After four years of going to bed with our stomachs in knots, hearts heavy and brains on fire, trying to make peace with yet another horrible thing, it will be a while before our shoulders fully drop and the knots in our stomachs unravel. It will take time to trust that the world might, at some point, be fundamentally OK.

At the same time, more than 73 million people chose to support our outgoing leader. This fact gives pause to the many others who cannot fathom that choice. And yet it happened, which leaves us with a difficult conundrum.

This conundrum is not a place to stop and get comfortable with a new kind of outrage, a new version of “what the hell is wrong with them?” If we use this conundrum as a doorway, not a destination, perhaps we can move the dialogue forward and create something that brings out our humanity once again.

In a country where the average American has to work more than a month to earn what the average CEO makes in an hour, there’s no doubt that our rage wasn’t born in 2016. But, even if this leader didn’t officially create the hatred and contempt that now pervades our society, he did create a system in which everyone feels the right to shout their opinions and disgust through a megaphone, to publicly point fingers at whomever they think is to blame for their discontent. This leader has empowered the mental garbage that floats through almost every human being’s mind and entitled it to an audience.

Over these last four years, there’s been no attempt whatsoever to rein in our grievances, to be kind or behave in any sort of civilized manner. The current leadership has modeled an attitude of bullying, blaming, and shaming, an attitude utterly devoid of empathy. A leader who feels perpetually persecuted and is always looking for someone to blame creates a sentiment that mirrors his own.

Many moons ago, there was a saying … if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Today, this saying might sound absurd, ignorant, and even dangerous to free speech. Most Americans believe that not nice words are important for creating change and making the world a better place. I agree; the idea that we would only speak if we had good things to say sounds like a recipe for becoming sheep.

But over these last four years, with a leader who spews venom and toxicity, we have twisted that original expression into its modern form, namely, if you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me.

I frequently find myself wondering, what happened to our basic sense of decency and decorum, to integrity and basic kindness? While it may seem old-fashioned to follow some sort of public etiquette, at this moment in history we could use an infusion of old-fashioned values. We could use what Senator Cory Booker called a “resurrection of grace.”

It’s hard for us to agree on anything these days, but I hope we can agree that a regular diet of anger and intolerance does something dreadful to us, to who we are as a species. It poisons our consciousness and brings out the worst in us.

What if each one of us made a commitment to stop contributing to this cesspool of hatred? What if we each made the choice to stop using the public square to announce and celebrate every angry thought or grievance that floats through our minds? Just because we think something doesn’t mean it’s true, and it doesn’t mean that we have to say it. In fact, when we stop awarding our angry thoughts with so much attention, stop providing these floating mental flotsam with a megaphone, they tend to get a lot quieter inside our own heads.

We cannot control anyone else’s behavior, but we can control our own. What if, crazy though it may sound, we just acted a little kinder than we felt, or thought?

We don’t have to wait for our leaders to change our country. We can start a revolution right now by making the choice to use our words and our own behavior as a means to resurrect decency and decorum, to bring back goodness and integrity as fundamental societal values. And maybe even, to invite grace back into the conversation.

The post What If We Acted a Little Kinder Than We Felt, or Thought? appeared first on Nancy Colier.

To recap: After many years of explaining to her partner how and why his anger (and denial of that anger) was hurtful and not okay, his behavior continued, barely impacted by her rigorous and persistent efforts to change it. My client, as I reported, eventually lost the willingness and interest to keep trying to change her partner. At the same time, she realized that her partner’s behavior was not in her control to change.

It was at this point that my client decided to turn her attention away from her partner and toward herself, to get curious about her own response, her own relationship with her husband’s bad behavior. Since changing her partner was clearly not possible and she still wanted to stay married, she began investigating her own narrative, the story she was telling herself about his behavior, and what kind of partner she “should” have, how she “should” be treated, and what her relationship “should” include.

A number of people were angered by this article and believed that my client’s choice to shift her attention away from her husband and his problematic behavior and toward herself and her own process was to demonize herself, make herself to blame. And furthermore, that I was encouraging her to accept what she positively “should not” accept, to find fault in herself. But in fact, it was nothing of the sort.

Turning her attention to her own process was not about trying to figure out how and where she was to blame, nor about denying or condoning her husband’s behavior. Rather, it was about finding a way to free herself from the anger, helplessness, and frustration that her current reaction to her husband’s anger was triggering in her.

What she wanted was to hand her husband’s bad behavior back to her husband, to not have to carry it around as her problem, and to not have to wait for it to change until she could be okay. In short, she wanted to be in charge of her own well-being.

It’s abjectly false and dangerous, in fact, to suggest that focusing our attention on our own response to difficulty, prioritizing self-awareness above fixing anyone else, is negative or self-defeating in any way. For my client, the decision to stop trying to change a behavior she couldn’t change felt immediately empowering and liberating, as if she were taking the reins back in her life. With the shift in focus, she was no longer waiting for her husband to change so that she could be happy. With a better understanding of her own narratives, her husband’s outbursts could be just that: her husband’s outbursts, his problem that he would or wouldn’t address in his own time.

But most importantly, his outbursts could be not about or against her, not something she had to be in charge of correcting. Turning the lens on her own response, and doing what she needed to do to maintain her own peace, was about taking care of herself in the reality she was in, as opposed to fighting with reality and continuing to demand that it be different. One thing we know for sure, when we fight with reality, reality wins, every time.

We hold firmly entrenched beliefs and internal narratives on the topic of relationship. They range from the micro to the macro, the subtle to the obvious. The most troublesome “should” of all, however, may be this idea that we “should” be able to change our partner, fix what we don’t like. And consequently, we can’t be happy or content until we do.

To stay in a relationship with a partner we can’t change, to accept what we don’t like, is seen as a surrender to failure, giving up on our partner and, to some degree, ourselves. When we stop trying to change the parts of our partner we don’t like, we are judged (and judge ourselves) as weak, dysfunctional, and lacking self-respect.

The idea of focusing on ourselves when the problem is our partners sends us into the fiercest of “should” minefields. We get tangled up in the narrative that we “should not” have to live with this problem, “should not” let the problem continue (as if we have a choice), “should not” have to change who we are to accommodate our partner’s problem, “should not” let our partner get away with the bad behavior, and countless other “shoulds.”

But these “shoulds,” while sensible and maybe even true in some perfect universe, do nothing to change the problem, the partner, or the relationship. And most importantly, they don’t bring us peace. These “shoulds” keep us fighting with reality, convinced of our rightness but suffering nonetheless. But worst of all, they keep our well-being hitched to someone else’s capacity or willingness for change, which is never where we want to be.

Contributing to these “shoulds” is the belief that the relationship is either good or bad. If the relationship contains difficulties we can’t fix, then the relationship must be all bad and we “should” leave. If we don’t, we’re agreeing to stay in a bad relationship.

The truth is, we abhor contradiction in this culture; we’re not trained to hold co-existing and contradictory truths. Contradiction, which paradoxically is the essence of a relationship, terrifies us. We can’t wrap up contradictory truths and put them neatly on a shelf. Nor can we categorize a relationship as either bad or good, worth staying in or not.

And yet, every relationship is both bad and good (except perhaps the newest ones). Accepting that good must coexist with bad, and being loving amid the contradiction, is the ground of a healthy relationship. Please note that those bad aspects of a relationship are not abuse. Your partner can have shortcomings that are difficult to bear without them being intentionally hurtful toward you.

A relationship requires an attitude of “and,” not “but.” “But” is an eraser word; it wipes out everything that came before it. Opposing truths can indeed be happy bedfellows.

It’s a healthy drive to want to fix what we don’t like in a relationship, to change what’s not working. And the period of figuring out and fighting with the problem and our partner, in other words, the period of suffering, can go on for a really long time, sometimes the duration of the relationship. For some people, the lucky ones, a moment arrives when we realize that we’ve done everything we know how to do to try to change our partner, and still the problem persists and the partner remains unchanged. We then have the option to take a new tack and examine whether there’s a way to find peace even with the problem. Our partner may keep doing what they’ve always done, but we can do things differently.

At any moment in a relationship, we can choose to get curious about ourselves, our history, our triggers, our stories, and our response to a problem we experience with our partner.

We can unpack our narratives and consider whether there’s anything we can let go of that will ease our suffering and bring us peace.

We do this not to blame or castigate ourselves, but to liberate ourselves from the fight. We do this so as not to be tangled up and victimized by the problem any longer, but to use it as an opportunity for self-awareness and expansion.

The act of turning the lens on ourselves is a victory, a setting ourselves free and handing the problem off to the one whose problem it is.

We unhitch our own well-being from the other person’s wagon.

Once unhitched, we discover that we can live with that same problem, but not experience it as problematic, our problem, or even a problem. This is freedom. This is autonomy.

The post Freeing Yourself From Your Partner’s Behavior appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Lily recently walked into the bedroom to find her husband, Ken, asleep. His sweater, which was covered in dog hair, was draped across her pillow. She wasn’t in the room but for a few seconds when Ken turned over, spun around to face her, and began unleashing his anger. “Look at it,” he said, accusatorially. “It’s dog hair. She’s been in here, sleeping in the bed. I had to change the pillowcases.” His tone was furious and aggressive. There was also a pile of laundered clothing on Lily’s side of the bed. “What is all this?” she asked. “Put it away,” he said sharply, and then turned back over and, after a few sighs, seemed to be back asleep. And no, he wasn’t dreaming.

Lily felt blindsided and completely confused. Why was he attacking her about the dog? Was he implying that she had left the door to the bedroom open? She had no idea what had just happened. But, given that it was late, she went about her nightly ritual, moved the clothing and hairy sweater, and went to sleep.

Ken was already at the breakfast table drinking coffee when Lily got up. She was carrying a lot of feelings as she sat down to join him. “What happened to you last night?” she asked. “I walked into the bedroom and you shouted at me, attacked me about the dog hair.” “I attacked you?” he said, raising his eyebrows, making a face and other mocking sounds.

Lily spoke quietly, “In my world, that was an emotional attack.”

Ken responded: “I didn’t shout at you. In what universe did I attack you? You think everything is an attack. Whatever you think, I’m sure it’s right.” Lily didn’t say any more. But when their daughter arrived at the table a few minutes later, Lily humorously told the story of what had happened the previous evening, mocking Ken’s rage and actions. As Lily put it, “I expressed myself to Ken, again, backhandedly this time, and let our daughter validate my feelings since he would not acknowledge anything had happened.”

Lily and Ken had been married for 14 years, with a lot of happiness.  Ken had always been quick to erupt over small things. But when his eruptions were done, which was also quickly, he carried on as if nothing had happened. He didn’t remember his anger. Anyone who pointed it out (which Lily had done many times) was then deemed to be distorting reality and attacking Ken. When these eruptions occurred, Lily was left feeling wounded and in need of an apology, which rarely came.  She wasn’t “gaslit” as she didn’t doubt her experience in any way, but still, she wanted Ken to acknowledge his behavior.  article continues after advertisement

After “the dog hair attack,” Lily felt upset, closed off, and emotionally attacked, even if it was in a small way. Maybe worse than the attack itself was the feeling of being further mistreated by what she believed was her husband’s demand that she pretend nothing had happened.

Lily desperately wanted to tell Ken that this was not OK, but she also knew no apology or empathy would be forthcoming. Rather, she would be judged for attacking him and inventing the whole thing. She felt trapped and alone. At the same time, Lily was angry and disappointed in herself for not having the courage to tell Ken how she felt. Lily believed that to truly respect herself, she had to be willing to be honest about how she felt.

She also knew that letting the incident go and moving forward would be the best choice if peace was what she wanted, and indeed it was. As Lily saw it, there was no good option. What she longed for, really, was a simple apology, an acknowledgment that he shouldn’t have spoken to her like that, even if it meant nothing to him.

For Lily, everything wrong about the marriage, a marriage she also very much enjoyed, was contained in this one incident. 

But her response felt inauthentic and incomplete; making fun of his behavior with her daughter didn’t take care of Lily—it didn’t make her feel more understood or loved. Was there a way to take care of herself, she wondered, even if her husband couldn’t give her what she needed?

When Lily and I dove into this experience together, we discovered a couple of powerful “shoulds” operating in the background of her mind, which, although not the problem, were intensifying her suffering. 

To begin with, Lily believed that she “should” be able to share all of her feelings with her partner and have them lovingly received. And that if she couldn’t share her truth, all the time, she should not be in the relationship. Lily also believed that she “should” have the courage (and be willing) to share her feelings with her partner, no matter what consequences doing so would create.article continues after advertisement

Together, we unpacked Lily’s suitcase of “shoulds,” exposing each to the test of the light. Was it really true that Lily “should” be willing to share all her feelings, no matter what consequences the sharing would create? Was sharing, even when she knew it would meet with defensiveness and rejection, really the self-respecting choice?

Was it possible that, in certain cases, the self-respecting and self-caring choice was to acknowledge and honor her experience—to herself—and not to her husband? Was it possible that the self-compassionate move was the one that took care of her pain but protected her from more aggression and misunderstanding?

And was it really true that she “should not” be in a relationship in which she could not share everything? Did Ken really have to always understand how she felt in order for her to feel good about herself? Furthermore, what if the story she was telling herself—that Ken had intentionally hurt her and was now bullying her into silence—was just a narrative of her own making and not the truth?article continues after advertisement

It occurred to her too, that when this happened in the future, she could simply hold up a “stop” hand to her husband, tell him she didn’t like or wouldn’t stand for his tone, or simply leave the room. She could choose to act in alignment with her discontent rather than explain it in words.

With her “shoulds” brought to light, Lily immediately felt freer. She realized that self-respect could come from not sharing rather than sharing—from actively choosing to protect herself from her husband’s defensiveness and anger.  This process was not about excusing his behavior but rather about seeing how her judgments about the what the relationship “should” be like were causing more suffering not less.

She accepted that her husband’s defensiveness was his issue and not something she could fix—and certainly not something that more disclosure on her part was going to change. She discovered that it was enough to acknowledge her experience to herself and take care of herself in the moment; she did not have to share all her feelings with her husband—even when they stemmed from his behavior.  

She also saw through her belief that a worthy relationship was one in which everything could be shared and received with an open heart. This marriage was worth a lot to her, and worth staying in, and at the same time, it contained a difficulty she couldn’t change.  And so, she started accepting her relationship for what it was and was not, which brought a lot of peace. article continues after advertisement

She was better off taking care of herself in the relationship that actually existed and with the partner who actually existed. Finally, Lily loosened her grip on the story she was telling herself about her husband’s intention to hurt her and his “demand” that she pretend nothing had happened.  She decided to let the meaning of his eruptions be the meaning he ascribed to them and not the meaning she had constructed.  When she let go of the idea that he was “doing that to her,”  the whole thing felt a lot lighter.

When what you want is not possible, and yet you still value and want to stay in the relationship, it is a good idea to investigate the stories you’re telling yourself about your partner and what’s happening in the relationship. Get to know the narrative you’re writing in your head about your partner’s intentions. So, too, it’s important to uncover the silent “shoulds” running in the background of your mind, the “shoulds” that are continually stoking your suffering. Unpacking your stories and “shoulds” is not a replacement for trying to change bad behavior, and not about justifying bad behavior, but it will free you to live more peacefully within your relationship—as it is.

One caveat: If your relationship feels abusive in any way, it’s important to leave, not to learn how to work with it.  This article is not meant to encourage you to find peace with what is consistently hurtful or to turn a blind eye to bad behavior.  Leaving an unhealthy relationship is an option that needs to be considered.  At the same time, every single intimate relationship, even the very best one, contains difficulty.  Joy and difficulty.  We often feel happy and want to stay in relationships that also contain aspects we don’t want and that are painful.  In this article, I hope to offer a path and some peace for anyone who chooses to accept and  stay in a relationship with elements that are not okay, and particularly elements that you cannot change.  

The post When Your Relationship Is Not What You Think It “Should” Be appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Her husband didn’t miss a beat and accused her of being too sensitive, twisting his words to mean something they didn’t.  Mary, becoming even more furious, shouted that it wasn’t about him and him and more him, but rather about the fact that his words had hurt her. And it went on… her husband, deaf to her pain, accused her of judging him, to which she again responded that this was not about him, not about who was right or wrong, but rather about his being able to simply hear the fact that she was hurt.

Later that day, Mary called to tell me that her husband had approached her about an hour after the session and acknowledged that maybe his words could have come off as a bit insensitive.  While she was still brimming with anger and hurt, Mary had offered a simple thank you for your apology.  It was the first time he had owned any of his own behavior in twenty years of marriage.  And so, while his “apology” felt light on empathy, she made the choice to acknowledge his attempt at kindness and leave it at that, and not risk doing or saying anything that could discourage him from this new, positive behavior.

But the following week, Mary reported that her husband had become withdrawn, sullen and unfriendly.  He was playing the part of the one hurt and angry, while she had stepped into the role of the one trying to win back his affection and regain a sense of peace in the couple.

This was the standard trajectory of their disagreements.  Mary would be hurt by something her husband said or did; she would then bring it to his attention. Upon hearing what he perceived (only) as criticism, he would immediately attack her emotionally (which I had witnessed), and then withdraw into his role as the victim in the relationship. As a victim, he would become silent, non-responsive, and backhandedly unkind towards her over the next several days.  He would, in essence, fall into full-blown episodes of passive aggression.

Mary and I had both felt hopeful the previous week when her husband was able to take a baby step forward in acknowledging his own behavior and considering how it might have affected her.  And yet, it seemed that his old pattern of reverting to passive aggression after hearing he had done something she didn’t like, was still firmly intact.

Mary confessed that she was completely lost as to how to deal with her husband’s behavior.  She still wanted to stay in the marriage (and still loved her husband) but his passive aggression, which appeared each time she shared that he had upset her, felt unbearable and maddening.  She was utterly unable to find her ground or feel at ease when he was in this mode.  She couldn’t get okay until the couple was again okay.

Mary felt that she had always been stuck in the same place with regard to her husband’s passive aggression.  Unable to speak her truth, she felt that her only recourse was to wait for him to get over it after which time she could get back to her own center.  But of course, when he did get over it, she then was left to deal with her own anger and hurt.  Regardless, her well-being was dependent on his behavior, which she hated.

But while she felt stuck, I reminded Mary that something profound had in fact transformed within her.  When we first started working together, Mary would actually feel guilty when her husband punished her in this way.  She would identify with his projections of blame and try to make up for the hurt she imagined she had caused him.  She would play the perpetrator (having told him he hurt her after all) to his imagined victim; she stepped into his projections and took on the role of the bad one. I was happy to remind Mary that she no longer felt guilty in any way despite his playing the part of the one abused.  This was an enormous change in her and a huge relief.

While Mary could acknowledge that she was no longer suffering from this most insidious consequence of passive aggression (imagining oneself as deserving of the punishment), she was however still frustrated that she felt so anxious and de-stabilized, that she couldn’t get comfortable inside herself when her husband was acting out in this way.  No matter what she did for herself, how much mediation and awareness she practiced, or how she tried to separate herself from it, she still felt afraid and off-kilter living with his punishing behavior.  She was angry and disappointed with herself that she couldn’t get a grip on her experience.  She couldn’t will herself into well-being, but she strongly believed that she should be able to control her inner-experience regardless of what was going on in her environment.

Simultaneously, Mary was bottling a lot of rages about the fact that she couldn’t speak her truth to her husband.  In the past, when she had tried to call him out on his behavior, he had attacked her more directly and denied all responsibility and intention for his behavior.  Her trying to talk about it had always made things worse and so she felt resigned to acting as if nothing was happening.  Pretending he wasn’t affecting her was the way she had learned to protect herself.  The truth was, he was getting to her; she felt manipulated, controlled, and humiliated by his behavior. Enraged in fact.

However, this pretending to not notice, to save face if you will, was breaking down as a defense strategy; it felt impossible to maintain this level of falseness, and also, more and more like an abandonment of herself.  It was making her angrier and more anxious to know that he was (as she experienced it) cornering her into being inauthentic.  Mary felt stuck in this either-or scenario.  Either she confronted someone angry, reactive and not self-aware and faced the consequences of that scary choice, which also included acknowledging that he was hurting her (and therefore winning in her mind), or, she pretended nothing was happening, pretended to be Teflon to his aggression, and in the meanwhile, went on living in an anxious, disconnected and angry state of being.  Neither felt doable for much longer.

When I asked Mary what she wanted to scream from the rooftops, she said this (without hesitation): I did nothing f***ing wrong.  I’m the one who was hurt!  And now, I’m the one being punished.  What the f*ck!  But instead, she went on smiling, asking if he wanted milk with his coffee, and being the person she wished he could be with her.

The first thing I wanted Mary to know was that there was nothing wrong with feeling anxious and angry.  Living with someone acting out in this way is bloody awful.  Her expectation that she should be able to feel well in an environment that was so un-well was absurd.  She was not made of Teflon and as humans, we are relational and porous beings; we are affected and impacted by our environment.  So right out of the gate, I insisted Mary stop blaming herself for feeling anxious and off-center.  If she didn’t I’d think something was wrong!

With regard to her desire to stop pretending she wasn’t being affected, I asked her a simple question: What was it was like to be with her husband when he was treating her this way?  She erupted with tears upon hearing the question.  After some time, she was able to share that it felt painful, unfair, unkind, hurtful and just terrible in every way.  I asked her if she could stay with these feelings and maybe see if there was also any sense of I don’t want to be treated this way, or maybe just I don’t want this.  I asked her if she could step outside the whole narrative and history attached this situation and just feel the direct, bodily-felt experience of I don’t want to be treated this way.  And indeed, Mary could feel this, without any help from her mind.  It was right there in her heart and gut.  It was true now.

I then asked her if she could remember this I don’t want this, I don’t want to be treated like this feeling in the moments when she felt herself putting on the Teflon suit.  This refuge of self and self-compassion could then be home for Mary, a destination she could go instead of having to step outside herself and into the pretender.  Her self-caring truth was safe ground for her in the present moment, when the unkindness was happening, and this is what she had been missing.

What we need in these situations, when we’re really struggling, is self-compassion.  We don’t need more judgment or more strategies for figuring out the situation.  Yes, we need to address the other person and their behavior, and yes, we need to decide if and how we can live with this situation if it’s not going to change.  But in the moments of triage, when we’re really suffering, what we need most is our own loving kindness.  In offering Mary permission to let herself have the experience she was having and also, pointing her towards her own self-loving experience of I don’t want this, Mary was able to return home to herself and to her ground.  While the situation on the outside might have been the same, her inner world had profoundly transformed.  She had somewhere to go inside herself now, a refuge in which she could live in the truth in the midst of whatever was happening in her outer environment.

Furthermore, I knew that Mary’s body-knowing of I don’t want to be treated this way would prove to be a far more powerful guide and motivator than anything our minds could come up with.  I trust and know (from experience) that when we let things be as they are, feel what we’re actually feeling, without judgment, and simultaneously, allow ourselves to feel the heart’s authentic I don’t want this, the process itself reveals our next right step; we are led to know what we need to know.  How and why this happens remains for me the great mystery and magic that is this thing we call truth.

4 Tips for Dealing with Passive Aggression

1. Don’t fall into guilt.  The passive aggressive character will play the part of the victim.  Be mindful not to step into the role of the perpetrator, the bad one.  Remind yourself, you are not that.

2. Give yourself permission to have the experience you’re having, to be affected by their behavior.  When we’re around aggression (regardless of whether it’s direct or buried), we feel it.  Don’t judge yourself for having a response; it comes with being human!

3.  Tap into self-compassion.  Feel your heart’s genuine I don’t want to be treated this way.  Drop into this feeling on your own and when their behavior is unkind.  It’s your refuge; let it guide you in how to respond.

4.  Prayer.  Regardless of whether or not you have a higher power, ask the universe for help.  Silently or aloud, ask for guidance: You can say something like, I don’t know how to do this, show me how to be okay in this not okay, lead me to where I need to go.  No matter what you believe, the act of asking for help always helps.

(All names are changed and permission was granted for use of all material.)

The post How to Protect Yourself From Passive Aggression appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Her husband didn’t miss a beat and accused her of being too sensitive, twisting his words to mean something they didn’t.  Mary, becoming even more furious, shouted that it wasn’t about what him and him and more him, but rather about the fact that his words had hurt her. And it went on… her husband, deaf to her pain, accused her of judging him, to which she again responded that this was not about him, not about who was right or wrong, but rather about his being able to simply hear the fact that she was hurt.

Later that day, Mary called to tell me that her husband had approached her about an hour after the session and acknowledged that maybe his words could have come off as a bit insensitive.  While she was still brimming with anger and hurt, Mary had offered a simple thank you for your apology.  It was the first time he had owned any of his own behavior in twenty years of marriage.  And so, while his “apology” felt light on empathy, she made the choice to acknowledge his attempt at kindness and leave it at that, and not risk doing or saying anything that could discourage him from this new, positive behavior.

But the following week, Mary reported that her husband had become withdrawn, sullen and unfriendly.  He was playing the part of the one hurt and angry, while she had stepped into the role of the one trying to win back his affection and regain a sense of peace in the couple.

This was the standard trajectory of their disagreements.  Mary would be hurt by something her husband said or did; she would then bring it to his attention. Upon hearing what he perceived (only) as criticism, he would immediately attack her emotionally (which I had witnessed), and then withdraw into his role as the victim in the relationship. As victim, he would become silent, non-responsive, and backhandedly unkind towards her over the next several days.  He would, in essence, fall into full-blown episodes of passive aggression.

Mary and I had both felt hopeful the previous week when her husband was able to take a baby step forward in acknowledging his own behavior and considering how it might have affected her.  And yet, it seemed that his old pattern of reverting to passive aggression after hearing he had done something she didn’t like, was still firmly intact.

Mary confessed that she was completely lost as to how to deal with her husband’s behavior.  She still wanted to stay in the marriage (and still loved her husband) but his passive aggression, which appeared each time she shared that he had upset her, felt upsetting and unmanageable.  She was utterly unable to find her ground or feel at ease when he was in this mode.  She couldn’t get okay until the couple was again okay.

Mary felt that she had always been stuck in the same place with regard to her husband’s passive aggression.  Unable to speak her truth, she felt that her only recourse was to wait for him to get over it after which she could get back to her own center.  But of course, when he did get over it, she would then have to deal with her own anger at having been controlled and mistreated.  Regardless, her well-being was dependent on his behavior, which she hated.

But while she felt stuck, I reminded Mary that something profound had in fact transformed within her.  When we first started working together, Mary would actually feel guilty when her husband punished her in this way.  She would identify with his projections of blame and try to make up for the hurt she imagined she had caused him.  She would play the perpetrator (having told him he hurt her after all) to his imagined victim; she stepped into his projections and took on the role of the bad one. I was happy to remind Mary that she no longer felt guilty in any way despite his playing the part of the one abused.  This was an enormous change in her and a huge relief.

While Mary could acknowledge that she was no longer suffering with this most insidious consequence of passive aggression (imagining oneself as deserving of the punishment), she was however still frustrated that she felt so anxious and de-stabilized, that she couldn’t get comfortable inside herself when her husband was acting out in this way.  No matter what she did for herself, how much mediation and awareness she practiced, or how she tried to separate herself from it, she still felt afraid and off-kilter living with his punishing behavior.  She was angry and disappointed with herself that she couldn’t get a grip on her experience.  She couldn’t will herself into well-being, but she strongly believed that she should be able to control her own inner-experience regardless of what was going on in her environment.

Simultaneously, Mary was bottling a lot of rage about the fact that she couldn’t speak her truth to her husband.  In the past, when she had tried to call him out on his behavior, he had attacked her more directly and denied all responsibility and intention for his behavior.  Her trying to talk about it had always made things worse and so she felt resigned to acting as if nothing was happening.  Pretending he wasn’t affecting her was the way she had learned to protect herself.  The truth was, he was getting to her; she felt manipulated, controlled, and humiliated by his behavior. Enraged in fact.

However, this pretending to not notice, to save face if you will, was breaking down as a defense strategy; it felt impossible to maintain this level of falseness, and also, more and more like an abandonment of herself.  It was making her angrier and more anxious to know that he was (as she experienced it) cornering her into being inauthentic.  Mary felt stuck in this either-or scenario.  Either she confronted someone angry, reactive and not self-aware and faced the consequences of that scary choice, which also included acknowledging that he was hurting her (and therefore winning in her mind), or, she pretended nothing was happening, that became Teflon to his control and aggression, and in the meanwhile went on living in an anxious, disconnected and angry state of being.  Neither felt doable for much longer.

When I asked Mary what she wanted to scream from the rooftops, she said this (without hesitation): I did nothing f***ing wrong.  I’m the one who was hurt!  And now, I’m the one being punished.  What the f*ck!  But instead, she went on smiling, asking if he wanted milk with his coffee, and being the person she wished he could be with her.

The first thing I wanted Mary to know was that there was nothing wrong with feeling anxious and angry.  Living with someone acting out in this way is bloody awful.  Her expectation that she should be able to feel well in an environment that was so un-well was absurd.  She was not made of Teflon and as humans we are relational and porous beings; we are affected and impacted by our environment.  So right out of the gate, I insisted Mary stop blaming herself for feeling anxious and off-center.  If she didn’t I’d think something was wrong!

With regard to her desire to stop pretending she wasn’t being affected, I asked her a simple question: What was it was like to be with her husband when he was treating her this way?  She erupted with tears upon hearing the question.  After some time, she was able to share that it felt painful, unfair, unkind, hurtful and just terrible in every way.  I asked her if she could stay with these feelings and maybe see if there was also any sense of I don’t want to be treated this way, or maybe just I don’t want this.  I asked her if she could step outside the whole narrative and history attached this situation and just feel the direct, bodily-felt experience of I don’t want to be treated this way.  And indeed, Mary could feel this, without any help from her mind.  It was right there in her heart and gut.  It was true now.

I then asked her if she could remember this I don’t want this, I don’t want to be treated like this feeling in the moments when she felt herself putting on the Teflon suit.  This refuge of self and self-compassion, could then be a home for Mary, a destination she could go instead of having to step outside herself and into the pretender.  Her self-caring truth was safe ground for her in the present moment, when the unkindness was happening, and this is what she had been missing.

What we need in these situations, when we’re really struggling, is self-compassion.  We don’t need more judgment or more strategies for figuring out the situation.  Yes, we need to address the other person and their behavior, and yes, we need to decide if and how we can live with this situation if it’s not going to change.  But in the moments of triage, when we’re really suffering, what we need most is our own loving kindness.  In offering Mary permission to let herself have the experience she was having and also, pointing her towards her own self-loving experience of I don’t want this, Mary was able to return home to herself and to her ground.  While the situation on the outside might have been the same, her inner world had profoundly transformed.  She had somewhere to go inside herself now, a refuge in which she could live in the truth in the midst of whatever was happening in her outer environment.

Furthermore, I knew that Mary’s body-knowing of I don’t want to be treated this way would prove to be a far more powerful guide and motivator than anything our minds could come up with.  I trust and know (from experience) that when we let things be as they are, feel what we’re actually feeling, without judgment, and simultaneously, allow ourselves to feel the heart’s authentic I don’t want this, the process itself reveals our next right step; we are led to know what we need to know.  How and why this happens remains for me the great mystery and magic that is this thing we call truth.

4 Tips for Dealing with Passive Aggression

1.  Don’t fall into guilt.  The passive aggressive character will play the part of the victim.  Be mindful not to step into the role of the perpetrator, the bad one.  Remind yourself, you are not that.

2.  Give yourself permission to have the experience you’re having, to be affected by their behavior.  When we’re around aggression (regardless of whether it’s direct or buried), we feel it.  Don’t judge yourself for having a response; it comes with being human!

3.  Tap into self-compassion.  Feel your heart’s genuine I don’t want to be treated this way.  Drop into this feeling on your own and when their behavior is unkind.  It’s your refuge; let it guide you in how to respond.

4.  Prayer.  Regardless of whether or not you have a higher power, ask the universe for help.  Silently or aloud, ask for guidance: You can say something like, I don’t know how to do this, show me how to be okay in this not okay, lead me to where I need to go.  No matter what you believe, the act of asking for help always helps.

(All names are changed and permission was granted for use of all material.)

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What does let it go mean? I’ve always wondered. I’ve also always had a slight aversion to anyone telling me or anyone else to do it. Truth is, I don’t completely understand what letting it go actually is or what it entails.

I spent some time with a couple of friends this weekend and one was sharing something deeply upsetting to him about the current political climate. The other friend told him that at some point (the implication being now) he needed to just let it go.  More specifically, she said that it was almost the end of 2018 and therefore the perfect time to let go of whatever didn’t serve him anymore so he could enter the new year fresh and free of baggage.  This friend is a kind and wise woman and not someone inclined to speak with malice or impatience. I know she meant for her advice to be helpful. I’m not sure it was; the man to whom she made the suggestion did not appear to be helped. Later, when I asked my friend what she meant by let it go, she explained that it was about his moving on inside himself from the argument happening in his head, and simultaneously, choosing to accept what reality is right now.

When she said the second part, about choosing to accept reality, I realized that I also don’t really know what it means when we say acceptance in this context. I was in a real pickle now. I didn’t understand the first concept, let it go,nor did I understand the concept used to define it.  And so I decided to try and discover and maybe create my own meaning for let it go and, depending on how far I got with that, maybe, for acceptance as well.

What I know about the advice let it go is that when I hear it, whether spoken to me or another, it feels like a demand and a judgment all rolled into one lovely suggestion. It’s a demand because we know we’re supposed to do it and if we don’t we’re failing to make ourselves happy and thus responsible for our own upset. It’s a judgment because we’re choosing to hold onto something painful that we could simply release. That said, if we continue to suffer, it’s essentially our fault. I often want to respond to let it go (or what’s usually “just” let it go) with, Yeah but how do you do that?

Depending on the topic, let it go can also feel like a kind of impatience with what’s being expressed, an “enough now” or “I’m tired of listening to you.”  Let it go, therefore, has the potential to arrive as a kind of abandonment, a way of saying I don’t want to be with you in this pain anymore.

Now that I’ve entirely trashed let it go, I will say that I do believe that there’s something profoundly important and helpful about the idea of letting go of what no longer serves us. But once again, what does that really mean and how do you do it?

To understand what something means I like to begin by understanding what it doesn’t mean, which is sometimes an easier place to start. Letting it go does not mean using our will power to annihilate what we’ve decided needs to go. It’s not forcefully efforting to block something out of our consciousness. Letting go is not an act of doing so much as it is one of undoing.

Furthermore, the suggestion that we need to let something go also suggests that we’re holding onto, grasping, or clinging to it too tightly, which begs the question, what does it mean to hold onto something, particularly a thought or feeling?  Alas… always more questions than answers.

Holding onto a thought or feeling can mean many things. But one way that we hold on is by continuing to re-think, re-tell, and ruminate over painful thoughts and experiences. We mentally rehash the source of our suffering even when it’s not organically present in our now. We bring it into our now by talking about it, engaging with our thoughts about it, and actively invoking the difficult feelings or whatever else is stuck to it.  It can feel as if the pain itself is compelling us to feed it.  And we are, paradoxically and strangely loyal to our pain, and driven to keep it alive.

Another way we cling to thoughts and feelings is by constructing narratives around them. We make our suffering sticky when we supplement our experience with a mental storyline about the experience. Let’s say we become aware of a tightness in the belly. Very quickly, before feeling the sensation for more than a moment, we name that tightness fear. Within seconds we have written a story about why we’re afraid, who’s to blame, what we need to do about it, and what’s wrong with us that leads us to feel and be this way. And that’s just the beginning of the narrative.  Our initial belly constriction is usually manageable. Even the naming it with language is tolerable. But by the time we’ve added on all the toppings, we’re pretty cooked and the direct experience of belly constriction is no longer manageable, because of what we’ve determined it means. Using our experience as a launching pad for narrative, the rope with which we hang ourselves, is clinging.

Letting go then is the practice of restraint, refraining, of less not more. It’s breaking the habit of continually re-introducing thoughts and feelings that cause us pain—declining the mind’s seduction to replay our grievancesin the hopes of figuring out a better outcome or solution. So too, letting go is resisting the urge to build a storyline out of our experience—getting in the habit of feeling our direct experience on its own, in our body first, and perhaps naming it if it’s helpful. But, and this is the key, leaving our experience there in the simplicity of what it is, without the who, what, where, when, and why, the what it means that follows and tightens our grip.

Letting go is not denial or ignorance; it’s not about pretending our hurts don’t hurt. It’s also not about willing ourselves into a pseudo-okayness with something we’re not really okay with. Some traumas are simply not let-go-able.  But letting go is a process of stopping—stopping to cause ourselves further suffering when we don’t have to.  Some grievances will fade away when we stop stoking them, some will remain painful when bumped into. It’s not really up to us.  But what is up to us is the choice to stop awarding our grievances with our habitual attention, romancing them if you will, parading them in front of others and ourselves to see, again. Furthermore, we can choose to stop feeding and growing our hurts with more thoughts about them, the storylines we write which intensify their importance and power.

Imagine holding onto a little bird, holding it tightly because we want to keep it from flying off and leaving us. That little bird is our pain. We grasp onto that pain because we believe that keeping it, remembering it and feeding it, is a way of taking care of it, and thus ourselves. But what if we loosened our grip on that bird, opened our hand a bit. That bird might want to fly off. Our pain might want to fly off. Letting go is trusting that taking care of ourselves might mean not feeding our bird, but rather opening our hand and allowing our pain to transform and be free to fly.

y.

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Paula tells Jon that she’s upset and hurt by something he said, a way he responded to her opinion on a family matter.  She asks if, in the future, he could say that same thing with an attitude of kindness and/or curiosity and not be so critical, simply because her opinion differed from his.  Jon reacts to Paula’s feelings and request by aggressively inquiring why he should offer her kindness and curiosity when last month she had shut down his experience over a different family matter and treated him unkindly.  Paula then attacks back, explaining why she deserved to behave the way she did in the interaction last month, and why her response last month was a reaction to what he did two months ago, which she believes was unkind and aggressive.  Jon then barks that he was entitled to his behavior two months ago because of the unkind and critical thing she did three months ago… and back and back in time it goes, to a seemingly un-findable place before the hurting began.

Couples do this all the time; they fight for who’s deserving of empathy, whose experience should get to matter, whose hurt should be taken care of and whose experience should be validated.  Often, partners refuse to offer empathy to each other because they feel that, to do so, would mean admitting that they are to blame and thus giving up the chance to receive empathy and validation for their own experience. Boiled down, if I care about the fact that my words hurt you then I’m to blame for causing you that pain, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the truth of why I said those words, or more accurately, my experience of why I was entitled to say those words, will never be validated or receive its own empathy. Empathy for you effectively cancels out empathy for me.

As hurt and resentment accumulate in a relationship, it becomes harder and harder to empathize with your partner’s experience because you have so much unheard and un-cared-for pain of your own. When too much unattended pain is allowed to sedimentize between two people, it can be nearly impossible to listen much less care about your partner’s experience. Over time, unhealed wounds create a relationship in which there’s no space left to be heard, no place where some injustice or hurt from the past does not disqualify your right to kindness and support, which just happen to be the essential components of intimacy.  For this reason and many others, resentment is the most toxic of all emotions to an intimate relationship.

So, what is to be done if you’ve been in a relationship for some time and hurts have built up and led to resentment and unresolved anger and pain.  Is there hope for empathy to regain a foothold in your relationship so that true intimacy can begin flourishing once again?  What is the way forward when it feels like there is too much toxic water under the bridge, too much wreckage under your feet to find your way back to a loving bond?

If you asked me if it’s possible, if there’s hope for empathy to re-emerge in your relationship, even when resentment abounds, the answer is probably.  But if you asked me whether there are ways to try and rebuild the empathic bond in your relationship, I would answer with a resounding yes. Yes, you can try and yes, the only way you can know if what’s probable can become possible is to name it as a problem and give it your very best effort.  One thing you can know for sure is that if you don’t try and address the resentment, it won’t go away by itself.

So, what to do?  I suggest, first, that couples set an intention, together, to re-create empathy in the relationship.  While this is not necessary, it helps to start with a conscious decision that’s named. Perhaps both of you want to deepen the intimacy or trust, or perhaps just ease the resentment.  The intention can be different for each of you, but what’s important is that there’s an agreed upon desire and willingness to bring attention to this issue in the relationship. Sometimes one partner is not willing to set such an intention, often because of precisely the resentment that’s being addressed. But if that’s the case, nonetheless, you can set an intention on your own; while it’s not ideal, it can still bring positive results.

Once an intention has been named, I recommend making a deal to officially press the re-start button on your relationship.  You can ritualize/celebrate this relationship re-start date as perhaps a new anniversary, the day you committed to begin again—without the poisons of the past.  It’s important that you mark this re-start date in some tangible way that makes it real and sacred.  A re-start date means that as of a certain day and time, you are beginning again, so that when you express your feelings to your partner, those feelings matter simply because they exist, and cannot be invalidated because of something that happened in the past.  Pressing the re-start button means you get a new point zero, a point at which you are both innocent and entitled to kindness and support.  A clean slate.  This one step, albeit manufactured, if agreed upon and followed can open up a brand-new field in which to be loving and meet and take care of each other once again.

Along with this, I recommend beginning a new way of communicating with each other.  I call this new way the taking turns way.  Taking turns means when one partner brings upset or anything difficult or less that positive to the other, she is heard and understood fully.  The experience of the other partner, what we might say caused him to behave in the way he did that created the upset, is then held for the next day. While again I am suggesting an imposed way of communicating around difficult issues, this process can encourage non-defensive listening and even compassion.  Because you know that your time to tell your side of the story is not coming until tomorrow, you are more able to hear, listen and be present for your partner’s experience.  You can also try mirroring back to your partner, through words, what you are hearing him say and feel.  And to do this mirroring until he feels that you have correctly “gotten” his experience.  Being able to hear your partner without defending yourself (since it’s against the rules for now) can lessen the chances that the exchange will end up feeding new resentments. So too, taking turns at expressing your experience, knowing that you will get to be listened to, without rebuttal, that there will be a guaranteed safe place for your experience to be heard, will ease your anxiety, anger, desperation and despair.  It will also vastly improve the possibility of building a newly empathic bond.  By communicating one at a time (with a breathing and sleeping break in between), at least for a while, you are creating a garden for kindness, curiosity and support, the defining aspects of intimacy, to at least have a chance to take root and bloom.

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These people are not isolated examples or peculiar in any way. Many people hold grudges, deep ones, that can last a lifetime. Many are unable to let go of the anger they feel towards those who “wronged” them in the past, even though they may have a strong desire and put in a concerted effort to do so.

Often we hold onto our grudges unwillingly, while wishing we could drop them and live freshly in the present, without the injustices of the past occupying so much psychic space.

Why do we hold grudges when they are in fact quite painful to maintain, and often seem to work against what we really want? Why do we keep wounds open and active, living in past experiences of pain which prevent new experiences from being able to happen? What keeps us stuck when we want to move on and let go? Most important, how can we let go?

To begin with, grudges come with an identity. With our grudge intact, we know who we are—a person who was “wronged.”  As much as we don’t like it, there also exists a kind of rightness and strength in this identity. We have something that defines us—our anger and victimhood—which gives us a sense of solidness and purpose. We have definition and a grievance that carries weight. To let go of our grudge, we have to be willing to let go of our identity as the “wronged” one, and whatever strength, solidity, or possible sympathy and understanding we receive through that “wronged” identity. We have to be willing to drop the “I” who was mistreated and step into a new version of ourselves, one we don’t know yet, that allows the present moment to determine who we are, not past injustice.

But what are we really trying to get at, get to, or just get by holding onto a grudge and strengthening our identity as the one who was “wronged”? In truth, our grudge, and the identity that accompanies it, is an attempt to get the comfort and compassion we didn’t get in the past, the empathy for what happened to us at the hands of this “other,” the experience that our suffering matters  As a somebody who was victimized, we are announcing that we are deserving of extra kindness and special treatment. Our indignation and anger is a cry to be cared about and treated differently—because of what we have endured.

The problem with grudges, besides the fact that they are a drag to carry around (like a bag of sedimentized toxic waste that keeps us stuck in anger) is that they don’t serve the purpose that they are there to serve. They don’t make us feel better or heal our hurt. At the end of the day, we end up as proud owners of our grudges but still without the experience of comfort that we ultimately crave, that we have craved since the original wounding. We turn our grudge into an object and hold it out at arm’s length—proof of what we have suffered, a badge of honor, a way to remind others and ourselves of our pain and deserving-ness. But in fact our grudge is disconnected from our own heart; while born out of our pain, it becomes a construction of the mind, a story of what happened to us. Our grudge morphs into a boulder that blocks the light of kindness from reaching our heart, and thus is an obstacle to true healing. Sadly, in its effort to garner us empathy, our grudge ends up depriving us of the very empathy that we need to release it.

The path to freedom from a grudge is not so much through forgiveness of the “other” (although this can be helpful), but rather through loving our own self. To bring our own loving presence to the suffering that crystallized into the grudge, the pain that was caused by this “other,” is what ultimately heals the suffering and allows the grudge to melt. If it feels like too much to go directly into the pain of a grudge, we can move toward it with the help of someone we trust, or bring a loving presence to our wound, but from a safe place inside. The idea is not to re-traumatize ourselves by diving into the original pain but rather to attend to it with the compassion that we didn’t receive, that our grudge is screaming for, and bring it directly into the center of the storm. Our heart contains both our pain and the elixir for our pain.

To let go of a grudge we need to move the focus off of the one who “wronged” us, off of the story of our suffering, and into the felt experience of what we actually lived. When we move our attention inside, into our heart, our pain shifts from being a “something” that happened to us, another part of our narrative, to a sensation that we know intimately, a felt sense that we are one with from the inside.

In re-focusing our attention, we find the soothing kindness and compassion that the grudge itself desires. In addition, we take responsibility for caring about our own suffering, and for knowing that our suffering matters, which can never be achieved through our grudge, no matter how fiercely we believe in it. We can then let go of the identity of the one who was “wronged,” because it no longer serves us and because our own presence is now righting that wrong. Without the need for our grudge, it often simply drops away without our knowing how. What becomes clear is that we are where we need to be, in our own heart’s company.

Copyright 2015 Nancy Colier

The post Why We Hold Grudges and How to Let Them Go: It’s Not About the Person Who Wronged You, It’s About Who You Want to Be appeared first on Nancy Colier.