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Coming Together

It seems to me that our country (and our world) is more divided than ever.  An interaction with the new husband of a long-time friend at my grandson Luke’s bar mitzvah celebration is a great example of what’s killing us.

I’d just gotten a drink and was winding my way to the dance floor when I stopped to connect with him. I paused to ask how he was and he told me that he hadn’t been able to stop crying during the ceremony.  Even as the music was pounding and a hundred kids were jumping, I was eager to listen to why.

I told him that I had been crying throughout as well.  I’d been swept up in the emotion of history and wonder how my sweet baby boy, who only a short time before slept on my chest as I sang to him, could be speaking to an entire congregation.  It was so poignant to find this beautiful child immersed in the study and reflection of a young man, how he declared himself, shared what he’s come to believe, and took his place in his community.  The source of my friend’s husband’s tears was different.  One part was appreciation for Luke’s parents’ dedication, their commitment to promoting values of education and contribution.  Another part was despair – how Luke is inheriting a world in chaos and run by greed.  “Our president,” he said, “is a disaster for this country.”

I offered a different perspective, “We needed this president.  We deserved him.”  He jumped, “I couldn’t disagree more,”  and proceeded to validate his position and explain why I was wrong.  Thus, we entered the land of toxic polarization, where our beliefs are 180 degrees different and we are frozen in our positions.  Just as he began launching into his diatribe, I interrupted, “Would you like to know why I said that?”  “Oh, sure,” he hesitated, courteously.  But I had the distinct impression that he was simply waiting for me to finish so he could resume mounting his defense.  I had blindly assumed that he, an educated man, a successful attorney, would be more open.

It was immediately clear that he was suffering from a pervasive, yet curable disease I call single-reality syndrome.  That’s where people look for the truth as if there is only one.   It’s an ancient malady we might attribute to Aristotle, one of the original speakers about truth. The truth, he is said to have said, “is to say what is that is or what is not that is not.”  In our hunger for The Truth, we’ve become blind to the actuality that there is little that is fixed or true about our world.  Mostly we have opinions about it.  And while it is possible to truthfully state, “mathematics is hard,” or “Trump is a jerk,” it is not The Truth.  By saying it, we make it so, as though “jerk” is a permanent and genetically encoded feature. Labeling shuts the door on a universe of other possibilities.

Let’s take this out of the political arena and look at the truth in sports.  One undeniable fact is that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the top all-time scorer in the NBA.  You can look up thisTruth in the World (38,387 points) in multiple record books. While Kareem was certainly the top scorer, he isn’t necessarily the best player.  For “best player,” there are any number of different standards we could apply – points per game, field goals, etc.  You could endlessly argue this, but until you come to agree on the standard you’re measuring against, you’ll be stuck in a protracted debate.  Debating an opinion is phenomenologically impossible, a waste of time, and destructive to relationships.  

It’s natural to feel disagreement.  Different opinions define us.  The problem is – our culture seems to have limited us to a “two-bucket” response to incoming information – agree or disagree.  The cure for single-reality syndrome is a simple set of lenses that allows us to see the world from different perspectives all at the same time.  All we have to do is be mindful enough to put them on.   Theses lenses eliminate the illusion of righteousness.   

When wearing multiple-reality lenses, rather than saying, “You’re wrong,” we become inclined to express wonder at why someone would say something that feels so incorrect.  To honor another is to accept them and their perspective as legitimate.  To deny them is to sow disdain and separation.  By cultivating a third bucket – curiosity, we acknowledge that there is a wider world than we can see alone.   “Tell me more,” is a powerful response to disagreement that expands us.  In the process of listening for understanding rather than self-validation, we inevitably discover the reasons others feel the way they do, their experience, their hurts, and joys.  Empathy is a natural outcome.

A more united world starts with each of us.  Rather than waiting for the world to change, we can start paying attention to our own inclination towards righteousness and see how it sets up polarization.  On a daily basis, start to keep track of the times you and others might say, “You’re wrong” and “I disagree.”  Once you can accept your blindness, you can lead others on the path that unites us.

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What does NO mean to you?

My mother used to tell me, “No means no.”  Not very illuminating.  As a teenager, NO was a clear rejection, an invalidation of me.  I never wanted to ask for anything that would produce that response.  Therefore, I was very measured about what I asked for.

As a young bride, NO meant, “I don’t love you enough.”  I thought that my husband would do anything for me.  He did, at least in the courting stage.  When NO started to appear in our relationship, I felt, “If you loved me, you would…”  We both bought into that meaning of NO and tried to avoid it as a way of demonstrating our care for one another.  But eventually, endlessly trying to accommodate another at the cost of our own self-concerns took a toll.  An invisible balance sheet loomed large in the background.  I started keeping score. 

This meaning is common. One of our family members absolutely cannot accept a NO when she’s asking for something that she considers reasonable and justified, as though it’s the only and right thing to do if you are a decent person.  She’s relentless in her pursuit of a YES and gets angry when the outcome remains unchanged.

After my second divorce, and years of difficulty with NO and feelings of rejection, I came to study the philosophy of language.  There I learned that there is no one true meaning of any word.   To understand words, we must seek to understand the intention of the speaker and acknowledge the kind of relationship we have with one another.  Before we ask anything of anyone, we ought to consider their right to say NO in the first place.  Because NO comes in two varieties – with or without consequences, it behooves us to reflect on the context of our relationship – who are you to me?   

If we are going to dance with others as equals, we must accept them as legitimate others, with full and equal rights.   Freedom to decline is a hallmark of equality. Legitimate others must be able to say NO without feeling pressured.

If I am your boss and your job depends on your fulfilling my requests, NO could come with penalties. In the army, saying NO to a commanding officer could have a very high price, up to and including court martial. Without room to decline, requests become commands.  If we are to honor another’s legitimacy, we must give them the space to say YES or NO to our requests.    

It’s important for people with rank to establish the rules of their dance.  Because subordinates frequently operate with the idea that they have to fulfill all the requests made to them, they experience a lot of pressure and undue stress.  A boss is well-served to set the context for working together.  A statement like, “I will be making abundant requests to you, and of course, I’d like you to fulfill them, if you can.  But I don’t keep track of what’s on your plate.  So, if it’s too much, you need to tell me and we’ll figure out together how to get it done by reprioritizing or bringing in other help. I also want you to be honest with me if you don’t know how to do what I’m asking or don’t fully understand what I’m looking for.”  Too often, subordinates are afraid to ask for clarification for fear of being thought incompetent, or worse, an idiot. 

If NO means, “You are an important person to me.  At the same time, I cannot or will not do what you are asking AND I am open to your requests in the future,” a decline will not insult, reject, or detract from the legitimacy of the requestor.

 In our personal relationships – family, friends, lovers, consider asking this question, “Do I have room to decline with you without punishment?”  And consider your answer when it’s asked of you.

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A Qualified Lover (The Short List)

After two and a half years of an on-again/off-again relationship, Diana called it quits.  I asked her why and she said, “We had a big gap in our education.  I love to move around.  He likes to sit around.  He has no spiritual path.”  

The story is all too familiar – falling in love; life is light and breezy.  The only thing you hunger for is each other. But endorphins only last so long. Eventually the breeze turns to tempest and good times are harder to find.  

Partnering “because we love each other” is an obviously insufficient platform for moving from single independence to coupled interdependence.  So, if love alone cannot sustain a long-term relationship, what will?

Among the hundreds of couples I’ve surveyed, I have found that building a joyful life with someone requires the presence of at least seven critical qualities.

1)    Hunger for learning – curious and secure enough to see gaining competence as a gift rather than a source of shame for not having already learned

2)    Autonomy – can stand on his/her own and is at peace in their sense of self

3)    Caring – acts with love and kindness

4)    Trustworthy – reliable and authentic

5)    Physical – sexual or not, the ability for tenderness

6)    Emotional competence – deals with anger, non-violently, and appreciates the ironies of life with the capacity to laugh at oneself

7)    Grateful to life – the essence of spiritual consciousness

With these seven qualities, you can build any kind of life you’re interested in.  You’ll note that neither money nor physical beauty made the cut. You can add them or other requirements to this list – a passion for scuba diving, perhaps – but these seven are fundamental.  Without them, or a commitment to develop them, the relationship is pretty well destined for failure.

One close family member who was frustrated at her partner’s lack of financial contribution asked for advice.   In looking at this list, the critical qualities were missing – autonomy, trustworthiness, emotional competence.  We focused on autonomy as a driving force in the breakdown.  Was it a quality she required?   She hadn’t come to terms with the reality that he was a dreamer and incompetent at making his daily bread.  “He’s trying,” she cried, “to be better in all these areas.” Alas, trying doesn’t equate to competent.  He didn’t have the skills to generate regular work or a career, he lied about money, his anger was untenable, and he had no commitment to learn. Once she got clear about what she needed, she ended their two-year relationship.

The consensus of the elderly is: Life is short and then you die.  Partnership of two autonomous beings who honor each other, are grateful to life, and have agreements for how to live, make us stronger and help us to en-joy our fleeting time on this plane.

What’s on your list?

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. Blessings and gratitude.

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. Seeing it changes everything. #theinvisibledance

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Seeing it changes everything.

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Seeing it changes everything. Who is there to remind you? #theinvisibledance

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The Treasure Mirror 12/20/17

Attractiveness - 

I hear it often - “I’ll be attractive when I lose 20 pounds,” or “Get a promotion,” or “A new car,” or… If you don’t see yourself as attractive as you would like, you’ve probably been short-changed by looking in the wrong mirror – one that’s been polished by Mother Culture in which you compare yourself to standards of beauty and success that are either unachievable or somewhere off in the future. Admittedly, while good looks and money are undoubtedly strong magnets, plenty of extremely attractive people possess neither.  The tabloids are constantly reminding us that wealth or physical beauty alone are insufficient to create an enduring intimacy.  It’s not about the wrapping, but what’s inside.

You can be attractive right now by changing the mirror.

A different mirror

Put aside the beauty mirror for a moment and check out the treasure mirror.  This mirror reflects your attractiveness from the inside out.  It shows your appreciation of life.  Gazing into this mirror, you can see yourself within an enormous, continuously unfolding, mysterious world, full of hidden gifts. How you feel about yourself and this world radiates your aliveness.  Your openness to discovery, your desire to contribute, your gratitude, and your confidence glows from your core and draws people to your light.

The bad news about this mirror is that it can be harsh when it reveals our humanity – our resentment, doubt, and stubbornness.  The good news is – this mirror reveals both our abilities and limitations. It can show us possibilities and what we must learn in order to be more satisfied with our lives.  It makes life a treasure hunt.  Appreciating the enormity of our learning creates an energy of wonder and a hunger for teachers.  Knowing we can learn anything we put our mind to, confidence expands as learning takes place. Attractiveness projects the message, “You want to dance with me, because I am a joy to be with.”

Are you willing to take a look?

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What it is to be ‘we’

November 16, 2017 

‘we’ is a physical, emotional, and spiritual experience of two or more individuals in which each is fully satisfied in their coexistence.  Enlightenment may be ‘we’ extended into the universe, but I want to talk about ‘we’ in the simplest terms of two.

‘we’ is the feeling you have when your touch of another produces bilateral pleasure – when it excites me to give you excitement.  You lose your self in ‘we’ and become a single, energetic entity. With softened boundaries, you are able to perceive the world more broadly and can flexibly accommodate the bumps along the road.

‘we’ is each being so attuned to the other that you come together.  Beyond sex, ‘we’ is the way you move with another into the future.  Attuned, you move as gracefully to the rhythms of life as Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.

But because life is an eternal bouncing between our individuality and our connectedness, ‘we’ comes and goes. You have it and then, you don’t.  It is lost as soon as your personal preferences become the priority.

You have a choice about how much ‘we’ you have in your life.  You can learn to create it.

It requires three things: 1) you recognize a profound appreciation for the other, 2) you use stumbles, failures, and conflicts as learning opportunities for the benefit of all; and 3) you see your part in the dance of relationship you’ve been doing all your life, unconsciously, and take responsibility for making it good.

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The Long Road to a Redemption Story

Identity is a story that comes in three basic parts.  First is communion – who we are connected to, who we love; second is agency – what we have done and contributed in our lives; and third, redemption – how we have transformed the bad things that happened to us into something good.  Most of us can site many times we have created happy endings from nasty situations.  This is one of mine.  It takes a long and winding road with a cast of characters (many who shall remain nameless) and extraordinary experiences, each adding a major milestone.  Redemption would take well over a decade to be revealed to me.

OK, here’s the bad thing. My best friend betrayed me by having an affair with my husband which I didn’t find out about until two years after my divorce. 

When I met her, I was 29, divorced with two kids, and commuting from a NY suburb to my Manhattan job on the Penn Central Railroad.  My neighbor Fred introduced us saying she had a good weed connection.  Our friendship began just as I was beginning to date the man who, within three years, would become my second husband.  My BFF danced at our wedding.  She became the sister I never had.  

In the second year of my new marriage, my family moved from NY to Texas.  Dallas launched my princess career.  He had a great job, making lots of money.  We got a great house.  My kids were enrolled in a great private school. And, no longer needing to work, I built an art studio in the house and put my National Academy of Design training to work as a portrait sculptor.  Life was full of carpool, art, tennis, jogging, and socializing.  

My long, lost sister was a constant presence, no matter where we were.  Our first Dallas summer of 100+ degree days, we rented a house for a month on the beach in Long Island.  BFF arrived to visit with a surprising new practice – Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism, a sect that believes we can unlock the limitless potential of our inner lives and achieve Buddhahood in this lifetime.  While she was locked away in her room chanting, nam myoho renge kyo for long periods of time, we were snarkily chuckling that she sounded like a buzzing bee.  She tried to get me interested. “Herbie Hancock and Tina Turner are Buddhists” she said. I would have none of it.

The following year, during one of her regular visits to Dallas, I was suffering a highly unusual and excruciating migraine headache.  BFF knew just the cure – chant nam myo ho renge kyo.  I was desperate.  After about 20 minutes, my headache was gone. And thus began what the Buddhists call, shakubuku, the initiation process into the Buddhist practice.  She connected me to a local chapter where I could meet people and learn to recite the gongyo, the morning and evening prayers.  From my first meeting, I was captivated by the sound, the harmony, the vibration, and the joy of these people chanting together.  

Through my regular practice with this chapter I came to know the family of TV star from the show DALLAS. While they were residents of California, they spent each of their summers in Dallas for location shooting of the show.  Seeing my work, they commissioned me to sculpt a portrait of their two boys, who were about eight and three years old at the time.  As summer turned to fall and they prepared to travel west, they asked me to shakubuku a woman named Carolyn, the ex-girlfriend of a doctor who had rented them their house the previous year.  Happy to oblige, I arranged for a meeting in which I taught her to chant.

Carolyn was the most dazzling, free spirit I’d ever met.  She was a model, a dancer, an actress, and a pothead. I would regularly go to her house where we would chant for a while, then smoke a joint, and go to one of Dallas’s luxury watering holes for champagne.   

Carolyn introduced me to her friends, a husband and wife who owned  a resort in Mexico and were purveyors of the drug Ecstasy, or MDMA, which, at the time, was still unknown and unclassified by the Drug Enforcement Agency. In other words, legal.  Ecstasy was a life-altering experience.  I’d had a commonly reported reaction – I felt my heart opening in a way that I can feel to this day, so many years later.   

One evening during a small cocktail party at my house with Carolyn and her friends, our doorbell was rung by a young family.  Enter Blair and Stephen, and their 18-month old son, Seraphim.  They had been on their way to their home in Austin and had stopped by to meet the resort owners just to say “hello” and give them thanks for the wonderful time they had had at their resort.  With our hearts Ecstasy-wide open, we invited them to stay, which they did, for three days.

Blair and Stephen were the personification of The New Age. During our time together, they taught me how to rebirth, a type of breath work invented by the therapist Leonard Orr. The basic idea is that you can heal whatever ails you by re-experiencing the trauma surrounding your birth.  It’s really just conscious, circular, yogic breathing that can be done lying flat or under water with a snorkel.  Traditional psychologists have voted to discredit it. But, for me, it was extraordinarily powerful.

Blair and Stephen were aspiring breatharians.  (If you’ve never heard of breatharians, think “vegetarian,” only substitute breath for veggies.)  I know. But stay with me. They believed that it is possible for a person to live without consuming food, purely on prana, Sanskrit for life force, IF you could eliminate all toxins from your body, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  Go ahead and Google this.  There have been many articles written on breatharians and breathariansim.  At that particular moment in time, they were subsisting as fruitarians and followers of Baba Muktananda and Siddha yoga, working to scrub their souls clean.

Blair was a practicing medium.  She channeled a Canadian Catholic priest from the 1800’s named “Father Andre.”  This was the first time I had ever encountered a channeled being.  Blair would go into a meditation, and with her eyes closed, a new voice sprang from her lips, with wisdom and guidance for those in her audience.  Father Andre told me that I was like the sands of the desert, beautiful but frequently shifting, and failing to give solid ground to my children.  I could see it.  This harsh counsel came with a strong recommendation, “You need to do the est Training.”  Naturally, I picked up the phone and enrolled in the next program.  

Est, an 80-hour two-weekend training, was developed by Werner Erhard in the 1970’s.  Est promised “to transform one’s ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with, clear up just in the process of life itself.”  In truth, the training stopped my self-doubt and striving to be someone I was not, and actually produced a sense of perfection and responsibility.  I came away from est feeling as though my life had taken a dramatic turn.  I stopped drinking and drugging and encouraged my husband, whose drinking I was always working to keep up with, along with several of my closest friends, to do the training also. 

As an enthusiastic and tremendously appreciative participant, I became a holy roller advocate for the training and guest seminar leader, leading evenings about the training to enroll newcomers.  That’s where I met Lisa, my newest best friend and certainly the smartest and funniest woman I’ve ever known.  Lisa was 11 years younger than I and 11 years older than my oldest daughter.  We became so close that my husband had suggested that she could support my spiritual needs while he supported my financial ones. This didn’t work out so well.  I was living a sober life with my husband, with whom I could find little in common, and simultaneously falling in love with Lisa.  We divorced one year after the training. 

Lisa moved in the day after he moved out.  Her brilliance transported me from my desolation and fear to excitement about the blank canvas that I was.  It would take a couple of years before I could come to terms with the failure of my marriage.

With no husband to support me, finance instantaneously became a priority in my life again.  The job title, ‘princess/sculptor’ did not seem promising for generating anywhere near the income I needed to maintain the lifestyle to which I had become accustomed. I had to come up with a new career, and fast. Forced to examine what I had done in my life, I was completely stymied at how to combine my experience in visual art, sales, business analysis, and mother, and articulate it in the form of a new offer.  And to whom would I make this invaluable offer? 

Lisa connected me to a program on entrepreneurship that was being given by a Werner Erhard connection, Fernando Flores.  Some background on Flores: At 29, he was the youngest minister in the Salvador Allende presidency.  Remember the American-backed coup in Chile in 1973?  Allende died and Flores was isolated in a political prison at the hands of Augusto Pinochet.  After three years, Flores was released through the efforts of Amnesty International and went to Stanford to do his Ph.D.  His doctoral thesis “Communication in the Office of the Future” provided important distinctions that Erhard used in his training.   

The course on entrepreneurship created a huge opening for my career.  I was introduced me to the fundamentals of the philosophy of language and the inevitability of the coming boom in the personal computer industry.  From my years in the corporate world, I could readily see an offer to business.  I returned to Dallas, a complete novice in the computer world but ready to start a company with Lisa where we sold grey market computers loaded with modems, floppy drives, and communication software.

Our first big break came with a contract with a global software company in Dallas.  We were doing so well that we interested an investor in our business.  Needing a staff, the first person I thought of was my old BFF who had been trying to find a job in Dallas for years.

The business venture was a disaster.  We naively gave away 51% to the man with the money.  Within a year, he had fired us and left us holding a $100K debt on a line of credit with which we had bought computers that our partner had sold and collected on.  And while Lisa and I were fired, my BFF stayed on.  It seemed that she had conspired against us, something we could hardly understand.  Until the following summer when my ex-husband confessed his affair with her.

I called her immediately. At first, she denied it.  When I told her that the information came from my ex-husband, she deflected by saying, “it was another time.”  I offered her the opportunity to clean it up with me.  She declined.  I fell into a rage which turned into a righteous obsession that I couldn’t shake without several months of therapy and deep work on the nature of forgiveness.

No longer living together, Lisa and I bootstrapped a new business.  Recognizing a substantial need for greater competence than our customers in communication, I immersed myself in a long-term program with Flores in the philosophy of language.  Flores committed that if I would give him three years, he would teach me how to think.

In my third year of the program, a group of students went out for a night of salsa dancing.  There I met Cristián, a Chilean man who studied with and worked for Flores.  The moment I saw him, I knew I had to dance with him.  Within two years we married.  

Our highest priority was to live together authentically.  One of our first commitments was to tell each other everything we didn’t want to tell the other.  And in so doing, we delved into the depths of our humanity, discovering more and more of ourselves and each other, healing our shames and traumas, and continually expanded the limits of what is possible in an intimate relationship. 

We have been together for almost 30 years.  During this time, I developed the agency aspect of my identity.  Building on my education, I created a program called Mindful Collaboration.  I  have become known as a virtuoso coach and team developer, working with the leadership of Fortune 100 companies. 

Another significant connection came from my relationship with Flores.  I coached a man named David who was struggling to create a new business. We became friends.  I introduced him to a training called Avatar that was conducted at my friends’ resort in Mexico.  There he fell in love with a woman who moved him to Mexico where he encountered Huichol shamans who completely changed his life.  A few years later, David offered me the gift of vision quest, a traditional indigenous ritual where one goes alone to the mountain, fasting for days, sitting in a small corn circle with nothing to do and nowhere to go, praying for a vision.  The mountain showed me the intricate, sacred, interconnectedness of all life.  This great gift answered the question I didn’t know that I had, but was the force that had been driving me, “why am I here?” 

The portrait of my life is drawn by connecting the dots of these remarkable encounters. Meeting the mountain was a dot that forms the heart of my portrait, like a keystone holding it all together.

Bringing the sacred into our lives has given our couple a palpable resonance, one that has had people constantly asking what it is we know.  Ten years ago, we began to offer a course together called The Dance of Relationship that shows that love is a dance everyone can learn.  We share our most significant commitments and provide practices for mastering the moves of the dance.  The course awakens the heart of all who come. 

We have become great learners, Cristián and I.  This is the secret to redemption – find the gift in those failures and pain, use them to become masterful in life.  I sit in great gratitude to my old BFF for putting me on the path of learning and finding my amazing partner.  Without her, I wouldn’t be who I am today.

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February 26

If you missed my appearance on Sirius XM Doctor Radio, Dolores Malaspina and I had such fun.  Car Talk for Humans.  Have a listen:

https://soundcloud.com/karenaberle/karen-on-doctor-radio/s-V4g0n

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A new cure for insomnia

Do you wake up in the middle of the night and lie awake for too long?  I do. Often.

I have fallen into an (annoying) habit of awakening in the middle of the night, usually between 2 and 4 am, and staying awake for 1.5-2 hours.  I know I’m not alone.  Many of my friends are complaining about this same pattern.  Google informs me that it could be either alcohol or spiritual awakening.  I have come to accept these hours as mental detox. 

Rather than get up and read or write, I have opted to lay quietly and attempt to return to sleep, employing many different methods – counting backwards, repeating a mantra, reciting the gongyo of Nichiren Shoshu, deep breathing, but my energetic monkey mind most often wins. Last night I landed on something much better.  Alphabetical gratitude. 

I fell into bed very early, 9:30, exhausted by my longest swim ever, compounded by a tremendous sadness at the state of our world, the worst of my entire life.  I had tried to stay awake longer with the thought that I was inevitably headed for a mid-sleep onslaught.  Sure enough, at 2:09 am, I awoke thinking about the holocaust in Syria for which the world minus Russia seems to be standing idly by, my 95-year old mother who is dying with half of her mind fighting both me and the idea of death, and my 11-year old grandson in Indonesia learning about community.  That’s just for starters.  There’s lots to consider at 2am.  And then I landed on the only thing that could save me – the incredible beauty and generosity of this life.

Starting with A, I began evoking everything of that letter that I am grateful for – apples, artichokes, ancestors, Amnesty International… you get the picture.  I made it to C before I was snoring again (Cristian gave me the ‘turn over and close your mouth’ nudge).  I awoke again around 3:30 and my first thought was, “I forgot to be grateful for chocolate,” and continued on through D and E, never made it to F, and slept soundly until 6:40.

My consideration now is: the next time I wake up in the middle of the night should I start with F or go back to A.  I invite you, my insomniac friends, to try it. And please let me know if/how it works for you.

I am wishing you the sweetest of dreams.

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What Makes Partners Partners

What distinguishes partnership, whether intimate or business, from all other types of relationship is the declared commitment of each of the partners, “Your concerns are my concerns.” That means I will hold your concerns as important to be addressed as my own.  Concerns are not about wants.  They are expressions of needs.   Declaring YCAMC does NOT mean I will have the same concerns as you.  I don’t have to change my desires or what is important to me.  I don’t have to endorse your point of view.  I accept that you have different concerns and I will work to support you in getting satisfied; as you are committed to hold my concerns as your own. Having jointly made this declaration we promise we will not take action until we can find a way to both get satisfied.

 So, for example, when planning a vacation and my husband wants city and history and I want beach and rest, we are committed to finding a destination that we can both be enthusiastic about.  More than “I pledge thee my troth” or other marriage vows, YCAMC is a declaration that produces one being out of two. 

The words matter.  Saying them aloud amounts to taking a stand in the world.  But saying them is not a magic wand.  Living them requires dedication, honesty, and a capacity to generously listen, learn, and innovate.  These practices represent the primary work of building trust, demonstrating respect, and strengthening our union.  A strong union makes lighter work of all of life’s challenges.

Working as a relationship coach over the last 20 years, I have found that among thousands of couples, very few have ever specifically made this declaration.  When asked, people who call themselves partners often say, “Well, we haven’t said those exact words although we certainly want to live that way.”  But when the going gets tough, difference inevitably devolves into pushing, pulling, guilting, accounting, and/or convincing the other that they have the wrong concerns.

Without this foundation, couples are likely to find themselves in a similar situation as my friends, Sam and Toby.  They have been married for 18 years, with four kids, and have been challenged to maintain a loving, intimate relationship amidst the common tribulations of modern life.  They are two working parents, struggling to make ends meet without the support of extended family.  He was severed from long-term employment which caused them to make a major move from north to south for a new job.  They end each day exhausted from having to deal with adolescent hormones, learning disabilities, and carpooling.  No sex happening there.   One day recently Sam told me they had begun talking about divorce.

They were ready to throw it all away without ever having sought counseling or given themselves a chance to learn how to work through some of their difficulties.  I asked Sam if he ever inquired about why she didn’t want to have sex with him. No.  And when I asked if they ever committed to hold the other’s concerns as their own.  Another no. How about therapy?  He says she’s been unwilling.  I suggested he make an urgent last ditch effort to get her there.

I went through two divorces before I ever recognized partnership as a domain of learning, just like golf, violin, or mathematics.  Mastery in relationship requires the commitment to a rigorous program of learning.  Like the violin, you don’t master it by reading a book.  It may be too late for Sam and Toby.  In my view, the best possibility of saving their marriage is for each of them to commit to learning the dance of relationship together.  

[thedanceofrelationship-blog]

No Regrets

WHY YOU REALLY CAN’T SAY, “I SHOULD HAVE OR COULD HAVE...”

It is tempting and all-too-common to look back and say “I should have done this” or “I could have done that,” imagining other choices that would have led to better outcomes.  But it is not an accurate representation of what was possible at the time. Most of us carry around regret for failures and bad choices that we’ve come to recognize as such much farther down the road. Yet when we look back, we do so through a lens of maturity that distorts and misrepresents our younger capabilities. In fact, the real failure is not so much our earlier choices—however imperfect they were—but our inability to accept that we did the best we could at the time.

People often balk at this idea, and regret and shame are pervasive. Candy Chang, an internationally acclaimed artist and activist, explores the process of regret in a participatory installation called “Confessions.” Chang invites individuals to step into a private booth and write a confession on a wooden plaque. Then she displays them, anonymously, 1500 confessions at a time. The confessions range from I eat too much cheese to I gave my friend heroin and it ruined his life. Participants laugh or cry and take solace in knowing that they are not alone—that making mistakes and regretting them is merely a part of what makes us human. Chang’s art provides a ritual for catharsis, intimacy, and consolation. More important, it grants permission to make mistakes and move on.

The failures that bring about regret are often the result of choices between doing what was hard or what was easy at the time. From a linguistic perspective, hard and easy are not descriptors of activity. Rather, they describe the actor’s competence. Juggling five balls, for example, may look hard if one doesn’t have that particular skill, but it’s easy for someone who’s learned how. We make choices based on our competence to act. And we take only those actions of which we are capable.

Moreover, when we talk or think about our competence, we are generally vague. “I know this,” or “I’m pretty good at that.”  But it turns out that acknowledging the extent of our competence helps us make better decisions. According to the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition, introduced at the University of California, Berkeley in 1980, there are five stages of competence that are applicable in every domain of life:

1) novice (or beginner) – someone who is just learning prescribed actions

2) advanced beginner (or minimally competent) – someone who is capable of    taking basic actions, unsupervised without getting him/herself into trouble

3) competent – someone who can deal with multiple activities, make plans and develop routines

4) proficient – someone who perceives deviations from the normal pattern, employs maxims for guidance

5) expert – someone who transcends reliance on the rules, has intuitive grasp on situations, and has a vision of what is possible

Patricia Benner of the University of California, San Francisco applied the Dreyfus model in three studies of nurses with a range of experiences and skillfulness over a 21-year period. She determined that the development of moral agency is linked with the development of expertise. Her studies show that the more competent you are, (competent in the sense of capacity to take action rather than simply having information), the better your decision-making. Seems obvious, so what is new here?

As we develop competence and begin to learn from our mistakes, we stand in the present with new moral agency and look back at the past with the belief that we could have operated more competently. But, in fact, it probably wasn’t possible. We did the only thing we could do with the competence we had at the time.

The key to shifting out of regret and shame is embracing failure as part of life’s ever-present demand for learning. Salvation lies not in judging oneself as a good or bad person because of certain character flaws but in becoming a learner who can rigorously assess his or her competence and determine where to commit to building it. No one gets to be an expert in the totality of one’s life. Someone may be an expert chef and, at the same time, a beginner at tennis, or public speaking, or parenting.

Accepting that learners make mistakes means attributing failure to incompetence rather than insufficiency. We can then apologize with dignity, commit to not repeating our damaging behavior, ask forgiveness, and move on without shame or regret. Even if we don’t receive forgiveness from others, we can forgive ourselves and generate compassion for the beginners we (and others) are. And that generosity and understanding has the power to make a difference in all of our relationships.

So with a serious commitment to learning from mistakes, when “I should have...” crosses our mind or our lips, we might say instead, “Alas, I wish I could have, but I was foolish then and have since learned a thing or two.”

By Karen Aberle