PFCoaching Newsletter

Extraordinary Relationships don't happen by accident. Ordinary behaviors beget ordinary relationships. It takes an awesome couple to have an awesome love connection. BUT, before you go about thinking "I'm ordinary, I guess that's the kind of relationship I'm destined for," I say, "Think again!"

The way to be an extraordinary couple and have an extraordinary relationship is to deal with everything that's not that. Use your challenges to learn and grow. Get help when you need it. Do whatever it takes.

A great place to start is to use the times you get hooked, triggered, and reactive. If we monitor our emotions and reactions on a scale of 1 to 10, then normal, healthy living exists in the one to four range. That means anything over a 4 has a past-based component. That's where the intersection of extraordinary and ordinary live. If you choose to fuel the past-based reaction, you get ordinary. If you use it to grow yourself up and forge a new connection with your honey, that's extraordinary.

Here's how it works. This material is adapted from Jennie Marlow's work, Relating Soul to Soul. In her conceptual framework, it is assumed that we have three core fears:

Abandonment (environment and safety)
Rejection (of values, what's important to us)
Loss of power (our ability to control ourselves/others, to maintain a certain self-image)

When these get triggered, we lovely human beings can become ugly monsters. That's because we default to survival mode, something called the Initial Reaction. It's knee-jerk instinctual; it brings out the animal in us.

Initial Reaction
Usually, this looks like some combination of shame, blame, outrage, guilt, self-pity, and/or pity for the other person. Usually, we either try to dominate the situation, or we collapse. Either way, what our "reptilian brain/animal mind" is trying to do is create a sense of safety by controlling the behavior of the other person or the outcome of the situation. This in and of itself isn't the problem. Safety is good, especially in relationships. The problem lies in the way we go about it. These kind of eruptive reactions destroy acceptance and affinity, which in the end don't really get us the safety that we want. Therefore, as the mature adults that we are or want to be, our job is to get to what is underneath the initial reaction - the Authentic Reaction.

Authentic Reaction
Our authentic reactions include some combination of fear, hurt, sadness, confusion and disappointment. These are partners to the three core fears. They are the vulnerable underbelly that our initial reactions are trying to protect.

Even though the authentic reaction is what is "real" about what was triggered, it too has its own distortions. It is based on a perception about the other person and their behavior that is seen through the lens of the past.

It is possible to get to a point where you are less and less reactionary. To do so, it is necessary to look at the core fear that was triggered, the authentic reaction and what is familiar about them. Was the triggering event or the feeling state a familiar experience, or both? Usually, we recreate conditions from our past, things that need to/want to be healed. Until we deal with those, our love life will look like Groundhog Day - the same thing over and over again. We keep creating the healing opportunity until we learn the lesson it is trying to teach us.

Guide
Here's a 10-step guideline to help you delve more deeply into your inner life and find the healing opportunity.

Name the triggering event - What happened? Remember, "Just the facts, ma'am". Keep your story to a minimum.
Take your attention off the trigger - That is not what is important.
Name your initial reaction - Can you be 100% responsible for your feelings and behaviors?
Identify the authentic emotion and core fear - How is your perception of the conflict being distorted by your fear and past-based perceptions?
Identify patterns in your perceptions, behavior, choices - What is familiar? What healing opportunity are you playing out?
Notice how you are filtering, distorting, resisting the truth - Has your partner become Public Enemy Number One? Why? Are you trying to dominate or avoid? Forcing resolution prematurely? Insisting upon being right?
Share this authentically with your partner - Meaning: honestly, responsibly, no blame.
Get to a place of acceptance with each other - "I can see why you feel that way"
Make a request from this place - What do you need? How can you, as a couple, do things differently?
Name the dance - if this type of conflict is familiar, you may be in what we call a Couple Dance. Naming, expecting it, and making plans to diffuse it will help the two of you move through it more quickly in the future.

Points to remember
Things don't change overnight.
You are likely to repeat patterns until you learn what there is to learn - only then will you move on.
Beware your standards and ideals -"it shouldn't be this way" will be a deterrent to healing.
If you let yourself stay stuck in your Initial Reaction, you are setting yourself up for failure. At best, the relationship never goes anywhere. At worst, it dissolves.

Relationships can be magnificent spiritual teachers, if we let them. None of them are perfect, they all include some conflict or another, they are all a rich opportunity for healing yourself/each other and deepening your ability to love. That's what extraordinary relationships are about!