Distinctions

And yet what do we know about initiating and repairing close-in, intimate relationships? I don’t just mean romantic, sexual relationships but also those we have with our friends, children, colleagues and so on.

What would you say has these work? What do you do when they stop working?

An important work colleague and friend recently told me about the book reviewed in this issue of Distinctions: Parenting Without Power Struggles, which references the work of Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. Neufeld and Maté have taken attachment theory research and applied it to parent-child relationships and, by extension, to any relationship that matters to us. They have invented a simple, straightforward vocabulary that lays out a path for building important relationships and mending them when necessary. I have been experimenting with their framework and am finding it immediately usable, even with clients who are not very skillful in human interaction.

The background of their method is that we humans can tell when someone is sincere and real in the different stages of relationship. Huge parts of our nervous system are dedicated to being able to tell what is happening in our social surround. Knowing who to trust/open to is essential for our physical and emotional survival so we humans have gotten very good at it.

So these distinctions are not for manipulation but for our learning to take skillful action. As you read through them, maybe you will understand what is happening in your own intimate/important relationships—how they got started and why they are in their current condition.

The Stages

• Proximity: we want to be around this person; we enjoy their presence. We are not distracting ourselves when we are with them, making excuses not to be with them or finding ways to cut the time short when we are with them. How many parents really do all they can to not be with her teenagers (they don’t like them) and then wonder about their children not wanting to be with them on vacation?
• Shared Interests: we like to do things together or talk about things together. Could be that we like the same foods or the same music or cities or artists or dogs and so on, or that we have a shared history that we can talk about.
• Providing Support/Loyalty: we are available when needed, we empathize with them, we bring all the resources we can to assist them, we stand up for them and they know this about us because we keep showing it. We don’t have to think they’re perfect but we see their side and advocate for them.
• Significance: what’s important to them is important to us simply because it’s important to them and not because that’s what we like or what we would pick. So if our child is into sailing it’s important to us (remember we can’t fool anyone here) or if our colleague is taken by his local sports team or her favorite painter they become important to us.
• Love: our warm, personal caring and deep positive regard for them is shown in our gestures, tone of voice, playfulness, how we look at them and, in some relationships, how we touch them—and they feel held, warm, seen and accepted.
• Being intimately known: here both people involved in the relationship feel they can share their private interior life, their thorny issues, their deep fears and their secret dreams with much much less need for self protection and an ever-diminishing need for image management.

What happened when you assessed your relationships with these distinctions? What could you strengthen? Are you going to mend some of your relationships based upon these notions?

How do you bring these to your coaching clients? Do all of them apply?

I recommend you take up the study and application of this method because relationships are who we are and we can always become more skillful with them.

More on the topic in the book review, practice and poems in this issue.

Take care of yourself.

Love,

When at a Certain Party in NYC

Erin Belieu

Wherever you’re from sucks,
and wherever you grew up sucks,
and everyone here lives in a converted
chocolate factory or deconsecrated church,
without an ugly lamp or souvenir coffee cup
in sight, but only carefully edited objects like
the Lacanian soap dispenser in the kitchen
that looks like an industrial-age dildo, and
when you rifle through the bathroom
looking for a spare tampon, you discover
that even their toothpaste is somehow more
desirable than yours. And later you go
with a world-famous critic to eat a plate
of sushi prepared by a world-famous chef from
Sweden and the roll is conceived to look like
“a strand of pearls around a white throat,” and is
so confusingly beautiful that it makes itself
impossible to eat. And your friend back home—
who says the pioneers who first settled
the great asphalt parking lot of our
Middle, were not in fact heroic but, really,
the chubby ones who lacked the imagination
to go all the way to California—it could be that
she’s onto something. Because, admit it,
when you look at the people on these streets,
the razor-blade women with their strategic bones
and the men wearing Amish pants with
interesting zippers, it’s pretty clear that you
will never cut it anywhere that constitutes
a where, that even ordering a pint of tuna salad in
a deli is an illustrative exercise in self-doubt.
So when you see the dogs on the high-rise elevators
practically tweaking, panting all the way down
from the 19th floor to the 1st, dying to get on
with their long-planned business of snuffling
trash or peeing on something to which all day
they’ve been looking forward, what you want is
to be on the fastest Conestoga home, where the other
losers live and where the tasteless azaleas are,
as we speak, halfheartedly exploding.

Poem

Rachel Zucker

One evening the husband yelled, “Ew! You smell like a rotten egg!”

The husband yelled, “Disgusting! Disgusting! Disgusting!” as he rolled around with their little boy, tickling him and smelling the little boy’s feet. The little boy laughed and shrieked and laughed so hard he struggled to catch his breath.

“Stop!” begged the boy, who wanted it to go on forever.

She wiped down the counters in the kitchen, surprised to feel a nut of envy hardening in her belly. She wanted to be touched that way. No, not that way.

Mayakovsky

Frank O’Hara

1

My heart’s aflutter!
I am standing in the bath tub
crying. Mother, mother
who am I? If he
will just come back once
and kiss me on the face
his course hair brush
my temple, it’s throbbing!

then I can put on my clothes
I guess, and walk the streets.

2

I love you. I love you,
but I’m turning to my verses
and my heart is closing

like a fist.
Words! be
sick as I am sick, swoon,
roll back your eyes, a pool,
and I’ll stare down
at my wounded beauty
which at best is only a talent
for poetry.

Cannot please, cannot charm or win
what a poet!
and the clear water is thick

with bloody blows on its head.
I embraced a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.

3

That’s funny! there’s blood on my chest
oh yes, I’ve been carrying bricks
what a funny place to rupture!
and now it is raining on the ailanthus
as I step out onto the window ledge
the tracks below me are smoky and
glistening with a passion for running
I leap into the leaves, green like the sea

4

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.