Life & Therapy

When you love someone who treats you badly, it is difficult to make sense of it.  Your friends don’t get it, nor does your brain, but still you just can’t seem to help yourself. The love feels so strong and powerful that you put up with or overlook the ways your partner treats you poorly.  People close to you will tell you that you should not be with this person, that you deserve better.  This sometimes makes you feel worse, because you wonder what it is that you aren’t getting.  You may even feel stupid for not seeing what everyone else is seeing.  

What you are not seeing is your own worthiness.  Maybe you feel lucky that anyone loves you at all.  Perhaps you have occasional moments of absolute bliss with this person that seem to make up for all the more painful times.  It could be that the sex is earth-shattering, or was at one point.  Whatever the reason, you are unable to imagine a relationship that doesn’t come at the price of being treated poorly and unpredictably.  

When you learn to value yourself, you stop tolerating people who don’t value you. Rather than trying to get others to change their attitudes toward you, you can focus on changing your attitude toward yourself.  You may not know what it feels like to be treated as if you are a person worthy of respect.  Getting therapy is very helpful in learning this- a good therapist consistently will treat you respectfully, and will help you to sort out the ways in which you accept disrespect from yourself and others.  In therapy, you will heal your battered sense of worth and lack of confidence.  With the self-worth you gain, you will develop standards for how you would like to be treated.   With your new self-confidence, you will be able to enforce those standards naturally.   Not only will you feel appalled when someone treats you poorly,  you also just won’t stand for it. 

When I was in my twenties, I got into one of those relationships that was all passion (okay, and sex) with very little else holding it together.  The first time I came over to this boyfriend’s house and up to his bedroom, there was a striking absence of anything but a bed.  This new lover acted as if he were just a very neat and clean person, but instinctively I knew better.  I thought to myself, “Uh oh- somewhere behind a closed door is a BIG mess.”  Then I dismissed this thought, because after all, staring at me right then was this lovely man and his bed.  Of course, as the relationship progressed, the mess in the closet came out and took over- soon the bed, the floor, everything became buried under the chaotic mess.  The relationship took a similar course- truths came out that had been hidden behind a deceptive facade, and things became complicated, painful, messy, and eventually the relationship ended.   

When I met my husband, he was much more honest about things.  The first time I came over to his house, I noticed a ladder in the middle of the living room.  He truthfully admitted that the ladder had not moved in months- he had been painting the room, but lost the momentum.  He also was reluctant to let me see his basement, because he was mortified about the mess that he told me was down there.  It took months before he trusted me enough to let me see this messy, dirty part of the house, but he didn’t pretend it wasn’t there to begin with.  That made all the difference in the world.

When I was 24, I had knee surgery that landed me with a few weeks on crutches.  I was in a good amount of pain, so I was taking Vicodin as one does in these situations. One day, I was hobbling home on my crutches when a voice called out to me from the front porch of a house.  I looked over to see a man about my age, who asked me very nicely what had happened to my leg.  Thinking that he was genuinely interested, I told him about my surgery.  His next question was whether I had been prescribed Vicodin, so I said yes.  Well, then he asked me if I could give my painkillers to him, as his girlfriend had a tooth abscess and that they didn’t have money to go to the dentist.  Right on cue, out from the house popped his girlfriend who demonstrated what he’d just told me by pulling her mouth open and stretching her cheek out, as if I could see her abscess from where I stood on the street.  

For a moment, I tuned into their needs more than my own, as if my own need for pain relief didn’t exist.  I wanted to take away this woman’s pain.  I overlooked the fact that the pills would only mask the pain of an infection that needed to be fixed.  I also overlooked the fact that they were asking me to commit a felony.  Instead, I felt guilt for having something they wanted- something I could barely afford myself at the time. This inner struggle lasted a short while, and was then replaced with a sense of shock: this perfect stranger pretended to be interested in my painful situation, when in reality he was only interested in getting me to relieve his girlfriend’s pain.

There are many people in the world who are injured enough to believe that their pain is your problem.  If you are a compassionate and caring sort, it may be tempting to ignore your own needs and tune into that person’s pain.  It isn’t compassionate to allow someone else to deplete you, nor is it compassionate to help someone ignore their own pain.  In this example of the abscess, if I’d given this couple my pills, the girlfriend’s infection would continue to grow in the absence of pain.  Taking her pain away would be a very bad thing, because then she’d feel that she’d fixed her mouth that would continue to fester and rot.  She’d keep having to find people to give her more painkillers whenever she ran out of them.    

There are many ways that people try get you to “numb the abscess” for them while they continue to ignore it.  One example is the friend who is in an unhealthy relationship, who complains to you at length about it, feels relief after dumping on you, then goes back to his partner and does nothing to change things.  You keep listening to him, soothing him, encouraging him to stand up for himself.  You feel drained after every conversation, and nothing changes. You may even notice that he doesn’t seem to have any time or interest in your problems.  You are so fully drawn into wanting to relieve your friend’s pain that you don’t realize that he’s using you for your painkilling abilities while the problem keeps getting worse.  It may feel selfish at first to not automatically give what is asked of you, but over time, you will see that you are being generous when you refuse to let others use you as a means to numb their pain.   

A classic dynamic in romantic relationships is The Ultimatum.  One person wants the other to behave in a certain way, and threatens to leave if they don’t.  Some examples include threatening to leave if your partner doesn’t stop drinking, hanging out with unsavory friends, or cheating.  The threat even seems to work for a while, but then something happens, and your partner falls back into the unwanted behavior.  Or, the behavior never stopped, and you catch your partner sneaking around.  Now you have to follow through with the ultimatum, but you probably won’t.  That lack of follow-through eats away at your already low sense of self-worth.

The reason that most ultimatums don’t work is that you aren’t ready to follow through on your threat to leave.  You hope that the threat itself will be enough to make your partner behave in the desired manner.  The follow-through is so difficult because you don’t have a strong sense of self-worth to begin with- that is why you are with someone who hurts you so much.  Instead of saying, “This behavior hurts me right here and now,” your ultimatum says, “Sometime in the future, this behavior will be punished.”  This is is a set-up, designed to further erode your low sense of self-worth.  

As the ultimatum giver, you are already trapped in the belief that you can’t do any better than this, and that life alone would be so much worse than life with this person who hurts you.  Saying “If you don’t stop drinking, I am out of here,” you are really saying, “Please change your behavior so that I don’t have to think about leaving you, because I can’t actually live without you.”  Your partner hears the underlying message, and knows that there is no real threat here.

If you are someone who has been giving ultimatums to your partner, only to find that they don’t work, it is time for you to put the focus on yourself rather than your partner’s bad behavior.  It is very likely that you have no idea how to give yourself this sort of attention, and also very likely that you don’t believe that you deserve to be with someone who loves and respects you, someone who doesn’t need fixing.  When you learn how to give yourself the attention you need, your sense of worth will grow.  When you feel worthy of love,  you naturally stop putting up with unloving behavior.  When you stop tolerating poor treatment in the present, you don’t need an ultimatum to tell you what to do in the future.  

Lately, I’ve become a bit obsessed with reducing energy use in our house.  It started with the refrigerator, and me finding out that it uses three times the amount of energy a standard new one does.  Then, I discovered that a good chunk of energy was wasted by having our TV and its accompanying recording devices on standby 24 hours a day.  Then there is the dryer and its amazing energy suck; living in arid Colorado, we can line-dry clothing pretty easily.  The list goes on.  There are many ways to save energy in a house, some involving no investment at all, such as turning off the power strip that the TV and friends are plugged into.  Others involve more of an investment, such as buying a more efficient refrigerator, or taking the time to hang the wash.

Emotionally, we have similar energy-wasters that we are often not aware of.  Many of them live in our automatic thoughts that go on all day without our notice- like the TV draining energy while on standby.  We may be thinking negative thoughts all day, and not noticing their impact on us.  We end the day drained and unhappy, but might have no idea why.  If we tune into our thoughts, we can also notice how we unconsciously tense up when we think certain things.  While driving, we might be unaware of our constant litany of how horrible all the other drivers are.  Tuning in to our body, perhaps we find that our neck muscles are really tight, or maybe it is our stomach that is taking the brunt of our thoughts.  Becoming aware of our thought patterns and our corresponding body reactions can be a low-investment way to save our emotional energy.

There are also high-investment ways for us to recover our emotional energy, which might involve some planning and time.  Perhaps we are working at a company that pays well, but makes us unhappy.  What good is the extra money when its source is sucking us dry?  Changing this part of our lives is more along the lines of putting out a wad of cash for a new refrigerator.  We may not readily have the funds, so we may need to save up.  We may not readily know what sort of job would make us happier, so we may have to spend some time researching and learning new skills.  We may even have to take a pay cut when we find the work that makes us happy, but the return will show in our newly gained emotional energy.

You can do your own emotional energy audit any time.  Notice how many relationships you are in that feel unsatisfying and depleting.  Who are the people in your life that make you feel worse about yourself when you are with them?  Notice the thought patterns that you have throughout your day- how many negative thoughts about yourself or others do you have during the day?  Notice how much tension you hold in your body.  Where do you hold this tension- your jaw, your stomach, your neck? Notice how often you swallow your feelings- this takes up possibly the most energy of all. Once you do your emotional energy audit, you can make a plan for how to reduce the waste, and you can regain that which belongs to you.

When you feel like you don’t deserve love, you might feel as if love is something that everyone else gets, but you never will.  It can be frustrating to watch all sorts of other people find love, keep love, and make it look easy.  Some people even seem to take love for granted.  Meanwhile, you are in a very dark and lonely place that you just can’t seem to figure out.  You may ask, “Why don’t I feel deserving of love? How do I fix this?”  

If you don’t feel deserving of love, you probably have felt that way for a very long time. You’ve probably developed an entire identity around it.  You know what to do as a person who doesn’t deserve love- you’ve got the roadmap all laid out for you. Unfortunately, that roadmap only takes you in circles.  It is very likely that you got the message that you didn’t deserve love in your childhood.  You learned how to get by without real love, and you developed all the coping skills that come with it.  Now you want to figure out how to find real love, and you have no idea where to start, because you don’t have any sort of map for that. Sometimes, we keep using the wrong map just because it gives us some sense of direction, even if it is a false one.

To learn how to feel deserving of love, it is good to examine the paths you are accustomed to taking from the old map of Not Deserving.  Before even looking at how others are treating you, see if you can find the ways in which you treat yourself as if you don’t deserve your own love.  Do you give yourself enough attention?  Do you find ways to ignore yourself through distraction?  Do you look in the mirror and see yourself as a series of flaws?  When you are sad, do you tell yourself to just get over it?  Do you try to silence your feelings by overworking, overeating, overindulging? This is the place to start- just noticing all the ways in which you treat yourself as if you don’t even deserve your own love and attention.  Now imagine treating someone else the way you treat yourself.  If a close friend came to you crying about something, you probably wouldn’t say, “Shut up and do more work.”  

Notice how much easier it is to give other people love and attention, and then you’ll see: It isn’t that others all get love and you don’t- it is more likely that you give your love to everyone but yourself.  It won’t be easy at first, but you can learn how to value yourself and treat yourself as deserving of love (and, of course, therapy can make this process much easier to navigate).  Once you learn to give yourself the love and attention that you are used to giving away to others, you will start to attract the love of others to yourself. 

Dogs have many different reactions to fear- some cower, some attack.  For years, we had the kind of dog that reacted to her fear by attacking- and she had a bottomless well of fear and anxiety.  Liver  was a muscular, hyper Dalmatian who came into the world with faulty wiring in her nervous system- constantly tense and anxious and overstimulated.  She also was a dog that really wanted to be good.   We never went out in public without having her leashed and muzzled, just to keep the world safe from her fear and anxiety.  She did learn to overcome some of her fears with training, which we did extensively.

When we first started to train Liver, we took her out of her comfort zone by letting our dog trainer take the leash.  She would constantly check in with us by nudging our legs with her muzzle- we called this “muzzle-bonking.”  We would pet her and say “It’s okay,” and she learned to trust the trainer more.  We noticed that muzzle-bonking happened in any new situation- it seemed to be her way of asking us, “Is this safe? Are we okay?”  This was a very good sign in her training, because she found an alternative to going into attack mode when in an unfamiliar situation.  Checking in with her humans made her calmer.  She learned that the humans would keep her safe, so that she no longer had to try to hold the whole confusing world together with her vigilance.

Sometimes, we react to our own anxiety just as automatically as a scared animal.  We may cower, or lash out, or bark like crazy when we get frightened.  Imagine that this part of ourselves is like an untrained, scared animal just reacting out of fear.  Now, imagine that we also have a calm and centered human inside of ourselves that knows how to handle the situation.  If we can pause before letting fear take us over, we can find our inner calm human, then we can muzzle-bonk this human, checking in to see how to handle the situation.  If this is too difficult to do on your own, therapy can be a very helpful way to learn how to muzzle-bonk.  If your therapist can be calm in the midst of your anxiety, you will learn what that feels and looks like, and soon, you will learn how to do it for yourself.

Falling for another’s “potential” is a common but dangerous trap in relationships.  You meet someone and inside they are just so brilliant, creative, sweet, wonderful, talented- but sadly they just don’t seem to know it.  You see something in them that they can’t see for themselves.  You love them so much, and you just want them to see what you see, so that they can be happy and fulfilled.  You may put a ton of energy into trying to get your lover to understand just how wonderful they are.   You come up with multiple solutions for their problems, but most of your suggestions get shot down.  This only makes you try harder to get them to see what you see. 

Maybe your lover feels ugly, and you try to get them to see their beauty.  Perhaps they are unhappy with their work, and you want them to understand just how talented they are, so you come up with all sorts of creative solutions for how they can find satisfying work that showcases these talents.  It could be that they are struggling with money, addiction, or compulsive eating, so you scrutinize just how much they spend, drink, use, or eat. You love them so much, you just want to fix it for them, so that they can live the happy life you envision for them.  Conveniently, if they did so, they would be able to love you the way you want to be loved.

While you are so invested in another person’s potential, you are ignoring your own. When your lover receives your undivided attention, they don’t have to pay attention to themselves.  Funnily enough, you get a similar benefit: you don’t have to pay attention to yourself, either.  You don’t have to look at the areas in your life that also feel unsatisfying, because you are so busy trying to fix your partner’s life.  This is a trap- it gives you the illusion of satisfying work, but it leaves you empty.  Every time you throw yourself into fixing your partner’s life, this is a sign that you are ignoring something in your own life.  

The other part of the trap is that, deep inside, you don’t actually want your partner to see their potential- because then what would you do?  Potential is the carrot on the stick that is driving the relationship.  One person needs the other to be a problem that needs solving.  I know this- I’ve done it myself.  I remember a particular love interest from years ago whose potential I was chasing after.  I focused on his unhappiness, and tried incredibly hard to get him to see how he was wasting his potential.  One day, he said something to me that really struck deeply.  He said, “I feel like compost, and that you thrive on me rotting.” That about summed it up, even though at the time I did not want to hear it.  

If you are in this pattern, it is likely that you have a very difficult time focusing on yourself and receiving attention, but this is exactly what you need.  A good phrase from the 12-step culture is “Do your own inventory.”  It often applies to the times when one person is judging another.  It can also apply to when you are giving much focus to your partner’s untapped potential while ignoring your own.  Notice when you do this, and do an inventory of your own untapped potential.  It is the only one that you can unlock and fulfill. 

I like to look at my website statistics, to see how people find this site.  The keyword phrases can be pretty interesting- I get many people looking for “Zacatecas ice cream.” Many people are also looking for help with finding love, keeping love, and navigating relationships.  While I can’t really offer much help in the department of Mexican ice cream, I can address the topics having to do with the emotional realm.

Recently, someone found me by searching for how to deal with a romantic partner giving them the silent treatment.  My first reaction was just to feel the pain of this unknown person somewhere out there in cyberspace.  Getting the silent treatment from the person closest to you can be hurtful and frustrating.  The silent treatment is a manipulative tool often used by the more passive partner in the relationship, usually as a form of punishment for something that the more assertive partner is supposed to puzzle out.  This way, the more passive one takes no risk while their partner squirms and tries to please them, figure out the mystery, pull them out of their shell, grovel, apologize, etc.  It is a very hostile maneuver, and a classic in the relationship dynamic I call underwatering/overwatering .

If you are being given the silent treatment, you are being punished for something, but you are not actually being told what that something is and how you can make up for it. The first step is to notice how you are feeling in the moment- do you feel pulled out of yourself, trying to read your partner’s mind?  Are you angry?  Apologetic?  Scared? Notice just how much you feel hooked into trying to work out this puzzle.  It is not your job to read your partner’s mind.  It is not your job to fix something for someone who isn’t using their words.  Give yourself permission to stop trying.  Take the focus off of your partner’s puzzle, and bring attention to your own feelings.  

Next, you can let your partner know that you care, and can see that something has upset them.  Invite them to tell you what has upset them, and let them know that unless they tell you, there is nothing you can do for them- they may not be talking to you, but their ears are working just fine.  Then, let it go as best you can.  Every time you notice yourself trying to read their mind and “fix” the situation, remind yourself that it is not your job to figure this out, and let yourself off the hook.  When you refuse to play games, the games tend to fall apart pretty quickly.  

Recently, I watched the movie “Murderball” which is an excellent documentary about a powerful, tough, and inspiring group of quadriplegic rugby players.  There is much that is worth seeing in this film, so I highly recommend it.  Today, I am focused on one quote in particular, by team member Andy Cohn, while describing the period of rehabilitation one goes through after becoming paralyzed.  He says that many people experience a stage of denial, grasping onto the idea that they will walk again, and not wanting to accept the reality of their loss.  The denial and grasping become an obstacle to rehabilitation, which is a long, hard road by itself: “Your mind becomes a bigger disability than the physical stuff,” says Cohn. 

This quote can be applied to so much in life.  When we don’t want to accept the truth about any situation that we are in, we become stuck.  Our mind paralyzes us by trying to change what can’t be changed: a mistake from the past that we regret, a loss of something or someone precious, a physical limitation such as infertility.  As long as we are caught in the holding pattern of trying to deny the reality that we are faced with, we can’t mourn.  If we can’t mourn, we can’t move on and see what we can do with what is left.  If you find yourself fighting some painful truth in this way, watching Murderball may be just the thing to give you some perspective.