This is the third article expanding on respectful and healthy relationship behavior. Who will be up for the New Year challenge of practicing all of these behavior for the month of January and beyond? (link to part one and part two)
21) Be Inclusive: Human beings often fall into the trap of dismissing others, sometimes due to a sense of personal superiority, but often due to not caring or listening to other people. In a relationship, dismissive behavior adds up over time with increasingly hurtful results. The counter to being dismissive is choosing to be actively inclusive of others. Making other people matter and caring about their thoughts, opinions, and emotions. With an intimate partner, this would mean to include that person in your life by sharing your successes and challenges, bringing that person into your world, even if it is mundane - and showing respect and care by including their experiences, stories, and life in your own through listening. This may mean inviting a conversation, becoming an active source of support, or making plans alongside your partner.
22) Be Open and Transparent: It's easy to be unconscious of manipulative and controlling behavior toward a partner. All it takes is selective information sharing (so-called white lies, withholding information, or lying by omission), yessing another person or being insincere (lying by assent), or of course blatantly saying or doing things to get a specific advantage (outright commission of lies or manipulation of information). Many people easily miss the build up of such patterns, and become manipulative for all the "right" reasons, even if for self-protection. But since it builds over time, it can dismantle a relationship once someone sees through that manipulation. It takes direct open communication about problems, challenges, and seemingly boring details to be transparent in how you work with your intimate partner. Your partner needs to have a sense that your motives are respectful and healthy, that those reasons for your choices are not based in coming out on top, but on working alongside. Since manipulation often takes a certain amount of personal mindfulness and reflection, it's easy to feel open and transparent while at the same time choosing behavior which alienates other people. Consider places in your life where you keep things secret - do such secrets ultimately benefit you at the expense of your partner? Are those personal things you do not speak about keep a barrier up in your relationship? Are there ways of dismantling even the small things to improve your ability to communicate and grow with your partner?
23) Let Time Run Its Course: Sometimes it seems very important to make a decision quickly, and pressure others to agree or join with you in a decision. This sort of pressure can wear others down, and make them feel less validated in their own decision making process. Not all decisions or situations are equally imperative, so balancing priorities and knowing when an immediate choice is necessary and when there is time to allow patience and discussion can help to make a partnership feel like a true collaboration. There are situations where an individual wants to make a quick decision to avoid pain or due to fear about outcomes - and in such cases allowing time can be important for other reasons. If decision making is about avoidance, then patience may instead lead to growing discussion and cooperation. If being right or winning a conflict is the priority, such motives are a trap that cause damage to a relationship. If your partner feels pressured to make a decision, and makes one out of that pressure, such a decision may be paired with regret and self-blame. Or it could be paired with anger and blaming you for pressuring. Sure, in some cases, particularly if someone is unsure or paralyzed in decision making, they might feel better about making a decision, but that is where it is important to know what is going on for your partner (and yourself) in decision making and to understand where your patience, or need to develop more patience, is important.
24) Remember the Value of Your Relationship: How do you add value to your partner's life? How does your partner add value to your life? These are critical questions to ask, and to understand the answer. In them, you can consider places you can improve (to add more value), and places to appreciate and validate your partner. I argue that this is a very important part of creating an amicable relationship with an ex-partner as well. Often men in my classes who have a child with their ex-partner speak to her faults and problems and their ability to co-parent suffers greatly as a result. Having neutral self-talk may involve the ability to remember why you chose your partner to begin with, and the positive characteristics that you had valued, and maybe even still value. Conflict can easily grow when there is discontent and a growing negative self-talk about your partner, and being conscious of value helps to keep that discontent from growing into contempt. It can also keep you humble if you have been working on awareness of your faults in addition to remembering the strengths that your partner appreciates in you.
25) Acknowledge Your Partner's Humanity: As human beings, we have any number of faults, make mistakes pretty regularly, and are self-oriented at times to the point of missing opportunities to validate and care for others. The ancient truism of "remove the plank in your own eye before addressing the sliver in someone else's" holds very true to this humanity. If you can recognize your own faults, and keep your partner's faults with several grains of salt, you can more easily navigate conflict by seeing where that humanity might be getting in the way on either side. Any of the items on this list can be challenging because they require a certain amount of personal choice and discipline. Your partner may not practice this (or any other of these things) but that does not mean you cannot. Sometimes a simple thing such as noticing your partner's exhaustion, understanding life experiences that are overwhelming your partner, or realizing you have made similar mistakes can lead to more understanding in conflict resolution.
26) Connect With Support Beyond Your Partner: It's important to choose wisely when investing in a relationship for many reasons, one of them being that it's natural that you will spend a lot of time together. When you connect with another person in a committed way, and as a relationship grows and evolves over time, you inherently will depend on support from your partner. This support might be emotional, but it may also be about sharing resources, time, and responsibilities. This does not mean all your support should come from one person. It is important to have others in your life, whether it be friends, family, or even coworkers who can offer feedback and emotional support. It's just as important to encourage your partner to foster such relationships and support. Being wise about your support system is also critical - it's no good to have people supporting you who give you hurtful ideas or selfish options to solving problems. Nor is it good to have people who fail to call you on your bullshit. Who is in your life outside of your partner who is there for you, and how do they demonstrate support for you?
27) Handle Tough Decisions Together: Not all decisions need to be made jointly in a relationship, but at the same time it's important to know your partner well enough to understand when that person wants to be involved in a decision. What are the tough decisions you face, and how do you get input on them from your partner? How do you work together as parents, and how do you work separately? Parenting is a useful example because of course you cannot make all decisions jointly, at the same time you need to be open and transparent about the decisions you do make so you do not override or counter your partner's choices. Even in decisions that may be more personal, having your partner's thoughts and input can lead to greater intimacy and validation.
28) Be Assertive: Know what you want and need, and know how to communicate those things. Often it's a trap to merely communicate what you do not like, do not want, or do not need - and use those things as attacks. Productively working toward goals and options will go much better when negotiating and compromising, and making decisions that do not end up as an expense to your partner are also important. Being passive and awaiting an outcome leads to less personal investment and makes it easy to later become aggressive about an outcome you had no investment in to begin with. Aggressively making choices to meet your needs or wants can easily steamroll over your partner and build resentment. Actively communicating and working together to prioritize, understand the difference between wants and needs, and set realistic and measurable goals are all traits that are a part of acting assertively.
29) Understand Respect: As a term, respect can be hard to define. Sometimes the examples given are things like "I respected my father, because if I didn't, there'd be hell to pay," but in such examples respect is confused with fear. If someone equates being respected to being obeyed or feared, they may pursue destructive and hurtful behavior in their relationships with others. Another common, but ultimately faulty example is, "to get respect, you have to earn it," but such ideas are more similar to defining authority. Rising in an hierarchy such as within a work environment may involve earning position, but if someone believes they have the right to control others or that they have earned such a right, then they may not be open to influence or negotiation which can again be destructive to relationships. Understanding respect as a concept involves understanding how you listen to others and show a certain amount of caring for them. The ability and willingness to listen to other's thoughts, emotions, and opinions demonstrates to others that you respect them. Alternatively, the ability to understand and listen to your own needs and gain them in a dignified way is what self-respect is all about. Developing respect in a relationship helps to strengthen and grow bonds between you, and is critical to having value in another person.
30) Balance Intimacy: Intimacy is no one thing, but involves layers of connection. Physical intimacy is definitely about sexual attraction and behavior, but it is even more than that. Passion about being with someone, enjoying physical (non-sexual) touch, these things and more are what make up physical intimacy and such things evolve throughout an intimate partner relationship. Emotional intimacy is about closeness to someone, knowing what they like and dislike, reciprocity of action and need, secrets shared and secrets kept, and overall knowledge of that person's life and history. Mental intimacy makes up commitment - how you bind yourself to another person by finances, marriage, having children, living together, making goals for the future, or other intimately binding behavior. Spiritual intimacy is about shared values and morals, both knowing your own and navigating your partner's, and appreciating their differences. All of these layers of intimacy are best developed equally, although it is natural for one to grow faster than another, and when that happens being aware of places that need to be developed further as a part of an ongoing and evolving relationship.
31) Be Mindful of How Others Experience You: Decent actors spend time in front of a mirror watching and practicing their emotional responses so they can best portray different situations and characters. Since communication is largely nonverbal, there are a multitude of gestures, vocal tones, and faces we make that others pick up on without our knowing it. Humans are sensing beings, as much as we put greater emphasis on thinking we all have the ability to feel that something is off, to know when tension is high, and to even determine danger or well being. It is an important skill to know how others may experience you at any given time, but particularly during conflict. If someone feels threatened by you, you can deny being threatening but that does not negate the other person's experiences of you or the reasons they felt that way. Within relationships, it is important to consistently listen to your partner's experiences of you so that you can learn more about yourself through their descriptions and their perspectives. Just like an actor practicing various responses, you can train yourself to become aware of how you act, and the "vibes" you give off when you are upset. Managing your responses is a big part of contributing to a relationship in a respectful and healthy manner.
I hope this discussion of healthy and respectful relationship behavior has been helpful! Please feel free to comment below, or send me an email if you have any questions. You can use the pamphlet in the link below if you think it would be useful for your work, and if you do please maintain credit to me (which is in a box on the pamphlet itself).
THIRTY HEALTHY AND RESPECTFUL WAYS PAMPHLET
Friday, December 28, 2018
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
Moving Toward a Respectful New Year (Part Two)
Continuing the list of respectful and healthy relationship behavior, this article highlights specific attitudes, behavior, and approaches to a relationship that can work on improving an intimate partner relationship. As in the previous article, a copy of the full list is at the end.
11. Give the Benefit Of the Doubt: Occasionally, an intimate partner does something that might initially seem designed to hurt you, or at the very least be a decision that violates an agreement or personal request. While it is possible this could be true, contempt is built up by having negative assumptions about other's motives and behavior. To maintain respect and health, it can be important to have an initial impulse to consider that your partner's behavior may not be about you, or may not be what it seems. You are in this way providing a sense of doubt about an attack on you, and allowing space for that person to provide their perspective, motive, or information before deciding how to respond. If your partner truly intended to hurt you, then you can respond by setting limits or potentially recognizing that this behavior is unacceptable and ending the relationship. In essence, a partnership is about defending the other person by being supportive and not assuming the worst until it is clear the worst is the reality. When choosing battering behavior, motives often dwell in the realm of negative assumptions and attacks, as well as a pattern of building contempt. To work toward repair, someone who has been abusive needs to begin choosing to walk back contempt and instead find ways to defend their partner, if the relationship has not been too broken to continue. In a healthy and respectful relationship, benefit of the doubt is often a default based on value for an intimate partner and a desire to defend them and support their decisions, even if they are different from ones you might have chosen.
12. Discuss Your Values and Meaning in Life: We all have long held and developed beliefs about both the rules we have in how to live life, but also what we value and care about. While it can be challenging to identify, we also have a certain understanding of what makes life meaningful which can include goals to accomplish, patterns of behavior to maintain, and connections that are most important. These are important conversations to have with a partner, and helps to develop emotional intimacy - a knowledge of another person that develops closeness. It can also help in building commitment, as we tend to grow closer to people who have similar values and goals in life. It can be a trap to only identify things we do not like, what we dislike about other's behavior. Values are about what you want - and how you want things to progress. Within a relationship, what shared goals to you have together, and do you have the same plans on how to achieve them? There can be trepidation about sharing such deep information, as it creates vulnerability - and often when someone avoids being vulnerable they also avoid becoming closer to others, which can make it easier to hurt and choose destructive behavior. It is much more difficult to hurt people who have similar values and goals, and having such overlaps in life also create unity and a sense of togetherness that foster health and mutual respect.
13. Be Okay With Not Having Complete Agreement: Building intimacy, particularly emotional intimacy, often means sharing your opinions, thoughts, and emotions - and in turn listening and caring about your partner's. As two separate people, there are going to be differences, and sometimes it's less about a difference and more about a different flavor or shape of the same thing. There are definitely differences that a deal breakers (see non-negotiables with #6 on the previous list), but there are also differences that enrich a relationship by creating strategies and approaches to situations that vary, and offer variable solutions. Knowing the differences between you is important, so you can listen and respect those boundaries (#2, on previous list), but also so you do not find incompatibilities with every potential partner. Some people get stuck in wanting a "perfect mate" and miss out on the reality that no such thing exists. When I do relationship histories as an activity with individuals in my classes, I find that the things that are listed as initial attractions to a partner can also in the end become specific reasons for disliking or finding problems with the other person. I think in part this happens because people learn more authentically about each other as they grow together, and initial traits end up either being a smaller part of themselves than portrayed, but sometimes people anchor these experiences and think they will never change and miss honoring differences and evolution within and outside of a relationship. You have to be able to appreciate differences, and be okay with disagreements that may never have a specific or satisfying resolution, but can help you understand your partner and acknowledge how such differences contribute to, instead of taking away from your relationship.
14. Make Time to Be With Your Partner: Life happens, at times in ways that create overwhelming schedules and difficult to manage recreational time. While it is important to have "alone time" (see #16 to follow), regardless of schedules it is important to make your time with your partner a priority in some fashion. For people in long distance relationships, this may mean phone calls or video chats, even online gaming. For those living together it may mean planning a "date night" or scheduling specific relationship time. Some may call on breaks or lunches at work, others may bond over social media. At the start of the relationship, there is usually a certain degree of physical passion that drives individuals to strive for time to be together. Over time, that needs to remain even if the specific methods need to change. If you work to find excuses to avoid your partner, that begins a slippery slope to not wanting to be together at all - so knowing what you wish to foster and build becomes important to the health of your relationship.
15. Learn and Talk About Your Partner's Hobbies: Everyone has things they really enjoy doing. It's not uncommon for intimate partners to develop a relationship around shared likes, including activities and hobbies. However, there will always be things your partner enjoys that you do not. What do you know about your partner's hobbies, how do you support them in that hobby, and how do you become involved with that hobby when your partner wants you to? I've heard several men in my groups complain about their partners, and things they enjoy that they mock openly. Often there is a nature of the mocking that involves a focus on financial expenditures - but very little appreciation for their partner's enjoyment or understanding why their partner may enjoy a certain activity. Learning about your partner's hobby also allows you to learn more about your partner. Showing interest in something you are not particularly interested in demonstrates caring and appreciation, and such attitudes and behavior foster health and respect. Being open to influence and learning to share time and space over activities you do not choose personally can be a window into negotiating and compromising over more challenging topics.
16. Encourage Space: While appreciating differences and learning about aspects of your partner's hobbies that are different from your own, it's also important to have a part of your life separate from your partner. Doing everything together, and always being in each other's business can become stifling. Making time for yourself is an important part of healthy self-care (#5 on previous part of list), and gives you something to later share about your life with your partner. Encouraging your partner to spend time with friends separately from you also fosters a sense of trust and care that are important to maintain.
17. Be Aware of Your Irritating and Alienating Behavior: As human beings, we are all irritating in our own ways. Often these irritating behavior are unconscious patterns and habits we have developed over time and have little or nothing to do with our partner. Easy ones to consider are biting nails, yawning loudly, physical tics, but there are several others that might be linked to attitudes or responses to certain situations. Often these things don't irritate us, personally, so we don't even think about them - but our partner might notice and dislike them fully. There's no way to completely eliminate all irritating behavior, particularly because in relationships over time each partner learns to accept such irritations either by considering them as part of who you are, or giving up when trying to stop those behavior. Sometimes in relationships, attempts to stop irritating behavior are like a grain of sand in a oyster, slowly building over time - but the result isn't a pearl but rather dissatisfaction, anger, and even in some cases the end of a relationship. It is important to know how you irritate your partner - what are small things that you recognize in yourself that you can work to minimize or stop, or at the very least choose to not do them around your partner? Related to this are various alienating behavior, and sometimes they are one in the same. We all do things that subtly (and sometimes obviously) push others away. A very common alienating behavior is avoidance, and avoiding conversations, situations, or others quickly builds into controlling or other hurtful behavior. In my classes, when I more broadly address hurtful behavior beyond violence, I talk about the "pyramid of harm" (an alternative to the Power and Control Wheels, this is an aspect of the Emerge Curriculum). When doing so I speak about the category of sexually harmful behavior in a relationship and how it builds. One of the irritating and alienating sexual behaviors I discuss is choosing not to talk about sex, or avoiding such discussions altogether. When you take something like the sexual aspect of your relationship, and do not talk about what is working and what is not, ways of improving it, what your desires are, what you do not like, then over time it creates a minefield in your relationship that must be navigated carefully - or ignored altogether and just build into other sexually hurtful behavior toward yourself and your partner. People who avoid conflict can do the same to emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects of their relationship, and taking personal responsibility for your irritating and alienating behavior can help to keep things like this from building up over time.
18. Own Up To Your Mistakes and Harmful Behavior: We all do hurtful and harmful things toward others. Humanizing this is an important dynamic to include during battering intervention classes, because if you instead shame, punish, and dehumanize there is almost no benefit in admitting to harm other than getting a facilitator to leave you alone. I believe it is an important aspect of battering intervention classes to, as a facilitator, openly admit to my mistakes and harm I might inadvertently choose during the classes themselves. For example, once in my class I had a participant who left the group to go to the bathroom. I have had various policies about bathroom use in my classes, and it often has to do with access - if the building has a setup where there is a bathroom right by the room we conduct class, I have no problem with participants using it if they go in and do their thing and come right back. I mention that I don't want them to spend 20 minutes in there doing their morning or evening "constitutional," but I haven't found that to be an issue. So, this man was gone for over twenty minutes - it was long enough to both be noticeable, but also I became concerned he had just left the class entirely. When he came back, I interrupted the topic I was on in the class and took time to directly address him and the group about the bathroom policy and asked him not to spend that long in the bathroom. He balked, taking insult at me calling him out, and I caught my mistake at about the same time. In the moment, I said it was not a huge deal I just needed to make sure everyone understood the policy - which did not decrease his anger, but he did stop talking. After class, I took a moment to ask to speak to him when everyone had left. I told him I recognized that calling him out like that was shaming, was inappropriate, and was not okay for me to do. I told him it would have been better to speak to him after the class, and that in the future I would make sure I did that. Just saying those things led to him changing his demeanor entirely. I asked him if he would mind if I apologized to the entire group the following week, and when he said that was okay - I did so. I think the ability to own up to mistakes allows others to see your humanity, it models behavior you want to see, and in a relationship it is important as a first step to working toward repairs. If you do not identify the problem, how can you possibly work to solve it? I think there are methods in battering intervention classes to have participants authentically describe and discuss their hurtful behavior - but a big part of that has to do with how I elicit that information. Developing emotional and mental intimacy with a partner makes it easier and more real to do such admissions, and acknowledging harms and being able to describe why they were not okay start to create goals on how to change behavior as well.
19. Know What Kind of Support Your Partner Appreciates and Do It as Often as Possible: There are methods of counseling and therapy, particularly those focused on marriage and family, that identify the concept of a "love language." In essence, this idea postulates that we all have specific kinds of ways we express our love of others, and often it is also how we personally want to feel loved. Part of the challenge is that in an intimate partner relationship, there are bound to be differences in how each person feels and expresses love, and by extension, support. If I am a person who feels happy with loving touch (pats on the back, holding hands, running my fingers through my partner's hair), then chances are that I do those things to my partner in my attempt to show appreciation, support, and love. However, perhaps my partner is in a different place in her preference for expressing and feeling loved - maybe she does so through service, such as by making a delicious meal, buying me a present, staying up late to spend time with me if I work late. In such a situation, I might appreciate her gestures, but I might not think of those as being things I should reciprocate if I am focused on physical loving touch to demonstrate love. She, in turn, may feel I do not love or appreciate her if I do not do service behavior for her. This can lead to all kinds of negative and hurtful self-talk, and a growing list of assumptions and hurt feelings. In a relationship it is important to put yourself outside of your own experience and focus on your partner's experience. Many of these categories of health and respect talk about different ways of doing this. In this example, that means you have to know more about how you feel loved - it doesn't mean you stop doing things with your partner that are things you personally like - it means you know you are doing those things as an extension of what you like. In turn you have to listen and be aware of the differences in how your partner feels loved, and then directly do them. Often. This is something you can continue to learn and develop as your relationship evolves.
20. Understand the Difference Between Negotiation and Compromise; Use When Your Plans and Ideas are Different: I ask participants in my class to describe the difference between negotiation and compromise and they often give the same definition. Conflict tactics are important to both be able to practice, but also be able to understand, and in many ways negotiating and compromising are the bread and butter of healthy conflict management. Both need to be used at different times, though, so knowing the difference is good for knowing when one is better than the other. Negotiation is about trading - I think of it like a pendulum that swings my way, then my partner's way. There are situations that come up where there is no way to come to a middle ground, and in such cases you can either agree to disagree, which is unsatisfying and often untenable if a decision has to be made, or you can railroad your partner into your solution or passively give in to your partner and build up resentment as a result. Neither is a good choice, so negotiation is the practice of being open to influence. You directly and authentically choose your partner's decision, with an understanding that in that category of conflict next time you both will try your decision instead. Where this can become messy is if someone negotiates incomparable categories - after all saying you will do a specific chore more often if your partner gives you more sex both starts to consider sex as a chore to be completed, but also means if you do such a trade then the person doing the chore might feel entitled to doing a different chore less often. So negotiation needs to be in the same topic, and needs to be discussed more thoroughly. Parenting decisions are often a category for negotiation if you have different parental instincts or idea on how to deal with your children's mistakes. Compromise, however, is about either coming to a middle ground (where you both do not get 100% of what you want, but you get some), or choosing a third viable option that neither of you had considered during that conflict.
Next article will finish up the remaining ten on the pamphlet and will include one additional so anyone wanting to practice these for the 31 days of January will have their days filled with practicing a different kind of respectful and healthy behavior each day!
THIRTY RESPECTFUL AND HEALTHY WAYS PAMPHLET
11. Give the Benefit Of the Doubt: Occasionally, an intimate partner does something that might initially seem designed to hurt you, or at the very least be a decision that violates an agreement or personal request. While it is possible this could be true, contempt is built up by having negative assumptions about other's motives and behavior. To maintain respect and health, it can be important to have an initial impulse to consider that your partner's behavior may not be about you, or may not be what it seems. You are in this way providing a sense of doubt about an attack on you, and allowing space for that person to provide their perspective, motive, or information before deciding how to respond. If your partner truly intended to hurt you, then you can respond by setting limits or potentially recognizing that this behavior is unacceptable and ending the relationship. In essence, a partnership is about defending the other person by being supportive and not assuming the worst until it is clear the worst is the reality. When choosing battering behavior, motives often dwell in the realm of negative assumptions and attacks, as well as a pattern of building contempt. To work toward repair, someone who has been abusive needs to begin choosing to walk back contempt and instead find ways to defend their partner, if the relationship has not been too broken to continue. In a healthy and respectful relationship, benefit of the doubt is often a default based on value for an intimate partner and a desire to defend them and support their decisions, even if they are different from ones you might have chosen.
12. Discuss Your Values and Meaning in Life: We all have long held and developed beliefs about both the rules we have in how to live life, but also what we value and care about. While it can be challenging to identify, we also have a certain understanding of what makes life meaningful which can include goals to accomplish, patterns of behavior to maintain, and connections that are most important. These are important conversations to have with a partner, and helps to develop emotional intimacy - a knowledge of another person that develops closeness. It can also help in building commitment, as we tend to grow closer to people who have similar values and goals in life. It can be a trap to only identify things we do not like, what we dislike about other's behavior. Values are about what you want - and how you want things to progress. Within a relationship, what shared goals to you have together, and do you have the same plans on how to achieve them? There can be trepidation about sharing such deep information, as it creates vulnerability - and often when someone avoids being vulnerable they also avoid becoming closer to others, which can make it easier to hurt and choose destructive behavior. It is much more difficult to hurt people who have similar values and goals, and having such overlaps in life also create unity and a sense of togetherness that foster health and mutual respect.
13. Be Okay With Not Having Complete Agreement: Building intimacy, particularly emotional intimacy, often means sharing your opinions, thoughts, and emotions - and in turn listening and caring about your partner's. As two separate people, there are going to be differences, and sometimes it's less about a difference and more about a different flavor or shape of the same thing. There are definitely differences that a deal breakers (see non-negotiables with #6 on the previous list), but there are also differences that enrich a relationship by creating strategies and approaches to situations that vary, and offer variable solutions. Knowing the differences between you is important, so you can listen and respect those boundaries (#2, on previous list), but also so you do not find incompatibilities with every potential partner. Some people get stuck in wanting a "perfect mate" and miss out on the reality that no such thing exists. When I do relationship histories as an activity with individuals in my classes, I find that the things that are listed as initial attractions to a partner can also in the end become specific reasons for disliking or finding problems with the other person. I think in part this happens because people learn more authentically about each other as they grow together, and initial traits end up either being a smaller part of themselves than portrayed, but sometimes people anchor these experiences and think they will never change and miss honoring differences and evolution within and outside of a relationship. You have to be able to appreciate differences, and be okay with disagreements that may never have a specific or satisfying resolution, but can help you understand your partner and acknowledge how such differences contribute to, instead of taking away from your relationship.
14. Make Time to Be With Your Partner: Life happens, at times in ways that create overwhelming schedules and difficult to manage recreational time. While it is important to have "alone time" (see #16 to follow), regardless of schedules it is important to make your time with your partner a priority in some fashion. For people in long distance relationships, this may mean phone calls or video chats, even online gaming. For those living together it may mean planning a "date night" or scheduling specific relationship time. Some may call on breaks or lunches at work, others may bond over social media. At the start of the relationship, there is usually a certain degree of physical passion that drives individuals to strive for time to be together. Over time, that needs to remain even if the specific methods need to change. If you work to find excuses to avoid your partner, that begins a slippery slope to not wanting to be together at all - so knowing what you wish to foster and build becomes important to the health of your relationship.
15. Learn and Talk About Your Partner's Hobbies: Everyone has things they really enjoy doing. It's not uncommon for intimate partners to develop a relationship around shared likes, including activities and hobbies. However, there will always be things your partner enjoys that you do not. What do you know about your partner's hobbies, how do you support them in that hobby, and how do you become involved with that hobby when your partner wants you to? I've heard several men in my groups complain about their partners, and things they enjoy that they mock openly. Often there is a nature of the mocking that involves a focus on financial expenditures - but very little appreciation for their partner's enjoyment or understanding why their partner may enjoy a certain activity. Learning about your partner's hobby also allows you to learn more about your partner. Showing interest in something you are not particularly interested in demonstrates caring and appreciation, and such attitudes and behavior foster health and respect. Being open to influence and learning to share time and space over activities you do not choose personally can be a window into negotiating and compromising over more challenging topics.
16. Encourage Space: While appreciating differences and learning about aspects of your partner's hobbies that are different from your own, it's also important to have a part of your life separate from your partner. Doing everything together, and always being in each other's business can become stifling. Making time for yourself is an important part of healthy self-care (#5 on previous part of list), and gives you something to later share about your life with your partner. Encouraging your partner to spend time with friends separately from you also fosters a sense of trust and care that are important to maintain.
17. Be Aware of Your Irritating and Alienating Behavior: As human beings, we are all irritating in our own ways. Often these irritating behavior are unconscious patterns and habits we have developed over time and have little or nothing to do with our partner. Easy ones to consider are biting nails, yawning loudly, physical tics, but there are several others that might be linked to attitudes or responses to certain situations. Often these things don't irritate us, personally, so we don't even think about them - but our partner might notice and dislike them fully. There's no way to completely eliminate all irritating behavior, particularly because in relationships over time each partner learns to accept such irritations either by considering them as part of who you are, or giving up when trying to stop those behavior. Sometimes in relationships, attempts to stop irritating behavior are like a grain of sand in a oyster, slowly building over time - but the result isn't a pearl but rather dissatisfaction, anger, and even in some cases the end of a relationship. It is important to know how you irritate your partner - what are small things that you recognize in yourself that you can work to minimize or stop, or at the very least choose to not do them around your partner? Related to this are various alienating behavior, and sometimes they are one in the same. We all do things that subtly (and sometimes obviously) push others away. A very common alienating behavior is avoidance, and avoiding conversations, situations, or others quickly builds into controlling or other hurtful behavior. In my classes, when I more broadly address hurtful behavior beyond violence, I talk about the "pyramid of harm" (an alternative to the Power and Control Wheels, this is an aspect of the Emerge Curriculum). When doing so I speak about the category of sexually harmful behavior in a relationship and how it builds. One of the irritating and alienating sexual behaviors I discuss is choosing not to talk about sex, or avoiding such discussions altogether. When you take something like the sexual aspect of your relationship, and do not talk about what is working and what is not, ways of improving it, what your desires are, what you do not like, then over time it creates a minefield in your relationship that must be navigated carefully - or ignored altogether and just build into other sexually hurtful behavior toward yourself and your partner. People who avoid conflict can do the same to emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects of their relationship, and taking personal responsibility for your irritating and alienating behavior can help to keep things like this from building up over time.
18. Own Up To Your Mistakes and Harmful Behavior: We all do hurtful and harmful things toward others. Humanizing this is an important dynamic to include during battering intervention classes, because if you instead shame, punish, and dehumanize there is almost no benefit in admitting to harm other than getting a facilitator to leave you alone. I believe it is an important aspect of battering intervention classes to, as a facilitator, openly admit to my mistakes and harm I might inadvertently choose during the classes themselves. For example, once in my class I had a participant who left the group to go to the bathroom. I have had various policies about bathroom use in my classes, and it often has to do with access - if the building has a setup where there is a bathroom right by the room we conduct class, I have no problem with participants using it if they go in and do their thing and come right back. I mention that I don't want them to spend 20 minutes in there doing their morning or evening "constitutional," but I haven't found that to be an issue. So, this man was gone for over twenty minutes - it was long enough to both be noticeable, but also I became concerned he had just left the class entirely. When he came back, I interrupted the topic I was on in the class and took time to directly address him and the group about the bathroom policy and asked him not to spend that long in the bathroom. He balked, taking insult at me calling him out, and I caught my mistake at about the same time. In the moment, I said it was not a huge deal I just needed to make sure everyone understood the policy - which did not decrease his anger, but he did stop talking. After class, I took a moment to ask to speak to him when everyone had left. I told him I recognized that calling him out like that was shaming, was inappropriate, and was not okay for me to do. I told him it would have been better to speak to him after the class, and that in the future I would make sure I did that. Just saying those things led to him changing his demeanor entirely. I asked him if he would mind if I apologized to the entire group the following week, and when he said that was okay - I did so. I think the ability to own up to mistakes allows others to see your humanity, it models behavior you want to see, and in a relationship it is important as a first step to working toward repairs. If you do not identify the problem, how can you possibly work to solve it? I think there are methods in battering intervention classes to have participants authentically describe and discuss their hurtful behavior - but a big part of that has to do with how I elicit that information. Developing emotional and mental intimacy with a partner makes it easier and more real to do such admissions, and acknowledging harms and being able to describe why they were not okay start to create goals on how to change behavior as well.
19. Know What Kind of Support Your Partner Appreciates and Do It as Often as Possible: There are methods of counseling and therapy, particularly those focused on marriage and family, that identify the concept of a "love language." In essence, this idea postulates that we all have specific kinds of ways we express our love of others, and often it is also how we personally want to feel loved. Part of the challenge is that in an intimate partner relationship, there are bound to be differences in how each person feels and expresses love, and by extension, support. If I am a person who feels happy with loving touch (pats on the back, holding hands, running my fingers through my partner's hair), then chances are that I do those things to my partner in my attempt to show appreciation, support, and love. However, perhaps my partner is in a different place in her preference for expressing and feeling loved - maybe she does so through service, such as by making a delicious meal, buying me a present, staying up late to spend time with me if I work late. In such a situation, I might appreciate her gestures, but I might not think of those as being things I should reciprocate if I am focused on physical loving touch to demonstrate love. She, in turn, may feel I do not love or appreciate her if I do not do service behavior for her. This can lead to all kinds of negative and hurtful self-talk, and a growing list of assumptions and hurt feelings. In a relationship it is important to put yourself outside of your own experience and focus on your partner's experience. Many of these categories of health and respect talk about different ways of doing this. In this example, that means you have to know more about how you feel loved - it doesn't mean you stop doing things with your partner that are things you personally like - it means you know you are doing those things as an extension of what you like. In turn you have to listen and be aware of the differences in how your partner feels loved, and then directly do them. Often. This is something you can continue to learn and develop as your relationship evolves.
20. Understand the Difference Between Negotiation and Compromise; Use When Your Plans and Ideas are Different: I ask participants in my class to describe the difference between negotiation and compromise and they often give the same definition. Conflict tactics are important to both be able to practice, but also be able to understand, and in many ways negotiating and compromising are the bread and butter of healthy conflict management. Both need to be used at different times, though, so knowing the difference is good for knowing when one is better than the other. Negotiation is about trading - I think of it like a pendulum that swings my way, then my partner's way. There are situations that come up where there is no way to come to a middle ground, and in such cases you can either agree to disagree, which is unsatisfying and often untenable if a decision has to be made, or you can railroad your partner into your solution or passively give in to your partner and build up resentment as a result. Neither is a good choice, so negotiation is the practice of being open to influence. You directly and authentically choose your partner's decision, with an understanding that in that category of conflict next time you both will try your decision instead. Where this can become messy is if someone negotiates incomparable categories - after all saying you will do a specific chore more often if your partner gives you more sex both starts to consider sex as a chore to be completed, but also means if you do such a trade then the person doing the chore might feel entitled to doing a different chore less often. So negotiation needs to be in the same topic, and needs to be discussed more thoroughly. Parenting decisions are often a category for negotiation if you have different parental instincts or idea on how to deal with your children's mistakes. Compromise, however, is about either coming to a middle ground (where you both do not get 100% of what you want, but you get some), or choosing a third viable option that neither of you had considered during that conflict.
Next article will finish up the remaining ten on the pamphlet and will include one additional so anyone wanting to practice these for the 31 days of January will have their days filled with practicing a different kind of respectful and healthy behavior each day!
THIRTY RESPECTFUL AND HEALTHY WAYS PAMPHLET
Thursday, December 13, 2018
Moving Toward a Respectful New Year (Part One)
There is always a lot of focus on holiday times during November, through to December, and into the new year. Increased anxiety and stress, unmet expectations, ideas about new goals and resolutions, unfocused hope - ultimately a combination of emotions, and sometimes an escalation of harm to self and to others.
Work in domestic violence - whether with victims/survivors, perpetrators, children and families, or all of the above - I believe it is important to directly discuss and address methods of managing and understanding the challenges unique to this time of year. An ongoing aspect of such work involves goal setting. I think it is important to do this with every individual in domestic violence services. I believe in goals that are specific, concrete, desired, measurable, and realistic.
In the small bit of time leading us up to January, it seems appropriate to consider these goals for respect and health in such a way. This article is part one of three discussing specific healthy and respectful tools that may be useful for battering intervention classes, healthy relationship classes, parenting classes, or support groups for victims/survivors. They can also be a reflective challenge for the month of January 2019 - can you consider each of the items on the list, one day at a time, for the entire month?
I will attach a pamphlet I have provided to my individual participants at program intake at the end of each article. If you are interested in using any of the information in these articles, please credit me by name, email, and website and you are free to distribute.
HEALTHY AND RESPECTFUL RELATIONSHIP GOALS (1-10)
THIRTY RESPECTFUL & HEALTHY WAYS PROGRAM PAMPHLET
Work in domestic violence - whether with victims/survivors, perpetrators, children and families, or all of the above - I believe it is important to directly discuss and address methods of managing and understanding the challenges unique to this time of year. An ongoing aspect of such work involves goal setting. I think it is important to do this with every individual in domestic violence services. I believe in goals that are specific, concrete, desired, measurable, and realistic.
In the small bit of time leading us up to January, it seems appropriate to consider these goals for respect and health in such a way. This article is part one of three discussing specific healthy and respectful tools that may be useful for battering intervention classes, healthy relationship classes, parenting classes, or support groups for victims/survivors. They can also be a reflective challenge for the month of January 2019 - can you consider each of the items on the list, one day at a time, for the entire month?
I will attach a pamphlet I have provided to my individual participants at program intake at the end of each article. If you are interested in using any of the information in these articles, please credit me by name, email, and website and you are free to distribute.
HEALTHY AND RESPECTFUL RELATIONSHIP GOALS (1-10)
- Understand Boundaries: Knowing your limits, and recognizing the limits others have in their lives is an infinite task. At any given time, we notice something we appreciate, enjoy, and support - and at other times we notice something we dislike, discourage, and attack. These are the complicated boundaries that bound and weave through our lives and our relationships. Often there is nothing particularly right or wrong about boundaries - much of the time they are simply preferences of life. The challenge comes in when your personal preference conflicts with your partner's, which is where the intersection of conflict and resolution exist. Convincing someone to side or adopt your boundary on a topic is the bread and butter of arguing. It's a simple thing to assume your idea is so commonplace, shared with everyone, it is a bit of a shock to discover your partner doesn't align with you. There are so many shared cultural traditions that we often categorize such boundaries as "common sense." But have you considered that these traditions have a regional component? Ideas and cultural upbringing native to Oregon state might not exactly translate to ideas in North Carolina, and vice versa. It takes self-reflection, mindfulness, and concentrated consciousness to be aware of your rules and values on how to live life. Since so many behavior are default choices developed during childhood for human beings, it's easy to miss slowing down to consider why you think the way you think - when and why you learned different ideas. This is also why during relationships, your knowledge of yourself and your partner are different after one year as compared to after five years of being together. Awareness evolves of both yourself and others - and consciously navigating this space can lead to smoother conflict and the ability to practice the second goal below.
- Honor Boundaries: In my classes, I spend a good amount of time discussing how we define words and concepts. I find that while we understand words, we often have a hard time explaining what they mean without using examples or becoming a thesaurus and using like terms, concepts, and words. Honor is one of those words and concepts that I find is difficult to explain for most people. We feel it when it happens, and we can practice it when needed, but going through what it is tends to be more challenging. In order to honor boundaries you have, and honor boundaries your partner has in their life, it stands to reason that you both need to understand boundaries themselves, but also understand what honor is. For me, honor is tied to the ability to see the legitimacy of a perception, and operate in such a manner that you follow the direction of that perception - whether you directly agree or not. It is the courage to respect truth - the truth in you, or the truth in others. An often discussed aspect of honor - honoring your elders - is simply the willingness and ability to follow what an elder asks of you, and often is associated with tradition. With boundaries in relationships, since we all have infinite reasons and examples of rules we place onto ourselves and other's behavior, it is important to honor other's perspectives that may be different from your own. When your partner puts forward a limit, says they want you to do something you do not want to do, or wants to keep you from doing something you want to do - there is a great need to be open to influence to these requests. This does not mean you have to automatically go along with every request, but it does mean you have to consider this request, and demonstrate that you believe their perspective is valid and legitimate. If your partner puts forward a concrete boundary that is about their own personal life, then it becomes increasingly important to practice honor. This also means if you have a boundary of your own, you need to be able to practice asking for what you want or need, and with that be able to navigate disagreement surrounding that request.
- Practice Listening: What is the difference between listening and hearing? This ends up being a good topic of conversation, and I find that people tend to parse it down to listening is akin to attentiveness, whereas hearing is comprehending. In general, I think this is a good operational differentiation - as the two are definitely linked, but separate skills to practice. Dynamics of active listening are good to discuss and teach during battering intervention classes - appropriate eye contact, indicators of listening (such as nodding along), limiting distractions - but those are the superficial ones that are definitely good components, but the deeper listening strategies are just as, if not more important due to them being easily overlooked. How do you summarize someone else's perspective, what they just said to you - and check in to make sure you heard correctly? Where does remembering prior conversations with this person demonstrate your ability to listen and retain information - and how does remembering end up being an indicator of the importance and value you hold for the other person? Noticing is a critical part of listening - it's often not about words, or even tone of voice someone uses - body language and nonverbal communication is a bigger part of our interactions than we can fully appreciate. I think about texting on phones as an example. You can text, "I'm doing fine," and depending on the context of that statement, it can mean everything from a loving response, to a pleasantry that is not very meaningful, to a subtle attack. The person reading that text will put their own present state of mind and interpretation of the body language and meaning into those words - while the person typing it will have their own meaning. With any luck, you'll both be on the same page, and texting has evolved to use of emojis to try and allow more indication of emotional state behind the words used. In direct communication, we often interpret body language and the context of a situation without realizing it. Noticing is a critical part of listening, and paired with checking-in and summarizing can help to avoid a miscommunication.
- Argue Respectfully: Participants in my classes sometimes mention that they want to stop arguing with their partner, and are surprised when I respond that isn't realistic, or even helpful. Life is all about conflict, and relationships are especially rife for arguments. Much of that has to do with the individual boundaries we all have, and how they interact (as mentioned in 1, above), which means avoiding conflict will only serve to create distance between partners - not bring them closer together. In fact, many individuals in my classes have partially ended up in a domestic violence intervention class because of patterns of avoidance in their relationship. Realistically, part of being healthy in a relationship involves understanding how to argue with respect. This gets into that same need to define the word, and the concepts behind respect. Within society, many define respect by incorrectly associating the word with authority or fear. How often have you heard someone say "you've got to earn respect," or "I respected my father because if I didn't there'd be hell to pay"? Earning "respect" is about authority - whether it be position, seniority, or station - all of these things are about climbing the ladder of hierarchy. If you have to "respect" someone or pay a consequence of some time, that is better described as "obeying" and failing to obey leads to something fearful or painful. I, instead, speak of respect as involving the ability and willingness to care about someone else's thoughts, opinions, and emotions. If you argue out of respect, you are looking toward a resolution that often involves mutual benefit of some kind - and an excellent tactic is to find the kernel of truth in someone else's perspective. If you find something you agree with, you can expand on it and eventually work together. This can be difficult if someone's perspective is about you, and you are not open to such feedback - but that involves another dynamic of healthy relationships (18 and 31). I challenge some individuals to find a perspective they disagree about with their partner - and defend that perspective. If you can do that, you can often work toward resolution rather than pressing toward winning an argument.
- Maintain Your Self-Care Needs: During program intake appointments, I have participants fill out an Adverse Childhood Experiences form, a depression screening tool as well as a mood disorder tool, in addition to other forms that contain risk assessment questions interspersed throughout the paperwork. When I give these papers out, I mention that if you don't take care of yourself, it's nearly impossible to care for anyone else. This is an important aspect of battering intervention, to navigate self-care and make sure it doesn't stray into the realm of selfishness. All human beings have needs and desires, and sometimes the two become conflated. We find something we want, and become convinced we have to have it - sacrificing relationships due to those desires. For many participants, this can come down to the topic of sex within their relationship. Failing to talk about sex leads to situations where an individual may not have sexual desires met - and that can be confused with a need, and justify cheating or other sexually hurtful behavior in a relationship. Beyond sex, I have found many men neglecting their physical health - not seeing a physician for routine health screenings, not taking medication for blood pressure, high cholesterol, or other health issues such as poor diet or not exercising. These self-care neglectful behavior can easily lead to relationship issues because on a whim, an individual with poor self-care can leverage a desire to a need, and use that to manipulate a partner. It is an individually responsible behavior to notice your needs and maintain them both with and beyond the support of a partner. Waiting for a partner to care for you isn't respectful or healthy. Making your needs superior to your partner's also isn't respectful or healthy. There is a need for balance, and both honoring your own and supporting your partner's needs. Maintaining your self-care needs is about introspection and consistency, and needs that involve emotional trauma and pain are incredibly important to recognize and address.
- Know Your Non-Negotiables: Rules we each have in how to live life, and define our values by what we think the purpose of life is overall. As a part of those values, we each have varying non-negotiables - boundaries we are unwilling to ever change. Often boundaries can be flexible preferences - say for example I prefer to eat Italian food, but I am open to other ideas about what to eat for dinner. When a participant in one of my classes attempts to blame their abusive or violent behavior on alcohol or drug use, saying it wasn't them, it was the substance - I use a gross example, asking the entire class of men how many drinks it would take for them to sexually abuse a child. Ever man suddenly says, with complete confidence, there aren't enough drinks in the world. The answer to this is that there is a non-negotiable behind not being sexually inappropriate with a child. No condition will make that choice acceptable. This means that assaulting a partner, hurting a partner in some way while intoxicated has nothing to do with the substance, but instead has to do with the ideas in a person's mind about what is okay to do. If someone fantasizes about hurting their partner verbally, or even thinks about responding to a conflict with physical assault - it's not that much of a leap to make that choice directly. In relationships, we have certain boundaries that could make a relationship untenable, completely incompatible. It is important to get to know someone else in several ways before fully committing due to this point. If you know what is not negotiable in your life, you can communicate it directly, and you have a better chance of being able to navigate and learn other's non-negotiables. I often say during classes that it is better to choose a partner by the things that irritate you that you can accept and enjoy as a quirk of their personality as opposed to only choosing partners by the fun you have together. Some conflicts may never be resolved because each person is not willing to change a part of their rules in life.
- Show Appreciation as Often as Possible: Demonstrating caring for others is a major component of respect, and the foundation of caring is appreciating. Appreciation is about value, showing someone you value them, and by doing so adding value to their own life. Appreciation can be small gestures of love, gifts and services, expressions verbally or non-verbally, or an ongoing attitude. Ideally, there will be a mix of how you demonstrate appreciation in a relationship, but it takes mindfulness and noticing to fully value your partner.
- Learn to Navigate Hard Times With Dignity: Life is full of ups and downs, challenges and successes. When it comes to difficulties, some people are able to be dignified in the face of bad and hard times, while others lack dignity altogether. Dignity is about maintaining a sense of self-respect when challenged. As mentioned in #4 above, respect is caring about someone's thoughts, opinions, and emotions - self-respect is doing that for yourself. It's easy to get wrapped up in struggles and lash out, attack others to try and get out of problems, turn to self-medicating and develop substance abuse issues or other poor self-care quick fixes. Recognizing that things are not going well, but knowing what you need to do to press forward and maintain connection to your values despite experiencing pain is the very essence of dignity. Slipping on individual values due to personal struggles can lead to disconnecting from your partner, hurting that person you may have had great value for, and ultimately hurting yourself as a result.
- Share Your Life With Your Partner: All relationships evolve over time, but occasionally during that evolution the couple becomes so comfortable one or both become bored and stop sharing with each other. Sharing life is definitely about shared experiences, but also about the events that happen in each person's life. Work events, personal successes, hobbies (#15 goes into this more in depth), family interactions, struggles, new learning and education are all examples of categories that individuals evolve and grow separately from their partner - and ideally these experiences are shared between both people. It doesn't necessarily mean your partner is involved in everything, but that you make efforts to talk about and share things with your partner. For example, if one person goes on a work trip and as a part of the trip goes to a delicious restaurant, when back together with his or her partner there's talk about that restaurant and perhaps even efforts to go together at a later date.
- Be Flexible With Chores: Unpleasant tasks are a part of everyday household maintenance, and while people tend to have tasks they are okay with doing no one tends to love doing chores. As part of a respectful and healthy relationship, chores tend to be divided between partners. A part of this distribution hopefully involves some sort of agreed upon distribution, either by quantity of chores or by the weight of the duty itself (perhaps food preparation and meal planning is not the same weight as taking the garbage out to the street). Regardless of this distribution, how do a couple work together to finish all the tasks? If someone is feeling overwhelmed, or runs out of time to complete a task, does the other person fill in or assist? When assisting, does the other person want high praise and exaltation, or does the task as a part of both demonstrating appreciation and being a partner? Throughout life, chores ebb and flow as well as ability and desire to complete certain tasks. Can the chores be renegotiated and redistributed as needed, and is there ongoing discussion about meeting household needs without making such discussion contentious? If someone is failing in their duties, what is the process of arguing respectfully about those needs? These are important questions to both ask and act out of when considering the completion of chores.
THIRTY RESPECTFUL & HEALTHY WAYS PROGRAM PAMPHLET
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