Category: Counselling Articles

Categories
Counselling Articles Sex and Relationship Advice

“Stop feeling that” – Can you tolerate your partner’s difficult feelings?

"Stop feeling that" - Can you tolerate your partner's difficult feelings?When faced with our partner’s difficult feelings, the reflexive response tends to be some version of this: “Stop feeling that.” We might dress up our response in language that sounds more caring or compassionate, but the essential meaning of our message – stop feeling that – rings loud and clear.

We want our partner to stop feeling what they are feeling because it makes us uncomfortable in a hundred ways. Until we examine the discomfort that their feelings activate in us, we will continue to respond with some version of “Stop feeling that.” The problem with this response is that it easily turns the partner’s feelings into a point of contention, defensiveness follows, and a familiar escalation of conflict is often not far behind.

The alternative?

Another possibility is to respond to our partner’s difficult feelings with some version of this: “Please tell me more.” The problem with this is that it conflicts with our true intentions and desires. “Please tell me more” is a nice idea, but the truth is that we don’t want our partner to tell us more; we want them to stop feeling that.

Who would we have to be in order to genuinely want our partner to tell us more about their difficult feelings?

First, we’d have to be someone who can tolerate our partner’s difficult feelings. This is no small task. When the people closest to us are feeling something difficult, it is virtually impossible to not feel anxious. How we manage this anxiety determines our ability to be curious about their experience rather than trying to avoid, control, or fix it. In other words, our ability to be present in relationship hinges our ability to tolerate or manage the anxiety we feel.

Many of the complaints I hear in my marriage counselling practice come down to this –

“My partner doesn’t listen to me; they try to fix me or control me. I just want to be heard.”

Of course, the person saying this isn’t always telling the whole truth. Often there is a secret desire to have our partner rescue us, or there’s a not-so-secret attempt to pin our feelings on our partner, which makes it even harder for them to just “be with us” when we are suffering. There can also be an expectation that our partner demonstrate sufficient understanding, acknowledgement, or agreement when we reveal our feelings.

These dynamics can best be seen in the context of a “relationship system.” Thinking of relationship in terms of a system means acknowledging that relationship dynamics can’t be reduced to a simple cause and effect, but rather that there are multiple inputs that shape the system in complex ways, and that each person in the system has a part in either maintaining or changing it, no matter if they see themselves as the protagonist or the antagonist.

Learn more about tolerating feelings and changing difficult relationship dynamics in my book The Re-Connection Handbook for Couples.

Follow me for sex and relationship tips, tools, and insights – Facebook | Instagram

Like what you’re reading here?
You’ll love my book.
Read the first 10 pages free.

The Re-connection handbook for couples - by Justice Schanfarber - web box2

Campbell River Marriage Counselling Justice Schanfarber Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counselling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples on the issues that make or break relationships – Sessions by telephone/skype worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

Like Justice Schanfarber on Facebook

Sign up to get my articles by email –

Like this article? Share it! You can use the buttons below –

Categories
Counselling Articles Sex and Relationship Advice

Parenting challenges – Are there differences between fathering and mothering?

Parenting, fathers day

I noticed an interesting fathers day trend on my social media feeds this year.

One woman lamented “Fathers Day is the worst.” She wanted to share the pain of navigating fathers day as a single mom who’s ex (her child’s father) was abusive.

Another woman wanted to say “Thank you to the fathers who do not have inappropriate relationships with their children.”

And then there were various versions of “Let’s celebrate the fathers who know how to be nurturers and caregivers.”

Aside from the first example (I feel for you, but no, I’m not personally on board with the idea that fathers day is “the worst,” even though I can imagine why that would be the case for you and many others), it’s pretty easy to get generally on board with many of these messages. Yes, obviously it’s good for fathers to not have “inappropriate” relationships with their children, and yes, let’s celebrate nurturing fathering. Simple. No-brainers.

And yet I remain curious about the context, mostly because I’ve never seen these sorts of messages around mothers day, and contrast tends to catch my eye.

Can you imagine seeing mothers day memes that say “Thank you to the mothers who do not have inappropriate relationships with their children”? Or “Let’s celebrate the mothers who know how to set boundaries and hold their children accountable”? I think these messages would pretty much universally be seen to be in very bad taste on mothers day.

What to make of this? What is the meta-meaning of this phenomenon?

Is mothering harder to screw up? Does mothering just come more naturally? Are there that many more “bad” fathers than “bad” mothers?

Many of the mothers who see me in couples counselling have a difficult time understanding or tolerating their partner’s fathering style when it includes rough-housing, risk-taking, aggression, competition, brusqueness, and so on.

I’ve observed too that some mothers have a difficult time allowing the father to manage his own relationship with the children; there’s an impulse to step in and intervene, to criticize or control. I’m also aware that speaking about gender differences period, including mothering as potentially distinct from fathering, is not always welcome. When I posted a brief perspective about fathering on my facebook page, two commenters were quick to respond.

One suggested “Sexist much?”

The other declared “F*ck gender norms.”

Here’s the original post –

Fathering is sometimes different from mothering. Yes, fathers can be nurturing, and this quality of fathering is valuable and needed, but good fathering also includes challenging, setting boundaries, and having expectations. Mothers can sometimes be uncomfortable with this, but a function of good mothering is making room for fathers to bring their own gifts to parenting, and allowing fathers to manage their own relationships with the kids. #fathersday

We live in a time when explicitly confronting or calling out the dark side of the archetypal father (masculine) is socially sanctioned, while confronting the dark side of the archetypal mother (feminine) is less acceptable. I chalk this up partly to the swing of the pendulum; one could say that the feminine has been on trial by the masculine for a couple thousand years and it’s time for fair turnabout.

A result of this pendulum swing is that so-called masculine traits have been made “bad” while so-called feminine traits are enjoying a time of broad and unquestioning glorification. For example, many mothers have terribly inappropriate and damaging relationships with their children, but if these inappropriate relationships resemble “nurturing” or “caring” in some ways, their inappropriateness can easily be missed or forgiven.

The dark side of nurturing (yes, nurturing has a dark side) includes smothering, poor boundaries, passive-aggressiveness, co-dependency, martyrdom, and even sexualization or inappropriate eroticization of the child… but it’s easy, almost encouraged in our cultural climate to de-emphasize or ignore this shadow.

On the other hand, a parent who “challenges” their child or holds them accountable, or assumes an appropriate developmental hierarchy in the relationship (ie – I’m the adult, you’re the child, I get the final say) will often be viewed with suspicion if not outright derision, when in fact all these qualities are an important foil to the “nurturing” that has been historically associated with mothering and which now seems to be held in absolute esteem.

In other words, certain qualities historically associated with masculinity and fathering have been reduced only to their shadow aspect; their appropriate, necessary, and positive aspects have become invisible, not because they don’t exist, but because our culture currently has a difficult time recognizing them, which perhaps comes as no surprise given the brutality that the dark masculine has inflicted.

Whether men or women are naturally more nurturing, and what should be done about it, is not a topic I’m interested in taking a position on. What I do take a stand for is the necessity for parents to allow each other their own, unique, and often differing parenting styles, and to allow each other to develop and manage their own relationships with the children, for better or for worse (obviously if there are genuine concerns about abuse, appropriate action is called for).

It’s also crucial for children to have boundaries set for them, to be challenged as well as supported, and to have expectations placed upon them. Traditionally this has often, though not always, been the role of the father. If an individual or couple – hetero, same sex, gender fluid, whatever – would prefer to “F*ck gender norms,” then please do. Switch up the roles. Mix ’em up however suits you. But please do not jettison altogether the value of boundaries, challenge, and expectations in parenting. Nurturing is wonderful and should be celebrated, but it does have its own dark side, and even at its very best nurturing is probably not entirely sufficient on its own.

Follow me on social media for sex and relationship tips, tools, and insights – Facebook | Instagram

Like what you’re reading here?
You’ll love my new book.
Read the first 10 pages free.

The Re-connection handbook for couples - by Justice Schanfarber - web box2

8-week Relationship Intensive - Justice Schanfarber

Campbell River Marriage Counselling Justice Schanfarber Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counselling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples on the issues that make or break relationships – Sessions by telephone/skype worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

Like Justice Schanfarber on Facebook

Sign up to get my articles by email –

Like this article? Share it! You can use the buttons below –

Categories
Counselling Articles

The Heroine’s Journey – Transformative story and myth for women

The Heroine's Journey
From “The Shape of Water”

When Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces was first published in 1949 it introduced (or perhaps reminded) the modern world of the archetypal Hero’s Journey. The narrative of this mythical journey follows a particular arc, as described succinctly in the book’s introduction –

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

I first encountered the written myth of the Hero’s Journey in my adolescence in the 1980s, more than thirty years after Campbell’s book was published. As a politically charged (if not particularly astute) adolescent, I immediately noticed the gender asymmetry. Women and girls were side characters, there to provide incentive or reward or danger or intrigue to the Hero. The Hero was always a man or boy. George Lucas exemplified this in his Joseph Campbell inspired movie Star Wars (perhaps notably, the first movie I remember seeing as a child).

As I reached the cusp of manhood myself, I wondered how women felt about so rarely having a mythical journey of their own told in story or represented in myth.

Today we see gender roles increasingly challenged and deconstructed. Women are taking the Hero’s Journey (and men are often-times foregoing their own, but that’s a discussion for another time). And yet, in my counselling work I regularly encounter frustration and confusion from women around the Hero archetype and myth. They don’t usually use the words “Hero” or “Hero’s Journey,” but I discern the reference to myth in the words they do use.

In our sessions women will report feeling restricted, burdened, immobilized, especially women who have made significant sacrifices as a mother or wife. The women who have made a pronounced Hero’s Journey will sometimes lament their loss of a sense of home or family, of belonging, of “hearth.”

The Hero’s Journey is in essence a masculine journey, and although women will embark upon it, often successfully and with great reward, there remains a glaring gap.

The Heroine’s Journey

It stands to reason that if there is a Hero’s Journey, there must be a Heroine’s Journey. But what is the arc of the Heroine’s Journey? Is it enough for the Heroine to simply follow the Hero and call it a journey of her own? Certainly we see this in storytelling, for example in the character Lyra Silvertongue, a pre-adolescent girl who travels to other worlds on a typical Hero’s Journey in Philip Pullman’s astounding Golden Compass trilogy (a personal favourite in contemporary literature).

But might the Heroine’s Journey be substantially distinct in form from the Hero’s Journey, even as it mirrors it in value, significance, and depth? It’s worth considering.

I was considering just this question recently when I happened to watch Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 film The Shape of Water (Del Toro is also responsible for the wonderful Pan’s Labyrinth).

The protagonist and Heroine is Eliza, a mute woman who works as a cleaner in a secretive military base where a special government agent has suddenly arrived at the base in possession of a military “asset.” This asset turns out to be an amphibious “aqua-man,” a prisoner, a creature that the agent, clearly the story’s antagonist/villain (perhaps the dragon or giant of the Hero myth) treats with open disdain and cruelty.

The agent is sadistic and efficient, identified as “a man of the future,” proponent of progress, enemy of the past, enemy of uncertainty, enemy of feeling (except perhaps anger and disgust), of vulnerability, and certainly enemy of the feminine.

The asset, the captured aqua-man, is revealed, through Eliza’s silent hand-signed interactions, to be highly intelligent, sensitive, and also powerful, all qualities that the evil agent is blind to (if not actually blind, unwilling to acknowledge, committed as he is to the cold ideology of the dominator-heirarchy and the particular brand of masculinity to which he has pledged his allegiance).

The asset/Aqua-man too is clearly male, but is completely unlike the agent. A Dionysian figure dragged from his ancient home in the murky wet depths up into the dry and shallow world of Apollonian modern man, he is in fact a river god, embodiment of the past, now scheduled to die at the hands of the future.

It is up to Eliza to save him, and of course she does, and of course in the process she too is saved.

But there are marked differences between her Heroine’s Journey and the archetypal Hero’s Journey. Her tasks of courage are the same as the Hero’s. Her transformation and initiation are no less profound. As in the Hero’s Journey help arrives from unexpected sources. But unlike virtually every Hero’s Journey, Eliza is not called away from home… her quest finds her right where she stands. This seems to be a rarely recognized distinction. I didn’t really think about it until a colleague pointed it out, and I think the implications are worth exploring.

The Shape of Water could be called a feminist film, but rather than minimizing, discarding, or demonizing the masculine element, a distinction is made between styles of masculinity, while a distinctly feminine Heroine musters all that is required to face the challenges that have come through her door.

The story offers a refreshing, imaginative, and symbolically rich take on the Hero/Heroine’s Journey. The Heroine is pitted not against men per se, and not against just a random “bad man” but, and this is worth repeating, against a particular and distinct style of masculinity. Along her Journey, the Heroine, in typical fashion, receives help, sometimes unexpected and often from men. The complexity of character in the men who help her is actually necessary in order to appreciate the complexity of what the Heroine’s Journey demands. This understanding seems to be lost on many popular film-makers and storytellers who settle instead for simplified stereotypes.

I hope for more stories of this caliber to help express the myths, new and old, of the lesser known and equally potent feminine side of the transformative human Journey.

Recommended books –
The Hero Within by Carol Pearson
Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Goddesses in Everywoman by Jean Shinoda Bolen

Follow me on social media for sex and relationship tips, tools, and insights – Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Like what you’re reading here?
You’ll love my new book.
Read the first 10 pages free.

The Re-connection handbook for couples - by Justice Schanfarber - web box2

8-week Relationship Intensive - Justice Schanfarber

Campbell River Marriage Counselling Justice Schanfarber Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counselling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples on the issues that make or break relationships – Sessions by telephone/skype worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

Like Justice Schanfarber on Facebook

Sign up to get my articles by email –

Like this article? Share it! You can use the buttons below –

Categories
Counselling Articles Sex and Relationship Advice

Is it possible to love without attachment?

Is it possible to love without attachment?Dear Justice,

I’ve been listening to some Buddhist teachings on love and attachment. This teacher says that to truly love someone is to want them to be happy, with or without you, but usually what we really want is for ourselves to be happy, and we believe we need someone else to make us happy. We call this love, but that is not love says the Buddhist teacher, that is attachment, and attachment is the cause of suffering.

I’ve struggled a lot with love. It’s true that the love I’m used to has caused me a lot of suffering, so maybe it hasn’t been real love at all! My question – Is it really possible to love someone without attachment?

Signed,
In Love and Suffering

Dear In Love and Suffering,

The kind of love that is incompatible with being attached to someone or loving them for your own pleasure is a spiritual love. Spiritual love is a high ideal, and one that some people are called to. In a way, attachment IS the cause of suffering just as the ascetic spiritual traditions teach, and so it makes sense from that point of view that if we want to be free of suffering we should attempt to eliminate our attachments. Since romantic love has caused you a lot of suffering personally, I can see why it would be appealing to trade it in for a love without attachment. But please understand, it won’t be the same love.

Buddhists tend to idealize the emotional equanimity that comes with “non-attachment”. For some this offers a satisfying and enriching path, despite its difficulties. For others the ideal becomes an exercise in self-deception, what is commonly called “spiritual bypass”: rather than face the suffering that comes with the attachments of life, one tries to trick oneself into enlightenment by avoiding life rather than engaging with it. Still others manage to work fruitfully with the tension and dilemmas that come with attachment, even while they continue to live an engaged life.

The classical Greeks offer a different perspective on love altogether. They did not see love as mutually exclusive from attachment (or suffering for that matter), but rather they recognized at least four distinct kinds of love; we’ll look at two: Agape and Eros.

For the Greeks, Agape is spiritual, selfless love. Genitals are not included in this kind of love because bodily desire is not included.

Eros provides a darker foil to Agape. Eros is romantic or erotic love. It is sexually charged and desirous (genitals included).

In some stories the Greek God Eros was said to be mothered by Aphrodite, Goddess of love, and fathered by Ares, God of war. This parentage should give us clues to the temperament of Eros. Erotic love is understood to be frictious and troublesome, obsessive and personal, full of projection and confusion, and yes, suffering. Erotic love is also passionate, invigorating, colourful, and joyous. It’s a mixed bag.

So, do you want a cool and non-attached love? Or do you want a hot love that includes attachment, as well as passion and the associated suffering? There’s no wrong answer, but it’s worth adding that one makes a place for desire, including fucking and other forms of passion, while the other treats desire as a problem, something to be liberated from.

Interestingly, erotic love also has a psychological association that non-attached spiritual love does not. In the old stories Eros himself falls in love with a mortal woman named Psyche. Their love relationship is rocky, there is attachment and suffering in spades, but the suffering is psychologically meaningful; it helps the couple grow.

The Buddhist perspective in your question assumes that liberation from the entanglements of both Eros and Psyche is preferable to the psychological deepening that suffering in love can provide. Another way to say this is that attachment and suffering (and fucking for that matter) might be the enemies of spirituality, but they can be necessary for the soul (to read more about spirit as distinct from soul and the spiritual journey as distinct from the soul journey click here).

We’ve been looking at this in polarized terms for the sake of clarity and understanding, but these may not be mutually exclusive realms. We can question our attachments in love even as we wrestle with and even indulge them (I sometimes hold my partner’s face in my hands and teasingly tell her “I’m so attached to you”).

Can you have it both ways – can you do away with suffering and still feel the kind of fiery love that many crave? Probably not. Is it worth trying? Maybe, but keep in mind that much hinges on the meaning that you make of your suffering. If you believe, as I understand Buddhists do, that suffering is essentially meaningless, then suffering and attachment merely become problems to solve, something to be liberated from. But if you find psychological or soul meaning in the suffering and attachment of erotic love, then suffering becomes perhaps not only tolerable, but even purposeful.

Thanks for asking hard questions.

All My Best,
Justice

Follow me on social media for sex and relationship tips, tools, and insights – Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Like what you’re reading here?
You’ll love my new book.
Read the first 10 pages free.

The Re-connection handbook for couples - by Justice Schanfarber - web box2

Campbell River Marriage Counselling Justice Schanfarber Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counselling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples on the issues that make or break relationships – Sessions by telephone/skype worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

Like Justice Schanfarber on Facebook

Sign up to get my articles by email –

Like this article? Share it! You can use the buttons below –