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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Feeling disconnected? Feeling as though all these folks standing around grinning, chatting, sipping from their clinking glasses are in on some secret of contentment and success that has somehow eluded you? Wondering what it is that they know that you don’t know . . . and don’t know how to find out? Now, remember the last time you felt this way. Remember when all your body parts didn’t quite fit? Remember when the sight of a certain ‘someone’ made your body tingle and your brain go numb? Remember the first time you felt all alone in a crowd? Remember back to when you were the only person in the entire world who ever felt this way: the time of favorite songs (that made your heart ache) and trying to do the ‘right’ things with the ‘right’ people at the ‘right’ time so that maybe eventually you’d belong? Remember how you felt when you were convinced that you didn’t belong? like you’d never belong? like nobody understood you? like you were alone?

Adolescence graces each of us with over-the-top social awkwardness and emotional drama. We come to realize, perhaps for the first time, what being isolated, disconnected, and alone can mean. Maybe it’s somewhat easier for those among us who are (or were) popular — I don’t know; that wasn’t me — but nobody gets out of that time of life without some scars of loneliness. These scars remain, even when we’re successful at bandaging them up or disguising them under layers of friendships, intimate relationships, careers, successes, families, houses, cars, investments, big-screen TVs and all the other trappings of adulthood. Contrary to those whom we’ve loved and lost and who are ‘gone, but not forgotten,’ the scars of adolescence hide just beneath the surface, ‘forgotten, but not gone.’

The unbearable loneliness of choice (apologies to The Unbearable Lightness of Being) comes only later when our emotional bandages and cosmetics have become worn and soiled and faded. There comes a time in each person’s life when all those emotional salves that held us up and and kept us together after the wounding of adolescence eventually turn on us, transforming from providers of uplifting and supporting scaffolding to become weighty, dragging, tiresome chains that we’d sooner be rid of . . . if only we could. Or what’s worse, we wake up one morning to find them just . . . gone, and there we lie, totally exposed and vulnerable, feeling utterly helpless.

Midlife loneliness comes on as a sickness of an entirely different order of severity from the loneliness we endured as adolescents: absent most of the drama except those flashes of heat when life finally rips and strips away the last vestiges of pretense covering our emotional nakedness. Midlife could be defined as that time when we first become conscious of living “lives of quiet desperation.” The loneliness of midlife invades our awareness in stark contrast to adolescence because, for those of us who have reached some level of spiritual maturity, we have come to understand that nothing from the outside world — no Cinderella or Prince Charming, no Nobel Prize, no C-level office — will ever be able to shield us from our own existential dread. Each of us must, in his or her turn, become Hamlet and realize in our very bones: “To be, or not to be: that is the question.” And, what’s more, we cannot look outside ourselves to define what ‘to be’ will mean. At midlife, there is no escaping choice . . . and it’s consequence.

“I am responsible.” That revelation constitutes the essence of midlife. Not my parents. Not my upbringing. Not my husband, my wife, or my ex. Not my children. Not my boss. Not ‘the establishment’ or the ‘military-industrial complex’ or the government or any other scapegoat imaginable (and there are very, very many to choose from). Not even God will respond to the summons to help us avoid our responsibility. God, Higher Power, the Universe, Whoever put you here, gave you possibilities, gave you circumstances, and gave you choice. The midlife transition is defined as that moment when you finally realize that what you feared all along is fact: you really stand in absolute solitude before your own destiny, at the turning point, without guarantees of any sort.

The existentialist philosophers of the last century lamented loudly over the unbearable loneliness of standing wholly vulnerable before the choice that will determine how the entire rest of our lives play out: “To be, or not to be.” And, like Jean-Paul Sartre, they remind us that “not to chose is a choice.” There’s no avoiding it and no escaping it, once the fact that this choice is yours alone has wedged its way into your consciousness. Unbearable? Yes, it certainly is. Yet, the moment that you seize on that choice that determines not whether but how your life shall be remade represents the moment that you have become most fully human, most fully alive!

Standing before that moment, in total clarity of awareness, you feel the full momentousness of that unbearable loneliness. And then, suddenly, once you’ve made the choice (whatever it may be: to recommit to or leave a marriage, to rebuild or abandon a career, to strike out in a new enterprise for which you feel entirely unprepared, or whatever), you’ll stand in awe of yourself, wondering what you ever feared and why you ever hesitated and what the drama was all about. You’ll learn that, even at the height of facing your most dreaded fears . . . even as you find yourself weighted down by the unbearable loneliness of choice . . . you are not alone.

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

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The fundamental essence of hell lies in an absolute isolation. In their attempt to transform the lives of criminals, the Quakers who designed the original penitentiary system (a place where wrong-doers could do penance and thereby reform) envisioned them as places where men and women would spend time in solitude and contemplation. Instead the total isolation that these people experience frequently drove them mad. We humans are at the core social beings; even infants deprived of social contact (and touch) will die. The hell that we create for ourselves and upon which the descriptions of perdition are based is a state of utter aloneness. Some have said, “If I’m going to hell, I’ll have a lot of good company.” On the contrary: in hell there would be no “good company” . . . in fact, there would be no company at all!

Why am I bringing up what are essentially philosophical and theological speculations in an article about midlife? Whether hell as a state in the afterlife exists or not is surely debatable. What’s not open to question, however, is that people can too easily create for themselves a hell on earth by succumbing to their fears — particularly their subconscious fears. I think that’s the reason why Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Hell begins when we allow ourselves to be victimized by our subconscious fears and where it ends, well . . . who knows? How hard is it, after all to look deeply at yourself in the mirror? Whom do you see there? Do you register a shock every time you see yourself as you really are, rather than that self you imagine yourself to be as you face the world? For most people reading this today, you’re not 20 years old anymore. The reality of aging is there for everyone (but you) to ponder whenever they see you. How does that make you feel?

If you’re holding on to that image you have of the 20-year-old (and who isn’t), what are you holding on to, and why? From conception until death (and, I’m convinced, beyond), our human existence, mirroring the evolution of the universe itself, is characterized by one factor: growth. We can (and often do) stop or stunt our growth, but we can never reverse it. 168 hours of opportunity pass by us every week, regardless of how we choose to use or waste it. In this universe, at least, time seems to move inexorably forward. As we grow, however, we experience two fundamental flows of energy: at times we acquire; at other times, we relinquish. It’s the ebb and flow of every life that bouys up our growth experience like the tides. Youth is designed for acquisition: allowing us to gain whatever we need to sustain and foster our life energies as we grow. Aging, on the other hand, is marked by relinquishment. The principle lesson of the whole of life consists of learning to let go.

Midlife — at whatever age it may come — represents a tipping point in your growth: the point where acquisition steps back and allows relinquishment to take center stage. This is the way life has to be, because acquisition serves as the support to growth, not its destiny. Our true destiny as human beings consists in transitioning into mature spiritual beings. All of our youth, all of our acquisitions, even our physical existence itself serves only to support and enable that process to progress. Our culture has it all wrong, but Robert Browning got it remarkably right in his poem, Rabbi Ben Ezra, when he wrote:

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith ‘A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!’

I highly recommend that you read the poem in its entirety, because it makes my point abundantly clear. Carrie Pierce, who was guest on my internet radio program recently talked about our culture’s worship of youth. That made me wonder. I’m starting to believe that it’s not so much a ‘worship’ as an idolatry: replacing the essential with the peripheral out of fear.You see, in order for someone to be able to set aside the peripheral and embrace the essential, he or she must give up, once and for all, the illusion (and delusion) of self-sufficiency.

It’s not until we humans reach the point where our best-laid plans have failed, where all the security we have so carefully amassed has proven useless, when all our striving to maintain our physical strength and beauty turned to vanity under the glare of bright lights or the challenge of a long and steep flight of stairs, when all those personal flaws that we’ve so carefully hidden from the world appear for all to see, that we begin to acknowledge the truth about ourselves: our true destiny lies within and in relationship with others. Paradise (now and hereafter) lies in our interdependence. An old (and favorite) saying of mine goes like this: Heaven would be hell for a godless person. The world’s greatest prayer is composed of four letters: ‘help!’ Isn’t it our own cowardice (our fear of admitting our dependency) that keeps us from uttering that prayer? Cowardice that prompts us to keep up appearances so that the outside gives the lie to what’s really happening within? If it’s our secrets that keep us sick, then isn’t cowardice the disease?

And, the road to hell — living forever alone — is paved, not with good intentions, but with self-reliance.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

In a recent article ("Sounding the Emotional Depths"), I talked about the four levels of emotion that people (both men and women) experience during the midlife transition: they feel — from the outside in — 'glad', 'sad', 'mad' and 'scared'. The guys in denial only want to feel 'glad'. If they were to acknowledge that those other three, much more uncomfortable, emotions were underlying their superficial OK-ness, they'd be afraid that they'd have actually to feel these things. And, of course, they'd be right. As a result, most males tend to behave exactly the opposite from what's natural for most females. I guess we shouldn't be surprised at that, should we?

In my estimation, there exists only four ways of dealing with the midlife transition situation, and, of the four, the only one that actually alleviates the situation is an attitude of active and committed acceptance. That, in effect, is the road that women, by nature and by culture, normally take. The other three approaches are, sadly enough, dysfunctional. As you probably guessed, these are the tools that most men use to deal with their feelings of being uncomfortable in their skin. These three approaches are: denial (or avoidance), blame (or deflection) and isolation.

None of these approaches give you any tools whatever for dealing with the real issues. In fact, they're quite the opposite. They provide convenient excuses and smoke screens to keep the problems covered up so that you can't deal with them. Denial is the most straight-forward of the three dysfunctional approaches. It reminds me of Mad Magazine's famous mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, and his equally-famous motto: "What — Me Worry? Or, from Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, where Igor responds to an offer of corrective surgery on his hump with, "Hump? What hump?" If it's not there, why deal with it?

The major drawback to this sort of denial can be addressed with simple cause and effect: if there's no cause, then why are you experiencing the effects? As a result, denial most often yields to blame. Those nasty emotions may be undeniable enough, but you don't have to do anything about them if they're not yours. And, if they're not yours, then they must belong to someone else: someone else must be causing them, and, therefore, they're someone else's fault (but not yours). Now that you've come to that conclusion, all that's left for you to do is to find out who's the cause of your pain and eliminate him (or her). So begins the blame game, or 'pin the fault on the scape goat' (a very old, but very popular pastime).

Now, even this approach has quite an evident (but hardly obvious to the operator) drawback because, once you've gotten rid of the apparent perpetrator, you'll quickly discover that the restlessness, irritability, and discontent are still there. Many times, the poor blamer just changes targets, but, no matter how many targets he may eliminate (his boss, his wife, his enemies, his friends . . . ), the underlying problem remains untouched.

The last thing that someone in either of these states of dysfunction wants to do is to share his feelings with someone else. If he talks about his feelings to someone else, he first of all has to acknowledge that they're there ("Hump? What hump?"). And, if the campaign to attack and eliminate the supposed perpetrators of injustice hasn't achieved its objectives (as, of course, it never could), then there'd be the added problem with having to talk about the shame of failure and the additional guilt about attacking and eliminating a person who's been basically an innocent character in this fantastic drama. Therefore, there'll be no sharing on these topics!

The more isolated this poor guy in midlife becomes, the more painful his restlessness, irritability, and discontent becomes. And why not? Like an untreated abscess, the deeper layers of his anger and his fears are left untouched, untreated, and, ultimately, unrecognized. What better description could there be of a man in midlife crisis? Before there can be any effective treatment of this painful condition, the patient first has to acknowledge — to accept — that there is a problem and, ultimately, that the problem is his own (and no one else's). Last, and certainly not least, he's going to need to have to accept that he can't handle this alone, accept that he has to share what's going on within him, and, ultimately accept help. Otherwise, that satisfaction that he can't get none of will slip farther, and farther away.

H. Les Brown, MA, FCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

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When you’re first practicing for instrument flight . . . particularly shooting an instrument approach to an airport, you’re flying with your instructor using either a ‘hood’ or ‘foggles’: wearable devices that restrict your vision so that you can’t see outside the cockpit of your aircraft. It simulates the zero-visibility conditions that you’d encounter in real instrument flight. Only toward the end of your extensive training period will your instructor take you up into real instrument conditions (the likelihood of experiencing debilitating spacial disorientation is rather high for a novice — like in the fatal situation experienced by John Kennedy, Jr. some years ago). I have to tell you, though, that there are few experiences more gratifying than, for the first time, breaking out of a true cloud cover and seeing the end of your runway appear directly in front of you perfectly aligned for landing.

One of the features that gives aircraft navigation — and instrument flight — the extreme precision that it has today (and also one of the reasons why a single pilot becomes so incredibly busy during an instrument approach) is the redundancy of navigational methods and devices currently available. There’s a variety of different systems, compass (dead reckoning), ADF (automatic direction finder), VOR (very high frequency omnidirectional radio beacon), GPS (global positioning system), and ILS (instrument landing system), just to name some. Newer systems are continuing to be introduced as avionics become more sophisticated. The higher the redundancy factor, the more accurate (and trustworthy) the navigation.

How can we relate all this to men at midlife? It doesn’t take much of stretch of imagination to be able to relate decision-making during the midlife transition to navigating through a thick cloud cover. Disorientation in midlife can have the same kinds of fatal effects as in powered flight, only in the latter case, the consequences come at you with a good deal more suddenness. The technical term is ‘powered flight into terrain.’ That’s a fancy name for a crash. In the case of disorientation during the midlife transition, it may spell the end of a career, the loss of a precious relationship, or much, much worse. In that case, how do you navigate your way through the clouds of midlife? How do assure yourself of accuracy for your navigational decisions? And where are you going to get the redundancy you’re going to require to avoid getting lured off course by a rogue signal?

For guys, this whole process can be too demanding. After all, men are culturally programmed to be ruggedly individualistic and self-reliant. For whatever reasons, our English-speaking North American culture uses the incredibly powerful psychological motivator shame to reinforce men’s required isolation. If you dare to allow yourself to become reliant on others in any meaningful way, says our culture, then you’re not a ‘real man’. You’re a cultural outcast and pariah, not only to other men but, more particularly, to your own sense of masculinity. Remember the difference between ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’: guilt is the negative emotion you feel when you recognize that you have done something bad; shame is the negative emotion you feel when you begin to believe that you are bad (incompetent, defective, inadequate, or unacceptable).

Whereas women are very much accustomed to re-setting their inner moral compass by their constant interrelationships with trusted people in their environment: people with whom they can be comfortable sharing their innermost secrets and most hidden fears, men have no such facility. What’s the advantage that women have in their capacity to share their secrets with one another? It gives them the sense that they’re not unique, and that others are dealing with the same issues that they are and at the same time. It’s not about going around from person to person ‘shopping’ for advice; the advice that’s exchanged turns out to be more or less irrelevant. It provides women with that sense of redundancy in their moral navigation systems that helps them to gain (and maintain) a sense of confidence in their own right judgment.

In most cases (except where they are introduced to a depth of personal spirituality that goes quite deeply into the core of their moral decision-making process), men have to fly by the seat of their pants, guessing and hoping that they’re at least close to being on-course. When your own inner compass is your sole navigational aid, the kind of pin-point accuracy that I’ve been talking about here remains nearly inaccessible to you. Think about how often your interpretations of other people’s behavior winds up being off the mark. It’s the old story of "What’s the matter with you, are you blind???" And the answer comes back, "Yes." Without the depth of communication that women enjoy, men just have to watch one another from the outside and guess as to what’s really happening inside. There’s not much chance for precision there.

It’s time that 21st Century men get over their cultural biases and start adopting an attitude that’s less arrogant, self-reliant and shame-based, and adopt a healthier attitude that’s more personally vulnerable and more open to others’ experiences and viewpoints. Bouncing your problems and the decisions that you’re being faced with off other people, and allow them the possibility of doing the same with you can provide you with the kind of navigational redundancy that every instrument pilot demands. If nothing else, the midlife transition is marked with the inability to rely on all the old assumptions, habits, and behavior patterns that used to get you by. In midlife, you’re genuinely flying blind. If you want to get through it without a ‘hard landing,’ it would benefit you to learn new and other-centered ways of evaluating your choices and making the decisions that will effect (for better or worse) the rest of your life . . . starting now.

H. Les Brown, MA, FCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

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