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 More“The belief that one’s own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous of all delusions.” Paul Watzlawick, 1976. From Forward to How Real is Real.
George Carlin put it like this: When you are driving behind a slow person who you want to pass, they are an asshole. When someone behind you tries to pass you, they are a maniac.
We laugh—because it’s true; we see ourselves. In this case it’s especially embarrassing (even idiotic) that we believe we are right, whatever our position. And it does nothing to help us get along or understand our lover or our neighbor.
As the old AA saying goes: Would you rather be right, or in relationship?
Multiple versions of reality, some contradictory, all are the result of divergent experiences and communication processes, none a reflection of an external, eternal, objective truth.
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Power 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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On Orlando: Some Feeling-Thoughts
Last Thursday night, four days after the deadly massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, I attended a vigil at the Q Center in Portland Oregon. Like many people, I had been moving through the week in a daze of grief, anger, fear and hopelessness, trying to wrap my brain around the complexity of the intersecting, colliding and exploding issues that ended in the horrific rampage. Over 100 shot and 49 killed, mostly LGBTQ, mostly under age 30, the worst massacre ever perpetrated by an armed US citizen with a legally purchased assault rifle designed to destroy as many people as possible in as short a time as possible.
Read More“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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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 MorePicture this: Week 3 of a five-week Intensive Course. About forty people—from different (and warring) countries, cultures, religions, races, genders and socio-economic backgrounds—are in attendance. The students have different levels of education, health, physical abilities, English language capacity and range in age from twenties to seventies.
Read More“In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is, as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.” Josef Albers
Many people are confused about color. I can understand why. Color is all about relationship. About perception. And that can get complicated.
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 MoreLately I’ve been carrying a lot. The world is in a mess. So much bad and scary stuff is happening. My clients are crying; they enter my office, hearts ravaged by life and love. I feel it all, even when I’m supposed to be off. Even though my personal world is filled with privilege and goodness.
Read MoreExpertise can act like a drug. It puffs us up, puts us on top of the world—especially when we’ve paid our dues and earned the role through years of hard work. But like most drugs, it has a side effect. Stoned on expertise, we forget what it’s like to be a beginner. This cognitive bias is known as the curse of knowledge. And it is most noticeable in highly specialized fields that require a lot of study or experience to master.
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Certain 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 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.
Read MoreMost of us have not cultivated a welcoming stance towards disturbances, especially ones that interfere with our goals and intentions. Whether it is an unsightly cold sore on the day of a big presentation, a piece of negative feedback from someone we respect or the appearance in our inbox of someone we hooked up with on that crazy drunken night all those years ago, disturbances are rarely met with open arms or attitudes.
Read MoreI am delighted to be here and it is a privilege to be in this role and speak about this glorious group of people. This is my first commencement speech, so bear with me. Let’s hope I can pull it off!
Read MoreEarly failure can be crucial to success in innovation. Because the faster you find weakness during an innovation cycle, the faster you can improve what needs fixing. Tom and David Kelly
You can’t be a loser if you are a learner. Arny Mindell
I paint best, when I couldn’t care less. When my expectations are low because I’m sure I suck anyway. Maybe it’s dusk and I can’t see well. I grab a canvas that’s already been painted, find some old tubes with ill-fitting caps and lumpy crusts and scrape yesterday’s paint from the palette. Tada. Now that I know I’m not wasting good paint, I’m willing to make the most terrific mess.
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