Posts Tagged ‘Being A Wife’

Posted on July 18, 2009 - by Jus

Knowing When To Say Goodbye

It will seem strange at first that this post is tagged with “being a wife” when I will primarily be talking about my relationship with my father… but stick with me.

Today I said goodbye to my father, forever.

He’s still alive and well, living in another state and I presume happily soaking up his Saturday with his wife and two young children (my half-siblings).  But to me, my father may as well have passed, because I will no longer have a relationship with him.

If I am honest, our relationship has been on life support for quite some time now.  For the better part of six years, I have done what I can to try to accept my father for who he is, his limitations as a parent and to neutralise the effect he has on me emotionally.

Part of that was giving him a very limited role in my wedding.  I wanted my son to give me away and as he hasn’t had much to do with my relationship with my partner, I asked my mother to make a speech at the reception.  I told him all of this and diplomatically explained the reasons behind my decisions in the months leading up to the wedding.  However, it was clear on the day that he had not explained this to his wife, who is very traditional, and remained sour-faced the entire ceremony.

My father gave me a great big hug after the ceremony, offered me some very nice words which brought tears to my eyes.  His wife was very cold and aloof.  When we entered the reception, we wanted to get the speeches out of the way, so we went straight into them.  Afterwards, I went looking for my father, but he was not there.  It was 7pm, just 4 short hours after my wedding ceremony had begun.  I was told he had left and the pain of knowing my father had chosen to leave my wedding day without saying goodbye was actually not as bad as you might think it sounds.  I put this down to the numbness that has developed in me when it comes to my father.

This was not the first time he had ‘deserted’ me.  But it will be the last.  His decision to leave was the sign that I needed to let my relationship with him go.  To let the father-daughter relationship that I have in my dreams go also.

So today I spent an hour with my kinesiologist.  We spent the hour ‘clearing’ my father – but really clearing the anger, hurt and saddness that I felt with respect to my decision to cut all ties with him.  In doing so, I have been able to say goodbye to him with love and peace in my heart and I feel so much more calm and centred because of this.

She asked me what symbol I could have to signify my saying goodbye to my father that would help me to move forward – I told her that I had a red key in my hand.  To my it signifies the shutting of the door on that part of my life, knowing that it is the key to opening other doors in my relationships.  Namely, my relationship with my husband.

So yes, this post is about improving myself as a wife.  Setting free all the baggage that I often lump my husband in with, which makes it hard to see him for who he is rather than someone who is “just like my father”.  It is my hope that over the coming months, I can see my relationship with my husband with fresh eyes and approach it as a strong, forward-looking woman, instead of a woman with a small hurt little girl inside of her.

To my father, I wish you well in your life and I hope you find happiness in whatever you do.  Thank you for everything you have taught me, both the things you consciously exposed me to and the lessons I learned from your misgivings – I would not be the person I am today without those lessons.  However, I feel that I have learned as much as I can from you and I must say goodbye to you now in order to continue my journey in life.  So I say goodbye to you in love and in peace… Love from your daughter, Justine.

Posted on July 3, 2009 - by Jus

How We Connect Emotionally

This short (ok no, it’s long!) excerpt from John Gottman’s book, taken from enotalone is a good taste of what the rest of the book is like… enjoy and then go buy the book!

A work team at one of Seattle’s floundering Internet companies has a problem that’s common in many workplaces: They can’t communicate with their boss. If you catch a few team members at a local tavern after hours, you’re likely to hear an exchange something like this:

“Joseph is the coldest fish I’ve ever worked for.”

“I know what you mean. The other day I saw this picture of a little boy on his bulletin board and I said, ‘Cute kid. Is that your son?’ And he goes, ‘No.’ ”

“And that was it?”

“Yeah. So I’m standing there wondering, ‘Well, who is it then? Your nephew? Your stepson? Your love child?’ ”

“He’s just so out of it. And to think we were so jazzed when we heard he was going to head the team, with that vaunted success record of his.”

“He’s smart, all right. But what good has it done us? We still haven’t launched the site.”

“That’s because he has zero people skills. Have you noticed how all the other managers try to avoid him?”

“Yeah, that’s what’s screwing us up. We have no real standing in the company. I was hoping he could take our ideas up the ladder and we’d finally get the resources we need. But he never asks for our input. He never even asks if you’ve had a nice weekend.”

“Remember when we moved to the new building and he decided to do away with private offices? He said we’d have an open floor plan to ‘enhance communication.’ What a crock!”

“Stop it, you guys. I feel sorry for him.”

“Sorry for him? Why? He’s the one with all the stock options!”

“Well, I think he wants to be a better boss-he just doesn’t know how.”

“Oh yeah? How can you tell?”

“I don’t know. It’s just a guess. Maybe he knows how disappointed we all feel in him. And that makes it even harder for him. I can’t read his mind, but I bet that’s what’s going on.”

Next meet Kristine, age fifty-four, an advertising executive whose mother was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Kristine would like to help with her mother’s care, but Mom lives several states away, near Kristine’s sister, Alice. Here’s a typical phone call between the sisters:

“How’s Mom?” Kristine asks tentatively.

“She’ll be better once the insurance pays her hospital bill,” Alice responds. “That’s all she talks about.”

“But that was last December. The insurance still hasn’t paid?”

“No, not that hospital stay. I’m talking about this last time, when she had that seizure.”

“What seizure?”

“Didn’t I tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“She was in the hospital last month after a seizure. They ran some tests.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about this. Why didn’t you call?”

“It was just so hectic. And it’s impossible to get hold of you with your voice mail or whatever. Besides, there’s nothing you can do from the East Coast.”

“But, Alice! I’ve asked you to call me when these things happen!”

“Well, it really doesn’t matter now. They put her on some new medicine and she’s doing much better. We got through it fine. There’s no need to worry.”

But Kristine does worry. And she’s angry as well. She tells herself that Alice isn’t cutting her out of the loop on purpose; she’s just caught up in her own concerns. But now that Mom’s health is going downhill, Kristine and her sister have got to cooperate better than this. Otherwise, Kristine might miss her only chance to be there when Mom needs help most. And if that happens, she and Alice could hold grievances against each other for the rest of their lives.

Now meet Phil and Tina, a couple in their thirties who seem to have it all. Solid jobs, two beautiful kids, lots of good friends-and they love each other. Trouble is, they haven’t had sex in six months.

Seated together on a small sofa in a therapist’s office, the couple describes how the problem started.

“Tina’s company was going through this big reorganization,” Phil explains. “And every day she’d come home exhausted.”

“It was a real drag,” Tina remembers. “I was spending all day in these long, tense meetings, trying to defend people’s jobs. When I got home, I couldn’t shake the stress. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I felt so anxious. Phil tried to be nice, but . . .”

“I wanted to help her, to tell her it was going to be okay, but I couldn’t do anything right. It wasn’t like we had this huge, catastrophic breakdown or anything. It was more about the little stuff. I’d kiss her on the back of her neck or start to rub her stomach when we were in bed-things that used to get her attention. But now I was getting nothing in return. Zip. It definitely threw me off balance.”

“And I felt that if I didn’t get all hot and bothered the minute he touched me, he was going to be wounded or something,” Tina explained. “It just made me so tense.”

Phil got the point. “She has all these people leaning on her at work. And then she comes home to this guy who’s feeling insecure, who’s whining about his needs. It was such a turnoff for her.”

So, to preserve his pride, Phil quit trying. “I got tired of the rejection,” he explains to the therapist. “I don’t know how long we can go on like this. It’s tough to keep putting yourself out there only to be shut down all the time. Sure, I love her, but sometimes I’m afraid we’re not going to make it.”

“It’s not working for me, either,” Tina says through tears. Then, after a long silence, she adds, “I miss making love, too. I miss the way it used to be.”

“Well, maybe that’s a place to start,” Phil says quietly. “Because you never told me that before. You never gave me that information.”

Phil couldn’t have said it better. Whether people are struggling to save a marriage, to cooperate in a family crisis, or to build rapport with a difficult boss, they usually have one thing in common: They need to share emotional information that can help them feel connected.

The disgruntled workers at the Seattle Internet company need to know that their boss shares their dream of launching a successful site. They need to know that he appreciates their work and ideas. But when they turn to him for this emotional information, he fails to respond. In fact, he can’t even react sociably to their attempts at friendly conversation. He doesn’t inspire confidence that they’ll be able to achieve their goal. As a result, the team members feel demoralized and they doubt whether they can make the launch.

A similar dynamic is happening between the sisters whose mother is sick. Kristine has asked Alice to keep her informed about their mother’s condition. But she’s after more than medical information. She wants to feel as though she is part of the family, especially in this time of crisis. By failing to call when their mother is hospitalized, Alice shows that she doesn’t really consider Kristine a part of the world she inhabits with Mom. Alice may blame the miles between their homes, but the emotional distance Kristine experiences seems even wider.

Phil and Tina are like many couples I see in marital therapy. Whatever conflicts the couples may have-sex, money, housework, kids-all of them long for evidence that their spouses understand and care about what they’re feeling.

Sharing such information through words and behavior is essential for improving any significant relationship. This includes bonds with our kids, our siblings, our friends, our coworkers. But even our best efforts to connect can be jeopardized as a result of one basic problem: failure to master what I call the “bid”-the fundamental unit of emotional communication.

This book will show you five steps you can take to achieve this mastery and make your relationships work:

1. Analyze the way you bid and the way you respond to others’ bids.

2. Discover how your brain’s emotional command systems affect your bidding process.

3. Examine how your emotional heritage impacts your ability to connect with others and your style of bidding.

4. Develop your emotional communication skills.

5. Find shared meaning with others.

But first let’s make sure you understand what I mean when I talk about bids. A bid can be a question, a gesture, a look, a touch-any single expression that says, “I want to feel connected to you.” A response to a bid is just that-a positive or negative answer to somebody’s request for emotional connection.

At the University of Washington, my research colleagues and I recently discovered how profoundly this bidding process affects relationships. We learned, for example, that husbands headed for divorce disregard their wives’ bids for connection 82 percent of the time, while husbands in stable relationships disregard their wives’ bids just 19 percent of the time. Wives headed for divorce act preoccupied with other activities when their husbands bid for their attention 50 percent of the time, while happily married wives act preoccupied in response to their husbands’ bids just 14 percent of the time.

When we compared how often couples in the two groups extended bids and responded to them, we found another significant difference. During a typical dinner-hour conversation, the happily married people engaged one another as many as one hundred times in ten minutes. Those headed for divorce engaged only sixty-five times in that same period. On the surface the contrast may seem inconsequential, but taken together over a year, the additional moments of connection among the happy couples would be enough to fill a Russian novel.

We also found that this high rate of positive engagement paid off in tremendous ways. For example, we now know that people who react positively to one another’s bids have greater access to expressions of humor, affection, and interest during arguments. It’s almost as if all the good feelings they’ve accumulated by responding respectfully and lovingly to one another’s bids form a pot of emotional “money in the bank.” Then, when a conflict arises, they can draw on this reservoir of good feeling. It’s as if something inside unconsciously says, “I may be mad as hell at him right now, but he’s the guy who listens so attentively when I complain about my job. He deserves a break.” Or, “I’m as angry as I’ve ever been with her, but she’s the one who always laughs at my jokes. I think I’ll cut her some slack.”

Having access to humor and affection during a conflict is invaluable because it helps to de-escalate bad feelings and leads to better understanding. Rather than shutting down communication in the midst of an argument, people who can stay present with one another have a much better opportunity to resolve issues through their conflicts, repair hurt feelings, and build positive regard. But this good work must begin long before the conflict starts; it’s got to be grounded in those dozens of ordinary, day-to-day exchanges of emotional information and interest that we call bids.

And what happens when we habitually fail to respond positively to one another’s bids for emotional connection? Such failure is rarely malicious or mean-spirited. More often we’re simply unaware of or insensitive to others’ bids for our attention. Still, when such mindlessness becomes habitual, the results can be devastating.

I’ve seen such results in my clinical practice at the Gottman Institute, where I’ve counseled many people who describe their lives as consumed by loneliness. They feel lonely despite their proximity to many significant people in their lives-lovers, spouses, friends, children, parents, siblings, and coworkers. Often they seem surprised and greatly disappointed at the deterioration of their relationships.

“I love my wife,” one client says of his faltering marriage, “but our relationship feels empty somehow.” He senses that the passion is waning, that the romance is drifting away. What he can’t see are all the opportunities for closeness that surround him. Like so many other distressed, lonely people, he doesn’t mean to ignore or dismiss his spouse’s bids for emotional connection. It’s just that the bids happen in such simple, mundane ways that he doesn’t recognize these moments as very important.

Clients like these typically have trouble at work, as well. Although they’re often skilled at forming collegial bonds when they first start a job, they tend to focus totally on the tasks at hand, often to the detriment of their relationships with coworkers. Later, when they’re passed over for a promotion, or when they discover they have no influence on an important project, they’re baffled. And they often feel betrayed and disappointed by their colleagues and bosses as a result.

Such feelings of disappointment and loss also crop up in these clients’ relationships with friends and relatives. Many describe peers, siblings, and children as disloyal, unworthy of trust. But when we dig deeper, we find a familiar pattern. These clients seem unaware of the bids for connection that their friends and relatives have been sending them. So it’s no wonder that their loved ones feel no obligation to continue their support.

People who have trouble with the bidding process also have more conflict-conflict that might be prevented if they could simply acknowledge one another’s emotional needs. Many arguments spring from misunderstandings and feelings of separation that might have been avoided if people would have the conversations they need to have. But because they don’t, they argue instead. Such conflicts can lead to marital discord, divorce, parenting problems, and family feuds. Friendships fade and deteriorate. Adult sibling relationships wither and die. Kids raised in homes filled with chronic conflict have more difficulty learning, getting along with friends, and staying healthy. People who can’t connect are also more likely to suffer isolation, as well as dissatisfaction and instability in their work lives. Any of these problems can create a tremendous amount of stress in people’s lives, leading to all sorts of physical and mental health problems.

But our findings about the bidding process give me a tremendous amount of hope. They tell me that people who consistently bid and respond to bids in positive ways have an astounding chance for success in their relationships.

We’ve written this book to share these discoveries with as many people as possible. We hope that reading it will help you to form and maintain the kind of strong, healthy connections that lead to a happy, fulfilling life.

Posted on July 3, 2009 - by Jus

The Relationship Cure

That’s a pretty bold thing to call your book – The Relationship Cure.  As a title I saw on a shelf in Borders, it seemed laced with potentially hollow promises and theories that were virtually impossible to put into place.  However, then I realised that the author was none other than Dr John Gottman.  I bought it immediately.

Dr Gottman is touted as being the USA’s foremost “relationship expert” and not just because he has relevant theories on the subject, but because he approaches this topic with a heavy dose of scientific methodology – including the use of his “relationship lab” – he receives broad acclaim for his research and proposed solutions to some of the problems we all experience in relationships.

The Relationship Cure is a 5 step guide to strengthening your marriage, family and friendships.  This simple program is based on 20 years worth of research! 

In what I think is a really groundbreaking book, he reveals the key elements of healthy relationships, emphasizing the importance of what he calls “emotional connection”.  He also talks about the biggest threats to emotional connection - what he calls the Four Horsemen – a subject he explores in more detail in another of his books.  He introduces the powerful new concept of the emotional “bid,” the fundamental unit of emotional connection – that is to say what we put out there as ‘bids’ for an emotional connection and how the way others react to our emotional bids plays a big role in the strength of our emotional connection with that person.  Of course, he then goes on to provide remarkably empowering tools for improving the way you bid for emotional connection and how you respond to others’ bids.

It’s a book that I plan on reading with my husband.  There are many exercises scattered throughout the book to assist us in developing our understanding of ourselves and of one another and where our emotional connection stands right now.

I have no doubt that I will write more about this book and our commitment to putting the steps in place in our marriage, so stay tuned for updates and (more than likely) some hysterical stories of where it all goes a little bit wrong.

Posted on June 30, 2009 - by Jus

Wise Advice from George Carlin

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider Freeways , but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness.

We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.

We’ve learned how to make a living, but not a life. We’ve added years to life not life to years. We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We’ve done larger things, but not better things.

We’ve cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We’ve conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We’ve learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less.

These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete…

Remember; spend some time with your loved ones, because they are not going to be around forever.

Remember, say a kind word to someone who looks up to you in awe, because that little person soon will grow up and leave your side.

Remember, to give a warm hug to the one next to you, because that is the only treasure you can give with your heart and it doesn’t cost a cent.

Remember, to say, ‘I love you’ to your partner and your loved ones, but most of all mean it. A kiss and an embrace will mend hurt when it comes from deep inside of you.

Remember to hold hands and cherish the moment for someday that person will not be there again.

Give time to love, give time to speak! And give time to share the precious thoughts in your mind.

Posted on June 28, 2009 - by Jus

The First Year of Marriage

No one tells you how hard the first year of your marriage is going to be.

Well, at least they don’t tell you until after you’d said ‘I do’.  I’ve only been married four months (today, in fact) and they have been a challenge enough, so if what everyone is saying is true – these next 8 months are going to be one heck of a ride!  Or perhaps, in true Jus Growing form, I have jammed 12 months worth of learning, growing and challenge into a neat four month shaped package. 

In the spirit of what I hope Jus Growing will become, I won’t go into the details of the past four months, instead I will share with you what I have learned in a simple “Top 5″ bullet point list.  I hope it can be of assistance to others as they take their first tender steps down the aisle.

Top 5 Things I’ve Learned In Four Months Of Marriage:

1.  Jerry McGuire’s infamous ‘you complete me’ is not only massively misleading, it’s also potentially misleading a large population of romantics out there.  I have learned that no one ‘completes’ me, I am responsible for my own happiness and in order to love the person I am in the relationship, I have to love the person that I am outside of the relationship first.

2.  I am a strong woman, fiercely independent and intelligent… and I also often do and say things that make my husband feel emasculated.  I have learned to stop being so quick to ‘answer’ – for if I am always giving him ‘the [my] answer’ and making the decision for him, why should I be surprised when he appears to stop thinking on his own?

3.  Feeling supported in my marriage has very little to do with how the housework is shared, and everything to do with the way my husband responds to me when I am in a bad mood, am stressed or preoccupied. 

4.  Taking time for myself is crucial, no essentialy, no mandatory.  I work full time, am about to recommence study, am mother to a 6 year old and run a household in all my ’spare’ time.  One weekend away without any distractions is all it took to set me back on track.  I will aim to do this once every six months from now on.

5.  John Gottman is probably the wisest man alive when it comes to relationships.