Be Happily Married- Even If Your Partner Won't Do a Thing Page 3
How I’ll feel when my first pain point is OVER:
1.
2.
3.
Now, I’d like you to do that same exercise with your second and third pain points. Take the time to do this right now. It’ll take less than 10 minutes and is TOTALLY worth it!
How I’ll feel when my second pain point is OVER:
1.
2.
3.
How I’ll feel when my third pain point is OVER:
1.
2.
3.
The next time you’re feeling like quitting or giving up, I want you to come back to these three pain points and how you’ll feel when they’re no longer an issue. This is your key to motivating yourself to stick with your commitment over the next three months.
I’ve been clean from a bad drug addiction for many years now. There’s a saying we have in Narcotics Anonymous: “Half measures availed us nothing.” That fits perfectly here. It’s time to go all in. Balls to the wall (boobs to the wall if you’re a woman reading this?). It’s time to change your relationship, even if your partner won’t do a thing.
* * *
3 http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage_divorce_tables.htm and http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/02/13/love-and-marriage/
4 http://www.apa.org/topics/divorce/
5 https://www.amazon.com/Science-Happily-Ever-After-Enduring/dp/037389290X
6 http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/marriage-divorce.htm
7 http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/10/us/studies-find-big-benefits-in-marriage.html
8 https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v72n1/v72n1p11.html
9 http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/happily-ever-after/372573/
10 https://www.amazon.com/30-Lessons-Loving-Americans-Relationships/dp/1594631549
11 http://marriage.psych.ucla.edu/research.html).
12 http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/here-is-what-real-commitment-to-228064
Chapter Three
Self-Awareness
You have to have a healthy relationship with yourself before you can have a healthy relationship with anyone else. I don’t mean that you have to love your thighs in order to really love your partner (since no woman would ever get married again if this was a requirement).
What I do mean is that you have to be able to look at yourself objectively and know your strengths and limitations. You have to know when you’re reacting because you’re hearing your mother’s voice inside your head instead of your partner’s voice in real life. You have to be able to pull back when the real reason you’re upset with your partner is because you’re tired and hungry and not because your partner made the HUGE, clearly divorce-worthy mistake of leaving the cap off the toothpaste (I’m being sarcastic— if you didn’t get that, you need to read faster).
Self-awareness is the key to realizing that you are responsible for your own happiness.13 Your partner is not (I hated learning this, too, but it doesn’t make it any less true). The more you feel the need to focus on your partner, the more you need to focus on yourself and your own actions and thoughts. You do this by learning to train your attention to be in the moment, and not on what’s happened in the past or what you think might happen in the future. The obstacle to being and thinking in the “here and now” is distraction.14
Distraction is the termites eating at the foundation of your relationship.
For example, you might be talking to your partner about his difficult day at work, but your mind is distracted as you think of what you need to make for dinner and whether it’s your turn to carpool tomorrow. Or maybe you’re walking the dog, but you’re not thinking about how nice a morning it is or how great the breeze feels on your face. Instead, you’re thinking about the project you need to finish for work and whether or not that was your hair in the sink this morning.
All of this mind-wandering leads to misunderstandings, frustration, anger, unhappiness and resentment. The problem is that your mind wanders a lot. In fact, research shows it wanders about 47 percent of the time! Depending on what you’re doing, your mind wanders from a high of about 65 percent (doing things like taking a shower or brushing your teeth) down to a low of about 10 percent when you’re having sex (this scared me a little to think that even 10 percent of the time my man is thinking about mowing the grass when I’m naked with him, but I try not to let my mind wander there too often). There’s also stuff in between (your mind wanders about 50 percent of the time at work and about 40 percent of the time when you’re exercising).15
The bottom line: mind-wandering affects everything you do. So, how does all this wandering relate to your happiness? Research by Matt Killingsworth16 found that you’re significantly less happy when your mind wanders. How often your mind wanders and what you think about when it does is totally predictive of how happy you feel (way more than how much money you make or the size of your house or ass, for example).
When your mind is wandering, you’re likely thinking of unpleasant things, playing something negative over and over in your head or thinking about regrets, worries or anxieties.
Maybe you’re worried your partner is cheating and you’re playing the movie of them laughing at dinner with someone else, or maybe you’re thinking of all the things you “should” have said when you were defending yourself in last night’s argument. Maybe you’re just thinking about what a jerk your partner is and how they don’t understand or appreciate you.
For the record, even mind-wandering about neutral or happy things is shown to lower baseline happiness levels. In other words, no matter what you’re mind-wandering about, it’s a downer to some degree.
What does all this have to do with being happier in your relationship? All that mind-wandering is causing fights, misunderstandings and miscommunications. This real-life example will bring home what I’m saying.
Real-Life Example
Let me give you an excellent example told to me by a woman I worked with named Shelly (we’re changing real names throughout this book to protect the innocent).
Once upon a time, Shelly and her husband, Jake, needed to get a tree taken down in front of their home. They both agreed that it would be a good idea for Shelly to call because the “tree guy” liked her better and would be more likely to come do the job quicker.
About two weeks after this joint decision, Shelly was in the shower and Jake walked into the bathroom and asked (innocently enough) if she’d called the tree guy. Now, before I tell you what she answered, I want you to know that Shelly was going to be very busy that day because she was leaving on a business trip and had a ton to do before she left. Shelly was standing there, washing her hair, but she wasn’t really in the shower. She wasn’t thinking about how good it felt to be massaging in the shampoo or leaning in to the nice, warm water. No, she was thinking about the ten billion things (yes, I said billion) she needed to do before she left. Shelly was distracted and not in the “here and now.”
Poor, unknowing Jake chose this moment to walk into the bathroom and ask her if she’d called the tree guy. The simple answer to this would have been, “No, I’m so sorry, I forgot.” Instead, Shelly was angry. This all happened in a split second, as most arguments do, but she was standing there stressed as hell, with her mind elsewhere, and she was mad that Jake was reminding her of something she forgot.
Shelly told me that she got defensive and was nasty to Jake. She said, “You know, I’ve got so many things to do and I’ve been busy planning meals for you and the kids while I’m gone and making sure car pool arrangements are made…blah…blah….blah.” She told me later, “Abby, I know now that I got defensive because I was distracted. I was standing there absorbed in my own feelings and busy thoughts and Jake asking about the tree guy put me over the edge!”
As you might imagine, Jake didn’t like being yelled at just because he asked a simple question. So, he became defensive and basically retorted, “You don’t have to jump down my throat! You do this all the time and I’m sick of it!” When Shelly left on her trip later that day, they were angry at one another and in a bad place.
When Shelly came to talk to me after her business trip, she had done some soul searching and recognized that she had so many examples like this. She realized that the majority of their misunderstandings, arguments, frustrations and annoyances were all due to one of them being distracted. Since Jake wasn’t willing to come in to therapy (he had told Shelly that their problems were due to her anger issues), we started with Shelly working on consistent self-awareness, so she could stop herself from making this mistake over and over again. Once she started practicing some attention training techniques (tools that literally help you train your attention to be in the present moment), the majority of these issues resolved themselves almost immediately.
In a later session, Shelly said, “I’ve only been doing this for about six weeks now and already we’re getting along 100 percent better. I thought our issue was that we didn’t know how to communicate. But our real issue is that we’re both lost in our own world half the time so, of course, we were fighting and bugging each other. Now that I’m more self-aware, I catch myself constantly about to say something nasty because I wasn’t really listening or paying attention. The issue wasn’t that we weren’t communicating. The issue was that we weren’t really listening to one another because we were distracted!”
In another session, Shelly told me, “I know it sounds crazy, but I could swear that Jake’s more self-aware now, too. It seems like he stops himself more or he’ll actually say sorry when he’s overreacted or not listened to what I said! That’s never happened before. Our relationship really has changed so much. It just feels easier and lighter.”
Think about how many times a day you’re doing one thing but thinking about another. Learning to train your attention to be in the here and now is incredibly important so you don’t have these moments. Learning to check in with yourself so you can act not react is what it’s all about.
The research backs me up on this. Many studies have shown a high correlation between some kind of attention training or “mindfulness practice” and an improved, more satisfying relationship. Couples report more closeness, better communication and a greater acceptance of one another when one or both of them are involved in some kind of attention training.17 In fact, even when couples do experience conflict, those who utilize attention training say they feel less stressed in those moments, so their fights are shorter and less harmful.18
And here’s the number one reason why you care about attention training and self-awareness. Is this the first thing you’ve ever read about how to be in a happy relationship? I’ll bet the answer is “no.” My guess is you’ve already learned tools to stop fights, reignite passion or improve communication. But what’s happened when you’ve been in a fight or stressful situation with your partner? Did you remember to use any of the great tools you learned? Probably not.
That’s because you forget all the great stuff you’ve learned and react with the same old responses, words or actions. In the moments when you need those healthy tools the most, you forget to use them. You stay stuck in old cycles or patterns because you’re distracted and not focused in the present like you need to be.
Self-awareness is huge for everyone, but especially when you’re in a relationship where your partner isn’t open to making changes. Why? Because it feels like your partner is rejecting and abandoning you when they don’t make your relationship a priority or when they say you’re the one with the problem. It’s then too easy to get caught up in resentment, hopelessness and anger. When you bring these three things to the relationship every day, it’s not going to improve. In fact, you’ll end up in a horrible, downward spiral and the relationship will worsen.
When you have self-awareness, you can see that you’re feeling rejected and reacting in an unhealthy way. You can then stop, recalibrate your thinking to a more open and compassionate mindset and change your own behavior. Once you do this, your partner will pick up on these changes (remember that unconscious mind processing 11 million bits per second!) and they’ll start acting differently in return.
It’s all about your intention. When you have self-awareness, you become aware (and in control) of your intention. We all have an intention before we do or say anything, we just don’t generally think of it like that. When your intentions aren’t good (whether you realize this or not), your actions follow, and your relationship will feel like a struggle or like it’s in a constant downward spiral (we’ll talk more about intentions in Chapter Five).
If you intend to be loving and have a loving relationship, then that’s what will present itself. You’ll see miraculous changes if you start thinking differently about your partner consistently—you’ll start to feel and see an upward spiral.
This isn’t just because of some “love is the only answer” platitude, but because when you act and feel loving, you’ll feel better! It becomes its own cycle. Just like feeling crappy can become its own cycle (you feel bad, you act negatively to people, people act crappy back, yucky things happen to you or you don’t notice the good things because you feel so crappy, blah, blah, blah). Having a loving and compassionate focus has its own pattern.
You can’t make someone love you…but you can love them; you can love yourself and them.
It’s easy to act loving when someone is acting loving back. What’s hard is to be loving when your partner isn’t acting loving toward you. But this is a crucial component to happy and healthy relationships. The other person is often unconsciously testing, “Do you really love me? What if I act like this? What if you see this really crazy side of me?” When you respond from a loving place, you’re showing what unconditional love and unconditional acceptance are all about.
Remember, you feel the way you think. If you want to change your feelings about your partner and your relationship, you have to change those thoughts first. Attention training and self-awareness is the answer for noticing your thoughts, so you can change them and your resultant actions.
When negative thoughts come into your mind, they can run wild and trigger destructive emotions like resentment, fear, depression, hopelessness, hate and anxiety. Mental training of any kind allows you to identify and control your thoughts, which allows you to control your emotions.
Being mindful also allows you to see yourself and your emotions objectively. It creates something called response flexibility, which is basically the ability to pause before you act or respond. It’s the ability to act, not react.
Most importantly, mental training, such as meditation, mindfulness and attention training, rewires your brain. We’ll go more into the research later in this book, but I’d like to give you a couple of key concepts now so you can see how vital it is to learn to be self-aware.
Neuroplasticity is the brain's incredible capacity to change and adapt. It’s how the brain physiologically changes itself depending on what you’re doing and thinking and how you’re interacting with the environment. The brain is dynamic and, from the time it begins to develop in utero until the day you die, it changes and remolds itself in response to your experiences. Your brain is NOT a done deal. The brain rewires and changes, physically, all the time. What you focus on creates new neural pathways, new connections in your mind and thoughts. It’s said that cells that fire together wire together. Now, the big question is: what are you wiring?
If you cringe when you walk in your house because you’re waiting to get yelled at and you do this over and over—this creates a neural pathway or wiring. If you think about how ungrateful, unappreciative and unthoughtful your partner is all the time, this is what gets wired in your brain. If you replay a scene when your partner was negative, critical or nagging over and over again in your mind, then this is what gets wired. If you allow negative thoughts to occupy your brain, this wiring (what we think of as thoughts) becomes more entrenched and stronger.
The good news is that you can flip the script. For example, focusing on something positive, like being generous with your partner, will also physically change your brain. Richard Davidson, a prominent neuroscience professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been working with monks who meditate on compassion, love and generosity for many years. He found that these monks had actually altered the structure and function of their brains! His research has shown that “The best way to activate positive-emotion circuits in the brain is through generosity…There are systematic changes in the brain that are associated with acts of generosity.”19
Imagine training yourself to focus on being compassionate, generous and patient with your partner (and yourself). The more you do it, the more the brain wires itself in this way and the easier it becomes.
Let me give you a totally badass example of wiring your brain purposefully. Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard University has been studying the “Tum-mo” or “inner fire” monks of Tibet for over 20 years.20 As a scientist, he became interested in the Buddhist belief that “The reality we live in is not the ultimate one. There's another reality we can tap into that's unaffected by our emotions, by our everyday world.” Buddhists believe this state of mind can be achieved by doing good for others and by meditation.
The Tum-mo monks have a ritual where they seclude themselves in an unheated room, in the dead of winter (we’re talking freezing temperatures here), high in the Himalayan Mountains. They sit in a meditation posture directly on the concrete floor of the temple while soaking wet sheets are draped over their bodies. Solely through the power of concentration, they thoroughly dry these sheets, right on their bodies! These monks actually raise their body temperature through their meditation so you can see smoke rising from the sheets as they dry in the cold room!