This is a book I often recommend to others. These are my personal notes from the book. These are not all direct quotes, but also paraphrases and added commentary from me. A * designates a note-worthy point. If any of these notes spark interest or curiosity, lean in and learn more. As always, reading the book for yourself is suggested.
Marriage is a garden analogy- needs to be tended to, rotting can occur, weeds need to be managed, fertilizing and watering is essential, planting/sowing seeds, etc
Most of history, marriage was prized for stability, not intimacy
Demands for connection, passion, and emotional support would have been seen as irrelevant and indulgent
70% divorces are initiated by wives
Women’s roles have radically transformed but mens have not
* A wife wants her husband to read her emotionally, to look beyond himself to the needs of those around him. To share who he is inside, what he’s feeling. To have sensitivity to others, capacity to identify and share his feelings, a willingness to put his needs aside in the service of the family.
But these are considered “feminine” qualities that boys have stomped out of them. Boys are not raised to be intimate, but instead competitive performers.
* The problem for women is: since their expectations exceed their partners skill, or even desire, the chances are good that if she doesn’t teach him, she wont get the treatment she wants, or she tries to and she’s seen as demanding, nagging, complaining.
* Girls are now being raised to want more from their relationships, and setting up women to be either unfulfilled or over-functioning.
Wife isn’t in any position to be her husbands relational coach, but the husband stands in real need of coaching.
We raise girls to focus energy on connection, raise boys to focus on achievement.
When husbands leave, research says their standard of living rises slightly, but women’s and children can drop as much as 60%!
Women “corrode or explode”
It’s impossible for women to maintain real connection and over-accommodate at the same time.
Female trauma (adapting to traditional roles)—> eating disorders, depression, low self esteem
* Help women move from “all bark and no bite” to “talk softly but carry a big stick”
Setting real limits initially throws couples into greater crisis for a period of time.
Where do women learn to demand so little?
Many men don’t have any tolerance for their own feelings.
Men tend to mutate pain to rage.
By the time boys are in kindergarten, they show significant drops in expressing emotion, or demonstrating dependency. Before sons learn to read, they have read the stoic code of masculinity.
Gottman- during times of conflict or stress, men though outwardly stoic showed more signs of physiological upset (more flooded).
It’s the surfeit of feeling, not the lack that causes much male withdrawal.
Men avoid and withdraw because they can.
* Men are taught to mistrust feelings, especially difficult feelings, to experience them as threatening, overwhelming, and of little value.
Men can’t connect because they don’t have the skillset. Men can’t fix their relationships.
Avoidance + Compliance = No intimacy, connection, or engagement.
Obligation isn’t enough.
Taking your woman for granted and abuse are on the same spectrum.
Masculine Side vs Feminine Side –> Rigid, defined sides.
* Those that could be both tender and tough, depending on circumstances, proved to have best mental health.
The way we turn boys to men is through injury.
Disconnection is masculinity.
Being a boy means not being weak, not feeling, not needing.
Vulnerability triggers the feeling of being attacked.
Patriarchy gives the illusion of dominance, power-over model of relationship, in contrast with the “being with” model.
Girls view their ticket into a relationship is silence, over-accommodation, indirect expression.
* With boys and men, it’s either winner/loser, one up/one down, in control/controlled, man enough/girl.
Healthy self esteem is an internal sense of worth that doesn’t pull you into a better than grandiosity or a less than shame. But the essence of psychological patriarchy(p/p) is the nonexistence of this middle ground.
Contempt is why so many men have such trouble staying connected.
Unholy triad- a mother’s shame, fear, sadness and rage, a father’s shamelessness, buried sadness and rage, and the child’s own fear, pain and anger.
Most chilling part of p/p is the conspiracy of silence. “Don’t tell anyone.” “No one can speak the truth.”
* 2 forms of childhood abuse- disempowering abuse (shame, hurt, feeling unwanted, helpless, unworthy) and false empowerment (over-praise, grandiosity, don’t check). Disempowerment leads to shame, one down, bad relationship with self, victim position. False empowerment leads to grandiosity, one up, contemptuous.
Girls are primarily prone to disempowerment. Boys to both based on performance.
Women remain quiet out of fear of triggering either grandiosity or in shame.
You deserve to be parented. Did you get parented?
Women’s disassociation- knowing but not knowing, seeing but not speaking. There’s no place for them to stand in the truth of their experience. “But you knew mom, and did nothing.” Who should we blame? Mom does her share of damage by not speaking.
The injured person is the spark plug, the carrier, that brings it into the next family system. Transmitting the virus into the next gen.
Father wound- toxic legacy of masculinity
Men’s blind actions further his own alienation.
Woman’s betrayal of knowing but remaining silent, becoming oppressed.
P/P devalues feminine “qualities” and protects male “qualities”
Many men read women’s chronic dissatisfaction simply as confirmation that they are an irrational and insatiable breed. In therapy husbands feel bewildered, resigned, and appalled. But are men willing to change?
* Gottman study: the most reliable predictor of long-term marital success with a pattern in which the wives, in non-offensive, clear ways communicated their needs, and husbands willingly altered their behaviors to meet them.
* Women, fearing their partners reactions, withdraw their real needs, scream them out ineffectively, or vacillate between the two.
As a therapist, I will tell you what I see as the probable result of your choices. Do with my thoughts as you wish.
Engage men by looking them in the eye and daring to tell them the truth.
Most contemporary men don’t ask much more of their marriages than their fathers had.
Many women find themselves rethinking the way they were raised and demanding more.
* She comes to therapy because she isn’t happy with him and he is there because she is unhappy with him.
* Pretending that both partners are equally troubled, equally skilled, and equally motivated is simply a charade.
First empower the woman.
It’s hard to fix what you don’t see.
It’s important for guys to realize that strength is not the absence of vulnerability.
* Strength is knowing what your weaknesses are and working with them.
Don’t you think it’s in your best interest to deal with it if she feels it? Why are men so stubborn?
You can’t get to the woman’s relatively subtle issues while she’s able to hide behind his outward flagrant ones.
Say to your client, we’ll get to it, I promise.
* Someone has to move first or you’ll never get out of the starting gate.
Superiority feels pretty good.
Most therapy misses the boat when it comes to issues of grandiosity.
* Grandiose states, by contrast, represent a kind of empathy deficiency towards others, what is missing is a capacity to sufficiently cherish those around us. In such instances, supplying empathy toward the client, while necessary, is not sufficient. More to the point is helping the client regain sensitivity to his impact on others.
* Shame states represent a kind of empathy deficiency towards oneself, what is missing is the capacity to cherish the self.
* Bottoming out: when the pain of continuing outweighs the considerable pain of recovery.
While we can’t make someone change, in relational recovery we can help tip the scale, not as conventional therapy teaches, by motivating the man, but rather by amplifying the consequences.
Invite change by rendering the man’s difficult behavior less appealing.
Back up the latent and address the blatant.
Women need help establishing a space in which their truth is voiced openly and not met with reprisals. And men need help holding fast, without recourse to the age old responses of discounting, retaliating, or running away.
Being maritally brain dead
Let go of your abiding revulsion, park your talons at the door, and let yourself heal.
Stop pushing things under the rug. Stop withdrawing, angry withdrawal.
* Your silence isn’t neutral.
The missing ingredient is repair.
No one means any harm, you don’t even really notice.
Angry withdrawal evokes angry withdrawal.
As long as everything‘s fine, everything’s fine.
Identify your cycle.
How did things get fixed in your family growing up?
* Both of you come in a marriage without any of the skills you needed. Wind up the cycle and let itself reinforce for 20 years and what you have at the end looks like two decent people trapped inside a dying relationship.
Real passion requires surrender.
Women learn service and men learn stoicism.
Let a betrayal first feel like a bomb but then later a wake up call.
Women swallow their wants and needs, consciously minimizing their sacrifice, but all the while pulling away from the abundance of pleasure.
For ‘giving’ women and hard-working men, sacrifice, not joy, becomes the preeminent value.
Adults with erotic yearnings are immature and cut off from the real relationship. They’re children’s fantasies with grown-up consequences.
* Women move back into intimacy by daring to tell the truth and men move back into intimacy by stepping down from privileged obliviousness and coming in from the cold of disconnection.
Move beyond his or her compelling understandable but ultimately childish fantasies to move beyond patriarchy‘s version of it.
In order to begin the work of having passion we must understand both what has been lost and also what has come to replace it.
Patriarchy glorifies the values and attitudes of masculinity.
What you do, not how you feel, or even who you are is the paramount value.
The dance of contempt makes it hard for boys deemed too feminine to change.
What kind of socialization pressure does it take to keep a man at a job most of his waking day year after year despite having deep and articulate dissatisfaction?
One way of protecting masculine values and pursuits and things deemed feminine is denigration (unfair criticism). One basic move is suppression or disqualification.
In the dominance rituals of patriarchy condescension may be as affective as outright intimidation in dismissing the feminine in someone of either sex.
The pattern of relationships is harmony, disharmony, and restoration.
Love is holding firm against the waves, choosing connection in the face of disconnection.
* The essential ingredient in all relationships turns out to be precisely the one that’s never taught, repair.
The return of passion means rekindling a passionate engagement with all of the seasons of their lives together, all the nuance, the multitude of feeling, that comes with being fully present to one another.
Passionate connection.
We have only one standard of a good relationship- erotic, intoxicated and youthful.
Real intimacy has a deep engagement with the whole dance, the endless dialectic of harmony, disharmony, and repair.
When we gaze deep into our lovers as we often appear through a window at those parts of ourselves we needed and never quite have.
Couples learn to move from nose to nose to side-by-side.
Partners almost always play out a template for relationships they first learned growing up. Who did you see behave like this? Who did it to you? Who Let you do it to them?
We are the relationship matrix we grew up in, until we do the hard deliberate work of transforming.
Walls of indifference
Hope is the dropping into the old wounds but then having the capacity for difference and for healing.
Socialization teaches women to manage, smooth over, minimize the stain even with allowance for occasional eruptions of histrionics.
Socialization teaches men that they are entitled to run, wall off, or deny— relational responsiveness has not been a part of man’s job description.
Couples who don’t make it through disharmony tend to get snared by one or all of three phases of intimacy’s erosion: control, retaliation, and resignation.
Men have relational immaturity. Women say “why can’t he just…”
* Wives try to get husbands to change, never realizing that no one ever has the power to get anyone to do anything in this world, short of outright coercion, least of all women in relationship to men. Wives reason, plead, threaten, and cajole. They speak rationally and also with wild desperation. But he will not be bent to her will.
You’re supposed to accept each other but you don’t.
We try to restore the old life by getting our partners back into shape, back to the qualities we once saw in them. If only… why can’t he she just…
Women control and men become passive aggressive.
People don’t like to feel controlled. Controllers then resort to revenge.
Failing in our attempt to “make the person better,” we then lose all patience and just want to hurt them. Maybe this will get through we might think. Beneath the impulse to hurt the other lies a deeper impulse to heal. Revenge is really a perverse form of communication, a twisted attempt at repair. We want the person to feel the way they made us feel. So that they might understand. So that they might “get” what they’ve done and feel remorse. And accountability evokes punitive impulses in most of us. We want to bring the shameless one to their knees and to see them humbled.
retaliation rarely increases someone’s capacity for empathy and responsibility. People don’t work that way. In real life revenge breeds a symmetrical response (get what u give) or withdrawal.
Revenge then leads to resignation.
Worn out disengagement is the surest predictor of eventual divorce. Resignation, whether in the domain of finances, sex, kids or the entire relationship often masks itself as mature acceptance. It is not.
The difference between real acceptance and just backing away from an issue or away from the whole relationship is resentment. If you really can let go then go ahead and do it. But then don’t mope around feeling like a victim. If there is one shred of resentment in your decision then go back to the negotiating table even if it means kicking up a fuss.
Both partners need to learn to be relationally maturity.
One in four couples have reversed roles. Women in such pairs ride in the one-up position often reeling against the same feminine qualities as their mates that are despised by the culture at large. Their husbands are too weak, too nice, can’t stand up for themselves. The men in these couples tend to manage and enable just like traditional wives. Women offenders when confronted one move into the victim role. They play at being one-down as a disguise for their grandiosity.
Withdrawal can be so severe that it’s virtually indistinguishable from clinical depression.
There’s another way to express your hurt and anger.
Resignation is a degenerative process that leads away from passion and connection. It’s a place where the truth is no longer possible and love is a matter of habit and form. They feel too used up to disrupt their accustomed equilibrium.
Faced with disillusionment— we have the choice of following the course of control, revenge and resignation on the path of degeneration, or we can choose repair and healing which is the journey toward restoration.
* For many wives, love’s deterioration reads like this: you begin to push less, you begin to fight less, you begin to give less, you begin to feel less. To be a good woman means sacrificing your needs for the sake of the relationship. But what you’re not told is that along with your needs (being dismissed, not being met)- so are pleasure, generosity, and feeling eventually diminished as well.
Skills of introspection and communication in personal relationships are as foreign to conventional masculinity as direct assertion has been to femininity.
* Encountering disillusionment, men rather than accessing these needed abilities, feel a deep sense of betrayal. Where is the loving caretaker that I was promised? I feel cheated. Stiffed. They retreat further from the relationship, they come to find less and less gratifying and more and more bewildering. They shoulder disappointment about their marriage silently (like they do everything else). Their women will out-feel them, out negotiate them, out talk them anyway, they’re (women) good at this game.
Most men are good people. But it’s a tall order for someone who learned often against his will to turn his back on the world of emotion and vulnerability sometime around kindergarten.
Some couples enter intimacy blessed and know how to authentically repair. But most of us have to cultivate it.
* The first step lies in understanding that we need skills at all. Staying in love demands craftsmanship. And craftsmanship must be learned.
Partners must establish a safe sober space to be intimate in. Attending to pre-conditions for intimacy is a critical component to recovery.
Clinicians must address three domains before work in a couples relationship is appropriate: addiction, violence, and psychiatric disorders. Even if a pattern of self-medication is not pronounced enough to qualify as addiction, relational recovery takes careful note of it affects on the partnership scanning for a host of exits that rarely blip on the screen for therapist.
Over involvement with work is perhaps the most common medium for chronic avoidance, TVs another, as in spending too much time on the Internet or exercise. Self soothing devices that become problematic when they are used to stabilize a bad situation.
No one issue is enough to fuss over but the cumulative affect keeps the partner from entering into full engagement.
In our overcommitted, work focused, child focused culture, intimacy comes last in the time-debit line.
* Helping a couple learn relational skills is not as difficult as helping them move to a place where they are ready to use them.
Five essential relational skills:
Five core self skills (for a well functioning mature person): self-esteem, self awareness/perspective, boundaries, interdependence, and moderation.
Immaturity means there is an imbalance.
Self-esteem is one’s capacity to hold oneself in one warm regards in the face of one’s own imperfections and limitations, one’s capacity to cherish oneself as a flawed human being.
Relational esteem is the capacity to hold the relationship in warm regards in the face of its imperfections and limitations, to cherish the relationship as the union of two flawed human beings.
* Esteem is the foundation for all other skills. Personally and relationally.
Relational shame is when we experience our relationship as less than or worthless similar to other shame disorders.
For many women relational shame triggers personal shame. Women find themselves bitterly disappointed in their husbands and themselves, expressing it openly through complaint or covertly through withdrawal.
When faced with loves disappointments, men pull away from introspection and toward blame, they experienced themselves as trapped with a deficient partner. Men move from relational Shame directly into grandiosity.
Relational esteem is not something one has but something one does.
The serenity prayer is helpful. Most of us live the opposite of the prayers suggestion. We become so involved, mostly in our own heads, with that over which we have no control that we fail to do what we can. What if I move and he doesn’t? What if…
We are so busy attempting to manage the result that we fail simply to run the race.
Traditional masculinity teaches men to feel both an entitlement to control and also the burden of unrealistic responsibility. Men use performance-based esteem which takes the place of healthy self-esteem. Most men have little faith that they will be cherished merely for their effort. Move from patriarchy into relationality, shifting out of the paradigm of control to one of personal responsibility.
Most come to couples counseling wanting to fix the other person.
* A seesaw analogy— changing one’s own behavior is a much more promising strategy than insisting on change from the other. Instead of asking someone to come down from their seesaw, try letting up on your end.
Practicing relational esteem =dance of relationship= feedback loop =you do something, your partner responds.
When your partner doesn’t change you complain more. Round and round you go.
What can I do to help you give me more of what I’d like?
How can I move differently on my end of the seesaw?
This requires creativity, sensitivity, and flexibility.
You work on the marriage by making an experimental move, seeing what your partner does with it, and then adjusting your behavior based on his or heart response.
The rule that surpasses all rules is that you must be connected, willing to see what’s in front of you, and willing to move if what you’re doing isn’t working.
* There are things you get in a real relationship, and things you do not yet. Moving into acceptance means moving into grief, without being a victim. You own your choice. You say I am getting enough in this relationship to make it worthwhile to mourn the rest.
Humans don’t resolve grief, we learn to live with it.
Couples who can communicate and negotiate will generally do better over the long run than those who cannot.
We fight for our needs and yet we also except the relationships limitations, not because we have to, but because we have decided it is worth it.
If we want our marriages to feel more like lover relationships, then we must be willing to take the kind of risks that lovers take. Safe passion is an oxymoron.
Silence comes in many forms.
Women can speak loudly and aggressively just not effectively.
Women’s silence demands our attention because its roots lie in suppression.
When there’s much to say and no safe place to say it, the unspoken festers and becomes chronic resentment.
Men are rarely bullied into silence but rather they tend to be less aware of interpersonal dynamics.
Most men are unused to identifying or explicitly dealing with the emotional turmoil that is a natural part of intimacy. Feelings, issues, and emotional needs are all devalued by traditional masculine code. Men lose their voices in a different way.
But both sexes need to be empowered to speak.
Perception battle = a contest about reality
From a relational perspective, what does it matter? It doesn’t matter who is more right, what matters is that your partner feels heard and seen.
Choices have consequences.
* Winning really makes you lose. A loss of connection.
Realizing your reality and your perception are your opinion.
The middle ground of not being too silent but not being too harsh.
Boundaries are a skill, not a structure. It can be learned.
Listen to yourself and listen to what’s going on between you and your partner.
* Learn to have appropriate internal and external boundaries. Moderate the extremes of over and under reactivity. Boundaries that are not too thin and not too thick.
Women need to learn how to decrease their sensitivity to the environment and men need to learn how to increase their‘s.
Behind men’s walls often lies someone who is overly sensitive.
* Healthy boundaries allow you to be both protected and connected at the same time.
Projections are human. We make up things all the time. Don’t feel shame or grandiosity about projections. Healthy esteem and boundaries work together. Don’t go one up or one down, but hold your self and your partner in warm regards while accepting nothing that inaccurately describes you.
Don’t be passive but rather active in using your internal technology. The lack of an internal boundary (letting anything in that comes at u) (believing everything you hear and feel) inevitably leads to control or withdrawal.
Share the results of your sifting and sorting of boundaries and perceptions. Is this right or am I totally off base?
Scanning for the positive — sifting through what you hear for those things you can agree to and give. Ask yourself what purpose we’re disputing what your partner is saying serve. You can choose to address things you don’t agree with later. Scanning for the positive disarms your partner. It may feel like submission. It’s a form of tenderness. Leaning in rather than away. It’s a profound shift, from being over to being with, from delusion to humility.
Whoosh— The wave of intense feelings that you want to react to, it’s visceral, it’s a reflex, and it washes over you instantaneously. It can be fear, shame, anger… normal to first field a wash and then the voice of reason. The importance of pausing. Letting the whoosh pass before reacting.
Growth, New Trench— Any occasion when a more mature part of oneself cuts into a habitual, dysfunctional reaction is an instance of recovery. those moments when every muscle and nerve in your body is pulling you toward your old set of responses but yet a new force lifts you up and towards a track of deliberate, constructive action, towards repair.
Degeneration— small wounds of disconnection
Regeneration— small repeated acts of grace
When men speak of fearing intimacy with a really mean is that they fear subjugation.
The fundamental issue in listening is surrender.
Using a boundary instead of a wall means you choose to drop your shield and to take in what the other person is saying.
Listen with cool heads and clear boundaries.
Three modes of negotiation: invitation, request, and demand.
Invitation are the least restrictive and the easiest to decline. Would you like to go? Yes or no.
Requests have nothing to do with the recipients desire. Would you do this for me? There’s nothing wrong with requests so long as the balance in the relationship remains relatively even. Request are not easily declined but they are declinable. Giving a reason is usually customary. demand is the most restrictive. Declining is not an option. You reserve demands only for emergencies or bottom lines.
Many women who are used to having to turn up the volume in order to get their wants attended to, speak the language of need when they really mean want.
Women also turn to habitual forms of complaint.
* A complaint is not a request. Complaints have a negative past focus. Requests have a positive future focus.
Requests are hard for women to do. It’s easier to complain than hold firmly to request.
An accepted invitation, request, or demand is a contract. Contracts can be large or small. You can renegotiate these but you do not break them. Don’t make contracts you don’t really agree to. Breaking these does damage to the relationship.
Learning relational integrity means managing your end of the seesaw. Relational integrity is detachment from the outcome.
* Attend to your own behavior leaving your partner to deal with their own.
Make a list of internal boundary violations—yelling and name calling, shaming, being sarcastic, patronizing, lying, manipulating—and contract to take all of those behaviors off the table.
Appropriate shame is remorse with amends. It’s a middle ground the partners can be taught.
Relational integrity means learning to back off at heated times. Give your partner the space to recoup. Don’t get seduced by the content or try to resolve matters in heated moments.
In healthy relationships everyone gets to be a jerk sometimes but mostly we have to take turns. Giving up the desire to correct your partners distortions and offering instead whenever you can, choosing to maintain integrity even as your partner indulges, it doesn’t feel fair. You’re right it’s not fair but in the future it will flip and your partner will do the same for you.
Shifting from speaking the truth to my truth means giving up the dream that we can live in some imagined twinship called agreement. Widen the band of acceptance.
When B finally gives to A the things A has been desperately pleading for, do you think A welcomes the progress with open arms? Sometimes but not very often. Typically A greets her partners improvement with disqualification moves (negating responses): you didn’t really mean it, too little too late, you’re doing it now but you won’t keep it up, I’ve been duped before, I’ve been hopeful countless times, I don’t want my heart broken again…
* In order for passionate connection to be restored between men and women to things need to happen: Men must recover the relational skills that women were deprived of and women must respond when they do.
A woman cannot reasonably expect her man to sustain his efforts and reconfigure everything he has ever learned while she remains cold and unmoved. But he was in the wrong, but he treated me this way for years…
Friends and family support women for individual empowerment without pushing her further toward relational empowerment. Not an either or but a both.
There is strength and connection. It’s not just about individual strength but rather closeness, softness… Some women will get empowered and empower themselves right out of a workable relationship.
Rather than focusing on personal growth, focus on relationship growth.
stop living behind a wall, a wall of mistrust and anger.
Like in self-defense, when the attack stops, you need to stop. It’s time to let that wall soften back into an internal boundary and become supple and responsive again.
Healing is the last phase of the process.
When changes, learning, and effort begin to be noticed and the other feels the change and welcomes it. Progress and response begin to chase each other like kids on a playground, self reinforcing, and actually having fun. The more responsive one becomes the more relaxed the other becomes. Vicious cycles transform into charmed circles.
Nobody does anything much all by themselves.
Kristi Schwegman is a psychotherapist specializing in helping couples develop healthy relationships, whether dating, engaged, or married. She also draws from her Christian-based approach to lead individuals in becoming aware of the limiting beliefs that can get them stuck.
We offer in-person and virtual services – contact us today to learn more!
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