“In the beginning…there was Space!”

 

 

 This week has been heavy with abandonment, neediness, and despair. I often feel hopeful for many clients who are able to deeply process their pain, understand and accept their realities….but this week was heavy. Endeavoring in the task to help people tear down and rebuild their relationships is a challenge. Approaching marital issues, couples, and individuals requires respect for where they are in the process, knowing they will need change. Before changes can happen, there is a need to shatter false hope and false expectations once we understand what is going wrong, to understand what’s getting in the way. 

 

Beginning the recovery process takes a leap of faith. When couples start counseling, faith is in limited supply. There is so much intensity and neediness in each person, that emotions run high and out of control at times. Some things to remember when entering counseling is (1) you are unable to make healthy changes on your own, (2) the issues you are experiencing in your marriage are outside of your control, (3) the negativity has run you into hopelessness and helplessness, (4) the issues are bigger than both of you. This is just the beginning. There is hope once you begin marriage counseling, but it takes several months before healthy changes become natural in you and in your partner and this requires work.

The process will bring about uncomfortable feelings that don’t feel good. That is supposed to happen. Addressing issues that aren’t being talked about or aren’t even known to each person in the relationship is precisely why there are issues in the first place. Trying to make changes and expecting them to feel happy or good is unrealistic. Sometimes clients can become frustrated or disappointed that certain behavioral tools don’t work early on in the process. Behavioral tools do not work because the issue is inside the person, so “doing” an activity isn’t going to change how you feel. In fact, it can irritate an already tense and painful situation, when it doesn’t work.    

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Couples need different suggestions for different issues. In some relationships people are too close…not in a healthy way, but in an enmeshed way. This can build abandonment feelings for each person if there is too much closeness. Self-abandonment is like losing your passion, drive, uniqueness for the sake of someone else. In this case, space is needed. Some couples are too distant, living separate lives, unaware of the lack of intimacy that exists between them. This is too much dependency on self, flawed independence, and may require uncomfortable closeness and an understanding of how this is the baseline in the relationship.

Let’s get back to the needing space for those couples who are enmeshed. The reason couples come to counseling is to stay together in a solid relationship for the long haul. That goal may not seem possible at the time, but with therapy, couples can become more secure within themselves, providing the relationship more security as well. Sometimes space is needed to be able to gain clarity, to reduce reactivity, anger, unhealthy reactions, and just some breathing space. Space can be actually physically separating, which could be scary for some people. But depending on how angry you are, separation could be exactly what you’re looking for; the ability to take time for yourself to gain clarity. Space can also be time taken to think before speaking, before deciding, before reacting to your feelings. Creating space is about slowing down life and your internal processes. Creating space can trigger abandonment, fear, shame, jealousy, insecurity, and other vulnerabilities in yourself and in your partner. These are the challenging times in therapy but are also the most rewarding for long-term, emotional health. Good emotional health benefits the individual and the relationship. Being in an unhappy marriage, before recovery, is like being in the eye of the storm. You can’t see, because there is too much going on right in front

of you and its all moving too fast to manage.

Creating space is a tricky move, especially when reactivity is high in the relationship. Being counter-intuitive, behaving in new ways, and thinking in new ways is scary, unpredictable, and represents more unknowns. It’s the best thing you can do for yourself. Learn new hope, new faith, and new trust…..

Build the space and the relationship will come.        

“He cheated, Why do I have to do therapy!?!?”

 

After an affair, it’s hard to imagine that hope, healing, and trust could exist in any way in your relationship.  From a recovery perspective, the reality of the state of the marriage is different from the way you, as the significant other who was cheated on, see it. I have a bright, brilliant, put together couple who come in to heal their marital wounds from an affair every week. Each week is particular painful for the wife, we’ll call her Jenny.  She expresses her anger in outbursts in each session, but not until several minutes have passed. Her composure at the beginning of each does not reflect her deep pain and hurt about the affair. Her husband, we’ll call him Bill, is often surprised at her reactions, because in their private life, Jenny either wants to be with Bill, all the time, or emotionally cuts-off.

Her reactions are normal, understandable, and valid for what she has been through. The confusion she experiences is so chaotic, because she was in love with her husband before, while and after he cheated. She was unaware of how disconnected he was emotionally, how he was pulling away, how he was making a choice to be dishonest, seek comfort elsewhere, and remain lost as to how to handle himself in the marriage.  Jill was in the mind-set that they were “okay.” So when she begins her sessions as a couple, she is surprised at how much work she must do for herself even though HE had the affair.

Her husband, Bill, remains apologetic, remorseful, and has cut all ties to the affair per his wife’s requests. So why is it that in every session, she is the one doing so much work and not him?

It’s easy to assume that he is not working and she is working too much, and it’s not fair…however, this is not an emotionally mature perspective. What happened in this marriage is that Bill “broke open,” with an affair, what the hidden issues have been in the marriage. He comes from a broken place and so does Jenny. Jenny has many emotional issues and intimacy disconnect just like Bill and how they have been managing these issues in their marriage has been growing over the years. There was no other way this marriage was going to get into recovery, until something woke them up from the unhealthy habits.

Jenny and Bob still love one another, through the anger, through the hurt, through the betrayal, and know they are working on being in this grey place, where there are no guarantees and no assurances. But they both work, honestly, openly, and come together to marriage counseling to rediscover their inner child, rediscover how to communicate, and rediscover how to love each other and themselves, as individuals. They had each been self-abandoning, spinning in their daily lives, disconnected from intimacy. That’s why everyone involved must work on their individual issues. Jenny and Bill have a good chance for a loving marriage, because they are both willing to be humble and broken, to do the emotional work. Recovery is not about shaming the cheater, worrying about keeping score, being defensive, or figuring out what is fair. All is fair in marriage and in real life, that’s why it’s called real life.

Some steps you can take to begin your recovery after finding out about infidelity: 

(1) read “Surviving an Affair”

(2) connect with your partner, be honest about your feelings

(3) make an appointment for marital counseling

(4) commit to counseling, this is not something you want to manage alone

(5) begin building bridges for hope, trust, and love in counseling.

(6) do NOT enmesh for fear of being abandoned, this is a false sense of security

Since the issues are within your marriage, you’ll need guidance to address these issues.  You’ll need tools and different perspectives, outside of yourselves, to assess emotional barriers and to make healthy changes.  

The Godfather and Abandonment

 

 

 

 

Last week, I wrote about the Godfather and the parallels of his life of addiction and real people’s addictions, such as addictions that clients often suffer from who seek therapy. The addiction is not the only issue to address in someone’s life. Addictions point to deeper, underlying issues within a person and influences families and loved ones. The person who is suffering from addiction can still be intelligent, highly functioning, financially successful, and gain approval from peers.  A person does not have to lose everything to understand that they are suffering from an addiction or an addictive personality. Losing everything that matters to a person is simply part of the final stages of an addiction once it has taken over. Noticing the addiction at this time is very late in the game. Having denial about masking or pain killing real feelings such as abandonment, shame, guilt, and other emotional struggles allows the addictive behavior ro run out of control.

Once an addiction is unraveled, understood, and accepted, the process of understanding the feelings that trigger the need to pain kill can be seen and felt more clearly. The type of addiction, the details and frequency are critical to understanding yourself. Abandonment, shame, and guilt can create a cycle that feels unending, helpless, and hopeless. When the Godfather abandons his needs for real love that he feels for his girlfriend and trades this for approval from his father and his family, he does so out of guilt and shame. A client recently began unraveling his addiction to approval from other people and more poignantly, of other women. In last week’s blog, I shared the Godfather’s family influences that pushed him further into addiction. As he grew further and further away from his own identity, essentially abandoning himself, by abandoning his needs, his new life provided opportunities for him to latch onto activities that recreated his pain and fed his pain killing activities. Similarly, my client recreated a life that mimics his childhood, even though he consciously knew he never wanted some of those events to be repeated. But the little boy in him, that feels hurt by the losses he felt as a child is all too familiar with seeking out relationships that are empty and void of love and affirmation, feeding the beast even more into a cycle of shame and abandonment.

There is a scene in the Godfather during a family dinner, where the Don (Marlon Brando) and all his sons are eating together. The youngest son, Al Pacino, has no interest in getting into the family business. He had fallen in love with a girl, was disgusted by his father’s behavior and saw himself as different from his brothers. However, his conscious desire to have something different in life, different from a mafia family, wasn’t big enough to overcome his childhood woundings. Something begins to chip away at his ability to self-differentiate, his ability to choose to be himself, true to his needs and his gifts, to be different.  Each time he felt pressure from his family, such as the time he gets a call from his family to join them for a holiday. He ditches the family holiday to instead spend time with his girlfriend. This comes back to haunt him as he hears about his father’s illness and he is triggered by shame, guilt, and remorse for being so distant from the family, especially from his father. It is in these moments that he begins saying things to himself that pull him away from his own needs. Needs that are healthy and self-differentiating and he instead chooses to become closer to his family through guilt and shame. His desires are not based in a healthy honesty about himself and his experiences, they are built on a foundation of shame and abandonment. He learned this type of abandonment and shame from his father, played by Marlon Brando, who watches his mother be killed by a Don mafia leader in Italy. The revenge and power his father needs is built-in from the his real feelings of loss of power and abandonment of his family. His triggers were based in his young boyhood.

 

 

The sins of the father were certainly passed down, generationaly, in this family even if the events were never discussed or shared with the children. Guilt, shame, powerlessness, and severe abandonment are the triggers that drove the Don to  become such a power-hungry person. The addictions they both shared as the Godfather and the Don, were all a cover for losing family members and growing up without real intimacy. 

After his father passes away, we see the Godfather making different choices. There is a sudden change in character. He can no longer feel intimate with his wife, the woman he fell in love with, the woman he married. He changes his path in life to include everything his father wanted from him, instead of being his own person. Eventually, his life spirals out of control with affairs, power, and corruption. He loses his wife, his unborn child, and most of all, he loses himself. This is what abandonment, shame, and guilt can create and destroy in a marriage and in a family.

“Self Talk Dictates your Life”

People in Indianapolis seek marriage counseling for many different reasons. Family Tree Counseling provides a unique approach to marital therapy to the Indianapolis area through the Family Systems approach. Focusing on family of origin issues provides a great deal of information about how we manage intimacy in marriage. The experiences we had as younger people, formed our ideas about ourselves. We carry these ideas as stories about ourselves and the world. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are influence who we become, how we behave, decisions we make, and how we feel about ourselves.

What story do you tell yourself? What do you think to yourself when you feel panicked, anxious, nervous or stressed? What do you say to yourself when you are running short on time, feeling busy, or overwhelmed?  What story do you tell yourself about your self-worth because of the situation or the circumstances that you’re currently living? What is your story and how are you stuck in it? What fear are you feeling because of the story you’re telling yourself? Does this feeling allow you to remain paralyzed, powerless to change your situation? Do you say that you are not providing as well as you could as a wife, as a mom, as a father, as a husband, as an employee, or as an employer? These valuable seconds of self-talk influence you and the environment around you. It is valuable to make these distinctions about your self-talk if you wish to influence your beliefs about yourself and others.

Thoughts and self-talk are powerful influences. The brain responds to these tapes constantly throughout your life. In turn, the body responds as well. As a child, your slate was blank, tabula rasa. Your thoughts were innocent, based on survival….basic survival. All you needed was simple. Through much of my recovery work, I learned about my own mental blocks that allowed me to remain trapped at moments in life where I felt I wasn’t making progress. I realized that being stuck was being created within my thoughts and self-talk. My body was also responding to the negative stress of feeling overwhelmed and busy. Somehow, all of that negative stress would weigh on me, like a heavy blanket and zap my energy. What I needed was to slow down and listen to myself. Regardless of what was happening in the world, I had to stop and listen to my self-talk.      

When we say to ourselves “I am….depressed, angry, upset, irritated, frustrated, etc. We create a state of being for ourselves. We are not describing a situation; we are ascribing to ourselves a value on our self-worth. This becomes the core value of you.  You teach yourself to be that thing, the dominant negative or stressful belief. If this is not what you desire in your life, you need to shift your self-talk or beliefs about your automatic thoughts that say you ARE this negative situation or negative feelings. Thoughts happen in a split second, come and go, so it takes a conscious effort to be deliberate about listening to your self-talk.

This type of shift in thinking is not the same as stating the opposite of what you feel or say to an automatic thought. For example, the automatic thought, “Crap, I am so dumb, can’t believe I forgot” and then saying, “I am not dumb.” The damage to the self-worth has already begun again with the automatic thought. Automatic thoughts cannot be consciously changed until recovery work begins. It takes time, like a journey, to stop having negative automatic thoughts. It is a conscious and deliberate change that occurs over time, with help, through recovery work. The automatic thoughts are based on family of origin and life experiences that you have taken on that continue to replay negative messages about your self-worth. “If I don’t do this, we’re not going make it!” “If we don’t have or I don’t do x, y, and z….then I will keep feeling shame, self-loathing, etc.” Through recovery work at Family Tree Counseling, serving marital and individual counseling to the Indianapolis area, these types of tapes can be eliminated and replaced with self affirming and truthful tapes that help you to create a more affirming life for yourself.   

“Is He Worth Therapy?”

Dealing with someone you love who feels distant, uncommitted, and is possibly having an affair can be gut wrenching and painful. The sting of  betrayal, the lousy levels of intimacy, and the all around detachment is the last thing you thought you would end up with, especially when you told yourself you weren’t going to be one of those women “who got walked all over and abandoned.”  You told yourself that you would remain independent, support yourself as best as possible, because you knew all too well the pitfalls of a man who doesn’t REALLY love you. Or are you the more patient type, saying to yourself, “I was taught to love him through it and I will stay” but the whole time you’re feeling victimized, praying for mercy. This may have well been one of your greatest fears…. 

Does this sound like you? Are you relating to the situation? Couples going through scary and challenging times in their relationships often ask, “Is therapy   really worth it? Is he going to be worth all the work I have to do if he’s just going to keep cheating or remain uncommitted?”  One spouse states, ”I’m going to keep  coming even if she doesn’t, because I see the benefit  of what I’m learning here.” This particular case is around a spouse who is having a tough time allowing herself to feel the emotions of her painful and abandoning childhood, so she attends sessions more sporadically, while her husband attends regularly. The preceding case involves addictions with Internet porn, sex-ting, and emotional affairs. The husband’s vague and dishonest responses to his wife’s constant questioning about nude photos of his female friends drives his wife to the edge, leaving her further isolated, desperate, and void of affection, like a starved dog.

What becomes clear in the counseling sessions are the family backgrounds that have influenced the break of intimacy this couple and many couples come to face in marriage. What therapy provides is a clearer picture of truth about who each person is in the marriage, rather than just a “cheater” and a “victim.” The music and dance that the couple is performing is perfectly orchestrated by their childhood and current life situations. One desperate to get away and the other desperate to be closer. When each person in a relationship is resigned to desperation, feelings of abandonment, betrayal, cut-off, lack of affection, lack of being understood, and of belonging are fiercely triggered. Basic needs are not being met. Eventually, someone will respond as best as they know how, which may cause pain for the other. These basic, core needs are similar to our younger, childlike needs, which are crucial to our survival. So the painful dance between the two continues and progresses, however viciously and disconnected, recreating the feelings of our past and become expressed and real in our present. This is often followed with anxiety, panic attacks, shame, guilt, addictions, pain numbing behaviors, or emotional and physical cut-off, and sometimes abusive behaviors. Once these types of behaviors are occurring, gaining clarity in a nightmarish storm is almost impossible without some guidance. Without therapy, the dance becomes a way of life, both people lost in the shuffle, or should I say, “The Hustle….”

The real issues the couple is facing can resurface with therapy, with some guidance for a deeper understanding of truth. In the end, the real issues are not about the betrayal alone. The behavior is simply the dysfunctional intimacy revealing and expressing itself in a final act of desperation. The work is to continue looking deeper, to gain clarity about the motives and intentions that drive the behaviors. To remain focused on the pain experienced from the behavior is only the beginning. If each person in the relationship is dead set on blaming and pointing the finger at the other, then a smoke screen is being created by someone who is being motivated not to see themselves in the mirror of their relationship. Just saying “Stop doing what you’re doing because it’s wrong and you’re a terrible person” does not work.  True recovery begins when each person’s shame, guilt, low self-esteem, pain, anger, and lack of trust can be managed enough to see the other person’s flaws in a non-judgmental light. Without the reactive filters of severe pain, one can forensically see the other person with less judgement. The cheating husband is no longer a villain in a bad movie, but with a lot of patience and grace, each spouse can see the other for the broken, highly functioning dysfunctional person they chose. More importantly, each person can see themselves in a more truth filled light. An illuminated view that eventually becomes more empowering compared to the “Whoa is me, I’m a victim” stance.

Whatever the addiction, workaholism, approval seeking, sex, people relationships, gossiping, shopping, drinking….all create a lack of intimacy with others and worse, yourself. Treating the behavior is not enough. Once the behavior stops, the feelings that were being managed by the addiction will erupt. So the choice is to blow yourself up or seek therapy. Choose the latter, even if you are the only bloom in the desert, at least you have yourself. You will gain the most important person you lost, YOU!