From Exceptional Marriage
May. 7th, 2007 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
locus_ofcontro"It's Your Fault!"
Disengaging from the Cycle of Blame
You wake up in the middle of the night asking yourself "Am I really miserable to be around?" This is what your spouse had suggested earlier in the day during a conflict over where to go this coming weekend. The phone conversation with your lover ends badly and for the remainder of the day you cannot shake off its effects. An argument you have during a 3 hour car trip to your in-laws leads nowhere and tension permeates the dead air.
Conflict in our committed relationships is never any fun. In fact it is often excruciatingly distressing. It knocks us off our carefully constructed edifice of self worth. It leaves us feeling shaky and raw. We never want it, we strive to avoid it and yet we keep creating it.
The DNA of conflict is resistance. We struggle against having to feel things we don't wish to feel. Hurt, disappointment, and humiliation are best left untouched. So we learn to blame. Each one of us has been well schooled in the fine art of blame. We have all been led to believe that assigning fault is the solution to conflict. Either I'm to blame or you are, but somebody is at fault. When we engage in conflict with our loved one we are resisting taking the blame because is a threat to our self worth. No matter how grand the façade, deep in our marrow we all feel insecure.
In a blame-based culture we are led to believe that by affixing a simple cause to anything that goes wrong, we somehow resolve it. Witness the child who learns to say "bad chair" when she stubs her toe on it. Blame comes from an over investment in defining everything in a good/bad dichotomy. "I'm right - you're wrong" thinking lies at the heart of blame. Or, we can accept the blame and say "I'm wrong - you're right." But this is a tremendous over simplification of reality and is a dead end to our conflict.
Marcia and I believe that conflict is crucial to the development of an exceptional relationship. But mostly it gets bogged down in blame. The three big problems with blame are:
1. It stems from this over-simplified cause and effect thinking. Either the problem lies with you or with me. This is characterized by the "If - then" perspective. "If you were just more romantic, then I would want to have sex with you more." This sounds so appealingly obvious that you may even get your spouse to buy it. In a sense it may even hold some truth, but not nearly a complete enough truth. What would happen if you asked yourself, "So why did I marry someone who's not so romantic?" Or, "How would I really react if suddenly he became Don Juan DeMarco." You see, blame is just way too easy and it leaves us stuck on the most basic level of conflict. If the phrase "If only you ---" is either expressed or implied, you can rest assured that blame is loitering in that neighborhood.
2. Blame also comes from a place of what is called negative intention. It arises from a destructive or anti-constructive place, where we choose punishment over intimacy. This is what makes us resist hearing each other. The negative intent to make each other feel badly is what separates blame from taking responsibility. We take responsibility from a place of compassion (for ourselves and for our partners.) We blame from a place of rejection. We affix blame, we accept responsibility. Blame invites humiliation, responsibility invokes humility. If we have an intention to see the truth, which means seeing the whole picture, we can dissolve the resistance. So if you can see that your desire for your partner to be more romantic is one piece of a larger picture and that what you really want most is the truth - perhaps to find out why it is difficult for him to express himself in that way, then you move away from simply making him feel inadequate. Your partner's resistance may dissolve from this type of interaction. We are all sensitive creatures and we feel the hostility in each other's blame. We want to blame and hurt back, creating a vicious cycle of anger and distance.
3. Finally, blame keeps us deadlocked. There's no room for growth. Without growth eventually our hearts grow harder and more defended. Increasingly we see each other in a negative light. We stare at each other through rust colored glasses. We fixate on what we don't like and goodness fades into the cobwebs of our consciousness. There is no way out from the blame exchange, so we cannot change. We stagnate because blame is the easier path. Little effort is required. As Jeffrey Kottler puts it, "Given a choice between two possible courses of action doing what you are already doing [blame] or doing something else [responsibility] you are probably going to select what you are already doing. It is easy. You have had years of practice. Even if you know that you will encounter some aggravation, it is predictable pain." A key to an exceptional relationship is a willingness to engage the unpredictable, foregoing the devil that you know. The lifeless energy of blame leaves us clinging to the familiar confines of a cloistered heart. When we blame we avoid having to feel our more vulnerable emotions. To enter the less familiar places where our truly tender feelings lie is to embrace the uncertainty of what might emerge. Yes, I could be rejected and be forced to feel that pain, but, more likely, I will be met. I will discover that hearts can indeed open to each other even in our imperfection.
Take a look at the routine ways your relationship gets bogged down in blame. Perhaps it would help to admit, at least to yourself that you have a negative intent to make your partner feel badly. Maybe you can extricate yourself from the blame box and ask your partner to reveal the mystery behind the things she does that frustrate you so much. Are you willing to know the rest of the story, or are you content to dither about in the domain of blame? You do have a choice.
Disengaging from the Cycle of Blame
You wake up in the middle of the night asking yourself "Am I really miserable to be around?" This is what your spouse had suggested earlier in the day during a conflict over where to go this coming weekend. The phone conversation with your lover ends badly and for the remainder of the day you cannot shake off its effects. An argument you have during a 3 hour car trip to your in-laws leads nowhere and tension permeates the dead air.
Conflict in our committed relationships is never any fun. In fact it is often excruciatingly distressing. It knocks us off our carefully constructed edifice of self worth. It leaves us feeling shaky and raw. We never want it, we strive to avoid it and yet we keep creating it.
The DNA of conflict is resistance. We struggle against having to feel things we don't wish to feel. Hurt, disappointment, and humiliation are best left untouched. So we learn to blame. Each one of us has been well schooled in the fine art of blame. We have all been led to believe that assigning fault is the solution to conflict. Either I'm to blame or you are, but somebody is at fault. When we engage in conflict with our loved one we are resisting taking the blame because is a threat to our self worth. No matter how grand the façade, deep in our marrow we all feel insecure.
In a blame-based culture we are led to believe that by affixing a simple cause to anything that goes wrong, we somehow resolve it. Witness the child who learns to say "bad chair" when she stubs her toe on it. Blame comes from an over investment in defining everything in a good/bad dichotomy. "I'm right - you're wrong" thinking lies at the heart of blame. Or, we can accept the blame and say "I'm wrong - you're right." But this is a tremendous over simplification of reality and is a dead end to our conflict.
Marcia and I believe that conflict is crucial to the development of an exceptional relationship. But mostly it gets bogged down in blame. The three big problems with blame are:
1. It stems from this over-simplified cause and effect thinking. Either the problem lies with you or with me. This is characterized by the "If - then" perspective. "If you were just more romantic, then I would want to have sex with you more." This sounds so appealingly obvious that you may even get your spouse to buy it. In a sense it may even hold some truth, but not nearly a complete enough truth. What would happen if you asked yourself, "So why did I marry someone who's not so romantic?" Or, "How would I really react if suddenly he became Don Juan DeMarco." You see, blame is just way too easy and it leaves us stuck on the most basic level of conflict. If the phrase "If only you ---" is either expressed or implied, you can rest assured that blame is loitering in that neighborhood.
2. Blame also comes from a place of what is called negative intention. It arises from a destructive or anti-constructive place, where we choose punishment over intimacy. This is what makes us resist hearing each other. The negative intent to make each other feel badly is what separates blame from taking responsibility. We take responsibility from a place of compassion (for ourselves and for our partners.) We blame from a place of rejection. We affix blame, we accept responsibility. Blame invites humiliation, responsibility invokes humility. If we have an intention to see the truth, which means seeing the whole picture, we can dissolve the resistance. So if you can see that your desire for your partner to be more romantic is one piece of a larger picture and that what you really want most is the truth - perhaps to find out why it is difficult for him to express himself in that way, then you move away from simply making him feel inadequate. Your partner's resistance may dissolve from this type of interaction. We are all sensitive creatures and we feel the hostility in each other's blame. We want to blame and hurt back, creating a vicious cycle of anger and distance.
3. Finally, blame keeps us deadlocked. There's no room for growth. Without growth eventually our hearts grow harder and more defended. Increasingly we see each other in a negative light. We stare at each other through rust colored glasses. We fixate on what we don't like and goodness fades into the cobwebs of our consciousness. There is no way out from the blame exchange, so we cannot change. We stagnate because blame is the easier path. Little effort is required. As Jeffrey Kottler puts it, "Given a choice between two possible courses of action doing what you are already doing [blame] or doing something else [responsibility] you are probably going to select what you are already doing. It is easy. You have had years of practice. Even if you know that you will encounter some aggravation, it is predictable pain." A key to an exceptional relationship is a willingness to engage the unpredictable, foregoing the devil that you know. The lifeless energy of blame leaves us clinging to the familiar confines of a cloistered heart. When we blame we avoid having to feel our more vulnerable emotions. To enter the less familiar places where our truly tender feelings lie is to embrace the uncertainty of what might emerge. Yes, I could be rejected and be forced to feel that pain, but, more likely, I will be met. I will discover that hearts can indeed open to each other even in our imperfection.
Take a look at the routine ways your relationship gets bogged down in blame. Perhaps it would help to admit, at least to yourself that you have a negative intent to make your partner feel badly. Maybe you can extricate yourself from the blame box and ask your partner to reveal the mystery behind the things she does that frustrate you so much. Are you willing to know the rest of the story, or are you content to dither about in the domain of blame? You do have a choice.
