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Greetings!
Do you feel pressured to do things you don't want to do in your relationship? This month's newsletter focuses on how to step up to the pressure and make things safe for yourself! If you have a question or a topic you would like addressed, please send it along to Don@DonElium.com. Not all questions will appear in newsletter, but all will receive a response. Please share this newsletter with those friends that you care about most! You can check for the weekly Blog at http://donelium.blogspot.com/Let's Get To It! Don Elium, MA MFT(Lic. # MFC28381) |
Let's Get To It! ASK DON:
I Don't Feel Emotionally Safe With My Husband!
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Dear Don,
I want to establish some rules in my relationship so I can feel safer. I often feel pressured to do things that I don't want to do, like being social with people I don't enjoy and having to make love whenever my husband wants to. I usually just go along with this, but I am just tired of it. My husband complains now that I close him out. I think if we had some clear rules about these things I would feel safer to be more open and available. Right now I feel numb when I think of him. Am I being reasonable to ask for these rules? Thanks for your straightforward answer. ~Cindy
Dear Cindy,
Rules don't make you safe.
The foundation of safety is telling the truth about how you really feel, what you want and what you don't want. The truth defined here is simple: what is actually happening without a story or drama.
So, for safety reasons, how important is the truth in a personal relationship?
Think about something extremely precious in your life--something you would actually die for. Notice the love you feel inside. You need to love truth more than that! Why? Because how can you protect and keep safe that which you value as extremely precious by ignoring what is actually happening? Rules don't make you safe. What truly makes you safe is the liberating, adventuresome, challenging path of truthfulness.
The good news here is that you are starting to do that! However, this is confusing your husband. He mistakenly thinks that you have closed him out, when actually you are starting to be open to him for the first time in a long time---maybe ever.
Although you will temporarily confuse him, your truthfulness allows your husband to know what is happening for you, and now a realistic exchange can occur. The reason you are starting to speak up is that underneath it all you are feeling frustrated and dead toward him and yourself in the relationship. Truth is not always pleasant and sometimes painful, but it is always authentic and feels alive. This authenticity and aliveness, often experienced as anxiety, opens the way for mature trust and intimacy to develop. Mature trust is based on what is actually happening instead of unquestioned assumptions, un-investigated expectations, denials, or lying. ONLY with truth comes intimacy. Only with intimacy comes trust. With trust comes safety. Your best bet is truthfulness.
Disagreements inevitably develop between spouses. But by constantly submitting to the wishes of your husband and by hiding your own desires, you are giving him unclear and inaccurate messages about what you really want. By giving him the impression of "yes" because you just go along, you trap yourself further into a role and into situations that you don't want. Having rules will not get you out of this trap, because people break the rules whenever "the boss" or "the cops" or whoever is in charge is not around. This is human nature. Rules as agreements are necessary guides for relationship, but they don't automatically make anyone safer.
Instead of a series of rules, I suggest making an agreement with yourself and your husband to be as honest whenever you feel pressured to do something, whether by yourself or with others. Agree that "No" just means "Not now" instead of "I don't love you" or "Never!" Then "Yes" can be "Okay for now, but don't lock me into this forever."
Give yourself room to change your direction or preference at any time. Being honest brings a flow of real choices where a feeling of connection to the flow of actual life is experienced---not always pleasant and not always painful but always real. You aren't locked into either way, yet you can keep agreements. You can adjust them as circumstances change. You will be living in tune with life, and not rule bound by an idea that keeps you a step away from your own life.
Truthfulness brings a direct experience of life as it is happening. This is the connection you are seeking. This is the love that you long for: LIFE. Without this honesty, anyone feels lonely, paralyzed, and unsafe. If you feel trapped and dead, this is not you. The "you" that you long for is aliveness itself.
Truth is not a robotic walk with a smile on your face. Truthfulness brings a direct experience of life as it is happening. This is the connection you are seeking. This is the love that you long for: LIFE. Without this honesty, anyone feels lonely, paralyzed, and unsafe. If you feel trapped and dead, this is not you. You are alive. Truthfulness will bring you back from feeling emotionally dead in a second!
To be truthful, moment-by-moment, will be most challenging, liberating, disappointing, and your best option for safety. You certainly won't feel dead to things! You will be in the flow of the living each moment. So, don't get ahead of yourself. Just be honest one moment at a time. Stay out of the idea of the future. Stay out of the idea of the past. Just be right now. At times you will resist it, because, at times being truthful in any committed relationship is very, very hard. However, being truthful gets easier with practice, and it yields something that rules can't: closeness, belonging, and love. And, if it ain't honest, it ain't loving . . . and it certainly ain't safe!
Best wishes in loving.
Don
Don@DonElium.com
www.DonElium.com
[Click Here For More Questions and Answer for those who are ready to "get to it."]
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| Individual Counseling |
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There is nothing wrong with you.
Life is just harder than you ever expected!
Getting lost in your circumstances is not a disease! Life is just harder than you ever imagined it would be. You lose your way by doing the same old thing over and over and expecting a different result. You find your way by learning something significantly new that stops the old patterns and opens up free and flexible choices about the possibilities in your life right now.
A fundamentally new way of seeing your every day awaits you . . .
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"Come new to this day.
Remove the rigid overcoat of experience, the notion of knowing, the beliefs that cloud your vision. Leave behind the stories of your life. Spit out the sour taste of unmet expectation. Let the stale scent of what-ifs waft back into the swamp of your useless fears. Arrive curious, without the armor of certainty, the plans and planned results of the life you've imagined. Live the life that chooses you, new every breath, every blink of your astonished eyes." - Rebecca del Rio ~
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| Couple Psychotherapy |
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Stuck in Vicious Cycles?
"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." --Rumi
Getting lost in your relationship is not a failure. Being true to yourself and being close to those you love is just harder than you ever imagined it would be. You lose your way by trying to do more or less of something to relieve the pressure in the relationship instead of resolving the underlying conflict that is causing the pressure.
In this therapy, partners receive straightforward, compassionate guidance to identify the unresolved, underlying issues that keep them in conflict in the marriage. Significant new learning supports partners to be true to themselves, to be close to their mates, and to develop a sense of belongingness. Honesty, vulnerability, integrity, respect, and transparency guide the therapy and discussions . . .
[Click Here for Info on Couple Counseling]
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| The MarriageSchool.com For Out of Towners |
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Get to the Heart of It
TheMarriageSchool.com is especially designed for couples who are unable to attend weekly appointments or who live out of the area. In a series of nine personalized sessions over a three-day period, couples immediately begin to get to the heart of the underlying problems in their marriage. Partners identify their individual roles and practice new options for dealing with long standing, difficult, and even hidden issues. Compassion, honesty, integrity, respect, and transparency guide the therapy and discussions.
[Click Here for Info on The Marriage School]
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| Be Set Free from Emotional Over-reaction
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Find the Calm in the Emotional Storm
Every day you tell yourself that you won't act that way again. But, then you do.
· Lonely at night, you lay beside the one you love, upset, after another round of the same argument that you've had for years.
· You experience personal loses and yet feel no emotions.
· Uncontrollable anger persists.
· You hear yourself speaking in a demeaning, hurtful way.
· You chronically let others walk all over you.
Precious moments are lost when troublesome emotional and behavioral habits get in the way. Psychotherapy with the technique Be Set Free Fast brings freedom of choice in the places where negative habits are controlling the relationships you value most. [Click Here To Read More]
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Thank you and the best to you this month!
Sincerely,
Member California Association of Marriage & Family Therapist
Accredited as a provider of Continuing Education by the
Board of Behavioral Sciences, State of California, Approval No. PCE 3717
(Lic. # MFC28381)
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