In previous posts I’ve written about the roots of that seemingly inevitable decline and what helps. But there’s another part of relationship failure or loss that can be a basis of new growth. Let me explain. Over the decades I’ve witnessed countless examples of people drawn into new relationships that are simply new versions of previous, failed relationships — old wine in new flasks. And inevitably, disaster is lying in wait, right down the road. I think that often happens when an important part of the foundation for a positive, sustainable romantic and sexual relationship is neglected or overlooked.

That is, mental health practitioners focus a great deal on building better mechanics of listening, mirroring to each other, techniques of communication and compromise, and so on. All good stuff. But what can go missing is a deeper learning, emotionally and spiritually: Learning not only what went wrong in your past, failed relationships; but also learning from the residue of the loss and using that awareness in your future relationships. That means incorporating the meaning of the loss or failure into the fabric of your life, and identifying what you need to learn from it as you go forward.

That missing ingredient came to mind recently while reading an essay by a woman who encountered the son of an early, lost love. Reading it stirred up an old memory, as I described in a previous post, in a different context.

As a young boy growing up in upstate New York, I sometimes roamed through some nearby woods and fields. As I did that one bright summer afternoon I came upon a large tree – perhaps an elm or poplar. I noticed that its trunk had a deep scar, and looked like it had been struck by lightning some years before.

That came to mind, for reasons I’ll explain later, reading Lee Montgomery’s essay, “First Love, Once Removed.” She describes a drop-in visit by the son of her first lover, with whom she had many romantic and adventurous experiences in her early youth, during the 1970s.

She writes, “When I think of Ian, I think of endless days hanging out in the woods and fields around our New England prep schools, sucking dope out of a metal chamber pipe. Ian showed me the world and taught me to live in it. New York City. The Great West. And Europe, where we lived for several months during his first college year abroad. He was socially connected and wealthy, two things I was not. For a long time, it didn’t matter.”

Eventually, their relationship ended. No surprise, for two 18 year-olds. She went on with her life: “I went to college, fell in love again (and again), married, went to graduate school and made a career. For his part, Ian….inherited a lot of money, moved out West, married, had no career that I knew of and shot himself when he was in his 30s.”

His son, who was quite young at the time his father committed suicide, was now about the age Montgomery was when she and his father were lovers. She describes his dropping by her office one day, hoping to hear some stories of what his father was like. The memories felt and alive as she drew into them and spoke with her young lover’s son about his father: “Sitting across a booth studying this young man, I was overwhelmed. So many years later, I was stunned to find the feeling of first love still there….We were really happy once. My word, imagine to be that age, in love and alive.”

Montgomery’s poignant essay brought to mind the importance of facing the enduring loss of love and connection. It affects us permanently, and that can be a good thing. No matter whether it was because the two of you grew in different directions as you enter adulthood life, or from failure to build on what you once shared together. Nor does it matter if the relationship ended because of something you did that harmed or damaged the relationship. None of those experiences can be undone. Nor should they.

Their legacy becomes woven into the larger tapestry of your life, even as that tapestry enlarges over time. The challenge is to incorporate all of it; learn about yourself from all of your experiences, especially what didn’t work or what was negative…or else keep repeating new versions of it.

That’s what brought to mind the old tree trunk I saw as a young boy. Damaged where the lightning had struck, I noticed that the trunk had continued to grow around it and gradually encompassed the damaged part within it. It was like oneself: Even if you continue to grow and change, learn from your experiences and continue on with your life, your losses nevertheless remain part of you…. always there, a visible, enduring part of you. But by embracing that reality, loss of failure in love can be a good thing for your future relationships; if you can learn to integrate it and meld it into your ongoing life journey, your personal “evolution.”

Here’s a way you can begin learning from your failed or lost love relationships. I call it doing a Relationship Inventory.

Start by making a list of your major romantic relationships. Then:

• For each one, reflect on and write down what attracted you to that person, at that particular time of your life. What were the qualities of that person that aroused your interest? Why those qualities? What were your life circumstances at the time? What role did those play? Include family influences, as well as the impact of what you thought love was, at that time. How would you assess your own level of development or awareness at that time?

• Describe in one or two paragraphs what you think happened during the relationship that led to its end, from today’s perspective. That is, from the vantage point of what you know about yourself today.

• Write down what you think you learned – or were unable to learn at that time – about yourself from that relationship.

• How did that help – or could have helped, had you been more aware at the time — evolve your capacity for a positive, sustaining relationship?

• How can you use that knowledge and awareness now, with your current – or next-relationship?

In a previous post I wrote that a key pathway to psychological health and resiliency in today’s world is learning to “forget yourself.” This post describes ways to do that in three important realms of your life – your work, your personal relationships, and your life “footprint.”

In the earlier post I explained that “forgetting yourself” doesn’t mean neglecting your own legitimate needs or concerns. Rather, it means letting go of our human tendency to overly dwell on ourselves – our own concerns, needs, desires, slights, complaints about others, and so on. Psychological health and resiliency in today’s world grows when you can do that and put your energies in the service of something larger than yourself: problems, needs and challenges that lie beyond your own personal, narrow self-interest.

That may sound like a paradox, but it’s based on a new reality: Today’s world is changing more rapidly than you can imagine and is becoming immensely interdependent, interconnected, unpredictable and unstable. In this new environment you can’t create or sustain a positive, healthy life through the old ways of reactive resiliency, of coping and hoping to rebound.

That is, chronic unhappiness, dysfunction and overt emotional disturbance lie in store for those who remain too locked into thinking about themselves and who use old solutions to achieve success in relationships and at work. For example, trying to achieve power and domination over others, and thinking you can hold on to that. Fearing collaboration and avoiding mutuality with people who are different from yourself, or with whom you have differences. Looking for ways to cope with stress and restore equilibrium or “balance” in your life. And overall, being absorbed by your own conflicts, disappointments and the like. The latter are inevitable, and dwelling on them is a breeding ground for resentment, jealousy, and blame. That’s a dead-end. The consequences are visible in people who are unable to handle career downturn, who experience mounting relationship conflicts and who suffer from a range of psychological problems like depression, boredom, stress, anxiety and self-undermining behavior.

In contrast, positive resiliency in today’s environment is the byproduct when you aim towards common goals, purposes or missions larger than just your own narrow self-interests. That keeps you nimble, flexible, and adaptive to change and unpredictable events that are part of our new era. Then, you’re creating true balance, between your “outer” and “inner” life.

Here are three ways you can move through self-interest. Each describes a shift, or evolution from the older, reactive form of resilience to the new, proactive form:

Upgrade your career to the 4.0 version; Practice “Harnicissism;” and Become a Good Ancestor

Yeah, I know — those descriptions sound odd. In future posts I’ll elaborate on each of them. But this overview will help stimulate your thinking about what they look like in everyday life.

Upgrade To Career 4.0 The most savvy men and women already know that today’s workplace requires a high level of collaboration with very diverse people. You need to align your talents and skills with common objectives, whether a product or service. That means diminishing your ego in the service of teamwork towards that larger purpose, while constantly looking for opportunities for learning, growth and impact. In essence, that’s the 4.0 career upgrade.

To oversimplify for the sake of contrast, the 1.0 career is doing whatever kind of work is necessary to survive. The 2.0 orientation is what most people think of as “careerism” – aiming for increasing personal power, authority and position within an organization. The rise of Career 3.0 during the last 20 years reflected a desire for more personal meaning and sense of purpose through work.

The more recent emergence of the 4.0 orientation goes beyond the self-focus of 3.0. It’s a shift away from self-promotion and purely personal ambitions – whether for increasing authority or personal “happiness” – and towards effective, creative contribution to goals larger than the purely personal. It means looking for ways to have impact on something that matters, as you continue to learn and grow your capacities and talents.

From the 4.0 perspective, you move through self-interest, not into it. You’re tuned in to the larger picture, in which you’re one player, while finding ways to make a positive contribution to the service or product. It includes being aware of how you’re perceived by others, and looking for ways to be collaborative rather than self-promoting at others’ expense. As a CEO recently commented, “the definition of success is the company, not an individual.”

Practice “Harnicissism”

Don’t go looking it up, because there’s no such word. I made it up to describe the second pillar. “Harnicissism” is shorthand for learning to harness your narcissism. I don’t mean that everyone is narcissistic in the pathological sense. Most people have tendencies towards self-interest and self-absorption, and those are often reinforced and promoted by cultural norms and values. They impact and distort our romantic and sexual relationships, as I’ve written in another post here. Those same tendencies cripple effective interactions and relationships in general, and will undermine positive resiliency.

But in fact, research shows that we’re not innately narcissistic. So, a second pillar of resiliency in today’s world is leading yourself towards mutuality and equality – “power with” rather than “power over” – people in your sphere of relationships. From the perspective of “Harnicissism” you’re aware that you’re serving a larger purpose than just your own agenda: the “third entity,” the relationship itself. It’s that third entity that supports and strengthens your intimate relationship, that with your children, co-workers, or groups that you’re a member of.

The shift, here, is from primarily self-interest, towards openness and mutuality in service of a shared goal. For example, it’s a shift away from maneuvering, dominating or subtly manipulating to get your own way; to get your own needs and desires met at the expense of the other person — or even, as is often the case — at the expense of the relationship itself.

You can practice “Harnicissism” through transparent exposure and two-way openness, as opposed to being in relationships that are transactional and commercial, operating with a “return of investment” philosophy. In fact, research shows that more effective, productive relationships are forged through cooperation and mutual support rather than by power struggles. Those actions are fueled by both empathy and “indifference,” as I described in previous posts.

Become A Good Ancestor

This third pillar of resilience refers to everyday actions that help support a healthy, sustainable planet – for your own life, your children, your community, and all humans, around the globe. Others who come after you will live with the “footprint” you leave behind. That’s why I call this pillar becoming a “good ancestor.”

That is, growing recognition of climate change, along with climate disasters like the Gulf oil eruption and political upheaval around the world has raised awareness that everyone’s well-being, security and future way of life are highly interconnected. We’ve all become global citizens. Your individual actions and “footprint” will impact the health of the planet and the lives people who come after you.

Becoming a good ancestor represents a shift from selfish consumption of resources, from fear of others who are different, towards actions that help sustain the health and well-being of both the human community and the planet. For example, it’s harder to enjoy and consume pleasures for yourself when you’re highly aware of the suffering of others, whether from famine, natural disasters, polluted water, torture. All such events circle back to impact each of us. Actions that help you become a good ancestor strengthen your own capacity to deal with the disruptions and upheavals that are in store for all of us; with being able to handle a “non-equilibrium world with flexibility and positive actions.

All three of these pillars of resiliency rest upon being able to “forget yourself” in the ways I’ve described. They are the vehicle for acting with empathy, a broadened perspective, and sense of responsibility for not only yourself and immediate relationships, but for the human community and the planet. When you “forget yourself” through flexible, focused actions, you’re better able to experience stability, success and well-being through tumultuous times, like a gyroscope that keeps a ship stable through choppy waters.

Facing what that means can be painful. It may even feel relationship-threatening. But doing so can open the door to strengthening the true foundation of your relationship: Your vision of life. That refers to what you’re really living and working for, both individually and as a couple.

That’s the fundamental core of a relationship, and it’s often overlooked or seldom discussed. When you do face it you may discover that you and your partner were never in synch about your vision of life. Or, that you may have gone off on different tracks over time. When either is the case, you end up seeing different things altogether.

That’s a crucial problem because your core vision of life will increasingly impact your long-term health and well-being in today’s world, whether you’re in a relationship or not. We’re now living in a totally interconnected, unpredictable, “non-equilibrium” world. My 35 years as a psychotherapist and business psychologist convinces me that our new era requires a new and revised picture of psychological health and positive resiliency — what it looks like and what helps build it – to support your outward success and internal well-being in the years ahead.

My previous posts about the impact of the New Resiliency on intimate relationships have focused on sustaining or rebuilding building positive connection, emotional intimacy and sexuality in our new era. These are important, but the underlying foundation for long-term vitality and connection is a couple’s shared vision of life. But typically, a couple doesn’t talk about it much, or may gloss over it and assume they’re on the same page. Then, when they get into trouble in their daily relationship, they start looking for answers that don’t help.

That is, many couples spend a great deal of time, effort and money trying to improve their communication skills, listening skills, negotiation skills, their problem solving techniques and, in general, trying to learn how to make a marriage “work” for the long run. And yet, despite best intentions, the divorce rate continues to be about 50%. Increasing numbers choose to live together without marriage. And affairs appear to have entered the mainstream (Ashley Madison, the on-line site for people seeking affairs, now advertises on TV and has made a $25 million bid for naming rightsto the new Meadowlands stadium).

But the yearning for a relationship that sustains and deepens over time – even the desire for the elusive “soul mate” – remains strong. The continuing market for articles, books, blog posts and videos about how to make relationships work better is, in itself, evidence that none of these programs, strategies and techniques help very much. But it’s also confirmed by actual research. For example, social psychology researcher Bella DePaulo has documented the lack of evidence for the effectiveness of marriage skills programs in two recent Psychology Today blogs.

What’s Your Vision of Life?

I think the reason these programs don’t contribute much to building or sustaining intimacy and relationship “success” is that most of them focus on tweaking or modifying what I’ve described as a Functional Relationship. It’s what most couples descend into as they grapple with “balancing” work and life issues, raising children, paying bills, and so on. Their interaction becomes increasingly transactional, less energized and less interesting. Conflicts and power struggles begin to become part of daily life. As one spouse said to me, “I can’t remember why we got together in the first place.”

Couples will begin thinking that they’re seeing things differently, and if they can only learn how to adjust those differences – perhaps some creative compromises or better give-and-take – then they will have a successful future.

Not so. Not when the real problem is that you’re operating with different visions of life to begin with. Your vision includes:

• Your overall sense of purpose, of meaning.
• What you’re actually living and working for, or towards, in “real time.”
• What you’re strengthening or diminishing in your personality and values — knowingly or unknowingly — individually and as a couple, as you travel through life.

Here are some guides for you and your partner to help identify your life vision. Compare your answers to the questions and discuss what you discover

Seeing Your Current Life Path
First, set aside a block of time to talk with each other about your deepest desires and aspirations for your lives, individually and together. Listen to each other. Ask questions, but hold off commenting on or judging what you hear. Just learn from each other. Be as honest as you can.

Begin the dialogue with these questions:

• Why do you think you’re here, on this planet, at this moment in time?
• How did you come to do the kind of work you now do?
• Why do you continue to do it?
• What are your material goals vs. your spiritual, creative or relationship goals for your lifetime, as an individual and as a couple?
• What do the answers reveal about your desires, values, aspirations or fears?

Then, look at what you and your partner are aiming towards at this moment in your lives, in the context of your careers; your financial situation; your family, if you have growing children or ones already “launched;” or elderly parents who may need care and decision-making. For example:

• Children – Are you on the same page about what you want for your children, regarding education, summer enrichment programs, how you see their personalities, temperaments, interests, cognitive strengths, talents, etc.

• Financial – Describe each of your views of financial “needs” vs. “wants,” with respect to your desires for lifestyle, long-term security, use of assets over time, and the role of giving to others in your value system. Discuss where you and your partner mesh, where you don’t, and how to bridge the differences. Focus on the long-term, the decades ahead, and not just immediate circumstances.

• Geographic – To what extent are you both compatible with, and have a sense of connection with your geographic location? How important is this dimension to you? Where there are differences, how can you deal with them through compromise or adjustment over time?

Your Life Plan

• Do you serve anything larger than your own personal needs and wants? If not, where do you think that road will take you over time? If you do, what is it? Does what you serve or contribute to feel in synch with your true self, your talents, your values?

• Did you turn away from any passions or interests that pulled you when you were younger, and that you regret not having pursued? If so, how could you try to reclaim them?

• Make a list of any talents, experiences, unfulfilled creative needs, and challenges that you would like to incorporate into the next several years of your life.

• For each item on your list, write down what changes you would need to make in your career, personal life commitments or relationship, to make that occur.

• What are the resources you currently have; and what ones would you need to acquire to make those changes (education, financial, location, life-style, etc.)?

• How do these mesh with those of your partner? What do you do if they don’t?

Should Your Relationship Continue?

Now, the big one: Describe why you want to stay together, including the possibility that you don’t.

• Be open with each other about whether you want to continue your marriage or relationship as it currently exists. Is this the person you want to stay with the rest of your life? If so, explain why.

• If you have doubts, express them. Consider the possibility that the relationship you entered years ago, and within which you may have raised children, worked for that earlier purpose; but that it may no longer work for you today.

• If it doesn’t, how could the two of you reconstitute it to fit who each of you are at this point in your lives? Do you want to try? If not, can you end it respectfully?

Share with your partner what you come up with from all of the above exercises. Discuss where you’re in synch, and how to deal with where you’re not. Just asking these questions about your life vision will reveal important information about each other and about yourselves as a couple. That will tell you if you have a good foundation for a self-sustaining relationship — one that will be resilient in the face of the unknowns and changes that are waiting for you down the road….and you know there are going to be plenty of them!

That memory came to mind recently, while reading two recent New York Times articles about loss and love.  They appeared on the same day, and reflected two very different kinds of life events. Yet I think they go together, in a way.

One was the “Modern Love” column in Sunday Styles, titled “Affirmation, Etched in Vinyl,” by Connie May Fowler.  It was about the loss of her father from a heart attack, when she was six years old. Both parents appear flawed, apparently alcoholic.  But Fowler describes her mother as having been intent on portraying her father as malignant.  She writes that

“…most of what I knew of him came from my mother, who considered him the embodiment of evil.”

And most significantly,

“…My father’s death stole many things from me, including the sound of his voice.”

Ever since, she had longed to be able to know and hear what his voice sounded like.  Well, it turns out that her father had somewhat of a career as a country and western singer.

“The lack of any memory of my father’s true living voice was all the more perplexing to me because before my birth, my father, Henry May, had enjoyed a reasonably successful run as a country-western musician. He had a television show in Jacksonville, Fla. He and his band, Henry May and his Rhythm Ramblers, were a major draw all along Florida’s northeast coast.”

In her essay, Fowler describes her search for a record that he had made along the way, as she looked in old record bins and on e-bay, over the years.  Then, one day, she received a message from a stranger who had learned of her search and, in fact, had a copy of her father’s record in his possession. At last, she might be able to hear his voice.  Here’s Fowler’s full story.

The other essay is “First Love, Once Removed,” by Lee Montgomery.  It describes a drop-in visit by the son of her first lover, with whom she had many romantic and adventurous experiences in her early youth, during the 1970s.

“When I think of Ian, I think of endless days hanging out in the woods and fields around our New England prep schools, sucking dope out of a metal chamber pipe. Ian showed me the world and taught me to live in it. New York City. The Great West. And Europe, where we lived for several months during his first college year abroad. He was socially connected and wealthy, two things I was not. For a long time, it didn’t matter.”

Eventually, their relationship ended.  No surprise, for two 18 year-olds.  She went on with her life, married, began a career.  He inherited money, married

“… had no career that I knew of and shot himself when he was in his 30s.”

The son, quite young at the time his father committed suicide, was now about the age Montgomery when she and his father were lovers.  He had dropped by her office hoping to hear some stories of what his father was like.  Montgomery’s essay describes how fresh and alive the memories felt to her, as she drew into them and spoke with her young lover’s son about his father:

“Sitting across a booth studying this young man, I was overwhelmed. So many years later, I was stunned to find the feeling of first love still there.”

The full article is here.

To me, these two essays read like bookends.  Both portray the enduring loss of love and connection and how it affects us, permanently.  No matter whether it comes from a child’s loss of a parent, from the ending of an adult love relationship at any age; or from an unexpected death.  Or, for that matter, if the loss results from something you did that harmed or damaged a relationship that was important to you. None of those experiences can be undone.  Their legacy becomes woven into the larger tapestry of your life, where it remains, even as that tapestry expands over time.

And that’s what brought to mind the old tree trunk.  Damaged where the lightning had struck, I noticed that the trunk had continued to grow around it and gradually encompassed the damaged part within it.  It was like ourselves: Even if we continue to grow and change, learn from our experiences and continue on with our lives, our losses nevertheless remains part of us…. always there, a visible, enduring part of our lives.

First, some clarification about what I mean by each term. “Hook-Up Sex” refers to just plain f***ing; that is, a purely physical encounter. “Marital Sex” is the kind of sex life that most committed couples tend to have — married or not, straight or gay. And “Making Love” is a different kind of experience that transcends both of the other two kinds.

That is, the three kinds of sexual relationships occur on different planes, different levels of integration between your physical, animal being, and your relational and spiritual beings. The kind of sexual life you have – and its conflicts – are embedded in the overall relationship you learn and how you “practice” it with your partner. I’ve described some of these connections in my previous posts, here and on my Psychology Today blog, on our adolescent model of love, the soul mate, and the positive power of “indifference.” Most relationships limit the capacity for “Making Love.”

Hook-Up Sex

“You know how there’s good sex, great sex, and then really great sex? That’s what it was like with her!” With gleaming eyes, Ken was telling me about his latest sexual encounter. He was a 44 year-old trust fund guy who lived with his mother and had never married. He entered therapy because he wanted to learn why he hadn’t been able to form a lasting relationship.

In Hook-Up Sex you and your partner use each other’s bodies for your own pleasure. It can be extremely intense and arousing, especially when you feel lust towards a new partner. There’s a place for this kind of sex, but it’s also the most primitive, least evolved form of sex. It reflects the purely animal part of being human — our physiological needs and impulses. We share those with other animal species. From a human standpoint, though, it’s mostly void of relationship beyond the physical connection; a form of playing through using each other’s bodies.

Aside from Ken’s deeper emotional issues that he’d never faced or dealt with, another barrier to his forming a relationship was that he had turned sex into a technique-dominated sport. He saw himself as a great lover and, in fact, had become very proficient in Tantric sexual practices. Handsome and charming, he was able to find women eager to participate. Tantric and related practices are, in fact, part of “Making Love,” but they can also be misused. Ken’s mastery of them had become an end in itself, and they were entirely divorced from human connection, beyond pure sex.

He was like a character in Nobel laureate Doris Lessing’s novel, The Four-Gated City, a man who had become a master of Tantric sex, but had devolved as a human being. He had no soul-to-soul connection with any of the women he drew into his serial sexual relationships.

Marital Sex

“Dr. LaBier,” she said, “I read that women require an average of 14 minutes of sexual stimulation to reach orgasm. Maybe that’s the problem – that Tom’s just not a good lover.”

Julie and her husband had descended into what I call a “functional relationship.” They didn’t have sex much anymore, and when they did it was pretty uninspired. They remained committed to each other, though, and wanted to improve their sex life. Their sex life was an example of what most long-term couples experience, as research and surveys have documented.

“Marital Sex” reflects a higher plane than “Hook-Up” sex because it includes some degree of emotional connection and intimacy. At least it does at the beginning of the relationship. But what tends to happen is what this couple experienced: Their sex life became entangled with the conflicts and disagreements that had accumulated over the years. They brought all of that into the bedroom with them.

For example, Julie didn’t talk very openly with Tom about what she wanted, sexually. She carried the residue of shame about revealing her sexual desires, shame that originated in her relationship with her mother. She was dealing with that in therapy, but that shame had joined with a still-existing view in our culture that a woman who expresses herself sexually must be a slut/whore. Moreover, Julie and Tom had descended into the low-level, adversarial power-struggle so typical of the functional relationship. So, learning new sex techniques or acquiring new sexual knowledge wasn’t going to elevate their sexual relationship beyond Marital Sex.

Sometimes Marital Sex includes a Hook-Up sexual experience – perhaps when on a vacation, or aided by ingesting substances, legal or illegal. And it shares with Hook-Up sex what sex therapist Joseph Kramer calls “balloon sex:” Building up tension, followed by release, mostly focused on the genitals. Nevertheless, Marital Sex is further along the continuum because it includes some degree of emotional, relational connection, in addition to sex. Couples who have Marital Sex like something about each other as people. Or at least they did at one time, when they first got together.

That relational connection is both good and bad. The good part is that your relationship is more humanly evolved, and contains the possibility of evolving towards Making Love. The bad part is that all the feelings, conflicts, non-mutual behavior, hiding out and manipulation characteristic of the adolescent model of love can seep into your sex life like a growing virus. For example, withholding sex as punishment, or using it as leverage for manipulating your partner in some way. Or projecting and reenacting all sorts of unresolved family, parental, and sibling issues in your relationship. Michael Vincent Miller described much of this in Intimate Terrorism, about the sex lives of modern couples bound by struggles for possession and power over the other. All of that usually leads to diminished sexual connection over time.

In short, couples that have Marital Sex play out in the bedroom everything unspoken and unresolved from outside the bedroom. Julie may have learned how long it takes to reach an orgasm, but she didn’t know much about what she and Tom need to do along the way to build a heightened, fulfilling and energized sexual relationship.

Making Love

For most people, their “normal” development into adult relationships cripples their capacity for moving beyond Marital Sex. But integrating what I call Radical Transparency and Words-Into-Actions with specific sexual practices can heighten energy, connection and excitement between partners on all levels of their relationship. Doing that is the path to the most evolved, integrated mind-body-spirit relationship: Making Love.

You might think of this as “spiritual sex,” but I think that term is too easily equated – mistakenly — with only ecstatic physical experience. And some recent research indicates that seeking just the experience of transcendent, physical sex can also increase the likelihood of unprotected sex. Instead, envision two partners whose sex life is interwoven with heightened mind, body, and spiritual connection.

That is, Tantric and similar Eastern practices like Qi gong will enhance conscious energy flow between partners and that “ego-less” state that people often long for. But your sexual relationship elevates to that higher plane only when you join that energy to the energy that comes from open communication and equality in your daily behavior with your partner. This integration focuses you and your partner on your shared journey through life on this planet, including larger issues about 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.”

The physical practices that are part of Making Love are aimed at building, increasing, and exchanging the sexual energy of your and your partner’s body. They are important pathways to elevating and steadily expanding pleasure throughout your entire body. In contrast to “balloon sex,” this form of sex broadens, deepens, expands and sustains arousal and positive tension between you and your partner. Orgasm is no longer the end-state to hurry towards. In fact, Making Love doesn’t even have to include genital intercourse. Couples who are unable to or who don’t have genital sex are still able to evolve towards the heightened mind-body-spiritual state of Making Love.

Most of the sexual techniques share a common core of meditative, breathing, and physical movement exercises with your partner, combined with extended foreplay. They help you let go of your ego-needs — for example, simply wanting to be given pleasure, or wanting to make your partner experience pleasure.

While sexual techniques build and increase energy exchange and flow, the quality and level of arousal and pleasure your and your partner experience sexually depends on the extent to which you’re doing building connection and arousal in the other parts of your relationship.

That is, when you treat each other as equal human beings within your daily relationship, 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 generates new energy and it enhances the sexual energy between the two of you.

There are many good sources of information and guidance for building heightened sexual engagement, equality and openness in your relationship – through books, videos and workshops. Some of the most substantial and useful include Margo Anand’s guides to Tantric practices; Kenneth Cohen’s detailed description of Qi gong sexuality; and Pepper Schwartz’s works, including building equality in relationships.

I think one of the best descriptions of Making Love is a passage in another of Doris Lessing’s works, the allegorical novel The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five. There, she describes the power of heightened sexual connection when it’s equal and reciprocal between two partners. In the story, the man was required to be apart from his new wife, during which time he became “ready” to learn equality and sensuality. Now, they meet again:

“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. There was no possible comparison between the heavily sensualities of that, and the changes and answerings of these rhythms. 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…and this on and on, 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 even as far as he could stand it, 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….

Striving for the Making Love type of sexual partnership keeps your relationship alive and growing. Couples who build such a relationship feel enduring connection and sustained passion. Their relationship becomes resilient through all of the changes and challenges that people face along the path of life. And it becomes a portal into continues spiritual evolution, individually and as a couple.

Well, OK, but take it back from what? And to what?

Well first, I think that many of those drawn to the Tea Party are genuinely concerned about the rising scope and size of government and want lower taxes.  Some have become fired up with rage about that (while also, of course, wanting to keep all the benefits and support that Big Government provides, as Louisiana Gov.Jindel recently discovered).

And some are so fired up that they just want to get rid of everybody on the Hill and the inhabitant of the White House – all those who are taking our country in the “wrong” direction.

But let’s take a look at what the Tea Party’s dominant ideology includes, with respect to what it thinks is the wrong course; what they advocate it it’s place; and, especially, what the Republican party is embracing as it bends over backwards to drink from the Tea Party’s cup (sorry for the mixed metaphors.)

Take Utah Republicans.  There’s a movement afoot to repeal the 17^th Amendment.  Having trouble remembering which one that is?  Well, it’s the one that gives people the right to vote for and select their Senators.  That’s right – elect their Senators.  Taking away that right is a favorite of Tea Party supporters, and they’re getting Republicans to join with them.

It gets better.  On the other side of the country, the Republican Party of Maine has adopted some Tea Party proposals of its own. It’s official platform calls for the elimination of the Department of Education and the Federal Reserve; demands an investigation of “collusion between government and industry in the global warming myth;” insists that “healthcare is not a right;” calls for the abrogation of the “UN Treaty on Rights of the Child” and the “Law Of The Sea Treaty;” and says we must resist “efforts to create a one world government.”  There’s more.  If you’re interested, here’s the whole thing.

The Maine Politics blog calls the official platform for the Republican Party of Maine “a mix of right-wing fringe policies, libertarian buzzwords and outright conspiracy theories.” It quotes Dan Billings, who’s served as an attorney for the Maine GOP, describing the new platform as “wack job pablum” and “nutcase stuff.”

In contrast to the claims of Tea Partiers around the country, Washington Post columnist E.J.Dionne has pointed out some actual facts.  He writes:

“…there was evidence on Tuesday that there are limits to the anti-government mood that is supposedly sweeping the country.  In Arizona — nobody’s idea of a liberal state — voters supported a temporary increase in the sales tax from 5.6 to 6.6 cents on the dollar, to raise $1 billion annually. This, coupled with a large tax increase on businesses and high-income earners endorsed by voters in Oregon earlier this year, suggests a pragmatic electorate that is far less reflexively opposed to taxes or government than Tea Party cheerleaders would have us believe.

He also points out that:

The most significant result for the fall was the Democrats’ success in holding the western Pennsylvania House seat left vacant by the death of John Murtha. Democrat Mark Critz won an impressive nine-point victory over Republican Tim Burns by distancing himself from Obama and liberal positions on guns and abortion, but also by running a relentlessly economic populist message on jobs and outsourcing.

Circling back to the rising star Rand Paul, the new candidate has also made it clear that he opposes the Civil Rights Act.  That’s the Act that most of the then-Republicans voted for, back in the days when Republicans were strong supporters of civil rights, back before the party morphed into a bastion of right-wing mostly southern white men.  Paul emphasizes that opposing the Civil Rights Act is not racist.  Go figure.

If you look at some hard data about what is, in fact, transforming our society, in contrast with what the Tea Party sees, it’s hard not to conclude that their appeal is to a small number of people and will remain a fringe movement.

Sometimes we become so convinced of our own convictions, when they are shared by others, that we seduce ourselves into seeing a movement that will transform the world.  There’s a long history to such delusions.

The sad consequence for our two-party system is that the Republican Party is allowing itself to upend it’s own principles and ideals as it tries to capture this “movement,” and thus risks marching into oblivion.

In a previous post, I wrote that your inner life is usually neglected, in contrast to your outer life.  I gave some guidelines for identifying and reducing the gaps between your inner and outer life.  That’s an important step towards building psychological health and resiliency that works in today’s 21^st Century world of heightened interconnection and instability.

Here, I’ll describe some specific steps you can take to strengthen your inner life and make it the driver of your decisions, choices, and actions within your outer life.

Think of your inner life as something you develop through practice, similar to building stronger muscles, or developing skill in a sport or play a musical instrument. Below are some inner life practices most anyone can do. The more you do, the better, because they reinforce each other.

Fill Your “Inner Reservoir”

• Sit quietly, without distraction. Observe your breaths as you breathe slowly, in and out. Count each breath as you exhale, from one to 10; then repeat. Twenty minutes daily is ideal, but if you do only five, that’s a good start.

An “entry-level” meditation-breathing practice, this one builds an emotional shock absorber.  It helps maintain centeredness and focus when dealing with your outer life demands and conflicts.

Some forms of meditation are rooted in Eastern and Western religious-philosophical traditions; others in current medical and scientific knowledge about effective stress-reduction. All provide a range of physical and emotional benefits that strengthen your inner life. Ongoing research supported jointly by the Dalai Lama and the U.S.-based Mind And Life Institute shows that meditation produces changes within specific regions of the brain associated with greater internal calm, resilience to stress, and focused concentration.

Amazingly, one study found that the sound of a shotgun going off near an advanced meditator’s head produced virtually no change of brain activity in response to it. Want to test out how steadily you can hold your own concentration? Go to this web site.

Advanced meditators were able to hold their visual focus in this experiment for its entire duration.

Meditation heightens your consciousness and mental control.  It also contributes to a stronger immune system and a more robust cardio-vascular system. It helps you awaken to what the real “drivers” are in your outer life — where you may be acting unconsciously or with illusions and rationalizations you’ve acquired from dealing with your outer life demands.

Counting your breaths (you could also focus on an object) not only increases your concentration, but also loosens your entanglement in the “flotsam” and “jetsam” of your outer life. This helps increase your attunement to your inner life; to your true self that lies beneath all the layers of accommodation and adaptation you’re acquired through immersion in the outer world.

This practice shifts your perspective towards just observing the ebb and flow of your emotional states with less knee-jerk reactivity to them. It’s like filling an inner reservoir with clarity and mindfulness that you can carry with you in each moment within your outer life.

A fringe benefit: Reducing your total number of breaths per minute to 10 or less, for 15 minutes twice per day (each inhale/exhale counting as one) has been found to lower blood pressure, according to recent research.

Grow Your Positive Emotions And Human Connection

• Focus your consciousness on emotions of compassion, empathy, and connection towards people around you, especially those who suffer or with whom you’re in conflict. Imagine those emotions occupying the main window on your computer screen. Deal with negative or indifferent emotions by visualizing them within a smaller, background window, or hidden in a file

This practice strengthens your inner life by attuning you to our shared human condition. It builds respect and tolerance for others, especially in the face of external differences, which may dominate your field of vision.

Cultivating positive emotions cultivates your inner life and also heals something most of us suffer from in our outer world-dominated lives: “Empathy Deficit Disorder,” which I’ve written about in a previous post. In a culture in which we define virtually every variation of human emotion and experience as a “disorder,” we’ve overlooked one of the most harmful. It results from being so overdeveloped in your outer life that you lose touch with your own heart; with the reality of your interconnection and interdependence with other humans.

Research shows that you can practice and strengthen positive emotions with practice. People who practice this through meditation show heightened brain activity in regions linked with positive emotions like joy and humor; and with feelings of compassion towards people who suffer. They also show diminished activity in brain regions associated with negative or destructive emotions like anger, resentment, depression, or self-pity. In short, practicing certain emotional states strengthen patterns within the brain associated with them.

This means that your brain is capable of being trained and physically modified through conscious practices. As you make efforts to change your feelings and thoughts in ways that build your inner life, you reinforce brain activity in regions associated with it. In effect, you can learn to change your brain activity, which reinforces changes you make in your thoughts, attitudes, and behavior.

The upshot is that you can actually learn to “grow” compassion, tolerance, and cheerfulness. You can physically modify your brain through conscious practice. In effect, what you think and feel is what you become.

This practice for growing positive emotions also helps builds awareness of your commonality and connection with other people, through recognizing them as fellow humans who suffer and struggle as you do. You might try picking a particular situation or encounter with a stranger as a target for practicing compassion and empathy. For example, when you’re dealing with the checkout person at the grocery store, try to generate positive emotions towards that person, as an experiment. Try to see that stranger as someone who shares, along with you, a desire for love; who’s experienced some kind of loss or disappointment along the way; or who has hopes and dreams to fulfill. In other words, a stranger who’s different from you but also like yourself, beneath those differences.

This practice is especially helpful when, say, a particular co-worker makes you want to reach for a blunt object. Or when you find yourself having malevolent fantasies about your kids the third time they start fighting with each other in the same evening.

But probably more challenging is feeling compassion and empathy towards someone you actively dislike, or with whom you’ve had big-time conflicts – perhaps an ex-spouse, or someone at work. Here, try seeing that person through the eyes of your inner self rather than through your outer self. The latter is where you experience your differences. Instead, imagine how and why that person might experience his world as he or she does; why that person might have the negative attitudes or feelings he shows towards you. Try to do that without judging.

Practicing compassion and empathy in these ways strengthens your inner life by attuning you to our shared human condition. It builds respect and recognition for others, even where there are conflicts. You become a more balanced, broadened and tolerant human being. Notice that when empathy and compassion are awakened, you tend to respond with a changed outlook or new action directed towards others, with less concern about your own self. Look at the spontaneous outpouring of help that usually occurs to the victims of natural disasters like earthquakes or tornado.  At such times, you’re letting go of your usual hyper-focus on getting and achieving things in your outer world.

A good source for practices that support compassion and empathy are the guided visualization and meditative practices developed by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan (1916-2004), an internationally recognized meditation teacher and scholar. Head of the Sufi Order International, his teachings reflected a universalist perspective, based on the common core of Hindu, Buddhist, Judeao-Christian, and Islamic meditative practices. The site also includes multi-media visual and musical models that accompany specific meditative practices.

Increase Your Mind-Body Health

Incorporate aerobic exercise or virtually any kind of physical activity into your schedule.

• Try a class in Yoga, Qi Gong, or Tai Qi
• Commit yourself to healthy diet and nutritional practices

Aerobic activity releases chemicals that enhance positive mental states and well-being. Research finds that it also has robust antidepressant effects.

Sustained aerobic exercise or virtually any kind of physical activity are important practices because a healthy mind-body is the infrastructure for your inner life. Aerobic activity releases chemicals that enhance positive mental states and well-being. Research shows that it has robust anti-depressant effects, equal or superior to medication, over the long run.

Another benefit for your inner life: Many kinds of physical activity require internal discipline, focus, and a desire to sustain the activity necessary for to reach a level of sufficient level of skill. Research shows that activities as diverse as mountain climbing, dancing, bike riding, or swimming contribute to a sense of internal mastery and self-control.

Moreover, aerobic activity expresses your physical energy within the larger environment. That, itself, enlarges your perspective about where your individual life fits in relation to the forces and features of the natural world and the cosmos. Your preoccupations and absorption in outer life tend to recede when you’re within the larger context of the natural world and the physical challenges you face within it. A friend who trekked to the base camp of Mt. Everest told me how the physical challenge, combined with being surrounded by the majesty of the mountains and their “indifference” to human desires, shifted her perspective about her entire life. It caused her to rethink everything she had held important.

Eastern practices like Yoga, Qi Gong, and Tai Qi blend flexibility, balance, and rhythmic motion with mental discipline and concentration These activities increase your attention to your inner world by integrating physical flexibility, balance, and rhythmic motion, on the one hand, with mental discipline and concentration on the other. Practicing that integration also diminishes the stress hormone cortisol, according to several research studies.

Good sources for state-of-the-art information about mind-body health include the web site of Andrew Weil, M.D.; The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine; and the Center for Mind-Body Medicine.

Open Yourself to Sensual and Sexual Experiences

• During your workday, take a brief walk outdoors, or visit a museum or art gallery. Write down how it affected you when you return to your workplace.
• Set aside time with your partner for slow, mutual physical stroking or massage, without thinking of intercourse or orgasm as the goal. Light candles, play music and agree to talk intimately – but not about outer life stresses.

Sensuous pleasures and beauty through art, music, or the natural world springboard you out of overimmersion in your outer life by “speaking” directly to your inner life. These nonverbal mediums evoke emotions, mental and even physical states that otherwise remain asleep when you’re too immersed in work and home activities.

Many people whose inner life is out of balance with their outer don’t realize that healthy sexual activity can help build greater balance between them. When mutuality, openness, and non-exploitativeness are part of the fabric of your whole relationship, emotional and sexual, then sexual/physical pleasure becomes an inner, not just outer experience – what some researchers call “spiritual sexuality.” That is, some individuals report a transcendent experience that combines heightened, whole-body sensations with intense emotional-spiritual connection, in which you lose yet retain a sense of your individual self at the same time. That’s the experience of two inner lives connecting.

Serve Something Larger Than Yourself

• Find a way to serve people or causes in need of help.

Giving to others strengthens your inner life by stimulating a “soul-to-soul” connection. It awakens your realization that we’re all global citizens. In fact, a common theme among people who create true balance between their inner and outer lives is that they feel pulled to giving, in some way, to the larger human community, through some kind of service. Some do this as a result of a natural evolution towards wanting to volunteer their time talents; others, from a sudden awakening.

Scott Harrison is an example of the latter. He had become a successful, well-known event promoter in New York City by his late 20s. In the spring of 2004 something awakened in him, he told me, which caused him to see that he had been living primarily to gratify himself. “I realized that I could either live selfishly, or for others,” he said. He decided to volunteer with Mercy Ships, an international organization that provides volunteer medical services to impoverished people, such as in West Africa.

Using his original training as a photojournalist, Scott began chronicling the work of the Mercy Ship and its medical volunteers through photos and stories posted on a web site/blog and in newspaper articles. He originally intended to spend just a month on the ship, but it was such a powerful experience that he remained with it. On a brief return visit to New York in the summer of 2005 he told me of the impact it had -aboard the ship, in a tiny compartment with cockroaches; working with health care workers who treat people who have nothing at all, not even drinking water; and who were afflicted with the most horrendous medical conditions and diseases. “It totally changed my world view,” he told me. “It was like looking through a different pair of glasses.”

Subsequently, he founded a highly successful international charity focused on creating fresh water wells in impoverished countries.

A good source of information about volunteer organizations  is Idealist.org.

Your Work and Life Balance Revisited….

Strengthening your inner life can change how you behave in both parts of that old work-life equation.

In the work realm, you might reexamine what you’re doing – whom you work for and with, and what your work contributes to the things you value. At the most radical end, you might change employers or careers, or go out on your own to pursue a dream. Or you can seek new assignments with your current employer that align with your personal values and goals.

In your home and personal life, a stronger inner life might lead you to give some time to help others, say through volunteer work. Or get involved with a social or political cause you believe in. You might decide to take that music appreciation course you’ve considered for years, or finally build that backyard garden you’ve seen in your imagination.

A rising theme among people who create true balance between their inner and outer lives is that they feel drawn to serving the larger human community in some way through their work, their values, and way of life. Both younger and older people express this. It’s reflected in the steady rise of volunteerism, and also in a  MetLife Foundation/Civic Ventures Survey that found that rising numbers of people want the work they do to contribute to the greater good and improve other’s lives, not just their own. They want to have impact. This shift reflects a broader rise in our culture that I described in a previous post as the “4.0” career.

Some people make significant changes in their work and personal lives when their inner life is awakened, like Scott did. Most people are unlikely to make a radical change. But examples of those who do can help stimulate your own thinking about how you might want to shift or redirect your own life, to build greater inner-outer balance. Like a woman who owned a high-end restaurant who sold her business and opened an orphanage after a chance encounter with some abandoned children while visiting another country; a man who took a “lesser” position at a smaller company in a part of the country where he and his family found a better quality of life; a lawyer who left Washington and became a Park Ranger. Or a senior vice president of a major corporation who resigned and bought a small business in order to have more time for parenting his two sons.

Such examples can help you focus on what would create better attunement between your own inner and outer life. They can point you to answer questions like these:

• Which of your current career goals, relationships and commitments are truly in harmony with your inner life?
• Is this the job or career you truly feel in synch with, despite the money it may pay or what people tell you that you should want?
• Are you and your partner devoting enough attention and effort to keeping your relationship positive and energized?
• Do you know why your son or daughter seems troubled or depressed? Have you even noticed?
• How can you become more transparent in both your public and private life?

As you develop your inner life and balance it with your outer, you’ll be likely to find that the old conflicts of work vs. life don’t cause you stress or even dominate your thoughts anymore.

In fact, you may find they disappear.

Meet Linda and Jim, who consulted me for psychotherapy.  Linda is a lawyer with a large firm; Jim heads a major trade association.  They told me they’re totally committed to their marriage and to being good parents.  But they also said it’s pretty hectic juggling all their responsibilities at work and at home They have two children of their own plus a child from her former marriage. Dealing with the logistics of daily life, to say nothing of the emotional challenges, makes it “hard just to come up for air,” Linda said.  Sound familiar?

Or listen to Bill, a 43-year-old who initially consulted me for help with some career challenges.  Before long, he acknowledged that he’s worried about the “other side” of life. He’s raising two teenage daughters and a younger son by himself – one of the rising numbers of single fathers.  He’s constantly worried about things like whether a late meeting might keep him at work. He tries to have some time for himself, but “it’s hard enough just staying in good physical health, let alone being able to have more of a ‘life,’ ” he said. Recently, he learned he has hypertension.

It’s no surprise that these people, like many I see both in my psychotherapy practice and my workplace consulting, feel pummeled by stresses in their work and home lives. Most are aware, at least dimly, that this is unhealthy – that stress damages the body, mind and spirit. Ten years ago, a report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, found that 70 percent of all illness, physical and mental, is linked to stress of some kind.  And that number has probably increased over the last decade.  Much of this stress comes from struggling with the pressures of work and home – and trying to “balance” both. The problem seems nearly universal, whether in two-worker, single-parent or childless households.

I think these conflicts are so common because people have learned to frame the problem incorrectly to begin with. That is, there’s no way to balance work life and home life, because both exist on the same side of the scale – what I call your “outer” life. On the other side of the scale is your personal, private life – your “inner” life. Instead of thinking about how to balance work life and home life, try, instead, to balance your outer life and inner life.

The Other Balancing Act

Let me explain. On the outer side of the scale you have the complex logistics and daily stresses of life at both work and home – the e-mails to respond to, the errands, family obligations, phone calls, to-do lists and responsibilities that fill your days. Your outer life is the realm of the external, material world. It’s where you use your energies to deal with tangible, often essential things. Paying your bills, building a career, dealing with people, raising kids, doing household chores, and so on. Your outer life is on your iPhone, BlackBerry, or your e-calender.

On the other side of the scale is your internal self.  It’s the realm of your private thoughts and values.  Your emotions, fantasies, spiritual or religious practices.  Your capacity to love, your secret desires, and your deeper sense of purpose.  In short, it embodies who you are, on the inside.  A “successful” inner life is defined by how well you deal with your emotions, your degree of self-awareness , and your sense of clarity about your values and life purpose.  It includes your level of mental repose:  your capacity for calm, focused action and resiliency that you need in the face of  your frenetic, multitasking outer life.

If the realm of the inner life sounds unfamiliar or uncomfortable to you, this only emphasizes how much you – like most peple – have lost touch with your inner self.  You can become so depleted and stretched by dealing with your outer life that there’s little time to tend to your mind, spirit or body. Then, you identify your “self” mostly with who you are in that outer realm. And when there’s little on the inner side of the scale, the outer part weighs you down. You are unbalanced, unhappy and often sick.

When your inner life is out of balance with your outer, you become more vulnerable to stress, and that’s related to a wide range of physical damage.  Research shows that heart attacks, stroke, hypertension, diabetes, a weakened immune system, skin disorders, asthma, migraine, musculoskeletal problems – all are linked to stress.

More broadly, when your inner and outer lives become unbalanced, your daily functioning is affected in a range of ways, both subtle and overt. When operating in the outer world – at work, for example, or in dealings with your spouse or partner – you may struggle with unjustified feelings of insecurity and fear. You may find yourself at the mercy of anger or greed whose source you don’t understand. You may be plagued with indecisiveness or revert to emotional “default” positions forged during childhood, such as submissiveness, rebellion or self-undermining behavior.

Even when you’re successful in parts of your outer life, neglecting the inner remains hazardous to your psychological and physical health. Without a developed inner life, you lose the capacity to regulate, channel and focus your energies with awareness, self-direction and judgment.  Personal relationships can suffer, your health may deteriorate and you become vulnerable to looking for new stimulation from the outer-world sources you know best – maybe a new “win,” a new lover, drugs or alcohol.

And that pulls you even more off-balance, possibly to the point of no return. The extreme examples are people who destroy their outward success with behavior that reflects a complete disengagement from their inner lives – corporate executives led away in handcuffs for indulging in ill-gotten gains, self-destructive sports stars overcome by the trappings of their outer-life successes, political leaders whose flawed personal lives destroy their credibility, clerics who are staunch moralists at the pulpit but sexual predators or adulterers behind closed doors.

These are our modern-day counterparts of Shakespearian characters like Macbeth or Coriolanus, whose “outer” lives are toppled over by unconscious aims, destructive arrogance or personal corruption.

Of course, most people want to function well in the outer, material world.  Doing so is part of a successful adult life.  But what you choose to go after in work and life often reflects values and behavior that you’ve been socially conditioned into through your family and society.  Much of that can be hard to see because you’re immersed in it.  What gets lost along the way is what your inner life might tell you about the consequences and value of what you pursue in your outer life.

But there’s good news: Reframing your challenge from trying to balance work and home to balancing your inner and outer lives will help you build overall health, internal well-being and resilience in your pursuit of outer life success.

That is, servicing your inner life builds  healthy, positive control over your life —  mastery and self-directed action, not suppression or rationalization.   A stronger inner life creates a solid moral core and harmonizes your inner and outer selves.  It informs your choices and actions by providing the calm and centeredness essential for knowing what demands or allures of the outer world you want to go after, or let pass; and how to deal with the consequences of either.

For example, clarifying which of the personal commitments, career goals and relationships you want or don’t want.   Whether this job or career is what you really desire, despite the money it pays or what people tell you that you should want.  And, whether you believe that your  relationship gives you and your partner the kind of positive, energized connection you want and need.

In short, a strengthened inner live brings your “private self” and your “public self” into greater harmony. That’s the foundation you need for dealing with the stress-potential of outer world choices and conflicts; for knowing how and why you’re living and using your energies out there in the ways that you do. With a robust inner life you feel grounded and anchored.  You know who you are and what you’re truly living for. Your inner life builds a state of heightened self-awareness and wholeness; a “heart that listens,” as King Solomon asked for.

Finding The Gaps

Brad was a financial consultant, noticeably underdeveloped in his inner life.  One day he came face-to-face with a classic inner-vs.-outer dilemma. For him, that triggered an important awakening.  He was debating whether to leave an out-of-town meeting early, which would create some difficulties, in order to be at home for his daughter’s 18th birthday.

I asked him the simplest question: Which choice would he be more likely to feel good about at the end of his life? Tears came to his eyes as he said that he knew in his heart that it was being at his daughter’s birthday. He told me that he felt enormously troubled by the fact that he’d been trying to rationalize away what he knew he valued more deeply.

At that moment Brad was able to see the gap between his inner life values – his true self — and the choice he was about to make based on his outer life conditioning – his false self.

His awakening to his inner-outer gaps is instructive.  A good initial step toward awakening your inner life is to identify the gaps between what you believe in, on the inside, and what you do on the outside.  Everyone has those gaps.  Here’s an exercise that can help you awaken to them:

• First, make a list of what you believe to be your core, internal values or ideals (5- 10 entries).  Perhaps it includes raising a strong, creative child; close friendships; expressing a creative talent that’s important to you. It might include your spiritual life; an intimate marriage or partnership; or contributing your talents, energies or success to the society in some way.

• Next, make a parallel list for each item on your list, describing your daily actions relative to those values: How much time and energy do you spend on them in real time? What are your specific behaviors regarding each? Be detailed in your answers – note the last time you took an action aimed at nurturing that creative child, building your marriage or giving some meaningful help to the less fortunate. Don’t be surprised or ashamed if you find that very few of your daily activities reflect those key values.

• Assign a number from 1 to 5 measuring the gap between each value and your behavior – 1 representing a minimal gap; 5, the maximum.

• Identify the largest gaps. Now think about how your inner values could redirect your outer-life choices in those areas. What would you have to do to bring the inner you in synch with the outer you? What can you commit yourself to doing?

• Write it all down and set a reasonable time frame for reducing your gaps.

Developing your inner life is a practice, like building a muscle or developing skill in a sport or musical instrument.  Look for future posts, in which  I’ll describe some practices most anyone can do to build a stronger inner life.  They involve your mind, body, spirit and actions in daily life.  You will see that the more you do, the better, because they reinforce each other.  And they contribute to building greater psychological health and resilience in today’s world.

In Part III of “becoming sane….” I wrote that our prevailing model of psychological health needs revision for today’s world – for outward success in a changing world, and for internal well-being.  I concluded by saying that a key to emotional resiliency and, more broadly, psychological health, in current times is learning to “forget yourself.”

So what does that mean?  Not thinking about your own needs?  Not looking out for yourself?  Not quite.  I’m using the phrase “forget yourself” to highlight an important capacity for health, survival, and “happiness” in today’s tumultuous, interconnected environment: the capacity to focus more on problems, needs, and solutions beyond just your own.  That is, the person who is too absorbed in his or her own self, own conflicts, own disappointments, and the like is much less able to engage the larger dilemmas and issues in positive, solution-oriented ways.  And that deficiency circles back to create dysfunction, damaged relationships, and career downturns.

Along the way I’ll be writing more about specific ways you can learn to “forget yourself” in your work, your relationships and your role as a global citizen. Here are some guidelines that help lay the foundation.

Three Responsibilities:

Think about your responsibilities as a human being living in today’s world, and on this planet.  Specifically, consider the following three responsibilities. They can serve as helpful guidelines for moving through and beyond the tendency we all share — to focus too much on our own selves.

Responsibility for your own mind-body-spirit

Recognize that it’s your job, alone, to continue learning and developing your emotional, mental, creative and physical capacities. Enlarging these capacities helps provide the flexibility and adaptability you need to deal with changes, good or bad. Don’t become like the character John Marcher in Henry James’ “The Beast In The Jungle,” who waited passively, believing that something significant was going to happen…and ended up with a failed life.

Responsibility for those less able

Part of the new criteria for psychological health include this awareness:  You grow through your efforts to help and support others, less able than yourself, to find and follow a healthy path in this world. Find someone who needs and would welcome your aid, whether your children or family member. But stretch further, to include a stranger or those within the extended world community who suffer from lack of clean water, from famine, disease or torture. Organizations and individuals who could use your help are a click away on the Internet.

Responsibility for the planet

Reflect on the fact that your actions at home or in your community can help maintain a healthy, sustainable planet for future inhabitants, including your own descendants. Or, they can further jeopardize the environment they will live in. Look at your own actions in your home, your community, and at work. Ask yourself, are you becoming a “good ancestor?”

Some Steps You Can Take:

Loosen the grip of self-interest

Use self-awareness to observe – and contain – your self-serving tendencies. It’s human to have them; healthy, to keep them at bay. Your emotional well-being and success in today’s world is interwoven with how well you engage and connect with something larger than your own needs and desires. Don’t neglect them, but when they dominate your field of vision, your heart shuts down. You can’t build the tolerance and proactive behavior that you need to keep “evolving.” An old saying goes, “If you want to see into your future, look into a mirror.” Everything you think, say, and do, steadily molds who you’re becoming down the road. What do you see in that mirror?

Practice connection and engagement

The metaphor of Google that I used in the previous post is a good guide for stretching yourself towards actions and attitudes that promote positive engagement.  Seek out ways to engage in and demonstrate greater collaboration, non-defensiveness, informality, a creative mindset, flexibility, and nimbleness. Assess yourself along these criteria — in your life as a worker, in your relationships, and as a member of the larger human community. Identify which of those criteria you could strengthen, and begin to do it.

Identify your commonalities with others

Focus on what you have in common with others rather than on the surface differences between you. That builds empathy, especially important for success within an increasingly diverse society. Research shows that you can train your brain to do this. Begin by stepping outside your own mental and emotional perspectives and visualize entering another person’s inner world. Seek to understand it, no matter how different from your own. Remember, what’s “right” from one perspective may be “wrong” from another.  As I wrote in a previous post, empathy is a core ingredient of adult psychological health. It helps expand your mental and emotional perspectives to more fully understand those with whom you have differences – without having to abandon your own views.

Reduce the gaps between your public and private life

Politicians aren’t the only people whose public image is sometimes at odds with their private actions: We all have gaps between our motives or values and how we present ourselves in pubic. Aim for transparency in your interactions and transactions. Better it comes from you than from discovering it’s been posted on Google or YouTube. More deeply, reflect on unconscious attitudes that might drive your behavior. As the philosopher and mathematician Pascal wrote, “The heart has reasons of its own, which Reason itself is unaware of.” Seek help when you suspect you’re being pulled by emotions or behavior you don’t understand or just can’t deal with. But find a mental health practitioner who’s tuned in to a more evolved, integrated picture of adult health.

Shift your perspective in difficult life situations

Too often, we personalize negative experiences and react with resentment or self-undermining actions. That’s another form of self-centeredness. Healthy adult behavior here means recognizing those tendencies in yourself but not indulging in them. In short, aim towards not taking things personally. Be “indifferent” to those reactions by focusing your energies instead on creating a pro-active, realistic strategy that either improves your situation or changes it. “Indifference” in this sense activates your creative problem-solving capacity for dealing with conflicts at home or at work, as I wrote in a previous post about intimate relationships.

Define your “life footprint.”

Imagine you have one or two years left to live. An unpleasant thought, for sure, but it can help in this way: Make a list of what you would want to contribute to the world through your emotional, intellectual and creative powers during your remaining time. This focuses you on thinking about what kind of “footprint” you want to leave on the larger community and the planet. What does that require of you, from this point forward? As an aid, write down how you currently apply your mental and emotional capacities, and what that means long-term. Think of your life as a work of art that you’re creating along the way. When you envision reaching the end-point, what will the picture look like that reveals your purpose for having been here? Do you want to make any changes, starting now?

There are people who illustrate some of the above themes as they shift towards healthier lives. For example, a corporate executive who stepped back and identified new business opportunities through sustainable, “green” practices, and initiated them throughout the company.  Inspired by Bono’s (Product) Red campaign, he created a company project that supported a philanthropic goal. “It was time to bring my personal values into alignment with my business perspectives,” he said. Like others who are beginning to think in similar directions, he sees business success as interwoven with serving the common good.

Or the couple who revamped their relationship by reviewing what they wanted their “life footprint” to be. They realized they wanted a greater sense of connection and mutuality between themselves, but also through what they did with their talents and energies. One began a business that had been a longtime dream; the other moved to a company that provided more opportunity for growth and creative expression, but less money. “Sure, there are trade-offs,” one of them told me, “but the bottom line is better for our lives. We feel more integrated, more engaged.”

So – all that’s a start.  More to come!

There’s nothing “wrong” with it, exactly. But the excitement and energy, the feelings of connection and passion that were once there have gradually faded over the years.  “The old feelings haven’t exactly disappeared,” Nora says. “Now and then it feels something like it used to. But mostly it feels like our relationship has ‘flatlined.’”

Another person, David, recently celebrated the eleventh anniversary of his second marriage.  He describes a similar shift a bit more sardonically, saying that his relationship has settled into a state of “depressing comfortableness.”  He’s thought about having an affair.

If these laments sound familiar to you, it’s likely because most men and women find that their long-term marriages (I’m defining “marriage” to describe all committed relationships, straight or gay) tend to head south over time.

Gradually, they descend into what I call the Functional Relationship.

Most people think it’s inevitable, but there’s a unique way to liberate yourself from it.  It’s learning to “leave” your relationship in order to transform it.  You do that through becoming “indifferent.”

First, let’s look at what typically happens in the Functional Relationship.  The relationship continues to “work” fairly well, but mostly in a transactional way, around the logistics of daily life: “I thought you were taking the car in for repair.” “Whose turn is it to take the kids to soccer practice on Saturday?”

Sometimes, it becomes more adversarial: “Why did you schedule the plumber for tomorrow when you knew you couldn’t be here? I told you that I have a meeting I can’t miss.”

But even when “functioning” goes fairly smoothly, feelings of passion or even fun just hanging out together diminish, especially in contrast to how it felt early on in the relationship.  As I’ve studied contemporary marriages in our post-9-11/post-economic meltdown-world of the 21st Century, I find that couples experience this diminishment in three main ways:

• Decreased emotional intimacy and sharing of feelings.
• Less equality in decisions and daily interactions, which are often tinged by power-struggles and silent maneuvering for the “upper hand.”
• And dampened sexuality, both in quantity and quality.

A note about that third item: Even when arousal is jacked up by Viagra or the new products purporting to enhance women’s desire, your libido — desire for the person you’re with — remains diminished.  That’s no surprise, because the latter is relationship-dependent. It remains unaffected even if you’re physiologically able to become aroused.

Overall, couples in a Functional Relationship report a diminished sense of connection with each other.  Sometimes it’s a feeling of not being on the same wave-length.

Most people assume that the Functional Relationship is completely “normal;” just a sad reality of adult life. Some are resigned to it as just one more part of the “long slide home,” as one 47-year-old journalist described his experience of midlife. Of course, not everyone feels so bleak, but many would agree with this woman’s lament about her 18-year relationship: “What was once a bright flame has turned into a pilot light.”

You, too probably assume that romantic and sexual connections are supposed to fade over time. Common sense seems to tell you so. After all, you’re seeing the same person day-in and day-out, not just when he or she is most attractive.  And like the majority of couples today, you’re probably dealing with the impact of multitasking, dual-career lives. Raising children in addition absorbs enormous time and energy.  Just trying to carry on in this uncertain, unpredictable world adds another huge layer of stress.

If everyday experience doesn’t convince you that the Functional Relationship is inevitable, there are the pronouncements of various experts. For example, some researchers claim that brain chemicals such as dopamine, norepinephrine, and phenylethylamine, associated with sexual excitement or desire, decline with familiarity. At the same time, oxytocin and endorphins, which generate feelings of quiet comfort and calm, rise. Therefore, they say, you are going to feel diminished desire for your partner over time.

Many marriage and relationship experts advocate just accepting this decline and learning to be happy with it. For example, in her  book Surrendering to Marriage Iris Krasnow advocates learning to appreciate and live with the security and comfort that come along with the “inevitable” decline — unless, of course, you want to go down the slippery slope of an affair, or dumping your partner altogether and look for a new one.   It’s easy to think it’s best to stop complaining about what you don’t have and learn to live with lowered expectations.

If all of the above is really true, then you’d better resign yourself to the fact that a “passionate marriage” is an oxymoron.

But before you do that, consider this: Descending into the Functional Relationship is neither natural nor inevitable.  True, the experience is widespread. But most people descend into the Functional Relationship because it’s the natural outcome of how you learn to engage in love relationships to begin with.  As I wrote in a previous post, it’s a version of adolescent romance. Its features — like intense arousal by a new person; infatuation, often followed by deflation; manipulating and game-playing, are part of normal adolescent development. But we carry them into our adult experience. And  that model of love can’t sustain long-term connection and vitality.

Becoming “Indifferent”

Through my research and clinical work I’ve been discovering how and why some people defy the norm and generate new energy and vitality within their long-term relationships. I’m convinced that there’s a way out of the Functional Relationship. There’s even a way to avoid it altogether.  I call it the art of Creative Indifference.

It’s the alternative to constantly trying make your relationship work better through finding the latest  technique; the alternative to responding and reacting to your partner in ways that have become habitual or frustratingly repetitive, convinced that you are “right.” All of those kinds of behavior drain energy and keep you locked within the Functional Relationship.

Through Creative Indifference you learn to disengage from your relationship in ways that circle back to  revitalize it.   It doesn’t mean you stop caring about your partner or your relationship. To the contrary, Creative Indifference is a way to become less reactive to your own and your partner’s behavior. It opens the door to positive change.  Ultimately it helps you care in a deeper, more genuine way.

The indifference you build is towards your own internal emotional reactions and habitual responses, especially in situations in which you typically feel disappointed, defensive or critical towards your partner.  That is, most tend to see things through the lens of your own needs, hurts, or conviction that you’re “right.” This reflects the narrowest part of the self, your ego-self.  It’s the narrow vantage point that tends to predominate in your perceptions and actions.

For example, maintaining resentments and disappointments in your partner’s “failure” to provide you with what you want. Or, negative emotions resulting from the conviction that you’re “right” and your partner is “wrong” regarding some issue of disagreement or difference.

With Creative Indifference you observe your internal reactions – recognizing them as learned, conditioned responses — but without acting upon them. You observe your partner’s behavior in the same way.  And you step back from both.

That is, you separate who you are — what you think, feel, and believe — from who your partner is.  You separate your own internal “reality” from that of your partner’s. This begins to fuel greater respect for each of you as separate, individual people.

Mary and Joe

An example: One night after dinner Joe’s wife, Mary’s brought him a list of some domestic things that had piled up and required some decisions and logistical arrangements. She wanted to resolve all of the items — right then and right there.  That’s her style.

In fact, Mary tends to become anxious about things that feel  “out of control.” On his part, Joe tends to react defensively and passive-aggressively when Mary reminds him about things he had agreed to do but keeps putting off. This becomes their dance, in which Joe sees Mary as always nagging; and Mary fumes at Joe’s unreliability.

For example, Joe might make promises, but fail to “remember” to take care of them. Mary then becomes angry and distrusting.  She shows it, very clearly.  In response, Joe withdraws and sees more evidence that she’s a constant nag.  Each of their individual issues reinforces the other’s through this little minuet.

But this time something different occurred. Using Creative Indifference Joe first observed his usual internal response to Mary – resentment, feelings of being controlled, that she’s a shrew, and so forth. He then stepped outside of this perspective — he didn’t deny it to himself;  just acknowledged it as a part of his own individual conditioning, the residue of old childhood issues, and so on.

He then imagined looking at himself from Mary’s perspective, and then from an even broader perspective of watching the two of them together, like in a movie.  This enabled him to see her anxiety, without his own reactivity. He saw that her reactions were simply her issues. With Creative Indifference to his old emotions and behavior, he refrained from engaging in those old ways.

From that perspective Joe could feel some empathy for Mary’s experience.  He recognized that his own tendency to put things off triggered her issues, her vulnerabilities.  This enabled him to create a more positive response. He told her that he understood how frustrating it is for her to not know when these items will be taken care of.  This acknowledged her anxiety and need without agreeing with their “validity.” Then, he gave her a time-frame that he could commit to, within the context of his own needs and schedule.   He observed but didn’t react to his old feelings that he would have to  “give in.”

He knew that Mary might not like his response, but, maintaining indifference to her reactivity, he stayed consistent with who he wanted to be in that moment — respectful of her issues, but very clear about himself. No anger, no retaliation, no submission.

“OK, I’m glad you told me,” Mary replied. “Now I feel we’re making progress.”

With Creative Indifference you’re not trying to get a particular response from your partner; nor acting with self-righteousness about yourself. This keeps the ball in your partner’s court because you’re not defending yourself, attacking, or trying to persuade him or her that you are “right.”

From that position of indifference you then demonstrate the kind of person you wish to be, at that moment, regardless of how your partner is behaving.  That is, envision  qualities in your relationship that you’d like to see grow — such as openness, warmth, or eroticism; closeness and respect, rather than distance or annoyance.  Start demonstrating those qualities yourself.  Inject them into your relationship, unilaterally.

Here are a few practices for building indifference in your relationship:

Expand your perception: Practice looking at yourself and your relationship from the “outside,” as though you’re watching the two of you interact in a movie or play. Use creative thinking to imagine ways you might interpret the “action” from a larger perspective.

Step outside your own ego-focus: You may be convinced that your own perception of reality is the correct one.   But that keeps you locked inside your head.  Consider, instead, that you may be only partially right; or even wrong, altogether. What would a broader understanding of your situation look like?

Step into your partner’s point of view: Use your imagination to view things from your partner’s perspective, even though you may totally disagree with it, or believe it’s “wrong.” Think of your partner as simply being him/herself; just as you are. Envision yourself from your partner’s viewpoint, without feeling you have to change your own. What new information does that give you?

Practicing Creative Indifference helps you let go of your focus on your own self — on getting your “needs” met; your resentments or disappointments about how your partner behaves; your own reactivity to what he or she is reactive to. All of those are products of your “ego-self,” which is distorted and narrow, by definition.

Disengaging from your ego-self while expand your perceptions — emotionally and cognitively — activates the realization that both you and your partner share legitimate concerns, desires and vulnerabilities.  They are part of your common humanness.  That, in turn, allows you to hone in on what best serves the relationship between the two of you, rather than the ego-driven needs of either one of you.

Couples find it Creative Indifference revitalizing because it disrupts the entrenched pattern.  It enables you to see your partner more as he or she really is — a whole being, not just a source of providing  – or withholding  – your needs.  It helps you realize that differences between you can be stimulating rather than frightening or disappointing.

You can never make your partner change or be different. You can only change how you deal with, respond to, and conduct yourself towards him or her. That’s what I meant at the beginning of this post about “leaving” your relationship in order to transform it.

In previous posts on the theme of “becoming sane in a turbulent, interconnected, unpredictable world,” I described why conventional emotional resiliency doesn’t work in the 21^st Century; and what that means for building a psychologically healthy life in today’s world.

In this post I’ll explain why many of the conflicts men and women deal with today stem from this contradiction:  The criteria for adult psychological health accepted by the mental health professions and the general public doesn’t really describe an adult. Nor, for that matter, does it describe psychological health.

A contradiction, to be sure, so let me explain: As we entered the world of the 21^st Century our definition of psychological health was largely defined by the absence of psychiatric symptoms. The problem is, that’s like defining a happy person as someone who’s not depressed.  Moreover, sometimes what appears to be a psychiatric symptom reflects movement towards greater health and growth in a person’s life situation.

But more significantly, our conventional view of psychological health is, in effect, a well-adapted, well-functioning child in relation to parents or parent figures.  Or, a sibling who interacts appropriately in a social context with other siblings. Either way, it describes a person functioning within and adapted to a world shaped and run by “parents,” psychologically speaking.

That is, we pretty much equate healthy psychological functioning with effective management or resolution of child- or sibling-based conflicts. For example, resolving and managing such child-based conflicts as impulse control; narcissistic or grandiose attitudes; and traumas around attachment, from indifference, abandonment, abuse, or parenting that otherwise damages your adult capacity for intimacy or trusting relationships.

Healthy resolution of sibling-type conflicts includes learning effective ways to compete with other “siblings” at work or in intimate relationships; managing your fears of success or disapproval; containing passive-aggressive, manipulative or other self-undermining tendencies; and finding ways to perform effectively, especially in the workplace, towards people whose approval, acceptance and reward you need or crave.

It’s no surprise, then, that many people feel and behave like children in a grown-up world. Examples permeate popular culture.  A good one is the popular TV show, “The Office.” It often portrays the eruption of these sibling-type conflicts, as the workers act out their resentments or compete with one another to win the favor of office manager Michael, another grown-up child who is self-serving and clueless about his own competitive motives and insecurity.

Unconscious child-type conflicts are often visible within intimate relationships and family life, as well.  They provide a steady stream of material for novels and movies. You can see, for example, fears of abandonment in a man who demands constant attention and assurance that he’s loved; or low-self worth in a woman who’s unconsciously attracted to partners who dominate or manipulate her. Of course it’s critical that you learn to become aware of and manage effectively whatever emotional damage you bring from your early experiences into adulthood. We all have some.  That’s a good starting point for adult psychological health, but it’s not sufficient.  A well-adapted member of a community of other “children” and “siblings” within a psychological world of “parents” is not the same thing as a healthy adult.  Especially not within today’s interconnected, non-linear world.

So – without a picture of what a healthy adult would feel, think and do in the current environment, you’re left with questions but few answers. For example:

• How can you maintain the mental focus to keep your career skills sharp and stay on a successful path at work when you suddenly acquire a new boss who wants to take things in a new direction? Or if your company is acquired by another, or goes out of business?
• How can you best respond, mentally, if you have a new baby and a drop in family income at the same time that globalization sidetracks your career?
• How can you handle the pressure to work longer or do more business travel when your spouse faces the same demands?
• What’s the healthiest way to keep your relationship alive with fresh energy – or avoid the temptation of an affair?
• And how do you deal emotionally with the threat of terrorism — always lurking in the background of your mind — while enjoying life at the same time?

We now live within a world where the only constant is change, and where a new requirement is being able to compete and collaborate with everyone from everywhere about almost everything.

Doing that with self-awareness and knowledge of how to grow and develop all facets of your being – that’s the new path to adult psychological health.  But you need to know where to find the path.

Learning From The Business World?

Actually, I think we can learn a lot about what’s needed for psychological health from changes occurring in the business world. In many respects, the most progressive companies are ahead of the game.  They’ve had to learn ways to build sustainable practices, in the face of climate change. They’ve learned to develop models of collaboration and connection; ways to engage with and learn from diverse people and talents.

They’ve had to develop strategies for navigating through a tumultuous, global economy and remain successful, while dealing with anxieties that are part of charting a course in unknown territory, as Robert Rosen has described in Just Enough Anxiety.

All of the above applies to the men and women I work with, both through executive consulting and in psychotherapy.  They’re in the trenches, dealing with constant change and conflict in their business or career environment, and in their personal lives.  Some are looking for ways to have clear impact from their work and talents, beyond just acquiring power or money, or even “meaning.”  Some are company leaders figuring out how to link long-term financial success with environmental and social responsibility.  Others are individuals trying to heal emotional conflicts in their personal lives, or find ways to help their children prepare for a future whose biggest constant will be change.

Trends in the business community are relevant to a new model adult psychological health, because each of us needs to develop ways to deal with new domestic and global uncertainties that can hit home any day, in our individual lives, and the business world has been gradually doing this already.  That is, progressive businesses can teach us something about psychological health is because they’re already illustrating it.

Take the example of Google. If it were a person, Google would display in many respects the model of a psychologically healthy adult relevant to today’s world. Its corporate culture and management practices embody such qualities like transparency, flexibility and collaboration with diverse people.  Non-defensiveness, informality, a creative mind-set and nimbleness, all aimed at aggressively competing for clear goals within a constantly evolving environment.

Similarly, a successful and psychologically healthy life reflects building those qualities into your emotional attitudes, mental perspectives and behavior; especially such capacities as cooperation and service to something larger than yourself.

If you confine your view of psychological health to good “management” of your conflicts – the old 20^th Century view – that will keep you too focused on self-interest, especially power, money, possessions.  And that will take you down a dead-end today.  Focusing on self-interest is an ineffective strategy in today’s interconnected world. It leaves you feeling like a vulnerable child rather than an adult when forces outside your control disrupt your world and your self-centered goals.

Of course, we have to take care of ourselves. But banking just on self-interest to achieve long-term success and internal well-being is like expecting to get to your destination while standing in place because you’re more comfortable there.

A successful and psychologically healthy adult subordinates self-interest to the common good; to serving something larger than just yourself; not just your narrow goals. This is based on the awareness that your own well-being is intertwined with that of others who share this global community; that all of us are parts of an interdependent whole, like organs of the same body.  The psychologically healthy adult learns to become proactive, innovative and creative; enjoys growing and developing within a changing environment, and with diverse people; values positive connection and is flexible in situations of conflict.

Overall, being a healthy adult – the “parent,” yourself — requires broad, tolerant perspectives and purposeful actions in the service of clear objectives. That’s the foundation for supporting the well-being and survival of the global community, including future generations. In effect, it’s being an engaged global citizen.  That may sound like a tall order, but those are human, not super-human capacities.  They exist within most everyone.

A good way to describe the path to psychological health – including external success and internal well-being – is learning to “forget yourself.”

Yes, that’s a paradox.  In future posts I’ll explain what I mean, and what it looks like in your work, your relationships, and in your actions as a global citizen.

In Part I of “Becoming Sane in a Turbulent, Interconnected, Unpredictable World,” I wrote about why you need a new kind of emotional resiliency for success and well-being in today’s world.  Here, I’ll extend those thoughts about resiliency to psychological health in general.  Just as we need to redefine resiliency, I think we need to reformulate what a psychologically healthy adult looks like in this transformed world.  Here are my ideas about that:

Throughout most of the last century, adult psychological health has been largely equated with good management and coping skills: Managing stress within your work and personal life; and effective coping with or resolution of whatever emotional conflicts you brought with you into adulthood – and we all bring along some.

So, in your work that might include being clear about your career goals, and working your way up a fairly predictable set of steps to achieve power, recognition and financial success – all the things that we’ve equated with adult maturity and mental health.

At home, it would mean forming a long-term relationship that withstands the power struggles and other differences that often lead to affairs or even divorce.  You would assume that the healthy adult doest that via compromise at best, or disguised manipulation at worst.  In addition, you would accept “normal” decline of intimate connection and vitality over time.

But the fallout from the worldwide upheaval over the last few years have turned all those criteria of health upside down.  To be clear, it’s important to be able to manage conflicts that could derail your career or personal life.  But doing that isn’t enough to ensure future success, sanity or well-being in this turbulent and highly interdependent world we now live in.

Massive, interconnected forces within this globalized, unpredictable world add a host of new emotional and behavioral challenges to living a psychologically healthy, well-functioning and fulfilling life.

I deal with the fallout almost daily: People who’ve functioned pretty well in the past, but now feel as if they’re standing on tectonic plates shifting beneath them. Despite their best efforts, they struggle with mounting anxiety about the future of their own and their children’s lives, and confusion about their values and life purpose.

There’s the former Wall Street financial executive who told me he’d always defined himself by “making it through the next end zone” in his career, working long hours to ensure financial success. Now, as his company – and career – crumbled, he found that in addition to sacrificing time with his family, he had sacrificed his health: He has diabetes and high blood pressure. “Kind of a reverse ‘deal-flow,’ ” he lamented to me.

And the management consultant, pressured to ratchet up her travel to keep her career on track. “I’d been coping with everything, I thought,” she told me, “though I don’t like needing Zoloft to do it.” Instead of her career becoming more predictable as she gained seniority, her career propelled her into an even wilder ride. “Now I don’t have enough time for my daughter or my husband,” she said. “What kind of life is this? . . . My husband’s checked out, emotionally. And what am I teaching my daughter?”

Or the lawyer, who’d prided himself on “eating what I kill, and I’m a good killer.” He told me he has “more money than I ever dreamed of,” but also says that, “secretly, I hate what I do for a living.” But what’s the alternative, he asks, without “looking like a dysfunctional failure if I opt out?” After a failed marriage, he entered therapy and had begun to realize how his father’s unfulfilled dreams of “success” have impacted his own life — when suddenly his father died. “I’m in a tailspin,” he says; depressed and confused about what his own purpose in life is.

All of these people were on the kinds of life paths they expected would bring them predictable rewards. But counting on that linear upward climb is now hazardous to your mental health.

In fact, following that old path can make you more vulnerable to dysfunction and disturbance in the days ahead.  That’s a prime reason for building the new pro-active resiliency that I wrote about.  It provides a necessary foundation for what you need going forward.

Life In A Changing World

To better understand the mental health impact of what’s been happening in people’s lives, let’s look at it in a bit more detail.  Men and women are discovering — often painfully — that the emotional attitudes, goals and behavior they thought would lead to successful, fulfilling and psychologically healthy lives suddenly leave them at a loss. They’re faced with new psychological challenges posed by the globalized, environmentally fragile, diverse and unpredictable new environment.  And they don’t know how to respond.

We’ve all become starkly aware that unforeseen circumstances can create widespread turmoil in all sorts of ways. For example, the actions of some mortgage lenders in the U.S. triggered worldwide economic turmoil and upheaval that began in the fall of 2008 and has affected everyone’s lives. Entirely new global business paradigms can create upstart competitors or put you out of business. Turbulent shifts in weather patterns, water and food shortages, and civil strife resulting from climate change impact everyone.  And the threat of terrorism is a scary backdrop in everybody’s lives.

It’s as if we’ve all been deposited in the Brad Pitt movie “Babel,” in which the inadvertent actions of two goat-herding boys have tragic consequences for lives on three continents. Welcome to the “butterfly effect,” where a small change somewhere far away can produce far-ranging consequences. That’s part of the “new normal.”

Moreover, the interconnected world impacts us in other ways, as well:  People become almost instantly aware of human rights violations or natural disasters wherever they occur.  Not to mention personally embarrassing moments that become instantly available thanks to Google and YouTube. And, if you wish, your moment-to-moment activities are available around globe through your Facebook and Twitter posts.

Other examples of the transformed world include companies shifting to green business, because the impact of climate change has highlighted the need for sustainable business practices, in order to stay competitive in a shifting global economy. More broadly, a new business model that combines financial success with serving the common good receives increasing attention.  It’s been raised in discussion at a recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and promoted by singer-social activist Bono and other social entrepreneurs.

These are among the many features of our “non-equilibrium world.”  They have the potential to impact your career and relationships in major ways; and, therefore, your mental health.

The latter impact is visible in the workplace, in which the management and business culture is increasingly unpredictable. The new conditions require you to be more pro-active, innovative and creative on behalf of your own career development; and not take anything for granted.

At the same time, both younger and older workers say they want their work to have impact on something larger and more meaningful than just their own personal gain, but without giving that up, either.  And outside of work, men and women increasingly seek relationships of respect, mutuality and authenticity, regardless of whether they take the form of traditional marriage.

All of these shifts create new challenges for your psychological health. Just trying to “cope” with stress isn’t enough. Trying to “balance” work and life doesn’t work very well. Nor does managing your emotional conflicts from childhood help you find the healthiest ways to deal with new conflicts brought about by our interconnected world.

In subsequent posts on this theme of “Becoming Sane…” I’ll explain why our 20^th Century understanding of psychological health is unable to support positive human development in our 21^st Century world.  And, in contrast, what you can do to build psychological health in this new era.

It’s becoming clear that our understanding of emotional resilience – what it is and how to achieve it — (and, more broadly, psychological health)  doesn’t mesh very well with today’s realities. Conventional descriptions of resilience and pathways to mental health don’t enable you to handle the challenges and stresses we face in the 21st Century.

Let me explain. Resilience is generally defined as the ability to cope successfully with misfortune or traumatic events. Being able to bounce back from adversity and keep on going. What helps you do that includes, for example, reviewing your strengths, focusing on positive thoughts and feelings, learning stress management, looking down the road to what you can manage better. And, by getting psychotherapy and medication when you’re unable to bounce back very well on your own.

Prior to the 21st Century, that view of resiliency and how to build it was more relevant than today. The adversity and disruptions you were likely to experience were more stable, in a sense. The world was more predictable, more linear, with respect to the kinds of stresses and disruptions that would occur – as emotionally troubling as they might be.

Most of our thinking about emotional resilience and healthy functioning, then, fits a world in which unanticipated negative events are fairly predictable. They follow a fairly understandable course, following which you can reasonably anticipate a return to some form of previous stability. In that world, wars eventually ended. The economy went through recessions, then recovered. You might suffer a career or relationship setback but could assume that there was a path to recovery.

That notion of resilience and the ways to build it remain an important foundation for mental health. But they don’t help so much when you’re faced with the challenges of today’s environment. That’s because the very notion of resilience and the strategies for bouncing back are reactive. They focus on responding to something that happens to you, rather than on what you need to be doing proactively, as part of your way of life.

Starting with 9-11, and especially since the economic meltdown that began in the fall of 2008, we’ve been living in a world that’s rapidly transforming beneath our feet. Today’s world is an interconnected, interdependent, diverse, unpredictable and unstable global community. And that’s created new psychological challenges for everyone, challenges that require a highly proactive mentality.

Without it, you might feel like the woman who consulted me recently. Even before she sat down she said,  ”I don’t know whether to reach for the Prozac….or Prilosec!”

Her grim humor masked her “recession depression” and other emotional battering. She didn’t know what would help. I’ve witnessed that a great deal in the last few years: Career and financial worries or losses; the ripple effect of those upon family life; anxieties about what sort of future one’s children are headed into, especially with climate change and terrorist threats; and the increasingly polarized views about our government’s role in people’s lives. Research and clinical observation show that all of the above are taking a psychological toll on relationships, families, career expectations, and on people’s entire sense of what they’re living and working for — their life purpose.

Unfortunately, those of us in the mental health professions haven’t been much help with these issues. Most of us continue to look through the rear-view mirror at a model of resiliency and health defined by coping with and managing conflicts in relationships and the workplace; conflicts that you can bounce back from and reestablish some kind of stability…all while continuing to pursue self-interest, such as getting your needs met, your personal goals achieved, your “happiness” acquired.

But today’s world of ongoing disruptions, continuous uncertainties and insecurity has become the new normal. Seeking to bounce back to stability and focusing on self-interest, which we’ve learned to think is the pathway to success, health and well-being, isn’t the right ticket.

In short, there’s no state of equilibrium you can bounce back to. In this highly diverse, interdependent, interconnected world.  Trying to do so is a fast ticket to dysfunction and derailment. You can’t reestablish equilibrium within a constantly shifting world. But engaging these new realities in positive ways will support your success and well-being.

Research shows that you can proactively build specific emotions, thoughts and actions that are effective for adapting to life in the non-equilibrium world we now live within. That’s encouraging, because I think we’re evolving towards a new definition of psychological health via rethinking resilience.

The criteria of a new, proactive resiliency – maybe call it “prosilience – may sound contradictory because they include letting go of self-interest in your relationships and work. The new view of resilience emphasizes being flexible, open and nimble; being able to shift and redeploy your personal resources – emotional, creative, intellectual – towards positive engagement with others.

Resiliency grows from putting your energies, your values, emotional attitudes and actions in the service of the common good – something larger than just yourself. That’s what supports both success in your outside life and internal well-being. And in today’s rapidly transforming world, you need both.

In the future look for new posts about perspectives, research and actions that relate to “becoming sane in a turbulent, interconnected, turbulent world.”  Through them I hope to contribute to a revised and needed reformulation of what psychological health and resiliency are in today’s world — in all realms of life:  intimate relationships, career challenges, engagement with diverse people, and in our responsibilities as  global citizens.

Rich points out that the “tsunami of anger” today is illogical, in the sense that the health care legislation is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare.  He also reminds us that the new anger and extremism predated the health care debate:

The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.

He’s pointing out that major changes are occurring in the demographics of our country.  These changes – and others, concerning what people look for in relationships and in their careers —  are beginning to have major impact on us psychologically, including our psychological health.  For some, they generate tremendous fear that can give rise to hatred and aggression; a desire to “take back our country.”

Rich points out that:

Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

Then, in a similar analysis, Charles M. Blow writes in his column:

It’s an extension of a now-familiar theme: some version of “take our country back.” The problem is that the country romanticized by the far right hasn’t existed for some time, and its ability to deny that fact grows more dim every day. President Obama and what he represents has jolted extremists into the present and forced them to confront the future. And it scares them.

Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy.

Blow cites a recent Quinnipiac University poll that found Tea Party members to be just as anachronistic to the direction of the country’s demographics as the Republican Party. For instance, they were disproportionately white, evangelical Christian and “less educated … than the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack.”  Blow points out that this is at the very time

when the country is becoming more diverse (some demographers believe that 2010 could be the first year that most children born in the country will be nonwhite), less doctrinally dogmatic, and college enrollment is through the roof. The Tea Party, my friends, is not the future.

Well said.  Mounting demographic and psychological research are confirming and extending what Rich and Blow describe.  In fact, several strands of change have been underway and coalescing into a changing psychology of people – their emotional attitudes, mental perspectives, values regarding work and relationships, and behavior towards people in need or who suffer loss.  These are shifts within a wide range of thought, feelings and actions.  Here are some of them:

Volunteer service – Data show that the number of volunteers is steadily growing among all age groups.  People describe volunteerism as part of their sense of  responsibility to help others in need, not something for padding their resume

Donations of organs by living donors to strangers.  That number is steadily rising.  For example, kidney donations from living donors have outnumbered those from deceased donors since 2003.

Hands-on philanthropy — Increasingly, donors want their contributions to have more visible, direct impact upon people’s lives.  They are turning away from contributions to already well-heeled organizations like universities or cultural centers.  On the rise are such examples as purchasing a goat for a family in an impoverished part of the world to provide its livelihood; or  paying the salary of a schoolteacher in a Third-World country.

Responsibility for a healthy planet.  Differences about global warming notwithstanding, the last several years have witnessed a steady shift towards feelings of greater responsibility for the planet’s health, across the board.  For example, grass-roots environmental activism now spills across traditional socio-economic lines, as well as across racial-ethnic differences; steadily rising financial contributions to environmental organizations; and increasing alliances between business interests and environmental groups.

Redefining “success” As I wrote in a previous post about the “4.0 career,” men and women increasingly want careers to provide more than personal recognition and financial reward.  They want meaningful work, opportunities for continued learning and growth, a positive management culture and a team-oriented, ethical environment. Research shows they want to have impact through their work on something larger than their own personal success.  These themes are especially pronounced among younger workers – the leaders of tomorrow.

Relationships are transforming. Surveys by the Gallup organization and other groups find that the quality of the relationship is more important to people today than simple allegiance to the institution of marriage.  Census statistics and other data confirm this, showing, for example:

• Steady decline in the marriage rate over the last several decades, while cohabitation has steadily risen in each of those same decades.
• About half of all households today are headed by people who are single.
• Unmarried couples are as likely as married couples to be raising children: it’s currently approaching 50%
• Between one-quarter and one-third of gay and lesbian couples are raising children; also a steadily rising number.
• Surveys find that at least 30% of those polled admit to having had an affair.  It’s not that people view affairs as desirable – especially when children are involved –  but they aren’t viewed as immoral, either.  See my recent post about six different kinds of affairs people have today, and their consequences.
• Attitudes towards gay relationships and gay marriage are changing.  Although surveys tend to show opposition to gay marriage, that, too, is shifting.  While  acceptance of gay relationships has steadily increased, opposition to gay marriage has steadily decreased, when tracked over the last several years.

These are just some of the pervasive shifts occurring are you read these words. All have implications for our emotional lives, our mental attitudes, and our actions.  I think this evolution underway requires us to re-think what constitutes psychological health in this changing world.  Our criteria have to change as people are faced with adapting to living, working, and relating to others in a very different world.

Charles M. Blow stated it well, at the end of his column.  Referring to the extremeists, he writes:

You may want “your country back,” but you can’t have it. That sound you hear is the relentless, irrepressible march of change. Welcome to America: The Remix.

“She was standing off by herself during a conference break, leaning against a wall, sipping coffee,” George said.  “As I walked by, our eyes met and I felt a sudden jolt — a rush of energy, real connection.  Suddenly we found ourselves talking, feeling like we had known each other for years.”  The affair “just “happened,” George added.

That’s an explanation I’ve heard many times.  Another is a bit more “strategic.”  For example, Jan, a 41 year-old lawyer, said her affair was a “marriage stabilizer….safe and discreet, a perfect solution for me.”  She decided it was a rational alternative to the disruption of divorce.

Of course the public always enjoys being titillated with stories of public figures’ affairs, especially when hypocrisy is exposed.  But cultural attitudes have clearly shifted towards acceptance of affairs.  They’re seen as a life-style choice; an option for men and women yearning for excitement or intimacy that’s lacking or has dulled during their marriage.  So given that new reality, I decided to write this piece, about the psychology of affairs — their meaning and their consequences.

Based on my work over the decades, I find six kinds of affairs that people have today.  I think a non-judgmental description of them (but with a tinge of humor) can help people who have affairs deal with them with greater awareness and responsibility.  Here are the six I’ve diagnosed:

The “It’s-Only-Lust “ Affair. The most common, it’s mostly about sex.  It can feel really intense, but it’s also the quickest to flame out.  John and Kim met through work, and felt a strong physical attraction.  John was separated; Kim, married.  They felt powerless to resist the pull. “It was inevitable.  We ended up in bed, as well as a lot of other places!  It was wonderful,” John added, with a big grin. The liberating and compelling feeling from this kind of affair, though, can mask hidden emotional conflicts.

An example is the person who’s able to feel sexually alive and free only in a secret relationship, hidden from the imagined hovering, inhibiting eye of one’s parent – which the person may experience unconsciously with his or her spouse.  The lust affair is often short-lived, and passion can slide downhill pretty fast as the excitement declines or underground emotional issues surface again.  It can also fade if the lovers discover that there wasn’t much connecting them beyond sex.  As John later told me, “As great as the sex was, we didn’t really have much to say to each other.  Eventually, that became a turn-off.”

The “I’ll-Show-You” Affair. Rachel began realizing the depth of her anger and resentment towards her husband after years of an unhappy marriage.  She had long felt unaffirmed, ignored, and disregarded by him.  His adamant refusal to go to couples therapy pushed her into acting upon her anger.  Rachel told me that a previous therapy had helped her recognize her collusion in becoming so subordinate in the marriage.  But she couldn’t create a solution, nor figure out how to deal with her desire for revenge.

She knew that “getting back” at her husband wasn’t going to produce empowerment or healing, but nevertheless began a disastrous affair.  She subsequently discovered that the man was only interested in a narcissistic conquest, and he quickly dumped her.  Eventually, she realized that beneath her anger was a desire for a man who would really recognize her, who could “see” her, as her father never did.   But before that awakening occurred, she suffered, and she still had to deal with the reality of her marriage and how to heal her own trauma.

The “Just-In-The-Head” Affair. Can you call it an affair if the “lovers” don’t have sex? Consider Paul and Linda.  They became very close working together on a volunteer project.   Paul was married, and Linda was divorced but living with a boyfriend.  They found they had much in common – a similar outlook on life and a spiritual compatibility as well.  They enjoyed talking and looking forward to time together.  They spoke on the phone frequently and lingered around afterward working on the project.  Soon they realized that a very intimate and emotionally close bond had developed.  It definitely felt like much more than just a friendship.

So why didn’t they have sex?  Linda, who was my patient, said that neither of them wanted to disrupt or leave their primary relationship, or “mess it up.” So, they chose to keep it platonic.  That level of intimacy and intensity makes it an affair of the mind, if not the body; it’s more than just a friendship.  I find that people in this kind of affair find something in each other that’s lacking in their “real” relationship, and they’re not dealing with that.  Aside from the challenge of remaining on the chaste side of the sexual borderline, such “lovers” must hope that their primary partners continue to believe they’re telling the truth.   And there’s a risk that what they’re not finding in their primary relationship will become increasingly disruptive to it.

The “All-In-The-Family” Affair. Bill thought this was fail-safe, because no one would suspect.  He and his wife’s sister finally had sex after years of mutual, erotic teasing.  Suddenly they were in the midst of an affair that neither wanted to end.  They thought they could keep it secret; that neither would make any demands on the other and it would be perfectly safe.  If you think that was naive, it was.  Most “family” affairs are interwoven with family dysfunctions and buried resentments.  Neither Bill nor Tina, his sister-in-law, looked seriously at the issues in their respective marriages or interlocked families; or even how dangerous it was.  Postscript: One of their spouses eventually discovered the incriminating e-mails, and the family affair quickly turned into a family nightmare.

The “It’s-Not-Really-An-Affair” Affair. We humans are experts at creating illusions for ourselves.  In this affair one party is available but the other isn’t.  The available partner believes that the other really will leave his or her spouse, given enough time and patience.  Jane, divorced for several years, began seeing a married man. She told me vehemently, “It’s not an affair!  It’s a relationship!”  But that takes two equally available and committed people.  I’ve seen many women and women over the years (though it’s usually women caught in this trap) who truly believe their lovers will leave their spouses.   Ninety percent of the time it never happens.  Jane eventually realized that her lover never had any intention of leaving.  In fact, he had had multiple affairs throughout his marriage.

The “Mind-Body”Affair. Here’s the most dangerous one of all for the lovers’ existing relationships.   It’s so powerful because it feels so complete — emotionally, sexually, intellectually, spiritually.  Matt and Ellen, who consulted me as a couple, met through a parents’ function at their children’s school.  Right away, they felt a strong, mutual connection.  “If I believed in reincarnation,” Matt told me, “I would say that we were together in a former life.  We feel like ‘soul-mates.’” “I never thought a relationship could feel like this,” said Ellen.

The “mind-body” affair is highly threatening to a marriage because it feels so “right.” Of course, the couple may try to end it or turn it into a “just-in-the-head” affair, but that rarely works.  Of all the different affairs, I’ve found that this kind most frequently leads to divorce and remarriage. The upside is that the new relationship often proves to be the right match for the couple.  Nevertheless, it generates all the mixed consequences that all affairs produce, especially when children are involved.

Learning From Affairs

You might assume that you can isolate your affair from the rest of your life.  Or, you might not give much thought to its consequences.  Both are mistakes.  If you’re considering an affair or are in the midst of one, I suggest you consider the following:

• There’s always a reason for beginning an affair, and it relates to some issue in your existing relationship.  It’s far better to face and resolve that first.  You don’t just “find” yourself having an affair, or “end up” in bed with someone.  It’s your choice, but it can be beautifully rationalized.  So take a look at what’s missing or unfulfilling in your relationship, why that is, and whether you can — or even want to – do something about it.   It’s preferable to try renewing your relationship, or end it with mutual respect.

•  Some affairs are psychologically healthy. An affair can help leverage you out of a destructive or deadened relationship that’s beyond the point of renewal. The positive feelings of affirmation and restored vitality generated by an affair can activate the courage to leave a marriage when doing so is healthiest decision for both yourself and your partner.  I’ve seen both men and women become psychologically healthier through an affair.  It springboarded them into greater emotional honesty and mature action.  Of course, you have to be honest with yourself, here, and not rationalize yourself into having the affair while postponing necessary action.

•  An affair can help renew your relationship with your existing partner. An affair can spur you to confront what you really want from your existing partner and motivate you to try creating it.  Larry, a journalist, had an affair for nearly four years.  After an argument with his lover one day, he realized he was beginning to feel much of the same irritation and sexual boredom that he felt towards his wife.  “This is pretty screwed-up,” he said to me.  “I’ve got to do something.” As he examined what he really wanted and valued he recognized his own role in evading long-standing conflicts in his marriage.  He saw that he wanted to experience what he did during the affair… but with his wife.  “I want my wife and lover to be the same person,” he said.  Larry began to confront, with his wife’s participation, the real problems in their relationship and the steps it would take to rebuild it.

By acknowledging that an affair means you’re living a lie in some form, you have a greater chance to deal with the emotional and practical consequences of the affair in a healthier way.  And there are plenty of consequences – for yourself, your children, your existing relationship. But if you fool yourself about the reasons for your affair and what it may set in motion, you can squander irreplaceable years, trapped within illusions and rationalizations.  When it all comes crashing down, loneliness and emptiness may be all that remains. That’s why I advocate awareness at the outset: You can become more conscious of your actions, and use that awareness to deal maturely with their consequences.  Or yes, you can remain unconscious….but then you still have to deal with the consequences.