Ordinary Blessings

for Annie,

on the 8th Anniversary of our first meeting

We arrive at the sink

                at the same moment

you

        from the workshop

I

       from the garden

scrubbing the grit from our fingertips

                smiling in each other’s eyes.                          

We agree on sudden changes

                in our plan for the yard

arriving at the same conclusion

                at the same moment

                         with almost no discussion.

We agree on changes

      in our plan for the yard

arriving at the same conclusion

after fierce disagreement

                and finally                          

                              laughter.

We sip coffee and tea on the deck

                feeling the cool morning breeze

                                together.

We sip wine on the deck

                feeling the cool evening breeze

                                together.

We laugh at the machinations of the many

                quail families

                                chittering

                as their babies peck at the dirt

                beneath mom and dad’s guardian eyes.

We mourn over a crow’s destruction

                of a wren nest in the pergola.

We begin and end the day with kisses

still lavish them

              alone in elevators

                         or on the street

                             or in a restaurant.

We get out the door together

                 on time

                      or early

                                every

                                      single

                                            time.

We savor food, books, our bodies,

                    yes our bodies

              their capacity for pleasure

              their capacity as instruments of spiritual fire-making

              their capacity to affirm

                              with a mere touch

                                that we are something

                                          real in a world that often isn’t.     

We savor imaginings, memories, wonderings

       …would we have met if this had happened, or that…

and celebrate

                that they didn’t

                                 and we did.

We rub each other’s shoulders and feet

                   hold hands everywhere

admire and cherish

                   each other’s spirit

                                 and intelligence,

engage in outrageous silliness

                     which if revealed to the public

would tank our reputations as serious people.

We actually listen to hear

           and speak to be heard

                   most of the time.

We manage to hold each other

                                tenderly

                                   knowingly

                     at some point

                            every single day

in spite of, and sometimes because of,

                     long-lived childhood despairs.                      

In the movie theater’s darkness

      we clutch each other’s hands

                               and weep

over lost loved ones

                               war

                          inexplicable acts of courage

                                  unrecognized genius

               the all too human

                               inhumanity of man.

When we get a splinter

bang an elbow

           stub a toe

                     bump a head

when we feel the ache of muscles,

            the wearing of joints

               --pain in the hands

                               feet

                              lumbar

                         elbows

                           shoulders

                   ankles,

when we contemplate together

           the long look back

                 and the ever-shortening

                      forward,

when we witness demon diseases

         drawing down the shades

                                in the cells

                              of family and friends

…then we know

               the usual search for miracles

                                 is misguided

because each moment

  no matter how

                         ordinary

                 mundane

                             routine

                       predictable            

               freighted with feelings

                     falling far short of joy

is miraculous

          is life

                 living itself

           standing strong and bending before its own wind

                 illuminated and blinded by its own light

                       instructed and frightened by its own darkness

                            mesmerized by its own music                           

                                --the sound of tears joining rain

                                 laughter

                                        thunder--

every nuanced moment

               --even the uncounted

                      unnoticed

                              certainly uncelebrated ones

               --and every ordinary breath

                                 a blessing.

C Bob Kamm 2015

July 16.

Why We Blame

One of the most difficult things for many of us to do is break the habit of blaming others for our situation and our feelings.  In my role as a leadership development consultant working with organizations large and small, I’ve found this to be rife in spite of much talk about personal initiative and responsibility.  However, the one place where I see it most graphically on display is in my capacity as an Imago Educator working with distressed couples.  Almost any upset will send us reaching for our hip-mounted six-shooter to blast off a couple of blames, shames, sarcastic remarks, criticisms, put-downs, mocks or outright attacks.  Of course, not everyone voices these, but they are no less limiting when they happen within the confines of the mind, manifesting as “the cold-shoulder” or stonewalling or an eruption in the chat room between our ears.

Clearly, a cascade of this kind of negativity damages and limits intimacy.  So why do we do it?  It seems almost self-evident this is a behavior developed in childhood for the simple reason that in childhood, we have no or little power (depending on our age) and other people have all the power, especially our caregivers.  We need them to fulfill our needs.  We are other-directed from birth.  The source of food is mother’s breast.  Warmth and protection are in her or Dad’s arms as well as the ability to dry us when we are wet, cool us when we are hot, soothe us with holding, rocking, cooing and singing when we feel bad and stimulate us to learn and feel good. We are incapable of providing and creating safety for ourselves in all its many forms. 

In a well-nurtured childhood, this other-orientation would give way increasingly to the rise of our competencies and sense of selfhood.  In fact, childhood could be seen as a gradual journey from powerlessness to, ideally, full empowerment.  In a perfect world, we would ultimately be able to fully care for ourselves physically, emotionally and mentally and enjoy others as friends, companions, team-mates, partners, fellow citizens.  We would have a fluidly clear sense of what lives within us—those things for which we are responsible and those things we do, in fact, have power to influence or change. 

But the evidence is that most of us do not get to adulthood through well-nurtured childhoods.  We are highly vulnerable during the first many years of life.  But the period beginning with conception, including all of gestation, followed by the birth experience and the first three years out of the womb constitutes a time of exceptional vulnerability—a fact that most of us adults don’t seem to be able to hold in consciousness for very long.  This is likely so because our physical and emotional suffering from that time is utterly out of reach of the adult day-to-day mind.  In our culture, day-to-day tends to be dominated by left-brain functions.  Early painful imprints were laid down in the brain stem, the limbic system and the right brain.  As the saying goes, “You can’t get there from here” or, put another way, why would we believe we can think our way (left brain) out of what we were wounded into (brain stem, limbic, right brain)?  In The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux highlights the fact that the neuro-pathways from the limbic brain up to the cortex are far more plentiful than those returning.  This makes sense because our brains evolved upward, not downward.  This is surely one of the main reasons Harvard neuro-anatomist and author of My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte Taylor, has stated “we are feeling creatures that think” not thinking creatures that feel.

The likelihood is that the deficits we experience in the womb, at birth and those first three years are so strongly taken into the early brain that they set up a neural architecture that is only added to when other insults to the system come in the following years.  As I have said often, this is not about blaming parents who, by and large, did the best they could with what they had.  But it is about discovering cause in order to understand better how to address the issue.

It has struck me recently that when we feel so angry with a partner that we whiz around a kind of high-speed merry-go-round over and over again about what they did versus what they should have done, we are re-enacting a moment in childhood that probably happened to most of us several times and which we have buried because it occurred so early and was so excruciating.  That was the first moment when the deficit of nurturing crossed a threshold into the unbearable.  Something in us cried out to our parents.  We didn’t have the words but the basic meaning was: “You must change!   I cannot bear this. You’ve got to start loving me the way I need to be loved!"  Again, we didn’t have the words or the ideas.  We had the experience, though, on an organic level.  The cries reverberated within our cells and tender souls. 

In The Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff teaches us that we are born with naturally unfolding expectations.  These are, again, on the organic and implicit level.  We expect to be protected in the womb.  We expect to have a tolerable birth.  We expect to be soothed and calmed after birth.  We expect to be suckled at our mother’s breast.  We expect our parents to be fully responsive to our need for skin contact, soothing sounds, appropriate stimulation.  When these expectations are met, we have what Liedloff calls “a sense of inner rightness.”  Biologically, she is probably describing homeostasis.  Need arises, is met and subsides.  We are calm.  All is good.  This process unfolds throughout childhood with the needs changing as we develop.  What does not change is the innate expectation that our caregivers will largely be there for us, will “regulate” us until we can learn to regulate ourselves, which is to say, care for ourselves.  Considering this, it is a devastating shock to our fragile and open beings to experience parents/caregivers who, for whatever reason, are not giving and cannot give enough of what we naturally need to protect and nurture a sense of inner rightness.  In adult terms, inner rightness is to feel like ourselves, comfortable in our skin, psychologically solid, capable and confident enough to take on life.

This is a terrible loss to suffer—the loss of trust and safety amplified by our dependence.  It is cause for grieving.  The first station of grieving is shock and denial.  Here, perhaps, we see the first experience of shock—in utero or in infancy.  This is an overwhelming moment.  It makes sense that since our brains are so far from fully developed, we are not able to fully process it in consciousness, which is a delicate neural web itself at this point.  Denial follows (a neural-electro-chemical sequestering) as a survival mechanism to help us get through to physical adulthood and, hopefully, material independence. 

However, to be a physical adult does not necessarily mean we have arrived at emotional adulthood.  How could we, carrying such a legacy of unresolved hurt?  In adulthood, this hurt that stubbornly resists identifying its true origins naturally transfers to our partner more than all other people in our lives, though we may project it onto bosses, friends, politicians and oligarchs. But with our partners, we are more exposed emotionally than we have been since childhood.  In other words, adult love relationships have powerful resonance with childhood experience.  This is not only an experiential truth.  It is a neurological truth.  After the initial romantic phase of falling in love, we awaken to the reality that our partners are not us, are not here for the singular purpose of satisfying our every need, including those of which we were bereft long ago.  In short, as much as we like to describe them as “a dream come true” in the romantic phase, in reality, our partners are not our dream persons.  (Is that a burden any of us would want to carry for a lifetime anyway?  Wouldn’t we rather be our partners “real person”?)  No matter how much we love them and they us, there are ways in which we are different enough that it triggers that old hurt of feeling totally alone yet dependent on someone who “really doesn’t get me.”  We are indeed back in childhood shock/denial, wishing they were different (“if-only-ing”) and anger—the first three stations of grieving.  Why are we so deeply stuck here?  Because the very essence of the childhood predicament is that we are not safe and not yet capable of consciously experiencing and processing the full depth of the hurt of what it is to be at the mercy of those who cannot consistently enough care for us as we need, in spite of their best efforts. 

The thing we most need to do in adulthood is the thing that was most forbidden in childhood—to weep our way past our shock, wishing and anger down into the full sense of fear and abandonment…and even to go beyond weeping to deeply feel the physical pain that is often the core hurt in the pre-verbal years.  It makes sense, then, that barring a full immersion in such a process, in adulthood we would be caught in a kind of repetition compulsion, if you will—focused on our partners and desperately wanting them to change now, blaming and criticizing them when they won’t, can’t or don’t  

Even with the best therapist, breaking this cycle is likely to be difficult.  However, it is within reach for people who have the emotional bravery and the good fortune to have a therapeutic process that helps us feel safe enough to go there.  We are not dependent little children any longer.  Our brains have fully booted up.  We have psychological and social resources available to us that were not there in childhood.         

As scary or painful as it may be, this requires skills different from what the day-to-day strategic accomplishing mind offers. Cognition may help some, particularly in increasing our awareness of the impulse to blame/go negative.  It can educate us and nudge us toward taking responsibility for what resides within us.  In doing so, surely new neural pathways are being developed.  But when we talk about neural plasticity, there are a few critical questions we would be wise to continuously ask: 

1.      In what part of the brain are these new neural pathways being developed? 

2.      Does development of new pathways in, say, either Pre-frontal Cortex correlate to changes in the deeper, older systems where early childhood pain is likely held?   

3.      Finally, what do these changes mean in terms of sustainable body-mind health?                                      

It seems a “no-brainer” (pun intended!) that whenever we learn something, we develop new pathways.  The questions above go to what kind of learning is taking place and whether or not it actually contributes to more long-term openness, consciousness and health or is actually a new stealth form of self-suppression.  After all, we have ample examples in the history of humanity, not just the history of psychotherapy, of individuals learning what is best for them yet going ahead and doing the exact opposite.  This is likely because it is literally a top-down approach, meaning that we are trying to think our way beyond something that does not yield to the most brilliant left brain because the locus of the generating dynamic resides in the emotional and sensory systems, literally embedded in a different part of the brain.  The skills necessary for resolving them have to do with emotional and sensory learning, learning to let go and surrender to what lives within our bodies and hearts in its original childhood context, not figuring it out or controlling it.  This would be a bottom up process fully in alignment with the way the brain evolved. 

If we are to help people break the behavioral grip of reactive blaming, isn’t it clear we will have to make ample space amidst the words and ideas for emotional, non-verbal and even somatic experience?  Wouldn’t this be true of both individuals and couples?  And doesn’t it make sense to be looking for how old neural pathways are changed and new ones generated in the brain stem, limbic system and right brain, too…in other words, in the entire brain?

C 2014 Bob Kamm

Winning and Losing in Love Relatiionships, Part II

What an irony that we spend so much of our lives longing for our “soul-mate” and then, when we find him/her, it doesn’t take long before we begin finding fault and treating our partner as if he/she is our competitor rather than our teammate.  This is inevitable.  Once the romantic period is over, our deeper psychological dynamics from our early years reassert themselves.  Unfortunately, there is no short-cut for eliminating the powerful impulse to make our partner wrong and ourselves right.  Its roots are tenacious.  Being “wrong” as a child has such hurtful consequences, we quickly learn to be “right” or at least avoid being “wrong” in our parents’ eyes.  The speed with which we as adults throw up defensive arrays of verbal and behavioral countermeasures, speak to the fact that we each grow up experiencing thousands of interactions with our caregivers that follow certain patterns because our caregivers have their own deeply grooved ways of being.   Look, I loved my parents and they loved me…and, like all of us parents, they were far from perfect.  My mother had a subtle way of shaming me when I made a mistake, did something outside her wishes or exhibited feelings that caused her discomfort.   My father resorted to teasing and sarcasm.  Both of them occasionally engaged in frightening outbursts of anger along with swatting the back of my head or my butt.  No doubt, many of us go through memorable moments of big, visible trauma.  But the idea that we all suffer them, and that they are the principle cause of distortion in our development is probably over-emphasized.  However, what is true for nearly all of us is that we are immersed in family cultures as children that have their own strong color schemes, as mine did.  That scheme is quickly absorbed into our cells.  We are “stained” into adaptive responses by the sheer volume and force of interactions and our powerful need to be safe and belong.   We accommodate because we actually are dependent as children.  The simple ability to feel and express those feelings clearly is often a casualty of this process.  Consequently, as adults, anytime we sense “wrongness” coming our way, we mobilize against it and the hurt it unconsciously summons from those early years.  You could say our defenses are psychological white blood cells trying to kill an infection.  The density and vigor of that counter-attack is one measure of the force of early messages. 

 If as adults we could just release the “fight to be right” by thinking our way out of it (using solely a cognitive approach) the world would already be a much calmer and more harmonious place.  Taking on a new thought is relatively easy.  Changing our ways of reacting emotionally and behaviorally is a much tougher undertaking.  For the most part, we humans are not run by cognitive, logical and linear processes.  Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize documenting this in a field as seemingly logical as economics.  The evidence is overwhelming that no quick and easy fix exists.  Sports metaphors such as I cited in Part I, can be seductive for their simplicity. In basketball, there is a play called a “kick-out”.  The ball-handler drives toward the basket hard as if he’s going to shoot.  The defense “collapses” in around him, leaving other shooters free on the perimeter.  The ball handler now reins in his desire to go for the two-point dunk and instead passes the ball out to one of his teammates who is free of defenders and has a clear shot at a three-pointer.  Now imagine yourself driving hard toward the idea that you have to be right in a given moment.  And imagine that just as you are ready to hammer home your point and make your partner wrong, ripping at the flesh of your relationship, instead, you kick-out…releasing the need to be right and refusing to engage in that struggle.   When you push less to be right, your partner has to push less, too, and perhaps, with a little luck, you both let the issue go, realizing that the energy beneath it is from the past and the consequences in the present are relatively minor and quite workable. 

    It’s good to remember the “kick-out” option.  It’s one of those touchstone ideas that might help you let go once in a while.  But most of us know that once we’re triggered into “fighting to be right” it is very difficult to just switch off that energy, which derives from our survival endowments channeled through the family landscape.  For real healing, there’s no avoiding the depths.  Long before modern psychology, philosophers, religious figures, poets and story-tellers have had implicit knowledge of this.  Fairy-tales and contemporary literature attest to the real “threat” hiding in the shadows, in the cellar or attic, in an old house, at the bottom of a lake, the top of the beanstalk,  in a cave, under a bridge, or close to natural forces such as volcanoes, dark forests, the untamed sea.  Unconsciously, the entire human race knows where the nemesis hides.  However, only a small percentage of us appear to be explicitly conscious of it. The birth of deception is self-deception.  For those of us trying to transcend early destiny, we know a great initiation is unavoidable.  We know the “monsters”  born in those tender years when our brains were not fully developed must be defrocked of fiction till the bare truth is before us. 

We can do this.  Now we are adults.  Our brains are fully developed (finally, by around age 25!) so we  have the resources to experience fully what was held in a kind of cryogenic freeze within us because it was overwhelming for our tender, underdeveloped brains and beings.  As Tara Brach has pointed out in a recent article in Psychotherapy Networker, C.G. Jung referred to this unprocessed pain of childhood as unlived life.  He urged us to be courageous and live out that unlived life so that we can integrate it and move on.  He is exhorting us to a hero’s journey.  The irony and the great challenge are that we are wired to avoid the lairs of predators and the pain and fear they cause.  However, and this is key, if the pain and fear are already in us, avoiding them means accepting that we are divided selves. 

How can we heal a sundered inner world?  By surrendering to what the Persian poet Rumi referred to as “the pearls of God,” meaning tears.  Our unshed tears from those early events are the waters of unlived life, held like crystals in caves high and low along the fault lines of the soul.  Their resolving force awaits us, awaits the moment when we are ready to transform them from solid back into liquid for the ride up and out of their subterranean holds into daylight. Without this liberating adventure, the division within us as individuals will become a division between us and our partners.

Because this work is indispensable to releasing psychological energy and literally rewiring the basis of  personality, the Imago Dialogues embody, for couples, the essential wisdoms and practices.  Developed by Harville Hendrix and Helen La Kelly Hunt, the Dialogues are arenas that invite the emergence of the heroes hiding within us.  They are crucibles for grieving and empathy.  When, in dialogue, we get beneath an issue in the present and visit the subterranean depths of our own divided inner world as it was wrought in our early years, we ride unshed tears into the sun.  Suddenly, our partner is no longer a competitor with whom we must struggle to make our own needs dominant.  He or she is a witness to our life.  So touching is this moment, and neurologically dynamic, that it leads directly to a releasing of clenched fists on the weaponry of winning without any admonition to do so--we by living out the unlived grief, our partner through the experience of profound empathy.  Grieving and empathy are the two great resolving alchemies of human life.  By taking turns as griever and witness over months and years, we emerge into daylight over and over again until the shadows recede and we own the day, together.

The Cost of Criticism

 Criticism, blame and shame--the Big 3 Negatives--can be deadly to a relationship. Why do we engage in them? The next time you have the impulse to visit either of these on your partner, try to catch yourself and check in with what's really going on under the surface. My bet is you'll discover a need and a set of feelings that you are not fully owning, and certainly not expressing in a direct and clean manner. Why is it so difficult for most of us to just ask for what we need...and why are we so quick to shift responsibility for our well-being to our partner...which really puts us in the position of being a victim, in spite of all our huffing and puffing to the contrary?
We might say that we criticize, shame and blame others precisely to avoid being on the receiving end of same, to avoid feeling wrong or bad. Feeling wrong or bad tends to light up the central brain and brainstem...we feel threatened and with very little participation from our executive centers in the neocortex,
react because those parts of the brain are designed specifically for that kind of quick reaction, to save our lives. But our lives are not actually in danger in the overwhelming majority of situations where we perpetrate the Big 3. So what's up?
Well, think about the consequences to us when we are little children and are made to feel wrong or bad. As children, we actually have little or no power. The power legitimately resides outside us in the hands of our caregivers. To anger them often yields consequences that are very difficult for little people to absorb. To be wrong or bad might mean we get spanked or yelled at and put down, ignored or isolated, or not fed when we're hungry, not changed when we're wet, not moved to a cooler or warmer environment when we're uncomfortable. It might mean privileges or prized toys or tools are taken away. The people to whom we look for safety, nurturance and love suddenly remove all of that. Most of the time, they don't do this because they're bad people...but because they're just not able to rise to the best possible version of themselves for some reason--a terrible economy pressing in on them, a natural catastrophe, war or the surfacing of some demon from their own emotional heritage.
In this situation, our system is likely to be overwhelmed and the feeling of emotional violation, loss, even a kind of temporary emotional death--these are all palpable and real to a child. The younger and smaller we are at the moment, the more dependent, the more dependent, the more likely the experience is authentically traumatic. No child can live with a continuing awareness that his or her caregivers are capable of this kind of reversal from the loving beings we need them to be. It's a genuinely shocking turn of events. In order to adapt to such an environment, those feelings of shock and loss get stuffed into the back pocket of the brain--the unconscious mind. They are held in the limbic system of the brain, the brainstem and in all likelihood, on a cellular level throughout the body. But they are not dead...far from it. Years later, as adults, no matter how old and experienced we are, when we find ourselves in a relationship whose intimacy resonates with those early intimate and dependent relationships, those feelings get stirred up. They hijack our consciousness and our behavior in the moment. This is why a six foot five inch 250 lb man can react as if he has no power when his five foot, 100 lb partner says something that touches the early emotional heritage. Next thing you know, he is using all his adult language and conceptual skills to respond by lambasting her with a ferocious verbal attack...or he is withdrawing and sulking like a three year-old. In either case, he is not his grownup self. He is incapable of seeing that whatever his partner has said is arising either from an innocent and real need for more closeness in the present, or may also be underpinned by her own old hurt. In short, we criticize, blame and shame because we are unconsciously triggered into an early scenario in which the power really did reside outside of us. We lose our grip on the present moment. This is a painful and divisive dynamic. It's cost is enormous--broken hearts, abandoned children, ugly battles over money, property and custody.
How do we get out of this? With the proper tools and coaching and commitment to be self-aware and use them, we gradually learn to speak directly from the feeling that is arising in a non-aggressive manner. "That hurts me." "I feel sad when you talk to me that way." "I'm scared when you do that." "I'm feeling engulfed, overwhelmed, like a little kid." Such openness and honesty is not easily achieved in a culture that worships supermen and superwomen...but it can be achieved. When it is, it brings grieving for both members of a couple, and in that grieving there is healing; and from that grieving is born a newer, deeper empathetic connection...and, sometimes, poetry.
C 2011 Bob Kamm

Original Welcome

Welcome to my blog.
So...love. What is it? Is it a liquid? A solid? A gas? Is it a state of being or a transcendence beyond anything science or religion can touch? Plato called it "divine madness". So is it a form of madness? An addiction or compulsion? Or a divinely outrageous creation of two souls gyrating and dancing within and beyond their bodies? My suspicion is "all of the above" and I don't see that as an easy way out of the conundrum. Rather it is an embracing of it.
Love is both knowable and unknowable. Some of it can be described behaviorally and scientifically, but to do so doesn't touch the actual personal and interpersonal experience of falling in love and being in love. So I'm fine with neuropsychiatrists talking about
the limbic system, oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin and hormones--the electrochemical
mighty mischief. I find the micro-architecture and processes of the brain enormously interesting, even poetic. But in the last analysis--if there ever is one--the language required to describe the inner experience of love is poetry, not science. Thus, my book, Love Over 60...love poetry that, I hope, speaks to lovers of all ages, and to scientists, philosophers and therapists. Finding myself at 60 single once again, I didn't think I could find love. I mourned for weeks about this. Then, I guess I got past that critical tear--the tear beyond which enough grieving has occurred to change our inner dynamics. I awoke one morning quite certain that I was indeed going to find love again. I called my son, Ben, and said, "I'm going to wake up a year from now next to the woman I love. I just haven't met her yet." Six weeks later, I met Andrea and, in the parlance of today, it was an OMG to the tenth power. Can science explain all this magic? I doubt it. But poetry can.
We have had an extraordinary three plus years together now and are just really getting started. Andrea is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and I am a leadership consultant with two certifications in Imago Relationship Therapy, the model Andrea uses. We both have been working in the realm of the heart for many years, although I certainly would not call myself an expert...and am not sure there is a person truly worthy of that term.

I have taken an avid interest in the brain, studying the works of Damasio, Le Doux, Schore, Siegel and others. So all through our romantic period, I had a joyful sense of irony knowing what parts of my brain were sucking up all the oxygen! Now that we are really creating a life together, I still find it fascinating, even as I write a poem, to feel, actually feel, what part of my brain is engaged. One of Damasio's books is titled, "The Feeling of What Happens". What a great phrase. The feeling of what happens throughout my body in this love is at least to some degree, what I hope I have mapped in Love Over 60.
So my intention in this blog is to explore the geography and geology of love, the science and the poetry of it, and above all, the personal experience of it from the sunlight to the shadows and back again. I invite you to join me in this joyful exploration.
C 2010 Bob Kamm

Posted by Love Over 60 Bob's Blog at 11/24/2010 7:25 PM | View Comments (37) | Add Comment

The Listening

As I write this, I'm sitting in a condo in Costa Rica, right on the Pacific. It's about 1:30 in the afternoon which means sane Norte Americanos are safely hunkered down in the a/c...unless you're a surfer, of course.

Whether you're in the States, Central America, Europe, wherever, the issues and challenges of keeping an intimate relationship worthy of that word are universally interesting to people. We're pretty friendly travelers. We like meeting new people and when we happen to share with someone that we have The San Luis Relationship Institute and do a lot of work with couples, they get curious and often end up sharing about their own relationships and asking for advice. Some are coy about how they approach the topic. Some will get straight to the point. Last night, a young man in his mid-thirties we happened to be doing a little business with down here didn't waste a moment. He was passionately interested in having a deeper connection with his wife...but the way that interest emerged was in his expressing some frustration over his wife not being as interested in doing many of the things they did together when they were courting, things in the outdoors he particularly liked. He asked what he might do to reignite her interest.

I took him out on the balcony to watch the sunset as I gathered my thoughts, looking for something in my Imago toolbox that might work for him (I'm a certified Imago Educator and Workshop Presenter). He is a very bright, hard working young fellow and was quite earnest in his question. We talk a lot in our practice about fully appreciating our partner as a separate individual with a unique point of view that will not always align with our own. When we're able to cross that open space between us--what we call the relational field--and see the world through their eyes instead of trying to get them to see things our way, we experience a shift of energy, often for the better, and often more empathy centered. So I asked my young acquaintance this question: "Do you think there are things your wife wishes you were still interested in doing with her...that you used to do more of when you were courting?"
He laughed, then dropped his head, then poked me in the chest in a friendly manner. "Wow, that's a really good point. So maybe we're both missing something."
"Chances are pretty good it's a mutual thing," I said. Now, we were in each other's company to do some business. This was not a counseling session and he was not my client. So I thought I'd just give him one suggestion in the form of a set of questions. "Do you really listen to her? Are you really attuned to her? Can you listen to her without judgment and without rushing ahead to a solution?"

He shook his head and readily admitted he wasn't doing his best work in that area...and that he did tend to rush ahead to find solutions instead of just letting her express herself.

"If you want your wife to do more of those things with you that you love, make sure, first of all, that you really show up for her, that you hear her and respond to her. If you do that, you'll likely find she'll be a lot more interested in rekindling some of those activities that used to give you so much pleasure."

As Harville Hendrix, our mentor, says, you could call this "the listening cure". We all want to be heard. Early in our relationships, we listen from a very deep place to everything our lover tells us. This ability resides in almost all of us, long after the romantic phase of our relationship has ended. The thing is to rejuvenate it and embrace it as a sacred practice, moment by moment, day by day. Practice...that says exactly what is called for. Practice listening empathetically with the same commitment you might apply to mastering your profession or your favorite past-time (golf is the obvious example that comes to mind).

This fellow was a young man, but we hear the same pain in folks who've been married for decades and over all have pretty good relationships. No matter your age, may you ask with love for the things you desire. May you listen with love to the things your partner desires...and may you both say, "Yes!" as much as possible.

C 2010 Bob Kamm

Posted by Love Over 60 Bob's Blog at 11/24/2010 7:11 PM | Add Comment