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The Challenge of Emotionally
Mature Love By Richard Kieninger Love is often blocked by conflict, and conflict is
often generated by emotional difficulties. The emotional maturity that makes the
flow of love easy comes slowly as life is lived. Perhaps emotional maturity
is best seen not as an accomplishment (which you either have or don’t have)
but as a process of becoming. That process can be intensely painful at times
along our unfolding journey toward a shift in consciousness. Taking personal
responsibility—not blame—is a key. When we realize that most of our conflicts
come from natural ups and downs in our process of learning to better handle
emotions and not from the dreadful shortcomings of others, then we are ready
to grow faster. Lao Tzu said it well: “Only he who contains content remains
content.” The challenge of loving in an emotionally mature way can be seen as
a series of challenges. Let’s look in depth at some common ones, with an eye
to learning how to gradually resolve them. 1. The
Challenge of Not Hurting Those You Love by Taking Out Your Anger, Pain or
Frustration on Them We’re all upset by various
events; and as we get more mature, we’re better able to “process” these upset
feelings. But while we’re learning to handle the feelings, we often “take
them out” on those closest to us. If we’re in an active mode, we may use some
little thing a loved one does as a “trigger” for the feelings just waiting to
be released, and they explode. If we’re in a passive mode, we may withdraw
into ourselves. However, emotional distancing can be a rejection, and people
can be just as hurt by it as by explosions. When this situation arises,
how does it evolve? Here’s our culture’s classic scenario: you explode,
blaming the explosion on someone else. Then he/she naturally defends
him/herself, and you defend your explosion by condemning his/her action. A
fight develops, and mutual hurt feelings block love and intimacy for some
time. Finally, someone apologizes. This type of conflict can be resolved, or
defused, by some of the pattern-breakers discussed on page four. Now, let’s
bring this challenge home. Please answer the following questions: a.
Who are the persons
on whom you are most likely to take out your feelings? b.
What kinds of
feelings do you most often take out on them (anger, hurt, loneliness, fear;
or just anything unpleasant), and in what situations? c.
Close your eyes
and imagine yourself striving to take out some feelings on that person—and
then change the script. Try some of the ideas listed in the “Breaking the
Pattern” section. What happens? 2. The
Challenge of Knowing How to Balance Nurturing Your Partner with Nurturing
Yourself In any good relationship—professional,
personal, or parental—each person both gives and receives love and support.
Part of the challenge of keeping a healthy relationship is developing an
intuitive sense of when (and how!) to give love, and when and how to receive.
This is a delicate balance. Surprisingly, there’s a
knack to asking for love and nurturing, and it can be learned. When you fully
accept that you’re needing nurturing and learn how to ask for what you want
you’ll usually get it. But when you’re feeling guilty about wanting support,
or have already decided that the other person isn’t going to give it, you’ll
often not get what you need. Frequently, when this happens, you decide that
the other person is not caring or supportive enough, and you use this as a
reason not to be loving toward them. On the other hand, if you
become too focused on meeting your own needs, you may neglect to give to your
partner. Sometimes, when you’re not feeling lovable, the best way to get out
of it is to just forget about your problems and focus on being loving toward
another person. Love is most enriching to the person who gives it. And,
through cause and effect, if you give more love, you’ll eventually receive
more. a.
Right now, in
your relationships, are you giving more, receiving more, or having a balance
of giving and receiving? Is this typical of how you usually are, or
different? b.
If you’re
receiving a bit too much, think of some ways you could give more in your
relationships. If you’re giving too much, how could you feel more comfortable
in receiving? Can you think of times that others tried to be loving and you
cut them off in some way? 3. The
Challenge of Knowing Who Has the Problem One of the things that
blocks the flow of love between people is when they get enmeshed in each
other’s problems. When you have a problem and try to project it onto your
partner (for example, if you are always “too busy” for quiet time and
touching, but blame your partner for not touching you enough) you create a
lose-lose situation. As long as you keep thinking it’s your partner’s fault,
you’ll never address the real root of the problem—yourself. And so you
prevent yourself from feeling close and loving. You need to identify your own
problems so that you can work effectively to resolve them. On the other hand, if
you’re always trying to own others’ problems, you’ll tend to block closeness
and love, because that means you have to take on all the other person’s
challenges. For example, if you get upset whenever your coworkers are having
a bad day, and feel that you must help “make everything all right,” you’ll
soon be overwhelmed and want to avoid them; because you can’t make everything
all right for them. Only they can do that. If you can trust them to work out
their own problems, without you getting stuck in them, you’ll be free to care
about others without feeling burdened. 4. The
Challenge of Empathizing with a Loved One When You’re in the Midst of
Conflict Compassion, which means to
“feel with,” is a strong foundation for love. Most of us can “feel with” someone
when we agree with their feelings, or when it doesn’t have anything to do
with us, but the real challenge is to empathize with someone when we’re
feeling attacked or hurt by them. It’s worth the effort, though, for nothing
so beautifully dissolves conflict as genuinely understanding the other
person’s perspective. As one wise person said, “To understand all is to
forgive all.” Reflective listening, which
means simply identifying what the other person is feeling and then telling
what you heard back to him/her, is one technique you can use as a “baby step”
toward understanding someone’s perspective. Even if you strongly disagree
with what another is saying, you can look for what they’re feeling and say,
“Sounds like you’re really angry about that.” Sometimes, the other person
will feel “heard” and this can start the resolving process. Really empathizing,
however, is a quantum leap beyond any technique. It is intensely moving when,
in the middle of a conflict, you just “let your hassles go” and fully feel
how the other person is feeling. When you do this, you touch the heart of
loving very deeply. It is from such true empathy that you find the wisdom to
resolve the conflict in a loving way. Have you ever experienced
what’s described above? If so, what were the results? Breaking the Pattern: Letting Love Flow Getting into emotional
conflict is one of the easiest ways to block love. We often use open or
hidden conflict as an excuse for not loving the people around us. Over time,
we develop patterns of conflict, based on emotional dynamics, that we replay
endlessly. When we can predict very closely how a conflict of ours will go;
what we’ll do, and what the other person will do, and how it will escalate;
we’re dealing with an emotional habit pattern. If the conflict is usually
with the same person, then we probably have interlocking patterns; in some
way, our emotional challenges mesh with their emotional challenges. To start becoming more
loving, break the pattern. Some patterns may be easily worked out; the
relationship can become more loving quickly. Others can be more deep-rooted
and may involve gradually working through many strands of emotions. For those
situations, here are some pointers to keep in mind: 1) You don’t both have to
be consciously working on improvement: if just one person’s behavior changes,
the dynamic will change. 2) Allow plenty of time for deep-rooted patterns to
change. Deep change is possible, but it unfolds slowly. Celebrate any step
forward, no matter how minute, as a positive accomplishment, and the pace
will accelerate over time. We stay in conflict when we
feel that it’s not possible to resolve it. In fact, there are a multitude of
different ways to understand any conflict. Here are some “baby steps” that
we’ve found useful for breaking out of emotional conflict patterns, and
changing the tone to a more loving one. If one doesn’t work, keep trying till
you find another that does. 1. Feel Your
Feelings That is to say, stop
acting them out or blaming the other person for them. Often, in conflict, we
are actually fighting against our own strong feelings that we don’t want to
accept. You can break the pattern if you stop and go within. Close your eyes,
and move toward the feelings you are fighting, allowing them to overwhelm
you, without projecting them outward or identify them in your head as being
someone else’s fault. Feeling and clarifying your feelings is the ultimate
resolution to conflicts. When you are clear enough about what is important to
you, you can usually present it clearly without fighting. 2. Tell What
You are Feeling When you know what you’re
feeling, it can help to express it. The simpler and clearer you say it, the
better. Saying “I’m really hurt!” with feeling and then nothing else for a
bit, is clearer than trying to qualify or explain why immediately. Give the
other person a chance to respond; let the pace of the interaction slow down. 3. Take
Responsibility for Your Part Conflicts continue when
people feel blamed or threatened. You can often defuse fights by telling the
other person what you think your part in the conflict is, rather than
defending yourself when they tell you what they think your part is. An
example is: “I really came home in a rotten mood today, and I guess I’ve been
snapping at you.” Saying “I’m sorry” here helps, too. 4. Say You
Don’t Want to be in Conflict, and Ask for Help Ending It This is a good “last
resort” technique when you are very unclear about what is going on or when
you’re too upset to do anything else. You can just say, “This really feels
tense and unhappy to me! I don’t want us to keep on like this. How can we
stop it?” 5. Laugh at
Yourself This is good advice in
general and is especially helpful when you are in the midst of a conflict.
Often emotional habit patterns can be almost caricatures of themselves, and
letting yourself shift perspective and see the funny side of your emotional
patterns can be very healing. Obviously, this only works with your patterns.
Laughing at the other person is a sure way to escalate the conflict. 6. Empathize
with the Other Person This item was discussed in
greater detail earlier, but it is one of the best ways to defuse conflict and
develop love. 7. Help the
Other Person Understand You Better If you explain a little bit
of why you are upset, sometimes the other person can understand your
perspective better and feel more loving toward you. For example: “Maybe the
reason it upsets me so much when you don’t pick up your stuff is because I
used to share my room with my sister, and she always had her things all over
the room. There was never any place for my things, and I felt as if I didn’t
matter.” Even if the conflict isn’t immediately resolved, at least there may
be greater understanding between you. 8. Touching Even with someone you’re
not very close to, touching can communicate caring. A touch on the arm or
shoulder, along with an apology or expression of concern, can help calm a
tense situation. With a close relationship, touch can be even more important
A hug with a friend or child or lover can go a long ways toward
re-establishing loving feelings. 9. Peeling
the Onion “Peeling the onion” is
based on the idea that people have emotional layers, like onions. To
understand why something bothers you, take an event that was upsetting you
and think about it. You’ll probably find that it goes back to an earlier
event that caused similar feelings, and that that one is connected to an even
earlier event, and so on. That’s peeling the onion. Choose an incident where
you were feeling loving and something happened to disturb the feeling. Focus
on the upset feeling that blocked love for you, and follow it back as far as
it will go. What did you learn about yourself? Summary Sometimes, we let our feelings of hurt or anger stop
us from loving others. As we become more emotionally mature, we gradually
understand more about our feelings, and
learn how we can use them to become
more loving, rather than letting them block us from loving. Emotional maturity is a
process more than an end result. None of us is fully emotionally mature;
rather, we are all striving to be more mature. Emotional maturity has little
to do with intellectual understanding or personality or of how emotions work.
It is, rather, a real ability to feel our way through life’s challenges,
while remaining centered and grounded. Some qualities that lead us
to greater emotional maturity are: 1) shifting perspectives, seeing many
points of view; 2) trusting ourselves: trusting our evolving ability to meet
challenges, and our growing ability to meet our own needs, and 3) accepting
life as it comes: enjoying it and seeing the humor in it. Use the “Baby Step”
approach to greater emotional maturity. It often doesn’t work when we try to
“act as if” we were wholly mature. Usually, we can’t even imagine what a
really emotionally mature person would do in a given situation. But, in our
own situations, we can usually think of a slightly more mature way to act.
So, we can take baby steps toward maturity, one at a time, as we are ready to
see them. Over time, they’ll add up to giant steps. Often, we get stuck in
emotional habit patterns of conflict that block us from loving. When that
happens, the first step to becoming more loving is to break the pattern. Some
ways to break the pattern are: feeling your feelings, asking for help to
break out of a conflict, expressing your feelings, empathizing with the other
person, and touching. The challenge of
emotionally mature loving can be seen as many smaller challenges. Among them
are: the challenge of balancing nurturing others with nurturing yourself, the
challenge of knowing who has the problem, the challenge of not hurting those
you love by taking out your feelings on them, the challenge of empathizing
with someone while in conflict with them. |
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