Healing Relationships is an Inside Job: When the Connection Between You and Another Person Is Strained or Broken

Life

INTRODUCTION

The book you are about to read, Healing Relationships is an Inside Job, is a basic component of Better Tomorrows, a program for healing strained or broken relationships. Both are the culmination of what I have learned from my clients and from a struggle I had for many years in dealing with a son who has chosen a different path in life than the one we thought he would take.

When he was a young adult many years ago, he was asked to leave our house because of clashes with our family rules. Even though I was a family therapist, I had little idea of how to deal with him, or the effect our strained relationship had on the rest of the family.

Of course, as almost any mother who has problems with how her children have turned out will understand, I believed that everything would have been fine if only I had done a better job of raising him. As those same mothers would understand, my heart was filled with pain. Then when the strained relationship broke and we sometimes didn’t know where he was, the pain intensified, although almost no one except my therapist understood the depth of my distress.

Then one day in her office, in the middle of crying once more because of the latest conflict with my son, I saw a pattern I hadn’t seen before. It was as though a light had gone on over my head, like a light bulb that appears in comic strips when a character gets an idea. It was clear that what was happening to me was the same thing I was seeing in clients who struggled with their family members. In fact, the dynamics could be seen in any relationship where there was suffering because of conflict between two or more people.

You see, I realized my tears were no longer of guilt, but of great sadness in watching a child who had so much potential choose to live a life that was unlikely to reach that potential. I had lost my ideal of having a perfect family, but I was entering a new stage in my healing. What I understood that day was that there were five stages to healing relationships and, in 1994, wrote Letting Go of Our Adult Children: When What We Do Is Never Enough to explain what I had learned.

STAGE ONE: Recognizing that the expectations for a relationship with someone have not been met.

STAGE TWO: Trying to get the other person to change through manipulation, anger, blame, and guilt—and finding none of these tactics work.

STAGE THREE: Looking closely at what we may be doing to perpetuate the situation and at the steps we can take to approach our relationship from a more positive perspective.

STAGE FOUR: If working on ourselves does not change the other person, or help us find a solution to the issues that divide us, then this is a time of grieving for that which is not possible and for releasing the past.

STAGE FIVE: Resolving to accept life as it unfolds without demanding the other person, and our relationship with him or her, turn out exactly the way we want things to turn out.

Most of us stay stuck in stage two, trying to change the other person. We have convinced ourselves that things will improve if we try harder, if we say the right thing, if we give him enough money, if we expend enough energy, if we wait long enough, if we can find someone who can to force him to change. In other words, we are convinced that there is a way to get him to be the way we want him to be. We just haven’t discovered it yet! Unfortunately, none of these techniques work because we don’t have that much power. Oh, things may change temporarily, but they will almost always go back to where they were before we realized our relationship wasn’t proceeding the way we expected.

This pattern runs true for every person who struggles with a strained or broken relationship, especially within the family. Some may take longer than others to recognize that their efforts to get the other person to change aren’t getting anywhere. Eventually, however, they realize they are repeating the same old arguments day after day, stuck on the old merry-go-round and getting tired of feeling dizzy.

When I got tired of going around-and-around in trying to change our son, before I could move on I had to learn, among other lessons, how to become a recovering perfectionist. I needed to abandon the idea that our children had to turn out the way I think they should before I could have a healthy relationship with them and/or peace in my heart.

Incidentally, one of the major problems with perfectionists who have difficulty with a relationship is an illusion that if they find the right self-help program, then they can repair their relationship perfectly: everything will be returned to an earlier stage in the relationship before problems arose—which is a strange goal, once you think about it, for that is the ground out of which the relationship developed problems in the first place.

What I have learned over many years is that if you are to heal your relationship—or at a minimum heal your heart—you need to be willing to explore what it is within yourself that contributes to difficulties in the relationship. In other words, you need to discover what needs to shift within yourself so that your situation can shift in a more positive direction. As I say in many different ways, a healthy relationship cannot be imposed from without, but can only come from within—which is why I call this book Healing Relationships is an Inside Job.

While I offer you the best of my experience and the experience of many experts on relationships, I make no promise that your relationship will look the way you want it to look when you have finished this book. On the other hand, I believe you will be able to create a greatly improved relationship, perhaps a superb relationship. At the very least, you will be able to approach your relationship with a lighter heart and an expanded ability to accept—with love, joy and peace—the way things turn out, knowing you have done your absolute best.

In fact, I believe that not only will you improve your relationship with the person with whom you are having difficulty, your relationships with others will deepen and become richer. That has certainly been the case with me. I have not changed my son, but I now understand why he is the way he is and accept him just as he is, as well as I can. When we talk on the phone or see one another, there is an ease and comfort I would not have imagined possible when my healing journey began.

Because I know the pleasure of resolving a difficult relationship—at least repairing it to a much greater extent than I thought possible at one time—I have a passion to help other families. Consequently, I initially created Better Tomorrows as a program that focused on parents whose adult children won’t talk to them anymore or who see them as seldom as possible. The rift can come from any of a hundred different reasons.

Then, as I began to pull together information and exercises that have proved valuable over many years in both my personal and professional experience, I realized the material was helpful for many kinds of unsatisfactory, unhealthy relationships.

For example, understanding the principles that I teach is also important for adult children whose parents reject them or make contact difficult and contentious. Perhaps these children married outside their family’s faith or ethnic group, or the parents are unable to accept the child’s spouse. Perhaps the children live in a way of which the parents disapprove, such as being in a gay or lesbian relationship, or as drug and alcohol abusers. There are many reasons why parents do not include their children in their lives as much as the children would like.

Knowing how to shift the dynamics of who is to blame and who has to be the agent of change is also helpful for grown siblings who can’t seem to stop arguing with one another. A woman may feel her sister manipulated her parents into giving her more than her fair share of attention. A man may hold a grudge over money he feels his brother owes him. Brothers and sisters can manage to continue their sibling rivalry well into adulthood.

What you will find in this book can even be valuable for people who had a difficult relationship with someone who is no longer living, and who are now burdened by unresolved guilt, resentment, and regrets.

Couples who have stressful relationships often benefit from marriage counseling, which I strongly recommend. However, when a partner is unwilling to attend couple’s counseling, the spouse who is willing to approach their relationship from a new perspective—notice that the first chapter is titled Viewing Your Relationship From a New Perspective—will be pleased to discover how to create a healthier, more satisfying partnership.

We would all be glad if everyone treated us the way you want to be treated: fairly, kindly and with respect. Yet there are those in our lives who seem to thrive on being rebellious and argumentative. They nurse grievances over long-finished family business. They get drunk and loud at parties. Wrapped up in their own lives, they don’t appear to care how their actions might hurt others. Unfortunately, however much others may wish these people changed, they are not interested. They don’t see themselves as being a problem: the problem always lies with the other guy.

Since these kinds of people don’t reach out for help, my advice is written for those of you who are tired enough of your pain and suffering in a relationship that you are willing to do something about it. In the end, you may not be able to change the other person the way you wish that person would change, but what you learn will help you react to the other person with less resentment, greater love, and an openness to healing in new ways.

The first eight chapters in this book offer time-tested principles of how to build a healthy relationship out of one that is now strained or broken. Rather than repeating here the topics that are covered, I recommend you look at the Table of Contents for an overview of material that will guide you on your journey to changing yourself, and your relationship.

The ninth chapter, Resolving Disagreements, is based on what you have learned in the other chapters. The reason I wait until the end to offer advice on how to manage conflicts is because you have already been given many of these suggestions for improving your relationship, from listening better to disagreeing with respect. These suggestions haven’t worked because you haven’t built a foundation upon which they can work. I know this was definitely true in my case. Until I had shifted something inside of me, trying to apply someone else’s advice fell flat.

To help something shift inside of you, I have provided an experiential exercise with each chapter. These are possibly the most important parts of this book. That is because you can read a dozen books that suggest ways you can change a relationship. You can listen to two dozen speakers on how you should try to view your situation differently. However, insight and intention need to turn into action in order for healing of a relationship to occur. The exercises make the difference.

Incidentally, if you especially value experiential exercises, you may want to participate in the complete Better Tomorrows Program. There you will be given more than fifty additional exercises that can reinforce the progress you make in your relationship, as well as a personal approach that tailors the program to your specific needs.

In the Appendix there are two bonus exercises that can encourage your efforts toward an improved relationship. I recommend that each time you finish a chapter, and do the exercise, that you make a quick notation in the exercise on page 112. The other exercise is one that can strengthen the development of rich inner qualities you may not even realize you possess.

A quick note about gender. It is clear that both men and women have broken relationships, and the politically correct way to refer to this reality is to say he/she, his/hers, himself/herself. However, I find this makes both reading and writing cumbersome. Therefore, I will use either one unless it is clear that a specific gender is needed.

I wish you well in creating better tomorrows for yourself and others in your life.

Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT

Altadena, California

Chapter One

VIEWING YOUR RELATIONSHIP FROM A NEW PERSPECTIVE

A good way to begin the healing of a relationship is to look at the story you tell about a problem that has come between you and another person. Why? Because our stories, and the way we tell them, are important elements in how we try to make sense of what has happened to the connection we had with someone else.

We tell the story of a past injustice to let others know how wronged we were and how our response was the only logical thing to do. With our tone of voice, the words we choose, our gestures and our posture, we want our listeners to remember the pieces of the story we want them to remember. The other person, of course, tells his version of the story and has a different point to make.

Nevertheless, it is through these narratives that we convey our understanding of our strained or broken relationship. It is through our stories that we view the mistakes that have been made and express our hope that the relationship will change, or at least end peacefully.

The purpose of this first chapter of Healing Relationships is an Inside Job is to help you notice what there is in the telling of your story that has kept you stuck in conflict with another person—and to recognize that your brain is determined to interpret your conflict from one particular, and persistent, perspective.

Pathways in the Brain

Whether and how change will occur in your relationship, and in the story you will later tell, depends on the change that will occur in your brain. That’s where all change ultimately occurs and where you have an extraordinarily linked network of 20 billion neurons connected to an average of 10,000 other neurons, giving you an incredibly huge number of new potential connections.

Unfortunately, we tend to use the same groups of neurons over and over, routing old thoughts, behaviors, attitudes, emotional reactions, and beliefs back and forth along the same pathways. Through this process the brain assigns meaning to an experience and creates a belief or filter through which the next experience can be accepted or rejected as true and valid.

For example, imagine that your brother has political views diametrically opposed to yours, and that you argue so vociferously that your respective spouses are ready to boycott family gatherings. Every time you are about to meet him again, you tell yourself that you won’t let him get you riled up. But he always does. In fact, he seems to enjoy it.

Why, you ask yourself, does he do it? I can tell you. It is because in his brain the beliefs he holds are routed through pathways formed from his experience and his temperament. He sees the world through the filters he has created and you see the world through your filters. Unfortunately, his filters include the pleasure of getting you to respond. Of course, it’s possible that you respond because you enjoy sparring with him, even though you won’t admit it. You would love to convince him that his opinions are illogical: since you consider yourself a logical person, it’s hard for you to understand how he could possibly see things differently.

Yet our world is filled with people whose brains operate along very different pathways than ours and who see life from very different perspectives. For example, a terrorist is an enigma to most of us. How can he create hell on earth in exchange for a heaven he hasn’t seen? The answer lies in his brain, with pathways along which his ideas flow that are constructed differently than the pathways along which your thoughts travel in your brain.

The importance of understanding how your brain’s pathways operate, i.e., noticing your strong attachment to your own beliefs and opinions, helps you recognize that all of us are, in a sense, controlled by our brains. However, by beginning to listen to others with a more open heart and a more open mind, we can begin to restructure the brain’s pathways. Your willingness to see things from a different perspective may, just possibly, help the other person see things from a different perspective.

It is important to remember, as you begin your journey of healing, that your brain is part of the equation that determines how the dynamics between you and another person are played out. When the belief neurons in your brain become active, they engage other neurons along a specific pathway to stimulate neurons involved in action. This causes you to say things and do things in a particular way.

And guess what? The chances are that the consequences of what you do and say will give you consequences you expect. After all, you’ve been doing and saying things in a similar way for a long time and getting similar results. Even if the consequences may be a little different now and then, you will interpret what happens in ways that reinforce your initial belief.

You can see that this cyclical process of belief-actions-consequences-belief leaves little room for our brains to maneuver, or to be open to new ideas. It is easier for the brain to continue doing what it’s always done, sending the same, or similar, thoughts down the same pathways, over and over again.

As I said, the opinions of an argumentative brother are delivered because located in his brain are the neurons and pathways that support his perspective. His beliefs cause him to act in a certain way, meaning he’s going to argue with you and you will respond as you have always done, which is exactly what he expects, and that reinforces his belief that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Clearly, you can’t do anything to change what happens in his brain. You can only do something to change what happens in yours. In other words, your brain will need to switch off some of the neurons that pass information along old pathways—tied to old beliefs—about how your relationship should function and who is responsible for problems you are having.

I can certainly understand that you may be hesitant in embarking on a journey that suggests you may need to change an opinion. After all, you’ve been attached to your opinions for a long time. It may seem impossible to even consider another viewpoint. Furthermore, changing how your brain interacts with the world will mean you are stepping into the future without any guarantee that the other person will eventually change.

Therefore, I suggest you carefully consider two questions:

ONE: Are you willing to continue