A musical canon consists of “two or more parts that have the same melody but start at different points.” Like the variety we find in music, we also find great variety in types of relationships that work and don’t work. There are both healthy and unhealthy relationships among couples who argue and among couples who don’t.
No Fighting
Unhealthy: Some couples who never fight will simply hide their differing opinions and emotions, creating a situation that leads to distance and frosty disengagement. The partners, feeling alienated, sadly drift apart.
Healthy: Some couples who don’t typically fight have learned how to actively listen and to express their opinions and disagreements without expressing contempt for the other person. This seems ideal, but is difficult to live up to when emotions run high.
Fighting
Unhealthy: Some people who argue and fight do not listen to each other. They attack and defend. As a result, mutual negativity and contempt for each other grow until the relationship is nothing more than a bitter struggle.
Healthy: Some couples who have disagreements and lose their temper care deeply for each other and desire to put right any harm done.
Attempts to Repair
What’s more important than avoiding conflict is the earnest attempt to repair hurt feelings after a disagreement—and the sooner the better. Loving couples have empathy for each other, and will therefore, hasten to apologize for harsh words or losing their temper.
Having fights is not necessarily harmful to a relationship as long as there is not abuse or a pattern of criticism and contempt. Getting past the hurt feelings caused by arguments occurs best when each person’s overriding concern is for the well-being of the other and the relationship, which rests on the well-being of both partners.
More important than whether a couple fights is how often and quickly they try to repair their relationship after disagreements. Phyllis Diller might have been right when she said, “Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.” Some fighting, unless it’s constant or cruel, can be fine as long as couples strive to make peace soon afterwards.
Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.
Emotions of sadness and grief often expose the depth of a person’s feelings of loss, love, or longing. Cutting off those feelings may result in losing connection to the heart. If there is no time for grieving, the feeling of loss mounts until you develop a fear of the hollow place inside.
However, dwelling too long in a state of sadness can cause you to cultivate a chronic state of sadness. Neurologist John Arden shows that sustained thoughts and feelings of sadness can lead to a neurological perpetuation of sad thoughts and feelings.
For instance, in grieving about a divorce, people may have thoughts such as, “How could I have let this happen?” or “I’m no good at relationships,” or “I’ve been so stupid.” If sadness turns to brooding over thoughts like this, the thoughts become neurologically connected with the feeling of sadness. A person then can become stuck in a rut of obsessive negative thinking.
Dr. Arden states,
The longer you stay in a low emotional state, the greater is the probability that those neurons will fire together when you are sad and will therefore wire together. As a result, this will become the chronic foundation of your emotional experience.
Succumbing to and remaining in a perpetual state of sadness can cause a vicious cycle that makes it hard to move onto other emotional states.
While it is necessary and healthy to feel sadness at times and to grieve, it is important to avoid creating an entrenched neuro-network of sadness. It becomes necessary to seek situations where one can experience other thoughts and feelings.
After experiencing some time of grieving for a loss, ask yourself “What could I learn from this?” By focusing on learning and growing, you break the negative emotional cycle. Ask yourself questions, such as, “What could I do to make my life more fulfilling?” or “What thoughts would make me feel more gratitude right now?”
Here are some ideas of how to step out of all-consuming sadness:
– Try calling a friend just to say hello.
– Play music from a time in your life attached to good memories.
– Volunteer at a local hospital, church, or community center.
– Pick a language, any language you’ve ever wanted to learn, and enroll in a course in person or online.
– Improve your vocabulary in your own language (http://www.vocabulary.com/.)
– Write a list of projects you’ve always wanted to do, but never had time for (painting, re-organizing, etc.), and pursue one and take the first step towards making that a reality.
Sadness is a deep human emotion that highlights the transience of life. It is a reminder that life wants to be lived whole-heartedly.
Our natural tendency is to trust, because, as infants, we trust our parents. It feels good to really trust. It is also an essential component of love and an important test thereof. Love without trust is dependence masquerading as love.
We must trust, it is almost biological. Most of the time, we do trust. We trust the universe to behave according to the laws of physics, soldiers to not go mad and shoot at us, our nearest and dearest to not betray us. When our trust is broken, we feel as though a part of us had died and had been hollowed out.
To not trust is abnormal and is the outcome of bitter or even traumatic life experiences. Mistrust or distrust are induced not by our own thoughts, nor by some device or machination of ours — but by life’s sad circumstances. To continue to not trust is to reward the people who had wronged us and rendered us distrustful in the first place. Those people have long abandoned us and yet they still have a great, malign, influence on our lives. This is the irony of being distrustful of others.
So, some of us prefer to not experience that sinking feeling of trust violated. Some people choose to not trust and thus skirt disappointment. This is both a fallacy and a folly. Trusting releases enormous amounts of mental energy, which is more productively vested elsewhere. But trust — like knives — can be dangerous to your health if used improperly.
You have to know WHO to trust, you have to learn HOW to trust and you have to know HOW to CONFIRM the existence of a mutual, functional sort of trust.
People often disappoint and are not worthy of trust. Some of them act arbitrarily, treacherously and viciously, or, worse, offhandedly. You have to select the targets of your trust carefully. He who has the most common interests with you, who is invested in you for the long haul, who is incapable of breaching trust (“a good person”), who doesn’t have much to gain from betraying you — is not likely to mislead you. These people you can trust.
You should not trust indiscriminately. No one is completely trustworthy in all fields. Most often our disappointments stem from our inability to separate one realm of life from another. A person could be sexually loyal — but utterly dangerous when it comes to money (for instance, a gambler). Or a good, reliable father — but a womanizer. You can trust someone to carry out some types of activities — but not others (because they are more complicated, more boring, or do not conform to his values.)
We should not trust with reservations: this is the kind of “trust” that is common in business and among criminals and its source is rational. Game Theory in mathematics deals with questions of calculated trust.
If we do trust, we should trust wholeheartedly and unreservedly. But, we should be discerning. Then we will be rarely disappointed.
As opposed to popular opinion, trust must be put to the test, lest it goes stale and staid. We are all somewhat paranoid. We gradually grow suspicious, inadvertently hunt for clues of infidelity or worse. The more often we successfully test the trust we had established, the stronger our pattern-prone brain embraces it. Constantly in a precarious balance, our brain needs and devours reinforcements. Such testing should not be explicit but circumstantial: your husband could easily have had a mistress or your partner could easily have robbed you blind — and, yet, they haven’t. They have passed the test. They have resisted the temptation.
Trust is based on the ability to foretell the future. It is not so much the act of betrayal that we react to as it is the feeling that the very foundations of our world are crumbling, that it is no longer safe because it is no longer predictable.
Here is another important lesson: whatever the act of betrayal (with the exception of grave criminal corporeal acts), it has limited and reversible consequences if you do not let it get out of hand.
Naturally, we tend to exaggerate the importance of such mishaps. This serves a double purpose: indirectly it aggrandizes us. If we are “worthy” of such an unprecedented, unheard of, major betrayal we must be worthwhile and unique. The magnitude of the betrayal reflects on us and re-establishes the fragile balance of powers between us and the universe.
The second purpose of exaggerating the act of perfidy is simply to gain sympathy and empathy — mainly from ourselves, but also from others. Catastrophes are a dozen a dime and in today’s world it is difficult to provoke anyone to regard your personal disaster as anything exceptional.
Amplifying the event has, therefore, some very utilitarian purposes. But, finally, blowing things out of proportion poisons the victim’s mental circuitry. Putting a breach of trust in perspective goes a long way towards the commencement of a healing process. No betrayal stamps the world irreversibly or eliminates all other possibilities, opportunities, chances and people. Time goes by, people meet and part, lovers quarrel and make love, dear ones live and die. It is the very essence of time that it reduces us all to the finest dust. Our only weapon — however crude and naîve — against this inexorable process is to trust each other.
Your child is likely to come across all kinds of people in his future. Some of them will be abusive, narcissistic, or even antisocial (psychopaths.) In a way, early exposure to a dysfunctional “bad” parent will render your child better prepared to cope with them, more alert to their existence and chicanery and more desensitized to their abuse.
For this you should be grateful.
There is nothing much you can do, otherwise. Stop wasting your money, time, energy and emotional resources on this intractable “problem” of how to insulate your son from the other parent’s influence. It is a lost war, though a just cause. Instead, make yourself available to your son.
The only thing you can do to prevent your son from emulating the other parent is to present to him another role model of a functioning NON-narcissist, NON-abuser, NON-psychopath – YOU. Hopefully, when he grows up, he will prefer your role model to the other parent’s. But there is only that much that you can do. You cannot control the developmental path of your child. Exerting unlimited control over your progeny is what narcissism is all about – and is exactly what you should avoid at all costs, however worried you might be.
Parental narcissism, abuse, and psychopathy do tend to breed narcissism, abusive conduct, and antisocial traits and behaviors – but not inevitably.
Consider the narcissistic parent, for instance:
Not all the off-spring of a narcissist inexorably become narcissists.
The true, narcissistic parent does tend to produce another narcissist in his or her child. But this outcome can be effectively countered by loving, empathic, predictable, just, and positive upbringing, which encourages a sense of autonomy and responsibility. Provide your child with an alternative to his other parent’s venomous and exploitative existence. Trust your son to choose life over death, love over narcissism, human relations over narcissistic supply.
Isn’t it curious that some people tend to become more critical, cold, and cruel with the very people who champion them the most? Why would someone treat their admirers worse than their critics?
People who devalue their biggest supporters — often their partner — resent the fact that they feel so dependent on that support. In fact, they may be addicted to their dependency, and for that reason, they simultaneously feel bitter about it.
They don’t like feeling helpless. They don’t like needing support and praise. They don’t like counting on you for their self-esteem.
Yet, they don’t have the fortitude to stop relying on you for services, accolades, and admiration. They belittle you so as not to appear needy. They despise their own weakness and you become the physical manifestation of that weakness.
By devaluing the sources of said supply (his spouse, his employer, his colleague, his friend) he ameliorates the dissonance.
~Sam Vaknin, PhD
Understanding why someone might treat you like a slave does not mean you should continue to act like one, or to accept the treatment. So the real question is why would you continue to be a fan of his if he treats you or anyone like a slave?
Anaïs Nin wisely pointed out that “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” It may be time for you to step back from your role as an admiring slave and to view people as they are in their entirety, to admire those who are more worthy of admiration, and to create your own life-opus.
