Real Love

by Sharon Salzberg

  Paradoxically, allowing her sadness was a relief for Clara, and she felt less defensive and angry. As she moved into Step 3 of RAIN, Investigate, she began to probe why she felt the way she did. She realized that at the core of her loneliness was a sense of abandonment that echoed her feelings when her parents divorced. After their breakup, life had become busier and harder for her mother, and Clara didn’t want to be a bother, so she put a lid on her feelings—just as she’d done with James.

  Clara came to see things from James’s perspective, too: putting in long hours on the job, feeling the pressure of supporting the family. Her resentment softened. She realized that she and James had made choices together, and she no longer needed to identify herself as the injured party. She had arrived at Step 4 of RAIN, Non-Identify. This was simply a phase in their lives. In a few years, the kids would be in school, and both her marriage and work life would offer new possibilities.

  By exploring the truth of her experience, Clara was able to reconnect with James. She chose quiet times for short talks, and her honesty created an opening for him to share his own feelings of missing Clara while also being frustrated by having so little time for himself. “We initiated a dialogue that is a work in progress,” says Clara. “And that feels very good. Very alive, compared to the stuck place we were in before. We’re much more loving, and trying our best to deal with my need for connection and his need for space. Now, when we get into tangles, we talk about what’s going on.”

  “In the hothouse atmosphere of committed relationships, our defenses arise again and again,” says George Taylor. “But the tools of mindfulness allow us to work with them and to fulfill our own vision of becoming a loving person, with all the care, forgiveness and generosity that suggests.”

  THE PRESSURE COOKER OF FAMILY

  COMMUNICATION AMONG FAMILY members is often as volatile as it can be between couples. Adult siblings, children, parents, and other close relatives may harbor intense feelings like hurt and resentment—yet often these feelings become buried and then expressed in unskillful ways. Though partners and close friends may aspire to more honest dialogue, many families shut down around recognizing differences.

  There are many good reasons for this: self-protection or the desire to protect others; the need to individuate and separate; rivalries; strong emotions, such as fear and shame; mental or physical illness; parental conflict and divorce; remarriage; economic instability; generational differences; the early death of a parent. The causes of familial discord and distance are countless, but the results are often the same: secrecy, blame, sadness, hurt, confusion, and feelings of loss and grief.

  At some point in our adult lives, we may recognize the love that lingers beneath the pain, and yearn to heal. But even then, we can’t assume that a family member will have a mindfulness practice or be comfortable with self-disclosure and non-judgmental listening. That doesn’t matter: remarkable openings can occur when one person sets out to transform an old, unhappy dynamic.

  In his book It Didn’t Start with You, therapist Mark Wolynn recounts how he repaired his damaged relationships with both of his parents. After traveling to the far corners of the globe, he realized that the peace and spiritual healing he sought could be achieved only by reconnecting with his mother and father back home in Pittsburgh.

  Wolynn started with his father. His parents had divorced when he was just thirteen years old. Wolynn and his father rarely got together after the divorce, even though his father didn’t live terribly far away. But now Wolynn invited him to have a weekly lunch with him, and his father agreed.

  “I had always craved a close relationship with my father, yet neither he nor I knew how to make it happen. This time, however, we kept talking. I told him that I loved him and that he was a good father. I shared the memories of things he did for me when I was small. I could feel him listening to what I was saying, even though his actions—shrugging his shoulders, changing the subject—indicated he was not. It took many weeks of talking and sharing memories. During one of our lunches together, he looked directly into my eyes and said, ‘I didn’t think you ever loved me.’ I could barely breathe. It was clear that great pain welled in both of us. In that moment, something broke open. It was our hearts. Sometimes, the heart must break in order to open. Eventually, we began to express our love for each other.”

  Wolynn went on to find a new connection with his mother, as well. “For the first time I could remember,” he writes, “I was able to let myself receive my parents’ love and care—not in the way I had once expected it, but in the way they could give it.”

  CHAPTER 12 PRACTICES

  Experimentation with RAIN

  Earlier in this chapter, we saw Clara use the RAIN method as a way of becoming less reactive and impetuous during a conflict with her husband. As explained more comprehensively in section 1, RAIN is an instructional acronym used to summarize a mindfulness practice geared toward helping us adopt a more expansive and flexible relationship with emotional suffering. Recognize. Acknowledge. Investigate. Non-Identify.

  Now to review a more detailed explanation of the process once again …

  When a thorny emotion comes up, we can simply remember RAIN. The first step, Recognize, is about noticing what is coming up. The next step is an extension of the first: we Acknowledge the feeling, allowing it to just be. Next, we Investigate the emotion by asking questions. We can find freedom in allowing ourselves to move closer toward the feeling with curiosity, rather than away from it.

  The final step of RAIN—Non-Identify—means that we consciously don’t allow ourselves to be defined by a given emotion, despite having explored it more deeply.

  Now let’s try it.

  1. Recall a tough situation or conflict in which the intensity of your emotions kept you from communicating in a way that felt direct, authentic, and from a place of integrity.

  2. Next, with the benefit of some perspective, comb through the emotions you felt during the conflict. This step precedes the RAIN method and is meant to immerse you in the memory. Did you start out angry? Resentful? Did you say hurtful things out of guilt? Disappointment?

  3. After determining some specific emotions that came up, think about an alternative situation in which you could have practiced RAIN. This is not an invitation to look back with regret but to feel the power of self-reflection. What happens when you simply Recognize how you were feeling? When you Acknowledge the situation for what it was? How does it feel to Investigate the situation and your emotions with curiosity? Does Non-Identifying help expose the places where we may become blinded by fear or anxiety?

  4. Now that you’ve familiarized yourself a bit with the RAIN technique, feel free to write a short reflection about your reactions to the exercise. You may even want to try actually rewriting the story of the situation in question in the present tense, as though you are actually using the RAIN steps as a guide. This can be an empowering exercise for showing us how capable we are of communicating with greater mindfulness.

  Lovingkindness for a family member

  One of the reasons that authentic communication can be so difficult with family is that our family members are often the people we are both closest to and also those from whom we feel the greatest need to separate and individuate. These underlying dynamics create paradoxes and tensions that we may not always be conscious of, but that can contribute to the reactive communication style that mindfulness so powerfully helps to shift.

  In this exercise, we practice a simple lovingkindness meditation on behalf of a particular family member. This person may be someone with whom you’ve had conflict, someone from whom you’ve received tremendous generosity, or someone with whom you have a more complicated and variable dynamic. Either way, the idea is the same—to open up to the possibility of transforming a relationship we often think of as set in stone.

  1. Sit (or lie comfortably on your back) with your eyes closed or your gaze lowered.

  2. Offer lovingkindness to a family member of your ch
oice by silently saying, “May this person be safe. May she be happy. May she be healthy. May she live with ease.”

  3. Repeat the phrases at a pace that works for you, focusing your attention on one phrase at a time.

  4. If your attention wanders, remember you can gently begin again.

  5. As you end the session, consider whether or not you want to reach out in some way to that person.

  Keeping it real

  Recall the wisdom from psychotherapists and Gottman Institute co-founders John and Julie Gottman in their book And Baby Makes Three: “[Couples] ask, ‘Is there a story behind this for you, maybe some childhood history that makes this so crucial for you?’ They want to uncover not just the topmost feelings, but the deeper layers as well.” In my mind, this kind of radical honesty is productive for our closest friends, as well.

  In this exercise, reflect on difficulties you may face in a current relationship (romantic, professional, platonic, or any other type), perhaps one that has resurfaced as a pattern. Without overidentifying with these difficulties, take note of them and explore them.

  1. Begin by asking yourself some questions. Here are a few to get you started: Do you have trouble voicing your needs? Are you afraid of expressing anger? How do you react when someone else expresses a need from you? Even if you identify certain things as personality traits, remember that you have the power to become more mindful of them, and communicate the difficulties you have in an effort to work on them.

  2. The second step here is to explore why these patterns may have come to be. Perhaps there is no reason you can think of, but often we channel dynamics we are familiar with from childhood in our adult lives. This can be a very personal exercise that you do in your mind, simply by thinking. You may choose to write about it, or you may, as the Gottmans’ quotation suggests, discuss it with a loved one. In all of these ways, this practice of becoming more conscious of ourselves opens us up to become more conscious of others.

  13

  PLAYING FAIR: A WIN-WIN PROPOSITION

  To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.

  —bell hooks

  WITH OUR CLOSE FRIENDS, FAMILY members, and lovers, we hope to create a special world, one in which we can expect to be treated fairly, with care, tenderness, and compassion. We hope to trust that the commitment we’ve made to each other is mutual and that we’ll work actively to keep it alive.

  B. Janet Hibbs, Ph.D., is a family psychologist whose clinical approach involves relational ethics—what we owe and deserve in family relationships. In her book, Try to See It My Way: Being Fair in Love and Marriage, she describes a radical rethinking and thoughtful negotiation of the fundamental aspects of fairness at the center of good relationships. She writes about the challenges of fairness, even though she notes it’s a lesson most of us feel we learned by kindergarten. “We all think we know what’s fair, but we don’t always agree—with a spouse, or a partner, or a child (growing or grown) … and then what? Fairness is a muddled mix of beliefs, traditions and multiple and sometimes opposing truths. Yet you need to learn how to be fair to keep your relationships healthy and make love last.”

  Her advice requires a willingness to let go of long-held positions and to approach issues from a fresh perspective. I call this a willingness to begin again, as we do in meditation. Stop keeping score, Hibbs suggests. Stop needing to be right. Stop doing things the way you used to just because that’s what you know. Be open to the possibility that there are other paths available to you in relating to yourself and to another.

  If we are really thinking about the “relational ethics” of our relationship, that means I’m sponsoring you to have the best life you can, and you’re sponsoring me. We are co-sponsors. We regard our time together as a collaborative effort to make life better for each of us.

  It also means that we don’t keep a ledger. I’ve done three good things for you, so when are you going to do three good things for me? Real love doesn’t keep score. We’re aware that from time to time one person’s needs will take precedence or another person can’t contribute as much as before. A friend becomes ill and needs extra help for a month or two; a close colleague needs a place to stay after breaking up with his partner. Yet each person must feel seen and respected, with his or her needs taken into account. Mutuality is one of life’s great balancing acts.

  In the very first discussion group I held to help me explore the topic of real love, a man said, “Most people think of a good relationship as fifty-fifty. My dog and I, we’re one hundred–one hundred.” I’ve kept that story in mind looking at love between partners, parents and adult children, friends, and others.

  Hibbs and I recently had an e-mail exchange about score-keeping. “Ideally in love relationships,” she wrote, “reciprocity is a seesaw of turn-taking, which has a generous feel. People recount quid pro quo accountings of who owes what to whom when there is a felt (or real) violation of give-and-take. The trick of course is ‘what counts’ to whom, a largely unspoken deal which requires renegotiation when things go awry, and the seesaw gets stuck in a power play (you owe me and I’m in control, or I owe you but on what terms of repayment?).”

  What might “count” as a gesture of kindness or generosity to one person in a relationship might be something that would go unrecognized by the other. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with having different emotional value systems. What does matter is establishing a secure and mutual vocabulary within the relationship, to know the kinds of things that “count” to you and that “count” to your loved ones—not in order to maintain a transactional system but to give authentically with the intention of merely giving, rather than, for instance, giving something we think counts.

  REFLECTION

  THINK OF A few relationships in your life, and simply note what counts for you in that dynamic, what is your strongest value in that circumstance. To the degree possible, see if you can discern (or, where appropriate, resolve to ask) what counts for the other person.

  The idea of repayment is firmly rooted in a vocabulary of transaction and ultimately doesn’t engender organic reciprocity. We can’t give with the intention to be given back to, to be repaid; rather, we recognize the unpredictable ebb and flow of each person’s emotional needs in any relationship, and don’t seek to control it by establishing a rigid currency for emotional availability. We trust the other person, and the other person trusts us.

  MUTUALITY IS CRUCIAL

  I RECENTLY GOT to know a young woman named Jackie who broke off her engagement after an incident with her fiancé. The day I met her, she was sobbing in the living room of a friend’s house. She’d just come from lunch with her fiancé at a restaurant where nothing on the menu had appealed to her. She asked the waiter if it was possible for the chef to make her a simple pasta dish that would be easy to prepare but wasn’t on offer. With that, her fiancé lit into her with fury.

  “You are so demanding. You are such a bitch!” he snapped.

  After she’d caught her breath, she said, “You know what I want? I want a partner who will look at the waiter and say, ‘She’s really special. Could you see if it’s possible to get her what she wants?’”

  As Jackie understood intuitively, we each deserve to be cherished and seen as special in the eyes of our beloved. “To love and to cherish” is part of traditional wedding vows. I thought Jackie was very clear-sighted to grasp the significance of her fiancé’s reaction to her request. It wasn’t just that her wishes were trivial to him. The very fact that she had asked had triggered his hostility. I admired her healthy sense of her own value, something that’s not easy to hold on to when we’re under attack. She didn’t try to soothe her fiancé or worry that she was embarrassing and demanding. Instead, she looked down the long arc of years that lay before them, and didn’t like what she saw. She didn’t like that her simple needs and requests for a little extra something would be shouted down. She didn’t like that she might end up suppressing her needs just
to keep the peace.

  A psychologist friend of Jackie’s happened to be sitting with us in the living room that afternoon. She said to her, “I’m going to offer you one word to guide your future relationships—mutuality.”

  FAMILY OBLIGATIONS

  IF YOU HAD siblings, you probably remember protesting to your parents, “That’s not fair!” And unless you’re lucky, those old fairness wars can reignite when elderly parents start to require care and support.

  Gone are the days when Nana lived around the corner, Mom and Dad didn’t hightail it to Florida, Arizona, or a cute little village in Mexico, and all the adult children in the family stayed put.

  Today’s sandwich generation juggles multiple pressures, from finances and demanding jobs to child-rearing. Adding to the pot, many older adults who need help suffer from a mixture of shame and anger at their loss of independence. And when old unresolved feelings of hurt, anger, and injustice get provoked, you’ve got a surefire recipe for bringing tensions to a boil.

  I hear so many stories: the sister who, whether by choice or by simple geographic proximity, becomes the primary caregiver for aging parents—and feels burdened and angry; the brother who foots the bill for assisted living and smarts with resentment; the siblings who go to the mat over every detail related to their parents’ care and, later, the disposition of money and family heirlooms; and parents who rage against any interference by their adult children.

  Happily, I’ve also known many families who’ve worked things through successfully. The key is usually a willingness to view the situation from each family member’s perspective, ultimately arriving at a common understanding that takes into account each person’s skills, resources, and life circumstances. In other words: awareness, flexibility, and generosity. Even if just one family member initiates open, mindful dialogue, it often turns out to be wonderfully contagious.

  About a year ago, my student Max hit a wall of exhaustion. Between caring for his ailing mother, his busy pediatric practice, and home life with his wife and two kids, he knew something had to give. But he wasn’t sure what, since his younger brother and only sibling, Tim, lived halfway across the country with his family. Tim kept in touch and came to visit once or twice a year, but only for a few days at a time. The more stressed Max became, the more fury he felt toward Tim. Yet he knew that trying to shame Tim into stepping up over the phone would backfire. So he waited until Tim’s next visit to have the talk.