Navigating Your Relationship: A Voyage for Couples

trouble.

PREFACE

A Voyage of Growth

and Learning

This book offers the two of you an opportunity to take a voyage. During this voyage, you will be encouraged to consider surprising images and intuitively sensible truths about intimate partnerships.

A great deal of our meaning in life comes from the reflections that we give each other, and the meaning we generate out of that. When we’re not paying attention to each other, we wind up hurting each other, causing each other pain that could be very easily rectified with a drop or two of moment-to-moment nonjudgmental awareness.

- Jon Kabat-Zinn

author of Full Catastrophe Living

The room was crackling with tension and silence. Julie and Josh sat uncomfortably in my office, having just described to me the course of their currently disappointing and frustrating relationship.

I asked Julie, How big do you feel when Josh interrupts you? and she promptly answered that she felt about as small as a worm. How big does Josh look at that moment? I asked. He’s gigantic. He’s always dismissing my thoughts and feelings. I turned to Josh and asked, How big to do you feel when she just keeps talking? and without hesitation he stated that he felt like a piece of dirt. How big does Julie look at that moment? I asked. She’s enormous. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to make her happy and she doesn’t hear me.

Sound familiar? What I told this couple is that, although it doesn’t make any sense, both people are big and small at the same time, and this confusing distortion happens all the time.

Now that I’ve been working with couples and families for nearly thirty years, I have an array of stories and visual devices that give comfort to my visitors. From garbage to gumballs, from fishing to baseball to soccer, from kaleidoscopes to Slinkys to Venetian blinds, I create a variety of stimulating visual experiences that are intended to interrupt and redirect the automatic and familiar behaviors that are connected to emotional cues. I will be sharing many of my favorite interventions in this book.

As you read this book, you will be taking a journey on a boat, just like the couples that bring their problems to me do. In exploring your relationship with your partner, you will discover how small you feel and how big you look at the same time, and how confusing that is. I hope you will embrace the complexity of relating and get more comfortable with who you are and how your relationship works. Hopefully, you can see this as a growth opportunity, and experience the satisfaction of developing more self-control as a way of creating a better intimate relationship with your partner.

This journey will offer you an unusual set of metaphors and analogies that constantly simplify your relationship in an optimistic and clinically helpful way. You will each be accountable for the way you handle your tipping point and be responsible for the behavior you use to keep from feeling worse when the boat feels tippy to you. You will be taught memorable tools that will help you communicate under duress, and become more comfortable with the familiar discomforts that lead to conflict and disconnection, giving you a better chance to short circuit the patterns that have led you to seek help from a book.

There are many books intended to help you, and this one will, hopefully, teach you that the dynamics that are driving you crazy are actually quite normal, and the solutions are not too complicated. You can find the strength and talent in yourself to improve your relationship, be a strong and attractive partner, advocate for your wishes, and navigate the shoals by absorbing these intriguing ideas and putting them into action as teammates who pull together on a voyage.

Using the best ideas that have been developed in the field of marriage and family therapy, you can become more adept at connecting your feelings to your thoughts and actions, more aware of motivations and reactions that are grounded in your family of origin, and more of an expert about who you really are. You will be prompted to catch yourself and be more than a squirrel, claim your gumball, handle being in a swamp, and feel like a captain of your relationship boat, and you will be gently reminded many times that both of you may be feeling small and looking big.

One of the risks you are taking as you read this book is that one of you will change and the other will need to respond to change in a healthy way. You may even find your own reactions to change surprising. Sometimes the whole idea of change is daunting. Even though the journey will take some twists and turns, and sometimes require you to stretch your imagination or your tolerance for mixed metaphors, the stories, advice, analogies, and original concepts are all intended to make your relationship voyage much more pleasant, meaningful, and long-lasting.

Among other things, I have used my family background of artists and caregivers to create original tools for you, just as you might gravitate to the work your parents did. I believe that certain principles matter, and I try to incorporate them into my work. The worth and dignity of each person matters. Speaking the truth matters. Our independence and interdependence matter. The journey matters as much as the destination. Early in my journey I found that The Kingdom of God is within you. You need only to claim it, and that matters. I happen to think that this concept transcends religion, and embraces the remarkable variety of personal narratives and religious beliefs that exists. Whatever your history is, you are welcome here.

This book is the product of my family history, days spent on a sailboat as a child, the different careers I have pursued, and distinctive experiences I have had. It is a privilege to treat couples, and to have them share their private truths with me, and in return I offer all of the creativity and mindful presence I can muster from my self.

When a couple comes to my office, I need to know how they tell their story, and I need them to know that I don’t have magical skills. I tell them that we are going to talk to each other and seek changes, but that I am not a magician. I tell couples to look again in the Yellow Pages or on the Internet if magic is what they want. I do something else.

What I can do is listen with authenticity. As I was trained in Contextual Family Therapy, I can say that I use multidirected partiality. In other words, as an authentic listener, I am partial to both partners in multiple ways that move the process forward. I try to listen in that way, actively giving credit to each person’s truth as I hear it. I also explain that I am focused on treating their relationship (the space in between them that also connects them). I admit to couples that it is an occupational hazard that I may annoy both of them so much that they agree with each other that I wasn’t favoring either person when they felt they were clearly right. If this book becomes challenging in some way for you, go ahead and blame me if you need to.

The various boat-themed chapter headings are intended to suggest a journey, using as touchstones the experience of being on a boat, while addressing emotional realities that emerge whether you are on a boat or not, and offering solutions that urge you to have your feet firmly on the ground. On or off the boat, I will keep the process sounding simple, by encouraging you to understand how much having things under control matters, how it may be enough to be more aware of your co-captain, or how when we sound like third graders we simply have an opportunity to grow. Later in the book, I will offer concepts that help with specific family issues (like the growth of a teenager, or infidelity, or other challenges that build up over time), but, first, we will focus on being a couple.

Enjoy the journey.

1

Getting on the Boat

To begin this journey, you and your partner learn that you are on a boat and that it matters how you handle tippiness when there are two captains on the boat.

If you are certain, then you are a prisoner of the known. When you embrace uncertainty, and include intention and detachment, then the most improbable happens. That’s what we call a miracle.

- Deepak Chopra, M.D.

author of Ageless Body, Timeless Mind

I have this theory that couples are on boats, I say unexpectedly to a couple that has just met me for the first time and spilled out their story. I really don’t know what they’ll think. I barely know them and they are trusting me to understand their shared emotional climate.

When couples visit me for the first time, they’re likely to be experiencing deep uncertainty. Wishing and once believing that they could work out problems for themselves, they suddenly find themselves dependent on a total stranger who will somehow do things with them that they’d hoped to be able to do for themselves. They don’t know how therapy will work, whether it will work, what it will ultimately cost, or what mysterious demands it will make on them. Yet, something has convinced them that they need to make this complicated and daring journey and talk to me about very personal things in the presence of their partner.

On top of the uncertainty, there is disappointment. I vividly remember attending a conference workshop about couples, where all of the therapists in the room were distracted by great weather, a fun lunch break near great restaurants, and the freedom of being away from their offices while collecting further education credits. The presenter tried and tried to get our attention, but without much success. Finally, he asked a single question that went something like this: What is the most common emotion about their partnership that couples are experiencing when they begin therapy as a couple?

Here was a roomful of perhaps eighty therapists from all over the country. I imagine the average therapist in the room had twenty years of experience with couples. We began to answer the question about what couples were experiencing emotionally about their partnerships. Thoughtful and experienced answers gradually began to cascade and echo around the room as we began to pay attention, but, actually, they were all the same answer. There was really only one answer offered to this carefully crafted question: disappointment. I realized that I was thinking of that answer, too. As it turned out, that was exactly what the presenter expected us all to say.

What does this mean? This means it is natural and predictable for you to have wonderful expectations for your marriage. After all, you can’t have disappointment without expectations. Unfortunately, expectations rarely match up with reality, especially over time. It is understandable and normal that, over time, couples experience something different from their special expectations for their relationships—and that both members feel disappointed.

Once I have heard both versions of the story that brought the couple in to see me, I often suggest that they are on a boat.

The Boat

It has dawned on me that I have been hearing narratives from couples that parallel my experience of sailboats. My theory is that when you met and fell in love and it was juicy and sexy and charged, you didn’t know you were building a boat. You see, my father loved sailboats and, after twenty-five years trapped in a stifling corporate job, he and a friend decided to start a business building beautiful ocean-racing yachts. Because I was about twelve years old, I just figured this was what fathers did, and it seemed perfectly ordinary to walk around the huge construction space and find all of these people just loving their jobs. I assumed everyone loved their jobs. What did I know? It turns out these workers were like couples falling in love: full of energy, joy, and hope—perhaps high on the fumes from the varnish or the new sails—certain that this would be a special boat, better than any boat anyone had sailed on before.

As couples, I think we usually start out on this kind of high. We believe we have the right partner and that we know how to do a great job of being married and parenting. We’ll do it better than our parents, right? But nobody tells us we are building a boat. Most of us wouldn’t choose to build a boat! Instead, we imagine we’re building a cozy, safe nest, where we will listen to each other and adore each other and it will be quiet and protected and everything will feel under control—the kind of climate couples seek when they visit my office. We need to believe this. We need this expectation, and, yes, we might need to be a little bit high. It helps us build the boat, and it drives us to jump onboard.

I remember the launchings of the boats my dad’s company built. There was champagne and dancing and everyone made promises about winning races and making more boats and being successful and happy. It was somehow sacred, just like a wedding where we make promises about success, having fun, staying on the boat, staying safe, supporting each other, and being faithful to the dream. Usually, even couples who haven’t had a formal launching have made this kind of promise when making a commitment to be together.

But, think for a minute. Wouldn’t your mind work differently on a boat? If you knew that—instead of a cozy little nest—you had built a boat, invested in a boat, jumped on the boat, and were sailing the boat yourselves, while promising that you would make the journey memorable and safe, would you still be as intoxicated as you were while building the boat, or would other kinds of thoughts take over? If you knew you were going to be going on a voyage, wouldn’t you instead ask Where are we going? What’s the weather like? Do we have enough supplies? What if the boat gets tippy? Who’s in charge? Will it leak? Are we safe? This is a very different mental and emotional experience from the more exciting building of the boat.

Couples often describe and share this unexpected shift when they tell me their story. They don’t know how or why their experience changed so dramatically, but when we start discussing boats they do find it easy to describe the way they would start to think if they were on a boat and responsible for its success and safety. When I tell them that they are sailing the boat, not just having a fun ride in the sun, there’s a pause, and then a less playful, more measured, weighty response about safety or direction, responsibility, or accountability that illustrates how much more seriously they are thinking.

Maybe it is important to imagine what it is like on a boat, and to accept that you build them and leap onto them— planning to keep your promise that nothing will go wrong. Maybe your minds just shift into a different gear once you are on a boat. We all have this gear, just waiting to kick in when we act on a serious decision and start an important journey.

I remember my father’s pretty ordinary sailboat. It wasn’t an ocean-racing yacht. I now realize that I didn’t invite my friends or enjoy the day when I was a young teenager and still went sailing most summer weekends with my parents. I see now that I was tuned out, not really there. We would sail to an island for a picnic, but I don’t remember the island at all. I know it was an island on a lake full of sailboats, but I have no real picture of it in my head. I was switched off, like many of the people who visit me with their partners.

To me, boating was complicated and overwhelming and since I couldn’t get out of my obligation to be on the boat, I just put myself in neutral. Actually, I do vividly remember the unusual damp smell of the fiberglass boat, and the rhythmic tapping sound of the water hitting the front of the boat. But that’s all. I was functioning on a pretty primitive level. Most importantly, I also remember that I suddenly became very present when the boat felt tippy. When the boat was tipping, I really was there. I took immediate action, and moved to balance the boat. At that tipping point, I responded to the same feelings of vulnerability and danger that also motivate our behavior in our relationships.

What if you and your partner each brought half of the boat with you? Each of you carries with you your gender, your family, your personal history, your career, your sexuality, and your expectations, and somehow you have created a supposedly leak-proof craft with another person with all of their qualities. It’s pretty exciting to see all the different pieces come together when you are building the boat. Once you are on the boat, though, the same differences make the boat feel tippy, like your partner is having it their way.

It feels like the boat is tipping away from you when your partner behaves in a surprising, unwanted, or unfamiliar way, compared to what you expected or felt you needed. When this happens, it doesn’t feel familiar, and it may not feel safe or controlled enough. If that is the way it feels, you could easily keep the promise you made at the launching, and move away from the middle of the boat, toward your own side, to keep it from tipping over. It’s as if the thought of both of you behaving the same way seems so extreme, that you exaggerate your opposite response. We react and respond for the sake of the boat. In fact, you promised that you would at your launching. Remember assuring your partner that the boat won’t tip over? But, your movement toward your side of the boat feels uncomfortable to your partner, for they feel as though the boat is now tipping away from them, and they move away, too, toward their edge of the boat, in order to rebalance it. They promised, too. Moving to my own side to balance things out is what I did on my dad’s boat, and that’s what I hear couples indicate they are doing with their actions.

When the boat gets tippier and tippier, the somewhat different person you couldn’t resist becomes someone who surprises and confuses you. They seem to be a danger to your comfort and don’t seem to be the person you chose, who seemed so safe and delightful. Now this person seems like a caricature of the person you fell in love with. You become disillusioned. Those poetic silences you used to love seem different, more negative. Those clever asides seem personal and pointed. Those kindnesses seem less sincere and less frequent.

If we are honest with ourselves, we realize that we, too, are becoming a caricature of the person our partner fell in love with. Both of us are exaggerating our differences, in order to keep the boat balanced. We do this with our behavior. We behave in opposite ways—for the boat.

Ebenezer and Florence, who you will meet again, often experience the most common, and most puzzling, play of opposites. For instance, Eb will have something important to say to Flo, but she’ll feel interrupted or that her space is being invaded, and she will withdraw instead of talking to Eb. Eb will respond by trying harder to get Flo’s attention, and Flo will withdraw even more because she is feeling pressured. Eb will eventually be afraid that Flo is mad at him, and pursue her even harder for an explanation or reassurance. Flo will eventually be afraid of being crushed by Eb’s pressure and withdraw even more. Pursuing and withdrawing are opposite behaviors and Eb and Flo are exaggerating them, hoping to keep the boat from tipping over.

Maybe you are a couple who do another version of this dance, with one of you getting louder while the other grows more silent, or one of you doing more tasks while the other does fewer. There are many ways to try to keep the boat from capsizing. Consider the ways you may act for the boat: one of you may be expansive and the other shrinking, one may begin to do things faster and the other to do things more and more slowly, or one may get tighter (more rigid) and the other looser (easy going) as things get tippy. Have you considered what your particular opposites are?

How Many Captains on this Boat?

A relationship can be like a pretty unusual and challenging boat. It can be tippy on one side and not the other. The weather can be terrible on one side and not the other. I innocently ask couples how many captains there should be on their boat. After a lot of squirming, their eventual answer is that there need to be two captains, and I agree emphatically. There must be two captains on today’s relationship boats. Somehow, both people need to feel like captains. This may not have been as clear to your parents, many of whom relied on a single captain, but you are navigating new waters, and it may seem at times as if you are pioneers. This is not a normal boat. Sharing the captain role is tricky, kind of crazy, and sometimes just not fair! It requires teamwork, patience, listening, and collaboration.

It will be helpful for both of you, as captains, to learn about your own emotional tipping points, and be able to catch yourselves as you slip from any sensitive, charged moment into your automatic, reactive behavior that makes the boat even tippier for the other captain.

There will inevitably be tension on the boat when it tips, and you can learn to handle that tension better—for the boat. That was your best intention anyway when the boat felt tippy, right? You promised. This new kind of boat safety is more considerate, more collaborative, and develops carefully, with less urgency. The best treatment that I know of for relationship seasickness is talking and listening. As a professional talker and listener, I naturally believe that these skills can help captains feel strong, competent, and safe. I help people reduce tension on their boats by talking and listening, and I think you can do this, too.

Here is a possible takeaway from this chapter:

CAPTAIN’S LOG

You didn’t expect to be on a boat. It can be complicated and disappointing.

2

Being A Captain Who Communicates

The best seasickness medicine is communication that reduces tension. Some intriguing recommendations help you talk about yourself and listen to your partner with less defensiveness.

Love doesn’t consist in gazing at each other. It consists in looking outward in the same direction.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

author of The Little Prince

We just don’t communicate . . . We used to have more patience and understand each other better . . . I want to feel like I’m being heard . . . We’re both stubborn . . . I really think I’m right!

These are familiar words from the couples that visit my office. Over and over again, I hear that communication is frustrating and becoming toxic when it used to be enjoyable and comforting. When I ask these couples what they want, they often tell me: We want to communicate better.

When you leave your comfort zone and begin a relationship voyage as a co-captain, the seas can feel pretty rough. Your once-exhilarating voyage now feels disappointing, uncomfortable, and much too tense. Communicating the way you are trying to communicate doesn’t seem to help, but you feel that it should. You might agree that the best seasickness remedy is better communication, but you may not