Being the Caretaking Partner

The Caretaker Partner

When your partner is in difficulty, your natural response is one of compassion.  You don't want to see your partner suffer, so you do all you can to help him or her.  When it comes to short lived difficulties like, say, a bout of influenza, you can ideally shift in and out of a caretaker role easily and in a way that serves your relationship.  When your partner is in difficulty over a period of months or years, you might take on the role of caretaker and lose track of yourself and your own needs.

Being in the role of caretaker can meet needs for contribution, acceptance, and having a sense of value or competency in the relationship, but over time this role is held onto at cost to other needs.

At some point you realize that being a caretaker for your partner isn't working.  When you are more unconscious about it, this realization shows up as a sudden impulse to get out of the relationship.  Internally it can seem like a life or death matter.  You imagine that the only way to survive is to get out of the relationship.  Some relationships end at this juncture.

If you are able to bring more awareness and catch yourself in the caretaker role before you are completely depleted, you choose to stay in the relationship and begin to set firm boundaries.  At first you might set extra firm boundaries tinged with resentment because you don't trust yourself to meet your own needs and you blame your partner for not meeting your needs in the past.  For your partner who has been cared for by you for so long, your boundaries and resentment might be experienced as a shove or a wall.

At this stage in the transformation process you are moving away from what you don't want (losing yourself) with the belief that your survival is being threatened.  There is a sense that you have to fight to have your needs met.  Trust builds as you become more conscious of the caretaker dynamic and  express your needs and requests and find your partner responsive to meeting your needs once he or she hears them clearly and understands your requests.

As this trust develops and your needs are met consistently the energy of fighting relaxes and you can come back to center.  Living openly from your center you can moved toward what you want to create rather than away from a perceived threat.  Creating what you want from a connected place means recognizing interdependence and the need for collaboration.  At this stage you no longer have the impulse to set extra firm boundaries.  You can trust yourself and your partner to have a dialogue and negotiate with caring until a way for meeting all needs is found.

Practice
This week watch for situations in which you are tending to your partner and giving up your needs with resentment or a sense of submitting.  If you can't express your needs in the moment, take time later to identify them and come up with a request for your partner.

LaShelle Charde

                                                   

Emotional Cheating

You see your partner creating a special bond with others and not sharing with you about it.  You feel confused because you know your partner loves you and at the same time you notice a sense of mistrust coming up in you.   I have heard some refer to this situation as "emotional cheating".

The term "emotional cheating" is directed at the partner who making special connection with others and not sharing about that in the relationship, but what it really refers to is unmet needs on the part of the the person making the accusation.

If you are the one thinking that your partner is cheating on you emotionally, then you likely feel lonely, scared, confused, and have needs for inclusion, intimacy and clarity.  What you value most about romantic partnership is the fullness of connection it can provide.  One way of creating that fullness of connection is sharing all dimensions of your experience with your partner, e.g., play, work, health, transformation, spirituality, problems, celebrations, daily tasks, etc.  A breadth and depth of sharing creates a sense of truly being together on life's path.

When your partner has close connection with friends and doesn't share something about that connection with you, you are missing out on an important part of your partner's life.  Unfortunately when you bring this up with your partner, you might be bringing some reactivity with you, such that your request for inclusion sounds like an accusation.  If your partner hears an accusation, then he or she is likely to withdraw more in order to avoid future conflicts.  This in turn is triggering for you which makes it even more difficult to broach the subject in the future.  Thus a reactive cycle has begun.

With any stressful and confusing situation, I encourage you to lead with curiosity.  Your partner has some reason for not sharing with you.  There is some need she or he is trying to protect.  If you can be gently curious about your partner's process this helps to reveal needs on both sides.  You can also begin these conversations with reassurance that you do not want to meet your needs at the cost of your partner's needs.  When your partner truly gets that you are not a threat, he or she can relax and share more fully.

Reassurance is highly underrated.  Most couples I work with are surprised by how much reassurance each person needs and how much it helps the relationship to move forward.  There is no relationship in which you are more vulnerable so of course it is easy to slip into a reactive sense of threat.  Accepting this as a given, you are able to offer and receive reassurance more regularly.  It's especially important to offer reassurance when it looks like your partner doesn't need any.  The need for reassurance is often covered over by anger, withdrawl, hyper-competence and self-reliance. 

Reassurance isn't just about words.  It's also about a gentleness in your voice tone, a warm embrace, a smile, a relaxed posture, a leaning forward in support, etc.  Most important, ask your partner what helps him or her to relax and experience you as someone who is looking out for their well-being.

Practice
This week experiment with offering reassurance to your partner as least once a day in as many different ways as you think of.  Notice what happens with your sense of closeness and sharing with each other.


LaShelle Lowe-Charde

Family Healing

LaShelle Lowe-Charde

Family Healing

I remember years ago, the moment in therapy that marked the beginning of healing the relationship with my mom. I had described to my therapist how in a visit with my mom, I felt tired and lethargic and everything took extra effort.

My therapist suggested that I was putting off meeting my needs and hoping that she would finally come through and be the mom I wanted her to be.

In that moment,  I got  how it was time to let go of my mom being some certain way. It was time to start relating to her as another adult rather than just my mom.

In NVC terms, I was attached to a particular strategy for meeting my needs. I was attached to her meeting all my needs for safety, affection, love, and nurturing. I wanted her to process all the unmet needs and difficulties of my childhood with me and then make up for these unmet needs with new behavior.

This was my unconscious strategy for healing. It wasn't very effective.

One of the things I love about NVC is that it asks for and helps create a deep level of self-reflection and self-responsibility.

Parts of me, very young parts, were still waiting for my mom to meet those needs. Seeing this I could mentally and emotionally go back to visit with various "younger selves" and offer empathy for the pain, loneliness, and fear they experienced. I could reassure them that the me of today can take care of those needs with the loving and reliable people I have in my life now. The me of today can create experiences in which needs for safety, affection, love, and nurturing are met easily.

When I have this healing relationship with myself and others who can currently meet my needs, I don't have to wait for my mom to change. As a result, there is a space in me to accept my mom just as she is. There is space to offer her empathy and understanding.  There is space to express my needs and requests in simple and non-reactive terms.

Resentment, anger, or the kind of listlessness I experienced, are all good signs that you might be holding fast to one particular strategy to meet your needs, particularly, one that isn't working.

Reflect on your relationships with your family. Is there someone your waiting on to change? Do you want them to recount what they did that stimulated pain for you, own what they did, express regret, and ask how they can help you heal from it? Sometimes family members will hear this request and meet you there. Sometimes they won't.

When they won't, you can look for other strategies for healing. You can heal the hurts from those relationships in how you relate to yourself and with others in your life, friends, counselors, teachers, pasteurs, and community members, who can meet you you there.  The healing work you do is always a contribution to your family, whether you process the past with them or not.

Practice
Take a moment now to name for yourself the people in your life that are a contribution to you.  How have they contributed to your healing and well-being?  What action do you want to take on your side to nurture and maintain those relationships?

                                                                     

12 Warning Signs That It's Emotional Infidelity and Not Just "Friendship"

A new sort of infidelity has been on the rise for decades, and it’s one of the biggest threats to marriage: ‘emotional affairs.’ Today’s workplace has become the new danger zone of opportunities for ‘emotional affairs,’ surpassed only by the Internet.

A relationship without sex can be just as intense, or more so than a sexual one. Not surprisingly, in most cases, approximately 80% according to Dr. Shirley Glass, author of Not Just Friends: Rebuilding Trust and Recovering Your Sanity After Infidelity, the dynamics of these platonic liaisons crosses over into sexual love sooner or later.

Why the crisis?

To understand the intensity of emotional infidelity, it helps to see the dynamics as an addiction, a form of addictive love. That’s because it’s easier to let go of a toxic pattern when you depersonalize the experience.

It’s not about ‘how’ special the person is or makes you feel, it’s about the neurochemicals that get activated when you think and behave a certain way that keeps you stuck in the damaging pattern! It isn’t a coincidence, for example, that persons with alcohol and other addictions are more likely to get into toxic relationships. Seeing the problem as an addiction also gives you access to proven steps to identify and break free of the toxic patterns.

Why addictive?

An addiction to an activity, person or substance puts a person’s brain and body in an intoxicating trance that, on the one hand, does not allow them to think clearly and make informed choices, and on the other hand, ‘rewards’  them for the toxic behavior with the release of certain chemicals that provide quick-fixes of pleasure in the body. Albeit temporary, there is also pleasure from lowering or numbing pain, shame or guilt, as it provides distance from taking responsibility to resolve the real issues of life and marriage (which risk failure).

In the The Addictive Personality: Understanding the Addictive Process and Compulsive Behavior Craig Nakken provides the following definition for addiction, as:

 “A pathological love and trust relationship with an object [person] or event … the out-of-control and aimless searching for wholeness, happiness, and peace through a relationship with an object or event.”

It makes sense that so many depressives and alcoholics find themselves in toxic relationships.

What are the warning signs?

There are at least 12 warning signs to alert you to take action to protect yourself and your relationship from ‘emotional infidelity.’

1. Thinking and saying you’re ‘just friends’ with opposite-sex.

If you’ve been thinking or saying, “we’re just friends,” think again. If it’s a member of the opposite sex, you may be swimming in treacherous waters. The very words are dangerous to your marriage.

This rationale allows you to make excuses, or more plainly, to tell lies (to yourself and others) about something you know in your gut is wrong. Regardless how strongly TV and entertainment promote the idea of opposite-sex friendships (and this is part of the problem!) as not only ‘okay,’ but also ‘right’ to demand unconditional trust, in most cases, an intimate friendship with a member of the opposite-sex that you find interesting and attractive poses risks.

2. Treating them as a confidant, sharing intimate issues. 

Sharing thoughts and deepest concerns, hopes and fears, passions and problems is what deepens intimacy; it builds an emotional bond between two people, time better used in marriage relationship. Giving this away to another person, regardless of the justification, is infidelity, a betrayal of trust. This is especially true when you consider that emotional intimacy is the most powerful bond in human relationships, much stronger than a sexual one. 

3. Discussing troubling aspects of your marriage and partners. 

Talking or venting to a person of the opposite sex about what your marriage lacks, what your partner lacks, or what you’re not getting to make you happy sends a loud message that you’re available for someone else to ‘love and care’ for your needs. It’s also a breach of trust. And, like gossip, it creates a false sense of shared connection, and an illusion that you, your happiness, your comfort and needs are totally valued by this person (when, in truth, this has not been put to the test!). 

4. Comparing them verbally and mentally to your partner. 

Another danger sign is a thinking pattern that increasingly finds what is ‘positive’ and ‘just right’ about the friend and ‘negative’ and ‘unfulfilling’ about the partner.  This builds a case ‘for’ the friend and ‘against’ the partner. Another mental breach of trust, this unfairly builds a physiologically felt case ‘for’ the friend and ‘against’ the partner, forming mental images in the brain that associate pleasurable and painful sensations accordingly. 

5. Obsessively thinking or daydreaming about the person.

If you find yourself looking forward to seeing the person, cannot wait to share news, think about what you’re going to tell them when you’re apart, and imagine their excitement, you’re in trouble. This sense of expectation, excitement, anticipation releases dopamine in reward centers of your brain, reinforcing toxic patterns. Obsessively thinking about the person is an obvious signal that something is wrong. After all, you don’t do this with your friends, right?

6. Believing this person ‘gets’ you like no other.

It always appears this way in affairs and romantic encounters at the start. It’s an illusion, and in the case of emotional infidelity, one that is dangerous to a marriage because the sense of mutual ‘understanding’ forms a bond that strengthens and deepens emotional intimacy, with the release of pleasurable neurochemicals, such as the love and safety hormone oxytocin. This focus also puts you in a ‘getting’ frame of mind. It means you are approaching your marriage in terms of what you’re getting or not getting, rather than what you’re contributing.

7. Pulling out of regular activities with your partner, family, work.

Being absorbed with desire to spend more and more time talking, sharing, being with the person, it’s only natural to begin to resent time you spend on responsibilities and activities at home (and work?). As a result, you begin to pull away, turn down, or make excuses for not joining regular activities with your partner and family. Family members notice you are withdrawn, irritable and unhappy.

8. Keeping what you do secret and covering up your trail.

Secrecy itself is a warning sign. It creates a distinct closeness between two people, and at the same time grows the distance between them and others. Secrets create a special bond, most often an unhealthy one. For example, there may be a false sense of emotional safety and trust with the person, and an unwarranted mistrust and suspicion of the partner, or those who try to interfere with the ‘friendship.’

9. Keeping a growing list of reasons that justify your behaviors. 

This involves an addictive pattern of thinking that focuses your attention on how unhappy you are, why you’re unhappy, and blames your partner and marriage for all aspects of your unhappiness. It builds a dangerous sense of entitlement and forms a pool of resentment from which you feel justified to mistreat your partner or do what you need to increase your happiness without considering the consequences.

10. Fantasizing about a love or sexual relationship with the person. 

At some point, one or both persons begin to fantasize about having a love or sexual relationship with the other. They may begin to have discussions about this, which adds to the intensity, the intrigue and the intoxicating addictive releases of neurochemicals that make the pattern more entrenched.

11. Giving or receiving personal gifts from the person.

Another flag is when the obsession affects your buying behaviors, so that you begin to think about this person when you are shopping, wondering what they like or would show your appreciation. The gift choices are something intimate items that you would not give ‘just’ a friend. Gifts send clear messages that the two of you are a ‘close we’ set apart from others, and that the relationship is ‘special.’

12. Planning to spend time alone together or letting it happen.

This is the warning sign that, when not heeded, most often pushes partners to cross the line from a platonic to a sexual relationship. Despite good intentions and promises to one another that they would not let ‘anything’ happen, it’s a set up, a matter of time, when opposite-sex friends flirt with the availability of time alone.

                                                           

Family Healing

I remember years ago, the moment in therapy that marked the beginning of healing the relationship with my mom. I had described to my therapist how in a visit with my mom, I felt tired and lethargic and everything took extra effort.

My therapist suggested that I was putting off meeting my needs and hoping that she would finally come through and be the mom I wanted her to be.

In that moment,  I got  how it was time to let go of my mom being some certain way. It was time to start relating to her as another adult rather than just my mom.

In NVC terms, I was attached to a particular strategy for meeting my needs. I was attached to her meeting all my needs for safety, affection, love, and nurturing. I wanted her to process all the unmet needs and difficulties of my childhood with me and then make up for these unmet needs with new behavior.

This was my unconscious strategy for healing. It wasn't very effective.

One of the things I love about NVC is that it asks for and helps create a deep level of self-reflection and self-responsibility.

Parts of me, very young parts, were still waiting for my mom to meet those needs. Seeing this I could mentally and emotionally go back to visit with various "younger selves" and offer empathy for the pain, loneliness, and fear they experienced. I could reassure them that the me of today can take care of those needs with the loving and reliable people I have in my life now. The me of today can create experiences in which needs for safety, affection, love, and nurturing are met easily.

When I have this healing relationship with myself and others who can currently meet my needs, I don't have to wait for my mom to change. As a result, there is a space in me to accept my mom just as she is. There is space to offer her empathy and understanding.  There is space to express my needs and requests in simple and non-reactive terms.

Resentment, anger, or the kind of listlessness I experienced, are all good signs that you might be holding fast to one particular strategy to meet your needs, particularly, one that isn't working.

Reflect on your relationships with your family. Is there someone your waiting on to change? Do you want them to recount what they did that stimulated pain for you, own what they did, express regret, and ask how they can help you heal from it? Sometimes family members will hear this request and meet you there. Sometimes they won't.

When they won't, you can look for other strategies for healing. You can heal the hurts from those relationships in how you relate to yourself and with others in your life, friends, counselors, teachers, pasteurs, and community members, who can meet you you there.  The healing work you do is always a contribution to your family, whether you process the past with them or not.

Practice
Take a moment now to name for yourself the people in your life that are a contribution to you.  How have they contributed to your healing and well-being?  What action do you want to take on your side to nurture and maintain those relationships?

LaShelle Charde