I’m super excited to be reading from my new book Make Love Better: How to Own Your Story, Connect with Your Partner and Deepen Your Relationship Practice, at the Process Work Institute at 7pm on Thursday September 19th. I’ll share about my writing journey, talk about some of the key concepts, and read excerpts from the book.
To give you a sense of what’s really important to me, here’s a short excerpt from the end of the Introduction.
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The Message in a Smile
I haven’t changed nearly as much as I’d hoped.
A couple of years ago, I made some short videos about various relationship topics. Recently, after I announced the upcoming publication of my book Make Love Better, some of these videos have circulated on social media. It’s always been challenging for me to watch myself on video—not sure if that will ever change. But what struck me most in this video (topic: navigating relationship when your partner’s political beliefs are antithetical to your own), was not so much what I said, but how I said it.
What struck me was my smile. Which made me smile. And blush in front of myself.
Allow me to explain.
Read MoreI discovered something. There’s a background reason that I blog—and I wasn’t fully aware of it.
I knew the reasons in front: To bring out my thinking and dreaming, to share personal experiences that might inspire others, to offer tools for navigating and finding meaning in tough experiences, to teach skills to people who coach or counsel others. A deep wish: for things to be easier, more facile for you than they have been for me, especially in relationship.
Read MoreI’m desperately upset about the president-elect of the United States, and the children in Aleppo, and our fragile planet, and so much else. I wake up in the night, scared or angry or hurting, and I can’t get back to sleep. I get obsessed with hating him for so many things, not the least of which is his abhorrent use of power.
So the other night, in the middle of the night, I got to thinking about my power—and how I use it. And then I did some inner work—a simple thought experiment that I’ll share with you here.
Read MoreWhen I’m upset, it’s always physical. My heart actually aches. My stomach comes undone. I feel a knife stabbing my back or twisting into the base of my neck. I’ve always been that way.
So it was no surprise that when Jerry and I arrived home on the evening of November 8th, 2016 after having witnessed the devastating, disorienting election results at the house of close friends, I climbed the stairs, brushed my teeth, walked towards my bed, fell to the floor and moaned. This went on. Apparently, I made a lot of noise.
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We all make mistakes. Ghosts from past errors and indiscretions come back to haunt us, if not in real life, then in our dreams. Most of us handle this in the relative privacy of our inner lives, our relationships and small communities.
If you’re in the public eye, and meant to lead a country, mistakes of judgment have serious impact.
In the creative fields and in entrepreneurship, it is seen as vogue to make mistakes, to fail and iterate. Design thinking luminaries assure us that that if we keep making mistakes and tinkering something interesting will happen—we will do our best work.
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Donald Trump is in love with me.
I know. It’s awful. But here’s why it’s true, here’s what is (sometimes) inside my head:
Make me great. Make me richer and more beautiful. Make me do well at whatever I attempt. Give me stamina. I don’t want to be sick or weak or get pneumonia. I don’t want this hearing loss—it’s embarrassing. Fix the skin that hangs from under my chin. Heal the capsulitis on the ball of my foot. Make me smarter, more able-bodied and minded. Make my mind quick again—I never used to lose a word or name when I needed it. Help me build a wall to keep out all distractions, symptoms, critical voices and vulnerable feelings. Make me better than others; make me the best. Dear god, I used to be so tough and strong—please make me great again.
And with this inner attitude, I help elect Trump. That’s why he loves me, in my dream.
Read MorePower is a huge source of conflict in the world. Intimate relationships have great potential to play a strong part in leveling playing fields.
Romantic love relationships between men and women reproduce sexism and gender inequality. Romantic love between black and white Americans reproduces racism and brings up the trauma of slavery. Romantic love between Jews and Christians of German descent or between American and Japanese people reproduce agonies from WW2. Because of the intimate context, these cross-cultural relationships provide fertile ground for the disruption of historical wounds.
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Why is it difficult for a justice-seeking, well-intentioned white person (me) to dig down and investigate the dehumanizing effects of racism (or any other ism) on myself? Or to challenge others within my own group to do the same? Why is it easier to focus on issues out there, instead of inside?
There are many possible answers, and so much complexity and nuance when addressing issues of privilege and oppression. Social problems need to be tackled from many angles, including the psychological.
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“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” Scott Adams
In the creative fields and in entrepreneurship, it is vogue to fail and iterate. Design thinking luminaries like IDEO founders Tom and David Kelly urge us to embrace our failures, to own them and to use the learning on our path to doing great and original things. But failing in relationship is not generally held in quite so high esteem; rather the contrary, even today in the US where divorce rates hover somewhere between 40– 50%, people who have more than two or three long term relationships or marriages under their belts by mid life are looked at sideways. We cluck our tongues, call them unlucky in love; we label their deeply personal experiences failed relationships.
Read MoreSomeone I love dearly no longer feels relevant. This saddens me. I tell her how important she is—to me, to many people close to her, to the readers of the newspaper column she’s been writing since her retirement twenty years ago. I tell her that she doesn’t need to interrupt or assert, that she is in fact central, especially because of her kindness, her helpfulness and her fierce love that didn’t used to shine with quite the same intensity. But she is of an age considered old in consensual time and has not adjusted easily to the brutality of ageism. For reasons unexplained, she gets the not delivered message, despite the fact her texts are indeed received. A technical (cultural) glitch confirming she isn’t being heard. This makes her frantic.
Read MoreSometimes we do things we don’t feel great about. Well, perhaps I should speak for myself.
It started with sneaking out a few pens and some travel-sized toiletries—toothpaste, mouthwash, mini dental flosses. The habit ramped up and five years down the road, when there was no way I could get caught, I was slipping unopened 5 packs of notepads, sturdy paperclips that they just don’t make anymore and a box or two of zip lock bags— into my bag. Hey, it's not like I went rifling through her bedroom drawers while she was sleeping; these items were all out and obvious.
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Discomfort is kicking my ass today. It’s that twitchy feeling I sometimes get in my chest when I have to do something hard and an inner voice is telling me I suck and since there’s no way I’ll succeed, I may as well put it off. Procrastinate.
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Sometimes things have to get bad before they get better. This is true for coughs and cold sores as well as grief and conflict.
Well meaning people try to make it better for the sufferer before the awfulness has peaked. This rarely works.
Read MoreFor most of my adult life I experienced a lot of relationship turbulence. And I don’t mean just internal churn, though there was plenty of that. I’m talking drama: arguing and fighting (punctuated by shoving, throwing stuff and occasionally destroying property), yelling (name calling), tears, snot and piles of wadded up toilet paper, closed doors, sleeping apart, silences that lasted for days and nights. My twenties were the worst. (Attention, young people—it does eventually get easier—and believe it or not, the sex might actually get better.)
Read MoreSomeone I know has been sober for nearly fifteen years. When he realized scotch had become a destination, the reason to get through the day, the carrot on the stick, he found his self-respect and gave it up. He swears that once he hits his eighties, he’ll start to booze again. After all, why would it matter then? That’s what he thinks today, in middle age.
My mother just turned eighty. She admits to being confused by the mandate to live each day of her life as if it were her last. If today were the last, she told me, I would eat a giant piece of chocolate cake. And another. And if I did that every day, I’d blow up like a house. And my last day would be soon! Now why would I want to do that?
Read MoreCertain people drive us crazy. We all have at least one in our lives. A demon with our name tattooed on its face. An entity so powerful it demands nothing less than our total attention. Its impact on our well-being is often way beyond what makes logical sense.
I call them phantoms. We find them at home, at work and at play. Whence they come, they work their magic in the invisible world—the world of our psyche.
Read MoreAfter a serious accident, a client unexpectedly found himself in a rehab facility. Most of the other patients were quite a bit older than him, and in more advanced stages of decrepitude. He confided to me his first thoughts, I am not like them, I don’t belong here, were swiftly cleared away—when he called a nurse to wipe his ass.
We want to feel powerful, or even better than others, any chance we get. Not so easy with one’s ass hanging out, or in my case, my eyeballs.
Read MoreYour eyes will never be normal. Dr Mark Terry, Surgeon, Devers Eye Institute, (explaining why post-surgery I still can’t see well enough to read or drive or cross the road safely without corrective lenses).
I never thought to call it naked before. It was just how I saw. Or, to be more precise, how I didn’t see, until I put my contacts in. I didn’t spend a lot of time there.
Recently, two high power intraocular lenses have been surgically implanted through small corneal incisions. (And from the twilight zone of anesthesia, I could see the scalpel). Although these lenses correct a good portion of my myopia, they aren’t quite bionic enough to take me all the way to what’s considered normal sight. The technology isn’t there yet. The new lenses bring my naked vision to about 20-200—the official number for legal blindness.
Read MoreHiding within every disadvantage is a potential advantage. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a whole book about this. For obvious reasons, the hidden advantage is nearly impossible to recognize—until that is, the disadvantage goes away. It’s especially true when the disadvantage has always been there; when it has been an integral part of one’s reality.
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