Who Started The Fight?

This is one of the big issues most couples have struggled with at some point in their relationship: who pulled the trigger on a toxic event – who was really responsible for the mess?

It usually goes something like this:

“If you hadn’t said ______________________ I wouldn’t have been so ____________________!”

“Well, if you hadn’t been so ________________ I wouldn’t have said ______________________!”

And round and round it goes. A circle of blame and justification for bad behaviors. Both partners not feeling understood around their respective grievances, because the context felt so critical to the sequence.

If you’ve ever been in one of these go-arounds, (and chances are, you have been, more often than you’d like to admit), then you know too keenly that this kind of exchange only contributes to raising blood pressure and your dog, who’s been witnessing it, getting more weirded out by the minute. (That’s another post: “Want the truth? Then watch the dog!”)

I’ve worked with couples who escalated so intensely around this kind of exchange that they fought for hours about this Who Started It All nonsense, then punished each other for days or weeks afterward!

So, what’s a more productive line of questioning to pursue around a fight? – one which might actually move the two of you toward some healthy ownership, some forgiveness, repair, resolution and some learning?

It’s a few simple questions to ask yourself:

“Where was I in that fight?”

“What were my contributions to that problem?”

“What do I regret about my own behavior in that situation?”

“What could I have done differently, even though I felt provoked?”

(My often blamed) but wise husband says: “In other words, take a look at yourself,  because that’s the only thing you can actually change!”                                                  

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Managing the Challenges of 2020 and the Uncertainty of 2021

If your experience of 2020 and early 2021 feels like the above image, you’re not alone! No matter what side of the political fence you’ve embraced it has been a year of loss, constraints, hopelessness, helplessness,  hatred,  anxieties and extreme division, often among members of the same family, or among friends. Not only have most of us faced differences which have felt toxic and relationship-breaking, but a daily onslaught of information and news about catastrophic events, happening now, or about to unfold. I think there has been a collective experience of trauma in this country, and probably in many places around the world. Covid 19 illnesses and deaths, loss of income, loss of faith in the System, violence, racism, uncertainty.

To that point I’m encouraging everyone to pause and reflect on a few things:

How have you been coping and how well has it served you?

• Over-drinking or drugging?
• Isolating?
• Reviewing the horrors frequently with peers who get it?
• Over-eating or over-indulging in comfort foods or sugar?
• Targeting your loved ones with rage-outs? 
• Overspending on Amazon?
• Denying anything unusual is happening and proceeding without any cautions or adjustments?
• Over-working and sacrificing sleep / self care rituals?
• Over-thinking and going to catastrophic conclusions?

In my psychotherapy practice I’ve seen how people’s responses to the trauma either exacerbate or alleviate some of the stress, bring people together for support and meaningful action or tear them apart. Depression and anxiety are off the charts now as people struggle with feelings and thoughts that can become runaway trains in response to such triggering events.

So, instead of going through a long list of more functional coping mechanisms I’m encouraging you all to begin by examining the strategies you’re already using and taking an honest look at how well these strategies are serving you. If they calm and energize you, at what cost to yourself or others? If they provide relief, how momentary or enduring is it? Do your coping mechanisms give you any sense of meaning, agency, or connection to others whom you respect and trust? Are you finding any joy amidst all this madness? Are you protecting your mental and physical health, or has that been one price of how you’ve tried to manage?

All meaningful change begins with Contemplation, so give that it’s due. Then, if you decide to seek out different coping tools you’ll be readier to use them intentionally, creatively and effectively.

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Life Is Not on Hold!

Here is a post I just received and got permission to reprint from Cindy Giovagnoli, a wise old soul, world traveller, photographer, artist and writer. See what you think:

Our lives are not “on hold”

Oooooh, do I have a doozy of a conversation to have with you today! 

Not everyone’s going to like this, but I think you’ll get it.

Sooooo…

There is a single phrase that keeps popping up in conversations with friends and clients, and I keep seeing it written as part of social media posts and in emails from people and companies I follow. 

And it’s a big fat ugly lie that I want to address head on.

The phrase?

That our lives are “on hold” during this pandemic.

Which, of course, they absolutely are not.

I know what you’re going to say, and yes, a lot of plans and projects and ideas are indeed on hold.

But plans and projects and ideas are not our lives.

They are part of our story, of course, but not its entirety.

Not even a little bit.

Every day the minutes and hours continue to tick away.

There is no “pause” button happening right now. No one yelled “freeze!” and the world stopped on its axis.

Ask any human who has suffered the unthinkable and they will tell you that there is no such thing.

The world marches on. The seasons change. The days pass whether we agree that that is the fair thing or not.

Our lives are never, ever “on hold” no matter how much we might beg for a time-out to catch our breaths.

But here’s the thing.

That is okay.

I’m not saying that it always feels okay, because it sure as shit doesn’t.

But it IS okay.

On a long enough timeline, everything is okay one way or another.

And here’s another thing. It’s the thing I really want you to take away from what I’m saying today.

You still have agency in your life unless you choose to relinquish it.

You have choices about how you spend each one of those minutes, hours, days- they are not “on hold.”

You always have and it’s as true now as it ever was.

Some choices have been taken off the table without our consent and we don’t like that.

Nobody does. 

Of course we don’t like that. 

But there are still plenty of choices left there for us. 

Feel whatever you feel— don’t shove your feelings away or pretend they don’t exist.

AND ALSO make conscious choices about what you do.

Those things are not mutually exclusive.

We can take ownership of our actions.

We can take ownership of our choices.

We do not have to relinquish the agency we have over our lives.

There is a lot in this world I cannot control. 

The truth is that there always has been. ALWAYS.

I choose to stay empowered.

I choose to decide how I want to spend my minutes and my hours and my days.

Sometimes those choices will look “productive” and sometimes they won’t.

Sometimes those choices will be to engage with people or tasks that “distract” me from other things I want.

But the choices are mine to make and I will strive to make ones that best serve the life I want for myself.

I wish the same empowerment and agency for you.

Stay curious out there.

Cindy

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Passive Choices

Most of us like to think that usually things happen to us because we’ve made an overt decision – we enroll in a class, then we take the class, we buy certain foods, then eat them later, we drive in a certain direction and end up at our destination. Our mindset is that when these things go awry, its misfortune or an overtly bad decision or mistake on our own part or someone else’s part. And that can be true, but how about the choices we make by not doing certain things or avoiding and denying certain things? How about the role of procrastination in shaping our outcomes?

I worked with a couple awhile ago who were in a war about these other types of choices I call “passive choices.” The husband years earlier had been diagnosed with very high blood pressure and high cholesterol. About 10 years ago he was hospitalized for a burst aortic aneurism, survived it and had a stent put in. He was advised to eat a heart healthy diet and exercise regularly to avoid further cardiovascular problems. According to his wife he initially paid some lip service to those instructions, then proceeded to eat whatever he wanted, drink alcohol liberally, and almost never do any cardio exercise. So it was no surprise to her when last year he needed another stent elsewhere and a repair of the aortic stent, a serious, painful operation requiring extensive recovery and involving lots of caregiving assistance. Needless to say the wife was rips**t! It was clear to her that this was the life he had passively chosen, he wasn’t a victim of bad luck. He couldn’t understand why she had so little empathy for his plight, why so cold? Her retort repeatedly was “You CHOSE this! Your inaction, your avoidance, your denial set the stage for this! What did you think would happen, living the way you did? You CHOSE this life!”

(In this case, the husband’s most recent health crisis sat on top of his history of 40 years of smoking, not heeding warnings from his doctors and dentist, and not stopping until most of his teeth had to be extracted, followed by a disfiguring cancer of the jaw, so the wife’s bandwidth for empathy now was almost nil. It all felt totally predictable to her while he continued to feel like a victim of fate). Predictably, they didn’t have a good outcome in therapy, as she continued to feel like a scolding mother to a childlike man who refused to look at how he was making decisions with his attitude and behaviors every single day.

So, what’s the moral of this sad story? Pay attention to not only what you do in an obvious, concrete way, but also to what you do through inaction or denial.

• Do you routinely put off paying bills until you get charged late fees? If so, you are choosing to create bad credit and financial complications. 
• Do you neglect to return calls or emails from family or friends? If so, you are choosing alienation or conflict in those relationships.
• Do you wait for a health crisis to follow your doctor’s advise? If so, you are choosing poor health.
• Do you procrastinate meeting deadlines for tasks at your job? If so, you are choosing to get a lousy review, maybe even be earmarked for the next layoff.
• Do you avoid hot topic conversations with your spouse or partner? If so, you are choosing to create a reservoir of resentment and distance between you two.

Instead:

• Focus less on your benign intentions and more on how you play them out behaviorally. Good intentions mean very little if your actions aren’t lined up with them.
• Realize that you can be a good person, making some bad passive choices.
• Pay attention to the “handwriting on the wall – early markers of negative outcomes so you can steer in a different, more desirable direction.
• Recognize that you make choices every day, both actively and passively, and that both kinds can create very powerful outcomes.

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Piano Folly – Are You Afflicted With It?

Most of us have talked about wanting to do or achieve certain things in our lifetime – learn to speak Spanish, remodel the house, write a book of poems, volunteer for a humanitarian cause, take a trip to India, etc. There’s also often a sense of what needs to happen first to make that possible – quit my job, earn six figures, retire, get married, etc. – some future point in time when the stars will align perfectly to facilitate the doing of the thing we claim is important. In the psychotherapy world we call this “destination addiction.” 

My “thing” was to be regularly playing our beautiful Mason & Hamlin grand piano with ease and competence. Early in our marriage my husband and I had been fortunate enough to buy the piano for a small sum after it made its way here, supposedly from a castle in Ireland. It was a magical event!

I used to take lessons, and MaryJoyce, my teacher, would exclaim about my large hands and how I was perfectly equipped to play Franz Liszt. It seemed that the piano and I were meant to be a team. Sadly, a few years later, MaryJoyce died and I was so pregnant that it was uncomfortable to sit at the bench, especially now with no accountability to anyone who could witness my musical strivings and ability. So, I stopped playing, and there the sad, majestic piano still sits, unused, reminding me daily of my unfulfilled “commitment.” I look at it regularly with longing from my desk in the “piano room” (which also functions as my home office). I’m reminded daily of my “piano folly.”

I now realize that playing the piano competently has been a sweet story I’ve told myself – a lovely idea, without any renewed infrastructure or resources to back it up, especially since I’ve been taking guitar lessons this last year, honoring a precious gift my family gave me long ago. With my full time private practice and the other realities of my life there aren’t enough hours in the day to dedicate myself right now to both instruments. So, realizing that we make choices in life about where to put our energy and time, I’ve accepted that for now, playing Franz Liszt with facility is part of my “piano folly.” Unlike my commitment to play the guitar, I’ve not hired a teacher, dug up the sheet music, or scheduled in regular tunings and the time to play the piano. A passion without a plan to make room for it, is just a dream.

So, if you’ve also dreamed about doing or achieving certain things in your life, make sure you avoid self delusion, (“piano folly”), by creating some accountability, first to someone else who will take you seriously and hold you to your dream when you get discouraged, but most importantly, accountability to yourself – an action plan, tools, markers of stagnation or change, so you make your dream come alive.

In my case, it’s not the end of the road for the piano and me. When I’m ready to fully commit with not just longing, but with action, Mason & Hamlin and I will make lovely music again together.

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