Forging Iron In A Time Of Crisis

When a person experiences a life crisis everything can seem to come crashing down. What once was stable is rocked to the core and the old way of living no longer seems to work.

I'm not speaking so much about pure tragedies (like the death of a loved one) as about the behavior of either you or a person close to you that rips apart the comfort and stability you've come to depend upon. To be devastated by the betrayal of either a partner or the painful reflection staring back at you in the mirror can cause the assumptions you've carefully built up over the years to shatter into a million pieces, perhaps never to be made whole again.

This extremely painful time is like a fire that consumes everything held dear, down to a person's core. But what happens then?

One of the realities of life is that the familiar surface of a person's identity is often built on a fundamentally incomplete foundation. It's common for a crucial character flaw, usually resulting from some aspect of incomplete emotional development, to exist just below the surface of an entire way of life. Perhaps an addiction has never been faced, a codependent relationship style has corrupted healthy autonomy, or the effective regulation of intense emotions was never fully developed. These character defects are like bent iron beams buckling under a weight they could easily support if only they had been forged correctly.

An intense life crisis is like a fire that burns away everything on the surface of a person's life to reveal some undeveloped aspect of that person's core self. This extreme heat, painful as it is to face, is necessary to melt and reforge iron. This is when a person's core can be hammered into a new and stronger shape. An objective and trustworthy source of support and guidance is the 'anvil' this process requires. This is why professional counseling can be so beneficial to the process of growing through difficulty rather than just surviving it.

The furnace of intense personal crisis can forge the ability to support a healthier, stronger and more stable life. The hammering will eventually stop, the iron will cool, and a new and better life will be revealed.

Meaningful Meantime

The phrase "meantime" is simply defined as the interval between one occurrence and another. As simple as this is, I think this one word has vital significance to the goal of experiencing a deeply satisfying life. Whether the interval between any two events is very large ("between birth and death") or very small ("between breakfast and lunch"), you are at this moment living somewhere within the span bridged by those two points in time.

The bottom line is that most of our days on earth are spent living "in the meantime." Any goal you hold dear is by definition a destination you haven't yet reached. "In the meantime" (where you are right now) is a lot of space to fill. If you remember (as I have previously written) that "there are no ordinary moments", this interval will be teeming with insights and wonder.

Now that's a meaningful meantime!

Problems And Solutions

We all have lots of problems.....or so we think. I recently heard a simple but powerful statement that merits a lot of reflection:

You don't have many real problems; what you mainly have are solutions you don't like.

The most basic definition of a problem is a struggle or conflict with no readily achievable solution. But more often than we care to admit, it isn't that the answer is outside of our grasp; it's that we just don't want to face it.

It's human nature to seek out solutions to our problems that are congruent with our desires. Whatever issue we are facing, we generally want to resolve it in such a way that we get what we want and not what we fear. Unfortunately, rather than rigorously questioning the underlying basis of our primal wants and fears, it's seductive to act like the real "problem" is wholly outside of ourselves.

The answer to any particular struggle may be unique, but it's generally an inner destination. Many solutions are simple but far from easy: Face the fear. Let go of the outcome. Stop trying to control the situation. Forgive. Look inward. Go into the unknown. Accept the situation for what it is. Relinquish the idea that what you think should happen should happen. Widen your perspective and you may find the solution reveals more about you than you ever imagined. There are many sources to help you on your journey, including counseling, but it helps to remember that a locked door isn't as much of a problem if you know that you hold the key.

Smart vs. Wise

This is another in my ever-increasing list of "therapeutic distinctions", pairs of words that at first glace may seem similar but which upon closer investigation reveal important differences that can be useful in the process of achieving personal change, growth, development and healing. This one is a very brief comparison of intelligence and wisdom.

To be "smart" is a great gift. Knowledge can go a long way in improving a person and the world at large. But "wisdom" is much more than the mere ability to retain and synthesize great quantities of information. It involves having self-awareness that only comes from mindful engagement with the struggles of life. Knowledge is derived by collecting information while wisdom is a result of collecting experience. Both require much study, but with a different focus.

It's been said that knowledge is aware of what it knows while wisdom is aware of what it doesn't know. Intelligence resides mainly in the head while wisdom is more at home in the heart. To be smart is to know a lot about what something does. To be wise is to know a lot about what a thing means.

Knowledge is something to seek while wisdom is something to receive. A person can climb the mountain of achievement to gain knowledge but wisdom just as often emerges from the cavernous depths of failure. The pain that is often required to learn something important is not the same as the suffering that is often necessary to give space for wisdom to emerge.

Many people with a lot of intelligence aren't very wise, and some of the wisest people you'll ever meet aren't especially intelligent. The ability to seek and perceive true wisdom in others around you if an effective pathway to finding that within yourself.

Heal vs. Fix

This is another in a long line of posts I've published about what I call "therapeutic distinctions", pairs of related concepts that are often used interchangeably but which reveal vitally important differences when examined more carefully.

Such is the case with "heal" versus "fix".

This distinction revealed itself in a session I had with a man earlier this week in which he was talking about his marital difficulties (many of his own making). We discussed his tendency in life to identify a problem, fix it and then move on. While this is an admirable trait, it is a style that many men use too often in their personal relationships, generally with poor results that baffle and frustrate them.

It's no news that many men aren't very comfortable talking about feelings. As the old joke goes, the five words a man most dreads to hear are "Honey, we need to talk." Men tend to see a woman's feelings as problems to be fixed rather than as opportunities for intimate connection. We're more comfortable offering solutions, often without being asked, than we are simply listening with active, sustained attention.

A man may realize that the "fix-it" mentality doesn't work very well but still not know any other way to relate to the spouse he truly loves but often doesn't understand. I may spend hours teaching and modeling more effective communication styles, so I'm not going to highlight them here. My main focus of this post is to simply point out that sometimes there is not so much a problem to be fixed as a wound to be healed.

Objects get fixed. Cars, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners and the like all will need "fixing" at some point (or simply thrown away in our disposable culture -- in many poorer nations cars are seldom junked until they've been ingeniously repaired countless times to keep them running for many hundreds of thousands of miles).

But wounds don't get fixed. They can only heal. And the skills for healing are often very different than those for fixing. Healing is often much slower than fixing. Healing requires less know-how and more want-to than fixing. Healing is often more a matter for the spirit than the flesh. It is the realm of the human being rather than the human doing.

The poet D.H. Lawrence wrote,

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of parts; And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly that I am ill. I am ill because of wounds to the soul – to the deep emotional self......

A shattered trust, a lost innocence, a broken heart are all deep wounds to be healed. Attempts to treat them as mere problems to be fixed will rarely do them justice.

Two Types Of Power

Many years ago I read a little book called "The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How To Recognize It And How To Respond", by Patricia Evans. I still recommend this book (despite its unfortunate tendency toward anti-male bias) for its admirable job of highlighting the many types of verbal abuse. These include many subtle forms that may slip by unnoticed, such as discounting ("Oh, that's nothing"), blocking ("I don't want to talk about it"), diverting ("That's not the real issue, this is"),and trivializing ("Whatever"), all of which reinforce an unbalanced power dynamic.

It all comes down to the basic idea that there are essentially two forms of power. The first is "Power Over", which boils down to one side exerting dominance over another. While this form of power easily becomes an oppressive control tactic, it does have a proper function in situations in which discipline is a more appropriate motivator than relationship (military hierarchies are a prime example).

What is generally more appropriate in intimate relationships is "Personal Power". This is a more autonomous form of power that places a value on inner strength, self-control, boundaries, the absence of shaming dynamics, respect, and the acceptance of feedback from others. While "Power Over" doesn't require much ego strength (and in fact often feeds on its absence), Personal Power is a sign of a mature personality construction. Some people come by it naturally but the rest of us have to work hard to develop and maintain our appropriate relationship to power.

Many people grew up in situations where their parents or other adult influences wielded power inappropriately. Much of society is based on inequitable power differentials. No wonder so many relationships fall prey to inappropriate management of power. In relationships it's one of the reasons contributing to what I call "underground" forms of power such as affairs and addictions.

One important aspect of relationship counseling, even if its not the initial reason a couple presents for consultation, is discussion about the ways power is expressed and the barriers to the effective management of power that is important to all relationships.

You're Not "Fine"

Sometimes when I ask clients how they're feeling I'll get this answer: "Fine". I usually try to point out that this doesn't tell me much. Even a relatively short list of feeling words like this one includes over 400 choices, and "fine" isn't included.

Describing and evaluating are different tasks. If I tell you that I just painted my office a color that I really like, this doesn't give you enough information to match it at the paint store -- you only know my evaluation of it. But if I specifically tell you the color (Benjamin Moore Historic Series Prescott Green, by the way) this detailed description gives you a much clearer ability to know my preference.

So expand your emotional color palette to be as descriptive as you can about your inner emotional experience. Otherwise, if you say "fine" you may run into someone who will point out that this can stand for:

F - Fearful
I - Insecure
N - Neurotic
E - Emotional

And you can do better than that!

By the way, for a vivid example of the richness of emotional language, click to visit "We Feel Fine", a stunning website that catalogs every use of the phrase "I feel" appearing on the Internet at any point in time,