Being Present - Testing Your Reflexes

It’s been a long time since my doctor tapped my knee to see if I would kick him or not.

Testing the reflexes like that is pretty old school, but there are other ways to do it, just as there are many different reasons.

If you have been drinking, one of the reasons you shouldn’t drive is because your reflexes aren’t very reliable. If you are an athlete in any competitive sport, you need those reflexes to pop. Emergency room technicians, police, construction workers. And what if you found yourself in a combat situation?

But physical reflexes are only part of the story, because the mental reflexes need to be even sharper than the physical ones. If you needed to dive for cover due to a shooting event nearby, you would first have to recognize that you need to dive! Standing straight up looking around when shots are fired (which I have done) is not advisable.

Yes, I have just admitted to having dull mental reflexes. You get used to it….

“Reflex” can be defined as a reaction to a stimulus, particularly without consciously reacting. We hear a loud sharp noise nearby and we wince or jump. We feel something painful and we just automatically try and get some distance from whatever is causing the pain. Itch, and you scratch. Generally folks don’t have to think about reacting; they just do. In fact, folks usually have to practice discipline to NOT react.

But you might not think of reflexes when it comes to dealing with someone in a relationship.

Not really physical ones, though. I’m talking about the mental and emotional reflexes.

Remember how you reacted when you first heard about someone close to you being hurt? You really didn’t need to process the fact in order to react to it. Your reaction may have been different from another person’s, but it was reflexive. Did you instantly go into denial? Did you start crying or shaking? Did your eyes get wide and your voice tremble? These and other reactions are very common to sudden bad news.

Now then: remember how you first reacted when your parent became angry at something you did, or something he or she thought you did. Consider some of these reactions:

·         Burst into tears.

·         Raised your voice in response.

·         Lashed out physically.

·         Ran away to another room.

·         Ran away to another house or location entirely.

·         Shut down and stopped responding.

·         Felt really, really bad.

These and other reactions are not uncommon for children. They aren’t that uncommon for adults either, although as we age we learn other reactions. Such as:

·         Defensive posturing (like watching a cat arch its back. Except with people it’s better posture, clenched fists, tight jaw, etc.)

·         Denial (“No I didn’t.”)

·         Lying (“No for real, I didn’t!”)

·         Shifting blame (“It was Sally who spilled the soda.”)

·         Counter-blaming (Oh yeah? Well, so what? You did whatever whatever whatever.)

·         Dismissal (“Whatever.”)

So we see that as we grow older we develop new reactions to a familiar stimulus, although the old standbys are still good.

Of course, you might spoil your lie when you instantly start crying.

When we boil it down, it still amounts to reacting to the stimulus out of reflex. Lots of choices for how you can react, but you probably have one or two standard reactions for specific circumstances or people. These default reactions are your outward manifestations of reflex.

When you get into a relationship, these reactions are probably already set in concrete with steel braces. The more relationships you engage in, the further they are developed, but you probably stick close to your defaults.

If you’ve ever gotten so mad at a partner that you called them by a previous partner’s name in the midst of hollering, you probably have a pretty good idea how that works.

Like water running down a path on a hill, it eventually erodes a little trough in the soil. That makes it easier and faster for the water to get down the hill. Unless you live on a really odd planet that has intelligent water, this was just a matter of something following the path of least resistance and shortest route in obeying gravity.

Reflexes happen the same way. Your brain develops little pathways that act like shortcuts between stimulus and response. The more often electric impulses follow a particular path in your brain, the more likely they will do so in the future. Only they will be able to follow the path a little faster next time.

For example, if we started off shutting down when blamed for something, and then developed a mechanism to relieve the pressure on us by throwing it back on the accuser, we begin remapping what path those little electric impulses take. The more successful we are with the new reaction, or the more we like the results of this new reaction, the faster the remapping occurs. Pretty soon we find we shut down and counter-blame in about equal measure, and eventually the counter-attack becomes our favorite reaction.

So that person begins to recognize the pattern, even if only subconsciously. They start reacting reflexively to your reactions. After awhile it’s like a well-choreographed ballet, with two dancers spinning around on a stage in relation to each other but not really thinking through each step.

Have you ever found yourself arguing with someone – again – only to discover a little bit later that you have no clue what either of you actually said or did? Reflex is a shortcut that you don’t have to think about. Just push the Play button and let it go.

Then you get with someone else, and it’s amazing. You don’t have to develop a new process, because the old stimuli start showing up and you just start reacting as usual.

Then suddenly you are standing with your jaw swinging in the breeze, because this new person didn’t react to your behavior like the old person did. Let the internal diagnostic begin!

“Hmmm. She asked me to take out the garbage. Check. I didn’t take out the garbage because this level of the game doesn’t have a Save Point. Check. She yelled at me to put the game down and take out the garbage because it has the diapers in it. Check. I yelled back ‘I’ll get to it when I’m good and ready, woman!’ Check. She started crying…. Wait a second. She didn’t start crying. Why am I laying on the floor and why does my jaw hurt so much?”

Perhaps that old process could do with some tweaking….

Again, the path those little electric blips follow in our noggin relates to what we perceive as the most desirable path. But as we find ourselves changing and growing, what used to be preferable may not be any longer. There might be a different path we would rather pursue.

That takes conscious evaluation of where we are, what we do, how we react, and most important what goal we really want to achieve with our reaction.

If we just want to win fights, that’s how we’ll develop our reflexes. Like a sniper honing his or her rapid aim.

But if we want peace, harmony, love, and a partner who won’t simply hand the relationship their two-week notice, we can develop reflexes for that instead. It may take a lot of doing, but it’s up to us. What do we really want?

Mindfulness says to be in the moment. We need to be MINDFULLY PRESENT, not merely reacting but taking a moment to analyze the situation and determine the preferred course. We need to be aware of what is happening, how we are reacting, and intentionally choosing a course to pursue.

It means getting out ahead of your reaction and choosing another option.

Of course, that reflex path is a pretty deep rut, so we might have to really yank on the brain to get it into another track. For awhile it will probably be after the fact, when we recognize that we reacted the old way out of habit, out of reflex. We need to figure out why we went that route, and what route we probably should have taken.

It ain’t easy. But relationships take work. If you want to succeed, it’s worth the effort.

For Your Consideration - A Simulation I Can Relate To

Now picture this scene:

I am at dinner with a beautiful woman. I’m not the only person who recognizes her beauty, and soon this gentleman makes a comment about her beauty. How do I react?

Survey says –

Ding ding ding. That’s right, I’m ticked off.

Why? He didn’t do anything other than tell her how beautiful she is. He’s totally right; she totally is. She smiled and accepted the compliment but didn’t reciprocate or escalate. He said his peace and that was that.

If things developed further, for example if she got up and joined him at his table for example, then yeah I might have reason to worry. If he pushed the matter and she became uncomfortable or offended, then that’s an issue.

But nothing really happened; I reacted with a possessive reflex. I got angry because he was intruding into my territory, doggone it! She’s MY date, so she’s MY territory.

Sheesh. Give me a minute and I’ll grab the post-hole digger, then I’ll start unrolling the barbed wire….

Men aren’t the only ones who put a fence around someone special to them. Women do too, although in the American Midwest it’s pretty standard behavior for guys.

But I’ve leaped way beyond the present moment and begun to apply past attitudes with a view to possible – POSSIBLE – future developments. Maybe I’m afraid of being shown up by another man, or replaced by this smooth-talking scumbag, or whatever. It’s my insecurity that mapped out that reflexive reaction.

By analyzing what really happened, I can gain control over my reaction to it. I am often so caught up in what I feel that I forget to notice that it is just a feeling. By staying in the moment, I notice that the past is intruding and threatening the future. I don’t want the evening to be ruined just because my dinner companion is knocking out everyone who sees her.

She has sovereignty over herself and her person. If she wants my help, she’s totally capable of asking. I will not decide how she will react, nor will I annihilate the guy for being wowed by this gorgeous lady. I will, however, recognize that my breathing is getting faster, my blood pressure is going up along with my temperature, and I will deal with those things. By managing those things and calming down, I am taking a huge step towards changing how I reflexively react.

Please repeat: I will not – I WILL NOT! – take my frustration out on her. Make that a priority on the reflex list.

It’s cool to tell her it caused a reaction in me. In fact, girls are pretty perceptive. She noticed my reaction before I was aware that I couldn’t hear anything over the pounding of my pulse in my ears. We can talk it out if necessary. But dude, really. It wasn’t her doing.

And if he was ogling her because she was sitting there naked, well shoot dawg. I took her to a restaurant like that. Lol.

As I said, in that example I reacted a certain way because I felt intruded upon. But the intrusion is nothing more than a perception on my part. And those perceptions are often geared towards “where it all was leading to”, in my mind. Instead of the event being a self-contained thing, it is seen as but step one in a series of steps. Imagination takes over, and soon I’m worrying. What would happen next? What would happen in the future?

That’s the topic for the next post.

Being Present - That Was Then, Isn't This Now?

To live in the moment, we don’t look behind us, or up over the horizon. We look around us right where we are standing at that moment. The leaves fluttering on the trees. The chirping of birds. The jackhammer reducing the street to a giant pothole. Whatever is present in that moment.

We concentrate n how we are breathing now, how we are feeling now, where we are walking now.

If I try and walk somewhere, I need to pay attention to things. Not the place I just was, because if I concentrate on that I’m going to end up walking into a lamp post. Normally I accomplish this by walking and texting at the same time, but that’s just me. Right?

I also can’t focus solely on the destination, because I won’t notice the gully I’m about to step into or the car coming around the corner.

I need to be grounded in where I am right then, while still acknowledging the past and future. Acknowledge them, but don’t focus on them to the exclusion of where I am.

Focusing on the past caused me to bring past experiences and reactions into the present where they had no business being. They became triggers for anxiety, not only frustrating me but those around me as well; especially those around me, because they didn’t even know the back story to any of the triggers.

So let’s see a few incidents and how they triggered huge anxiety in me later.

I was in a relationship once with a girl who liked to dance. I was forced to dance by my parents in our living room on the farm. They liked to dance, so doggone it I was gonna like it! Well, I already associated dancing with negative things. Well, she wanted to dance but didn’t want to drag me out there since I didn’t want to go anyway. So she danced with other guys, which was also generally a no-no based on our religious upbringing in the country.

If you danced with someone else’s girl, and you’d be lucky to get the three steps made famous by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Line dancing made it more palatable, but only because you were just touching your own belt.

This particularly happened more once I got engaged to her and she began to move into her own life and away from me. So now I’m associating my girl – yeah, I said MY GIRL – dancing with other guys as a symbol of her abandoning me and our relationship.

Oh sure, the patterns are clear now….

So later, a girl I was seeing let me know that she went to clubs and danced with guys. It meant nothing. She liked to dance, I wasn’t a clubber. I may be a lover but I ain’t no dancer. So she danced with a friend of hers generally. No big deal, right?

You try telling me that over the deafening alarms going off in my head.

I was dragging the past into the present simply because of similar patterns that my brain recognized and associated with abandonment.

I could have said, “Ok, well, she’s out enjoying herself. At least she was kind enough not to insist I go endure assaults n my eardrums and personal space. She deserves to enjoy doing things she likes and she appreciates me enough not to inflict it on me. She’s awesome!”

Instead I said, without really saying it, “Crud! She’s out dancing with another guy! Maybe a bunch of other guys! They’re touching her right now! They don’t even know she has a boyfriend! A girl dancing in a club must be on the prowl. They’re probably kissing and touching and maybe she’ll get drunk and end up sleeping with him!!! AAAGGGHHH!!!”

Thanks a lot, rural religious upbringing.

And don’t laugh too hard. I ain’t the only dude whose mind has made connections like that. Even dudettes make them.

Yes, the past informed my present, but it should not have been allowed to replace my present. I let that happen, if only because I didn’t know at the time that I could choose not to let it.

So Mindfulness helps us in relationships by reminding us that it’s called THE PAST for a reason. Let go of what happened with that person then and face the new person now with fresh eyes.

Way easier to say than do, for some folks. (Oddly, it seems to be exactly what happens when folks get into serial relationships with the same basic person over and over. Oh no, this one’s different…!) Whereas we should learn lessons from mistakes, we should not see everything as a replaying of that mistake.

Emotions? Keep 'Em Inside!

Another situation, only far worse.

I was always a fairly private person. Growing up an only child on a farm didn’t give me a whole lot of people to talk to. So I was pretty self-sufficient for the most part. I had emotions, but I wasn’t really sure how to express them sometimes.

Both mom and dad drank. A lot. It was a participant sport in the country. Drinking and driving happened because you had obviously been drinking beer all night and you also obviously needed to go home at some point. So emotional expression was often skewed in my household.

My wife always complained I held my emotions inside and needed to let them out more. Very true! However, she could not take into account the things that tended to happen when I did around her. If I complained, she got upset that I was complaining. If I held it in, she got upset too, but at least the house was quieter.

My frustrations and unhappiness triggered the same reaction in her, only she was much more volatile in expressing it. So while I was upset, she was upset and yelling. It got to where I hated the yelling so much that I became afraid of it. I became afraid of her unhappiness, of any negative emotions on her part. Since I was afraid, I hid.

I held in my frustrations because if I let them out when I felt them I would have been doing nothing but complaining. So they built up until I exploded, which then got me yelled at some more.

Flash forward. I was seeing a young lady who was way more balanced and mature than anyone I had really been with before. She wasn’t fond of yelling in the home for reasons similar to mine. But anytime she would get frustrated or unhappy, I would cower. I might not have even been the reason, but I often wasn’t the reason in my marriage.

An unhappy partner = that unhappiness being vented against me. Outside f a relationship, that’s no big deal. I handle that at work pretty often. But in the intimate confines of a relationship, it terrified me. My anxiety would climb to dangerous levels as I looked for any way to avoid that confrontation I just knew was coming.

I let the past experiences, and my learned reactions to them, infect my present relationship. That led to future imbalances that contributed to tearing the two of us apart.

Mindfulness teaches us not to try and stop reacting in reflex, but to learn new reflex reactions. I’ll take a look at that notion next. Then I’ll look at how worry about the possible future is another opportunity to learn to live in the present.

Being Present - Mindful Of The Moment

Live for the moment. Live in the Here and Now. Be fully present in the moment.

So many ways to put it, but it all boils down to one singular concept: the past is behind you, the future is ahead of you, and you are never ever in either one. You can only ever be in the present.

But man, how much we try to pretend we are above that fact.

The past tells us where we came from. It defines our earliest being, and shapes our fundamental beliefs, values, and views.

The future is the home of our hopes and goals, the horizon before us which we travel toward all our lives.

But when we try to drag the past into the present, it does bad things to our present and potentially worse things to our future. So staying in the present is the safest bet really.

Of course, just as Acceptance does not mean giving up and giving in all the time, Being Present doesn’t mean we don’t learn and embrace the past or plan for the future. It just means leaving the tenses in their places. Let’s start with the baggage we call The Past.

If we keep dragging the past into the present, it begins to invade. It’s like having someone who was recently in a bad marriage plan yours. Yes there will be good advice, but the negative things will start seeping through, and pretty soon you find yourself thinking negatively about the Big Step too.

You know how a bad incident in your life sticks around in your mind? You might find yourself replaying it at times. The most common time for a replay is when something happens that reminds you of that moment. Someone says or does something, and poof! It’s right there in front of you.

In a relationship, you can find yourself reacting unfairly towards the present person based on a past person.

 If your previous guy yelled at you or blamed you whenever the bank account got overdrawn, the next guy in your life might suddenly get a defensive reaction from you over the same incident later, even if he doesn’t really feel strongly about it.

If your previous young lady constantly vented her frustrations on you, even if you had nothing to do with most of them, you might find yourself dreading your next young lady’s frustrated moods simply because you associate that with getting yelled at.

Relationships are very intimate and vulnerable times in our lives. So when damage occurs to us in connection with them, the damage and scars live on. Unfortunately, the scars really don’t do much to help us. Scars don’t prevent folks from choosing to be in relationships with other people who are not good for them. And scars tend to make us react in pre-programmed ways to similar stimuli even when there is no like motive.

I had this problem in proverbial spades! I had experienced so many things in my life that I did not know how to properly get distance on. Over time I could recognize those issues approaching like watching storm clouds roll in. And when the darkest of those clouds began to bear down on me, I developed the strategy of heading for my mental storm shelter.

Stormy Weather!

I think that’s an appropriate analogy. See, I used to live on a farm in Nevada, Missouri. That’s 100 miles south from Kansas City on Missouri 71 Highway. My life changed in a jillion ways on that farm. We had lived in Kansas City until the middle of first grade, and then we suddenly needed to move down south where both sets of my grandparents lived. We moved into my paternal grandparents’ home until a fire destroyed the upper level and we had to move into a mobile home.

Let’s see, I believe that’s called foreshadowing right there. Farm; mobile home; he’s already mentioned storms and storm cellars…..

Yes, a very hot day with no wind made that summer day pretty miserable. In time I saw a couple of small clouds out on the horizon, approaching out of the east. Yes, the east. In time more clouds approached, bigger and darker. And man were they ever moving!

I went inside to tell my mom about these big black clouds that moved faster than I could run. She was on the phone, though. So back outside I went.

A stiff, chilly wind was blowing now. The sunshine was piercing through waves of black clouds, such that it looked like the sky was on fire. It didn’t take long for things to go downhill.

We got in the mobile home, while the rain and thunder and wind competed for our attention. The trailer was a double-wide, with its wheel frames set in concrete, but we were rocking back and forth like we were out on a lake on a windy day. Tornado sirens were barely audible in the distance. My mom and I struggled against wind and rain and hail to get into the root cellar, a man-made cave covered with a concrete shell and braced aluminum doors on the front.

That was so terrifying and so loud. By memory, there were two funnels which crossed our farm in that storm. It was so terrifying to me that even mild thundershowers sent me into a crying panic for a couple of weeks afterward.

What does this have to do with being in the present moment?

A traumatic event scarred me. Afterward, I would react with panic to triggers that were not the same thing. Yes in both cases they were storms, but there was a world of difference between the occasional spring storm – which I had experienced dozens of – and tornadoes. But after the trauma, in my 7 year old mind: as soon as the thunder started clapping and the wind started whipping, there was no difference.

Something that should have been a past memory was infecting my present behavior without so much as asking permission. I did not leave the past in the past. Each storm was not treated as its own thing, but as a sort of a revisit to that traumatic time. I was not in the present moment any longer, but in the past.

Yes it’s pretty common, and pretty normal to have reactions like that to traumatic events. Mindfulness doesn’t teach us that it’s wrong to react that way. It teaches us that there are other ways we can choose to react. Healthier ways. Before we get to that, let me share a couple of defining examples from my life of allowing the past to infect the present to the detriment of the future.

Acceptance - Accepting You Don't Need To Control

Some folks are compelled to be in control. Maybe you know someone like that. Maybe you ARE someone like that.

One curious thing about being a controlling person is that there are so many variables. Some folks are Alphas, having to always be in control of everything they are involved in. Some only want to control certain circumstances; others only want to control certain people.

I was a Controller, basically as a coping strategy in a relationship where I felt controlled by the other person. Granted, as we saw in the previous post, I gave her that control. But still – it’s not like she had to accept the offer! When I offered her to control me, she could have said no!!!

How in the world did I make it to 47 years old?

There are also differences in what led to a person being a Controller. Some folks learned it from a controlling parent. Others learned it after a traumatic incident involving abuse.

But a big constant seems to be a deep fear underlying the controlling behavior.

For some folks, one of the most terrifying feelings in the world is feeling OUT OF CONTROL.

You know that feeling when you suddenly realize you are at the mercy of another person or even just the world at large? And the only way to react is either Fight or Flight. Escape the person/situation or gain control over it.

It may take the form of micromanaging something else. If I feel out of control at work, I might over-exert control at home. If I feel out of control with my health, I might over-control my diet, down to how many milligrams of potassium I take every day.

In a relationship, though, we see control issues so much. Relationships seem to be scary because we can be so not-in-control. Some folks like that, just like they enjoy the feeling of riding a roller coaster. But generally, we might feel vulnerable to the point that we start trying to control as a defensive and protective strategy, probably not even consciously.

One of the big things we try to control in a relationship is the contact our partner has with others. Men and women both are very capable of doing this. Jealousy spurred by insecurity can be the culprit.

Other times, someone is an attention sponge who can’t abide the thought that their partner is paying attention – any attention – to anyone except them. That is true even if the insecure person isn’t even with their partner!

Controlling your partner gives you unhealthy illusions.

You can pretend you are now less vulnerable. They are under your thumb and they can’t go anywhere now. That’s translated as “Now they won’t leave me.” Au contraire. The tighter you squeeze, the more they will wriggle to have some personal freedom. They don’t want to leave, but they also don’t want to become the slave you are forcing them to become, someone who can’t go and do things without permission. The more they wriggle, the more you squeeze, and so on until either they break free and actually do leave, or you destroy the person they are inside.

Folks who feel compelled to control their partner may feel like they can’t trust their partner, so controlling them just makes sense. Well, if you can’t trust them, what are you doing in a relationship with them? That’s your choice right there. Trying to control them won’t make them more trustworthy. It might very well drive them down the road you think you’re preventing them from taking!

What if you find out your partner says things about you to others that you don’t like? Two things: one, if it really bothers you, tell them about it. Two, what do you really care?

This is true at work, school, in relationships, or just out in public. If you are secure in who and what you are, what other people think doesn’t matter.

Let me say that again. If you are secure in who and what you are, I mean inside and honestly, then what other people think and say about you really does not matter.

And if you think it totally matters, you are gonna be pretty worn out trying to monitor every conversation that might reference you across the globe. Then people can add “paranoid” and “control freak” to their personal opinions about you.

I should know. I worried constantly about what my wife’s friends were told about me, especially when the relationship was ending. I worried so much about it that I made myself sick with anxiety. I just had to know what all she was telling them.

Why? What on earth did I really think I was going to do about it? Did I really think I was going to find out they had a bad opinion of me and then I was going to argue the points and defend myself? Maybe take out a page in the local newspaper every week to rebut their opinions? I’d probably end up working for the paper after awhile just from sheer publishing credit!

Mindfulness teaches that we should concern ourselves only with the things that we can control and that are worth controlling. I couldn’t control what she said to her friends. I couldn’t control what they thought of me. But I could control how I acted, how I spoke, how I carried myself.

If they think I’m an idiot or a jerk, any argument I might make to the contrary won’t make a lick of difference. It totally won’t. They will say and believe what they will. But if they really care to know me then they will see I am simply who and what I am. No more, no less.

What other people say or think about me is their opinion and their choice. It does not affect who and what I truly am, and therefore I am free from any power their opinions have over me.

If I have friends, then so should my partner. That wasn’t a problem in the marriage, but in my later relationship it was a concern. I was unbalanced and felt that any and every other guy was a threat. I didn’t have that view before, but suddenly I was seeing things the way guys growing up in rural Missouri in the 70s did.

You know the Buck Owens song “Tall Dark Stranger?” I can’t listen to it nowadays because it perfectly encapsulates the stupid and ignorant viewpoint I just described. The song merely reflects views held by so many men (and often by women too), whether consciously or not. The Tall Dark Stranger is danger, he tells us. We need to basically lock our women in the house when he comes into town, because if we don’t, just by existing near our women he will steal them and ride off into the sunset. With our women!

(When did we start actually owning women, by the way? Where do you purchase women? I know where I could rent one, but that’s a whooooole different thing.)

What are the dynamics here? Foundations include:

·         Women can’t choose to stay with a guy so long as she has another option.

·         Women can’t be trusted to remain faithful.

·         Women will leave you in a heartbeat if a “better offer” comes along.

·         Men can prevent the loss of women in relationships by preventing contact with other men.

·         Men need to keep other men away from their women.

·         And by the way, that woman there is YOUR PROPERTY!

As I said, it’s ignorant and stupid. Actually by mistreating women in your life, you are just helping them to choose escape from you. It turns out that the safest way to make sure someone stays with you is to treat them the way they want and need to be treated. A bikini model or a body builder or an actor or a singer won’t have a chance.

Well, maybe in a fantasy, but remember – a fantasy is just a thought. And a thought is merely a thought and nothing more. Just remember to keep your fantasies to yourself unless you want to provoke your significant other to jealousy or insecurity.

So accepting that people will think or believe what they want is a good thing. It frees me from the power those beliefs could have over me. Accepting that folks in relationships need friends and interests outside of the relationship helps maintain boundaries and balance in life. Accepting that a partner has sovereignty over himself or herself relieves me of the compulsion to control them.

And accepting that sometimes I’ll still lapse into the old bad behaviors, fears, and attitudes will help me forgive myself for doing so. Then instead of wallowing in failure, I am free to stand back up and do better next time.

I also can’t control the past or the future. All I can do is control certain things in the present. I need to live in the Here and Now. That’s the next Mindfulness Pillar I’m going to consider.

I hope you can accept that.

Acceptance - Yeah, We Need Boundaries

Did you know that people hate having limits placed on them?

School has limits like bedtime hours, test time limits, scores you have to meet or exceed to pass, appropriate behavior, time frames to be in class to avoid being tardy, what courses you can take, and morning alarms that come way too early.

Work has limits as well, such as your official duties, meeting agendas, deadlines, budgets, and morning alarms that come way too early.

We have limits on how we drive, eat, spend, act in public, and even act in private.

People just want to be free, but even the freedoms we may enjoy come with limits. That’s part of why we have a legal system.

If you try to go beyond any of those limits, there are consequences. Some may not be huge; some might change your life or even end it.

Relationships have limits too, as well as consequences for violating them. And yet there is one big limit, invisible to the naked eye, that many relationships see violated regularly. Worse yet, violating this limit is celebrated pretty regularly in music, film, and popular society.

The limit is called Personal Boundaries.

I’m going to look into Boundaries deeper in another set of posts, but for now I’m going to concentrate on how Acceptance and Boundaries relate.

I needed to accept that my partner had sovereignty over herself. That means that she had the right and obligation to rule herself and no one else. That is, she had no right to rule anyone else, and no one else had the right to rule her.

My big failure in that respect meant that I tried to rule over her. We had that Parent-Child dynamic going on. And this wasn’t being helped by the fact that we were Jehovah’s Witnesses for most of our marriage, and the emphasis on Biblical Headship was a touchy spot. “The Man Of The House” isn’t just a job title; it is viewed as Divine Right.

Since Eve was created with the rib of Adam, per Genesis, this led to a mindset of the woman being an attachment, an appendage, an extension of the man instead of her own individual person with her own rights, freedoms, and needs.

So instead of accepting her as she was, I struggled against her, taking away her right to behave true to her character, her nature. I tried to mold her into a form I wanted. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. Only in this case I had German Chocolate and I was trying to turn it into Pineapple Upside-down.

That’s one of the biggest problems with men and women in relationships. We don’t shop around for someone who would be best for us. We shop around for someone who meets a few criteria (usually physical) and then start working on them, trying to turn them into what we should have been looking for in the first place.

What’s that? There aren’t any people around you who meet your “Need” criteria? Check real quick: do you know what you really need, or what you think you need? There’s a difference.

Or is your idea of finding Mister or Miss Right based on the definition of art? “I’ll know it when I see it.”

That was kinda my approach. No one helped me know what would make a good wife for me. It was just assumed I’d know it when I saw it. Yeah, okay.

But no matter. I should have chosen to either maintain my our boundaries as separate people and accept her as she was, or I should have ended the relationship before the inevitable heartbreak. The short term pain would have been way less than what I would face staying in an unhappy relationship.

So like so many guys and girls, I chose to stay and force her to change to make me happy. Men and women do that all the time, one failed relationship after another, swearing not to ever do that again, then suffering friction burns because they run so fast into a new relationship with someone they tell everyone “Oh, no. He (or she) is DIFFERENT!”

Again: yeah, okay.

For me, it only increased the stress in the home. Soon I noticed she was raising her voice at me regularly. I refused to be in a relationship where I was going to be yelled at all the time (especially since yelling back only escalated things), but again instead of seeing the signs and leaving, I gave in. I fought it in many ways, but over time I just decided to hunker down and reduce my encounters.

I tried to undermine her sovereignty over herself, and when that didn’t get the results I wanted, I decided to surrender my sovereignty over myself. Gave it right to her. Oh, there was no ceremony and no grand declaration; shoot, it wasn’t even a conscious decision.

I went from having a backbone to slinking away. If I was right I would still back down and admit how I was wrong. I wasn’t doing it to preserve the harmony of the home; I was doing it to cope with the fact that I refused to do the right thing and either shape up my head or get out.

She regularly apologized for how much she was hurting me. So we both saw the signs but neither was prepared to do anything really about it.

My anxiety led t depression. My depression led to bad ideas. One day I simply took a bunch of Xanax tablets and told her about it, telling her I was prepared to take the rest of the bottle. I don’t recommend doing that, by the way. All I ended up doing was having my wife drive the family to Best Buy to go shopping. And I was the one who didn’t end up getting anything!!!!

Can you believe that? I was so boundary-less that I was thinking of how I could step in front of a semi on the highway, and I was swallowing a handful of Xanax tablets. Self-destructive behavior was preferable to leaving the bad relationship!

It may sound stupid, but that’s what happened. And I know I’m not the first or last person to put himself or herself in that same torment. (And before anyone judges me, just let me say that everyone does stuff that’s dumb to someone else. Don’t judge other people.)

So I didn’t accept the need for the boundaries, and I almost died because of it. So there will be a deeper examination of boundaries later. Safe to say, I failed to practice Acceptance. Accepting her as she was would have prevented so much junk. Once there was too many checkmarks in the MINUS column, I should have accepted the need to leave. Instead I didn’t accept spit.

Usually if someone won’t accept, it’s because they are trying to control. Like controlling others, or our environment, or a billion other variables, will make our lives happy. Not so much. More on that next.