Wednesday, December 26, 2012

How Intimate Relationships Fail | Psychology Today

There are three clear cut ways to measure if your relationship is thriving or headed for trouble. Independently or simultaneously, they pose significant threats to a relationship?s survival. The sooner intimate partners recognize them and change their patterns, the more likely they can get their relationship back on track and recreate the love they once knew. ?

Threat Number One ? When bad interactions begin to outnumber good ones

Most intimate love relationships begin with many more positive, intriguing, and loving interactions than painful ones. In time, though, every relationship will face unexpected hurdles that create negative interactions. If the partners do not resolve the resulting emotional damage at the time, they will silently suffer from those buried, unresolved issues and begin the process of withdrawing energy and hope from the relationship. ?

When your relationship began, you most likely remember how treasured you felt by your partner, praised for your assets and readily forgiven for your faults. Some ?not-so-compatible? areas may have existed, but consciously or unconsciously, you chose to give them less attention. ?

Over time, those non-attended-to negative interactions may have changed the percentages of good connections to bad ones. Now you are having more difficulty both erasing them and also holding on to the positives you once took for granted. The good parts of your relationship may still be there, but the damage is taking its toll and you can feel each other?s lowered frustration tolerance and increased quickness to anger. Emotional scars are building and your relationship?s ability to create new options is diminishing.

If you cannot transform your negative patterns and grow beyond your current limitations, your lack of action will keep feeding energy into the bad interactions and starve out the good ones. Your relationship will begin to show signs of decay: loss of hope, more conflict, and decreased intimacy. Stuck in old patterns and destructive rituals, you may no longer be able to access the resilience you once had.

Solution

The imbalance of bad interactions to good can be reversed if both partners do the following:

  1. Recognize the direction the relationship is going without blaming each other for what has happened. This is a crucial time to not judge, but simply to share your observations with each other without becoming defensive.
  2. Identify and stop whatever interactions that may be causing either of you to feel scarred. You must stop your destructive behaviors destruction before you can move forward.
  3. Begin focusing on behaviors that still feel positive between you, and share those observations. Agree to continue to remind each other of feel-good interactions every day until your love feels stronger again.
  4. Look for new ways to go beyond your current relationship?s limitations by creating better communication skills, more joyful times together, re-prioritizing your obligations and commitments, and cutting down on any stressors that have weighed your both down.

Threat Number Two ? Letting attachments suppress authenticity

Every partner in an intimate relationship has attachments to his or her significant other. An attachment is anything that you may be afraid to lose or something you want from your partner. As the relationship matured, you may both have increased or added attachments to certain behaviors, and found others to be less important. ?

As you deepened your commitment to each other, your attachments likely increased as well. To keep them secure, you had to sacrifice some of your own needs at times in order to give your partner what he or she wanted from you. You may have felt a little martyred some of the time, or even gave up some of your own self-respect, but in the moment, it seemed the right thing to do. You felt that your partner not only recognized your willing sacrifice, but would readily have done the same for you.

Somehow, over time, you began to feel that you were giving more than you were getting back. Your sacrifices now appear to be more expected and your paybacks are not adequately compensating you for your efforts. Your partner not only doesn?t give you more of what you want, he or she doesn?t even recognize that you?ve been silently bargaining.

If you allow this imbalance to continue, you will eventually feel like you?re being taken for granted and lose trust in your partner?s willingness to reciprocate. Shutting down your own needs to keep your attachments from being threatened, you are now self-blackmailing just to keep things in place. Worse, you may be blaming your partner for breaking a contract that he or she never signed.

Status quo attachments are hard to give up. You started out readily sacrificing and expecting reciprocity, as your partner may have as well. Over time, you may have also have created many other legitimate tethers: children, possessions, families, friends, business partnerships, spiritual communities, values, and commitments. You would understandably want to hold on to those attachments, not knowing how to resolve with the imbalance that is now expected.

Solution

  1. Make a list of the behaviors or things you are attached to in your relationship. Put a number from one to ten after each to let your partner know how important they are to you. Asking yourself what you would be afraid to lose can help guide you in creating your list.
  2. Tell your partner which of the things on the list he or she already provides for you, and which you feel you are not getting.
  3. Let your partner know those things or behaviors you have been willingly sacrificing, and those you martyred yourself in giving.
  4. Ask your partner if there is anything you can do to get your needs met.
  5. Ask your partner which things you are presently sacrificing that may no longer be important to him or her.

Threat Number Three ? Trust-breaking incidents

Most new couples do not address their non-negotiable bottom lines up front. They either trust that their lovers have the same values and ethics, or believe that they would never hurt them by doing something they have agreed would be unacceptable.

You probably began the same way. Then, as your relationship matured, you discovered new things about each other that altered your initial perceptions. Some of those revelations were delightful surprises that deepened your trust and love. Others may have caused concern, like past behaviors that your current relationship could not survive. You?ve probably talked to each other about what each of you holds sacred, and trusted that your commitment would keep any potential trust-breaking at bay.

As you grew to know what your partner could or could not tolerate, you may have begun withholding some potentially relationship-destroying thoughts, telling yourself that you would never act upon them. Perhaps you feared a loss of your intimacy or painful criticism if you did share what you were thinking. Whatever the apprehension, you chose to keep them in an internal, emotionally secret compartment to keep the love between you intact. ?

If you were aware of the slippery slope you were creating by rationalizing the situation, you may have decided to risk sharing your internal desires with your partner to restore your relationship?s authenticity. Hopefully, your partner was grateful that you were honest and was willing to work with you. If, instead, he or she communicated anger, resentment, or fear, you may have regretted your decision to be honest, offered superficial reassurance to ameliorate the situation, and gone underground again. That choice will have left you vulnerable to act out your hidden desires at some future time.

Couples who cannot share their secret thoughts or behaviors risk the loss of their intimacy. Their bond weakens, and they are more likely to act without considering the outcome. For instance, one partner may have started a non-flirtatious relationship with a co-worker, then found it slowly becoming more intimate over time. Were the other partner to know, he or she would feel exposed, threatened, or embarrassed. The initially innocent partner now cannot share how far it has gone without fearing incrimination or loss.

If you have been the unfortunate one who discovers your partner?s secret, threatening behavior, your trust may be irrevocably shattered. You must now decide whether you to stay in the relationship, and, if so, what it would take to rebuild. A significant break in trust is agonizingly difficult to repair, and you both must decide if you have what it takes to stay together.

Solution

Source: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rediscovering-love/201212/how-intimate-relationships-fail-0

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Sentinel : Borrowing Hope | Keystone Elder Law ? Mechanicsburg ...

Tis the season to be jolly! Festive decorations, gatherings of family and friends, and sharing of lavish feasts and sweet treats brighten our spirits. Today, some of us celebrate the birth of Jesus in the Little Town of Bethlehem as we sing ?The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.?

Hope is essential to our ability to face the uncertainty of life. A great prophet proclaimed to the chosen tribe of Israel: ?Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.? (Isaiah 40:31)

Hope that is promised within religious scripture is a certain hope, greater than a secular, human hope that Webster defines as ?to expect with confidence.? The difference in the two concepts is spiritually profound for those with religious faith. Those who are not religious might not perceive degrees of hope, so the distinction of religious hope could remain as a mystery for them, much like an unwrapped gift under the Christmas tree.

There is a real difference for me between the perfect hope that is promised in the Old Testament and celebrated in the New Testament, and the hope which we, as attorneys and care coordinators, lend and nourish. Our clients and their care advocates face difficult choices as they anticipate and manage the challenges and opportunities of extended care. Our experience and knowledge is useful, but promising a perfect outcome in the final chapters of life is more hope than we can offer.

Sometimes an individual client has an uncertain medical prognosis, as can occur with a rare disease. Other times, a spouse of a person who has dementia feels such stress from caregiving that his or her own health is deteriorating; yet, a profound commitment to stay together makes a suggestion for voluntary separation seem to be impossible. In such circumstances, it can be hard to know what to hope for.

When it comes to knowing whether a legal document will stand up to scrutiny if challenged in court, it is the responsibility of a lawyer to understand the legislation, regulations and case law which apply to the circumstances at hand. An elder law attorney knows how legal outcomes for older persons might be different than for those of a younger age. Giving our clients a high level of confidence that their wishes as expressed in a legal document will be honored by a court, or encouraging wise planning now so that extended care can be affordable in the future, supports our clients? healthy desire to have a hopeful attitude.

Sometimes, a client comes to us with uncertainty and fear about what will happen after their finances are exhausted. Our services help clients to preserve their assets, obtain government benefits, and avoid financial liability for their children after their assets have been exhausted. To feel a sense of independence and dignity and to fuel a hope that life remains worth living, most clients need to feel that their extended care challenges will not drain their family emotionally or become a financial liability.

Our mission to integrate the legal and caregiving aspects of extended care issues is challenging. Since every case is different, we are like a guide who has walked the trails and fished the waters previously, but cannot guarantee what will be around the next bend or whether the fish will be biting today. Our experience enables us to understand a probability of what might occur, yet for many reasons we cannot know the certainty of what lies ahead. A wise approach to extended care issues can sometimes seem like the Chinese wisdom that one?s best hope to cross a river is to focus on the need to progress from one stone to another, one step at a time.

Sometimes the confusion and stress of extended care can become overwhelming, and it is hard to know what to do next. Just as a hiker who is lost in the woods feels relief to be found by a park ranger, we offer a sense of relief to those who are lost in the extended care maze. The guidance and preparation we give our clients equips them to experience the extended care journey with less confusion and greater probability for financial advantages.

When a caregiver feels lost, his or her sense of hope can seem to be burnt out and in need of rekindling. Often, clients or their caregivers come to our office with an arm full of information and a chest full of stress. We lend our clients and their caregivers the hope which our experience and knowledge with extended care issues has given us an opportunity to discover. We feel it is a hopeful sign when they sigh deeply before leaving our office and express a sense of relief.

If Alzheimer?s or dementia seems to be stealing the personality of someone you love, we understand that you might feel lonely, and even angry or abandoned. In some ways, a caregiver?s pain can be similar to that of grieving a death. Eloise Cole, a bereavement specialist who was also a family caregiver, wrote a poem ?Borrowed Hope? which begins: ?Lend me your hope for a while. I seem to have mislaid mine. Lost and hopeless feelings accompany me daily.? The hope that her poem seeks is the type of hope that we offer as elder law practitioners.

If your family?s humor and laughter as you celebrate Christmas feels a bit awkward at moments because you are also suffering with a loved one through an extended care crisis, that is understandable. But give yourself a break and embrace what joy you can in this time of celebration. Find comfort in this conclusion of Eloise Cole?s poem: ?Lend me your hope for a while. A time will come when I will heal and I will lend my renewed hope to others.?

Merry Christmas!

Dave Nesbit
Attorney

Source: http://www.keystoneelderlaw.com/blog/sentinel-articles/sentinel-borrowing-hope/

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