Part 6- The Three Worlds: Survival, Emotional, and Practical
“DO OVERS” and OTHER PARADOXICAL GRACES IN THE EW
In my last post, I talked about the importance of knowing which World is “in the room” and being able to switch into the role required of each one. The problem is that so many of us actually don’t know what to do with the appearance of the EW. In responding to this post, one of my readers sent me the following example from his life. It’s apt.
“Reading your latest article and thinking about the sudden appearance of the EW in the room, I was reminded of the first day of my ophthalmology residency. We met with the chief resident, and then he said, “There’s a patient in room one. Go in there and examine her eyes.” I can still remember the feeling of utter panic when the three of us realized that we didn’t have a clue as to how to proceed. We each had a vision of walking into the room and standing there, dumbstruck, having no inkling of what to say or do. Luckily, the chief resident was a nice guy and had been joking. He then walked us through the different stages of an eye exam.”
When I began my training with Bob and Mary Goulding during the fall of 1971 at their facility, the Western Institute for Group and Family Therapy, they taught psychotherapy by immersion. I was in one of their three-day treatment workshops and I observed them work and supervise others for a time. Then one day I volunteered to be the “therapist” in the chair arranged in front of a “group” made up of other professional trainees. I hardly knew what to do. I proceeded to work with a middle aged male for twenty minutes and waited, trembling, to be critiqued by Bob who had been in the room observing the whole time.
Instead of crushing me as he could have, he congratulated me on my intuitive skills and other positives I no longer remember. He then invited me to listen over and over to the tape recording of the “piece” of work until I could hear certain things. I did just as he said and over the years he gently and firmly taught me the skills of psychotherapy. He didn’t expect me to know something that no one had ever shown me, just as the chief resident didn’t expect someone to be able to do an eye exam with no prior instruction.
The key purpose of these articles and perhaps the greatest challenge is teaching how to separate out the EW from the SW and the PW; and then know what to do when the EW is “in the room.” The first steps obviously are recognition and then being willing to switch as best you can into the EW. “But I don’t know what to do there?” “Yes, but you probably would know what to do if the PW or SW had just shown up.” So, for starters, don’t do any of those things!”
“Just do nothing?” Not, exactly. It might look like doing nothing, but it is much more complicated than that. Don’t panic. The first challenge is not using the PW tools or the SW tools. You wouldn’t stop to chat with a neighbor while rushing someone to the hospital. This is the same principle only so much more subtle. You have heard the old PW saying, “Don’t just sit there, do something.”
Well, the equivalent for the EW is, “Don’t just do something, sit there,” meaning, “Be there.” Don’t be somewhere else. It is a call to be present, emotionally present; nothing more. As you are there in this new space you can muse on a question, “What would a person who is really proficient in the EW do or say or not do or not say in this moment?”
Remember, no one dies in the EW and fortunes aren’t lost there either. Nothing needs to be fixed because that is a PW pursuit. The discomfort you feel is not fatal and is not a sign that something in the material world needs to be rearranged. Remember, the most important skill is: Being comfortable with being uncomfortable.
It also wouldn’t hurt if you could say to yourself at the appearance of the EW, “There is no place I would rather be in this moment.” "What! That’s crazy. I don’t want to be where the bullets are flying.” There aren’t any bullets. No one is getting shot. The EW is messy. That’s all. And the EW is like a muscle. The more you use the skills of it the stronger it gets.
And all the really good recurring stuff in life comes from the EW. When that “muscle” is strengthened then it can handle the truly tough challenges like feeling deeply happy, contented, or even joy in unexpected and unrehearsed moments. Learning the skills of the EW is learning how to be alive in the current moment. Oddly enough, the highest level of proficiency in the EW is being able to accept unconditional love. And the current moment is the only place where one can feel loved, touched, intimate, connected and happy. Remember, you can’t get full eating tomorrow’s soup.
The EW is really and truly different in every way than the SW and the PW, except, of course, that we always want a positive outcome in all three. No one makes a deep commitment to a relationship in hopes that it will someday be a big failure in the EW. That is the same with the SW and the PW. Here is a short and incomplete list of characteristics unique to the EW.
A WORLD OF REPAIR: “Endless Do Overs”
I awoke in the middle of the night while in a cabin on the banks of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin in 1968. I was there as a youth minister in a church camp. I was startled awake by the awareness that I did not like or want the new car I had bought just two weeks previous. Years later, I understood the psychology the salesman used on me that I had bitten on. But that was it. There was no taking it back and getting one I wanted. Buying a car is a PW activity and, for the most part, there are very few “do overs” in that World. I had that car and my regret for close to a decade.
Obviously, the same is true for the SW. There is always an outcome in the SW and always hope for a positive one. But when the outcome is negative, a line has been crossed and there is no crossing back. There are no “do overs” in a cemetery.
OK, there are some “do overs” in the SW and the PW. Miracles really do happen. People are brought back from the brink when it appeared all was lost. You or I can send a meal back in a restaurant if it is not to our liking. It is pretty easy to return items and get replacements or refunds. But “do overs” don’t characterize these Worlds. They are not a key trait. The EW by contrast is a World that needs to be filled with “do overs.”
By this, I mean we can repair our relationships. It is not possible to not harm our most treasured relationships in moments of anger, exhaustion, mental fatigue, or mental angst. It is not possible to not touch our loved ones Tap Roots or for them not to touch yours.
It is just not possible to never “blow it.” The damnedest stuff can come out of our mouths or those of our loved ones; our behaviors or theirs can sometimes represent coldness, uncaring, abusiveness or abandonment even if none of those was intended. As a friend of mine was fond of saying, “Life is too complex to always get it right.” That goes double for love relationships, maybe even triple. In light of that we have to have a way to repair things, to do them over in order to make things right.
The EW is a World of “Endless do overs:”
“I don’t like how I said that to you.”
“If you say that to me again I will try harder to hear you.”
“I think I just blew it.”
“Let me try again.”
“I think I was being thoughtless.”
“I hope you can forgive me.”
“Was I just being an ass?”
“I’m feed stuck now, but there is no place I would rather be.”
“Are you feeling safe right now?”
“What are you feeling?”
“Here is what I wish I had said….”
“Can we go back two minutes so I can say that over?”
“Can we/I have a do over?”
And that can go on and on because there are dozens of ways to do repair.
The most important task of love relationships in the EW is to maintain, protect, and promote emotional warmth. The goals of the SW and the PW are equally important, but they are vastly different. Neither one of them has specifically to do with maintaining an atmosphere of loving warmth where it is safe to be vulnerable, but that is exactly what needs to be the modus operandi of the EW.
A WORLD OF CURIOSITY: “When in doubt, lick.”
Forty-five years ago, a friend shared a wonderful British children’s book with me about a cat named Jennie (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/610718.Jennie). The author, Paul Gallico, really knew cats. It concerned the story of a young boy of about ten set in early 1900’s London. He repeatedly asked his parents to allow him to have a cat. They always said no. One day, he was not paying attention and walked into the oncoming path of a horse-drawn cart and was struck. When he woke up he was a cat, completely disoriented, and in a panic. He fled the scene and ended up wet and cold huddled in an abandoned warehouse.
A cat named Jennie found him there and took him under her wing. She set out to teach him how to be a cat including how to use his ridged tongue to lap water into his mouth. She taught him the exquisite hierarchy of acceptable behavior in the world of cats and its many no-no’s. There was one overriding rule if a cat was ever in a situation where it was unclear what behavior was called for: “When in doubt, lick.”
In any situation, under any circumstance, it was acceptable behavior to sit down on one’s haunches and lick one’s paw or tummy. This provided a graceful moment until there was more clarity about what one should do.
There is a parallel guideline in the EW: “When in doubt, be curious.” This is a very good piece of advice because so many of us are like that little boy in the story. We want to be adequate in the EW but a lot of us lack a complete or up-to-date playbook when it comes to that World. This is why it is so easy for us to substitute the tools and strategies of the PW and the SW in moments when in actuality something entirely different is called for.
As I have said before, “Curiosity might be what can kill the cat in the PW but it is what allows the cat to thrive in the EW!” This is also important from a neurological standpoint. Dr. Friedman said in paraphrase, “When one is truly curious, that person cannot be hostile in the same moment.” Why? Two different portions of the brain are in play and they can’t both be activated in the same moment.
“But I try to be curious. I mean, I asked him, “Why the hell did he do such a stupid thing?’” That is not exactly curiosity, as least not as it is being presented here. True curiousness allows for the observing portion of our brains to be at work. It is a genuine wanting to know as opposed to using our intelligence to prove the other wrong or ourselves correct. It allows us to say without prejudice, “I wonder why my loved one is speaking to me this way,” “I wonder what he/she is feeling,” or even “I wonder what I am feeling in this moment.” No one dies in the EW.
Curiosity allows us to be reflective in the moment as opposed to reactive. Rather than shouting back or even cussing back, it allows us to say non-intuitive things such as:
“Are you OK?”
“Can you tell me what’s going on?”
“You look very upset.”
“How can I help you right now?”
“Is there anything you need from me?”
“I really want to hear what you are saying to me.”
“This sounds very important.”
“I can feel my heart beating fast just listening to you.”
These are just a small sample of the kinds of responses possible in the face of relational stress.
Reread this last paragraph. I’ll bet most of you reading this never heard these kinds of phrases or had them modeled for you in your home growing up. I thought so. I certainly didn’t and I had two of the nicest people in the world for parents. If not brilliant, they were close to it, especially my mom, but neither had a clue about the EW in the presence of stress.
A WORLD OF PROTECTIVENESS: “I know where your ‘third degree burns’ are.”
“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
The Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
He wasn’t implying that knowing your enemy’s suffering would cause you to like him or no longer feel him to be an enemy. He was stating the role of empathy. If we can feel another person’s pain, we can relate it to our own. We tend to be very understanding, even forgiving toward ourselves.
Besides neglect, hostility is the greatest enemy of contentment and feeling love in a relationship. John Gottman likes to use the word “contempt,” but he is talking about the same phenomena; which he refers to as “the sulphuric acid of relationships.” Hostility in relationships always harms, never heals.
Hostility is not anger. Anger is an emotion that is connected to the other emotions. Satisfied, anger can switch to sweetness and longing for intimacy. Hostility is an aggressive mindset focused on victory, not reconciliation. No wonder. In Latin, the root word for hostility is hostis which means enemy, foe, or antagonist. When we employ hostility, we take on the attitude of our loved ones as adversaries who need to be overcome, not protected.
What I call, “McNeel’s rules of marriage” contains this as one of its instructions, “Come to know yourself well enough so you are able to protect your loved ones from yourself.” If one agrees with that admonition, it imposes yet another requirement: To know what in our loved ones needs our most fervent protection.” I call this phenomena knowing where the person has, “third degree burns.”
Literally, if you knew someone had a third degree burn on her arm you would be loath to touch it. If you did touch it accidentally, you would most likely recognize the pain caused and apologize, perhaps profusely. If you knew it was there and touched it intentionally, whatever your reasoning, you would need to make a very thorough evaluation of the state of hostility within you.
The task in our love relationships is to know our spouse, our friends, our child, our parent, our cousin, our sibling, or anyone else we declare to be within the protective sphere of our own personal EW. These are the people we have chosen. It may or may not include blood kin or childhood acquaintance. By definition, we are not fully in the EW with someone if we lack knowledge of that person’s joy and suffering. That is the realm of the superficial.
Gilbert Tennent was an eighteenth-century Presbyterian minister from Philadelphia who wrote:
“Fragile love will love up to a point, but it’s not worth anything. But there are those who are willing to know and to be known to the point where they go crashing right on through the threshold of pain to where they know and are known.”
If we know someone in the manner that Gilbert is describing, then we will know where that person’s “third degree burns” are. We all have them because we have all suffered and have known vulnerability and helplessness. There are those who cope with this by seeking in life to be “bullet proof” (One of the leading pursuits of Type A Behavior). They are always lonely and unknown to others, no matter how popular, famous or infamous.
Safety in the EW is based on our protectiveness and that is best expressed, either out loud or to myself, “I know where your third-degree burns are.” Here are some examples:
“I never forget that your mother wasn’t just difficult, she was cruel.”
“I never forget that your father abandoned your family when you were very small.”
“I never forget that your brother committed suicide.”
“I never forget what you went through in the war.”
“I never forget that you were constantly teased because of your stutter.”
“I never forget that your father sexually abused you.”
“I never forget that you grew up in a home full of coldness.”
“I never forget that you father was bi-polar.”
“I never forget that your mother was alcoholic.”
Obviously, this goes on and on. These phrases give us a lens to look through at our loved one. This carries with it a conscious commitment to protect those burns, never try to “fix” them and to do our best to never touch them; apologizing the moment we become aware we have. “I will do my best to protect you even when, especially when, hostility has its sway over me so I never use them as a weapon.”
A WORLD OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE: “I know where I am with you.”
“I don’t think my husband loves me any longer.”
“My wife has become very cold-hearted toward me.”
“Ever since she turned fifteen, she hasn’t had a kind word to say to me or her father.”
“I thought we were friends, but now I am not so sure.”
“I think she is just mean.”
“I can’t understand why my brother is so cold with me.”
“If anything my dad gets colder with me as he gets older.”
I can never get my mother to understand my feelings.”
There is a common theme to all of the statements above. Often said in utter frustration or emotional pain, they have great truth to the person saying them. Factually, any one of them might be accurate and a harbinger of a relationship about to shift on its axis. The common theme is the externalization of the emotional compass in each of them. “That person no longer cares, she has lost her warmth, he has become cold-hearted” and on and on.
There is no accounting for one’s own feelings and what they are. Those statements treat emotions as if feelings are determined by the other person: If the other feels warm, then I will feel warm and if cold, then cold.
There is one certain truth about relationships that last for more than a half hour, we will be challenged to know where we are in relationship to that other person. The fiftieth time a two-and-a-half-year-old screams, “I hate you,” the mother or father might have the thought, “Maybe, I hate you too.” But that thought passes with some sleep, food, and repose and the parents have no doubt of their absolute love for this “makes me crazy” child.
Remembering the mantra, “It’s not personal” helps us to remember that life for our loved ones is just as stressful, or even as crushing as it is for us. The common complaint in all of the statements in the first paragraph is that the other person is not making life secure or predictable for us in the present moment. And, it’s true. Like the husband in the earlier example who comes home full of scorn for his wife, only for her to find out he has lost his job, it wasn’t personal. It certainly wasn’t comforting or reassuring to hear those things, but she was able to remember it wasn’t personal.
It is so easy to move to a part of our own brains that says, “If that’s the way you feel, then I’ve had it.” But that thinking model doesn’t ask us the most necessary question, “Where am I with this person?” “What are my abiding feelings that are separate from this person’s immediate behavior or vocalizations?”
It is intuitive to look to external sources for comfort. But what do we do when those sources are empty? It’s like standing in the middle of a dry lake looking for a glass of water. It’s not there. The argument, “Well, it should be there” may make good sense at one level but won’t produce the needed water. In this analogy, we can stand there and scream at the empty lakebed, “But you promised me you would always have water.”
Especially in the EW, external sources are not always able to live up to their promises, no matter how sincere they were. I recall a sixteen year old stating to me unequivocally how deeply he hated his parents. Somehow, that passed with time, but it was not a good moment for his parents to ask him for reassurance about anything, much less if he loved them. They had to know where they were with him. We have to know. The manifestations of love and commitment can wax and wane in the EW, subject to the subtleties of mental exhaustion, illness, stress, lingering “ghosts” from the past and a whole host of other things over which we have little control.
But with that cranky two-year old, the maddening teenager, the distant spouse, the friend who is not returning calls, or other harbingers of emotional dread, there is one absolutely dependable, certain, and predictable safe haven: what my enduring feelings are for that other person. Then, in those times of upheaval or uncertainty, I am able to say out loud, or just to myself: “I know where I am with you.” I know.
That is one of the great non-intuitive secrets to the feeling of security in the EW. In a World such as that where we have little to no control, we have a lot of control over our thoughts and our actions; and we can remember our true feelings even we don’t feel them in the moment. We may not like what we hear. Some of it will undoubtedly be biased and unfair. It might sound like the other person has turned against us completely (Of course, this sometimes actually happens and is real) and no longer cares. But we can take comfort in knowing what our feelings are and what our abiding commitment is. This arises from the constant: “I know where I am with you.”
This allows us to fulfill one of the highest callings of the EW: To be able to invite the other person into the EW with us. Confident of our own warmth we can offer an invitation that is safe, not into an ambush. This invites the other the opportunity to switch into the EW with us, “Yeah I lost my job,” and not into a World of recrimination and blame. Needless to say the other person may or may not be able or willing to accept the invitation (What John Gottman refers to as ”Bids”) because we don’t have control of that either.
Many of us never saw this as children. If you did, then you possess riches beyond price.
A close friend of mine, a retired diocesan Catholic priest, tells two very similar stories from his pastoral history. Understandably, he spent copious time in nursing homes ministering to the ill. On two occasions, he observed husbands who were devoted to visiting wives, never missing a day even though they no longer knew them due to dementia. Asking the source of their devotion, he received these responses, “But, Father, she is the love of my life,” and “She may not know who I am, Father, but I know who she is.”
They knew where they were with their love ones.
A WORLD OF INFLUENCE: “Your loved one is not an appliance.”
There are lots of great things about the PW and one of those is that you can fix stuff. If something doesn’t work, you can repair it, get someone else to repair it, or replace it. The energy of “fix it” is very powerful and in the EW it is very seductive. It is seductive because in that world it is illusory and that is the essence of all good seduction.
When the SW appears, it is always completely inconvenient at the least and at the most it can be stupefying as well as terrifying. But its call to action is almost always obeyed in the hopes of obtaining a positive outcome. There will be an outcome. This is why some people escalate the natural discomfort of the EW into the energy of the SW. Unconsciously, it is the desire for a positive outcome that drives lots of “crazy” scenes in relationships.
“If I just yell at you loud enough with huge energy, maybe you will understand (a positive outcome).” Unfortunately, it is not possible to scream or terrify someone into a positive place, especially if that person has been hooked by the SW energy too. In that case, the responder will fight, flee, or freeze. Yes, those are all responses to adrenaline and no one that I know has been able to adrenalize their love relationships into a better place, at least if tenderness and safety are the overriding goals.
Fixing and adrenalizing don’t work in EW. Sorry, but they don’t. They can be “effective” tools if the true goal is to control the relationship or to “win” arguments. Facts, especially selected facts are handy for getting the upper hand, but not so good if I want to end up holding hands. If those are the only tools available I will keep using them and I will continue to live in frustration as well as my loved ones. There will continue to be lots of surly, “You win again” or slammed doors. In that atmosphere, there will be no oxygen available for curiosity about the emotions in the room.
“Winning” or “threatening” or “being cold” or “fixing” have their place, but by being used in the EW it actually amounts to an admission of inexperience with the most powerful “tool” in that World: Influence.
Properly understood, influence is the confluence of all that has been thus far written in this article. It is the sum of its parts. People sometimes despair that I am teaching a kind of resignation or powerlessness in relationships. I tell them, “It is just the opposite. I am always teaching to power. I want you to be more powerful in your love relationships, not less. I want you to be able to get what you need and I want you to be able to give what you have.”
Being powerful in the EW is so completely contradictory to how power is expressed in the SW and the PW. Completely. It is a wonderful thing to have SW or PW power when those Worlds are in play. It is also a wonderful thing to have an understanding of EW power and to have confidence in it.
The hardest thing about the power of influence is there is often no immediate outcome that is measurable and immutable. It is a belief. But, it is a belief that is borne out over time. It is the ability to believe in the concept of infection in relationships. It is easy to see evidence of infection when one catches a cold or even worse (this is being written in the sixth month of COVID 19 pandemic). No one wants that because it is a bad infection. The intensity of the SW or the cold practicality of the PW are “bad infections” when the EW is the “in the room.”
It is not so hard to believe that there can be “spoilers” in the EW that can cause it to feel toxic. What is more difficult is to believe in the “good infection” that comes from affection and acceptance and that they have power over time.
The concepts of this section are summed up in the phrase, “Your loved one is not an appliance” that can be fixed, regulated, controlled, or be disposed. The most powerful infection in the EW is warmth, especially when warmth is a non-intuitive response. That doesn’t mean everything should be “gooey nice.” It means knowing where you are with someone in the EW and being able to stay with that conviction with the confidence of knowing that when we are sharing the “good infection” of warm influence, we are not being weak or passive or non-assertive, but strong and powerful: and very safe. Safety in the EW is the name of the game.
By the way, you can be mad as hell at someone while not surrendering warmth. When the anger resolves, the warmth will appear as the constant. Trust me.
In my next post, I will explore the ways in which we can recognize the EW when it is “in the room.”