It seems to me that the biggest hurdle we're all trying to clear is trust. We all have expectations of our spouses, and they of us. Most of us, if truth be told, don't completely trust our spouses. Many of them don't trust us. Some of us have very low expectations ("She doesn't love me anymore, she'll never change." or "He's a selfish [censored] now. He'll pretend to make changes, but they'll never last.")
Some of us have very high expectations. ("I read the book, I did Technique #32-A, where the hell are my blowjobs?")
I'm beginning to see some similarities in the way we handle each other and the way people in my profession deal with delinquent children. Generally, we punish them until they either straighten out (I'm not saying that never happens, but it's rare enough that they make movies about it) or push back hard enough to get expelled. Or we tolerate their behavior, more or less, and lower our expectations because they're poor, or their parents are divorced, or they have ADHD, or whatever.
Beginning to see the parallels? Well, how about this?
There is a school of thought referred to as the "Nurtured Heart" approach. It's got a patchouli-scented hippy free-love name, but here's how it works:
The basic assumption of NH is that there are few kids who genuinely hate humanity and would like to kill everybody. But there is a large group of kids who have been trained to understand that they don't count for anything and nothing they do matters to people. NH looks for ways to change this. They take two approaches:
1. Lower, then raise, expectations. The standard approach if Johnny is throwing tantrums (in middle school) and threatening people is to punish him with what amounts to time out--in-school and -out-of-school suspensions--until he not only stops doing that, but also treats classmates with respect, goes to class reliably and on time, does his work, etc. But it took him years to get to this point, and combined with what he deals with at the best of times, that's impossible to do all at once. Because he knows he can't do it all at once, and he knows the school won't be satisfied unless he does, it logically follows that there's no point in making any of these changes because it'll never be enough--"Nothing I do is ever good enough for you people." The NH solution is to set one or two goals--NEVER more than three--for behavior and stick to those. Sounding familiar yet?
The way this is explained involves ropes and whales. No, I'm not kidding. Ever wonder how they train a killer whale to jump up and over a rope suspended several feet above the water? The don't do that in nature, you know. Sure, they reward the thing with fish when it does the trick well--but how did they convince it to do it the first time? The answer is that the trick IS impossible at first. They lower expectations. They put a stick on the floor of the pool. Every time the whale swims over the stick, it gets a reward. Then they raise the stick a foot off the bottom and repeat. Soon the whale knows it can swim over the stick and get a treat. Every time it learns to do this reliably, the stick is raised.
When the stick is high enough for the whale to swim under it, it learns that there are no treats for swiming under. It doesn't have to be punished; there are treats for going over, there's nothing for going under. It's not rocket science, even for a whale! When the stick is raised too high to swim over, the whale starts jumping. At that point, you can set the stick at any height the whale can reach, and it will gladly go over.
Ironically, this "lowering" of expectations is actually a "raising" of expectations. The trainer is willing to put in the hard work and long hours of moving through the lower goals because he knows the whale will be able to move on to fulfill his very high expectations. If the whale couldn't do that, there wouldn't be much point. Does this suggest any similarities with your expectations of your spouse? Or theirs of you?
2. The second approach, used at the same time, is to "Tape Over." I'm sure you all remember cassette tapes, right? They were like CD's, only they cost three times as much to manufacture and a third as much to buy in a store. Well, NH compares problem kids to a tape recorder. All their lives, or at least since they started misbehaving in school, chances are that people have been harping on what they did wrong. Each of these comments gets stored away. If they heard one bad thing per day for five years at school--and that's WAY low for even a fairly good kid, sad to say--that's 180 days x 5 =900 negative comments on the tape. If you say "Hey, GREAT job on that report! You must have worked like crazy! I think that was the best I've seen all year." to a kid like this, your comment goes on the tape, too. But it's got 899 competitors that all agree that it's false. That's why these kids don't trust adults who say positive things, and the more aggressively positive and forced-cheerful you try to be, the more they dismiss it as fakery. They don't trust. You or people like you (in their minds) have told them over and over how bad they were, and that's what they know.
If you asked a stranger how to get to the park, and he told you to go left, you'd probably go left. But if there 20 people behind him and they all said "No! Don't believe him, you've got to go right!" then you'd probably go right. We're trained by evolution to go with the numbers when we're not in a position to judge the quality of information. Usually, it's right. But when you've gotten erroneous (even if well-meaning) information repeatedly over the years, your logic works against you.
So what does NH do about this? Well, the problem with trouble kids is that they have this backlog of a thousand negative comments, but their behavior at the moment makes it hard to give genuine positive feedback--and remember, faking it makes it worse, not better. One fake positive comment is like two negatives. So if you can't say negative, and you can't say positive, and you can't fake it, what do you do?
In the NH way of thinking, you forget positive and negative and make neutral, but absolutely true comments. Things like "I see you wore your Metallica shirt today." or "You brought your book today." Never anything like "Dude, I love Metallica too!" or "You brought your book! That's EXCELLENT, Johnny, doesn't it feel great to be responsible?" These are dismissed as fake by the NH kid.
The comments suggested may seem meaningless, and in a way they are. They're simple observations of facts with no value judgment made or implied. Their purpose is not to pump up the all-important and all-powerful Self Esteem. They have three purposes:
They establish that you are paying attention to Johnny. This is not dishonest, by the way, because to do this, you DO have to pay attention to him.
They establish that you are not being dishonest. The first couple of times you say "Hey, you're wearing your red shirt today" to a truly troubled kid, they'll literally say "No I'm not!" It's a reflex they don't control at first; they trust NOTHING an adult says.
You are replacing the negative records on the tape, taping over them with neutral comments. The idea is not instantly to change the kid's outlook from negative to positive; that can't be done. The idea is to begin to lower the amount of negativity in his head.
OK, that's all I've got for now. Discuss amongst yourselves. Feel free to tell me I'm crazy.
Dude, you're brilliant. Seriously, this is not a fake comment to an NH kid. You really are brilliant.
So I am assuming you are realizing that your wife's negative comments and rejection over the years have made all those taped messages in your mind and you are having to do a lot of work to do the tape-overs. Is that where you are headed?
Again, brilliant.
And yes we should treat ourselves and our spouses with the same tenderness and compassion that misguided youth are treated! We all deserve that compassion and help.
I am sorry if you have already said this elsewhere, but what do you do exactly? (Just curiousity, don't have to answer if it is too personal).
Special education, currently in the sixth and seventh grades. Basically I'm the guy who tries to help kids make the transition from special ed to regular classes with less and less support.
Really good stuff. When I get frustrated by rejection or lack of enthusiasm for ml, even when I try to pretend it doesn't bother me (usually by not saying anything) my wife notices and "can't believe what a baby I am being" which, of course, makes it go from bad to worse. After reading your post, I think that is because my tapes (or hard-drive for the Gen Ys out there) is full of negativity that was already there. This makes a lot of sense because when I look back at the beginning of our relationship, a request of "not tonight, but we will do it tomorrow" didn't bring the negativity and cynicism that it does today, that had to be earned.
CB
Me; 42, W; 43 M; 16 yrs S12, D9
3/13 - "I want to move to XYZ City (four hours away) and it might be without you, not sure" 5/13 - "Not sure I meant that"
Right, and it works both ways. She's building up a tape record on you, too.
Originally Posted By: DanceQueen
So I am assuming you are realizing that your wife's negative comments and rejection over the years have made all those taped messages in your mind and you are having to do a lot of work to do the tape-overs. Is that where you are headed?
Yeah, that's one thing I've been trying to do. Unfortunately, my wife has never had the Nurtured Heart training. It's the way someone can make a genuine effort to do something positive, and yet you find yourself unable to believe in it at all, that's most insidious. And I'm a defensive person . . . and an argumentative person, truth be told. . . by nature anyway.
Originally Posted By: DanceQueen
Dude, you're brilliant. Seriously, this is not a fake comment to an NH kid. You really are brilliant.
Well, I'm observant and analytical, which are often mistaken for brilliance. The problem, as you tried to tell me, is that observation and analysis can take the place of things you should be doing instead. I'm the nerdy scientist in every action movie who's standing in the path of the monster muttering "Fascinating . . ." and has to be reminded that it's time to run or fight or do something.
Silly - Another way to "erase" the tapes, I have found, is to do activities that allow you to disconnect the thought process and go into auto-pilot. You have mentioned the firing range in the past, that's a good one. Other examples might be sports, dancing, working out, etc....sex!? (oops that might have been a little insensitive.)
My personal favorite is listening to music and I don't mean putting music on in the background. Really listening to music, you sit down in the sweet spot of your system, close your eyes and picture the soundstage in front of you. Before long you are carried off to a different place and have music floating in front of you. If there are lyrics you may have thoughts of those. If it is an instrumental you are free to have thoughts about whatever you like. Sometimes you don't think at all and other times you may have an emotional release. It does really help to get you to a more positive frame of mind and erase some of the bad stuff. (BTW a really good set of closed headphones work wonders if you have a noisy household.)
