The Relationship Dynamic of “Over-watering, Under-watering”

With plants, if you water too much or too little, the results are similar- the plant will get stressed, and if nothing changes, will die. People who over-water their plants tend to not trust that the plant will make it without their constant tending. They just keep pouring water on, and the roots can’t breathe, and the plant eventually suffocates. People who under-water tend to trust that the plant will magically feed itself. They go about their business, ignoring the thirsty plant, and then one day, it dries up.
In relationships, often an “over-waterer” will get together with an “under-waterer” and a similar dynamic happens. The over-waterer will keep track of everything, will constantly tend to the relationship with a hyper-vigilance on everything that goes on with their partner. The under-waterer will rely on the over-waterer to know what is going on in the relationship- not really actively contributing much until things start looking really bad, relying on their partner to tell them that things need to change.
Both partners in this dynamic get something out of it. The over-waterer never has to sit back and see what might happen if their partner were to come forward, so they are never vulnerable in that sense. Of course, they never get to be on the receiving end in the relationship. The under-waterer never has to come forward, so they never have to take a risk and expose themselves emotionally. The downside is that they don’t really get to express their feelings in the relationship.
Eventually, one person becomes uncomfortable with the dynamic and then everything gets shaken up. One person is going to have to learn to do less “watering” and sit with the restless, prickly feelings that come up with not being able to act. The other person is going to have to learn to water more, and take the risk of being exposed, and feel all the vulnerable feelings that come with the exposure. The pay-off in the long run is a much healthier and solid relationship that both partners can count on.

Other articles:

Disengaging from the Silent Treatment and Engaging with Each Other: An Experiment for You

Dealing with the Silent Treatment

30 Day Emotional Challenge

Communicating about Taking Space in a Relationship- An Alternative to the Silent Treatment

“EVERYBODY MAKES MISTAKES!!!!!”

My six-year-old nephew told me a story. He was in school, and he bumped into a girl who got very upset with him. This made him feel mortified, so he started to cry. His teacher told him something that seems to have changed his entire perspective on life. As he described her words, he threw his hands up in the air as high as his arms could reach, and then shouted emphatically, while shaking his hands around, “She told me, EVERYBODY MAKES MISTAKES!!!!”
We hear this phrase a lot in life, and it may even seem like a cliche, but to my nephew, this was a revelation that freed him from the shame he was feeling. How often do we make mistakes and dwell on them as if that is all we have done? We might inadvertently hurt someone, then apologize, make amends, and receive forgiveness from that person, but then still punish ourselves long after the fact. We might make a mistake that leaves us feeling foolish, exposed and vulnerable. When we dwell only on our mistakes, we are binding ourselves up in shame and mortification.
We can free ourselves just as my nephew was freed by his teacher’s words. The next inevitable time that you make a mistake, try to imagine your own little six-year-old inside, arms raised high, hands shaking, excitedly shouting, “EVERYBODY MAKES MISTAKES!!!!!”

Scrape-offs

A couple weeks ago, I walked down my street and was surprised to see a neighbor’s house being torn down. I was struck by just how quickly a house goes down, since it takes so long to build one. I was also caught off guard by just how much material that could have been recycled was instead being tossed into the multiple dumptrucks that cycled through. The entire house was gone by midday, leaving a giant crater in the lot where it once stood. A brand new house will take its place sometime in the near future.
Sometimes, when we are fed up with our lives, we may also want to do a “scrape-off” and just dump everything, and start all over again. When feeling like this, it is very difficult to see what there is that is worth keeping, so it is easier to picture leaving it all behind. Sometimes, we actually do things that are close approximations to the scrape-off. Maybe we move to another state, or country. Maybe we break off a relationship, or quit a job. Eventually, the same issues we thought we’d fixed, magically show up in that new home, new relationship, new job.
We can’t just toss ourselves out, as much as we may want to. When we are this frustrated with ourselves, we are in the most need of our own attention. To try to do the scrape-off is to abandon ourselves in our greatest time of need, and being abandoned may be familiar to us. It may be difficult, but we can learn to sit still when we are tempted to run, and find just what it is that is worth keeping in our lives. Rather than trying to remove everything that bothers us, we can sort through the messy feelings to find something in ourselves that we like, that we want to keep, that feeds us. When we breathe life into this part of ourselves, we strengthen the foundation of a life that we can savor.

Biking up a Mountain

When I used to bike tour, I discovered an interesting thing. If I was pedalling up a mountain, I would project into the future how miserable I was feeling. Suddenly, it wasn’t just the mountain that was hard, EVERYTHING else would be just as hard, in my mind. Finding a place to camp? Miserable. Going another 60 miles after this? Miserable. Eating mac and cheese for the 50th time? Miserable, miserable, miserable. Even the promise of going downhill after the up didn’t seem like a reward. In fact, why even do this miserable bike trip thing? It’s all misery! I also noticed that my perspective on life instantly changed when I got to the downhill part. All was well again.
Eventually, I learned to focus only on the mountain while on the mountain.
When you feel miserable, it is hard to imagine that anything in life feels good, so the trick is to understand that your current misery is coloring your view of everything else. It is best to just focus on what is right in front of you. For example, if you just went through a rough break-up, or lost your job, it would be easy to imagine that your future will always be miserable, because you are in a particularly miserable place in life. Like the biker on the mountain, you can only get through these challenges one step at a time. If you notice that you are projecting your current state of mind far into the future, you can remind yourself that you are on the mountain now, and this mountain, once climbed, will soon fade into the horizon behind you.

Quiet Children Hatching their Devious Plans….

It seems to be a pretty well known fact: if a child is suddenly quiet in another room, chances are that said child is up to no good. Some people learn this the hard way, thinking, “Ah, at last, Susie is self-entertaining, and I can relax!” Then they discover that the “self-entertaining” resulted in quiet and impressive mass destruction of whatever it was that was in the other room.
In a similar way, we have feelings that we may want to ignore, so we try to put them somewhere where we can’t see them. We think we’ve dealt with them, because things get quiet for a while. Meanwhile, the feelings are quietly wreaking havoc, unsupervised somewhere deep inside. Some common feelings that people like to ignore are anger, jealousy, or sexual desire.
Maybe we have a judgment about anger, that it isn’t “nice” to show it. So it gets swallowed and hidden somewhere away from our consciousness. That anger hasn’t been expressed, and it is not just quietly playing. Because we’ve hidden it away from our supervision, it will build itself up. When it gets built up enough, it will become rage, and will come out in any number of surprising or even shocking ways. Perhaps it manifests as road rage, maybe we snap at the unsuspecting clerk, or yell at our partner. However that hidden feeling does blow up, it will feel similar to walking into that room where you thought your child was playing quietly, and finding that mass destruction has occurred.
So, just as you can prevent quiet destruction in your home by not leaving children unsupervised, you can prevent ambushes from your own emotions. If you have an emotion, you may as well admit it is there, and witness it. Notice how you feel about that particular emotion- do you hate feeling angry? Do you feel like a bad person if you feel jealousy? Sit with those feelings, acknowledge them, and feel them, and they will eventually move through you. Ignore them, and they will make sure that they are heard above everything, and it will likely be messy.

Well Intentioned but Slightly Misled…Dog

We have a highly exuberant dog whose maniacal barking got out of control. Nothing we tried was helping, so we bought one of those citronella collars that squirts her on the chin when she barks. When she had it on for the first time, she did not make the connection that it was her barking that caused the squirting. Instead, she concluded that being on the floor was the problem, so she joyfully jumped from chair to chair, trying to make sure her feet never hit the floor. She looked incredibly proud of herself for having solved this challenging puzzle.
If you came from a difficult childhood, you may have employed equally bizarre (and creative) strategies to avoid painful experiences. They may have made sense to you at the time, because they were the ideas of a hurt child, and you were working with what you had. And these defenses got you through your childhood intact, so they worked, no matter how strange they may seem now.
If you grew up in an abusive household, the rules of the household were probably just as insane as the idea that a dog would get squirted for standing on the floor. Rules in abusive families make no sense, just as abusing a child makes no sense. So, you develop strategies that only apply to the crazy situation you grew up in, but that are bizarre in the non-abusive world.
When you leave your abusive home and enter the world beyond it, some coping strategies become a hindrance. Recognizing the outmoded protective strategies is the first step in changing them. Understanding how they protected you is very important, and learning new ways to protect yourself is crucial. As always, being slow and gentle with yourself is the best approach. Eventually, you will have enough new strategies, so that the old ones won’t be necessary any more.

Emotional Hooks: Bait versus Real Food

What is it like to be a fish, swimming around in the day-to-day, looking for some food, when all of a sudden, there’s a big, delectable worm floating right there in your face? Maybe it seems like the food is chasing you around. An irresistible feast is dangling right there before your eyes. So, you take a bite, and now the worm is dragging you around by a hook, and things don’t end well for you.
We humans can fall for bait, too. Maybe we meet someone, and the feelings of attraction are so strong that we overlook certain important, not-so-good details about that person. Maybe we believe that this person will make everything in our lives better, so we ignore ourselves and chase after the illusion. The thing about bait is that once you get hooked, you are no longer in control- you are now being dragged around by something that isn’t real.
It takes some work to find out where in our lives we might fall for the hooks. Usually, a hook fits into a place in ourselves that feels powerless. It could be about money, and not knowing our way around it- and a get-rich-quick-scheme is the hook. It could be about feeling unattractive, and we may ignore all the details in a potential partner, except that this person makes us feel attractive. As in the case of the fish, there’s always a price to pay for getting hooked.
So, after we identify where we fall for the hooks, then we can strengthen those parts, so that “real food” becomes much more attractive to us than the bait on the hook. No matter what the weakness, the process is to learn to take the focus from the promise of the bait, and bring it into ourselves. We can learn a lot from just what it is that baits us, and that will point us to what it is we are needing to grow and strengthen in ourselves.

Gratitude

Sometimes, we pay much attention to the things in life that are going badly, or that we don’t yet have yet, or that we no longer have. When our focus is purely on those things, it is easy to overlook that which is going well, the things that are working, and the things we have now. This is similar to being in a family where the misbehaving child gets all the attention, while the behaving one gets ignored.
Thanksgiving is a great opportunity to spend one day paying attention to that which we have right now, that which is going just fine. In fact, every day is a good opportunity for this, but you might as well start with Thanksgiving. Sometimes, it can be hard to find things to be grateful for, especially when life is just feeling difficult. One way through this is to think of something you’d miss if it were taken away from you this minute. It could be something simple, but vital, such as your vision, or hearing, or your ability to breathe effortlessly, or your ability to walk, run, dance. We take these things for granted when they are working smoothly, but when something goes wrong- it can be as if nothing else exists, and we just wish things were back to normal. For example, in daily life, we probably don’t think much about our lungs, but if bronchitis hits, then suddenly the lungs are in the spotlight all day and night!
Gratitude is a way to give attention to what we have while it is working for us, and Thanksgiving is as good a day as any to start a practice of daily gratitude. Practicing daily gratitude doesn’t mean we ignore our problems. It just means that we can learn to distribute our attention more evenly so that the “bad” things don’t seem like the only things in our lives.

For more on gratitude, go here: http://elyntromey.com/therapyblog/?cat=24

The Holidays- Ideas for Reducing Stress

Here they come! The winter holidays can be stressful, and also can bring up many emotions. Some of these emotions can be good ones, some not so good. If you are lonely, or have financial stress, or recently went through a loss, the holidays can be downright frustrating. I’ve made a little list of some possible strategies for taking the edge off the holiday madness.

1. If you are visiting with family, go easy on yourself. Sometimes family can bring out old behaviors that you may not be so proud of. Rather than expecting yourself to be perfect, see if you can be self-forgiving. Remind yourself of who you are in your regular life, because it is easy to feel like you are still a child when you’re with family.
2. If you have a lot of invites, try this sorting process. How many of these invites feel like guilty obligation minus the actual desire to go? How many are ones that you actually want to accept? Only accept the ones you want to! If a friendship would fall apart because you didn’t show up to a party, it probably is a friendship that needs examining.
3. Schedule relaxing time for yourself. This could mean scheduling a massage, or taking a long bath, or just vegging out and watching a movie. Try to give yourself a slot of time where you are not doing anything for anyone.
4. Gifts- this area can be an emotional landmine. Many people spend more on gifts than they can afford, and often for the wrong reasons. If you are buying gifts because you feel guilty, for example, then you are giving the recipient your guilt all wrapped up in the gift. Sort through your feelings and figure out who you genuinely want to buy gifts for. For those people you do want to give gifts to, simple & thoughtful is often better than expensive and elaborate. There are tons of ideas online for simple, inexpensive, but thoughtful gifts. You can let everyone else know that you would like to keep the holidays simple this year, and therefore you are not doing gifts- this lets them off the hook, too.
5. Try to be open to feeling whatever emotions you feel during the holidays. Just because “cheer” is being thrown at you in the form of canned music, ads, TV shows, and more, this doesn’t mean you feel cheerful. There is no such thing as a “wrong” emotion, and trying not to feel something is a sure-fired way to make the feeling much bigger and stronger. Let yourself feel whatever it is, and it is more likely to pass through you, so that you are free to feel other things.
6. If you are feeling overwhelmed by stress and emotion, try this little exercise. Give yourself five minutes to do nothing but breathe and count. Pick a number, like 4 or 5, and breathe in, counting slowly up to that number. Then breathe out, again counting up to that number. Do nothing else but breathe and count until you feel a little calmer. Repeat as necessary.
7. If your emotions still feel too overwhelming, and you have no one to talk to, and if you feel like you are in crisis, you can call a crisis line and get some immediate help & support. In Boulder, the 24-hour crisis line number is: 303-447-1665.

Compost

This will likely be the first of many musings on compost, because I think compost is really cool. You can put so many things into the compost, and like magic, these things turn into fertile soil. Some of the things I put in the compost hold good memories, like the pumpkins I carve with friends every year. Other things are embarrassments- that soup I couldn’t get myself to eat as leftovers, so it went bad. Then there are the mistakes, such as the Aloo Gobi experiment that ended in disastrously bad flavor. All sorts of endings go into the compost- the end of a colorful summer goes in as stalks of many plants that flowered gloriously. All of these- the glory, the mistakes, the shame, the joy- all go into the compost to die and then transform, so that they can feed the living plants.
In life, we can “compost” our diverse experiences if we strive to make meaning of them and then let them go, rather than try to hang on to them long after they have passed. We hang on to experiences by living in regret, or trying to recreate something that no longer exists, or even just trying to avoid painful memories. When we are open to the experiences we’ve had, and we find meaning, no matter how difficult the memory, we can then release it to decompose and then fertilize our experience that is alive right now.

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