The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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What caused my past relationships to fail?
Why were there topics that neither I nor my partners could discuss without it leading to emotional scenes, covert battles, confusion and final withdrawal? It felt to me that if I ‘surrendered’ on an issue I was dismissed as a wimp, and if I ‘won’, I would have to pay for it later. I hated the conflicts and in the end hoped they would simply pass by, or I would ‘tread carefully’ so as not to upset things. The battles would pass – but then eventually, so would the relationship.
Why did I yearn to be with a woman when I was alone, and yet feel trapped when I was in a relationship with a woman and secretly yearn to be free again? Was it that I had to accept the bad times in a relationship on the basis of ‘this too will pass?’ or ‘that is the way it is – the ups and downs of life.’ In the end, like everyone else I knew, I had give up on relationships; it was just that some chose to stay in their relationships on the basis of it being as ‘good as it gets’. Others stayed because the thought of starting again was too much. I had chose to give up. I simply wasn’t willing to get to the same place of ‘stuckness’ and compromise, nor did I want to inflict that on anyone else.
As I now look back on these relationships I find it amazing how my attitudes and actions were formed by my social conditioning, and that those instilled beliefs, ‘truths’, ethics, values and morals inevitably ensured the failure of an unliveable ideal. I had simply been re-taught that which had caused the failure of men and women to live in peace and harmony since time immemorial. It became obvious that there was something dramatically wrong with the whole male-female relating business, and that the problem was universal. I simply played out, like a puppet on a string, ‘my’ particular role in a play that was pre-scripted to failure or, at best, a second-rate compromise.
It was only when I was finally with my current wife, with a firm, mutually agreed pact in place that I was able to experience, investigate and make sense of the full range of feelings and emotions that arise in a love relationship between a man and a woman. Then subtly things began to get a little awkward, which I first attributed to the radical issues we were discussing and my particularly chaotic and nomadic life at the time. But something else was at the root of the problems between us – something else was causing this ‘dis-ease’ I felt.
I found myself continuously bringing up the issue of her not wanting to live with me and would strongly question her motives for wanting to maintain her ‘independence’. I began to become jealous of her around other men and of her time when we weren’t together. We both started to get anxious about meeting times and some misunderstandings occurred because of this. Once I misunderstood something she said, didn’t bother to check, and took it completely the wrong way. By the time a few hours had passed, I had made a mountain out of a molehill, interpreted what she had said as her wanting to get out of the relationship, decided this is how women always treated me, and that I wasn’t going to stand for it any more! However, finally I came to my senses, thinking what a good boy I was as I had ‘seen’ an old pattern of mine. Little did I know that what I had ‘discovered’ was to prove to be but the tip of the iceberg. The final straw came as I waited to meet her one evening and she was late.
As the time ticked away, so my mind raced away, and after about thirty minutes I was furious. How could she be late? How could anything else, or anyone else, be more important in her life than me? As my fury built and built, as my mind churned over countless possibilities as to why she was late, suddenly I began to see the stupidity of it all. Here I was, comfortably sitting at a seaside café, cool drink in hand, looking at a spectacular sunset on warm summer’s evening. I’m involved in the adventure of a lifetime, I’ve found out more about what it is to be a human being in the last few months than I have in a lifetime, there is this wonderful woman in my life – and I’m being neurotic because she is thirty minutes late! Gradually I came out of it and was able to be where I was, delighting in the balmy evening air and the gaiety of the scene as the last of the beach-goers drifted home. When my wife arrived she apologized for being late, and I explained what had happened to me. We had a beach walk, dinner at a nearby restaurant, and tootled off home to bed.
Over the next few days something continued to nag me. Why was it that this relationship seemed to be going off the rails? Why, increasingly, were there misunderstandings, petty conflicts and difficulties between us? Why was I becoming more and more obsessed about what she was doing when we weren’t together, and what she was thinking about when we were together? Over the next days I contemplated on what was wrong and suddenly it dawned on me that, despite our matter-of-fact contract and investigations, we had fallen in love! We were both exhibiting the classic symptoms, emotions and feelings associated with being in love. I was battling her and trying to force my opinions on her. I realized that I had been jealous, possessive, pushy, demanding and obsessive with her. And, most appallingly, I saw how when the impossible demands of love are not fulfilled then it can all so quickly turn to disappointment, resentment, withdrawal, spite and eventually hate. It had got to the stage where it was obvious to me that, unless something changed, this relationship was heading exactly the same way as all my previous ones – doomed to failure.
So this where I am. The future is wide open, I have no way of knowing what will happen. As I've written before, my wife is already questioning love.
There are five character virtues which, when brought together, make a relationship magical. If all five are present and balanced (more on that in a moment), there will be joyful harmony, despite the woes and travails of life. If one is missing, the magic will disappear. If two or more are missing, the relationship will be toxic.
Each of these “Elements of Harmony,” when enacted by one party, banishes a different fear in the other:
Honesty banishes the fear of hidden things
Loyalty banishes the fear of ulterior purposes
Kindness banishes the fear of judgment, undeserved or deserved
Laughter banishes the fear of drama and seriousness
Generosity banishes the fear of lack and loss
If one party is doing all the “Honesty” or “Laughter” heavy lifting in a relationship, for example, the Elements are out of balance, and it’s probable the other has a fear which is not being assuaged. They can’t banish the other’s fear because they are not free from it themselves.
There are many ways to go against the Elements and thus against relationships. The most pernicious are what I call the Seeds of Discord, five forms of defensiveness or selfishness which strike at the heart of a relationship:
Deceit defends self from loss of control but selfishly robs the other of a true perspective
Hypocrisy defends self from loss of freedom but selfishly robs the other of a whole relationship
Slander defends self from loss of clarity but selfishly robs the other of a chance to be forgiven
Malice defends self from loss of will but selfishly robs the other of the slack to make an honest mistake
Envy defends self from the despair which comes from loss but selfishly robs the other of a sense of securely having.
These two lists of five, the Elements of Harmony and the Seeds of Discord, are particularly useful when used with a Fourth Step worksheet, such as those used by CoDependents Anonymous, Adult Children of Alcoholics, Families Anonymous, or Al-Anon (for lovers, friends, or family of alcoholics).
Here is a sample worksheet, a 7-page PDF, of which pages 4-7 can be printed out and worked on. If anything in here seems judgmental or religious or focused on failures, skip it; the goal isn’t to make you feel shameful or blamed, it’s to give you a safe space to discover your fears, resentments, self-judgments, self-betrayals, and motivated thinking, which hold you back from healthy and fulfilling relationships. Only when you live for shared purpose are you truly partners.
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