Tag Archives: relationships

Emotions that get triggered

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Yesterday, I came up against the passion and the idealism, the anger at injustices done in the world and the frustration of complacency, and the disappointment of someone I love and cherish. It was not the first time and yet I found myself no better equipped to respond adequately than in the past. When emotions are fired up in a loved one and you get in the firing line, it often triggers your own emotional pathways as well, even when you know in your heart that the anger is not about you, not really.

So here we were, from a news item on the TV, followed by some comments, to this. My first reaction was to placate, only to meet judgement and criticism, which in turn triggered my defence and denial. As usual, this did not help the situation either.

Within the next microsecond, I was heading along one of two well-developed emotional pathways. We tend to be vulnerable to the ones we love. So, before I knew it, I let it get to me and allowed the implication that I was ignorant, ill informed, complacent and a disappointment, to take its hold.

Now this story is not about who was right or wrong – as if there is an answer to that. This story is about how very quickly our well-developed neural pathways (emotional and thinking habits) are triggered. You don’t immediately recognise the unfolding of your emotions and thinking – not while you are still in the situation. Within a hundredth of a second a reaction is triggered – faster than the analysing, logical part of our brain can respond. By that time, the whole of our body has reacted and we are in fight/flight with our emotions having the upper hand. So, as I withdrew, my own ‘stuff’ came up and I was already having thoughts about not being able to respond effectively, not being intelligent enough, about my thoughts and opinions not counting. {Now I want to make a point here. None of this was true! It was just thoughts, and it was just old stuff}.

I did what many people do, I started to make my own meaning of the whole event and, of course, it had absolutely nothing to do with the original discussion, the state of the world, corruption or Australia. With my emotions and thinking unchecked the meaning I was making of it was fairly negative.

It was not long before practice and training took over and little logical thoughts emerged. “Wait! Wait a minute!” clanged in my head. There is usually a window of opportunity where we have a choice whether to allow our emotional and thinking habits to run the show or not. This was mine.

I realised that the most important thing in all of this, the priority, was not what was said or felt or who was at fault. The most important thing, the base from which all interactions grow, was not our relationship but my relationship with myself, and it was the same for them. What was I doing to myself? What was I saying to myself? Where was the part of me that is able to hold my centre? Was I showing myself understanding, compassion, support and trust? Were my words and actions both inside and outside of myself in alignment with my purpose and values? {Referencing this sort of event through your purpose is a very useful tool.}

I had not taken the learning from earlier experiences. In my rush to connect and make things better, I had not centred myself. I had forgotten about the parts of me that could be so easily triggered and hurt and they had taken over on their own and run their story.

So, I invited myself within and cared for and guided myself in the same way I often do for others. For if I cannot do it for myself; if I cannot invite forward and connect with all the parts of myself, the parts that are fearful, the angry parts, even those that frustrate or disappoint me; if I cannot hold myself with love and compassion and create harmony within myself, then how can I possibly hope to respond effectively? If I do not take that window of opportunity and weaken that neural pathway, then how can I hope that others could do the same?

I was reminded of the saying that I have seen attributed variously to Hermetic and Vedic texts, “As within, so without”.

Are decisions or choices causing you stress?

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A friend was stressing about which car to buy. A client was worrying about her son who was trying to decide what he should do with his life. As well as worrying about her son, she was also stressing about what decision he should make. Another was experiencing a lot of stress trying to choose when was the right time to retire. These are just a few examples. None of these situations are uncommon but they all have two things ‘in common’ – they all involve a level of stress and each involves a decision or choice. One of the most important aspects of finding your way through stressful times is being able to make decisions and choices that are right for you while creating as little stress as possible in the process.

People tend to use the terms decision and choice interchangeably and this means that the same amount of time and energy can be spent on decisions or choices that are not equivalent in importance. It is useful to differentiate between deciding and choosing for a number of reasons.

Firstly, this helps to create some sort of hierarchy of importance with respect to the amount of time and energy, and therefore stress, you allocate. When there appears to be a fork in the road and it feels like this is an important decision to be made, but you feel really stressed trying to make it, then chances are, there is a more important, higher level decision that you must make first. So, for the friend who was stressing about the choice of a car, there were bigger, more important decisions she needed to address first and this helped her see it was, after all, just a choice.

Secondly, it makes life easier if there are guiding principles for making the choices that life throws our way. One way of looking at this is to allocate decisions as involving the bigger, more important and profound aspects of life and see them as the foundation on which choices are made. Let me give you some examples. A fundamental decision that guides all the choices you make is the answer to this question “What is most important to you?” Or, to put it another way, “What do you value most in life?” Because this is at the high end of decision-making, these are not questions you can take lightly – yet many of us do, if we bother to consider them at all. There is a process for getting really clear on what you value in life and it takes time and needs to engage different types of thinking. But it also helps to identify how, and often why, you are creating your stress and suffering. It usually takes some guidance to follow the process and understand how to put the decisions to practical use. However, ultimately, it leads you to truly understand what gives your life meaning, in a way that is not just you making up your mind but the whole of you – body,mind and soul – is clear and engaged. This was the decision that both my client and her son needed to make first. Another important decision for her, was “What sort of relationships do you want in your life?” This is relevant because that decision impacts on any choices she made in trying to help her son – or really more accurately – supporting her son.

When I made the choice to study for my MBA, I did it without understanding or working on the more important decisions in my life so I used the rational thinking part of my brain and analysed the decision and the implications, finally making the choice. But, then, three quarters of the way through, I began to realise that what I thought I wanted to do with it wasn’t right for me. It became really hard work and only determination got it finished – only to feel in the end like it just didn’t feel as good as I thought it would! There is a quote from Albert Einstein that I discovered later on and it gives an important tip about making high end decisions.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

So the third reason for differentiating between decisions and choices, is for more effective goal setting. You do the process and decide what you truly value in life (not what you think  is important or what you should value) and then you choose your goals, based on those decisions. I rarely find people do it this way round. If not, like me, people often say that finally achieving a goal that they have worked towards somehow lacks meaning and they can even feel dissatisfied, or they loose the motivation or drive to keep going and it becomes really hard work or is never achieved. This is because the goal is either not aligned with what is important to them or, at some level, does not give meaning to their life – they only thought it would. The thing is, of course, you might still make a choice that ends up not feeling right for you, but it’s just a choice, and with your decisions and your understanding of yourself firmly in place, you can recognise it early and you have a guide on how to shift your direction.

The final reason, is that by creating in your own mind an understanding that life decisions are the high-end, guiding principles on which life’s choices can be made helps to easily sort out the more important choices from the less important. Barry Schwarz wrote a book called “The Paradox of Choice”, in which he brings together current research in the social sciences and shows how too much choice has been detrimental to our psychological and emotional well-being. He makes a counter-intuitive argument that eliminating or limiting choices can greatly reduce the stress, anxiety and busyness of life. Knowing when to put time and energy into choosing is a valuable thing. This means, from the decisions you have made, you understand which choices matter, and therefore need reference to those guiding principles, as well as some time and energy. You also understand which choices matter less and therefore are allocated to “does it really matter, do I need to stress, will either way be okay in the the end?”

So what about the man who was stressing about when to retire? Well, his decision appeared to be not when he should retire but – if he wasn’t a farmer and creating wealth for his family then who was he? What use was he? Really, there is a more fundamental and profound decision that needed to be made first – “what gives purpose and meaning to his life?” That is the most important decision any of us can make about our lives. And it is never too late!

What do you tell yourself?

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When people ask me what is it that I teach, my response is that I teach about relationships. When I say that some say “Oh, something like marriage counselling”.

My answer is “Mmm, well, yes, relationships between people are the context of most of our lives but what’s really interesting is that relationships actually exist on a much broader scale than that so I take an inside out approach so that you can see how outside in works as well”. That usually confuses everybody and I love it when they say “how do you do that?”

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines relationship as “a kind of connection or feeling that prevails between persons and things”. So, what I am talking about when I refer to relationships is a connection or feeling that exists between people, between things and between people and things. I like the word “connection” because, despite the fact that our senses tell us that we are separate and we view ‘things’ as separate such as our mind and our body or our work and our home or the plant in my room and me, its not true – connection is fundamental to our existence, both as a reality and as a personal experience.

This means that nothing happens in isolation. Relationships exist on all levels and that is important to our lives, it is just that sometimes we don’t realise it until we make the connection! Scientific research helped me see this.

I will give you some examples for those of you who are interested in the science but for those who aren’t – skip to the next paragraph! At the level of quantum physics there is a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, which refers to the phenomenon where particles that appear to be separate in one sense really are not separate at all because when one particle is stimulated the other one has an identical reaction to the stimulation, even when they are long distances apart. Then there is the research into networks, which identified that the relationship between people’s happiness extended up to three degrees of separation. It concluded that people’s happiness is influenced by the happiness of others with whom they are connected. Astronomers discovered that we are made up of the same elements as everything else in the universe. We are made of stardust; we are connected to the universe. Psychoneuroimmunology is a multidisciplinary study of all aspects of the body and mind. It is the study of how the mind and the body communicate. Through a complex network, our thoughts and our emotions have a relationship to everything that happens in our body, as seen by the relationship between our emotions and our immune system.

So there is a relationship between our thoughts and feelings and our health and healing. The relationship between mental attitude and rate of recovery is well established in medicine.

When we talk about our thoughts, we are really referring to what we are telling ourselves. We tell ourselves lots of things but we mostly don’t even notice we are doing it and seldom pull ourselves up on it. What we tell ourselves and how we feel about ourselves determines what we do, how we act or react, what we say. It is the basis of habits.

In the absence of awareness, we use established thinking and emotional patterns and so most of our actions and behaviour are habits. That’s important for us and it is important for the relationships we have with other people. Years ago, I had a client in my dietetic practice who was trying to lose weight. If she had worked really hard during the day or if she had a bad day she felt like she wanted to nurture herself so she would give herself something “nice” and sweet to eat. It had been a totally unconscious pattern but as she started to realise how her relationship with herself, her body and her food created her behaviour, that new awareness was a real turning point.

Our relationship with ourselves is determined by our thinking and emotional patterns. There are other aspects to our inner experience that are also important including our spiritual intelligence and our access to joy and inner wisdom.

What does this mean for you? It means that your relationship with yourself determines your actions and behaviour and has an enormous impact on all the relationships you have with other people.

There is a wonderful story that Dan Millman tells when he teaches about how little things make a big difference. A woman came up to him and told him how she had always been very shy and had been suicidal, having had a couple of half hearted attempts. She had decided that she was going to do it, in her words “once and for all”. She said, “I didn’t believe anyone cared whether I lived or died, so I didn’t care, either. I was on the way home where I was going to do it, when I saw a man – a nice looking man, walking in the opposite direction. I don’t usually look at people, but in the state I was in, it didn’t matter, so I looked at him and he looked back and smiled at me. He had a wonderful smile – and then he was gone. I know it sounds crazy but his smiling at me – it was something I wanted to hold on to for a while, so I – I didn’t kill myself that day or the next. Then I decided to stick around and get some help. Things are better now. I have a boyfriend I love…….”

Little things, small actions, do make a difference but what struck me is that there is more than just a moral to that story. She had told herself that no one cared whether she lived or died – and she believed it! Byron Katie speaks about a realisation that came to her at a time of complete despair, “I realised that when I believed my stressful thoughts, I suffered, but that when I questioned them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being.” We are capable of stressing ourselves. We are capable of telling ourselves things that are simply not true. We are also capable of turning that around and caring for ourselves.

And then there is that man who made a connection with her or put another way, he acknowledged his connection to her. It was brief and passing but the thing is how he acted was a reflection of how he felt about himself, what he was telling himself and his relationship with himself. In that moment, it turned out to be incredibly important.

But really, isn’t it always?

Opening the invitation to authentic relationships

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I love books. My husband can spend hours in a hardware store and I can spend hours in a bookstore. Fortunately, my husband also likes bookstores but I don’t know, I just can’t reciprocate with the hardware stores.

Over the years, I have developed a very reliable technique for choosing books. I let them call to me. I just run my eye or sometimes my hand along a bookshelf and somehow a book will call to me. I then have a more rational process I go through (table of contents, trial read, author etc) to confirm that this is the one for me, right now, in this moment in my life. I know it sounds strange but it works every time!

I was visiting one of my favourite bookstores in Montville in the Sunshine coast hinterland when a little book called to me. It was called “Opening to The Invitation”. Some of you may be familiar with the poem “The Invitation” written by Oriah Mountain Dreamer – I have to admit my rational mind did think Really? But once I read this little poem I knew this book was the right one for me. It tells the story of how Oriah (Mountain Dreamer was given to her by the Native American shaman she studied with and was apprenticed to) came to write this prose poem. She is one of those people who, after two years of serious, chronic illness, were called to choose between a life that “was a good life, just not my life” and a life that connected her to herself and her dreams and nourished her health.

She wrote the poem “in a quiet moment late at night when tiredness stopped my head from censoring the words that flowed from my heart onto the page”. Oriah later included it in a little newsletter she edited and was surprised when it “went viral”. So much so, that people did not know who this Oriah Mountain Dreamer was (lots were inaccurate), some even changed some of the wording and she had to finally learn about letting go of control.

When you read her story, it is clear that different people have brought their own perspective to the poem but for me there is a call for authenticity in relationships in this prose poem. Those of you who study the Enneagram will be aware that some personality types have a more profound need for authenticity but everyone wants relationships that they can trust, that are reliable and genuine. Connection is the key. I am talking about a connection that both gives and receives something of each other.

She starts “The Invitation” with:
“It doesn’t interest me
what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.”

Because our western world mostly sells the superficial and values things that are often not the most important, many long for and seek genuine connection – I know I do. Some people deeply desire trustworthy and reliable relationships but hold back because of doubt or fear of the opposite.

“I want to know if you can live with failure,
yours or mine,
and still stand on the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon
‘Yes!’
It doesn’t interest me to know where you live
Or how much money you have…”

Some people find discussing the inner, more meaningful part of a person just too intense, too much or feel safer keeping to the superficial in their relationships. Some want genuine relationships but also place value on what you do and have a need for you to know what they do or have done. All that this tells us is that relationships offer us opportunities for growth. And in the end, there is no avoiding the importance of your relationship with yourself.

She finishes with:
“I want to know if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company
you keep
in the empty moments.”

It seems to me that the desire for authenticity asks of me to care, to be true, to give and to be accepting in my relationships. It needs me to open my heart, my mind and my embodied knowing, not just my heart and ignore my mind and my instincts, not just my mind and ignore my heart but all three, open and working in concert. That is no always easy.

To read the full poem visit Oriah’s website at http://www.oriahmountaindreamer.com