Today part 4 of Mindful Thoughts and Relationships: Mindfulness at work.
Example:
You go shopping on Saturday and you visit 10 stores. In 9 of them the clerks are very friendly and helping. In 1 shop the clerk is rude.
When you get home which one are you gonna talk about?
The rude one. it makes you really mad, you obsess about it and it keeps flipping back in your mind.
This is negativity bias at work. Negativity bias is the natural evolutionary hard wired tendency of humans to focus on threats
and it is not hard to understand why most humans and animals minds are wired to notice threats.
A threat can kill you or at least make your life unpleasant.
How might this undermine your romantic relationship?
The focus on negative events with your partner.
In an intimate romantic committed relationship this tendency shows up all the time, you share many things together, good and bad and for most relationships 9 out of 10 will be positive and make your life better.
When your partner does something wrong or she/he has a problem, you start to focus on that problem, you will start to ruminate on that treat.
And unlike other animals we can carry threats around in our imaginations, all life is organized around the idea of moving towards pleasure and rewards and moving away from threats and unpleasant things.
It also works like this in an intimate relationship.
If you are doing what you are naturally wired to do, focusing on threats, two things happen:
Your attention becomes a spotlight and when you shine your spotlight on something what happens on everything
outside the spotlight?
It sits in the dark.
That is why you don't see the car or house you have, that is why you don't see the 9 helpful clerks in the stores,
that is why you don't see the good things your partner did but only the negative.
When you are focused on the negative, a stress response is triggered, a neurological cocktail designed to get you away from
threats pumps through your body, your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure goes up, the right response to escape a lion
not so much as a reaction to a store clerk.
And in addition to the animal brain, we have this much newer part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, that part remembers and that part tells a story. That story can become part of our relationship and change it drastically.
Example:
You have a really bad day at work, you come home, the kids are loud, and your partner hasn't made dinner yet
even when it is their turn. So what do you do?
Even if you don't lash out, at the very minimum you will feel mad.
Disappointment, negativity bias and hydonic adaptation all happen below subconscious awareness. You react
without thinking, playing out the patterns and habits.
Mindfulness corrects what happens below our subconscious awareness. The moment you become aware of your thoughts
and feelings, you see more clearly what is happening.
Once you are aware of the dynamic that happens inside you, the spotlight of your attention,
your thoughts and emotions, you can start to control them.
There are 3 strong pillars forming the base of Mindfulness in our relationships:
gratitude, compassion and forgiveness.
Gratitude is the affirmation of the good things in life, it's an affirmation of the relationship
If your partner cooks dinner for you and you say thank you, you are affirming that dinner is good
but also affirming your relationship. You recognize there is interdependency between the two of you and that your partner is important to you.
She/he gives you things that are good and improve your life. Gratitude is very important in every relationship.
Let the ones around you know you appreciate who they are for you and what they do for you.
Withholding gratitude is an exercise in power in an intimate relationship. You are dis-affirming the relationship
You reject the good things implicitly, you may not mean to, you make your partner feel invisible,
you make their contribution become invisible.
People do this all the time and there is nothing intentional about it, most of us do it instinctively because this
is our emotional toolbox and we are just picking the tool.
Gratitude is the antidote to the needy ego and hydonic adaptation, but it is also a corrective to negative bias
it is a way of making the good things visible.
When you are focused on threats and negativity, stress puts the frontal part of your brain offline, it means the social part of your brain that
helps you make compassionate decisions is taken over by the limbic system, it becomes very easy to walk away from someone in distress, because
you perceive their distress as a threat too.
Where you otherwise would act comforting and do something to alleviate their suffering you become defensive and ready to fight or fly.
Perhaps you don't react like this without a reason, but it is not gonna make your relationship better.
To override patterns like this requires effort and a little bit of courage, being aware of your thoughts and emotions gives you the choice how to react,
to see your partner and yourself consciously, to look at them with kindness and compassion in moments you usually react disappointed or angrily.
Relationships involve feeling vulnerable, fearful, uncertain and disappointed, how else could it be?
Suffering is inherent in human life and the mind is not equipped to maintain equanimity, let alone practice compassion and loving-kindness, in the face of these difficulties.
And what we talked about yesterday, there is also the tendency to want, even expect, the relationship to be a source of unconditional love and endless praise, to heal your childhood wounds, to help you overcome self-loathing or to rescue you from your boredom and unhappiness or from your lack of purpose.
Mindfulness provides the strength and awareness to cope with all of these problems. Your relationships become a vessel to help you travel deeper into yourself and, in time, to become more self-contained and less fearful or needy.
And here we arrive at the last pillar of Mindfulness; forgiveness.
When negative things happened in your relationships it becomes very easy to ruminate, it is a natural thing to do, every time we call to mind a
negative event, our brain reacts as if it is happening again, the story becomes concrete in your mind, you can hold on to it forever and it will color the relationship.
The key why forgiveness is so important is that it opens the possibility for change. If you are willing to forgive someone, you create a door for change, not only for them but also for yourself. And that will always make the relationship better.
Forgiving someone means healing for yourself. It will make it easier to let go of the event or the person who caused you pain.
If your relationship has real problems and is unhealthy your self is ravaged and so is your spontaneity. You have no possibility for inner development and feel shut off from the joy of life.
Abuse, emotion or physical factors, strong incompatibility, no possibility to negotiation to name a few. A relationship like that deadens your spirit; you feel lifeless inside. Your partner might be at fault, or you, or both, because of personal wounds or because the two of you are simply mismatched.
If you repeatedly experience the relationship as having an unhealthy core, ending it may be the wise and compassionate course of action.
Positive thinking does not mean you need to ignore threats, positive thinking is making sure you count the good things.
It can be difficult depending where you are in your life it takes strength and courage to do that, Mindfulness helps and
it will make life better for you and your partner
You learn to work with the difficulties and disappointments that arise in all types of relationships.
Slowly those emotions, which you previously knew only as reasons to suffer, become opportunities for exploring the mystery of
being a flawed human being loving other flawed human beings.
Try to take what I told you into your heart, look at your partner with kindness and compassion, when it is difficult try to make the conscious choice
to do things differently. Be in the moment and truly listen what your partner says, hear them. Let them know you appreciate what they mean to you,
as you are aware and see the good things, so will your partner. And when things go wrong try to forgive them and don't make every fight a concrete story.
A good exercise is holding a journal. Write for yourself how you started the day, begin with being grateful. Make notes of fights or moments you
reacted strongly, turn the roles and examine what the result would have been with more kindness and compassion. Recognize the patterns
and habits that lead to struggling with each other and step by step train your mind to become aware of them before things get out of hand.
And last but not least always practice the golden rule: always count to 10 before reacting ♥
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