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WEEK 7
EXPLORING CHALLENGING RELATIONSHIPS
PAIN OF DISCONNECTION
A common type of pain experienced in relationship is the pain of disconnection. Some examples include feeling rejected, betrayed, lost, or alone. Disconnection causes a host of emotions to arise, both hard and soft. For example, Anger is a common hard feeling directed at those who have harmed us through disconnection
When anger arises in the service of Yang compassion (to protect provide and support) it has some really important and positive functions.
How anger might be useful in relationships? What’s its function? Anger gives us information that someone overstepped our boundaries and hurt us in some way by providing us with the energy we need to protect ourselves or take action to make a change. Anger can also be wise if it reduces harm to oneself or others.
Anger can support our general wellbeing as long as we don’t suppress it or turn it against ourselves (e.g., harsh self-criticism). As with all emotions, our relationship to anger is what determines whether it is helpful or harmful.
How anger can be harmful? Anger can be harmful for our physical health by raising blood pressure and releasing hormones that impact our body's overall functioning. We also know that anger can destroy relationships, including having a healthy relationship with ourselves. Anger can also take us out of the present moment. If we continually harden our emotions in an attempt to protect ourselves against attack, over time we may develop bitterness and resentment.
Anger, bitterness, and resentment are hard feelings. Hard feelings are resistant to change, and we often carry these hard feelings for a long time, even when we don’t need them anymore.
Here are some poignant sayings that highlight what can happen when we do not have a healthy relationship with our anger:
“Anger corrodes the vessel that contains it.”
“Anger is the hot coal we pick up to throw at another person.”
“Anger is the poison we drink to kill someone else.”
If we decide that anger is not helpful to us any longer, that it isn't protecting us but has hardened into bitterness, we can explore it and learn to respond to it in new ways.
(1) Validate: we need to fully validate our anger before we can do anything about it. Remember the saying, "If you can name it, you can tame it" and "if you can feel it, you can heal it". Many of us know that we are angry, but we still subtly criticize ourselves for being angry. This is especially true for women, who are told they aren't supposed to get angry as well as for members of marginalized groups that experience constant discrimination and for whom anger can come at a high price. Validating anger has a yang-like quality—supporting the truth of our anger and the worth of ourselves when we are angry.
(2) Identify the Soft feelings: The next step is to identify the soft feelings behind the hard feeling. Often anger is protecting more tender feelings. What are some examples beneath anger? Feeling scared, lonely, or lost. Leaning into soft feelings has a yin-like quality.
Rosenberg (2015, nonviolent communication) noted that behind these soft feelings there are usually unmet needs (e.g., the need to be seen, heard, validated, connected, respected, and, above all, the need to be loved). Rosenberg notes: Every act of violence is an expression of an UNMET NEED.
Validating anger, finding soft feelings, and discovering unmet needs are all mindfulness skills that enable the last step—a compassionate response. It is easier to evoke compassion for ourselves when we are no longer frozen in anger and we understand that our unmet needs are UNIVERSAL, LEGITIMATE, and WORTHY.
Self-compassion is finally giving ourselves the love and compassion we may have been yearning to receive from others for many years.
It is important to note that to a great extent, there’s a cultural legacy, degrading love to sentimentality and compassion to root cause of fatigue. Love and compassion are strengths that seem, at best, as secondary virtues in a competitive culture.
We need to step outside of our conditioned patterns of responding. Compassion is a tool for transformation.
FORGIVENESS
We cannot forgive others or ourselves without first opening to the hurt that we have experienced or have caused to others.
To forgive others, we must first face that we were hurt. Acknowledging pain can be especially difficult when the pain is systemic. To forgive ourselves, we must first open to guilt or shame for hurting others, or betraying ourselves in the face of difficulty. As the saying goes, “Forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past”
Even when the harm we experience feels personal and intentional, it is usually the product of a universe of interacting causes and conditions stretching back through time. For example, the offending persons may have partly inherited their temperament from their parents and grandparents, and their actions may have been shaped by their personal history, cultural identity, health status, current events, and so forth. Therefore, we often have limited knowledge and control over precisely what we say and do from one moment to the next.
Sometimes we hurt others with no fault of our own and we still feel regret for causing such pain. An example is when a young adult leaves home and their parents feel lonely.
How do we begin to work with forgiving either ourselves and others:
(1) Opening to pain—reliving the pain of what happened, slowly.
(2) Self-compassion—allowing our hearts to melt with sympathy for the pain, no matter what the causes and conditions might have been.
(3) Wisdom—beginning to recognize that the situation wasn’t entirely personal but was the consequence of many interdependent causes and conditions.
(4) Intention to forgive. We begin with the intention to forgive and we go slowly: "May I begin to forgive myself what I did, wittingly or unwittingly, to have caused someone else harm.” "May I begin to forgive myself for what another person did, wittingly or unwittingly, that caused me harm."
(5) Responsibility to protect—committing ourselves to not repeating the same mistake again and to stay out of harm’s way to the best of our ability.
Take a moment and read, Prayer Before the Prayer by Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tuti (2015) presented in the next lesson. This prayer helps speak to our natural ambivalence about reliving old pain. Ambivalence is a precursor to old pain.
Prayer Before the Prayer
By Demond Tutu and Mpho Tutu
I want to be willing to forgive
But I do not ask for the will to forgive
In case you give it to me
And I’m not yet ready
I am not yet ready for my heart to soften
I am not yet ready to be vulnerable again
Not yet ready to see that there is humanity in my tormentors’ eyes
Or that the one who hurt me may also have cried
I am not yet ready for the journey
I am not yet interested in the path
I am at the prayer before the prayer of forgiveness
Grant me the will to want to forgive
Grant it to me not yet but soon
Can I even form the words
Forgive me?
Dare I even look?
Do I dare to see the hurt I have caused:
I can glimpse all the shattered pieces of that fragile thing
That soul trying to rise on the broken wings of hope
But only out of the corner of my eye
I’m afraid of it
And if I am afraid to see
How can I not be afraid to say
Forgive me?
Is there a place where we can meet?
You and me
The place in the middle
Where we straddle the lines
Where you are right
And I am right too
And both of us are wrong and wronged
Can we meet there?
And look for the place where the path begins
The path that ends when we forgive.
PAIN OF CONNECTION
The pain of connection is based on our human capacity to resonate. The human brain is highly social. We appear to have neurons dedicated to perceiving in our own bodies what others are experiencing called mirror neurons.
Similar neural circuits are stimulated when people experience emotion as when they see others expressing emotions. For example, witnessing another person in pain activates similar brain structures in the observer as in the person in pain.
Our capacity to resonate empathically with others is evolutionarily adaptive. Not only do we require this capacity to raise our young, but we also need to understand and cooperate with one another to survive. Although the survival of the fittest is generally attributed to Charles Darwin, he actually considered cooperation to be the key factor that helped a species to survive. We like to think of it as survival of the kindest.
Emotions are contagious. You can watch this video of talking twin babies that exemplify how emotions are contagious. Most of us have had experiences of how our moods are influence by others around us and how we can co-regulate one another by changing our emotions. It is also important to note that empathy occurs on a preverbal level, which is how infants emotionally communicate before they have language.
Emotional resonance also occurs in intimate partner relationships. For example, imagine you returned home in a good mood and your partner was in a bad mood. The disappointment of seeing your partner in a bad mood makes you unhappy. Perhaps you frown when you’re expected to smile and your partner asks, slightly annoyed, what’s the matter with you? And you think, me? What’s the matter with you? Despite our best efforts, it’s difficult to hide how we really feel because empathy is preverbal. We are influenced by micro communications such as a twinkling eye, a long sigh, or a slight shift in the tenor of the person’s voice. While others are partly responsible for our state of mind, however, we are also partly responsible for their state of mind.
Downward and Upward Spirals
Our contagious emotions can send us into a downward spiral in which negative emotions trigger negative thoughts and appraisals in one person that can lead to a similar or worse thoughts and feelings in another person.
The good news is that compassion can interrupt a negative cycle and start an upward spiral instead. When we cultivate compassion– engendering feelings of kindness and concern for ourselves or others–our improved attitudes lead to positive thoughts and interactions with others. The tone of our conversation, the underlying attitude, is the main message that we convey to others.
Power of Goodwill
The easiest way to have good relations with others is to have compassion in the face of suffering – for our own suffering or that of others. Positive emotions flow from goodwill, and positive interactions flow from positive emotions. The more we cultivate goodwill toward ourselves and others, the better our relationship interactions will be. Lovingkindness and compassion training cultivates goodwill.
CAREGIVING FATIGUE
We are all caregivers to some extent. Caregiving fatigue is another example of how human connection can become painful. Empathic resonance is a key feature of caregiving relationships. When we empathically resonate with others who are suffering, it can be draining and even overwhelming.
Some signs of caretaking fatigue can include frustration, irritability, absentmindedness, disinterest, avoidance, isolating, worry, poor sleep, and others. Behaviorally, we can engage in unhealthy activities such as excessive drinking or eating. This fatigue is not a weakness, it is a sign of being human and of needing a break.
Everyone has a limit to how much empathic distress they can tolerate on any given day, in any given moment. When it is too much, we become fatigued and shut down. The result is that we may begin to resent the people we are supposed to care for. This shift can be doubly disconcerting for people who consider themselves to be naturally compassionate. Florence Nightingale said, “Caring for self is not self-indulgent, it is self-preservation for ourselves and those we serve.”
When we experience caregiving fatigue, others often encourage us to take care of ourselves by exercising, spending time with friends, and going on vacation. The usual advice is to take care of ourselves. Ironically, we recharge our mobile phones every day imagine if we could do so for ourselves. We know that self-care is extremely important. The primary challenge is that self-care tends to happen off the job and this usually requires time and money. We need something on the job.
What role does compassion have here? Ironically, although we often use the term compassion fatigue, actually need more compassion. Compassion fatigue is actually empathy fatigue. Compassion is a positive emotion and inherently energizing. Compassion is an emotional resource that helps us deal with empathy fatigue.
What is the difference between empathy and compassion?
Carl Rogers defined empathy as “an accurate understanding of the other’s world as seen from the inside. To sense another person’s world as if it were your own.”
Compassion is the capacity to empathize with the addition of warmth and kindness. If we just feel the suffering without having the emotional resources to hold it, we will resist/fight against it and exhaust ourselves.
Compassion is empathy + love.
Empathy says "I feel you."
Compassion says, "I hold you."
How can we grow in compassion for others who are already exhausting us?
Self-compassion! Empathic distress is just another source of emotional pain for which the healthy response is self-compassion. This can be done in the moment. Caregivers often believe they should only be concerned with the needs of others, and are self-critical when they think they aren’t giving enough. However, when we don’t attend to our own emotional needs as well, we become depleted and unable to give to others.
When you calm and soothe your own mind, the person you’re caring for will also feel calmed and soothed through their resonance with your nervous system. When we cultivate peace within, we help those with whom we are in contact to be more peaceful as well.
Another important skill for dealing with caregiving fatigue is equanimity. Equanimity is a mental balance in the midst of opposites such as pleasure and pain, success and failure, or joy and sorrow. Mindfulness leads to equanimity, which leads to wisdom. Mindfulness gives us the space to see the complex, interdependent causes and conditions that make our lives as they are, and the wisdom that we have limited control.
Equanimity is not cold detachment (indifference is the near enemy) but arises from deep understanding of the transient, interdependent nature of reality. It’s a different kind of caring, based on both emotional intimacy and wise discernment.
Equanimity gives us the emotional space to be compassionate while remaining in connection with others. It also gives us the capacity to act and engage with the world from a place of discernment. Equanimity is about skillfully titrating our emotions.
Awakening Rights
by Mark Nepo
We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are
when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed, and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.
When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added level of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our changes of joy.
It’s like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft an unrepeatable.
HOME PRACTICE
The practices from this session are:
Compassionate Friend
Self-Compassion Break in Relationships
Compassion with Equanimity
Workbook: Chapters 18-21
SELF-COMPASSION BREAK IN RELATIONSHIPS
This is a way to apply self-compassion to interrupt negative emotional contagion in relationships.
Rather than getting caught in a downward spiral, the Self-Compassion Break is a way to change the tone and direction of a conversation. Next time you are in a heated conversation, try taking a self-compassion break and see what happens.
One way to do this is to excuse yourself from the conversation, offer yourself soothing or supporting touch and silently repeat, "This is a moment of suffering... Suffering is part of any relationship... May I be kind to myself... May I give myself the compassion I need."
Once you feel that one or both of you have shifted from feeling threatened to a caregiving frame of mind, the conversation can be continued.
Another practice that you can use in the midst of an interpersonal relationship is Giving and Receiving Compassion (i.e., breathing in for oneself and out for the other) during the ensuing conversation to help you sustain a compassionate frame of mind.
Notice how the state of mind of the other person changes as your own state of mind changes.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
A Quiver of the Heart by Sharon Salzberg
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