Do we really need to ask why a preoccupation with the big issues eventually leads to failure and unhappiness in careers, in relationships, and in regard to your personal health and well-being? When it comes to your health, what happens when you wait until things get really bad (a crisis) before looking for treatment? Don’t you then find yourself racing to beat the pathology to the finish line? The closer you allow issues to come to the tipping point (that point at which failure is unavoidable), the more important and urgent the need to engage in corrective action becomes, and the lesser your chances of meeting that challenge successfully. At the same time, the more your resources are dedicated to handling any crisis, the greater the chances will be for other issues to approach their tipping points.

Conserving your energies to handle the big issues does little to address or solve them; in fact, the approach that focuses only (or mainly) on the important things risks creating an error cascade. Let me explain. An error cascade begins with just one overlooked detail. When that detail goes wrong, it becomes an attention grabber (Quadrant One again). While your attention is focused on taking care of that one errant detail, you ignore several other details that are needing your attention. As your attention is drawn away in a rapidly-increasing complex of (relatively) minor failures, your capacity for reacting to the situation erodes until you are unable to stop a catastrophic collapse of the system. The disasters at Three Mile Island and, to an even greater degree, at Chernobyl are graphic cases in point.

As early as the 14th Century, we find the following poem:

For Want of a Nail

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

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Must couples in trouble necessarily fail? No, not necessarily: no healthy couple is doomed to failure. In fact, the only ‘doomed’ relationships are those where one or both partners are unapologetically physically or emotionally abusive . Without a doubt, the only realistic option for someone who finds her- or himself in a fundamentally abusive or exploitative relationship is to exit immediately. Apart from that, I believe that many (if not all) relationships “on the rocks” could be healed under the right circumstances. From my perspective, the fact that this healing so often fails to take place could be an indication that one or both of the partners have stopped listening. Additionally, ceasing to listen indicates a spiritual problem. Let me explain.

It would seem that the  person who hears another’s voice, but is no longer committed to listening to what the other has to say has given up on her or his partner, as well as their relationship together. If you look more closely, however, it soon becomes clear that the person has actually given up on him- or herself. Empathetic listening and appreciative inquiry represent a three-fold choice: 1) to accept the other, 2) to trust the other, and 3) to engage with the other. Closing off the lines of communication also represents a choice: to cease accepting, trusting and engaging with one’s partner. Before I relate this to fundamental spiritual principles, let’s look briefly at each choice.

The choice to accept another human being is foundational. True acceptance represents a fundamental option to see in the other person another self, with exactly the same sorts of strengths and weaknesses that we ourselves possess. This choice to acknowledge the other person as another self  has two destructive opposites. The first perversion of acceptance we call ‘exploitation‘. Philosopher Martin Buber contrasts these approaches with the terms I-Thou (for true acceptance of the other), and I-It (for exploitation). To see your partner merely in terms of his or her usefulness (like a tool or a piece of furniture) or her or his capacity to satisfy you represents a fundamental denial of humanity on your part. The second perversion of the choice to accept your partner shows itself as conditional acceptance. In brief, “I’ll accept you if you do such-and-such or so-and-so.” Conditional acceptance of another puts you in the position of being their judge, jury and executioner. In fact, it represents nothing less than your attempt to usurp the position in your partner’s life properly held by God alone.

Next, let’s look at the choice not to trust your partner. Why don’t you trust her or him? Because you’ve been hurt before? The refusal to trust your partner goes way beyond self-preservation. Once again, it is passing a judgment of condemnation on another person — another self — who exhibits the same sorts of faults and failings that you yourself exhibit. In fact, if the truth were known, the faults and failings that you find most easy to condemn and most difficult to forgive in others are the very ones that you exhibit most strongly yourself. In fact, the two keys that are absolutely essential to unlocking both acceptance and trust are these: first, to acknowledge an identical humanity in both yourself and the other, and, second, to commit yourself to the path of unconditional forgiveness. Who cannot look at the plight of even the most desperate of people around us and not be able truthfully to say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I?” The greatest message of Christianity — and also, I’m afraid,  its most forgotten and neglected — is simply this: unconditional, unlimited forgiveness. If you cannot forgive unconditionally, you cannot trust for very long.

The final choice is the choice to engage with your partner. If you refuse to engage with her or him, you thereby give credence to the (Jungian) ego’s false belief that you are vulnerable and need protection. It’s the same force that drives people’s frantic searching for that illusive (and illusory) ‘security’ that they believe will fix everything and protect them from danger. Once again, it would be foolish to put ourselves in harm’s way by engaging with an abusive partner. We owe it to ourselves and to them to take the necessary precautions so as not to allow ourselves to become victims of deliberate abuse. However, if you imagine that refusing to engage with your well-intentioned partner will grant you some sort of immunity from harm and from hurt, you are mistaken. Do you believe that spiritually you are invulnerable and that nothing outside of yourself — not even death — can destroy the essence of you? “Greater love has no one,” we have heard, “than to lay down his life for another.” Oddly, dieing for someone can actually be a whole lot easier than living for them.

Finally, what does the choice not to listen say about that person’s spiritual condition? The testimony it gives is nothing short of damning. Personally, I would liken it to what Christians refer to as the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ or the ‘unforgivable sin.’ Here’s what I mean. Whenever I write, I use the terms ‘acceptance,’  ‘trust’ and ‘engagement’ as  synonyms for what are called the ‘theological virtues’, namely: faith, hope , and love. The ‘sin’ against faith is the decision not to accept the will of God exactly as we encounter it in our world. The ‘sin’ against hope is the choice not to trust that our only Source of genuine security is divine providence. The ‘sin’ against love is the refusal to become meaningfully engaged with those we were sent to serve: our fellow creatures who, along with us, share the “image and likeness of God.” If the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ is a refusal to believe that the love of God is powerful enough to forgive us (and so we refuse to ask for forgiveness, and therefore refuse to accept it), then turning a deaf ear to someone we once claimed to love is a ‘sin against love’, for, as we know, the opposite of love is not hate, but deliberate indifference.

What can you do if you find yourself failing to listen? Remember the futility of protecting yourself. What can you protect yourself from? Even more importantly, what are you protecting yourself for? After all, your mission here in this world is not to try (futilely) to keep yourself safe. It’s to share with your fellows (and especially those in relationship with you) the same kind of acceptance, trust, and engagement that your God has shown to you. God hears his people’s cry . . . can you do any less?

And what about you who find yourself ‘learning to love one another’ and your words keep falling on deaf ears? You, too, have the opportunity to pass on the love of God. Your acceptance of the other can be renewed continually. Your trust of the other need never fail or fade. You may stand ever at the ready to engage. However, engagement (love) requires reciprocity. God does not condemn, so how could you? God does not constrain, either (because love can never be forced), but rather waits for all eternity for the other to emerge from his or her isolation and re-engage. You can have the willingness to re-engage, whether or not the other ever seeks it. You may never re-engage as you once did: time and the world goes on while the other chooses to isolate, stagnate, or (what’s worse) repeat the same self-defeating choices and behaviors with other partners. You, on the other hand, have the opportunity to accept and trust and engage with people at every stage and every condition of your life: people who, like you, have chosen to listen not only with their ears, but with their hearts.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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Love is a drug

In 1980, singer Grace Jones recorded the hit song, Love Is a Drug. That reference to love as a narcotic can be remarkably accurate, particularly at midlife. I see huge differences in the forces that drive people to ‘hook up’ during adolescence and young adulthood as compared with what happens at midlife. Obviously, youth is made for experimentation, getting involved in new situations, or trying on a variety of relationships to see which ones might be a good ‘fit’ for creating a family of one’s own. By midlife, all this should have become ‘old hat.’  All, that is, but the desire for companionship, and the thrill of the hunt and the excitement of conquest.  There’s enough of the narcotic in relationship-hunting at both stages of life, but at midlife, there’s a lot less of the ‘family-building’ motive going on. For most people, by midlife, that’s a “been there; done that” experience.

Certainly, illicit relationships (going out on your partner) can happen at any time of life.  When they do, I believe that they’re always narcotic relationships. I mean that seeking or permitting a new relationship while you’re already committed to another partner always represents your attempt to medicate something going on inside you that you don’t want to deal with. For someone who’s already in a relationship to allow her- or himself to get involved with someone else, means that you’re letting yourself get ‘hooked’ on love as a drug so you won’t have to feel (or deal with) what’s going on inside and around you. Narcotics always offer the promise of pain relief. But at what ultimate cost? Nobody who’s ‘hooked’ really looks at the facts (they’ve become too numb) and recognizes that, when the drug wears off, the pain will still be there waiting for you. Even worse, when the drug wears off, you’ll have the additional pain of having to deal with the guilt and shame you’ll eventually have to face for having compromised your values. Oh . . . and I almost forgot: narcotics wind up being very, very, expensive.

I have been in a committed relationship now for over fourteen years (it took me a long time to find someone worth committing to). Like all relationships, we’ve had our ups and downs, our laughing and crying, and our shouting matches. As someone who used to have chronic relationship issues, I find myself often amazed that, although I find other people attractive, and thoughts of what ‘hooking up’ would be like sometimes show up, they’re no more attractive to me than a huge serving of [fill in your favorite grossly fattening desert here]. In both cases, I can genuinely say, “Yum!” without actually wanting to indulge. That’s what people do when they’re committed to living life on life’s terms, rather than looking for the next ‘narcotic’ escape.

Virtual Addiction

“But,” you say, “all I ever do is flirt. I’d never actually do anything about it.” I have to tell you: that doesn’t matter. You don’t actually have to consummate a narcotic relationship to have it give you the escapist ‘high’ you’re looking for. If you’re at all wise, you know that going out on your partner can be very dangerous. A messy divorce or breakup with everybody knowing all about your private business can really mess up a good fantasy.  No matter how you look at it, ‘hooking up’ is really risky business. How can you get the thrill of the hunt and the ecstasy of conquest while minimizing the risk? Behold the internet! It’s private: just the two of you can know. There’s no possibility of being observed by a casual onlooker. There’s no risk of disease. Nobody (so you lead yourself to believe) will be the wiser, and nobody will get hurt. You imagine that you can medicate your problems away through this other person (or people) and thus you can have the best of all worlds.

We call this delusional thinking ‘virtual addiction.’ By ‘hooking up’ over the internet, you get your narcotic at a fraction of the price. If this describes you, you’re missing the hidden costs. While you’re busy numbing your pain (and getting high) with your virtual relationship(s), the pain that’s coming from your primary relationship is growing . . . but you’re unaware of it. In a word, a healthy, fulfilling relationship doesn’t need a narcotic to mask what’s really going on. As you experience the midlife transition, it’s normal for you to experience huge changes in yourself: how you look at your life, how you look at all your relationships, how you look at your career, how you look at your future. All these things shift — often dramatically — during the midlife transition. Regardless of the changes that are going on around you (in your spouse, your family, your job, etc.), the biggest changes are happening in you.

All those things that narcotic relationships may be telling you may be correct. Maybe your spouse no longer loves you. Maybe you made a mistake in your choice relationship. Maybe your future will be entirely different from the one you had imaged for yourself. Any or all of these things may be true. It doesn’t matter! Getting yourself involved in a narcotic relationship (physically or virtually) isn’t going to solve anything. You can look at whatever seriously good feelings you may be generating for yourself from stepping out on your relationship as just a down payment on the pain that you’re storing up for yourself. While you’re off chasing feeling good, the problems you’re escaping are busy festering and getting worse. Sooner or later, your house of cards is going to come crashing down and, strangely enough, you already know that’s true. Guilty people subconsciously want to get caught.

Midlife Mastery

If you’re involved in a narcotic relationship, what do you need to do to get ‘clean and sober’? First and foremost: tell yourself the truth. Perhaps the biggest betrayal that you’re experiencing here is your betrayal of yourself. Put aside for a time your fears of not getting your relationship ‘fix.’ Recognize that your perspective has become warped. Get a confidant in whom you can have total trust (for example, hire a therapist). Start talking out loud about what’s going on with you. You’ll be amazed how ridiculous your addictive thoughts sound when you’re speaking them aloud to someone else. Explore with your confidant all those things about your life that you’re trying to avoid dealing with. Be courageous now (in facing your fears), or go down to flaming defeat later (when your relationships blow up in your face). The choice is yours.

I’ve often said that midlife presents each of us with the opportunity to come to terms physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually with the person who we really are. It’s perhaps the greatest challenge to our courage and integrity that we’ll ever face. There are so many and varied ways that we humans can avoid having to deal with these issues; but the only way to resolve them is head-on. Every minute that you continue to use things like narcotic relationships to maintain your avoidance, you also continue to accrue emotional and spiritual interest in terms of the suffering you’re going to have to face eventually. As they tell us in the ad: “Eventually . . . . why not now?”

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

By their very nature, our emotions are reactive. They’re indicative that something (for better or worse) is going on with us. We’re liking or disliking, fearing or fighting something in our environment. When we’re hit with one of these life-bombs, our emotions first generally register shock and disbelief. We feel the emotional ‘kick in the gut’ that initially (at least) sends us reeling. Then, quickly or slowly, we progress through the famous Five Stages of Grief that Elizabeth Kübler-Ross wrote about: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance. It’s critical that people develop effective personal strategies for dealing with these midlife ‘bombs’ because, as likely as not, regardless of what our past experience has been, there are probably more just like them yet to come.

Today, I don’t want to talk specifically about the emotional ‘shock and awe’ that comes from experiencing one of these events. There’s already a lot a material out there on handling crises that arrive during midlife: why we’re vulnerable to them and how to cope with them when they come. Many people don’t realize that, even after surviving one of these ‘bombs’ and getting yourself all the way to acceptance, you still have to face the fallout. It seems to me, from my own experience, that there are three kinds of fallout from an emotional blast: there’s the permanent fallout (where your whole approach to life is permanently altered, as in the case of a devastating illness or injury), there’s the temporary fallout (where it may take months or years to recover, as in the case of a death or relationship breakup), and finally there’s the episodic fallout (where bouts of emotional distress will appear at seemingly random moments). I think people badly underestimate the effects of this last type of fallout — and they pay a heavy price for it.

Some months ago, I experienced a major disappointment that caused me to change my whole approach to the way I earn my living. It’s bad enough when your boss lays you off; it’s almost worse when you’re your own boss! Sometimes, the hard facts of economic life come along and hit you right between the eyes with a compelling argument that’s hard to ignore or avoid. Changes then have to be made, regardless of how it may feel at the time (in my case, that would be a lot of pain). Once the die is cast and the changes that must be made have been made, time mercifully allows those of us in that situation to work through grieving process. I would hope that those who care about us will be there for us, supporting us as we work through the not-altogether rational deluge of feelings that come marching along as we pass from one landmark to the next: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, at last, acceptance.

Episodic fallout throws an emotional monkey wrench into the whole process because, just when we think that we have the whole thing under control (if not licked), we experience a throw-back to one or more markers along the road that we imagine we’ve long-ago left behind. Suddenly, I’m angry for no reason (or disproportionately angry over something insignificant). Or, I find myself in the middle of the afternoon wanting to cry or deciding to go back to bed rather than join others in some excursion or other. “Wait a minute!” you might say, “what’s going on? There’s nothing wrong, and I’m feeling rotten anyway! Am I going crazy?”

No, you’re not going crazy. You’re just imagining things. You’re not imagining your feelings. You really do feel awful. You’re imagining that that you’re really ‘over it’, just because you’re not aware of the emotional fallout from what has been, for all intents and purposes, a traumatic event. Perhaps you’ve gained enough acceptance to have made the decision to get on with your life. That’s great! It just doesn’t mean that all of your emotions have caught up with your decision. Every trauma involves flash-backs: if not flash-backs where you re-live the traumatic event, then flash-backs of the emotions that accompanied them. We forget that memory is not confined to our little gray cells. There’s body memory as well. All we need to do is to give our body half a chance, and it’ll allow those buried emotions to come cascading out. And, by definition, it’ll happen when we’re least expecting it.

Now what about that fallout shelter? There’s only one simple (but not easy) approach that we can take that will shelter us from these emotional flash-backs from midlife trauma: beware of free-floating emotions! By that I mean that we can actually train ourselves to spot emotions that come out of nowhere and that seem . . . well . . .  just wrong. Let the thought, “Why am I feeling this way?” raise a red flag inside your head. Of course, your first task would be to look around you to ascertain whether something is, indeed, wrong right here and now. Yet, once you’ve done that, and you still can’t justify the way you feel, look around and see if anything is reminding you of past trauma. What are your thoughts telling you? How similar are these thoughts to the thoughts you were having when you were experiencing trauma? What unresolved questions from back then might these feeling be highlighting?

Here’s side note to everyone about free-floating emotions (by that I mean emotions that seem dissociated from your current situation and environment): immediate and past situations are not the only sources for these kinds of emotions. It is possible for sensitive people to ‘pick up on’ the emotions of people around them — particularly people with whom they share a close intimate bond. Furthermore, it is possible to gain or grow that sensitivity. We all have that capacity, and we can choose to grow it. If you are psychically sensitive, or believe that you’re becoming more so, then you have a further distraction that you need to pay attention to. You may have to ask yourself if these free-floating emotions might be coming from someone outside yourself. Look around; see what you can find. If possible, ask the people closest to you how they’re doing.

Turning back to you and to your fallout emotions: I firmly believe that you can learn to manage these feelings, once you’ve recognized them for what they are. Emotions only have the power to disrupt your life so long as they’re not serving their purpose (which is to alert you of what’s going on). As long as you’re aware that you may not be finished with your denial, anger, bargaining and depression, even when you seem to be feeling ‘fine’, when the fallout comes (as it will), you’ll be better able to identify its source and know how to handle it. After all, you’ve already handled it once; this ‘fallout’ is just an encore performance letting you know that there’s more work to be done before you’re finished with it. My parents died fifteen years ago, and I still have pangs of grief once in a while. Your best shelter, then, is this: a) know how to identify free-floating emotions and b) when they come, take good care of yourself, just exactly the way you did when the feelings came the first time. Not all fallout shelters are holes in the ground, you know: don’t forget to turn to your Higher Power at those times. Remember the words of that old hymn: “O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home.”

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

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If you're one of those no-nonsense people who's hard-working and minding your own business, doing everything you're supposed to be doing right now, chances are you're laying the foundation for a doozie. When you wake up one day with your career in a shambles, your family shattered and your health a wreck, at least you'll be able to say, "I worked for it, I owe it to myself, and nobody is going to deprive me of it."

Remember how, in Dickens' Christmas Carol, Jacob Marley showed old Scrooge the links in the chain that he carried that so weighed him down? He told his old business partner how he had forged each link by his own hand, one at a time. And you? What kind of a chain are you forging. On one of the sites where I publish my articles, a critic complained that my thoughts were meaningless double-talk and unrelated to real-world issues like getting yourself hired. I have to admit that he's right: it is meaningless double-talk until you come face to face with your own personal, individual crisis; then you find yourself at a loss as where you are, how you got there, and how in God's name you'll ever get out.

Do I sound a bit irritated? I am. I was just talking with a fellow on a major business network who told me, "The kind of information you're offering is the kind of important information that people need the most. Unfortunately, they're just not interested in it." He's right. People want down-to-earth, meat-and-potatoes, take-it-to-the-bank sorts of information. They want to know 'how to': how to prep for the job interview, how to get their spouses to do what they want them to do, how to do more of what they want to do in less time with fewer bad side effects. Yup! We got a pill for that!

God forbid that we should ask whether that job's right for you. How many years are you going to burn up doing something you hate that leads you nowhere? And, while you're at it, that family that 'you've gotta support' with that soul-killing job cops an attitude a mile wide because you've basically abandoned them, becoming emotionally unavailable. Of course, they're the bad guys in all this because, after all, they're not even grateful to you for breaking your back in a job you hate just 'for them'? And speaking of that back of yours, how well are you handling the extra weight?

Think about it: who's responsible for the mess you're in right now? (Don't tell me it's not a mess . . . I know better!) Maybe you should sit right down and write out a list of all the people who have treated you unfairly and who got you (and keep you) in your current state. Don't forget the government and those criminals on Wall Street. Once you've completed your list (how long is it?), you might want to go back and dream up some fitting punishments for each one of them. What would you like to do to them? When you're all done, here's what I suggest: that you tear up your list and get rid of it. It's crap. There's only one name that should be on that list and that's your own. You're not a victim, you never were, and all the drama in the world that you could create around the people you blame for your own decisions isn't going to deflect that responsibility one bit from where it belongs: on you.

If nothing changes, man, nothing changes! If you've let yourself get caught in a forest of problems and you never make the effort to climb a tree to see where you are, is it any wonder you find yourself going around in circles? You're stuck in a game of your own invention! You don't need more schemes and tactics to get you more of what you already have. What you need are new strategies that can provide you not only with a way out, but with a plan. Build your crisis brick by brick and decision by decision for as long as you want. But when you're finally sick and tired of being sick and tired, come talk to me.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

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