KEYS TO FREE YOURSELF FROM RIGIDITY
Give a gentle embrace. Choose a current challenge in your life—an injury or physical ailment, an ongoing tension or conflict, or any circumstance that has you feeling restricted, limited, or confined. Start by speaking your truth. What don’t you like about it? How does it make you feel? Then get curious. Ask, “What is this situation telling me? What’s in my best interest? What serves and empowers me now?”
Meet others as they are. Write down the name of a person with whom you’re in conflict. Then write all your complaints about this person. For example: My daughter is rude and ungrateful. She calls me names and uses toxic language. She has no respect for me. She flat-out ignores me and breaks curfew. Now, rewrite the list; this time, state what you observe, without any editorializing, interpretation, judgment, or assumptions. Eliminate rigid words like “always” and “never.” Simply state the facts: Sometimes my daughter raises her voice and uses swear words. Once or twice a week, she comes home later than 11:00 p.m.
Cooperation, not domination. Choose one thing from your list of observations that you’d like to address with the other person. Find a neutral time to talk—not in the heat of conflict. First, say what you notice: “I’ve noticed that a couple of times a week you come home later than 11:00 p.m.” Then, get curious about the other person’s point of view. A simple question works best: “What’s up?” Next, without blaming or shaming the other person, say what you want: “It’s important to me that you get enough sleep during the week. And I’d like to know that you’re home safe before I go to bed.” Finally, invite the person to collaborate on a plan: “What ideas do you have for a solution that works for both of us?” It’s okay if the conflict isn’t resolved right away. The important thing is to shift into a cooperative way of addressing conflict—to privilege the relationship over either person’s need for power and control.
Treat others as they are capable of becoming. Visualize a person with whom you’re experiencing conflict. Now envision this person’s highest self. It might help to close your eyes and picture the person surrounded by light. Put your hand over your heart. Say, “I see you.”
Chapter 8
WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE MARRIED TO YOU?
The Prison of Resentment
The biggest disruptor of intimacy is low-level, chronic anger and irritation.
My resentment toward Béla—for his impatience and temper, for the ways he remained stuck in the past, for the disappointment that sometimes showed in his face when he looked at our son—festered for so many years that I thought the only way to be free was to divorce him. It was only after we’d split, and completely disrupted our children’s lives, not to mention our own, that I realized my disappointment and anger had little to do with Béla—and everything to do with me, with my own unfinished emotional business and unresolved grief.
The suffocation I felt in our marriage wasn’t Béla’s fault; it was the price of all the years I’d spent disowning my feelings: sorrow for my mother, who gave up an independent, cosmopolitan life working for a consulate in Budapest, and gave up a man she loved but was forbidden to marry because he wasn’t Jewish, to do what others expected her to do. Fear of repeating the loneliness of my parents’ marriage. Grief over my first love, Eric, who died in Auschwitz. And grief for my parents. I got married and became a mother before I’d come to terms with my losses. And suddenly I was forty, the age my mother had been when she died. It felt like I was running out of time to live how I wanted to live: free. But instead of finding freedom by discovering my own genuine purpose and direction, I decided that freedom meant being away from Béla’s yelling, cynicism, irritation, and disappointment—from the things I imagined limited me.
When we’re angry, it’s often because there’s a gap between our expectations and reality. We think it’s the other person who’s trapping and aggravating us—but the real prison is our unrealistic expectations. Often, we marry like Romeo and Juliet, without really knowing each other. We fall in love with love, or with an image of a person to whom we’ve assigned all the traits and characteristics we crave, or with someone with whom we can repeat the familiar patterns we learned in our families of origin. Or we present a false self, seeking love and a secure relationship by giving up who we really are. Falling in love is a chemical high. It feels amazing—and it’s temporary. When the feeling fades, we’re left with a lost dream, with a sense of loss over the partner or relationship we never had in the first place. So many salvageable relationships are abandoned in despair.
But love isn’t what you feel. It’s what you do.
There’s no going back to the early days of a relationship, to the time before you became angry and disappointed and cut off. There’s something better: a renaissance. A new beginning.
Marina, a dancer and performance artist, was trying to figure out if such a rebirth was possible in her marriage—whether she and her husband could move forward together in a healthy way, or if the way to freedom meant finally letting go of the relationship.
“We’ve been fighting every day for eighteen years,” she told me, twisting her long hair into a loose bun. Sometimes the fights were violent. Her husband didn’t hit her, but he acted out—shoved chairs, threw his phone against the wall, overturned the bed she was sitting on.
“I try to avoid being at home,” she said, “because every conversation turns into him telling me what I did wrong.” Afraid to stand up to him, afraid to walk out of the room when he was
