I’m often asked that question by men and women who feel puzzled about why things didn’t go so well, just when the situation seemed ideal.  It’s ironic, they think, because they’re absorb the flood of advice and prescriptions for having super sex out there.  The magazine covers touting “10 new techniques to drive him/her wild;” the online e-zines like Your Tango or Libido for Life.  Some of the advice is pretty sound, like that from the respected sociologist of sexual relations, Pepper Schwartz, or the advice on sexual matters that’s useful for both straights and gays from Dan Savage.  But there’s so much more that’s not so good.  It touts juvenile-sounding, superficial advice.

In fact, the majority of the advice, strategies and techniques overlook the core of a sustaining, mutually energized sexual connection: It’s an integrated relationship—one that combines transparency in your communications, true mutuality in decision-making, and physical/sexual encounters that heighten erotic energy.

If you’re not working at all three parts in unison as a couple, your sexual connection will flatline over time, no matter how ideal the setting and environment.  I’ll describe these three below, but first let’s look at what fuels the possibility for an integrated relationship to begin with.  It’s essentially a thriving spiritual connection between the two partners: Your values and outlook about life; your desires and fears in your shared journey through life.  That includes your sense of meaning and purpose in the world. As Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, “Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is meaningless.”

Your spiritual core is reflected in the extent to which all of the above are in synch; shared and expressed, between yourself and your partner—or aren’t:  As a woman said to me about her 11-year marriage, “It’s worse than seeing things differently; we see different things!”

Whole-Person Sex

The spiritual core of your relationship includes your life and family goals as a couple; how your values and ideals may change and evolve over the years, as separate individuals and as a couple.  If this spiritual core grows over time, it fuels the three parts of an integrated, intimate relationship – the kind of romance that couples desire, as research shows.  I call them Radical Transparency, Sharing The Stage, and Good Vibrations. Think of the result as building and sustaining “whole person sex.”

Radical Transparency  — This means communicating truthfully and completely, to your partner.  Yes, that means exposing your vulnerabilities, fears, as well as desires and points of view about everything.  It can be hard, especially given the hiding out, concealment, secret manipulation or outright lies that couples often engage in with each other. Most people don’t really want to hide the truth or be deceptive, but family issues and our larger culture conditions us to relate to each other that way in love relationships – what I called our “adolescent model of love” in a previous post.

Radical Transparency means being fully open to hearing your partner’s feelings, wishes, desires, and differences from yourself; and revealing your own to your partner without inhibition or defensiveness.  Amy Elias, a yoga teacher and personal growth consultant, described this in The Huffington Post  recently, writing that, “The truth is the greatest gift we can give ourselves. Say the TRUTH when you feel hurt, sad, distressed, betrayed, abandoned, unrecognized, invisible — be out with it and be clear in your own heart… A coming clean refreshes all and allows the real you to emerge.”

Or, as a 42 year-old man recently blurted out in frustration—about himself—to his wife, “No more lies!”

Sharing The Stage - This is behaving with equality and mutuality in the large or small matters of daily life.  It means being neither dominating nor submitting in your decisions or areas of conflict.  For one person, it might mean working consciously to let go of your tendency to control or dominate your partner.  For another, containing your tendency to  submit and comply with what your partner wants, subordinating your own “voice”  in the process.  Shared power is what defines mutuality between partners.

The opportunities for Sharing The Stage exist throughout daily life.  For example, in decision-making, especially where there are differences or conflicts between yourself and your partner.  In those situations ask yourself, how you can best serve the relationship itself  rather than your own desires?  When both members of a couple do that, you’re drawing on the spiritual core of your relationship.  You’re contributing to the empathy for each other that’s part of that core, and which helps fuel an integrated relationship.

Good Vibrations – A heightened sexual/physical relationship depends on strengthening the other two parts.  And that’s where so many couples falter.  They assume they can enhance and energize their romantic, sexual connection while neglecting the other two. Or they haven’t built enough of a spiritual core to begin with.  But when you are working towards an integrated relationship, then some attentive, consensual practices and techniques are useful and important.

Good Vibrations build from open communication about your sexual feelings, desires and needs.  You need to carve out the time and setting for focusing on each other, physically and sexually –  “adult” time – without the kids.  But also, physical connection and affection in everyday life is a part of building Good Vibrations sexually, as well. You can’t do it just in the bedroom.

Couples who work towards an integrated relationship practice letting go of inhibitions and fears throughout their total relationship.  They don’t use their sexual relationship as a vehicle for unspoken emotional grievances or personal issues.  An example of what happens when you do the latter is the conflict a couple in their mid-30s experienced.  Julie feared talking openly with her husband, Tom, about what she wanted, sexually; but also stifled herself about what she thought and desired in the relationship as a whole.  She carried some shame about revealing her sexual desires, as well as her own “voice,” generally.  She had begun recognizing that her shame originated in her relationship with her mother. And Tom had his own issues, as well, which he wasn’t dealing with.  So, their efforts to learn new sex techniques didn’t go anywhere.  In fact, it made their alienation worse.

Essentially, the practices of Good Vibrations increase and exchange sexual energy within and between your own and your partner’s body. Their aim is to elevate and steadily expand pleasure throughout your entire body.  That is, to broaden, deepen,  and sustain arousal and positive tension between you and your partner during your sexual engagement.

The best sexual techniques for building Good Vibrations include a mixture of meditative, breathing, and physical movement exercises with your partner, combined with extended foreplay. These practices help you let go of your selfish needs.  For example, simply wanting to receive pleasure; or wanting to make your partner experience pleasure that you want him or her to experience. Orgasm isn’t the end-state that you’re trying to hurry towards. In fact, the practice of Good Vibrations might not even include genital intercourse.

Good Vibrations techniques will build and increase sexual energy exchange and flow, but the quality and level of arousal and pleasure your and your partner experience will depend on the extent to which you’re building connection and arousal in the other two parts of your relationship.  That is, when you treat each other as equal human beings in daily interactions, and you’re transparent about your inner life and emotions, you automatically feel more stimulation and excitement with each other. When you feel connected as equals and yet engage each other as separate, distinct individuals as well, that will generates new energy and enhance the sexual energy between the two of you.

The practices that build Good Vibrations have been described in Tantric practices, and many refer to them as practicing “spiritual sex.” But I think that description often mistakenly describes a transcendent, ecstatic physical experience that’s disconnected from the relationship as a whole.  That will lead to disappointment—or to a dead end of soulless, technical expertise.  Tantric and similar Eastern practices like Qi gong generate energy flow between partners—that “ego-less” state that people often long for. But your sexual relationship elevates to that higher plane only when you integrate those practices with energy generated by transparency and equality in your daily behavior with your partner.  That’s the key.

One of the best descriptions of Good Vibrations that reflect the growth of an integrated, spiritually strong relationship is a passage in Doris Lessing’s allegorical novel The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five. There, the Nobel laureate portrays what that looks like, sexually. In the story, the man was required to be apart from his new wife, during which time he became “ready” to learn equality and transparency.  The “zones” in the title symbolize stages of spiritual evolution, and the man’s partner had been helping him evolve towards readiness for “whole-person” sex. Now, they meet again and Lessing writes,

He had remembered something entirely blotted from his mind during that enervating month. The light, glancing, inflaming kisses that he had not known how to answer, had gone from his mind. The invitation, the answer and question, the mutual response and counter-response—none of this had been within the provision of the courtesan Elys, since she had never in her life enjoyed an equal relation with anyone, man or woman.

(His wife) came to him, and began to teach him how to be equal and ready in love. It was quite shocking for him, because it laid him open to pleasures he had certainly not imagined with Elys…..He was laid open not only to physical responses he had not imagined, but worse, to emotions he had no desire at all to feel. He was engulfed in tenderness, in passion, in the wildest intensities that he did not know whether to call pain or delight… while she, completely at ease, at home in her country, took him further and further every moment, a determined, but quiet companion.

He could not of course sustain it for long. Equality is not learned in a lesson or two… But he had been introduced to his potentialities beyond anything he had believed possible. And when they desisted, and he was half relieved and half sorry that the intensitites were over, she did not allow him to sink back again away from the plane of sensitivity they had both achieved. They made love all that night, and all the following day, and they did not stop at all for food, though they did ask for a little wine, and when they had been entirely and thoroughly wedded, so that they could no longer tell through touch where one began and the other ended, and had to look, with their eyes, to find it, they fell into a deep sleep…

Couples who aim for a sustaining, “whole person” sexual relationship feel enduring connection and sustained passion. Their relationship becomes more resilient through all of the changes and challenges that everyone faces along the path of life, as recent research shows. Their relationship becomes a gateway into ongoing spiritual evolution, both individually and as a couple.

Here’s to your own “evolution” through the New Year!

For example, this time of year can intensify feelings of losses you’ve experienced as well as fears about change, in general. In a previous post I described how you can become frozen into a mindset and perspective that your life is fixed and will spiral downward from your middle years onward. Such a mentality restricts your vision. You can’t see that it’s possible — and necessary — to continue evolving your life, while reframing your emotional attitudes about the life changes that will continue to occur. I’ve always liked a line from one of Norman Mailer’s novels, “It is a law of life… that one must grow, or else pay more for remaining the same.”

Many of 78 million baby boomers, now in the thick of midlife, are vulnerable to feeling demoralized about their lives. For some it’s the classic “midlife crisis.” But for many, it’s more of a chronic, low-grade fever, reflecting a range of things: Loss of intimacy with their partner, emotionally, sexually and intellectually. Regrets about what they didn’t do well enough in their parenting of their children, who are now launched into their own adult lives… and in an uncertain world. Unfulfilled creative longings for their careers or for contributing to something more meaningful. A career that’s flatlined, or worse — lost altogether. Physical changes or limitations that accrue. The desire for deeper friendships as they feel increasingly sporadic and elusive.

On top of all that are the anxieties about what lies down the road for yourself and your children in this world of economic instability, political polarization, the specter of terrorism, and general unpredictability on all fronts of life. It can be hard trying to maintain sanity (assuming you know what that even looks like) while dealing with all this. It can make you wonder what the point of it all is, as a midlife woman said to me: “It’s been hitting home lately that I’m going to die, eventually, and all of a sudden nothing has any meaning, anymore.”

Of course, there are people whose emotional conflicts predate midlife, or for whom midlife issues trigger old conflicts that now erupt in the form of depression, anxiety and other symptoms. But most don’t fall in that category. For the majority, their suffering is a product of having arrived at midlife in our culture with socially conditioned attitudes about loss and change; a mentality that doesn’t allow for envisioning new possibilities within the reality that now exists. Without that vision, there’s no hope. And without hope you can’t learn what actions will support positive growth in your life from this point forward.

That’s especially ironic, because people are living longer, with extended health and the potential for productive, energized lives. What we call “midlife” is really an outmoded term that reflects an earlier era in which you could expect to die in your 60s. But the mature adult years now cover several decades in people’s minds. For example, recent surveys find that about 80 percent think “old age” doesn’t begin until around 85.

So: Here are a few evidence-based ideas that can help catapult you out of the risk of suffering from midlife blues during this holiday period — or any other time.

Continue Your Personal “Evolution”
Take note of the evidence that you can — and should — continue to evolve within your lifetime, especially during the so-called middle years. By then, you’ve accrued enough life experience to know what’s worth going after, and what’s worth letting go of. In a previous post I pointed out that your capacities for positive development — emotionally, intellectually, creatively, spiritually, physically, and in your relationships — are actually heightened, but you have to know how to use them. One example: Research finds that the brains of older people are not slower but rather wiser than young brains. That is, older adults in the study achieved at least an equivalent level of performance, based on that enhanced capacity.

Revise the Meaning of Loss and Change
What you probably call “loss” is the conventional emotional experience of change, transition and the overall impermanence of life. It reflects your desire to stay attached to and hold onto something that’s ended or evolved in a different direction. It may be a relationship, your growing child, your physical state or some experience you once “had.”

It can be hard to see or open yourself to the other side of that coin: that every “loss” contains a new experience to learn from and do something with. That’s your karma in action. For example, if you accept that your son or daughter is no longer a young child, that opens the door to a new challenge: building a different kind of relationship as he or she grows and matures. You might not embrace that side of the coin if you’re fixed on the fear and pain of letting go of what you’ve “lost.” The key is to fully absorb your emotional experience of whatever’s changing or evolving — including sadness or regret. But at the same time embrace and feel gratitude for what now exists in the life you have, at this moment in time. This shift of perspective can be helpful to you if you’ve suffered a career loss or downturn, as well.

Build A Sustainable Relationship
Studies of couples who are able to maintain a highly positive, energized connection for the long term find that they learn to “forget” themselves and become more focused on serving the relationship itself. By “forget” yourself I’m referring to conscious actions that serve and support the relationship between the two of you, not just your own needs. That is, think of your relationship as a third entity, with a life of its own.

A woman in a 20-year marriage illustrated the difference when she said to her husband during a couples therapy session in my office, “I still love you, but I hate our relationship.” Psychological and social conditioning within our culture teaches us to relate to intimate partners as commodities, and therefore engage with them in transactional, mercantile terms: I give in order to get. I “invest” in the relationship to receive a “return.” Relationships have become another part of a commercialized, consumer-orientation approach to life.

At midlife, though, you have a greater opportunity to break through this mentality and behavior. One reason is that you’ve hopefully learned from some negative experiences in your relationship. Most people have some along the way. Also, it helps to note that research has found that couples who are pretty materialistic have unhappier marriages than couples who don’t care as much about possessions. The effect holds true across all levels of income. And a more materialistic orientation goes hand-in-hand with the commercialized, commodity orientation to one’s partner. That’s a good prescription for becoming unhappy roommates, at best.

Serve Something Greater Than Yourself
It’s almost a cliché to engage in volunteer activity around holiday time — and then forget about it the rest of the year. But providing service to some problem — through your time, abilities and efforts – can generate renewed vitality and life purpose during midlife. It can mitigate feelings of inner emptiness or absence of real human connection. It stimulates more proactive growth regarding your values and life. Service to some issue or purpose larger than yourself at midlife often triggers a strong yearning and action to create more positive, authentic connections in your life. It can awaken you to the reality that beneath surface differences, we’re all one; all organs of the same body, so to speak.

When you engage others who have it worse off than yourself, it often leads to a healthier perspective about your own life dilemmas or disappointments. That shift of consciousness increases your flexibility in the face of ongoing life changes, and contributes to your overall psychological health and resilience during the midlife years.

I think what helps support a long-term, positive relationship through midlife is not so much finding the right techniques – for good communication, compromise, and so forth.  We know how many of those are available in all the  self-help books crowding bookstore shelves. Instead, it’s building your relationship’s spiritual core. By that I mean your sense of purpose and life goals as a couple; and dealing with how your values and ideals change and evolve over the years. The challenge is whether these and other spiritual dimensions remain in synch over your years together.

In this post I describe a path that can help build (or resuscitate) your relationship’s spiritual connection.It’s learning to “forget yourself” within your relationship. I’ve described this seeming-paradox more generally in a previous post, but it think it’s especially helpful for bringing fresh energy into a midlife relationship, to keep it alive and growing. By “forgetting yourself,” I’m referring to a conscious choice to behave in ways that serve and support your partner rather than just yourself. That is, acting in ways that strengthen the relationship between the two of you. Think of your relationship as a third entity, with a life of its own. A woman in a 20-year marriage illustrated that difference when she said to her husband during a couples therapy session in my office, “I still love you, but I hate our relationship.”

In fact, learning to “forget yourself” in your relationship is linked with long-term positive emotions — essential for long-term psychological health through your middle years. Research shows that positive emotions are a powerful antidote to stress, pain and illness throughout life. And they’re associated with proactive attitudes and behavior in general — all elements of psychological health.

Moreover, learning to “forget yourself” is crucial for reasons that relate to our evolutionary heritage, and the ways we’re socially conditioned into our relationship behavior. Here’s what I mean: First, research into the evolutionary basis of intimate relationships indicates that humans (and some other primates, such as the bonobos) are highly sexual and social creatures. Evolution may have created intertwined needs for sexual and social connections with more than one partner at the same time. In other words, such research indicates that monogamy may not be “hard-wired.”

At the same time, our psychological and social conditioning also creates challenges for enduring, positive relationships. We learn to relate to intimate partners as commodities and engage in transactional, mercantile terms: I give in order to get. I “invest” in the relationship to receive a “return.” Relationships have become another part of a commercialized, consumer-orientation approach to life in which someone wins and someone loses.

This orientation is part of what I’ve called our “adolescent model of love.” It includes learning to hide yourself; self-serving goals of gaining power and control over the other; and in many cases repeating the dysfunctional relationships that you had growing up in your family, like feeling loved only when performing or behaving in ways desired by parents, and subsequently by the larger society.

Learning To “Forget Yourself” In Your Relationship

The many changes and transitions of midlife — kids growing up, career and retirement uncertainties, physical changes, desires for new growth — can accentuate the impact of both our evolutionary heritage and our socially conditioned attitudes upon your relationship. However, long-term connection and commitment to one partner can also be your conscious desire and choice. That capacity is also part of your potential for continued evolution and growth.

That is, there’s also evidence that consciousness enables you to evolve, psychologically, toward attitudes, emotions and behaviors that you want to strengthen or build. Those can include an enriched spiritual connection and deeper intimacy with your partner.

In fact, the 21st century — with its unpredictable, unstable, economic and political conditions and an increasingly diverse, highly interconnected and networked world — makes such conscious evolution both more necessary and possible. The events of 9/11 and the economic decline of the last few years really turned our old way of life on its head — in love, in work and in our sense of life purpose. That upheaval has opened the door to new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving — ones that serve larger, common goals, beyond just self-centered ones.

Overall, I think we’re in the midst of a large-scale shift toward behavior and values that reflect more awareness of interconnection and interdependency throughout the planet. People are becoming more awake to the fact that actions everywhere and anywhere affect everyone, everywhere. That well-being throughout life depends upon actions that sustain and build something of value for the larger good. That’s different from seeking to control and extract from the other what you want just for oneself.

The broader perspectives and the life experience that can accrue by midlife enable you to apply these new realities to your relationship, consciously. Ask yourself how you feel when you do something or give something to someone who really enjoys and appreciates, what you give — whether it’s emotional or material. You probably recognize that it just feels good, period. That’s a form of “forgetting yourself,” and is a model for bringing positive energy in your relationship. That is, such action comes from the heart, for the sake of giving, without regard for getting something back.

Studies of couples who are able to maintain a highly positive, energized connection for the long term indicate that they “forget” themselves and engage in serving the relationship itself. Interestingly, brain scans of couples in long-term love find similarities between them and couples who had just fallen madly in love. Their energy stays healthy and alive.

Here are two practices in common to midlife couples who maintain long-term connection:

Two-way communication and openness. This is the opposite of the CFO who, when informed that his subordinates complained about a lack of two-way communication, said cluelessly, “But I do provide two-way communication: I send e-mails and I tell them in person!” No, this refers to being open in the sense of receptivity to what your partner is experiencing and communicating to you; and being open in the active sense — revealing your own thoughts, concerns, fears and so on. Two-way openness is the antidote to conventional, relationship-killing vying for power over the other. It supports building positive emotions within yourself and toward your partner. And, as new research shows, positive emotions and attitudes can protect against poor health later in life.

Collaboration toward joint, common goals. That’s visible in the most successful, contemporary workplaces. For relationships, the common goal isn’t a new killer app or a new service but rather a high-energy, engaged connection between equals — emotionally, spiritually and behaviorally. In fact, research shows that shared decision making between equal partners actually leads to better decisions. Similarly, brain scans of couples who’ve maintained long-term, positive marriages show activation in areas of the brain that indicate strong connections and engagement. Overall, positive connection around the common goal of the relationship itself is associated with long-term vitality and energy.

In short, a living, growing relationship is an ongoing, flowing energy exchange, emotionally, behaviorally and sexually. Deepak Chopra provides a good description of this in Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul, writing that “…the difference between healthy and unhealthy energy can be summarized as follows:  Healthy energy is flowing, flexible, dynamic, balanced, soft, associated with positive feelings. Unhealthy energy is stuck, frozen, rigid, brittle, hard, out of balance, associated with negative emotions.”

At midlife, especially, you have the capacity to shift an unhealthy energy state into a healthy one. And that’s a good description of resuscitating a declining relationship and giving it new life.

For example:

• You happened to catch an old episode of “Sesame Street” or “Mister Rogers” on TV, and you felt engulfed by a wave of nostalgia and loss over your children, who are now grown and building their own lives without you.
•  You worry about whether your career has peaked, especially when you’re reminded every day of the hordes of younger people coming up right behind you — or who’ve now moved ahead of you.
• You’re divorced and dealing with new challenges as a single person.
• Or, you’re married/with a partner, but feelings of passion and intimacy have faded like autumn leaves.
•  You’re stressed about your financial future in your later years, given our economic uncertainty.

I think there’s a core reason why such feelings and experiences aren’t helped all that much by the midlife guides and programs out there: We’ve learned to experience midlife through a mentality that keeps us frozen within feelings of loss, regret and fears about change. That paralyzes our capacity for consciously-created actions, ones that can generate renewed energy, creativity and engagement in the period of life we’re now living through.

What can help free you from that sense of sinking, sliding and stagnating — the “big three” of midlife despair — is first, learning to mentally reframe your current experience of loss, regret and the like. And secondly, using that new perspective to identify and undertake actions that serve something beyond preoccupation with yourself.

Reframe Your Perspective About Loss, Regret and Change

In our culture, we tend to equate change with loss and therefore experience it as painful and bad. Most of us can recall something that we wanted to “possess” forever — a special moment, a period in a relationship, a particular experience. The difficult part is accepting those feelings while also embracing the reality that all life is in a state of transition, from one state to another. All is impermanent. But that awareness will activate your capacity for engaging life and creating positive experiences with what now exists at this moment in your life.

What we call “loss” is the conventional emotional experience of change, transition and the impermanence of life. It’s your response to the desire to stay attached, holding on, to something that’s ended or evolved in a different direction. It may be a relationship, your growing child, your physical state or some experience you once “had.”

It’s hard to see or accept the other side of that coin: that every “loss” contains a new experience as well, that you can do something with or learn from. For example, if you accept that your son or daughter is no longer a young child, that opens the door to building a different kind of relationship as he or she grows and matures. But you won’t see or embrace that side of the coin if you’re fixed on fear of letting go of what you’ve “lost.”

The key, here, is to fully absorb your emotional experience of what’s changing or evolving, including feelings of sadness or regret. But, at the same time, accept and feel gratitude for what now exists in the life you have at this moment in time. This enables you to continue to evolve, as I’ve written about in a previous post.

Fear of letting go and accepting change is powerful. It can fuel a desire to stay fixed, just as you are, even as you suffer — whether from a specific loss or a sense of life having gone awry. You might feel as though it’s safer to suffer, because at least that way you feel alive. Or worse, as one midlife person told me upon learning that he had a serious illness, “I don’t mind dying, because I’ve never really lived.”

Learning to reframe the experience of loss is hard. It requires embracing the unknown, what can look like darkness and uncertainty that lies in front of you. That fear can freeze you into unhealthy nostalgia and fantasy about what you once “had” or embellish in your mind a time in your life that might not have been quite as positive as you now want to recall. I frequently see examples of aging baby boomers who retreat into such nostalgic paralysis.

Fears of loss and change often lead to trying to cope with and manage decline, an attempt to slow down the impact of the involuntary events that are part of midlife change. You’re probably well-acquainted with them: children growing up and leaving home, unexpected changes at work that impact your career, an aging body that doesn’t look or act the same as it used to, unexpected injury, illness or death of friends or family members. Involuntary events and experiences are part of life in general but are often more visible and pronounced at midlife. However, when you equate managing involuntary events with a healthy midlife, you remain mired in fear and stagnation. You’re unable to become unstuck and engage life with passion, energy and gratitude.

In contrast, healthy midlife builds from voluntary events and experiences that you set in motion. That builds the positive resiliency you need for life in today’s world, as I’ve written about in some previous posts. It involves reframing how you envision loss and transition – away from fear and holding on, away from a coping, reactive mentality in which you keep looking at what’s behind you; and toward a conscious vision of how to engage your powers and energies towards something larger than your self-interest. As the novelist Graham Greene wrote in “The Heart of the Matter,” ”One small act of daring can change one’s entire conception of what is possible.”

Live for More Than Your Ego

Much fear, sense of loss and focus on the involuntary events of life is rooted in fixation on your self, your ego, in the sense of too much self-interest, self-absorption and perhaps self-pity. What helps is expanding your perspective beyond that preoccupation and engaging your energies with a purpose or aim that’s larger than just “you.” In that sense, learn to “forget” yourself.

This is a shift toward being highly engaged with your mental, emotional, creative and other powers, yet disengaged at the same time. That is, you let go of ego-expectations for “getting” something for yourself because of your acceptance and awareness that change is ongoing and continuous. Of course, psychological health throughout adulthood, not just midlife, includes flowing with the involuntary changes and experiences but, more importantly, focusing your powers on voluntary actions. The latter enable you to continue evolving all of your life’s dimensions — emotionally, spiritually, creatively, spiritually, intellectually.

Ironically, the failures and losses you experience along the way into midlife are helpful allies. Those experiences can strengthen courage to undertake new actions because you’ve learned something about what works and what doesn’t, and why. A healthy midlife perspective is to think of “failures” as ineffective solutions to problems at the time, and “losses” as a transition into a new opportunity contained within the reality that now exists.

I find that the most energized, engaged and positive midlife men and women share some features. Keep in mind that most everyone has these capacities:

• They don’t identify so much with what they’ve lost or failed at, compared with others who become defeated or stagnated by them. In contrast, they are much less inhibited by the past regarding new actions, new risks and new possibilities to stretch toward.
• They can see through the banal, shallow and inconsequential values and preoccupations that dominate so much of our culture – the gossip, the concern with appearance, the social status and recognition, and so forth. They focus their energies and intent on what they identify as more meaningful and lasting.
• They can see — and accept — the end of the road more clearly than ever. That perspective fuels a greater sense of urgency, new determination and vision. They know what’s really worth going after and what to let pass by. That helps you become more of the “author” of your own life rather than a character in a story that’s been written by someone else.

Here’s an exercise that can help you apply an expanded perspective about loss, change and self-preoccupation to actions that serve something larger than “getting” for yourself:

Imagine that you’ve been informed that you have just a few years left to live. From that vantage point, reflect on what you might want to alter now — or wish you had altered — regarding your values, perspectives, priorities and actions. Don’t compile a list of “50 things I want to do before I die.” Look beyond that kind of self-interest, toward:

• How do you want to use your mental and emotional energies in your remaining time, and toward what end?
• What will those choices have contributed to others, or to the world? How does that sit with you?
• What kind of legacy or “footprint” will your actions and decisions create? Will you be satisfied with that impact? If not, what’s missing?
• From your answers, reflect on what changes you might want or need to make.

Even worse, some become outright despairing and cynical about love relationships in general. That became evident to me from some of the comments and emails I received about my previous post, in which I explained why most relationship advice doesn’t really help. There, I argued that most “expert advice” mistakenly focuses on techniques rather than on the relationship’s spiritual core — your sense of purpose and life goals as a couple, and how your values and ideals change and evolve over the years. The challenge is whether these and other spiritual dimensions are in synch.

Here, I want to point out one particular practice — a perspective, really — that helps build or resuscitate a relationship’s spiritual connection: learning to “forget yourself” when relating to your partner. I’ve described this more generally in a previous post, but it’s especially helpful for bringing a supply of fresh energy into a relationship, to keep it alive and growing. By “forgetting yourself” I’m referring to a conscious choice to behave in ways that serve and support your partner rather than just yourself. By doing that, you’re strengthening the relationship between the two of you — which is really a third entity, with a life of its own. Mary, a 45-year-old in a 15-year marriage, illustrated that when she said to her husband, “I still love you, but I hate our relationship.”

In fact, learning to “forget yourself” in your relationship is linked with long-term positive emotions. Research shows that the latter are a powerful antidote to stress, pain and illness throughout life and are associated with proactive attitudes and behavior in general — all elements of psychological health. Moreover, learning to “forget yourself” is crucial for reasons that relate to our evolutionary heritage and our social and psychological conditioning within current culture.

Here’s what I mean: Research into the evolutionary basis of intimate relationships indicates that humans (and some other primates, such as the bonobos) are highly sexual and social creatures. Evolution may have created intertwined needs for sexual and social connections with more than one partner at the same time. In other words, such research indicates that monogamy may not be “hard-wired.” Nevertheless, it can become a conscious desire and choice. Such a capacity is also part of our potential for continued evolution.

Our psychological and social conditioning also creates challenges for enduring, positive relationships. We learn to relate to intimate partners as commodities and engage in transactional, mercantile terms: I give in order to get; invest in the relationship to receive a return. Relationships have become another part of a commercialized, consumer-orientation approach to life in which someone wins and someone loses.

That orientation is part of what I called our “adolescent model of love in a previous post.” It includes learning to hide yourself; self-serving goals of gaining power and control over the other; and in many cases repeating the dysfunctional relationships that many people had growing up in their families, like feeling loved only when performing or behaving in ways desired by parents, and subsequently by the larger society.

Of course, that damages people’s capacity for healthy relationships and healthy living in general. In fact, based on research and clinical work on the role of childhood experiences in the development of the brain and behavior, Gabor Mate, M.D. has argued that that current society is so addicted to work and consumerism that it has undermined conditions necessary for healthy childhood development.

In general, our overall way of life has pointed us in the wrong direction, away from growth and health. Consequently, relationship advice ignores the spiritual core of the relationship because it’s grounded in embracing the same self-interest and cultural narcissism that’s rampant. That deadens relationships over time. For example, much of the relationship advice about sex falters because the relationship has become fragmented, one in which sex has become a disembodied activity apart from the rest of the relationship. Then, people feel disheartened to see surveys that show that sex ebbs away in a long-term relationship. But in fact, the data indicate that that happens when partners are emotionally and spiritually disengaged from each other to begin with, when the “parts” of their relationship are not integrated.

But there’s also evidence that we can evolve in healthier directions, that consciousness enables us to evolve psychologically toward attitudes, emotions and behaviors that we desire. That includes an enriched spiritual connection and continued growth with an intimate partner. In fact, the 21st century — with its unpredictable, unstable, economic and political conditions and an increasingly diverse, highly interconnected and networked world — actually makes conscious evolution both more necessary and possible.

That is, the 21st-century events of 9/11 and the economic decline of 2008 turned our old way of life on its head — in love, in work and in our sense of life purpose. That’s opened the door to new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving that serve larger, common goals, beyond our old self-centered ones. Overall, I think we’re in the midst of a large-scale shift toward behavior and values that reflect more awareness of our interconnection and interdependency throughout the planet, and of the fact that people’s actions everywhere and anywhere affect everyone in every place.

People are awakening to the reality that “success” and well-being throughout life are now based on values and actions that sustain and build something of value for the larger good — whether in your work or in your intimate partnership. That’s different from seeking to control and extract from the other what you want for oneself.

‘Forgetting Yourself’ In Your Relationship

A simple step: Ask yourself how you feel when you do something or give something to someone who really enjoys and appreciates, what you give — whether it’s emotional or material. You probably recognize that it just feels good, period. That’s the model for fueling positive energy in a relationship, because such action comes from the heart, for the sake of giving, without regard for getting something back. You might ask, “Doesn’t ‘forgetting yourself’ run the risk of being taken advantage of?” Sure it does. But that would tell you something about the kind of partner you’ve connected with to begin with. It’s something to learn from (see my post about doing a “relationship inventory”).

Studies of couples who are able to maintain a highly positive, energized connection for the long term indicate that they “forget” themselves and engage in serving the relationship itself. Interestingly, brain scans of couples in long-term love find similarities between them and couples who had just fallen madly in love. The energy stays healthy and alive.

Here are two practices that couples who maintain long-term connections have in common:

Two-way communication and openness. This is the opposite of the CFO who, when informed that his subordinates complained about a lack of two-way communication, said cluelessly, “But I do provide two-way communication: I send e-mails and I tell them in person.” No, this refers to being open in the sense of receptivity to what your partner is experiencing and communicating to you, and being open in the active sense of revealing your own thoughts, concerns, fears and so on. Two-way openness is the antidote to conventional, relationship-killing vying for power over the other. It supports building positive emotions within yourself and toward your partner, and new research shows that positive emotions are a powerful antidote to stress, pain and illness. An ongoing positive attitude can protect against poor health later in life.

Collaboration toward joint, common goals. This is certainly visible in the most successful, contemporary workplaces. For relationships, the common goal isn’t a new killer app or a new service but rather a high-energy, engaged connection between equals — emotionally, spiritually and physically. In fact, research shows that shared decision making between equal partners actually leads to better decisions. Similarly, brain scans of couples who’ve maintained long-term, positive marriages show activation in areas of the brain that indicate strong connections and engagement. Overall, positive connection around the common goal of the relationship itself is associated with long-term vitality and energy.

In short, a living, growing relationship is an ongoing, flowing energy exchange, emotionally, behaviorally and sexually. Deepak Chopra provides a good description of this in Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul, writing that “[the] difference between healthy and unhealthy energy can be summarized as follows: Healthy energy is flowing, flexible, dynamic, balanced, soft, associated with positive feelings. Unhealthy energy is stuck, frozen, rigid, brittle, hard, out of balance, associated with negative emotions.”

Chopra adds that people have the capacity to shift an unhealthy energy state into a healthy one. And that’s a good description of retrieving a relationship from the dead zone and bringing it back into the realm of the living.

Most people know this to be true. And ironically, the never-ending stream — books, magazine articles, workshops and now, websites and e-zines — confirms it, because If any of them really did help, there wouldn’t be so many of them. In fact, substantial research confirms that these programs and advice aren’t very effective at all.

I think the reason this: Most of the prescriptions for restoring emotional and sexual vitality focus on the wrong things. Most teach techniques – actions and strategies for having better sex, for improving listening and communication, or for successful negotiating around conflict. But if you want to deepen intimacy and build greater vitality in your whole relationship, you have to nourish its spiritual core. Acquiring new techniques won’t do it. However, there are some practices that help you nourish your relationship’s spiritual connection, as I describe below.

What Handicaps Most Relationships

Let me explain. By “spiritual,” I’m referring to a less visible, less behavioral realm than most relationship advice and strategies deal with. Your relationship’s spiritual core includes, for example, your sense of purpose and life goals as a couple; how your values and ideals may change and evolve over the years, as separate individuals and as a couple. The relationship challenge is whether these and other spiritual dimensions are in synch. If they are, some relationship techniques may be helpful along your journey together. If they aren’t in synch, none of them will.

In fact, when you don’t service the spiritual core of your relationship you’re likely to end up, at best, improving what I call the “functional relationship” – one that may work fairly well for dealing with the logistics of daily life, but in which intimacy keeps heading south the longer you’re together. Couples within the functional relationship describe their interactions as increasingly transactional, devoid of energy, and less fun. Moreover, if you’re carrying with you unconscious conflicts, projections and expectations about your partner – those that require a good therapist to help you resolve – applying relationship improvement techniques may intensify those deeper conflicts and damage the relationship beyond repair.

And there’s more: Even those couples whose relationships are not highly distorted by dysfunctional attachment patterns from childhood have trouble servicing their spiritual core. Two other problems, in addition the functional relationship, handicap them. One is the widespread struggle to deal with the so-called “work-life balance” problem. It get’s a lot of media attention, and couples try hard to find the right kind of balance. But most don’t realize that “work” and “life” can’t ever be balanced because both are on the same side of the true scale, between your inner and outer life. The other problem is broader: We learn a model of love in our culture that’s really an arrested version of adolescent excitement and infatuation.

That is, most adult men and women relate to each other in ways that are an extension of adolescent relationships – replete with struggles over power and dominance; a tendency to idealize; an experience of passionate connection most strongly when you’re unable to “possess” the object of your desire; feeling intense attraction towards someone new and unknown, but then finding that passion cools with familiarity.

This adolescent experience is the basis of what most people learn to think is the norm for adult love and sexual relationships, as well. Interestingly, some research shows that falling in love, in the way that most adults experience it, affects the same areas of the brain — and triggers the same sensation of euphoria – when taking cocaine. It’s an addictive “high.”

However, that results from a socially conditioned experience of love, based on what’s normal for adolescents. Consequently, people assume that strong connection and vitality must necessarily decline with familiarity with your partner, over time – just as it does for adolescents. But in fact, that’s true only to the extent that you practice an adolescent version of love. In contrast, both research and clinical evidence shows that couples are able to “make it last” when they build the spiritual core of their couplehood. For example, recent research has found specific brain mechanisms by which romantic love is sustained in some long-term relationships. One study using brain imaging found “very clear similarities between those who were in love long term and those who had just fallen madly in love,” according to Arthur Aron, one of the lead authors of the study.

Growing Your Relationship’s Spiritual Core

When you nourish the spiritual basis of your relationship, you inject positive energy into three interlocking dimensions — your emotional, relational and sexual connection. I’ve referred to these three in another post as “radical transparency” with your partner regarding your thoughts, feelings, desires, and fears; “sharing the stage,” so to speak — making decisions and choices in daily living that promote mutuality, rather than either of you trying to maneuvering to gain the upper hand at the expense of the other; and “good vibrations” in how you relate physically and sexually. I’ll be writing more about these three in future posts, but the point here is that nourishing the spiritual core of your relationship – it’s soul – is the underpinning of all three.

The main way you can do that is learning to let go of self-interest in your relationship. That may sound contradictory, but loosening your grip on what you want to “get” for yourself is actually the key to growth and happiness as a couple. Letting go redirects your energies towards increasing vitality, connection and pleasure between the two of you, and away from the self-centered goal of just getting what you want from your partner. In short, you’re more likely to “get the love you want” by not aiming for it.

Research and clinical observation confirm this. For example, studies by psychologist John Gottman and other marriage researchers have found that key predictors of a positive, resilient relationship include mutual support and a willingness to sacrifice. That means willingness to forgo personal interests and putting your partner’s needs ahead of your own. Letting go of self-interest in these ways is directly linked to a long-lasting, happy relationship. Staying entrenched in your own ego won’t do it.

There are many steps you can take to strengthen your relationship’s spiritual core. Below are some that help you move beyond and through the tendencies we all have to dwell on our own needs, as well as our perceived slights, resentments, and so on – those features of self-interest that are sure-fire killers for your relationship.

Show Your Partner What You Want By Giving It

• Identify some positive qualities you’d like to experience more within your relationship – say, openness, warmth, eroticism, respect. Envision them as within your partner’s capacity, even if you think they’ve become dormant or neglected.

• Focus on how those qualities will strengthen the relationship between the two of you, not just on how much you want to “get” them from your partner. That helps shift your attention away from self-interest.

• Then, begin to demonstrate those qualities yourself. “Prime the pump” by injecting them into your relationship. Act unilaterally; recognize that by showing the qualities you desire from your partner, you’re also strengthening those qualities in yourself, which puts new energy into the relationship between the two of you.

Disengage From Your Conviction That You’re “Right”

Another part of self-interest is the tendency to believe that your own point of view, your own “reality,” is the true or correct one – especially in situations of conflict. You can be pulled into reacting to your partner’s emotional needs, demands or conflicts in ways that hurt the relationship because of your own issues, such as insecurity, longing for acceptance, or fear.

Research supports the value of disengaging from your self-interest in this way. One example: researchers at the University of Minnesota found that if you have an argument with your partner, and either one of you disengages from the emotional impact of the dispute upon you; that is, you don’t let it overflow onto the relationship in other areas, then both partners feel more positively towards each other, afterwards.

That is, recovering well from a dispute includes not letting its remnants spill over into other parts of the relationship. Those might include maintaining resentments and disappointments about your partner’s “failure” to provide you with what you want. (“I know he’s going to be resentful if I tell him what I want, so why bother?”) Or, dwelling in negative emotions from the conviction that you’re “right” and your partner is “wrong” regarding some issue of disagreement or difference. (“I just can’t talk to her about the finances because I know she just doesn’t understand the whole picture.”)

The following exercise can help disengage you from that reactivity and respond, instead, in ways that bring you and your partner into greater synch, spiritually.

• Envision a characteristic or behavior of yours that you know your partner dislikes. Imagine shifting your consciousness into your partner’s perspective and mentality, even though you may disagree with that perspective or are convinced it’s “wrong.”

• Immerse yourself in your partner’s perceptions of you. Try to experience them fully. At the same time, hold on to your own views. Don’t let either negate the other.

• Then, try to understand your partner’s feelings or attitudes as a reflection of who he or she is, based on all the forces and influences and choices that have shaped him or her. Don’t judge.

• Based on that, describe how and why your partner perceives you in the way he or she does.

Here, you’re learning to separate who you are – what you think, feel, and believe – from who your partner is; distinguish your own internal “reality” from that of your partner’s. That fuels greater respect for each of you as separate, individual people, and can deepen intimate understanding of each other – an important part of your spiritual core.

You may not think that you can consciously direct your own evolution. But there’s increasing evidence that you’re able to evolve your conscious being – the driver of your personality, cognitive capacities, emotions and actions.

Of course we normally think of evolution in terms of physical changes over eons – though some recent observations raises the possibility that some evolution is occurring right now, perhaps spurred by need or desire. For example, the noted nature writer and photographer Boyd Norton recently caught on this video a baboon that suddenly began walking and running upright. And the Moken people of Southeast Asia, who live off the sea, are able to evolve the capacity of their eyes to have superior vision underwater, by maximally constricting the pupil to achieve superior vision. This is something other humans are unable to do.

But even more interesting, I think, is the prospect of being able to evolve your whole person in specific new, healthy directions. I’ve often heard my psychotherapy patients as well as my corporate executive clients ask – or lament – why they don’t think they can change, or grow.

Here, I’ll describe some of the evidence that conscious evolution is possible, and a part of building psychological health; and then show five steps you can take to evolve yourself.

Much research indicates that the capacity for self-evolution — of your personality, mental capacities, relationships and actions in the world — is based on conscious intent.
That is, shaping your being is an art form – the way an artist develops, evolves and creates a painting; or a composer creates music. You can make your conscious being and all that emanates from it a work of art.

I think today’s highly interconnected, interdependent world is arousing in people a new need or intent: to evolve capacities that support both personal well-being and service to the common good, the larger human community. That is, capacities that promote the benefit of all, not just the few. This shift is both psychological and spiritual, in the sense that the Dalai Lama described as “The full blossoming of human values that is essential for the good of all.”

This shift is the counterweight to the tendency towards “social psychosis” that I previously wrote about. Psychological and societal health now heightened self-awareness, positive values, emotions that support collaborative engagement and policies that serve the larger good. These are qualities of mind, emotion and behavior. Research shows we can shape and grow them within ourselves and promote greater mental health. Here are some examples:

Stretching towards new challenges
When you challenge yourself to stretch towards a higher level of your abilities, you also increase your overall well-being. Interestingly, this research demonstrates the power of having a vision of what you want to stretch your capacities and abilities towards. Holding a vision of possibility in your consciousness tends to pulls you towards it. Research shows that your actions that follow lead to noticeably increased happiness with your life. Other studies indicate that people who consciously build positive emotions, such as empathy and compassion, also increase their resilience in the face of new challenges. Moreover, a longitudinal study of the impact adverse events have upon people found just going through adversity tends to increase resilience and positive adaptation to new, unexpected situations. There’s apparently some truth to the old adage, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Seeding well-being in yourself and others
What goes around, comes around. Studies at UC Berkeley and elsewhere find that when people consciously behave generously and compassionately towards others, they become more valued and esteemed by others, in return. And, that this, in turn, contributes to the common good.

Behaving “outside the box”
There’s evidence that you can evolve by choosing to behave in ways that are different from — even counter to — what you think of as your usual or “fixed” personality traits and characteristics. That is, you can evolve by acting more like the person you want to be. This isn’t faking; it’s pushing yourself outside the box of your usual “self,” and bringing your behavior into alignment with a picture of what those new features would look like if you demonstrate them. That’s similar to what I described in a previous post as creative “indifference” in dealing with relationship conflicts; that is, disengaging from your own typical emotions and behavior.

Altering your brain
It’s well-documented, now, from several research studies that meditation affects brain circuitry related to cognitive processes and positive emotions; that the brain is much more susceptible to change than has been thought. But another aspect of your capacity to evolve your brain towards positive emotions and thoughts is that such efforts are also associated with less age-related decline of your brain volume, compared with people who maintain more neurotic and self-focused personality traits. And, as Joshua Foer has described in his recent book, Moonwalking with Einstein, anyone can learn 2500 year-old techniques for dramatically improving your memory; feats that can seem impossible or super-human.

Much of the research that indicates the capacity to self-evolve links with a growing perspective among scientists that, as Deepak Chopra has written, “Consciousness is destiny. Instead of being dictated to by yourgenes and chemical processes in the brain, it may turn out that you are the author of your own life — capable of change, healing, creativity and personal transformation.”

Actually, everything in existence is experienced through our consciousness. And scientists increasingly explore the point of view that a unifying reality underlies the physical world – what the physicist David Bohm called the ‘implicate order’ — and that this unifies the totality of existence. That is, nothing is separate from anything else. Chopra and others have proposed that science will eventually find that the universe itself is conscious. So it’s not far-fetched to think that we can direct our consciousness – that undefinable experience that cannot be explained by the physical brain – in ways that we desire.

Five Steps For Evolving Yourself
Given what we know so far, we probably have enormous potential to self-direct how we evolve new personality traits, mental capacities, emotions, and positive engagement as a citizen of the planet. Here are five steps for doing so:

This article originally appeared in The Huffington Post in slightly different form.

These new realities raise a important question for couples to face, head-on: Do you want to stay married at this point in your life — in your relationship as it now exists, and at this time in our culture?

Consider this: It may be psychologically healthier to end your marriage. That is, I think that the conditions and challenges of the 21st world – the “new normal” – point to considering a more radical way of life: Engaging in two different kinds of marriages may be a better response to the emotional and sexual realities of our fluid, interconnected world.

On the other hand, you might decide to reconstitute you marriage in ways more in synch with how each of you are “evolving” in your individual lives; and more consistent with your vision of what you want a partnership to be as you become older.

Let me explain both paths. Increasingly, people recognize that our post- 9-11 world — the economic downturn, global crises and uncertainties, the impact of climate change, the increasing diversity of our population, global interconnection, and a host of other shifts – all of it forms a new era of uncertainty, unpredictability and diminished expectations of career and material success.

Part of this new normal includes turmoil in people’s emotional and sexual attitudes and behavior, and generates what looks like contradictions in relationships. For example, people report wanting a “soul mate” relationship that sustains for the long run. And in fact, new brain research confirms that romantic love can, in fact, last – it’s not a fantasy.

On the other hand, affairs are pretty much socially accepted, and the services of sex workers seem headed in the same direction. People seek that “high” associated with the intense connection and excitement of a new partner, and which is also visible in brain changes, according to recent studies.

Such apparent contradictions actually reflect a growing rejection of the tendency to simply accept a marriage’s inevitable descent into the “functional relationship,” one devoid of energy, connection, and intimacy. This backlash had been underway prior to the events of the last decade, but it’s now intensifying. At the start of the new century men and women were reporting increasing boredom and crises in their marriages – along with the 50% divorce rate. Interestingly, research shows that the “love hormone” oxytocin is also associated with distinctly negative memories and feelings about one’s partner. Not surprisingly, survey research shows that marriage problems often occur between about 7 and 15 years of marriage

In my view, all of these shifts, challenges, and social trends occurring within today’s world warrant new ideas about what constitutes psychologically healthy relationships. I propose considering two kinds of marriages more relevant to current realities. And, in the meantime, that couples reassess why they stay together; whether they want to do so, at they go forward in their lives. Let’s look at each:

Two Kinds of Marriages

In Marriage #1, people who want to raise children would join with a partner who shares the same basic values about child rearing; and whose ethics, views about finances, education, as well as physical features support a positive marriage partnership. The objective is raising healthy children within an emotionally supportive, stable environment.

Marriage #2 is next, after child-rearing and financial goals of Marriage #1 have been achieved. Then, you would connect with a partner with whom you experienced a stronger romantic, soul-mate connection; a shared “same wave-length” kind of feeling about how you envision your life, growing and unfolding in the years ahead.

Of course, some may find that both kinds of marriage occur with the same partner. But I propose this framework for thinking about what best serves your children and your own psychological growth and development throughout life.

Meanwhile, Do You Continue?

Say you’ve been together a number of years. You’ve probably had good times and bad; probably wondered what your lives might be like if you went in different directions without each other; or followed a different life path altogether. If you’re in midlife, you’ve almost certainly had some of these thoughts. Maybe you suppressed them or dismissed them with a laugh. But just as many baby boomers are thinking about “encore careers” or a career shift during one’s prime, I suggest you do the same about your marriage.

Specifically, take an honest look at your marriage as it exists today. With your partner, confront whether you want it to continue. That is, your aim is to clarify whether you want to stay with this person for the rest of your life. If so, why; and what will it take? 
And if that’s not the case, can you end it with regret, respect, and mutual support for your future life paths?

Some steps: Consider the possibility that the marriage you began years ago, and within which you raised children, worked for that earlier purpose; but may no longer work for you, today.

• Be open with each other about how you view the state of your marriage at this point in your relationship.
• Reflect on why the two of you joined together in the first place. How have each of you have changed over the years? How does each of you experience the changes in the other?
• What do you want a relationship to look like, to feel like, as you go forward post-children? With your partner, compare and discuss where you are aligned.
• Where you aren’t, what qualities would you like to see in your partner? What are you willing to “grow” within yourself in response to the feedback your partner gives you?

The most positive outcome, here, would be to reconstitute your marriage in ways that support who each of you are, in reality, at this point in your life – assuming you’re aiming in the same direction, and want to go that way together. That can build a new foundation for a self-sustaining relationship — one that stays alive and resilient as you face the unknowns and unpredictable events and experiences waiting for you down the road.

In this and future posts I’ll describe more about what supports a positive relationship, emotionally, sexually and spiritually.  What won’t are the fantasized portrayals and simplistic formulas promoted by the advice and technique books and magazine articles.    Most of them don’t work anyway, and can do more harm than good because they can make couples feel inadequate if, for example, they can’t find the right words to reflect back to their partner; or they discover that the new sexual technique or tantric exercise just doesn’t arouse them.

This post is about a frequently overlooked first step towards a sustainable relationship with your current or future partner.  Couples I’ve worked with find it helpful because it builds the self-reflection and self-awareness you need for growing and evolving yourself in your relationship capacities.  I call this first step doing a “Relationship Inventory.”  With it, you can review, understand, and learn from your past relationships; and then face forward with greater clarity and capacity for creating and sustaining emotional and sexual intimacy in the present and future.

Begin by making a list of all your significant romantic relationships.  For each, reflect on and write down what attracted you to that person, per se; and why, at that particular time of your life.

What Was The Pull?

That is, what qualities of that person that attracted you to him or her? Why did those qualities attract you in the first place? Be honest, regardless of how you might feel about those traits today.  Consider what role your life circumstances played in the attraction were at the time, including your emotional state and needs.  Describe your level of emotional development and awareness at the time of each of those relationships.

Also, reflect on how your parents’ relationship impacted you, in terms of the model they exposed you to of how couples relate. Did they show loving connection, a “functional relationship,” or somewhere in between?

Think about how you viewed sex and relationships as you entered your relationships.  Keep in mind that most of us acquire distortions about love and are conditioned into an adolescent model of romance, as I wrote about in a previous post.

Then What Happened?

Write a paragraph or two describing what you think happened during the course of the relationship that led to its ending.  Of course, you’re looking back from today’s vantage point, but try to portray an unvarnished of what happened, and why. Describe, without assigning blame.

Did You Learn Anything?

Next, write down what you think you learned about yourself from each of those relationships that ended.  Include what you think you recognized at the time as your blind spots; your own behavior or unexpressed feelings that might have contributed to the failure; or to prolonging the relationship when it would have been healthier to end it sooner.  Did you apply what you learned in your next relationship, or did you repeat the same things, despite what you thought you learned?

Or Not….?

Reflect on what you now realize you didn’t learn about yourself in each relationship that would have been helpful to your growth and to your next relationship. Or, what you could have learned from the relationship that ended that would have helped you grow your relationship capacity if you had been more self-aware at the time?

What Happens Now?

How can you use what you’ve discovered from the Relationship Inventory in your present life, as you go forward in your current – or next – relationship?  For example, can you describe the kind of personality, emotional qualities, life vision, values or  “vibes” that mesh well with your own; that promote connection and positive energy between the two of you?

What changes might you and your partner need to make in how you handle differences, or individual desires?  Describe the attitudes and behavior you believe would increase and help sustain intimacy, passion and connection, in contrast, for example, to ongoing frustration over being “heard,” “understood” or “accepted” for who you are.

In future posts about psychologically healthy relationships I’ll describe steps that promote transparency, true partnership and sexual energy for the long term.  All share a common core: learning to “forget yourself.”  That is, giving to your partner with less regard for “getting” what you want in return.

I know…that’s contrary to how we’re taught to conduct ourselves to get our “needs” met.  That is, through strategies of self-interest, manipulation and subterfuge.  But that’s a good formula for a relationship that stagnates and falters in today’s world.

To begin with, I want to emphasize that psychological health isn’t the same as the absence of mental or emotional disorders. For example, you can’t say that a happy person is someone who’s not depressed. Many people have consulted me who aren’t depressed by clinical criteria, but they aren’t happy with their work, relationships or their overall lives, either.

Moreover, self-awareness isn’t equivalent to health. It’s a necessary underpinning, but it’s not enough. Therapists often help their patients deepen self-awareness about the roots of their conflicts, only to wonder why they remain the same. Psychiatrist Richard Friedman described that dilemma in a recent New York Times article in which he illustrated the puzzlement practitioners experience when they are confronted with the limitation of awareness, alone.

To the extent there’s a conventional view of psychologically health at all, it’s mostly equated with good life-management and coping skills. That is, managing stress in your work and personal life, and coping with — if not resolving — whatever emotional conflicts you brought with you into adulthood.

A less visible view of psychological health also exists: Successful adaptation to and embracing of the dominant values, behavior and attitudes of the society or milieu you’re a part of. The problem here is that such socially-conditioned norms have also embodied greed, self-absorption, domination, destructiveness, and divisiveness. They’ve been equated with “success” in adult life.

The upshot is that you can be well-adapted to dominant attitudes and behavior that are, themselves, psychologically unhealthy. So you may be “well-adjusted” to an unhealthy life.

We’ve been witnessing the fruits of that form of “health” throughout our society in recent years, in the form of dysfunctional lives and failing institutions. Part of the reason is that we now live in a highly interconnected, unpredictable, digitalized world of “non-equilibrium.” It presents new challenges for individual lives and society. That’s why I believe we need to revamp our thinking about psychological health, to take account of the new realities and challenges of our post-9-11, post-economic meltdown, 21st Century world.

So, I propose that psychological health – in emotions, attitudes, mental outlook, and behavior – consists of whatever builds, creates, grows and sustains; rather than that which exploits, extracts, or destroys.

That definition of psychological health, for individuals, institutions and public policies, is grounded in explicit values: Building and creating for all, rather than consuming and taking for the benefit of the few.

Those values, in turn, steer you towards wanting to develop and engage your human capacities in the service of something larger than just amassing or extracting benefits for yourself. That focus is what’s known as the “common good,” which, I argued in a previous post, is on the rise in our society.

To clarify, it may sound contradictory that if you “forget yourself,” so to speak, you’ll grow your own mental, emotional and creative capacities and become psychologically healthier. But the fact is, you stagnate when you overly dwell on yourself – just your own needs, desires, slights, complaints about others, and so on. In contrast, building psychological health today occurs by putting your energies in the service of something larger than just your narrow self-interest. That is, towards common goals, purposes or missions that require contributing and creating; not justconsuming and extracting value for yourself.

The positive emotions and broadened perspectives I wrote about in my last post are important sources of health because they grow your inner life, which is the wellspring of healthy actions in your outer life of relationships, work, and your conduct as a citizen and future ancestor. In the outer world, psychological health is visible, for example, in being highly proactive and innovative; positive connection with diverse people; flexibility in situations of conflict; using the anxiety that’s always present in life as a guide to wise judgment and action. And overall, being nimble, flexible, and adaptive to the changes and the unpredictable events that are part of life in our new era.

Here are three realms where you can see how those qualities come alive:

At Work — Psychologically healthy behavior includes collaboration, non-defensiveness, informality, a creative mindset, and ease of engagement, as a team member, with the overall objectives or mission. It includes tuning in to the whole picture, in which you’re one player, while finding ways to make a positive contribution. In short, psychological health at work is visible in being collaborative rather than self-promoting at others’ expense.

In Your Relationship – Building a healthy relationship is thwarted by self-oriented maneuvering, dominating or subtly manipulating your partner to get your own needs and desires met, often at the expense of the relationship itself. Psychological health here includes transparency with your partner, two-way openness, a shared vision of partnership and way of life that both of you are committed to creating. Mutual respect, authenticity and power-sharing promotes the relationship between you, not just the self-focused aim of “getting my needs met.”

As A Future Ancestor – Healthy behavior here reflects the desire to act in ways that help preserve and sustain resources and a healthy planet for yourself and for those who will be here after your time is over.. John Friedman, Senior Director for Public Relations at Sodexo, recently described this in Forbes as “the compelling concept of a shared fate.” That is, psychological health in this realm iis visible through actions in daily life, in business and public policy that promote and sustain the well-being of the human community and the planet.

I encourage discussion and criticism around these ideas, and I’ll be writing more about reframing and redefining psychological health in our 21st Century world,…so stay tuned!

In contrast to discussion about mental disorders, I think we’ve neglected its flip side: What constitutes psychological health in today’s world? What does it look like? And how can you promote it in your own life, your children and in society?

These questions loom large because the most psychologically healthy people and societies will be best equipped to create and sustain well-being, security and success in the tumultuous road we’re now traveling on.

Take a look: At the start of this second decade of the 21st Century our lives and institutions are reeling, trying to cope with an interconnected, unpredictable world turned upside down by the events of the first decade: terrorism that’s come home to roost; economic meltdown at home and abroad; rapid rise of previously “underdeveloped” nations; and in our social and political spheres, the rise of hatred, bigotry and intolerance, as Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupik commented on following the Tucson shootings. This upheaval has fueled what I described in recent posts a “social psychosis” that’s locked in conflict with a societal need to serve the common good.

The problem is that we know what severe mental illness as well as “garden variety” neurotic conflicts look like in daily life. Those have become more prevalent in the current climate. But what we think of as psychological health is pretty vague. Moreover, it’s a 20th Century view that doesn’t fit in the new world environment.

That is, psychological health has been pretty much defined as successful resolution and management of childhood traumas and conflicts; coping with stress and adapting to the world around you, as an adult. The problem is, that view has assumed a relatively stable and static world. One in which you can anticipate the kinds of changes or events that might occur. And when they do, a healthy, resilient person could bounce back to the previous equilibrium that existed. But today, there’s no longer any equilibrium to return to. Psychological health requires living with disequilibrium.

Moreover, the 20th Century view equated psychologically healthy with adapting to the values and behavior that were culturally rewarded.  For example, adversarial competition; power-seeking for oneself; consuming material goods; living with trade-offs between your personal values and outward behavior; depleting resources in disregard for future generations. And that didn’t even work so well in the 20th Century: Some years ago I documented the emotional downside of with this kind of “successful” adaptation, in Modern Madness.

More recently, the Huffington Post blogger Tijana Milosevic described, from her European perspective, the negative side of American’s workaholism and hyper-focus on careerism. Economists and business writers such as Umair Haque in his Harvard Business Review blog and new book, The New Capitalist Manifesto, are also criticizing the 20th Century model of success and well-being as undermining positive development of our institutions in today’s current world.

In short, the prevailing old model creates, rather than diminishes psychological dysfunction and disturbance. It provides no useful guidance towards healthy living today, when people’s careers are uncertain, businesses struggle to stay afloat, relationships shatter with changing life goals and personal values, affairs and divorce; and when the public is confused and adversarial about the role of government in people’s lives. Moreover, old “truths” in several areas are found either to don’t work or to reflect established beliefs rather than actual evidence, as a recent New Yorker article revealed. Given all this, here’s some suggestions for beginning to redefine and rethink the essentials for a psychologically healthy life in the world we now live in. They reflect the likelihood that people who thrive in this new era will share some common features.

Overall, think of psychological health as an overall mentality of using emotional, cognitive, creative and relationship capacities in ways that help sustain and enhance the well-being of all, based on the recognition that all lives are interconnected and interdependent.

Put differently, this view of health reflects embracing a set of values — what a person believes in as important or vital in life; what he or she wants to use their powers for. For example, someone’s values might include, self-aggradizement, subjugation of others, power-lust and so forth. Such values fuel unhealthy behavior because they undermine rather than enhance well-being for all people. Ultimately, they lead to some form of dysfunction in relationships and career.

In contrast, values that are the underpinnings of psychological health include, for example, positive, supportive engagement with and respect toward diverse people; actions that contribute to the well-being of all, not just oneself; collaboration and compromise to achieve shared goals; self-regulation of stress through honest self-examination and reflection.

Values are a foundation for health. Then, several capacities support psychologically healthy living. Here are two important ones that research has confirmed.

Positive Emotions – We now know that you can train the brain to build new capacities, through meditation and “practice.” Among the most important for psychological health are empathy and compassion. These capacities enable to you develop greater wisdom and effectiveness in dealing with problems.

This reflects what researchers call the neuroplasticity of the brain. Recently, the eminent neurologist Oliver Sachs described the remarkable capacity of the brain to learn and regenerate. Research also shows that positive emotions increase your capacity for resilience by strengthening your ability to handle stress and adversity.

Broadened Perspectives – This is the capacity to step “outside” of yourself and view problems from an enlarged viewpoint, including that of people you disagree with. In a previous post I’ve used the term “constructive disengagement” to describe this as a positive way to handle relationship conflicts. Research shows that you can move forward, emotionally, when you detach yourself; that is, disengage from the emotions that have been stirred up. In fact, we now know that even the infant is able to recognize another’s point of view.

Another aspect of a broadened perspective that research confirms is that you can enhance your cognitive powers for problem-solving when you engage in positive rather than adversarial relations with others. Moreover, other research shows the positive benefit of simply behaving contrary to your usual personality traits — another form of stepping “outside” of yourself.

Of course, building positive emotions and enlarging your perspectives are intertwined. Actions that strengthen one also strengthen the other. These are just two capacities that I think are part of a psychological health, today. They support the behavior that will be increasingly recognized as essential for creating and building lives and institutions that sustain, grow and develop in our interconnected world. For example, being able to let go of purely self-interest as the driver of one’s relationships and work. Being flexible, transparent and nimble. Shifting and redeploying emotional, creative and other capacities towards positive engagement and collaboration, in order to achieve common goals. That is what supports both outward success and internal well being. And that’s psychologically healthy.

Coming from Serbia — a country of six million in Eastern Europe that once belonged to a larger, war-torn entity called socialist Yugoslavia — I wasn’t fully aware of the notion of “career anxiety” when I came to Washington DC for my MA degree. Until one evening, that is, at the very onset of the school year.  A colleague of mine who was just turning twenty-seven raised his glass and voiced his fear: “Twenty-seven: no serious job and no stable career track.”

I was twenty- three at the time and could not comprehend why anyone would be obliged to have a “career track,” let alone a stable one, especially at (what I saw as) the tender age of twenty seven. In fact, I had never entertained the concept the way my American friends were referring to it.

While many Americans move out of their homes when they’re 19 to hit college, the East- European model is quite different.  Countries are smaller, and if there’s any migration it is directed typically towards the capital, so young people continue to live with their families through college. Because of high unemployment rates and poor standard of living, they aren’t expected to become financially independent, and many depend on their parents well into their late twenties or even early thirties -without a sense of shame that such state of affairs entails in the US. These factors reduce the relevance of what Americans often describe as “the treadmill feel”- an almost compulsive desire for continuous promotions, financial gains, followed by a rise in social status, and an increasing social anxiety.

In societies that are similar to mine, the American model is looked down upon as “harsh capitalistic,” “individualistic” and above all “alienated,” as American parents are not perceived to provide enough financial and emotional support for their children. In fact my family and friends had observed that I shouldn’t have chosen America, since I would probably feel better in Western Europe – where life is not as fast paced as in the US and capitalism still has a “human face.”

For example, Americans still work nine full weeks (350 hours) longer than West Europeans do and paid vacation days across Western Europe are well above the US threshold. The French still have the 35 hour working week, while the hourly productivity is one of the highest in the world. On the other hand, in the US an increasing popularity of employment therapy suggests that a high-paying job still comes first, as job issues “have a huge mental health component,” and therapists emphasize the importance of “toxic co-workers and the ramifications of massive layoffs.”

Numerous writers have outlined the dangers of isolation and careerism in the American society. In her famous work “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Hannah Arendt equates careerism with lack of thinking that led to Holocaust: “what for Eichmann was a job, with its daily routine, its ups and downs, was for the Jews quite literally the end of the world. Genocide […] is work. If it is to be done, people must be hired and paid; if it is to be done well, they must be supervised and promoted.”

In Serbia even young and busy corporate-minded career professionals do not have to mark their calendars to meet with close friends.  One can always find the time for a spontaneous chat over coffee. Still, this laid back culture is now beginning to change with an increasing development of free market capitalism.  I still remember how strange it felt when I first came to DC and had to schedule coffees and lunches with people weeks or even months in advance. I found it odd that people rarely picked up the cell phone (which, granted, could be merely my personal experience, although many Americans confirmed it!) and would often leave the time and date of the call in their voicemails, which implied the other person might not get back to them in a while. I also came to discover that what Americans often referred to as “friends,” people from my region would prefer to call “acquaintances.” The term “friend” cannot be reserved for someone you meet once in a couple of months and do not know well enough to open up to.

Those experiences bring to mind a memorable line from from “Eat, Pray, Love,” a biographical story recently turned into a Hollywood blockbuster starring Julia Roberts: “You Americans know entertainment but you do not know how to enjoy yourselves,” Roberts plays a successful thirty-something American who decides to embark on a soul-searching trip to Italy, India and Bally after realizing her job, husband and newly bought house are not what she really wanted from life. Perhaps that’s a superficial take on what many would describe as an equally superficial Californian trend to “do something spiritual,” but the above quote shows there’s something to the American career frenzy that remains unique to the United States. The opportunity cost for “dolce far niente” or “the joy of doing nothing,” runs high.

Reflecting on this, I ran into an interesting take on “Eat Pray Love” by a 23-year old blogger: “We are not sympathetic to spiritual personal crises anymore. If you want to have an emotional breakdown about something, you better have a logical, elaborate and secular reason; otherwise you will be dismissed as whiny, annoying and laughable.” I wonder if her comment has to do with the lack of experience or the possibility that the generation entering the work force will not have an adequate justification for its desire to escape the treadmill feel– amidst all the superficial takes on this complex topic.

The popularity of the TV show “In Treatment” is one indicator that there’s a large, market for psychotherapy, today. Despite the decline of the more orthodox psychoanalytic treatment – the kind that Daphne Merkin described in a recent New York Times article about her years in treatment – people continue to seek competent professional help for dealing with and resolving the enormous emotional challenges and conflicts that impact so many lives in current times. Beyond healing, they want to grow their capacity for healthy relationships and successful lives.

Many skilled and competent therapists are out there. (I use term “therapist” to describe psychologists, psychiatrists and clinical social workers – professionally trained and licensed practitioners.) Moreover, research shows that psychotherapy can be very effective. Either alone, or sometimes in combination with the judicious use of medication.

Yet so often practitioners don’t help people very much. Some struggle for years in therapy with one practitioner after another, and never seem to make any progress. Others resolve some conflicts, but then are hit with others that hadn’t been addressed.

I see three reasons for this situation. One is rooted in the kind of people therapists tend to be today. Their personal values, social attitudes and how they relate to conventional norms and behavior contrast in several ways with those of the “pioneers” from Freud’s era. That contrast impedes effective help.

Then there are the kinds of problems that people experience. They’ve evolved over the decades, but especially since 9-11 and the near-depression that began in the fall of 2008. But many therapists aren’t in synch with the impact of that shift. They fail to understand how 21st Century conditions impact emotional lives and conflicts. Many are clueless about how life in today’s world interweaves with the dysfunctions or family conflicts that patients bring with them into their adult lives.

The third reason is the therapists’ vision of the goals of treatment; what a healthy outcome or resolution of conflicts should look like, and how to get there. Many remain stuck within an older model – helping patients better manage, cope with or adjust to change and traumas; build resilience and restore equilibrium. But that’s no longer possible: Our new environment is one of “non-equilibrium” and unpredictability. That creates new emotional and life challenges across the board — for intimate relationships, careers and for engaging with a changing society – the “remix” that America is now becoming.

The Psychotherapist – Past and Present

The early analysts were pioneers, adventurous explores of uncharted terrain. They were trying to uncover how human personality and unconscious passions evolve within people to create symptoms and dysfunctions. They courageously risked their careers when they called attention to the impact of repressed sexuality. Aside from the accuracy of early theories about the causes of emotional disturbance, the practitioners’ aim was to reduce suffering. They wanted to help people develop more love, reason and independence – albeit within the context of the norms of their era that they, themselves, accepted.

Moreover, most were well-read in literature, history and culture, more so than today’s practitioners. That gave them a broad outlook and perspective on life. For example, Freud’s writings are filled with references from Shakespeare, Goethe and other great works of literature, drama and mythology. He drew on their themes, plots and character portrayals to help illuminate and understand the motives and moral dilemmas underlying his patients’ emotional problems.

Most contemporaries and followers of Freud possessed a radical spirit. They wanted to uncover the truth beneath patient’s symptoms; see beneath the surface. They shared the view that successful treatment was based on a love of the truth; that is, emotional reality. And that it must preclude any kind of sham, deception or illusion.

Of course, Freud and his contemporaries interpreted their patients’ problems in many ways that were flawed. They made assumptions about psychological health that were part of the prevailing values and norms of post-Victorian, early-20th Century society – a largely patriarchal culture. For example, most assumed that a normal, successful life derived from being well-adjusted to those norms.

Nevertheless, their spirit of truth-seeking, rooted in broad understanding of human culture, literature and history, has become lost. Today’s practitioners tend to be technicians, looking for the right technique that will treat the patient’s symptoms. Many tend to be cautious, often disengaged and detached people in their manner and interactions with patients. They are largely ignorant of philosophical, religious, cultural and socio-economic forces that shape people’s psychological development, especially those in non-Western societies. And yet, all of those forces in all parts of the globe profoundly impact how and why we learn to think and behave as we do. Much current world conflict reflects those differences that define what we think in “normal” or “disturbed.”

Many therapists today simply assume that adjusting to prevailing values and norms reflects psychological health. Now that’s desirable for those whose conflicts have disabled them from minimally successful functioning. But it misses the mark for those whose conflicts are linked with their successful adaptation to begin with. The therapist then fails to explore their patients’ definition of “success” – how it’s shaped their career and life goals, their conflicts and disappointments.

Some therapists will spend inordinate time ferreting out tiny truths about the patient’s family and childhood, without figuring out which have relevance to the person’s conflicts today, and which don’t. They may ignore the impact of trade-offs and compromises patients made as they created their sexual and intimate relationship patterns

Overall, today’s practitioners tend to share in, rather than critique and examine, the social norms, values and anxieties of today’s world. Too often, they uncritically accept good functioning per se, and conventional values like power-seeking, as psychologically healthy. This blinds them from recognizing that “normal” adjustment can mask repressed feelings of self-betrayal, self-criticism, and the desire to be freer, more alive. All of those longings can conflict with or oppose parental expectations or the pressures from social class membership.

Emotional Conflicts In Today’s World

People’s problems have evolved. Up through World War II and into the 1950s-early 60s symptoms that were more typical of Freud’s time — hysteria or specific phobias, for example – diminished. People wanted help for fitting in with the apparent paths to success and happiness and for dealing with conflicts that interfered with or limited it. Therapy often addressed things like guilt, inhibition, the need for approval, and dealing with the conflicts generated by defined, rigid roles for men and women. Desires or longings that deviated too much from the prevailing norms were troublesome and created conflicts, often unconscious.

The popular TV show “Mad Men” is a good portrayal of conflicts of that era, especially issues of identity, longing for an authentic self and gender roles. At the same time, the men enjoyed the surface appearance of power and control. And women chafed against the limits imposed by gender roles, as the women’s movement began to arise.

The period of social upheaval of the late 60s and 70s created more openly conscious conflict and struggle for many people. The theme, here, was seeking more freedom from oppressive relationships and social constraints. Some therapists were able to address these issues in helpful ways. But others were bound by their own uncritical embrace of the very norms their patients wanted help to free themselves from.

Partly because of that disconnect, many psychotherapy patients were attracted to the vision of personal development offered by the rising “new age” movement, although its gurus generally lacked any depth of understanding about emotional conflicts or psychological development.

Then, from the 1980s to about 2000 more men and women sought help to create more personally fulfilling, engaged relationships, and more personal meaning from their work. The costs and limits of success became visible in patients who wanted help to create greater work-life “balance” while preserving their relationships and their upward climb in their careers. Dealing with the emotional fallout of the dot-com bubble burst added another dimension to these stresses. During this period of greater fulfillment-seeking, more people turned to spiritual development as a companion to or substitute for traditional therapy, especially via older traditions like Buddhism and other Eastern practices.

And now, in the current era, emotional conflicts spring more from the psychological impact of our nonlinear, unpredictable, highly interconnected world. For example, financial and career uncertainties. Changing practices in romantic/sexual relationships. Facing one’s responsibilities to fellow inhabitants of the planet, and for sustaining the planet for future generations. The psychological impact of these issues interacts with the legacy of family conflicts and their dysfunctions that people carry with them into the adult world. It’s a new universe of potential pain and confusion that people are now struggling with.

What Helps?

Therapists need a vision of what healing and emotional health looks like, today, and how to help the patient achieve it. And therapists must engage in self-examination about their own values and attitudes. That’s one safeguard against rationalizing failure to help their patients examine these same issues within themselves. Otherwise, the therapist may collude with a patient to avoid confronting issues relevant to both of them. Then, it becomes like a Shakespearian play where the motives of the characters are visible to members of the audience, but the characters themselves remain oblivious to their unconscious motives that propel them along.

Therapists bear a responsibility to help patients uncover the deeper truth about their life dilemmas – not just continue to detail all of its manifestations. Like the branches of a tree, all of them spring from the same trunk, the same roots. For one person, that might be a deep, unconscious desire to remain protected and secure like a baby. Or a desire to destroy one’s father or mother. It could be intense lust for power and domination. Exposing and confronting that core of truth can be liberating, like in fairy tales when the power of the evil spirit is broken when you can call it by its name. At least you then have an opportunity to do something about it.

Being a more personally engaged therapist is also important today. People are increasingly turned off by therapists who maintain the old manner of silence and detachment. Or whose rigid focus invokes in patients the same unmet longings for nurturance and acceptance that patients may have experienced in their families to begin with.

The traditional practice is for the therapist to divulge little or nothing about him or herself. That’s been fading, especially in a Google world. More are drawn to people like the psychiatrist played by Gabriel Byrne on “In Treatment.” While that TV show has elements of a soap opera and the therapy sessions often sound like “life-management” discussions, the psychiatrist shows more openness and flexibility with his patients.

The viewer sees him as a human, himself, struggling with his own personal issues. People like that openness. It’s more consistent with psychoanalyst Steven Kuchuck’s comment about Merkin’s article in The New York Times. He described the greater appeal and benefit of practitioners who emphasize “…greater patient-analyst collaboration, the analyst’s selective self-disclosure and other techniques designed to address many of the concerns and limitations Merkin has experienced…”

In addition to personal qualities, therapists who are familiar with the broad impact of our post-9-11, post-economic meltdown world on people’s mental health are better positioned to help their patients. In addition to knowing that people’s emotional issues are tightly interwoven with global political, social and economic forces as I described above, it’s helpful for therapists to be tuned-in to demographic and other changes that are pulling many in our culture to move beyond motives of purely self-interest, and towards serving the common good.

Similarly, too many practitioners tend to be sadly uniformed about the realities of life in business and career world — the political realities, the politics and conflicting agendas; the challenges of transparency, collaboration, and innovation — all needed for success. Without that awareness it’s hard for them to differentiate problems that people bring with them from in their attachment issues and family relationships, from those that are reactive to confusing, demoralizing, non-linear challenges and constantly shifting goal posts in their workplace.

It’s also valuable for therapists to be current with new research relevant to dealing with today’s conflicts. Two recent examples: One finds that people who maintain a long-range perspective of their past, present and future are better able to navigate through turmoil or setbacks and maintain greater well-being. Another study finds that some adversity in life actually contributes to mental health and resiliency.

The upshot of all this is that you need to be an informed consumer of therapy. To aid that, here are some useful questions to ask:

About Your Therapist:

• Does the therapist seem to enjoy his/her work? Sound bored or depressed?
• Does he or she convey a sense of humor?
• Does he or she seem to have a broad, understanding perspective about the variety of human lives?
• What experience and knowledge does he or she have regarding the impact of work and careers on people’s lives? Be wary if the therapist indicates that such familiarity is irrelevant to treatment.

About Yourself:

• Do you feel challenged by your therapist to look at yourself, but within a safe, respectful, non-judgmental environment?
• Do you feel the therapist is capable of “seeing” you; your hidden truths?
• Do you think the therapist is engaged and interested in helping you, as opposed to treating a diagnostic category?

Keep in mind that everybody has some barriers to facing and dealing with unpleasant truths about themselves. You might rationalize your own and conclude that you’re dealing with a bad therapist. Try to be open and honest with your perception. Use your intuition, but in consort with your reason. Don’t’ hesitate to discuss these questions and your response to them with the therapist.

In Part 1 of this post I wrote that the reality of life today includes much confusion, uncertainty, and confused emotions about pursuing success and wellbeing. In fact, our tumultuous, changing world spurs actions that often undermine rather than support psychological health. That’s visible in the dysfunction and unhappiness emerging from the choices, decisions and overall way of life of many people, today.

Based on current research and new thinking about resiliency and psychological health, I suggested three practices for “rebooting” your life in today’s environment: Self-awareness (“Wake Up”); envisioning your life circumstances with out-of-the-box perspectives (“Lose Your Mind”); and actions that support positive growth rather than stagnation (“Push The Envelope”).

In Part 2 I propose that you combine “rebooting” your life in those ways with a life “remix.” That is, create an intent to activate six important dimensions of your life, each with a new, clear purpose. The “remix” reflects the holistic reality that everything you do in each “part” of your life affects and is affected by every other “part.” A life “remix” in the dimensions I describe below helps you evolve in healthy, proactive ways. And the latter is a necessity for positive, resilient living within this fluid and uncertain world that we now inhabit.

The Six Dimensions:

Here’s what you do:

• Formulate specific new goals for each of the following six interconnected dimensions of life. Each should be modest; that is, realistic and able to be achieved within a reasonable time-frame that you specify and commit to.

• Then, describe some specific actions you can begin taking right now that support each of the goals.

The six dimensions are:

• Intellectual – Identify a subject area for new learning of any kind. It should have some intellectual or knowledge component, but could consist of something involving motor skills or a non-cognitive subject as long as it has some mental component.

• Emotional — Choose an emotional experience or capacity that you want to strengthen. For example, greater empathy; more attention to inner emotional life; diminished anger or frustration; more self-exposure in your daily interactions.

• Relational – Define some feature or quality of an existing or potential relationship that you want to strengthen. Perhaps with a family member, a friend, or even strangers you may deal with. Examples might include becoming a better friend; being a better listener to someone you care about; being a more loving parent.

• Creative — Pick one area in which you want to develop or enhance your creative expression. The “product” that emerges is unimportant; no one is going to judge it. Just work at doing it, as an expression of something that you find creative. Preferably, it should be something that’s not directly work-related.

• Spiritual — Choose some activity through which you build a stronger sense of purpose and meaning in your life; something that transcends your day-to-day, “outer life” material existence. The goal is strengthening your sense of connection with God, if you are a believer; or unity with the Cosmos, the “One;” or whatever frame of reference you prefer.

• Physical — Select an objective for improving your physical health. It may be a new goal, or one that helps you move towards optimal health. Be mindful of the mind-body-spirit connection.

How Your “Remix” Integrates Your Life

Most people discover two things as they work on this. First, each new goal affects and is affected by what you’re doing in each of the others dimensions. They are synergistic. Therefore, your goals and your action-steps towards them steadily build greater integration and connectionwithin yourself; and they build greater integration between your mind-body-spirit and the other “parts” of your life. Here are some examples of what that can look like:

Bob chose a relational goal: he wanted feel more engaged, more connected with the needs and life dilemmas of family members and friends. This, in turn, impacted his spiritual goal — building a greater sense of purpose and meaning, beyond his career achievements, by service to a religious institution. And that, in turn, strengthened his actions that supported his physical goal – which was to lose some weight and respect his body more. That is, these connections helped him see that he was striving to feel at his best, overall, through self-directing and integrating his life in new ways.

Another example: Richard crated an emotional goal: strengthening his empathy towards colleagues and subordinates at work. He saw that he couldn’t do that while maintaining the same old patterns in his relationship with his wife — he had become less sensitive to her emotional needs. This gap became more visible and uncomfortable to him. His emotional goal impacted his relational goal. That is, he began to step “outside” of himself, and saw things more from his wife’s perspective and experiences, not just through the lens of his ego-self.

By opening himself more to his wife, intimacy grew. And she responded with greater openness, herself. But more than that, they began to feel more closely attuned, spiritually; on the same wavelength. So for Richard, his emotional goal also strengthened his spiritual goal, as well.

Tina established a creative goal: to take a painting class. This opened up new sources of pleasure and beauty in her life. It also introduced her to some new people and generated more vitality, overall. Consequently, she began feeling happier interacting with her partner. The products of her creative goal spilled over into the relational dimension of her life. She experienced a “remix” of pleasure and fulfillment from different sources.

Similarly, Jeff decided to learn flower-arranging as his creative goal. It became such fun for him that he became more emotionally expressive and lively in his relationship with his wife — which was his emotional goal. It also increased his desire for more knowledge about botany – which was an intellectual goal. And it strengthened intimacy with his wife, hisrelational goal.

Robin’s intellectual goal was to read one book per month in a particular subject area she had long-standing interest in. With more ideas now circulating in her head, she had more to talk about with her husband. In fact, she realized that she had ideas and thoughts in a lot of areas that she had not been sharing with him. So her intellectual goal cross-fertilized her relational goal.

From learning to “reboot” and “remix” your life, you strengthen your capacity to build greater psychological health and resiliency in this post-9-11 world. Growing and integrating these six dimensions of your life forms a kind of latticework of new growth.  It activates your natural drive towards wholeness and positive adaptation to change. It helps you retrieve your capacity for resiliency from immobilization and uncertainty…and the latter are so easy to sink into when dealing with the pressures, material values and fears that are part of life today.

Many people today don’t like what they see when they look into that mirror. Especially when so much feels out of control: Economic decline with no end in sight; social and political changes that can feel frightening, even threatening; career uncertainty; relationships unraveling under stress; climate disasters, both man-made and natural. All of these events impact your mental health and overall well being, as research and survey data show: Emotional, physical and social symptoms are rising, such depression and anxiety, obesity, demagoguery from media personalities like Glen Beck, emotional disturbance in the workplace…the list goes on.

All of that can make you feel frozen in today’s world. How can you find a psychologically healthy path into the future, in the midst of such confusion and turmoil? And, within a cultural and political environment that feeds self-serving, shortsighted behavior?

I’ve been addressing the impact of living in our new world upon people’s emotional health on my posts for this blog, Progressive Impact.  In this post, I suggest three ways to “reboot” you life in positive ways, within today’s unpredictable, interdependent and often scary world.

Wake Up!

Common lore is that it’s harmful to wake up a person who’s sleepwalking, but that’s not true. And when you’re sleepwalking in your life, it’s especially crucial to wake up to some important truths. They include what really drives your life, your values, your beliefs and your conflicts. That is, what lies behind the denials, rationalizations, and social fictions you’ve created or bought into along the way. Keep in mind that we all have hidden drivers; it’s part of growing up as a human.

So, it’s important to wake up. That means facing and working at rectifying what’s unexamined or unresolved in your life that’s caused difficulties for you. These are mostly unconscious and usually products of old childhood and family-based conflicts. People tend to repeat and reenact them through adulthood. As Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead – in fact, it’s not even past.”

In addition to old traumas are the consequences of having taken a wrong path in life; a decision that you may now regret, perhaps one that was based on fear. That can also keep you locked in place and less flexible today.

No question, waking up to painful truths can feel frightening or humiliating. But it’s the road to “rebooting” your life. It might mean confronting feelings of deep self-loathing. Or recognizing shame about expressing your needs, perhaps because your parents affirmed only the desires they approved of. It might mean facing up to a character trait you’ve been blind to, like arrogance or contempt. Therapy can help with these issues, when they are particularly troublesome. But you can also practice honest self-examination on your own.

A marketing executive I worked with awakened to the fact that she was chronically drawn to relationships in which she felt invalidated and unaffirmed – both with lovers and bosses – just as she felt as a child, when she was treated indifferently by her mother and rejected by her father. Awakening like that can activate feelings of rage, loss, and disappointment. They might come from realizing what was done to you, and from what you did to yourself. But if you don’t awaken, you could seal your fate. Like this woman had been doing, you might keep reenacting old themes over and over, telling yourself new versions of the same old lies (“This time, with him/her, it’s going to be different!”).

Another part of waking up is learning about your inborn temperament and how that impacts your sensitivities and needs. For example, how much or how little social interaction you enjoy; your reactions to light and sound. Learning how to penetrate through the cultural and gender attitudes you acquired as you grew into adulthood is also important. For example, our culture has taught that “success” in relationships and work is equivalent to possession and control – getting it or submitting to it. This has created all sorts of emotional problems, individually and socially, especially when “failure” results. Take a look at how devastated people can feel when they suffer a career setback. And that experience has become even more intensified since the economic downturn began in the fall of 2008.

Lose Your Mind

Henry Miller once wrote, “Don’t try to change the world….change worlds!” He was referring to the liberating experience of looking at your life situation from a very different perspective than your usual one. I’ve described this shift in previous posts as a way to create new solutions to relationship conflicts. But more broadly, “losing your mind” can be helpful for creating new ways of seeing and thinking about your life in many ways, especially when you feel frozen or stagnant.

For example, envision what it would look like to behave differently in a situation that’s confusing or causing conflict. Picture yourself in a movie, where you’re creating different scenarios, alternative “takes” for the same scenes. Or, imagine yourself as the character in a novel….and you’re writing the story as it proceeds. Just picturing in your mind alternative ways of seeing yourself can free up the new energy you need for making changes.

One example: Jane, a media executive, sought help for dealing with a new, faltering relationship. Her emotional mindset was such that she viewed herself “the problem” because of what she assumed was her “chronic insecurity.” With help to visualize a different “take” of her story, she looked at her insecurity not as a deformity but as her response to her partner when he withdrew from conflict. That is, her insecurity was the product of something she brought to her relationships, as well as the kind of man she was drawn to, to begin with. She also saw parallels in chronic conflicts with some co-workers on her team. Waking up to the roots of her own issues, combined with shifting her view of those chronic situations, opened up new possibilities for growth and change in her relationships.

Creating a different mindset can also help when you have a setback or loss in your career. For example, a senior executive who had enjoyed a stellar career was suddenly faced with “failure,” when he was let go in the current economic downturn. He felt depressed and rudderless. One thing that helped him was to create a different picture of what had make him successful in the past; different from the career roles that he had defined himself by, previously. Using the analogy of the children’s toy, Lego Blocks, he visualized himself as a set of strengths and capacities. Those were the keys to his previous career success. They could be reconfigured and redeployed in different ways – just as you can use Lego Blocks to make different objects – and therefore create success in other kinds of roles than his previous one.

To use a very non-psychological term, “wisdom” begins to accrue as you practice “Waking Up” and “Losing Your Mind.” That’s because the more you see, the more you can understand and create more effective actions in response to what you understand. Wisdom reflects a broader set of perspectives, sort of like the expanded vision you have, looking from the top of a tall building vs. when you’re standing on the street. That helps you with the next practice for rebooting your life – making deliberate shifts in your behavior.

Push The Envelope

Becoming more self-aware and shifting your mindset about your life are the foundation for positive change. But then you have to apply them to how you behave in daily life.

One way to trigger positive change is to put yourself in new environments, situations or relationships that require you to stretch; to create new behavior consistent with how you want to change or grow.  For example, a man who had become aware of arrogant and superior attitudes that he’d been demonstrating towards others, wanted to change. He committed to growing his capacity for empathy towards others, and knew it would take some work. One avenue for building greater empathy was undertaking volunteer work that, in effect, “required” him to practice compassion and giving. That behavior was like strengthening a muscle. The more he “exercised” it, the more it grew.

Keep in mind that “rebooting” your life comes at a price: All of your actions from the past remain a part of you. But that doesn’t have to be a negative.  In fact, they can inform you about what you need to rectify or build on in order to redirect your life today. When you awaken, shift your mindset, and undertake new actions, you’re also incorporating all the consequences of your past. That’s part of creating greater wisdom in the present.

For example, some people were damaged by ignorant, abusive, or narcissistic parents. Some voluntarily hurt themselves, as well, by foolish actions or decisions. Positive change in your life is fueled by integrating and accepting responsibility for all of that. Forgiveness and compassion towards yourself and others is key. Without it, you don’t grow. You’ll remain like a computer program that’s become frozen.

Learning from the consequences of your past helps you restart and grow, whether in your relationships or any other part of your life. In fact, every moment is a new opportunity to “reboot.” And as you do that you create the foundation for a “remix” – which I’ll describe in Part 2.