Excerpts from:
Together: A Relationship Survival Kit
Excerpt #1
You are the most important factor in all of your relationships. In fact, you are the only common element in every single relationship you have. How are your relationships going? If you are like most people, you are probably winning some and losing some. Further, if you are like most of us, you have probably had more training and instruction in running the dishwasher or the lawn mower than you have had in “running” relationships.
You learned about relationships and how they should or could be from the way you were treated as a little child and from observing other people’s relationships-in real life and in the media. This method of learning would work just fine if you had great and growing relationships to learn from, if the people you observed (parents, friends, relatives, characters on TV, in the movies, or in books) were living enlightened and loving relationships.
If this were so, you could just watch others carefully, take good notes, copy their actions and voila! you could have great relationships, too. But this probably is not the case. Most relationships tend to be less-than-inspiring, boring, or worse. So you tell yourself, “My relationships will be different, I won’t be like them.” You throw yourself into relationships with hope, determination, lots of emotion, and not much information on how to do it differently.
Despite your best intentions, somewhere down the relationship road, you catch yourself- “doing it” just like mom and dad, just like Bertha, just like Fred. Lacking a clear model for how to do relationships differently, or even for what a good relationship looks like in action, you default to the same familiar behaviors and patterns that didn’t work for mom and dad, didn’t work for Lucy and Desi, and guess what? They didn’t work for you either.
You may become so discouraged that you walk (or run) away from relationships to start all over again with new and “better” people, only to find yourself and your partners again repeating the same patterns with, not so surprisingly, the same discouraging results.
How does this happen? Are the people you pic bad, unlovable, wrong? Are you? Is this just the way it is? No, no, and no. You and they are not bad, not sick, not wrong, but perhaps misguided or more accurately, unguided.
Excerpt #2
Roadblock #1: Stuff
“Stuff” refers to leftover hurts, slights, injuries, and grievances from the past. Everyone has stuff, and stuff deserves to be looked at compassionately and with an eye to resolving or dealing with it.
It doesn’t help you to be a better or more loving person to “stuff you stuff” or to pretend that you don’t have hurts from the past, In fact, ignoring your stuff is how it got to be a problem in the first place. When you ignore or deny your hurts and resentments, you rob yourself of the opportunity to free yourself from them, to learn, and to live fully in the present. Unresolved pain becomes “baggage” or your “stuff.”
One day is enough to live through at a time; you don’t need to drag all the bad days you ever had with you-just in case something similar happens again. Bad days will not protect you; they will not defend you.
Stuff has a way of distorting lives. Have you ever “overreacted” to some event? Maybe a friend didn’t call you on your birthday, so you spent a week feeling depressed and angry? Or your car wouldn’t start, so you dented the fender with your fist? Most of us have “overreacted” to some situation, The event might be trivial, like someone cutting us off on the highway, but we respond with great anger. We may even do something dangerous-like chasing the “offending” car down the highway at 80 miles per hour!
Now, where does this enormous anger come from? None of the events mentioned here is serious enough to warrant such a strong response. In all these cases, we are not just reacting to the moment, which in reality is not too tough to handle. We are spilling over with leftover anger, anger we did not express at the appropriate time when the original event occurred. We are conjuring up hurts and grievances from the past; old hurt is dredged up by the new hurt; old anger is dredged up by the new anger.
You see, the old feelings packed away did not go away-no more than the old clothes packed away in the garage have gone away. We may ignore them, even forget about them for a while, but they are right there waiting for an opportunity to intrude on the present
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