photo credit: Thomas Roche

DAWNE: For a long time, Marc and I had a pair of problems: He suffered from anger issues and I suffered from deep depressions. Our base personalities are both happy and cheerful: We like to help people, we love to laugh and we recognize the truly important things in life. We’re “discussers” of issues, not arguers. We respect each other deeply and always want to know each others opinions. Yet we spent 10 years mired in anger and depression. So what was going on?

MARC: Dawne’s depressions stemmed from her difficult past, and often kept her locked in that past. She would relate many of the things that I would say and do to events from her history, even if they bore only a superficial resemblance. For my part, I grew increasingly angry because I felt that Dawne was rejecting me, deliberately keeping me at a distance. My angry outbursts only served to validate her historical perspective on her life. We were caught in a vicious cycle, each feeding the others habit.

It’s All About Energy Flow

DAWNE: There is a saying: Energy flows where attention goes and attention goes where energy flows. That means wherever you place your focus, you give energy to the situation. It also means that when you concentrate on changing a situation and keep your focus there, others will follow after a while. This applies to all areas of our lives, whether personal, professional or social: It’s the magic formula for achieving dreams. And we apply this formula just by existing - as long as you think and feel, you do this.

But… When you apply this to something negative, it will work just as effectively as when applied to something positive. In fact, just as it can help you to achieve your dreams, it can tear your life down.

MARC: Here’s what happens when we tackle personal problems: We focus on a single area of concern to the exclusion of all else, hammering away at it in an effort to fix it. The end result becomes one of feeding the monster rather than slaying it. When we do this we can inadvertently create marriage killing situations out of trivial problems that could otherwise be easily resolved.

The mistake arises in the idea that human beings and their relationships can be dissected into their component bits, and those bits addressed independently of the whole. We don’t work that way. The human mind is a holistic environment, an internal ecology in which every part is inextricably intertwined with every other part. The result is that when we focus on one area of our lives, instead of fixing it, we feed it and give it more power. As Dawne said: Energy flows where attention goes.

Problems: The Beginning of Solutions

DAWNE: All problems have within them the very solution we seek. The difficulty is that we’re taught to fight “problems” and to frame them emotionally as “bad”. However, if you look at almost every problem you’ve ever faced, you will find that any effective solutions you found were actually found within the problem itself: You just had to be willing to really see it.

The first, best place to start in a relationship situation, is with oneself. If we concern ourselves with becoming the best we can be, then many problems vanish. This is not about “performing” though: It’s about the kind of person you are. If you are thoughtful, kind, honest and considerate to those you love, then you will find loving tenderness and support in return. If you act like a jerk, then you get anger and resentment.

MARC: The solutions lie in looking at the whole of your relationship, and asking some hard questions. The number one question on your list should be, “What did I do to contribute to the situation?” Perhaps your sweetheart said something hurtful. Did you say or do something to prompt the statement? Have you been unreasonably grouchy due to work stresses? Have you been bringing that bad attitude home with you, subjecting your innocent family to your bad attitude?

If that, or something similar is the case, then you have a starting point to rectify the problem. If, on the other hand, it’s your lover who is bringing home the bad attitude, what do you do? Once again, it falls to you to provide the solution to the problem. Offer your love, faith and support to your partner. Encourage them and be their safe harbour in the face of life’s storms.

This does not mean become their punching bag; a place for them to dump all their crap! Your role is to give your lover the strength and encouragement that they need to face the trials they are undergoing, not become their personal garbage dump. Experiences like these, rather than becoming marriage killers, can be transformed into wonderful opportunities to strengthen your love for each other. Together you can face anything, apart you suffer alone.

Acceptance & Responsibility

MARC: For my part, trying to learn how to control my anger - focusing on the problem - simply magnified it and made it worse. What I needed to do was focus on the solution, which lay in switching my focus from one of anger management to that of acceptance. I had to learn to accept Dawne’s history and the role it played in her life. I had to accept that her reactions were not personal attacks, but instead an expression of her depression and subsequent fears that she was doomed to endlessly repeat her history. Those fears were leading her to see all that once was, as still existing in the here and now.

My process started with one not-so-simple change in attitude: I had to accept sole responsibility for my anger and reactions. No longer could I permit myself the luxury of blaming Dawne, claiming that she was pushing me away. Though her behaviour was the trigger that set off my anger, it was not her fault. This is an important distinction: I was permitting myself to become angry, when I should have been stepping back and taking an honest look at the situation as it was, rather than what it felt like. Out of this change in attitude I was able to slowly realize that my anger was actually re-enforcing and validating her depression and all the reasons for it.

DAWNE: I had to learn to wake up to today and remain asleep to the nightmares of yesterday. I knew this, but every time I cracked open my eyes, I was sure I was just looking at more of the same; especially with Marc getting angrier and angrier. But our todays have a habit of being very insistent, forcing us to deal with them in the here and now. Unfortunately, that meant that I would drag my nightmares into the waking world. However, the wounds I carried from that nightmare past were very real and they hurt more when I was “awake”.

It took a long time, but slowly I realized Marc loved me so much that my past, or rather my living in it, was the culprit of his anger. I had to learn to describe in words things that can only be felt so that they became visible to someone outside myself. Doing this was terrifying because it meant I was going to find out if the nightmare was real or not. But as I told Marc my fears and pain, the nightmare began to fall away and be replaced with a waking reality I never wanted to lose. This was learning to take responsibility for my here and now. The second thing I had to do was accept Marc: His love, his compassion and his understanding - today, as it was. In other words - TRUST HIM.

Solutions

photo credit: ljcybergal

MARC: No problem exists in a vacuum, and as such you cannot solve a problem by simply ignoring it or eradicating it. You must replace it with something else; something positive. Is your instinctive reaction to stress one of anger? Replace anger with acceptance, and if you want to be a really positive person, learn to see stress as a road sign guiding you to opportunity!

Acceptance allows you to see a situation with clarity, forbidding its unreasonable magnification into something that it’s not. Stress is caused by problems, and what are problems if not opportunities to be a solutions provider? Though us incurable romantics’ primary purpose is one of strengthening relationships, these skills translate very well into every arena of your life. Solutions providers are given the promotions and raises. They are handed opportunities where others are relegated to the ranks of the trench workers, fated to ever blame others for the mud under their own feet.

By deliberately choosing to take responsibility for your role in your relationships, you build a solid foundation for better relationships and a life of happiness built for two. And that will also be something that you can claim responsibility for, as your spouse and family learn from your example. They will begin to do their part in building their relationship with you into something that none of you could ever have imagined. At least you couldn’t have imagined it while you were toiling in the mud, just like everybody else.

DAWNE: When you focus on the patterns you find in your partner, it forces you to look back to yourself. This is because our partners are our mirrors, showing us our behavior in the reflection of their behavior towards us. The proof of this lies in just how uncomfortable we get in the face of it and how we often turn to blaming our partner for daring to reflect back at us how we’re behaving. To really see the reflection for what it is means you need to ask yourself WHY your partner is acting the way they do towards you.

But whatever you find, the trick here is to not allow yourself to fall to extremes, either too positive about yourself nor too negative, as you look into that mirror. The hardest person to accept as they truly are is ourselves. We somehow think we’re supposed to be or reach some kind of “perfect” and that we are so far from it that we’re not worth the time it would take to reach it. If that were true, then the world would be a truly dark place, since there would be no love: We are liked for our good points, but we are loved because of our flaws. Many times what could easily be seen as a big negative is in fact a huge positive, just as I found with Marc and his anger.

Another important aspect to the mirroring that partners provide each other is to learn to be seen through their eyes. In my case, the big one was that I was worth loving just for being me. Marc also showed me that I was creative, kind and gentle: All things I knew deep down, but had been told repeatedly I was not. In the learning of these, Marc gave me a new “lens” through which to view my past. It was his love and his positive view of me, untainted by others opinions, that allowed me to grow again.

MARC: I knew that Dawne loved me beyond a most reasonable measure, otherwise she would not have stayed with me when she thought I was just like everybody else. It was out of that love that I found the strength to face myself and commit to doing whatever I needed to in order to heal our relationship. To do so, I had to face my innermost twin demons of anger and fear of losing Dawne. I could not have done this, indeed would have had absolutely no motivation to do this if not for Dawne.

As you commit yourself to being the change that you desire to see, the people who love you cannot help but come around to your way of thinking as they see the positive results in your life and the overflow of those results into theirs.

Allow me to assure you; you will become the person you always dreamt of being, and your relationships will become even better than what you dreamt. That’s what happened to Dawne and I, and that is what will happen to you!

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