suggested they meet together.  She then contacted Dad to suggest that they should work at working together.  He replied that she was once again trying to control everything and that he had set up a separate meeting.

Mom wrote to me aware that the feelings she had discovered of a sense of strength and purpose in acting on behalf of her daughter had withered in the face of Dad’s attack.  She was again feeling sad and weak.

I hear your discouragement at how Dad is showing up in the relationship with you and that your efforts at reconciliation are no match for his efforts at alienation.  You are noticing that the feelings you have about yourself for what you are trying to do changed back in just 24 hours and you would like to recover a sense of power and purpose.  So let me offer a couple of observations.

When we were talking about what you see going on and what your concerns are and how you would like things to be, you began to feel more calm and focused and even powerful.  When you begin to focus on Dad and what he is doing and whether his choices make sense, you begin to feel out of kilter and even sad and weak.

When we are focused on things we can do something about we feel powerful.  When we are focused on things we can’t change we feel helpless and hopeless.  When we are focused on things within ourselves we feel centered.  When we begin to focus all of our attention on others we start to feel off center.  We start to wobble.

I am not suggesting that you don’t pay attention to what is going on with Dad.  It is even helpful to try to anticipate how he will feel about and respond to what you might do.  I am just suggesting you do that from a vantage point which is within your sense of your Self, your values, your perspective.

Having said that, I will now appear to argue the opposite position.  You look at the choices Dad is making—as that he doesn’t want to meet with you at school but will go to a meeting with you at the clinic—and you don’t see them as making sense.  And that is true; from your perspective they don’t make sense.  They only make sense from Dad’s perspective.  For you to see the sense they make, you would have to want to be able to see from his perspective.  Is there any benefit to seeing things from his perspective?

We get stuck on this because we assume there is only one valid perspective.  When we make that assumption, we then fight over who has the right perspective.  When instead we start with the assumption that there are many valid perspectives but that they are all partial…even my own…then there is something to be gained by seeing from the perspective of the other.  I can get a fuller sense of what is going on.

So, holding fast to your own perspective and not abandoning your own values and hopes, can you see anything that is valid about Dad’s perspective which is different from your own?

One thing that occurs to me (and I don’t really know much about what is going on) is that the school and the clinic are the ones creating the meetings and they may have different goals for the meetings.  Those differences require meeting separately or together.  Another is that neither of you likes being in the presence of the other.  You both feel like the other is trying to make you lose.

So there are aspects of the perspectives from which you both approach this situation that are the same and arrayed against each other.  You are both afraid.  You are both feeling controlled by the other.  You are both looking from the same place, just in opposite directions.  You may not be ready to acknowledge this to Dad, but, if you can hold onto this awareness for yourself, it may help you to stay calm and centered.

Boredom is the name we have for the feeling that arises when what we have been doing to soothe our anxiety isn’t working any more.

We all do things to soothe ourselves. We have ways of being—reading, walking, meditation, listening to music, fishing, praying—which are things which are an antidote to anxiety because they are not things we do to create a specific outcome and so are not things we can fail at. Sometimes the anxiety is too intense for ways of being to be enough soothing, so we do things that actively seek to avoid the anxiety. These are things like eating, shopping, smoking cigarettes, getting high, zoning out in front of the TV, playing online games, and acting out sexually.

Sometimes even these are not enough. They become “not enough” by our having relied on them without doing enough to actually address the causes of the anxiety, or they become not enough because we are giving up some of the other self-soothing activities we use. If we have been smoking to address anxiety and we stop smoking, the other self soothing strategies we retain have to take up more of the effort and they are not able to carry the weight. We become bored with them.

The only long term solution is to address the anxiety. We have to become aware of the things that are making us anxious.

We have suggested that all relationships experience conflict, and when we are able to negotiate a process of naming, addressing, and resolving a conflict that arises into our awareness, we find that we have actually strengthened the relationship. We have even suggested that all conflicts can potentially be resolved. So what then does it mean to resolve a conflict?

Typically we find that when a conflict arises in our awareness, there are actually multiple conflicts arising from many perspectives about a variety of issues. The complexity of most conflicts can overwhelm us and lead us to declare that this conflict is not resolvable. By this we give ourselves permission to give up. … continue reading

Tammy and John have been dating pretty seriously for several months.  They don’t live together but they spend many weekends together and occasionally spend the night together during the week.  They are each divorced with children from a previous marriage. 

John is an only child and feels lonely when he is the only one in the house.  He likes having his children with him and enjoys having friends over.  Tammy is from a big family and sometimes feels overwhelmed by lots of people and enjoys her time alone.

After a several day period of Tammy choosing to be alone, she called John on a Friday and let him know that she would be coming over to see him that evening.  John was pleased and looking forward to seeing her but didn’t mention that he would have his two children with him and that his buddy, Frank, would also be there.

When Tammy arrived Friday evening John could see that she was put off by the presence of others in the house.  He tried to engage her but was also responsive to the demands of his children and the game that he and Frank were watching on TV. 

After about an hour, Tammy became very agitated and declared that she was leaving.  She was clearly angry.  John responded by being loud and demanding and demeaning  and stated that, if that was the way she wanted to be, she could just go and take all of her stuff, too.

Saturday morning John was still very angry.  He text messaged her (he knew she was at work) a couple of times saying mean things about her.  He then realized that he was really scared about losing her.  He apologized in a text message for his behavior.   He called and left voice messages Saturday evening and Sunday.  It was mid-week before Tammy called him back.

We sometimes use the terms expectations and standards interchangeably.  I find it helpful to make a distinction between the two.  I find it most helpful to have my expectations be exactly what is actually going to happen.  I, of course, can’t always know what is going to happen, so I am sometimes surprised or disappointed.  But the closer my expectations are to reality, the more I can accurately anticipate what my experience will be.

Tammy expected that when she got to John’s house that Friday it would be the beginning of a weekend alone with him the way so many other weekends had been.  John expected that Tammy would join in the activities with Frank and his kids.  They each harbored unreasonable expectations. They were both very disappointed.

Standards are the adjustable supports that hold the bar in the high jump.  They can be set at different heights depending upon the ability of the high jumper.  The height is set just slightly higher than the last jump that the athlete was able to make.  Ideally, we want to have our standards be just a bit beyond what we are usually able to do.  If they are too low, we sell ourselves short.  If they are too high, we set ourselves up for continual failure.

Sometimes the standards that we set are not for our own behavior but for the behavior of others.  We, in effect, tell them how they must be.  We cannot, however, control their behavior.  The result, then, is that when they don’t meet our standards we feel justified in abandoning our own standards in relationship to them.  We start to make demands of them, they resist our demands, we get scared, and then we abandon our own standards for ourselves.

This is what John did.  His standard for himself is to be considerate and calm in his relationship with Tammy.  But he also set a standard for her wherein she was to be

When she failed to meet his standards, he reacted by abandoning his own.  As a consequence, he showed up in his relationship with her, not as someone who was curious about what to expect, or as someone who diligent about maintaining his own standards, but as someone who was demanding that she be who he expected her to be and punitive towards her when she was not.

Ideally then we are able to build expectations that are very close to what will actually happen, and have standards for ourselves that we maintain whether or not others meet our expectations.  (See also boundaries, demands, tactics, and requests)

Speaking Of Faith this morning is looking at the relationship between the feeling of sadness and the disease of depression.  One of the guests points out that as a culture we have pathologized feelings, especially those that we consider to be “bad” feelings.  If we don’t like having the feeling, then we should get rid of the feeling.  We do this by “getting over it.”  Some time we do this by just waiting and sometimes we have to actively suppress the awareness of the feeling, but what we almost never do is to pay attention to the feeling.  “Don’t dwell on it,” we are told.

In contrast, what I tell myself and my clients is to use the feeling.  It is important data.  Emotions are a more refined form of sensation.  If I feel hungry, I know to eat.  If I feel sad, I know that I have experienced a loss that I will have to heal from. 

The problem is that we don’t always know what is causing the feeling.  “Is this hunger or is it just the sensation I have when my stomach is empty?”  Many of us can’t tell the difference because we have always had food available.  “Is this depression or is this sadness?”  Sometimes we can’t tell the difference.

And it becomes especially complicated because there actually is a connection between the two.  Depression is the sensation we have when we have been working very hard for a long time to not feel our emotions.  When I have many things going on in my life that are generating the feelings of hurt, fear, sadness, anger; and guilt and I have decided (though mostly not consciously) to not be conscious of the feelings; then it takes a huge amount of emotional energy to keep those feelings out of my consciousness.  The result of that emotional effort is a complex set of sensations which form the syndrome we call depression.

I want to just add that I am only addressing here the awareness aspects of depression.  There is also a set of causal factors that are related to physiology and genetics that give one a hindrance to emotional processing and a tendency for the appearance of depression.  This is why it is so important to treat depression with medication when it lingers or is recurring.

So, remember that the thing to do with feelings is to feel them.  They are information and we ignore them at our peril.  When feelings arise…and they do all the time…feel into them and listen to them and allow them to teach you what they are about and where they are coming from.