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

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

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

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

Whole-Person Sex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In brief, it’s that management practices, the workplace relationships that result from them, and the overall business model is stuck within a 20th century mindset and worldview. And that’s dysfunctional in today’s world of chaos, interdependency, and transparency. Today, collaboration and openness are essential for generating and sustaining success, both in work and in life outside of work. The new world environment includes clear shifts in what people look for and want from their careers; and from the organizations to which they’ll commit their creative energies. These new realities are pushing companies to transform how they do business and how they treat people working within them. The push is towards supporting new learning, creative innovation, and long-term vision that promotes sustainability as well as contributes to greater well-being via the product or service.

What Happens At Work

With those emerging shifts in mind, some of the new findings shed light point to what may help support these transformations in people’s life at work and within business leadership. Consider a new survey from the consulting firm rogenSI. It reports that about 25% of the global workforce is depressed. The primary source is people’s experience at work. In fact, 92 percent of those surveyed linked the state of their mental health to their job.

That’s no surprise, really: A ComPsych survey finds that two-thirds of employees report unprecedented levels of stress. And 29% report feeling so stressed that they’re often unable to be effective at all, during the workday. Of course workload is a factor. But the impact of other sources has been increasing. They include negative, unsupportive and undermining relationships on the job, including those with peers; destructive interactions with management; and the negative impact of a management culture that’s stifling or unrewarding of talent.

Another study finds that work actually makes many people physically sick. It’s not so much the long hours but conflicts with others, each day at work. Also contributing to sickness are confusion, ambiguity or negative competition around roles; in addition to insufficient resources or other organizational constraints. A recently promoted senior executive described the latter, telling me that her new role didn’t include the staff and other resources she needed to be effective.

Overall, continuous intense pressure and heavy workloads fueled by negative management practices will generate fear and anxiety, especially when employees lack the flexibility or resources they need. These are unhealthy Catch-22 situations, and the research shows the consequences: a close association between physical symptoms and each of the above factors. Moreover, research finds a link between your level of stress at work and the length of your life. In a literal sense, your work may be killing you.

Chronic stress takes an emotional and physical toll, and working within a negative, unrewarding workplace and management culture are prime contributors. Researchers find that such factors are the single most important factor related to length of life, especially the absence of positive support and collaboration in relationships with co-workers. Another study found that the level of engagement and connection in people’s workplace relationships with co-workers and in performing their workplace roles corresponded to whether they felt they were thriving, struggling….or suffering.

Most of these destructive features coalesce around trying to succeed and have impact within a workplace culture that either undermines what you need to be successful, or is stacked against you to begin with. When I first wrote about the link between career success and emotional conflict in Modern Madness a couple of decades ago, I found that the main conflicts people typically experienced were enervating trade-offs and feelings of self-betrayal — especially around personal values and ideals that clashed with the behavior and attitudes necessary for career advancement. Much of that is still true, but those conflicts have been mostly supplanted by two major changes: In the world that organizations operate in; and in what people look for in their careers today.

The Backstory

The Crash of ’08 helped unraveled the old model of career pressures to cope with unhealthy work and role behavior in exchange for financial reward and steady career advancement. That’s now gone. Much of the mental and emotional distress people experience today reflects the disruption that we’re now in the midst of. Robert Reich has described the heart of the current unraveling, writing that,

In that old view, being rich was proof of hard work, and lack of money proof of indolence or worse. The old view was anyone could make it in America with enough guts and gumption. The old view was also that great wealth trickled downward — that the rich made investments in jobs and growth that benefited all of us. But that view, too, has lost its sheen. Nothing has trickled down.

 At the same time there’s rising awareness that many alternative paths to success and fulfillment are sprouting all over the place. That can leave one chagrined about what’s happening – the current decade’s version of “Mr. Jones” in Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man.” For example, recent stories in the media question the value of college and it’s relevance to a successful, fulfilling life. And New York Times columnist Tom Friedman described an emerging, relevant theme of younger people who see themselves as a pro-active personal vehicle of innovation and success; of their own development — what he calls “the start-up of you.” A great illustration of the new paths and attitudes that are breaking free from the old model was a recent story in the New York Times Magazine about Lex Luger, a young, highly successful music-maker who dropped out of high school, driven by his love of what he wanted to do, his pro-active attitude and his talent.

The consequences of the new world environment for careers in organizations is that people respond with energy and commitment when their workplace is highly collaborative and supports continuous growth; when it enables them to have impact on something beyond just financial reward. And, when the company pursues long-term, sustainable business strategies. People who build success and well-being within such organizations are highly proactive within the “nonequilibrium” world they’re immersed in. These are among the features I’ve described as part of the rising 4.0 career orientation.

If employees are more likely to be engaged and productive when their work provides a greater impact than simply helping increase profit, companies are also more successful when they building a culture of collaboration and transparency; when they create a flexible, long-term vision of the business. All this is a far cry from the old top-down, command-and-control world of yesterday. In short, companies that are able to retain the best workers build a business model that integrates sustainable practices, commitment to high value in their service or product, and contributes to the common good.

Moving Towards Transformation

There are hopeful signs of the kinds of changes that will support positive, healthy practices for both organizations and their employees. Some are found in research findings; others in examples of new business perspectives. Some examples:

• Studies find that well-being is highly related to a sense of positive connection and engagement at work, and to being able to provide service of some kind through your contributions to the enterprise. In fact, only 7% of well-being was attributed to income. In addition — the flip side of the finding that an unpleasant workplace can shorten your life — positive relations with co-workers and a supportive, positive management behavior is associated with a longer life. The perception of emotional support at work was the strongest indicator of future health.

• Increasing movement towards a business model that prioritizes well-being over growth, in which a company’s products, services and brands support maximum flourishing for customers, workers and society. For example, Dov Seidman calls it the rise of the “new normal,” marked by high degrees of transparency, interconnection and interdependency. Successful companies embrace these perspectives, rather than ignore or resist them. Short-term mindsets become displaced by long-term perspectives.

• The best businesses realize that they are more than just engines to make money, as Rosabeth Moss Kanter pointed out in the Harvard Business Review, writing that they are “also vehicles for accomplishing societal purposes and for providing meaningful livelihoods for those who work in them.” The most successful companies consider whether or not they are building long-term institutions of society. They invest in the future while paying attention to the needs of society and people.

The upshot of these encouraging signs is that employees will feel their work is meaningful and will be more engaged when it has some wider benefit other than simply increasing profits. But that’s part of a larger shift in leadership and business perspectives that represents, in effect, an evolution of the “DNA” of the organization’s culture at all levels. For the individual worker, that means healthier interactions with co-workers, subordinates and bosses, and a diminishing sense that your work is “interfering” too much with your life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning To “Forget Yourself” In Your Relationship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

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

Reframe Your Perspective About Loss, Regret and Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Live for More Than Your Ego

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many people struggle to find ways to better cope when subjected to unhealthy, abusive management. Often that means learning stress management techniques. They can be helpful, especially when you don’t think any alternatives exist. But ultimately, they aren’t enough. However, reframing how you envision your situation to begin with can open the door to proactive, positive actions in the situation you feel trapped in.

Cathy’s example contains some ways you can do that. She was at mid-level in her company and had a record of steady promotion. At one point, senior leadership in her area changed abruptly, and she was now reporting to a newly appointed boss. “I’m here to shake things up,” he told everyone when he took over. “Everyone’s job is on the line.”

Cathy’s assessment of her new boss was that he didn’t really know her area of expertise, nor was he very interested in learning about it. Nevertheless, he freely criticized her work. Moreover, he kept sitting on a promotion that she had been in line for.

It wasn’t just her: Her boss stirred up much resentment among others because of his arrogant, controlling, dismissive style. When Cathy researched something he had requested and presented it to him, he exploded, saying that she had wasted her time doing something that had “no relevance.” When she pointed out that he had requested the analysis to begin with, he denied it.

But Cathy didn’t just hunker down, become stressed and depressed, or feel disempowered. First, she used a meditative technique to focus her attention on just observing the negative emotions her boss’ behavior aroused in her. That is, she practiced “watching” her emotions as they passed through her. This helped her refrain from being pulled by angry emotions into greater, more debilitating depths, or into unproductive behavior.

Doing that enabled her, in turn, to step “outside” herself (that is, outside the narrow vantage point of her own ego). She looked at herself as if she were a character in a movie. She imagined rewriting the dialogue and actions of the character that was herself, and she envisioned how this “character” might create a different scenario.

This is a form of what I’ve called learning to “forget yourself” (that is, moving beyond and through your immediate self-interest to see yourself in a larger context). Cathy’s enlarged perspective enabled her to accept that her boss was simply acting in accordance with the person he was, regardless of the reasons or how she judged them. Doing that helped prevent her from being drawn into taking his behavior personally, even though it impacted her personally. She rose “above” her situations with, in effect, “engaged indifference.”

That is, she remained “indifferent” to her own emotional reactions, yet she stayed very engaged in looking for solutions from within her broadened perspective. She considered the possible viewpoints and agenda of her boss, from within his possible mindset. That added to her capacity to figure out what might be going on — and what might help.

For example, she thought about what might be some drivers of her boss’ behavior. Was he simply a jerk? An unskilled manager? Did he have an agenda that she didn’t understand? Was he dealing with some insecurities of his own? Personal issues at home? She did a little sleuthing and learned that her new boss had been brought in under a lot of pressure to create some major changes in that part of the organization. Moreover, she learned that he had a troubled teenager at home. Knowing these things didn’t change her opinion about his behavior, but it helped her realize that it would be useful to both of them if he didn’t think of her as a thorn in his side. And it was up to her to try to make that happen.

In essence, she saw the whole picture as a set of circumstances that created a “perfect storm” for her, and that called for an effective solution, from her. So, when her boss criticized a report she had prepared — on the grounds that it didn’t include something that he had previously told her to ignore, but which he now claimed he needed and had told her so — she anticipated that. Rather than reacting with anger, defensiveness or frustration, she simply said she would provide it immediately and asked how she could best help him with anything else that he needed at this point.

Now this may sound counterintuitive, or that it’s “giving in” to a tyrant. But from an enlarged perspective of indifference and engagement, it’s not. That’s because you’re taking into account the emotional drivers and needs of the difficult person you’re dealing with. And you can’t do that if you’re driven solely by your own.

By stepping “outside” herself, Cathy saw some ways to provide her boss the support he need to feel, which, in turn, could help calm his anxieties. She asked him for ways that she could aid his objectives. At the same time, she decided to cede control of some areas that didn’t matter to her, but which her boss seemed to enjoy micromanaging. Cathy felt secure in the knowledge that her expertise wasn’t diminished by her boss’ agenda or his actions.

But there was one more important step that she took: looking down the road, Cathy concluded that her future under him was probably a dead end for the foreseeable future. So she immediately updated her resume and began looking for a new position. She kept her eyes on her own career development objectives, while at the same time navigating through her situation with as little friction as possible.

Learn To ‘Enlarge The Problem’

President Eisenhower once said, when speaking about his experience as Allied commander during World War II, that if you have difficulty understanding a problem or figuring out how to solve it, “enlarge the problem.” That’s what Cathy did. Her example provides some general guidelines that can help, at least in some situations. They include:

• Create an emotional buffer zone. Observe your internal emotional responses to your situation, but recognize that you’re not obligated to act on them. Visualize a “space” between your emotions and how you choose to deal with them in your behavior. If you don’t, you’re likely to say or do something unhelpful or damaging to yourself. That is, stay fully aware of your buttons that your boss is pushing, but separate that from simply reacting to what he’s triggered, or from taking his behavior personally. Don’t get drawn into reacting to your boss’ emotional issues. Recognize that you always have a choice about what you do with your emotions in your conduct.

• Expand your perspective. By not reacting externally to your internal reactions, you are, in effect, learning to be “indifferent” to them. This allows you to enlarge your perspective about the whole situation: what’s feeding into it, and what’s driving your boss’ conduct. When you expand your vision beyond your personal, narrow vantage point, you can see the problem in a much larger context. That includes the multiple factors that feed into it, such as the role of other players or other organizational issues and politics, regardless of what your opinion is about them. This includes getting inside your boss’ mental perspective to understand what he or she may be sensitive to or reacting to. For example, some of your boss’ controlling or abusive behavior may reflect fear about her or his own security in the position.

• Create productive actions with “engaged indifference.” That means staying proactively engaged with solving the problem, yet “indifferent” to your own emotional reactions. Then, you avoid getting sucked into unproductive behavior fueled by anger, resentment or self-pity, or staying fixed within too narrow an understanding of the problem, which leads to a dead end.

Ask yourself what you can do proactively, even if it means “feeding the dog what it wants to eat,” regardless of your opinion of your boss’ choice of “food.” Visualize alternative takes of the “movie” about your situation, as Cathy did. Use them to identify some new actions that reflect “turns of the plot.”

You might decide to go along with some parts of your situation, because your enlarged perspective enables you to see down the road, as you might from the rooftop of a building. You may decide that that’s the best strategy for achieving your longer-range objectives. That might sound like “giving in,” but it’s not when you know what you’re doing and why. For example, you might look for ways to help your boss feel more secure or supported, despite what you think of him or her, because that diminishes your boss’ anxiety and will therefore make your life a bit easier, as long as you remain there.

Of course, it’s important to self-examine at the outset, when you find yourself in a bad situation. Look honestly, with outside help, if necessary, at what you might be contributing to the problem. Ask yourself, “How much is it me or the situation?” Without doing that, you might take actions that you later regret or that prove to be unhelpful.

Finally, it’s crucial to leave any situation that becomes outright abusive, or if you’re subjected to humiliation and extreme denigration. And then, do the research when considering a new job: look for signs of a potentially negative situation, tune in to what you hear during interviews, ask people within the organization what it’s like to work for that company or that boss, heed any red flags raised by what you hear, and don’t enable history to repeat itself.

The list goes on, the latest being the Anthony Weiner’s “rolling disclosure” episode. The Washington Post recently compiled may of the scandals into a nice summary – for those who are interested in keeping track.

But I think this steady stream of sex-related scandals is just the most titillating and graphic part of something more widespread and troublesome in the lives of many men and women today: the gap between people’s public lies and private truths.

That is, many people live with contradictions between their inner lives (the truths about their desires, emotional experience, self-image and ideals) and what they do with those truths behind the scenes, hidden from view (their private selves), and the lives they conduct publically, in their career paths, their relationships with their families or others they deal with and the positions they espouse or advocate (their public selves).

Public lies that contradict private truths have been part of our culture for some time. But in my work with people over the last few decades, I’ve seen it grow more rapidly since 9/11 and the economic/political events of the last few years. As I reflected on the reasons for this gap, how it damages people and our society, I was reminded of the Egyptian myth of Osiris. He was killed and dismembered, and each of the 14 pieces of his body parts was buried in different places. But then Isis, the wife of Osiris, collected the body parts and was able to put them back together. At that point, Osiris came back to life.

There’s a relevant message for today contained in the symbolism of the Osiris myth, which I’ll explain later. But first, take a look at the usual explanations of the most flagrant examples of the public-private gap, and what they suggest about power, success and social conditioning. The most common reasons offered by both media pundits and mental health professionals include the possibility that the power lust of people — most often men — and the enabling of sycophants around them loosen their control of impulses. Then, the opportunity to act on impulses for sex and domination may increase. Some research even suggests that, as people rise in power, they’re more likely to commit adultery.

In this view, as men rise in power, they have more opportunity to act on their impulses, and will do so. However, it’s not clear whether such people had shaky impulse control to begin with. Perhaps the atmosphere and adulation around power and recognition fuels and reinforces nascent narcissism, like pouring gasoline onto a fire. But it’s hard to say whether such people were narcissistic to begin with, or had tendencies that became strengthened and intensified by the perks and rewards of their situation.

Psychologically, high levels of success and power in business, politics, sports or entertainment can strengthen and fuel self-centeredness, at least. Environments in which you’re often under public scrutiny can also feed heightened aggressiveness and a sense of entitlement, an attitude of “taking what I want, because I can,” coupled with a belief that you can get away with it. Interestingly, research shows that a higher level of testosterone, typical in aggressive, narcissistic, “Type-A” personalities, stifles the natural capacity for empathy. That’s visible in people with power who use others for their own self-centered ends.

These are plausible explanations, per se, but the lives of a broader range of people who aren’t politicians or celebrities also contain private truths and public lies, though less visible and less dramatic. In my view, a major source for those within that larger mainstream is found in how men and women become conditioned into what they think an adult life is supposed to be, or should be. And much of that originates in parental imperatives, whether overt or implied. The filmmaker Spike Lee described that in a recent interview. He remarked on parents who “kill more dreams than anybody,” those who push their children to opt for career security at the cost of pursuing their passions.

Life In A Parallel Universe

The heart of the deception many enter into is that you present yourself in one way in your public role, but feel or behave a different way, in private. Life in your parallel universes often grows gradually, as you adapt to and embrace behavior that you see rewarded, even as it clashes with your own values or beliefs. Over time, that generates increasing discomfort, especially if whom you’re morphing into publically doesn’t mesh so well with the person you are inside.

This can occur when people follow pathways to “success” that are easily available or acceptable to parents. Those pathways might connect with innate abilities, whether they reflect real interests or not. The end result for them is becoming entrapped in their lives. They feel caught between elusive longings for something different and more purposeful, as opposed to settling for what they have acquired in their relationship, their lifestyleor their work.

For example, they may feel vaguely or even acutely at odds with their chosen career path, like the man who said, “I never wanted a business career,” or the woman who said, “I really wanted to be come a research scientist.” Or the feeling of being out of synch may occur in the person they created a long-term relationship with, as in the lyrics of “Once in a Lifetime,” a Talking Heads song: “You may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife/You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”

This feeling of vague emotional discomfort is often the product of having embraced the “acceptable” or “practical” view of adulthood that’s put in front of you. That may include “acceptable” ways to relate, or what kinds of people to relate to, based on what the parents or extended family wants to maintain; and following one acceptable path that the parents desire and encourage or is part of a family tradition.

Private truths in conflict with public lies often erupt as overt psychiatric symptoms. Self-absorbed, narcissistic behavior may reflect a deformed effort to secure recognition and affirmation of the person’s inherent value and self-worth, an attempt to secure love for who one is inside. That may become visible in unconsciously seeking a state of infantile bliss through the hoped-for love and full attention from the partner. Some are more driven to overt hypocrisy, exploitation and dominance, and they may be fueled by deep feelings of resentment or shame.

Whether the gaps are more benign or malignant, they are the root of much of the depression and anxiety rampant in today’s culture.

Macular Degeneration Of The Self

In today’s interconnected, highly exposed and networked world, the contradiction between public lies and private truths is harder to maintain. That’s good, actually, because it opens the possibility for learning how to create a more integrated life. And that’s healthy and necessary for both individuals and society. While people’s lives are highly fragmented, the need for interconnection and interdependence is greater than ever, for building security, success and well-being in today’s globalized environment.

It’s in the present moments, not in regrets about what happened in the past, nor in fantasizing about the future, that people have the opportunity to create a life of “no more lies!” as a woman shouted at her husband one day. The old ways don’t work so well anymore, and that’s a major reason why the older baby boomer generation struggles with these conflicts. On the other hand, younger people are showing a different kind of orientation. They act more openly to create a more integrated life, one that serves something larger than just their own ego. They do so with energy and commitment. And they’re more likely to reject the “careerism” mentality that’s fueled much of the public-private gap within the older generations.

But revamping how you work and live to serve the social good as well as oneself requires an expanded vision of what you’re working and living for. Doing that is part of building psychological health today in all sectors of life. In your personal life you need an integrated vision of what you’re living and working for, a larger purpose that pulls you toward something beyond your own narrow self-interest. Such a broadened perspective is also visible in forward thinking about business, such as described by management strategist Umair Haque in his emphasis on the need for leaders to build and create value in today’s companies. And the absence of a larger vision in our political and social policies is undermining our country, as some commentators, such as E.J. Dionne, have been pointing out.

Returning to the symbolic meaning of the Osiris myth, “re-membering” the buried “parts” of yourself, those private truths, putting them back together and integrating them with your public life, is the path toward becoming “alive” again. Bringing together your private self and your public self into one person may require healing of emotional damage. And it requires some courage to shift course in your life as you assert who you are and how that impacts the person you will become as you go forward.

Here are some suggestions for beginning to live a life of “no more lies!”:

• Make a list of what you believe are your private truths, including your values or ideals. Look at all parts of your life: as a worker, parent or friend; your creative desires and abilities; your marriage or partnership; your spiritual beliefs or values; your ambitions.

• Next, make a parallel entry for each item on your list that describes your public behavior relative to each of the items. To what extent does your public behavior embody contradictions or outright denial of your private truths? Assign a number from one to five, showing the gap between each of your private truths and public lies.

• What would you need to do to reduce the lies? What can you commit yourself to doing? What kind of help do you need?

• Set a reasonable time-frame for reducing your gaps.

I’m often asked, “Why can’t I find the purpose of my life?” Over the decades I’ve heard many men and women — whether they’re psychotherapy patients working to build healthier lives or business executive trying to create healthier leadership — say at some point that they don’t know what they’re really here, for, on this planet. They’re not necessarily religious or spiritually inclined, but they feel a longing for that “certain something” that defines and integrates their lives.

Many turn to the various books and programs purport to identify their life’s purpose, but most come away dissatisfied. No closer than they were before, they identify with Bono’s plaintive cry in the U2′s song, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

And yet, many do find and live in harmony with their life’s purpose. Here are some of my observations about why many don’t, and how they differ from those who do.

First, I think everyone feels a pull towards some defining purpose to his or her life, no matter how much it may have become shrouded over along the way. In fact, you can say that all forms of life, all natural phenomena, have some purpose. There’s always movement or evolution towards some kind of outcome or fulfillment — whether it’s a tree that produces fruit or clouds that form to produce rain. But we humans become so enraptured by our daily activity, engagements, goals and so forth, that our awareness of our own unique life purpose is easily dimmed.

And there are consequences to not knowing or finding your purpose. I often see men and women who’ve become successful in their work or relationships — their outer lives — and yet they feel hollow, empty, unfulfilled. They describe feeling “off-track” in some way, or incomplete, despite a conventionally successful life. Sometimes they wonder if they’ve been on the “wrong” path all along — chosen the wrong career, or the wrong life partner. Or that perhaps they haven’t realized that their chosen path could be more meaningful or purposeful to them, if they let it. Moreover, they wonder how you can tell the difference?

One thing is clear: The consequences of not finding your purpose include chronic, lingering dissatisfaction; an absence of inner peace and a sense of not being fully in sync with your inner self. That’s because your true inner self knows that your life purpose is out of sync with your outer life. The latter is often a false self, but you’ve identified with it because it’s been so rewarding to your ego.

I think most people retain at least a glimmer of awareness of their life’s purpose within their inner being. It often feels like a leaning, an inclination, that continues to pull at you. Sometimes is right in front of your eyes but you don’t allow yourself to see it, like when you’re hunting for your missing keys and then discover that they’ve been right in front of you the whole time. For example, an investment advisor found himself doing more and more work with charity organizations. He finally realized that what he felt most in sync with was hands-on work helping people. That was the part he enjoyed about his work, not the money managing per se. Helping people was his true calling, and it was staring him in the face the whole time.

Those who experience a clear inclination but don’t pursue or fulfill it remain incomplete and dissatisfied. But it’s important not to confuse seeking happiness with finding your purpose. Happiness is what you experience in the daily flow of life — the highs and lows that are situational. They will fluctuate. But purpose is deeper. It’s more of an underlying sense of peace and fulfillment overall, a sense of integration and continuous unfoldment of your being. It transcends everyday ups and downs, the disappointments or successes, even. When you’re living in accordance with your life’s purpose, you view all of the above as part of what you encounter along the road. They don’t distract you from that larger vision, your ideal, which is like a magnet steadily pulling you towards it.

Themes Among People Who Find Their Purpose

There are commonalities among those who find their true purpose for being. One major theme is that they aren’t very preoccupied with self-interest, in their ego-investments in what they do. That can sound contradictory. How can you find your life purpose if you’re not focused on yourself? The fact is, when you’re highly focused on yourself, with getting your goals or needs met — whether in your work or relationships — your purpose becomes obscured. Your ego covers it, like clouds blocking the sun. Self-interest, or ego in this sense, is part of being human, of course. It’s something that requires effort and consciousness to move through and let go of, so you don’t become transfixed by it, as the Sirens sought to do to Ulysses.

Letting go of self-interest opens the door to recognizing your true self, more clearly, so you can see whether it’s joined with your outer life and creates a sense of purpose — or clashes with it. Knowing who you are inside — your true values, secret desires, imagination; your capacity for love, empathy, generosity — all relate to and inform your life purpose.

A second theme of those who discover their life purpose is that they use their mental and creative energies to serve something larger than themselves. That is, they’re like the lover who simply gives love for its own sake, without regard for getting something in return, without asking to be loved back or viewing his actions as a transaction or investment. That can be hard to imagine in our mercantile society, but giving your mental, emotional and creative energy from the heart comes naturally when you serve something larger than your self-interest. It beckons you; it calls forth your spirit.

This theme of service to something larger than your ego, larger than “winning” the fruits of what you’re aiming for, takes many forms in people. For some, their service and sense of purpose is embodied in the work that they do every day. That is, what they do reflects the paradox of not directly aiming to achieve something, because doing so only fuels the ego. This theme is described by John Kay, former Director of Oxford’s Business School, in “Obliquity.” There, he shows examples of achieving business or career goals by pursuing them indirectly; by deliberately not pursuing them. That is, too much self-interest tends to undermine success. It’s the difference between passion in the service of creating a new product, rather than trying to capture a big market share from the product.

Service towards something beyond ego is always visible in those who’ve found their purpose, whether younger and older. Sometimes it’s by conscious intent. For example, letting go of a previous path when they awaken to it’s not being in sync with their inner self. Sometimes it’s triggered by unanticipated events that answers an inner yearning

One example is a 20-something woman who, disenchanted with college, returned home and happen to join up with some other musician and artist friends. That led, in turn, to creating a nonprofit organization, the GoodMakers Street Team, a group of passionate young adults who are bringing positive change to communities. Older people are also discovering a newly-found life purpose. For example, the rise of “encore careers” and projects or engagements that they discover are more in sync with their inner selves; and perhaps have lingered in the background of their lives for years.

Sometimes one’s purpose is awakened by a tragedy one learns about, such as person who become moved by victims of torture and discovered his life’s purpose in helping them. Or, a tragedy one experiences, like John Walsh, whose nationally-known work in criminal justice was spurred by the murder of his young son.

Some Guidelines

If you work towards weakening the stranglehold of self-interest, you can take an important step towards discovering your life’s purpose: Learning from your choices and way of life. That is, they can give you important feedback about the path you’ve been on, in relation to your deeper life purpose.

Begin by examining what you’re currently doing in your choices, way of life, and commitments, looking from “outside” yourself.

Try to discern what the outcomes — whether successes or failures — reveal to you about your inner self. Look for where there seems to be resonance or not. That is, don’t try to “find” your purpose by tweaking or fine-tuning what you’ve been doing in your work, relationships or anything else. Instead, let all of that teach you what it can. That is, look at what it tells you about your longings, your inner vision and predilections that you might be trying to express through your outer life, even if the latter may be an incorrect vehicle.

When you do feel a pull towards some purpose, activity or goal that you feel reflects your inner self, then pursue it fully and vigorously, and with great intent.

Keep looking for the feedback your actions give you along the way. It doesn’t matter if your purpose is something more concrete or more spiritual. If you pursue it with minimal self-interest, with “obliquity,” you will learn from what happens if it’s the true path for you or not.

Infuse all of your actions with a spirit of giving, of service; in effect, with love for what you’re engaging with.

That includes all the people you interact with, as well. The more you consciously infuse your thoughts, emotions and behavior with positive, life-affirming energy – kindness, compassion, generosity, justice – you’re keeping your ego at bay and you’re able to see your true purpose with greater clarity.

Of course, this is hard, and you might encounter opposition from cultural pressures or others who have their own interests at stake. Keep in mind, here, something Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:

Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires courage.

The Sufi spiritual leader Hazrat Inayat Khan, who brought his teachings to the U.S. and Western Europe in the early 1900s, described the pull of your purpose in an interesting way. He wrote that one

…may suddenly think during the night, “I must go to the north,” and in the morning, he sets out on his journey. He does not know why, he does not know what he is to accomplish there, he only knows that he must go. By going there, he finds something that he has to do and sees that it was the hand of destiny pushing him towards the accomplishment of that purpose which inspired him to go to the north.

I find that men and women who set out to “go north” and awaken to their life purpose radiate a calm inner strength, inspiration, power and success in whatever they do with their lives. It radiates to all around them.

A version of this article was originally published in The Huffington Post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Forgetting Yourself’ In Your Relationship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Handicaps Most Relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growing Your Relationship’s Spiritual Core

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

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

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

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

Show Your Partner What You Want By Giving It

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

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

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

Disengage From Your Conviction That You’re “Right”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Kinds of Marriages

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

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

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

Meanwhile, Do You Continue?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Was The Pull?

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

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

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

Then What Happened?

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

Did You Learn Anything?

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

Or Not….?

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

What Happens Now?

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

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

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

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

Consider this: The old, conventional view of a successful life is mostly defined by financial and self-interested criteria — getting, consuming and possessing for oneself. As Ronald Reagan once said about pursuing the “American dream” everyone “...wants to see an America in which people can get rich.”

But as President Obama pointed out in his address, “That world has changed. And for many, the change has been painful.” The reality of today’s interconnected, highly interdependent world, greed is not good. It’s psychologically unhealthy; it undermines the values, mindset and actions people need to strengthen in order to meet the challenges we face as individuals and as a nation.

That is, our security, success and well-being now require strengthening communal values and behavior; working towards common goals, the common good. Acting on self-interest alone, especially in the pursuit of personal power, steady career advancement and money… well, that’s a non-sustainable way of life. Even when it “worked” it left a hollowness inside, that people longed to fill but didn’t know how. Today, the consequences of that old vision have become heightened for many men and women in the aftermath of the recession, as they struggle to deal with a world that feels turned upside-down and insecure.

But more ominously for “winning the future,” the consequences of the old definition of success are taking an emotional toll on the younger generation. The very next day after Obama’s SOTU speech, a major survey of college freshman was released. It found that their mental health has declined to the lowest level since the survey began 25 years ago. Rising numbers report depression, anxiety and a rapid rise of using psychiatric medication.

However, the explanations offered for this decline were all filtered through the same lens: that the students’ mental health is being damaged because they realize that they won’t be as “successful” as their parents’ generation; or as much as they expected they would be — all defined by financial success and career advancement. No question, economic uncertainty creates anxiety. But I think that one-dimensional explanation ignores a broader problem that the younger generation struggles with: It looks at the adult careerist culture that equates self-centered careerist and financial goals with a successful life; and then considers the rapidly changing world they will be entering. As a result, they don’t see much to look forward to, as a way of life.

That is, they don’t see a whole lot about the adult career world worth aspiring towards. They know they’re living in the midst of major social and political transformations within a globalized world, but they continue to be sold the old 20th Century careerist message that happiness, success and — yes, mental health — are derived from achieving personal power, more money and career advancement in a stable environment. It feels false and unauthentic.

Of course, the hollowness of that singular vision has been visible for generations, but it’s even more pronounced today. J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye was the most impactful for the generations that grew up after World War II. And as Kenneth Slawenski has emphasized in his new biography of Salinger, that novel also tapped into a larger theme — the search for ideals, authenticity and something that makes life worth living; necessary for both personal meaning and survival.

Those themes are current today, in the new world environment. David Foster Wallace’s writings are a good example. They’ve generated a following within the current younger generation, in particular. His themes — longing for authentic connection in the face of chronic disillusionment and ongoing life crises — resonate with many experiences of today’s young adults, although his own tragic end leaves many of his admirers lost in confusion.

Nevertheless, Obama’s call for a shared, communal vision for our future points the way to an antidote to the emptiness of having nothing to look forward to adult life. It’s through defining success to include the happiness and fulfillment from helping and supporting others; expanding beyond just your own self-interest by recognizing that we’re not isolated entities on a planet that exists for our personal benefit, alone. We all need and depend on each other.

Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum captured the essence of this shift in a recent interview, saying that,

…we have to recognize that the post-crisis world will be very different… from the pre-crisis world. We have to deal with a completely new reality. We have the millennial generation coming up, which will change certain social patterns.” And, “We have to learn from one another. We are now much more in a multicultural world. (One) has to be… not only very understanding about cultures and very at ease in dealing with different cultures, but someone who accepts cultural differences as a natural way of doing business.

All of these shifts contribute to redefining what a successful life is, and how to deploy our personal capacities in ways that benefit all of us, not just ourselves. In fact, we can see many examples of people who find creative and personal fulfillment through serving something larger than just themselves, what I called “forgetting yourself” in a previous post, and through serving the common good.

One example is Abraham Akoi, one of the “lost boys of Sudan,” who escaped his village at the age of 11, and was able to come to the U.S., where he excelled, eventually received an MBA. Despite several offers of six-figure salaries — for pursuing success defined by money and traditional career achievement — he decided to return to Southern Sudan to assist the new government-to-be with his skills; and to put his skills and capacities in the service of ideals and a vision, rather than just his own personal financial reward.  He said,

I have a commitment and integrity to do the right thing for south Sudan… our biggest challenge is creating a system that is bigger than one person, to create a system that will stand the test of time.

A second example from a whole different realm is the decision by injured Kansas City Royals pitcher Gil Meche to walk away from collecting on his $12 million contract, by retiring at age 32. He could have collected the balance of his contract for doing nothing, but said that he needed to keep his self-respect:

Once I started to realize I wasn’t earning my money, I felt bad.  I was making a crazy amount of money for not even pitching. Honestly, I didn’t feel like I deserved it. I didn’t want to have those feelings again.

Examples as disparate as these share an enlarged perspective and different set of values, of ideals, about what makes life worth living. These are not exceptional capacities or shifts. It’s abundantly clear that people are capable of “evolving” in these ways. For example, the mounting scientific evidence that people can build the capacity for and behavior that demonstrates empathy and compassion. It’s “hard-wired,” as is the capacity to changed our brain activity in ways that promote new capacities, as the eminent neurologist Oliver Sachs recently described.

As such examples become more visible in business, personal relationships, and career choices, they define a growing shift towards redefining personal success in work and life with broader criteria that include the common good. And that’s more consistent with something else Obama said, in calling forth Americans’ best spirit: Such attitudes as, “I might not know those people in trouble, but I think I can help them, and I need to try.”