Owning Your Own Power

I see people give away too much of their own personal power. While I'm not interested in power over other people, I see it as highly desirable to exercise your own power over yourself and your own life choices.

Mastery of our own power seems difficult for most people, but especially challenging for women. As women, we are socialized with the feminine archetype of the all-sacrificing, demure, other-centered mother who puts herself last. Most young women have trouble developing their own voice within relationships, advocating for what they need and want in an assertive way.

It always shocks me to be treating a bright, educated, talented young woman who allows herself to be verbally abused or otherwise mistreated in a love relationship. Many other young women are in relationships where they are so grateful to be loved and accepted that they pack away and sublimate their own desires, goals, and interests. It's as if young women believe we have to make a bargain, and give away part of ourselves to be in intimate relationships. You shouldn't have to do that, but first you need someone to remind you that you need to be yourself in close relationships, or it's not the right relationship for you.

How do you empower yourself?

1. You ask yourself what would you REALLY be doing or wanting if you were not afraid. Don't operate out of fear.

2. You keep working on your own personal goals, even when you are in a relationship. This might include career goals, more education, volunteer service, making and maintaining friendships, financial health, physical fitness, learning new things, developing your interests and passions, cultivating your spirituality, traveling, or learning a new skill. Remember, whatever happens in your relationship, you are with you, either way! Keep making you interesting, and keep growing.

3. Give up blame.

4. Take responsibility for yourself, your attitude, your mistakes, and your part in things.

5. Get some support. Most people feel more courageous when they are encouraged. Build your own supportive community. Find a therapist who can help you identify how to build yours. Consider deepening your existing support system by joining a support group, a meetup group, a women's or men's group, a book club, or a religious or spiritual group.

6. Give up playing 'victim'. Don't use victim language. Don't hope for a rescue, make some plans and set some goals. Act like you believe in yourself.

7. Learn to negotiate, and do it at work as well as in your close relationships. You may not be able to get what you want, but how do you know unless you try? Many partners and supervisors respect you more if you advocate respectfully on your own behalf.

8. Say hello to 'NO'. Boundaries have to be set and maintained with other people. Having limits gets you respected. Your yes means nothing if you aren't free to say no. Don't be a doormat. They get walked on.

9. Show some confidence. This isn't the same thing as arrogance. It isn't boastful or prideful. Humble confidence means you respect yourself.

10. Focus less on what other people think of you. People pleasing is overrated and exhausting.

11. Appreciate your unique qualities.

12. Work on accepting yourself, and speaking kindly to yourself on the inside. The power of our internal dialogue is huge. Become aware of what your inner voice is saying to you all day, and upgrade that criticism to encouraging, supportive self-talk.

13. Speak up. Say what you think, want, and feel. If you don't, you are going to be underrepresented in the relationship, and over time you may grow to resent the other person.

14. Don't sign up for any long-term relationship with a person who devalues you, demeans you, doesn't care what you want, or doesn't feel you are just as important as they are.

Recently, when I was participating in a large women's collective discussion, I noticed the dramatic difference between those we were fearful, and those who, in the words of writer and vulnerability researcher Brene Brown, were "daring greatly". Only you can decide to be you, undiluted by life's events and disappointments, and striving for a bigger life. Only you can play you at full strength. Don't settle for anything less.

Making Repairs

I really liked Ben Affleck's acceptance speech at the Academy Awards ceremony this February. In accepting the Oscar for best picture, he acknowledged and thanked his wife, actress Jennifer Garner. He told her that while their relationship has taken a lot of hard work, there is no one he'd rather work with. Truly great, committed relationships do take continued awareness about yourself, the other person, how you treat each other, and how you can repair things if they go off track.

Great relationships are a little like great houses. You can't buy a beautiful house with a terrific yard, move in, and not repair or fix anything for 5, 10, 20 or more years and expect to have anything of value. Both houses and relationships take regular attention, care, and repairs when things aren't working.

All couples are going to disagree at times. What matters most is being able to repair the problem. It helps to stay solution-focused. Avoid blame. Describe what you observed, as neutrally as possible, and explain what would work better for you next time. Apologize for any ways in which your behavior, thoughtlessness, or reaction made the situation worse. Ask what you could do differently when a similar situation arises again. (It probably will; most couples have patterns). This should help your partner be less defensive with you, too.

Both people in a relationship need to share responsibility for making repairs. I don't like to see the responsibility always resting with one partner, while the other one stubbornly refuses to ever take initiative for a repair. That's not fair, and it will eventually burn out your partner and breed resentment.

I also consider it a danger sign when couples don't speak to each other for days when they have had a fight. This 'deep freeze' is often very painful for one or both partners, and is actually a very wounding and passive-aggressive behavior. It's perfectly okay to cool down when angry, decide you will meet up and talk it through a bit later, but a day or more of not speaking is a really bad idea.

Try to avoid black and white or extreme thinking when there is conflict between you and the other person. While it is sometimes necessary to cut-off or end a relationship that is toxic or dangerous to you, most healthy relationships do have conflicts from time to time. It's not generally helpful to threaten to leave or end the relationship every time you hit a speed bump. The conflicts, if worked through in a respectful way, can actually deepen your connection and understanding of each other.

Choosing a wonderful house to live in, or a terrific partner to share your life with, is a great start. The happily ever after part often depends on different skills, which definitely include attention, care, maintenance, and regular repairs as needed. Think of it as protecting your investment.

Children of Divorce

Children whose parents divorced are affected by that loss, and for a longer time than people often think. This was among the findings of a pioneer research psychologist, Judith Wallerstein, Ph.D., who passed away in June 2012 after making significant contributions to the research of mental health concerns for families and children after divorce.

Wallerstein wrote 60-70 journal articles and 5 popular books on the topic of helping families and children after divorce, several with her co-author Susan Blakelee, including The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce (2000), What About The Kids? (2003), and Second Chances:  Men, Women, and Children a Decade after Divorce (1989).

Wallerstein was the lead researcher on a 25-year longitudinal study on the impact of divorce on children. She followed 131 children from 60 families in Marin County, California beginning in 1971. She met and assessed the children again every 5 years for 25 years. Wallerstein has been criticized for not having a control group of children whose parents didn't divorce, as well as for not having a larger sample size.

Despite these critiques, she really did contribute to the knowledge base of mental health professionals and influenced changes in family law and custody in order to try to better meet the needs of children. She taught for over 30 years at UC Berkeley in the Social Welfare program. She lost her own father at age 8 from his early death, perhaps stirring her interest in the profound impact of parent-child bonds and attachment.

Wallerstein was a pioneer in the early 1970s, as the divorce rate in the US was climbing, to begin to shift the focus to how this change was impacting the children involved, and what parents can do to minimize that impact, rather than increase the damage. Here are some important points from her life's work that Wallerstein leaves as a legacy:

1.      Parents divorcing is a significant and generally long-lasting loss for children.

2.      Grief impacts children differently, depending on their age and emotional maturity at the time of the divorce. The loss issues experienced by children can reappear at later watershed points in a child's development, triggering more feelings long after the divorce.

3.      One of the great risks to children is the alienation or abandonment by the father, emotionally, time-wise, or financially becoming disengaged.

4.      Both parents need to work through their own issues of loss, anger, resentment, etc. about the break-up of the marriage to avoid poisoning the children with the adults' feelings. I always recommend that divorcing parents work out their own feelings in personal therapy, or a divorce recovery program for this reason. Your children, no matter what age they are, cannot be your listeners to bad stuff about their other parent. It's not fair to put them in that position.

5.      Parents dating again, remarrying, and blending together families is challenging, and needs to be handled with a great deal of sensitivity and thought. Step-parents shouldn't be asked to replace parents where the parents both exist, they are simply another adult who should love the child, and leave the discipline to the biological parents. It takes a really mature grown-up person to love someone else's child. (Screen carefully!)

6.      Children of divorce can be vulnerable to depression or worry. They can feel especially concerned that they not experience a divorce in their own life as an adult. Parents should be watchful and get professional counseling support for the child if it is needed, to work through the child's grief.

7.      Each child has their own grief process about their parents’ divorce, independent from what the other children are feeling.

8.      The transitions back and forth between the parents' households often stir up feelings for children and teens. Many teens resent the impact on their own life with packing up and changing houses.

9.      Custody arrangements need to be revisited from time to time to make sure they are still working for the child or children involved.

10.  Children often later resent a parent who ruined their relationship with the other parent. While a child may initially join with a parent by fusing with what the parent is feeling about their former partner, this usually backfires down the road.

I had the pleasure of hearing Wallerstein present her findings at a conference for mental health professionals 20 years ago at UCLA. She was bright, caring, and deeply devoted to helping families through the divorce process and on to healing.

Judith Wallerstein was an important pioneer researcher about the impact of divorce on children and families, and got mental health professionals and parents thinking about the longer-term picture. While Wallerstein sometimes got criticized for her research methods or for her comments about questioning the necessity for the increasing divorce rate, ultimately she had the best interest of children at heart. Children are often the most impacted in a divorcing family, and their developmental and emotional needs should be at the center of every decision that is made. After all, the divorce wasn't their choice.

How do you Relate to Others?

Someone gave me a tip on a terrific book this last month, about a little known book with a very powerful idea to teach us. The book is Leadership and Self-Betrayal by the Arbinger Institute. I found it ready for easy download onto my Kindle through Amazon. I have never seen it in a bookstore, even though it has been out for about seven years.

How do you relate to other people? There is a simple but elegant concept in this little book that I think pretty much all of us could use. You can apply this concept to your relationships with co-workers and your boss, your friends, your children or step-children, your partner, your parents, your siblings, and your neighbors.

The concept is, basically, that we all relate to other people in one of two ways: either from being in our own box, or out of it.

When we are in the box, we relate to other people like they are objects. We depersonalize them. We see ourselves as important, valuable, and benevolent. We fail to see our own shortcomings. We feel justified in not being relational, kind, or fair-minded with others because we delude ourselves that they don't matter, or they don't deserve it.

When we are out of the box, we relate to other people as people. We recognize that other people have their own story, and their own hurts and limitations. When we step out of the box, we don't assume evil intent on the other person's behavior. We watch our own tone, so that we are not hostile, demeaning, cold, or acting better than. We don't justify cruddy behavior on our part by pointing out someone else's misbehavior.

You can operate in or out of the box in any situation. You may have to correct your teenager about being more responsible with money. You can scream, yell, threaten, and demean (operating from the box), or you can choose to discuss the money situation calmly, and set limits and consequences in a more mature, grown up tone (operating out of the box).

In Leadership and Self-Deception, the main character is a middle-aged man who learns this concept at work from his new employer after he has a run-in with a direct report who makes a mistake. As it turns out, every employee at his new company gets trained on this concept. The character soon identifies that he is not only relating to his employees from atop a big box, but also his wife and teenage son who have been having problems. In the book, we get to see all the shifts that happen when one individual gets out of their box. It causes a chain-reaction of good shifts in other people.

I particularly liked the concept of self-betrayal. The book teaches that when we don't do the right thing for others---both those we know and complete strangers---we actually betray ourselves.

This book is an easy read, and a paradigm shift that could change your family, your work day, and ultimately, your life. Think about tearing down your box today, and stick it out for recycling. Taking responsibility for doing your part to make things better, with your partner, children, co-workers, family, and friends is a huge step towards being your best and most healthy self.

Giving up the Blame Game

Blaming others for your circumstances never works. It makes you more of a victim. It puts you into a passive, helpless mind frame. It's not a mentally healthy neighborhood to hang out in. It's negative, and it keeps you stuck and powerless to improve things.

You can hear people blaming all around you. Like these statements:

"I'm all stressed out because of my boss."

"My teenagers drive me crazy."

"My marriage is bad because my (wife, husband) does (x, y, z)."

"I've always had bad self-esteem because of my childhood."

"I can't control my anger because people upset me."

"My health is bad because of my genetics."

"I can't save any money because of my kids."

The truth is that there are givens for all of us----your partner, your genetics, your personality, your earning power, but there is another huge untapped influence for most of us also. That powerful influence is our thoughts and our behavior choices.

Diabetes might run in your family, but you can get great information on how to lower your risk with diet and exercise and work on that plan every day.

You might get hot-headed with anger, and come from a family of bad anger role-models, but you personally get to choose learning some better skills, and using them. To do less than this is to choose the easy way out and stay in your comfort zone of unskilled behavior.

Mentally healthy people take some authority over their own thoughts. They realize that negative thoughts breed more negative thoughts and behaviors. What we think about truly expands to fill the space available inside us. Weeding out your own negative, maladaptive thoughts is each person's responsibility. A good therapist can teach you how to scale back those distorted negative thoughts in a couple sessions. Everyone needs to "take out their own trash," meaning manage their own thoughts.

How do I know that this is possible? I have had the privilege of working in counseling with individuals who have overcome incredible odds, including abusive parents, poverty, multiple significant losses, and the betrayal of others, and yet adjust their thinking to have their experiences make them softer, gentler, and more full of loving kindness for themselves and others. They go onto full and emotionally rich lives after amazing hardship, and it deepens their appreciation for the goodness and light in life.

To move past blaming others puts you in a better position to take back your own power over your own life, both your present and your future. When we abdicate responsibility for our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, we are stuck in a bad neighborhood called helplessness.

When we take responsibility for our thoughts, feelings, and actions, and our part in making any situation or relationship better, that's when better things can happen in our present and future. Owning our own feelings, thoughts, and behaviors is a hallmark of emotional maturity.
When stressed, the mature person exercises more and sorts out their negative thoughts and feelings that keep them churned up. The mature person realizes that part of not being stressed out is showing humor and flexibility, and doing good self-care. Dealing with your own stress, rather than taking it out on others, is essentially a choice.

You can choose to make blame unnecessary in your life, because as you take responsibility for where you are now in your life, and where you want to go, blame becomes irrelevant. What really matters as time passes is enjoying moments with those you love and doing things you are passionate about. Both of those things are so much more fun than blaming.

Are You a Clean Communicator?

When I watch the Monty Python skit "The Argument Clinic," it always crystalizes for me why some people are much easier to communicate with than others. Like the person behind the desk at the argument clinic, sometimes it’s just too frustrating to be understood. What if each person took responsibility for being a clean communicator? Couldn't we make life easier, make communicating more satisfying, and end some drama that happens with dirty communication? I think so.

Think about who you want to speak with when you are frustrated, upset, sad or churned up inside. What qualities do you look for in someone you can open up to? Most people prefer people who listen well, ask questions to deepen their understanding, are non-judgmental, emotionally available, not distracted, direct, honest, not lecturing, and who care and listen from the heart.

Clean communication is clear and direct. If you have a concern or a grievance with someone, you have the courage to talk with them directly, not passive aggressively complain about them to a third party.

Being a clean communicator means you don't use sarcasm, or try to operate like you are "one up." You operate from a base of mutual respect and value the other person.

Clean communicators manage their own stress level. They exercise, meditate, pray, and do their own self-care. They don't make you the verbal punching bag for every speed bump in their daily life.

Clean communicators mean what they say, and say what they mean. Therapists call this congruency.
You keep your commitments, and are impeccable with your word.

Skilled communicators deliver whole communications, as in "when you did x (their behavior), I felt y (your feeling), and next time I would like z (their behavior)."

Good communicators can set boundaries with others. They can say "no." They try not to do things just out of obligation or guilt.

When clean communicators are unhappy with the way an important relationship is going, they don't start an emotional or sexual affair with someone else. They set up a time to honestly talk with their partner directly about their concerns, and see whether they can each take some responsibility for getting things back on track.

Clean communicators avoid saying "always" and "never." They choose "I-statements," rather than blaming "you-statements."

It's dirty communication to label other people, judge them, and blame them. (This is not your job!)

Dirty communication drags out the past in every disagreement and can't let go of it and move on.

Threats are the favorite ammunition of dirty communicators. They threaten to leave, to divorce, to break up with you. This dirty communication style is called being an emotional bully.

Dirty communicators attack and denigrate the other person in any disagreement. They refuse to accept that the other person may have their own perspective, and that that's often okay and healthy. We therapists call this differentiation, and it means you accept the differences between your view of the world and someone else's. Dirty communicators can't do it.

Clean communicators keep their non-verbal cues warm. This includes facial expression, tone of voice, and body language. Dirty communicators do non-verbal leakage that is cold, judgmental, and tight. Warm non-verbal cues make you want to open up. Cold ones make you want to shut down.

My theory is that everyone can look emotionally pretty healthy alone, but it is in close relationships that our insecurities and fears pop out. It gets harder to assert yourself about personal things, and with those that you care most about. The stakes are so much higher than when you assert yourself with a stranger.

For a nice review on these concepts of healthy and clean communication skills, check out the classic book Couple Skills by McKay, Fanning, and Paleg (New Harbinger Publications, 2006).

The good news on communicating cleanly and effectively is that it's entirely learnable. It's our choice every day to choose dirty communication that hurts our relationships and makes people feel they have paid a visit to the argument clinic, or healthy, clean, and open communication.