I was reading Steven Stosny the other day and he said something profound. He has been working for decades on helping people who’ve been not merely angry, but sometimes enraged, to feel compassion.
This is no easy matter because highly angry people often don’t feel anything else but the anger. Their goal is to not feel other emotions because if they did, they’d hurt too much, way too much. (That is why you’ll occasionally hear about murder-suicides. The murderer will then feel the enormity of pain from what he did – usually it’s a he – and will not be able to tolerate it anymore.)
Of course, if you want to ask the logical question – so why couldn’t he just feel the pain first so he wouldn’t have to kill two people – the answer is that feelings were blocked. Quite literally. If you took a brain scan it would look as though the brain were not functioning.
Getting back to Stosny, what he said is that pain is a gift. If used properly, it tells us something is terribly wrong and needs fixing. He pointed out that when an Alaskan comes into the house to warm up from the cold, his limbs will start to hurt as they defrost. But the Inuit, the native people of that region, say that this pain is good because if their limbs don’t hurt, that means it’s too late for them. The limbs are dead.
In fact, Stosny says that the opposite of pain is absolutely not, not for one minute, pleasure. It’s numbness. Nothing. And that’s not good. That’s not something we would ever want because if we felt nothing we would not be alive. Or we would be the walking dead. Like all the people who use escape methods to not be fully alive.
The trick is to read the message that pain offers so that we can immediately take corrective action.
We are not supposed to suffer.
Let’s look at options.
Symptoms
If you have the following issues:
- Anger unexpectedly flares up, out of your control, rather often
- You have a lack of self-esteem or self-care; putting yourself down
- You feel easily offended or mistreated, especially when those who “do” it say that wasn’t intended
- You are unable to get your message across to your spouse
- You and your spouse don’t listen to each other
- You don’t feel respected in the relationship
- You feel neglected in the relationship
- You argue with each other a lot and it gets worse and worse
- You are thinking of divorce
- You feel you have nothing in common
Then you should consider my 12-week LoveYourselfLoveYourMarriage program. It is an intensive hybrid of group and personal coaching and 1:1 therapy. I put together the key elements in it to cover everything couples complain about. Here they are:
Love YourselfLoveYourMarriage Program
*Taming Your Triggers – you have a host of gold-standard approaches to annihilate triggers;
*Self-Validation – you will overcome every grain of self-hate within you, completely.
*Compassionate Honesty – you will also learn how to speak your truth in a way that does not hurt but helps the relationship to deepen. This is how you get the marriage you want out of first developing Self Love.
These 3 components of my program include both “Top-Down” and “Bottom-Up” approaches to healing.
Top-Down is the kind of therapy we are used to: Talking. The “top” is the cerebral cortex which is the thinking part of our brain. We make decisions with our cortex, we analyze, and we plan. The problem is that sometimes our emotions get the best of us.
Our emotions are manufactured not only in the brain, but in our bodies. Proven methods are used to change feelings by bypassing conscious awareness and willpower (which do not work).
You will get Lifetime access to the learning materials. However, during the twelve weeks of the program, you will have 24/7 text message access to me as well. Literally. In addition, there are 18 in-depth group coaching calls, regular bi-weekly one-to-one private therapy sessions to help you over the rough spots unless you want or need more and a 3-week mini-intensive of 6 one-to-one sessions with me.
This is the support aspect of the program which is superb, personal, and goes beyond any other therapy or coaching program that I am aware of.
What there will not be is blame-fests of finger pointing and exhausting going over the things that each person said that hurt. Why? Because we are not ready for conversations until you are past being triggered; you cannot be shaken by a remark that goes below the belt any more; and you are so past resentment and so full of compassion that you can have a rational conversation filled with Compassionate Honesty.
How do you do all that? With daily written, verbal, and thinking exercises, as well as exercises to change your body’s state. By the time you get to Compassionate Honesty, you’ve laid the foundation to have a good conversation, one of depth and kindness – and truth. Those three together: depth, kindness, and truth, are the foundation of intimacy. And we make sure you do all the work, too, with the Accountability System that I have in place!
The investment for the program is way less per person than buying a 10 year-old Honda Civic! But it is far more valuable because you will be restoring yourself to yourself, something an old car cannot do. And that, of course, paves the way for the marriage to get back on track.
The key is to take action, not to suffer with pain and just accept it. That is not how or why we were created. Discuss it with me and we can figure out together what is the best step for you.
Book a call with me and we will go over your situation and map out a plan for you which may or may not include more details on my program. Whether we work together or not, the call itself will reveal things about yourself that you didn’t see but will recognize immediately as true when you hear them. https://drdeb.com/book