There are four basic stages that relationships can pass through as they progress. Many relationships end because they get stuck at one of these levels, and the couple does not have the skill or willingness to do the necessary work to push through to the next level. Even within the healthiest and most conscious relationships, people don’t spend all their time at the highest levels, but will move between levels as their consciousness level fluctuates.

The Honeymoon – Ah! The bliss of falling in love. Songs, poetry, plays and novels have been written trying to capture those first few moments, months or even years when we see the object of our love through the filter of adoration. Those physical flaws are cute, those obnoxious behaviors are endearing, and everything they do just makes you love them more. It is much like having a new baby. “Oh look, he made a doody in his diaper, how cute!”  Unfortunately, after five hundred diapers, it’s just another stinky load. Most romances follow the same course. The initial falling in love. The period of blind love, usually six to eighteen months, though this may be extended if the couple gets married. Then, as the blinders come off, the seeing of the love object as they really are. Not Prince Charming or the Fairy Princess, but just another human being, full of fears, neuroses, and annoying behaviors. This is when most romances break up. That rush of adrenaline/endorphins is no longer triggered by the mere sight of the former love object, so the mind concludes that s/he is not “the one.”  Time to end it, and look for the next person that triggers the love response. And if what you want out of life is a series of experiences of falling in love, this is a perfectly good way to live. Not everybody is looking for either the experience, or the work, that comes with long term commitment. If however, you decide to stay around past the lessening of the bloom of first love, you will enter into the next phase:

The power struggle – Who’s in charge here?” is the question of the power struggle phase. Whether it’s where we live, what we eat or does the toilet tissue go over or under, no issue is too big or too small for a couple to fight about in this phase. This is because all the fights are really over dominance and not the subject being discussed. These kinds of power struggles can begin to occur on the first date, but tend to be smoothed over by romantic feelings. However, as the good feelings fade, the battle over who sets the rules intensifies.

While power struggles exist in every relationship, it is intensified during marriage because you’re committed to spending the rest of your life with this person, and losing the battle for domination would make it a long life indeed. For many couples this battle becomes never ending, and leads to the demise of the relationship. Some couples keep fighting for a lifetime, staying together while the resentment builds, while others manage to find their way to the next level of relationship.

3. Acceptance: The only way out of power struggling is to accept your partner as they are. Stop trying to change or control them. This doesn’t mean not speaking up if you’re unhappy, because that would mean not accepting your own experience. It does mean communicating your experience responsibly, without blame or judgement of your partner. It means accepting that you and your partner may be very different people, with very different styles and beliefs, but that both are equal in value. Learning to truly accept another, and to truly accept yourself, is a lifetime process that will arise repetitively over the course of a relationship. It is also the most spiritually rewarding part of marriage that I have found.

4.Cooperation: – Now that you mostly accept each other, what are you going to do? Here is where the skills you have been learning are used jointly to create something bigger than you can create individually. For some, this may be children, for others, it will be creating opportunities for work that both satisfy your needs and make a contribution to the planet. While you may not physically work together, at this point of relationship your support for each other is so complete, that you experience whatever one partner does as being created by both. The power that each partner gains by knowing they are completely supported in all their endeavors is vast. This empowering of each individual through full partnership is one of the greatest benefits of a working marriage.

Early in my life I spent some time doing stand-up comedy. I was adequate at best, and soon decided that I was better suited to the field of stand-up therapy. For me, humor is an essential part of everything I do including therapy, teaching, writing and getting through each day. Finding the humor in a situation is an essential element in staying sane when faced with life’s difficulties. In fact, the more grim the situation, the more important it is to find the silly lining.

When we are embroiled in our upset, it tends to be all we can see. It is like being in a dense cloud bank while ascending a mountain, everything looks like fog. You lose all perspective on where you are, how far you’ve come, or where you’re headed. Generally, all fog banks look alike, so it is easy to be fooled into thinking that you’ve made no progress since the last upset. Humor can temporarily lift us out of our upset, even if only for a moment and let us lift our mind out of the fog at least temporarily. That moment of laughter reminds us that something is possible besides being upset. For a brief time we see the fog bank from outside, and can remember that it’s just another fog bank that we are passing through. It’s not our whole world, and it’s just another learning experience on our way up the mountain. With perspective regained, we can go back into the fog and work our way through it.

This works because humor is an essentially left brain intellectual activity, while emotions are primarily generated by the right side of the brain. When we’re upset the two hemispheres of our brain have great difficulty communicating. Most upsets consist of our getting stuck in the right brain which leaves us very emotional, and unable to see the big picture. Humor lifts us out of this emotional overwhelm for a moment by engaging the left side of the brain. When we return to looking at the upset we are more able to use both sides of the brain, and therefore we tend to be less overwhelmed by our emotional response. While we do not want to suppress or deny our emotions, when it comes to problem solving, emotional overwhelm can get in the way. Humor does not suppress emotions but allows them to be put into perspective.

Humor is also a uniquely human quality, and I think when we laugh it connects us to the common human experience. We feel less alone. While there is evidence that other creatures can laugh, we alone make jokes. The humor within a joke is based on the human condition. It is through twisting reality in an unexpected way that humor is created. A joke must surprise the mind in some way to be funny. Whether a play on words, or a comic story, it is the unexpected twist or association, which makes us laugh. Our mind is headed down one path when suddenly it is forced in a new direction. The fresh thought causes laughter. During some upsets we get caught in thought loops in the left side of the brain. We actually lose touch with our feelings and are only able to see the problem from one perspective. Finding some humor in the situation involves seeing it from a fresh angle. This breaks the mental looping, allows for fresh thinking about the problem, and opens the way for emotions to be engaged.

Within a primary relationship our deepest fears and feelings are often exposed. Therefore, we have the greatest potential for upsets occurring. Part of what makes a relationship special is how vulnerable we allow ourselves to be. It is that same vulnerability that scares us and leaves us open to fear based upsets. Humor within the relationship is tremendously helpful in reducing the fear level. Laughing together creates an important bond. Look to find humor in your daily life, especially in those things that perplex or annoy you. If you’re not good at finding humor, take some lessons from the masters. Watch funny movies, read funny books, or go to a comedy club together. The ability to laugh at your self is a truly blessed state, and makes it much easier to view other people’s foibles with more compassion. As the old saying goes “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly”

It is illegal in most of America to kill your self. It is even more illegal to help someone else kill themselves. However, it is legal to both consume and sell cigarettes, alcohol, and various toxic substances masquerading as fast-food. These things kill far more people than every year than suicide does, yet we are content to let adults make up their own minds about putting themselves at risk. For that matter we allow sky-diving, mountain climbing, racecar driving, and hundreds of other potentially fatal activities. With some we even gather in large crowds to watch and see if the participants survive. I have a feeling most NASCAR fans oppose right to die laws for the terminally ill, but support the right to risk your life which is racing. After many years of dealing with the matter, both personally and as a therapist, I’ve come to the conclusion that when it comes to death and dying, people have issues.

If asked, I’m sure most people would say that they would like to live as long as possible. Yet, most people don’t live in a manner which would increase their odds of living a long and healthy life. Most of us eat unhealthy foods, don’t get enough exercise, have various other unhealthy habits, and wait till we are in significant pain before seeing care. Up until this year, all these things were true about me. I have lived a fairly healthy life. By this I mean that my diet not terrible, but included way too much fat, sugars, and processed foods. At times I would get lots of exercise, but then I might go years getting little. My weight has gone up and down over the years. I have probably gained and lost 500 pounds over the last 35 years. While I gave up cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol when I was 21, I have a tendency to sit around reading or watching TV for far too many hours. Most significantly, I went too long without a colonoscopy, even though I knew I was at risk, and that came alarmingly close to costing me my life in March. I was incredibly lucky to survive, and even though I am now cancer free, the lesson of my brush with death seems to be finally sticking with me. I have realized that I really do want to live, and am willing to push myself out of my comfort to make that happen. These days, when I think about eating unhealthy food, I ask myself: “Is this worth getting cancer again?” That usually stops me, but boy do I miss barbequed ribs.

I am now doing many things to make myself healthier, and to live a longer, healthier life, but the question stays with me: why did it take so long and coming so close to death to get me to make the changes I’ve always known would be good for me? It is not that I was in denial of my own mortality. In fact, since I was a child I expected to die young. I was always in a rush to accomplish things because I didn’t think I had much time. Long-term health was not a big issue if I wasn’t going to live that long. Eventually I got over that belief, and realized I had the possibility of a long life, but that didn’t significantly change my health habits. I have also had several other close brushes with death, but none of them had much impact on my behavior. Because of these early beliefs and experiences I haven’t had much fear of death, but I certainly don’t welcome it. As a teenager I was very unhappy, and generally borderline suicidal, but I found how to be happy in my late teens, and have led a joyful, satisfying life since. I have experience love beyond my wildest dreams in my marriage to Mary, and still none of this was enough to make me truly committed to living in as healthy a way as possible. And while I think I’ve finally gotten the message, I still don’t know why it’s taken this long, or if I will eventually slip back into old habit.

So this is a column full of questions and challenges, rather than of wisdom gained. I would invite you to ask yourself these tough questions about your life. Do you want to live a long, healthy life? Are you living a lifestyle that truly expresses that? What are you doing, or not doing, to lead your healthiest possible life? If you’re having trouble finding the strength within yourself to make changes, think about your family, your spouse, your kids and your friends. They would all really miss you. I’m planning on sticking around awhile. I hope you’re here too.

We live in a time when the pace of change is accelerating. Evolution itself is occurring with unprecedented speed. Human Beings have existed in their current biological state for maybe twenty thousand years. This is an evolutionary blink of an eye, but on a societal scale the changes are even faster. Over ninety percent of human knowledge has been acquired within the last one hundred years. I believe that the biggest change is in the amount of information each of us must deal with on a daily basis.

Only a few generations ago, the average person was illiterate and never traveled more than a hundred miles from the place of their birth. They knew only the people who lived nearby, and received news of the outside world only occasionally. The standards that people had for evaluating and living their lives were limited. It is much easier to settle for what you have, if you have no idea that anything else exists. Our picture of success, of what we may accomplish, is set by what we believe to be possible. A child growing up in an isolated rural environment does not dream of life in the big city if they have no knowledge that such a thing as a city exists. Not knowing any other possibility, that child will tend to be more satisfied with what they have than a child who thinks they might be missing something. While different people have naturally different interests, and need for accomplishment, these all must be met within their environment of possibilities. In our modern world, the possibilities seem endless. While this amazing expansion of choices has many benefits, it also causes many problems, and lots of stress.

While the basic human truths of relationship (love, trust, respect, communication) remain unchanged, the circumstances in which our relationships occur have become far more complex. This world of vastly expanded possibilities can make for confusion, uncertainty and decreased relationship satisfaction. It also holds the possibility of far more conscious, equal, and nurturing relationships. When people speak of “the good old days”, I think they long for a time where the choices were simpler and fewer. Of course we can not go back, nor would we want to. The freedom we have gained to create the relationships we want is priceless. However, if we take the time to examine what we want out of our relationships, how we want to be treated and to treat others, what our purposes and goals are, then we voluntarily simplify the choices we face. We do not need to be confused by endless possibilities; most of them have nothing to do with what we really want. Getting clear on what you want out of the relationships in your life will keep those relationships focused, and allow you to quickly spot those that have no potential to give you what you want.

In order to get clear about what you want, make a list. If you’re not in a committed relationship, and want to be, start with a list of the qualities you want to experience in a relationship. What is important to you? Intimacy, companionship, passion, shared interests, physical attributes, economics, spiritual and personal growth, all these things, and others, matter to different degrees to different people. Get clear and write down which are important to you. This list will grow and evolve over time. Feel free to change it as you change. Make a list of what you want the other person. What demands do you have of them? What qualities are most important to you? If you don’t know what you want, your chances of getting it are slim.

Even if you are already in a relationship, taking the time to clarify your wants is very valuable. Many couples I see feel dissatisfied with their partner, but they’re not sure why. They give mixed or unclear messages about what they want from the relationship and their partner. These people have not gotten clear about their own needs, yet are hoping someone else will make them feel satisfied. Until we take responsibility for knowing what we want, we can’t expect others to give it to us.

1. No relationship is meant to be until it is.
If a relationship is meant to be, it will be. If someone is truly “the one”, then you can’t ruin it. The two of you will simply love each other through whatever arises, and work out the problems. If it ends, then that’s what was meant to be. Just because you are very attracted to someone, or think they’re the one for you, doesn’t mean it will work out. Healthy, positive relationships can last a week, a year, ten years, or a lifetime. The value of a relationship is not measured by time, but by the love, joy and learning generated while it lasts. If you stay in an unfixable relationship, holding on because it used to work and you can’t let go of the old hopes, you may miss out on somebody really great who’s available now.

2. They have little good to say about prior relationships/lovers or does not have good relationships with the former lovers.
This is a powerful indication that a person has not learned to take responsibility for their experience or actions. They are still blaming others for their failures and their pain. If they have not reconciled with the people in their past, what makes you think they will be more forgiving of you? The odds are great that you will end up as one more in their litany of “lovers that done me wrong”.
If a person has nice things to say about former lovers, but doesn’t actually have good relationships with them, there is something suspicious happening. Is this because their former lovers want nothing to do with them? Maybe they have a much different view of themselves in relationship than other’s hold of them.  It is natural that some relationships will end badly. Sometimes, any on-going connection is unhealthy. People, whose relationships all seem to end badly, are usually not taking responsibility for their part in the outcome. Staying friends with people you used to date is a sign of emotional maturity and health.
3. They have no close friends of the opposite sex, and/or are threatened if you do.
The ability to see people that you could be sexually attracted to as just friends is critical to intimate relationships. Many men have never learned to really like women, and many women return that feeling. They may “love” them, or even “need” them, but they don’t necessarily like them. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life with someone who doesn’t really like you.
Many people feel threatened by their partner having close friendships with someone of the opposite sex. These fears reflect both a lack of self esteem, and a lack of trust within the relationship. If you do not trust your partner enough to let them be friends with others, the issues which cause this mistrust, whether they are within you, or based on specific actions of your partner, need to be addressed.

This is one in a series of “Best Of” columns from Jeff Low’s archives.

A marriage is an eco-system, and like any eco-system it must be maintained in order to assure the health of those living within. Allow things to get too far out of balance, like the current state of our planetary ecology, and the very survival of the marriage is at stake. Learning how to keep the relationship loving and healthy is the work of marriage. Here are some daily, monthly and yearly things you can do to keep your relationship alive.

Daily – It takes just fifteen minutes a day to maintain the connection between two people. This is not just some random number, but the result of scientific studies demonstrating that if two people spend fifteen minutes in close connection, the electronic signatures of their hearts begin to match. If they do this on a daily basis, their heart signatures will remain the same even if they are separated by hundreds of miles. The best way I know for couples to do this is the “Be with Process.”

The Be with Process.

Begin the process by finding a comfortable place to sit across from each other.  It doesn’t matter where, as long as you can easily look into each other’s eyes.  Take a few deep breaths to get settled.  You may be touching or not, depending on your preference, but you want to be close.  Mary and I prefer to hold hands.

Look into each others eyes for at least five minutes.  Allow yourself to be as present as possible.  Focus your attention on your partner, not on the chatter of your mind.  When you catch yourself lost in thoughts, simply refocus your attention on your partner.  Be aware of your emotional response.  Notice if you feel the need to perform in some way for your partner.  There is no wrong way to do this, since the purpose is merely to be together during this time.  Whatever arises in you is the stuff that gets between you and being with another.  The longer you practice being with another, the easier it will get to be present.

When your silent time is over, each of you will take a turn talking to the other.  Alternate daily who goes first.  Each person shares for five minutes.  The other person continues to be present, and just listens.  There is no responding.  Each person talks without interruption about their own experience.  This is not a time for discussing the business of the day.  This is a time for revealing your thoughts and feelings about your life.  Certainly, you can discuss your feelings about what is happening in your life, but this is about revealing what is below the surface to your partner.  Since your partner cannot respond, it is especially important to use ‘I’ statements during this process.  This means talking about what is happening with you, not telling your partner what you think is happening with them. If, after both partners have had a chance to share without interruption, you wish to have a dialogue about whatever came out during the process, so much the better.

Monthly – Couples who have been together for a while, especially those with children, forget the importance of extended time together. Taking at least one day per month for just the two of you can make a big difference in your closeness level the rest of the month. This is like when you were dating. Make a plan, do something special, or just go for a drive, the point is to spend the day with just the two of you. If you have children, find some other couples who want their own togetherness days, and trade childcare duty on those days. The parents of your child’s friends are good candidates.

Yearly – Do a minimum two-night marriage retreat each year. Like the year-end meeting of a business, this is a time to examine what’s working in your marriage and what is not. What have you learned about yourself, your partner, and your marriage during the year? What would you like to work on individually and together to improve your marriage in the year to come? Be honest both about your successes and shortcomings. Talk and connect during these three days so that you return to your daily life with renewed senses of love, commitment and discovery about your relationship. If you’ve never done anything like this, and are not sure how, you could take a marriage class together as a substitute. The California Healthy Marriage Coalition is a great resource that lists many groups offering marriage weekends.

Everyday, within our relationships, we come to choice points. These are the moments when the actions we take will determine the direction of the relationship. These are the times when we have an opportunity to be responsible for our actions and create the kinds of relationships we want in our life. It is also at these moments that we may choose to play the victim and give away our power to create the life we want. These moments will determine the path our lives follow, yet more often than not, we allow them to pass unconsciously and unnoticed. It is only later, when the results of our unconscious choices are clear, that it occurs to us that things might have turned out differently. However, I discussed last week, while we can do nothing about the past except grant it forgiveness, by becoming aware of our choice points, and being responsible for them, we can gain power over the future.

A choice point is that moment when you are presented with a range of options in a given situation. Within a relationship the question is; how will you respond to the other person’s actions. This is more than just what action you will take, but what emotions you will generate and how will you hold the person internally. Many people think that the thoughts, emotions and actions they experience in response to an event are automatic and uncontrollable. While there is an element of each that is automatic, we actually have far more power over our actions that we are generally aware of. The process of becoming aware of our ability to respond intentionally, to increase our response-ability level, is a fundamental purpose of therapy and consciousness work. Our relationships to others, and especially to our partner, provide the perfect forum in which to become more skillful and effective in being responsible for ourselves.

Your partner has said or done something that triggers reactions within you. How will you respond? This is the choice point. Will you act to create more love and connectedness between you, or to protect yourself and establish dominance? Your partner sees a situation in a completely different way from you. Choice point. Do you battle over who’s right, or do you work to understand how the other thinks and perceives in a manner different but equal to yours? You and your partner have been fighting. You have been reasonable and wise. Your partner is completely wrong and irrational. If you can just hold your ground a little longer, your partner will undoubtedly give in, declare you the winner, and from here on out do whatever you want. Choice point. You can wake up or keep dreaming.

In any given situation we do in fact have the choice as to what outcome we will work towards. Throughout our lives, we will usually encounter multiple choice points every day. Each time we must stop and consider our choice. What do I want from this situation? Will the action I take produce the result I really want? At work the question may be along the lines of, “Are my actions going to create more good feeling towards me from my colleagues?” or “Are my actions producing the best results for the greatest number?” In every situation of life we can take responsibility for creating the world we wish to live in. In that moment before you flip that other driver the finger, consider if that’s the result you really want. Try blowing them a kiss instead.

While many people, especially men, treat their relationships as if they were contests, they don’t recognize that it is a contest they can never win. In any working relationship you are playing for the same team. Either the team wins or the team loses. Does the choice you’re about to make benefit the team or just yourself? If you interact with your partner on a win/lose level, one of you is always the loser, and the loser generally does not like the winner. Being right, dominating, controlling, or getting one’s way, are just other ways of winning, and don’t create love and partnership. Choosing openness, honesty, co-operation, vulnerability, and mutual benefit will create the love you want.
In some ways it is easier, or at least less challenging, to go on acting as if we are not responsible for what happens in our relationships. Blaming others, or making ourselves right, is what people tend to do. But in the end it leaves us alone and powerless when we don’t have to be. There’s another choice point just ahead, what will you do?

Having an affair is a truly unworkable choice in a marriage. This Friday I will be talking to Dr. Doug Snyder, author of “Getting Past the Affair,” about repairing the damage after it happens.

I have not had a first date in almost twenty years. This does not mean that I have forgotten the particular excitement and agony that makes up the world of dating. Starting with my first boy/girl dance party at age 10 in Woody Karp’s basement playroom, through my amazing first date with Mary at the Kailua-Kona Tennis Club, I can remember all the awkwardness, fear, and pretense of my early years. Eventually, I learned to relax, be myself, and enjoy meeting a potential new friend. Not coincidently, by the time I learned to be my authentic self, even on a first date, I found someone to take me off the market. While much has changed in the mechanics of dating in the last 20 years, (how did we ever meet without the internet?) I don’t think the underlying principles of finding someone to be in a healthy relationship with have changed at all. Here then, are a few guidelines for healthy dating.

The first step in finding someone else is to find out more about yourself. People tend to go looking for “someone” to have a “good relationship” with without actually defining what they mean by these terms. It’s like going into a restaurant and simply asking for something good to eat; the chances of getting what you really want are slim. People are often so unclear about what they want and where to get it, that they may as well be ordering Chinese food in a Mexican restaurant.

Begin with the question “What kind of relationship do I really want?” Intimate relationships come in all shapes and sizes, and it is not a question of what kind is better, but merely a question of what you prefer. Is marriage for you? The first truth about marriage is that it is not for everybody. Most people who thrive in marriage have great desire for closeness and partnership, and a willingness to give up many of their personal wants for the good of the whole. People who wish to follow their own path, to do their own thing when they feel like it, will tend to find marriage a constricting and frustrating way to live. For a great number of people serial monogamy is a more satisfying way to live. The focus is still on getting to know, and being intimate with, one person at a time, but the length of commitment is flexible. Some people are simply not built for monogamy or even committed relationships. For these sexual adventurers the idea of limiting themselves to one person would be like eating the same meal every day for the rest of their life; it would keep them alive but hardly satisfy.

Making a full and honest inventory of what you want for yourself out of life makes it far easier to then identify what you want from another. Make a list of those things that you see as central to your happiness. Examples of this would include; whether you want kids, whether a specific religion is important to you, is where you live critical, what lifestyle elements do you see as essential, are you a homebody or an adventurer, is your priority family or career? Anything that you see as important, even if it’s something that somebody else might view as trivial, belongs on this list. It is only by being honest about what you really want, rather than looking for what you’ve been taught you should want, that relationship fulfillment becomes possible.

When you start dating someone, you want to be as honest about who you are and what you want as soon as possible. Could this lead to a quick rejection? Hopefully. Why would you want to spend a bunch of time dating someone who is not interested in the real you? The great myth of dating is that there is a shortage of people to date. The truth is there are lots of single people and some of them want what you have to offer. However, the odds of finding them goes way down if you don’t let people know what it is you’re offering. I know that rejection is sometimes painful to deal with, but unless you take the chance of being yourself, you will never find somebody who loves you the way you are.

People often ask me what I consider the most important element to success in relationships. Co-operation? Communication? Intimacy? Friendship? All of these are important, but in terms of the long term workability of any relationship, whether personal, business, or societal, the most important thing is integrity. If you know a person lacks integrity then you can’t trust them, and without trust none of these others is possible. If you believe that a person is likely to lie to you, cheat you, break agreements with you, not respect your boundaries, or attempt to harm you in some other manner, then it clearly not safe to get close to them. While we humans have evolved in many ways, we are still hard wired to be alert to any danger, and to go into fight, flight or hide mode when afraid. It takes years for a deep, genuine trust to develop between people, and a lack of integrity can quickly destroy that trust.

Integrity is not some vague idea, though it has many permutations, and is sometimes inconvenient. Basically, it comes down to not knowingly lying, in either word or action. In order not to lie, we must begin by accepting the truth of our situation. We are human beings living in a world and society that is governed by laws and agreements. These laws may be physical, such as gravity, or agreed on by society, such as our legal system. You might not like the laws you live under, but like gravity, it’s the law. You can choose to break the law, but to maintain your integrity, you must accept the consequences.

Individual relationships are also governed by the laws of nature and society, but additionally they are governed by the agreements that are made between the persons. These can be formalized legal agreements such as a lease or an employment contract, or verbal agreements made between individuals. While a verbal agreement may not be legally binding, the consequences to the relationship of breaking your word can be devastating. The more times you give your word to someone and don’t follow up with the promised action, the greater the space between you becomes. Even seemingly small broken agreements (i.e. “I’ll be there at 5.” Only to arrive at 5:30) accumulate and reduce the amount of space available for a close and trusting relationship.

It is reaching an assumption of trust that brings about peace within a relationship, and the loss of that assumption that is the cause of most conflicts. By assumption of trust I mean that you assume that the other person means you no harm. That if they do something which is painful to you that it must have been unintentional. If someone hurts me unintentionally my response is very different than if I suspect or fear they did it on purpose. There is no need for defensive or retaliatory action in an accident, but merely the need for communication. I need to let the other person know I’m hurt, and, if possible, let them know how they can avoid hurting me in the future. Once this spirit of assumed good will is lost, then people will fight about all sorts of minor upsets, and every assumed slight. Much time in couple’s therapy is spent restoring this trust.

Finally, lack of integrity harms your relationship to your self most of all. Every time we lie, or pretend to be who we are not, we in essence declare that our truth is not okay. And if our truth is not okay, then we are not okay. Integrity flows from our willingness to speak our truth, to be our authentic self, no matter what the circumstances. This is why keeping our agreements is so essential to integrity. If I say I’ll do something, and I don’t do it, then my original statement becomes a lie. The Bible says “In the beginning there was the word.” Our world is created by what we declare it to be. If we lie about, or deny our creation, then we feel ashamed of what we have done and who we are. Without integrity our world descends into one of shame and conflict. I encourage you to look deep inside yourself and the world around us. Do you see integrity and trust, or shame and conflict? We may not feel we can clean up all of the mess that lack of integrity has caused on our planet, but each of us can keep the integrity in our own life. We can honor our agreements, play by the rules and speak our truth. It may be challenging at times, but the increased co-operation, communication, intimacy, and friendship will be well worth it.

For many, loneliness starts at birth. The physical pain of being born, separation from our mother, and being physically and emotionally confronted by full awareness of the world, is so traumatic for some that they never stop experiencing life as some sort of punishment. After we survive the pain of being born, we then must deal with the terrors of childhood. We are small, powerless and helpless: completely dependent on others to feed and shelter us. We were utterly at the mercy of that band of lunatics that we called our families. Did our parents love and want us, or were we an unwanted addition to an already unhappy union? Were our siblings happy to see us, or were we seen as competition for the limited love, attention and resources available from our parents? If you were lucky enough to grow up in a loving, welcoming family, I am very happy for you, but so many of us were not, and the scars can last a lifetime.
Then, just about the time we’re starting to feel a little in command of our world, and adjusted to our place within it, we are sent off to school. For those who are already a little wounded, socially less at ease, or just a little different, school can be a very lonely place. In America, we have made learning a competition. Those that win the competition are resented by the others, and mocked for being smart. Those who are slow at academics are called names and ridiculed. The majority of kids try to blend into the middle, and not be noticed. Often, unless action is taken to heal the wounds of childhood, the patterns set then continue throughout life.

The key steps towards overcoming childhood patterns are to recognize what happened, accept that the past cannot be changed, forgive yourself and everybody else involved for whatever happened, and begin to live the life you truly want. It has been wisely said that those who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat it. This is as true for individuals as it is for nations. Our childhood is a time of learning, but because we were small, and unable to fully comprehend what was happening to us, we often take away completely mistaken conclusions about how life works.

The most common and damaging false conclusion we reach about life is that it is our fault. If our parents are unloving, it must be because we are unlovable. False! All children are lovable; it’s just that not all adults are capable of giving love. If our siblings or other kids are mean to us it’s because there’s something wrong with us. False! Kids are mean because they’ve been taught to be, or simply don’t know better. Nobody deserves to be treated cruelly. The chances are you grew up with a bunch of other scarred, wounded people who were too wrapped up in their own struggles to behave lovingly towards you. Life is not our fault because there is nothing faulty about us or life. Life is our responsibility because our experience of living is determined by how we respond to the world around us.

At some level we are still scared children trying to get along with the big scary people around us. We each have our unique style of coping with this strange experience called life, so there is no normal or right way to play this game. So just relax, give it your best shot, and enjoy the adventure. If you’re feeling lonely, reach out. Be the loving, giving person you wish others would be towards you. I know it’s scary but take a chance. The amazing thing is that the more you behave the way you wish the world would treat you, the more the world treats you that way.