Should You Run Your Family Like a Hedge Fund?

Billionaire Harvard Business School graduate, Ray Dalio heads one of the most successful hedge funds in history. Hedge funds attempt success in markets good and bad, and over the last 20 years his fund, Bridgewater has returned nearly 15% annually for its investors – no easy feat. Dalio and friends have managed to accomplish that success by following a specific set of Principles.

Hyper-realist Ray Dalio

Essentially Dalio’s Principles invite family members to contemplate what it is we want, what’s true, and what do we want to do about what we want? Some of these Principles echo the spiritual maturity I wrote about several years ago in The Two Perilous Questions. They also hold the potential to be very useful when applied to parents and children, or to families (or graduate institutes).

Dalio’s not a fan of adopting pre-packaged principles offered wholesale by American business, religion or contemporary culture. Or parenting blog writers. He’s an advocate for developmental authenticity: what might be of value for others at any point in time could very well be inconsistent with my truest values. Taking on and trying to maintain incompatible principles often leads to conflicts between values and actions—like parents who act one way in public and then behave quite differently behind closed doors. My principles work best when they reflect values I truly believe in my heart of hearts…now.

Valued Principles

To be most effective, Ray argues, each principle must be consistent with our values, and this consistency demands that much like inquisitive children we continually ask,”Why?” Is the reason we won’t steal because we feel empathy for our potential victims? Is it because we fear getting caught? By asking this and other questions, we continually refine and deepen understanding of ourselves and others. The result: our principles becomes increasingly aligned with our core values. To be successful, we must make correct, tough choices. We must learn to “cut off a leg to save a life,” and to be an effective family, it is important to remember that we will have to make hard choices by understanding and “meta-caring” for family members, including ourselves. And what that means is paying rapt attention to mirate bien (taking a good look at yourself) by examining mistakes and weaknesses…

I learned that everyone makes mistakes and has weaknesses and that one of the most important things that differentiates people is their approach to handling them. I learned that there is an incredible beauty to mistakes, because embedded in each mistake is a puzzle, and a gem that I could get if I solved it, i.e., a principle that I could use to reduce my mistakes in the future. I learned that each mistake was probably a reflection of something that I was (or others were) doing wrong, so if I could figure out what that was, I could learn how to be more effective. I learned that wrestling with my problems, mistakes, and weaknesses was the training that strengthened me. Also, I learned that it was the pain of this wrestling that made me and those around me appreciate our successes.

Essentially, Ray is advocating for a way of operating in the world to help facilitate growth along the Nine Pathways of Neural Integration. “Refining our understanding” could be another way of saying that we grow more hippocampal neurons and make more general connections in the brain. Of prime importance are the connections along the fiber tracts in the ACC (Anterior Cingulate Cortex) “the heart of the brain” which bridges limbic (fear)structures and the PFC (pre-frontal cortex), the home of Mindsight and Executive Function. The more connections neurons make, as a general rule, the more energy and information we can process. The more energy and information we can process, the greater the chance we’ll be able to catch ourselves in the act when “Interpreter Brain” bullies us into behaving in ways that go against our principles, like screaming at our parents or moving from not stealing for fear of getting caught to the expanded heartful awareness of the pain that stealing causes others. Being able to process increasing amounts of information, especially often painful information emerging from the brain’s trauma storage centers, increases the probability of seeing the Big Picture as well as being able to anticipate Black Swans and unintended consequences.

Strength Through Weakness Investigation

So, why don’t we all simply get with Ray’s Principles program. He has some theories about why we don’t …

Twin Sentinels Safeguarding Our Somatic Security

Most people don’t like helping others explore their weaknesses, even though they are willing to talk about them behind their backs. For these reasons most people don’t do a good job of understanding themselves and adapting in order to get what they want most out of life. In my opinion, that is the biggest single problem of mankind because it, more than anything else, impedes people’s abilities to address all other problems, and it is probably the greatest source of pain for most people.

It’s interesting and encouraging to me that Ray recognizes both the complexity and the need for understanding how the brain works with respect to learning. As I’ve argued repeatedly: knowing how my brain works makes it work better.

Hyperrealists R Us

Finally, Ray describes himself as a hyperrealist. Hyperrealism has a lot going for it, as he outlines below:

In pursuing my goals I encountered realities, often in the form of problems, and I had to make decisions. I found that if I accepted the realities rather than wished that they didn’t exist and if I learned how to work with them rather than fight them, I could figure out how to get to my goals. It might take repeated tries, and seeking the input of others, but I could eventually get there. As a result, I have become someone who believes that we need to deeply understand, accept, and work with reality in order to get what we want out of life. Whether it is knowing how people really think and behave when dealing with them, or how things really work on a material level—so that if we do X then Y will happen—understanding reality gives us the power to get what we want out of life, or at least to dramatically improve our odds of success. In other words, I have become a “hyperrealist.”

When I say I’m a hyperrealist, people sometimes think I don’t believe in making dreams happen. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, I believe that without pursuing dreams, life is mundane. I am just saying that I believe hyperrealism is the best way to choose and achieve one’s dreams. The people who really change the world are the ones who see what’s possible and figure out how to make that happen.

I can think of worse things than running a family like a hedge fund. Afterall, don’t most of us want to live in families rooted in hyperrealism with a strong sense of what’s possible in the world together with the drive and creativity and chutzpah to make it happen? And then for the icing on the cake, almost as an afterthought, we can all earn 15% on our money! 

Dissolving the Barriers to Brilliant Sanity

Last week I misplaced my iPhone. I thought I would be clever and use the Find-My-iPhone app to find it, but because the phone was turned off (which is how I usually keep it, since I have the luxury of loathing intrusive ringing or vibrating telephones), Find-My-iPhone couldn’t. If it’s not in my pocket, then the phone is usually attached to the charging cord on the kitchen counter. After looking in every pants and jacket pocket I’d worn during the last week, rummaging through the trash, tearing my truck apart, traipsing around the perimeter of the house, I finally gave in and asked my wife to bring new eyes to the situation. She found the phone in six minutes.

Separated From Sanity

While on the surface a lost phone might seem a pretty mundane incident, a bigger issue underlying the experience turns out to be me separated from something I’ve spent the greater part of my life trying to cultivate: Brilliant Sanity. Brilliant Sanity is a term rooted in Tibetan Buddhism described and practiced most elegantly by Karen Wegela, a contemplative psychologist who was kind enough to contribute a chapter to my Deep Listening anthology. The elements of Brilliant Sanity turn out to loosely mirror the cycles of the seasons. In her crystal clear account, How to Be a Help Instead of a Nuisance, Karen identifies five aspects of Brilliant Sanity. The first is The Cultivation of Openness.

Radical Openness

Openness is associated with the color white and invites us to walk through the world with a sense of sacredness and an unfixated, flexible mind. Losing my iPhone and then not being able to find it no matter where or how hard I looked, resulted in me increasingly losing the luster of Brilliant Sanity. Anything that might have initially unfolded as sacred and flexible in the search soon narrowed into frustration and fear as I began considering what important personal information was stored on the device. Whoever had the phone was surely draining my bank accounts and ordering every single brain science book on Amazon, while I frantically wracked my brain. But then I caught myself and moved in to …

The Richness of Experience

The second quality of Brilliant Sanity: Appreciating the Richness of Experience. This quality is associated with the color of pure gold. The moment I became aware of the crazy-fear thoughts arising in response to the missing iPhone, I was able to pause, lighten up and even laugh: woolly-bully left brain had caught me yet again with its penchant for spinning out endless stories of disastrous futures. All that I knew for sure was that my phone was somewhere and I knew not where. And that’s ALL I knew for certain. Paring back to that simple fact then quickly led me to …

I Can See Clearly Now

The third aspect of Brilliant Sanity: the Wisdom of Seeing Clearly. This aspect is associated with the deep blue of a clear sky. It arises out of left brain, right brain, mind, body and spirit all operating in concert to drive enthusiastic curiosity and inquisitiveness. As we well know, I am deeply curious about how my mind and brain work. I play an ongoing awareness game: doing what I can to catch left brain trying to drive me Brilliantly Insane. Left brain is a master at this game; I like to think I am a worthy opponent. Catching it clearly at work during the Great iPhone Search was encouraging. It also then allowed me to move on to …

Expressing Compassion

The fourth element of Brilliant Sanity: Expressing Compassion through Genuine Relationship. This element is associated with a warm, vibrant red color. One bit of compassion I am able to get in touch with and express is towards myself and the deeply disorganizing response my brain has to loss. Not only the loss of my iPhone, of course, but the loss of friendships, parents, idealized visions, the sweetness of my daughter’s infancy and early years, of my own youth and untold, unrealized personal promise. Loss undergirds virtually every element of human enterprise and if I don’t turn away from it, but instead do my best to turn gently toward loss with softness and compassion, it becomes workable. It also then allows me to move toward …

Applied Effectiveness

Archie and Gracie Lap-Chilling After a Day of Mutual Mischief

The fifth aspect of Brilliant Sanity – Taking Effective Action. This aspect is associated with the growthful color green. Recognizing how being emotionally disturbed distorts not only my capacity to think clearly, but also my senses of vision and hearing, I am able to tell my wife of my plight and ask her for help. The first thing she does is go online and look at the ATT call log. No calls have been made on my iPhone that I didn’t recognize. Next she asks me to think harder about where and when I had it last. Together we determine that the probability is high that the phone made it home with me the last time I was out. Next she starts looking room by room, leaving no covered surface unturned. In my office she lifts up a picture of Bodhi the dog that the cats have apparently knocked into an open carton of Neuro-bliss. And there, under the dog picture next to the bottles of bliss, sits my iPhone.

Undoing the Neurobiology of Learned Helplessness

When Bodhi the puppy was in the process of being house trained, he spent a lot of time penned up in the kitchen. His bed was there; his food was there, and any exocrine accidents could be easily cleaned up. Gradually Bodhi came to learn however, that most of the real action in the house was happening in the living room, dining room and bedroom, places where the kitties, Archie and Gracie had free rein. So, every chance he got, Bodhi would make a break for the action rooms. Each time he did, I would authoritatively call his name to get his attention, walk over and lead him firmly by the collar back to the kitchen.

Over time, once he learned that chewing table legs and eating Kitty-poo Roca was a no-no, he was able to spend more and more supervised time liberated from the kitchen. Gradually he learned and earned the right to have the run of the whole house (Although the cats, Archie and Gracie, have their way of letting him know when his intrusive presence is unwanted).

What has contributed most to Bodhi’s learning in my estimation is that he has never been hit and has rarely been yelled at. Whenever he would prematurely escape his kitchen training ground, my wife or I would simply repeat the return-to-the-kitchen drill. The fear and shame structures in his brain were rarely set ablaze. I would simply explain to him, calmly  in words, why he wasn’t ready to have the run of the house. My sense is that he didn’t understand my words necessarily, but he DID understand the energy behind my words. In my mental cosmology, Bodhi came to respect my intentions. He was also never punished for his natural desire to pursue the exhilaration of discovery which is almost, but not entirely irrepressible in puppies (q.v. Pavlov).

The point of this story is that Bodhi has rarely experienced anything that would work to teach him learned helplessness. There have been no severe punishments for Bodhi taking action in the world according to his needs and wants. Simple, firm, nonreactive guidance showed him what behavior was desired and acceptable and what wasn’t.

Training Helplessness

Children, however, both deliberately and unwittingly, are continually subjected to treatment that undermines their power and their ability to act on their environment to meet their own needs and wants. From public schools where curriculum is rarely designed to match specific, unique levels of interest and development, to interactions with peers and immediate and extended family, children are constantly constrained by the odorless and colorless restraints of emotional reactivity.

Neurochemistry Makes It Happen

When we feel helpless, neurochemical changes in cortico-releasing hormones and serotonin reuptake structures profoundly affect the flow of energy and information in the brain. Learned helplessness is sometimes likened to the state of dissociation that often results after an overwhelming traumatic experience. Immature brain circuits, which can generate an avalanche of healthy activity when the system is supported but not overly stressed, can become trained, intentionally and unintentionally to  shut off and go into Homeland Security Lockdown in the face of negative reactions from the people around us. To overcome such inhibitions takes effort, encouragement and practice. And it needs parents who don’t consider “talking back” or assertive “No’s” to be disrespectful. A more skillful response, found in disciplines like Authentic Movement or Aikido, might be to “pace and lead” children in the behaviors we desire.

Learning Optimism

One perspective on overcoming learned helplessness and transforming it into “learned optimism” can be found in Buddhism.  Korean Buddhist teacher Seung Sa Nihm expresses it succinctly:

First kill the Buddha.
Then kill your parents.
Then kill your teacher.

Cereal Murder

Obviously Seung Sa Nihm is not advocating for actual serial murder. What he is advocating for is growing into our own authority; finding our own way to continually ask and answer The Two Perilous Questions. Wouldn’t it be remarkable if children were raised, guided and actively supported from birth to continually ask and answer those two questions? That would require parents to actively work with almost every single conditioned fear alive and well in their own neural network. It would invite parents to do the work required to kill their own Buddhas, teachers and parents. Not such easy work.

But we actually can kill them all … while loving and respecting them at the same time. It requires a kind of slowing down, a softening and a willingness to honor what might be true for others, but not necessarily true for us. Which is as it should be. Each generation grows minds and brains capable of processing evermore energy and information. How could they not be different than us? 

P.S. I’d like to invite you to consider the book below to be the perfect Mother’s Day Gift … for Father’s Day. To learn more, click HERE.

Single Women: The 6th Uncommon Possibility

One last time: this blog series is in no way intended as a negative judgment of unpartnered women. The central aim has been to offer uncommon possibilities that might provide food for thought leading to some kind of healing integration and the lessening of suffering.

Over the last year or so, I have had contact with an increasing number of single women who have disclosed a preference to me that they wish they weren’t. They are all lovely, intelligent, spirited women, thus I found their struggle somewhat surprising. In contemplating their situation, I’ve come up with six possibilities you won’t find in The Star or Us magazine that I thought might be worthwhile offering for consideration. Rather than simply offer six capsule summaries, each week I’m offering a different possibility in depth…here is the sixth and final possibility.

Possibility 6: Practicing the Art in Answering The Big Brain Question

Just as Rumi observed, there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground, it’s my deepest sense that there are at least that many ways to answer the Big Brain Question – Are You There For Me – “Yes.” That in fact, we can approach answering it for ourselves and others as artistic action in relationship, as a kind of practice in answering this fundamental neurological question positively.

Zorba – Self Portrait

To begin answering this question as art at the most basic level, we can practice opening our hearts to the widespread unconscious, unskillful actions in the world. Suffering touches every single life, and as Brené Brown reminds us, we can’t simply choose to feel happy, positive emotions in response to this First Noble Truth. We can only become Skin Horse Real by cracking open our hearts, perhaps only a little bit each day, to take in as much as we can of Zorba’s “full catastrophe.” Especially, the full catastrophe of our own lives destined to unfold in a body that will inevitably grow older, weaker and ultimately one day no longer be able to sustain our vital life force. As this lovely academic research on Terror Management Theory demonstrates, and as Don Juan wisely advised, maintaining regular death awareness inversely and paradoxically often works to focus pursuits and expand joyousness. Death awareness, as this recent research suggests, is a good place to begin practicing answering The Big Brain Question “Yes” for ourselves first. When we begin to feel even the possibility of companioning death, much of the fear that drives unconscious, unskillful behaviors often begins to dissolve and fall away. Even the Grim Reaper needs love.

Artistically Living into the Question

As a positive preparation for our last day alive, we can then begin to work diligently to positively answer The Big Brain Question for others in all kinds of artistic ways. It’s such a relief to no longer have constant self-concern as the driving force in our lives. Nobel octogenarian and brain scientist, Eric Kandel practices answering the Big Brain Question in this way: talking to non-scientists about brain science and getting people like me really excited about the potential it holds for alleviating suffering here, there and everywhere in the world.

And there are many more creative ways to answer that Big Question “yes.” Perhaps, as attachment specialist Gabor Mate suggests, a village can work wonders in this regard. Which is often what many of us try to have happen at work, in school and in church or temple: answering the question “yes” for others as a community by holding rummage sales, staffing soup kitchens, planting community gardens and opening and operating thrift stores.

Because we are all on a transcendent, growing, learning, integrating trajectory, “healing is always wanting to happen.” What will go a long way towards integration and wholeness, and I suspect in finding and sustaining committed lifelong companionships, is doing the work of both getting and giving material and emotional support to one another in a balanced and healthy way. Contemplative psychologist Karen Kissel Wegela, the author of How to Be a Help Instead of a Nuisance and What Really Helps calls this way of being in the world, Brilliant Sanity. It is rooted in openness, clarity and compassion, and available to rise up in us in the midst of any disturbed moment.

Transforming No into Yes

Because answering the Big Brain Question “No” is the Number One Complaint that couples show up voicing in therapy, we would be well-served to find creative solutions to remedy this deficit – partners not being able to consistently be there for one another, especially in times of crisis. A great gift we can provide one another is a presence that allows each of us to calm down when we’re emotionally highjacked. Beginning  before birth, assurances in word and deed that “every little thing’s gonna be all right,” go a long way to providing the answer to the Big Brain Question that all of our hearts and brains yearn for. And it seldom stops simply because we get older.

So, what keeps us from being able to consistently provide that comfort for each other over the whole of our lives? Many things, in my experience. Primary among them: unconscious emotional reactivity. It’s the reactivity that undermines peace, often subtly substituting fear in its place. Steve Jobs, the recently departed Apple co-founder, once offered an interesting perspective on how to dispel fear and reactivity in relationships. Here’s what he said: “One way to drive fear out of a relationship is to (remember) that your partner’s values are the same as yours, that what you care about is exactly what they care about. In my opinion, that (remembering) drives fear out and makes for a great partnership, whether it’s a corporate partnership or a marriage.” 

It’s also a brilliantly sane way to show up in the world as a single woman looking for partnership.

Single Women: Why Many Remain Unpartnered – Possibility 5

So again, let me remind you that this blog series is in no way intended as a negative judgment of unpartnered women. Much of what I am offering can just as easily apply to men or women, partnered or unpartnered. The central aim here is to offer some uncommon possibilities that might provide food for thought leading to some kind of healing integration and the lessening of suffering.

Over the last year or so, I have had contact with an increasing number of single women who have disclosed a preference to me that they wish they weren’t. They are all lovely, intelligent, spirited women, thus I found their struggle somewhat surprising. In contemplating their situation, I’ve come up with six possibilities you won’t find in The Inquirer or People magazine that I thought might be worthwhile offering for consideration. Rather than simply offer six capsule summaries, each week I’m offering a different possibility in depth…

Possibility 5: Humorlessly Searching for the Wrong Thing in the Wrong Place

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed that “No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.” Coleridge was expressing a traumatological truism: When retained or embodied trauma becomes triggered in me, my sense of humor is nowhere to be found, making people, places or things just not that funny. It’s a poopy, stressful way to walk through the world. And the evidence is overwhelming: many women in almost every culture on the planet have been exposed to sexual, physical or emotional abuse at some point early in their lives. If those early experiences remain skillfully unaddressed – the operative word being skillfully– they will tend to shape and direct a woman’s life in different ways than they might otherwise; that abuse impacts a whole variety of subsequent preferences, from the people we feel most and least drawn to, to our capacity to readily regulate hot emotions, to the choice of life’s work we pursue.

As Famous as You're Able to Be

When our early experiences, especially emotional abuse, diminish our capacity for easy emotional self-regulation, our brain then determines to a great extent what we impulsively and unconsciously turn toward and away from – it can make us even further susceptible to stress. There’s a reason very few of us can grow up to be Rock Stars or Presidents, Movie Stars or CEOs: our hearts, brains, minds, and bodies simply haven’t been sufficiently organized to easily manage the stress. But we can all do the work to recover our authentic smile.

Having our authentic smile and our sense of humor compromised by abuse of any kind, frequently compromises our brain’s capacity to process sufficient energy and information necessary to live a life of joy, with a committed partner if that’s what we greatly desire. A genuinely joyous person, someone whom it feels good simply to be in the presence of, stands a much great chance of attracting a resonant partner than someone whom it doesn’t feel good to be in the presence of. And those are often people like me, carrying anywhere from 1-9 Adverse Childhood Experiences on the ACE Scale.

Joyfully Searching for the Right Thing in the Right Place

Motivational psychologist, Frederick Herzberg once asserted that the most powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money or finding the perfect mate; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements. In other words to grow and integrate connections in heart, brain, mind and body such that unending, lifelong growth and development is the recurring result. In even simpler words, learning and … unlearning. We unlearn and discharge the painful memories contracted in our early lives, and replace them with new learning borne of new, healthy people, places and things.

One way to increase such capacity and resist the impulse to go “Bowling Alone,” which brain research suggests compromises our capacity for learning, is to give away your TV set and increase civic participation. As Nathan Heller points out in his New Yorker review of the several books recently published on people “squandering their golden years” – more than half of U.S. residents are single (in 1950 four million people lived alone; in 2012: 31 million do). So, instead of joining organizations like Single Mothers by Choice out of resignation, join the PTA or Habitat for Humanity by intention instead.

WW♥D?

Sticking out from the right side of my computer screen is a small, rectangular piece of paper. Printed on it in colored fonts are the easily visible letters: WWLD? What Would Love Do? That note serves as a frequent reminder; I need it because the fear centers in my brain so often get triggered and override this higher-order, heart-brain impulse. It’s also a way for me to rightfully and joyfully manage Herzberg’s assertions. With love serving as my neurological CEO, my fear circuitry is repeatedly invited to take a back seat. When it does and there’s plenty of room for love, there’s concurrently plenty of room for creativity, ease, relaxation, mindfulness and joy. And I’m reminded that my first work isn’t to find someone to love me; my first work is to find increasing opportunities to be fiercely and fearlessly loving. And it’s paramount to include myself in that circle.

Feel free to express a small bit of that love to someone you know on the upcoming holidays by clicking HERE.

Single Women: Possibility 4 Why Many Remain Unpartnered

So again, let me say that this blog series is in no way intended as a negative judgment of unpartnered women. Much of what I am offering can just as easily apply to men or women, partnered or unpartnered. The central aim here is to offer some uncommon possibilities that might provide food for thought leading to some kind of healing integration and the lessening of suffering.

Over the last year or so, I have had contact with an increasing number of single women who have disclosed a preference to me that they wish they weren’t. They are all lovely, intelligent, spirited women, thus I found their struggle somewhat surprising. In contemplating their situation, I’ve come up with six possibilities you won’t find in Cosmo or Elle magazine that I thought might be worthwhile offering for consideration. Rather than simply offer six capsule summaries, each week I’m offering a different possibility in-depth…

Possibility Four: Unfinished Business from the Past

Shortly after Stephen Levine’s book, A Year to Live came out, a friend and I invited a collection of courageous people together to meet weekly. Our intention was to support each other in asking and answering The Two Perilous Questions in order to help us make changes in our lives that we would absolutely make if this was going to actually be our last year alive (Side note: the friend I co-led the group with was hit by a bus and killed a short time after the Year-to-Live Group ended).

At a time that long predated The Bucket List, each of the people in the group went through Stephen’s book and began to rank the areas of their lives they felt needed the greatest amount of attention. When everyone’s list was complete, by far the greatest need uncovered collectively by the group was to begin taking steps to finish unfinished business.

Relaxation Makes It Happen

Unfinished business remains unfinished for many reasons. Chief among them I think is our discomfort and reluctance and lack of supportive training in softening our neurophysiology. When we relax our hearts, bodies, minds and brains, we also relax our habitual defenses and our brains begin dredging up and secreting buried memories, sort of the way we eliminate embodied toxins during a cleansing fast. Often these memories are painful ones: being betrayed by my best friend in high school; discovering my business partner spending money our company didn’t have and then hiding it; a series of ungrieved losses resulting from significant relationship ruptures. For many of us, the list of painful, unresolved and unintegrated memories is often a long one – a collection we’d much prefer to drop in a bucket and keep buried in someone else’s backyard.

Even so, I’ve written here and here and here about the importance and need to finish unfinished business and repair ruptured relationships. The relationships we repair with others essentially works as an internal remodeling and rebuilding process. Reconnection and forgiveness are important neurological reconfigurations: it’s our own heart/brain/mind/body that we’re restoring. It’s our own neural capacity for processing energy and information that we’re increasing. Unfortunately, that’s a work too easy to forget or make low priority – who wouldn’t prefer to simply move on and “accentuate the positive?” – and thus delay or avoid attempts at repair altogether. For finishing unfinished business often requires re-enduring some degree of pain, since current evidence suggests neurons holding stored traumatic memories need to be actively firing in order to be able to reconnect back up to the neural network. Most often we have little real choice but to “feel it in order to heal it.”

For me, feeling painful things and going through them once, was more than enough. My greatest wish of course, is to be “one and done.” Except that’s not the way our brains are built – their very structure and function requires us to pay attention to the pain in our lives. Not necessarily to retain painful memories forever, but rather to get access to them and express them skillfully and constructively (and perhaps ideally, creatively) in the world when we no longer need them to protect us in the present moment. Think: artists creating art or spring closet cleaning and hauling the many things we’ve stored and accumulated over the years off to the local thrift store. The donation will, more often than not, help connect and strengthen altruistic impulses hiding out in our tangled, forgotten compassion centers. As we begin to feel kindly and compassionately toward ourselves, when we are no longer struggling to “get enough of something that almost works,” those feelings begin to present an energetic picture to the world which I predict increasing numbers of people will invariably find themselves drawn to. Increasing the odds of becoming partnered?

Finishing Unknown Business

According to University of Texas fetal origins researcher, Peter Nathanielsz, “We pass more developmental milestones during life before birth than we do during life after birth.” Unless we were born of mothers living in Nirvana, able to take eustress to the apex of the stress cycle and rarely top the curve, how many of us passed those in utero milestones without incident?

Which, when you think of it, makes for a pretty challenging after-birth assignment: how does one uncover, address and remedy developmental milestones that might have been problematic in utero? Especially when we don’t even know what missing pieces in our unfolding development require us to do? Unfortunately, these aren’t questions I have good answers for, yet; might some of you?

What I do have, though, is great food for thought, intended to inspire even more interesting and easily answerable questions. Click HERE to partake.

Single Women: Why Many Remain Unpartnered – Possibility 3

Once again, let me say that while it might seem the height of chutzpah for a married male to write on this topic, it is in no way intended as a negative judgment about unpartnered women. Much of what I am offering can just as easily apply to women or men of either circumstance. The central aim of these pieces is to offer some possibilities to consider that might provide food for thought leading to some kind of healing integration and the lessening of suffering.

Over the last year or so, I have had contact with an increasing number of single women who have disclosed a preference to me that they wish they weren’t. They are all lovely, intelligent, spirited women, thus I found their struggle somewhat surprising. In contemplating their situation, I’ve come up with six uncommon possibilities I thought might be worthwhile offering for consideration. Rather than simply offer six capsule summaries, each week I’m offering a different possibility in depth…

Possibility Number 3: We Never Learned How to Be Brave Companions

In Act I of my life, what I mostly learned about relationships was how to manage and organize them to best serve my own, seemingly never-ending personal needs. Fulfilling needs may be an important part of the developmental journey: I need to be deeply connected with and within myself before I can begin connecting deeply with another. Think of it as ego-strengthening. But ego-strengthening is not the be-all and end-all of relationship growth and maintenance (Nor is having 25,000 Facebook friends, as this Atlantic Monthly article so potently reveals).

 

Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt

As the environments we hang out in begin to mold and shape our brain, we learn different ways of being in relationship with others. One environment that I know profoundly shaped by brain was the 25-plus years I spent as a volunteer grief counselor.

Grief training has explicit protocols: our job is not to fix other people; it’s not to make their pain go away; it’s not to project or overlay our own personal preferences or value judgments onto others, especially people in deep pain. The job of counseling people in grief is essentially to show up and shut up, to be someone offering gentle, trustworthy presence. It’s to honor each person’s unique personal journey as they struggle to integrate loss. It’s to show up and be present to one rimed and ravaged heart after another the best we can. We are essentially called each time to be a brave companion of the heart.

Companioning Lets It Happen

Unlike Facebook Friends, companioning is a very special way of showing up in relationship to other people. It requires us to be more than what MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle calls “sociable robots.” Below is a list borrowed from grief educator Alan Wolfelt, Ph. D. that describes some of the qualities that make up the warp and woof of companioning…

• Companioning is about honoring the spirit; it is not about focusing on the intellect.
• Companioning is about curiosity; it is not about expertise.
• Companioning is about learning from others; it is not about teaching them.
• Companioning is about walking alongside; it is not about leading.
• Companioning is about being still; it is not about frantic movement forward.
• Companioning is about discovering the gifts of sacred silence; it is not about filling every painful moment with words.
• Companioning is about listening with the heart; it is not about analyzing with the head.
• Companioning is about bearing witness to the struggles of others; it is not about directing those struggles.
• Companioning is about being present to another person’s pain; it is not about taking away the pain.
• Companioning is about respecting disorder and confusion; it is not about imposing order and logic.
• Companioning is about going to the wilderness of the soul with another human being; it is not about thinking you are responsible for finding the way out.

Mismanaging the Goldilocks Effect

Ideally, I want my interactions with other people neither too hot nor too cold. To avoid too hot, I’m often willing to settle for contact in lieu of true connection, i.e. massive numbers of Facebook friends. I greatly fear interactions in which I can’t manage my anxiety, where I might end up being more vulnerable than I can easily manage. I become uncomfortable in my own skin, because I can’t control the thoughts that arise from the depth of my feeling, right brain unconscious. Unfortunately, I can distract myself from such discomfort. One way is by flooding my life with busyness. A life filled with busyness is severely handicapped when it comes to authentic companioning. It does not allow me the time needed to practice in-the-flesh skills for such connection.

Warring with Trolls

While companioning is not about conflict, most relationships, if they’re to be authentic, are going to have conflicts arise. That said, a great many of us are very uncomfortable with disagreement and conflict (me included). In part because we haven’t received much practice or experience or understanding concerning a significant unconscious purpose in such encounters: healing integration. Without that awareness, together with skills to actually facilitate resolution and integration in ourselves and in a committed partner, conflict is probably wisely avoided. To do otherwise risks doing additional damage: piling trauma on top of trauma. The bind though, is that avoidance isn’t optimal either – it rarely leads to healing.

Part of what often makes fighting so challenging for people partnered and unpartnered is usually one or both people have little experience, and thus great difficulty readily self-regulating in the aftermath of a disagreement. My daughter attended a K-8 school where conflict was openly encouraged and worked with until resolution (or at least restored peace) was the ultimate result. So, from kindergarten on she was exposed to both conflict and its resolution. Today she is very comfortable both engaging in conflict and hashing things out to peaceful restoration. She has taught me a lot in this area, mostly in learning how to feel okay in letting the other person help with restoring feelings of safety and security.

So, the work often in relationship is to avoid ending up in a double bind: discovering issues surfacing from implicit memory involving earlier trauma that needs addressing and resolution, but we can’t address and resolve them because attempting to do so will make us too upset. It also risks simply unskillfully reenacting the original trauma. What to do?

Tune in next week for Possibility 4 for some suggestions, or take a look at this new book HERE.