A Different Leap of Faith

*Author's Note - This article is actually a chapter from a book I am now writing.  I would be grateful for your feedback if you would please send it to me on the form at the bottom of this page. 

              Propensity for shame, like pride, seems hard-wired into our emotional motherboards.  It’s embedded in our basic genetic endowment.  I’m tempted to start a long esoteric discussion about the evolutionary advantages of such an endowment.  The subject fascinates me but I’ll spare you from what would be my own indulgence.  Let it suffice to say that shame is nearly universal and the fear of shame is woven throughout our private daily experiences.  In an intimate relationship we feel most vulnerable because of our fear of shame.  We don’t want to “get our feelings hurt.”  But what does that expression really mean?  It’s unfortunate that we limit our self-awareness when we use that expression.  We don’t look to define exactly what feelings will be hurting and how we’re already afraid of them before they get conjured up.

            So what does all this have to do with practical improvement of your relationship?  After all, I had initially promised you practicality. OK, here’s something very practical to consider.  In my experience, the single biggest reason why counseled couples fail to improve their relationships is that they won’t do the work.  Either they won’t get started or they quickly stop working when they hit an uncomfortable feeling.  Only a minority will methodically persist despite uncomfortable shame charged emotions.  These emotions are often attached to beliefs and perceptions such as the following:

• I’m putting in more effort than my partner.  I’m being victimized so I’ll stop my efforts.

• My partner doesn’t really care about me.  Therefore, why should I care about them.  I’ll show them that I can be uncaring and independent too.

• My partner blames me.  I need to stand up for myself by blaming back.

• I just don’t have any free time to spend with my partner.  Why can’t he/she appreciate how hard I work for both of us.

• I initiate more suggestions than my partner.  I’m being taken for granted.   I’ll stop initiating until they do more.

• When I try to use self-suggestion to influence my emotions, I feel silly.  Most other people don’t do this silly stuff.  They use self-discipline.  I’ll stop being silly and I’ll try to act stronger like the others.

• My partner isn’t changing fast enough.  This isn’t working.  I’ll stop what I’m doing.

• My partner won’t give me any credit for changing.  They still won’t trust me.  Since it makes no difference to them, I’ll stop my efforts.

            Embedded throughout these perceptions are three fear driven beliefs that inhibit marital change.  The first one goes something like this: “If I’m not getting at least 50 % or if I’m giving any more than 50 %, then I’m a victim.  And if I allow myself to be a victim, then I’ll be unworthy.”   This fear of victimization is often so powerful that it tempts us to strike a pre-emptive emotional blow.  That way we can get “one up” at the beginning of the anticipated conflict we assume will occur anyway.  The second belief involves an inflated responsibility for being productive.  It may unconsciously dominate us by making us too busy with work or childcare to ever arrange private leisure.  This exaggerated sense of responsibility usually results from fearing that we’re unworthy if we’re not toiling away for pride.  Without hard work, we may feel uneasy and anxious.  Of course all this is very hard to consciously admit.  Instead, we may tell ourselves something like: “I just don’t have any free time because of everything I have to do.  We’ll eventually get around to having time together when things let up.”  We need to look within ourselves if the work burden never lets up and we can’t find free time.  Our blind spot could be that we’re too emotionally hamstrung to ever make time.  We may covertly feel that our private selves are not as important as our responsibilities.          

            The third common saboteur of marital recovery is the fear of being “silly.”  This fear inhibits us from trying something new.  There’s a particular irony about this fear.  The irony is that “feeling silly” often occurs when we’re experiencing our greatest growth.  The sense of silliness actually comes from contradicting old emotionally conditioned mandates for how we should be.  These are technically called schemas.  We feel silly when we begin to defy our old roles and old inhibitions.  The silliness comes to us because the old schemas have not yet been reconditioned.  If we continue to practice our new behavior, then the sense of silliness will eventually dissipate.  So to reiterate, feeling silly is often a sign that we’re beginning to grow in a new direction.

Inoculating yourself with faith and courage

Let me share a concern.  At this point in our discussion I am aware of how much I’ve dragged you over the coals of a very negative focus.  We’ve discussed fear, shame, and self-sabotage.  I’m just a bit concerned that I may be misinterpreted or prematurely judged.  Based on our preceding discussion, it may appear that I’m preoccupied only with the dark side of human nature.  Will the rest of the book be depressing?  Is this guy the Darth Vader of marital self-help authors?  

            Anyone who knows me well knows how much I believe in the power of love and spirituality.  My clients are used to me talking to them in such terms.  They also know several other important things.  They know that I don’t teach these concepts to promote my own religious beliefs.  They know that I teach them to help people unlock their own personal authority and creativity.  I have no need to promote a belief in a particular religion or a deity.  That’s not my concern.  My concern is that you learn to strengthen and effectively use the positive emotional forces that are already within yourself.  And you can’t effectively use those forces if you can’t use them methodically.  And you can’t use them methodically if you don’t know where and when to apply them.  And you can’t know where and when to apply them if you keep yourself in La La Land about the real obstacles within yourself.  That’s why I’ve risked such a negative focus early in this book.  My commitment is to be practical and it’s very practical to know the exact nature of the obstacles even if they are well hidden in yourself.

            It isn’t practical to use this chapter to detail all the different ways to apply faith and courage.  We’ll deal with some of those later.  What we can discuss are some general guidelines that will help.  If you want to avoid self-sabotage and thereby avoid becoming a part of the 2/3 statistic of couples who stay stuck, then work hard to adopt the following principles:

1)      Dare to have faith that you are larger than your conscious self.  Risk believing that there are other powerful and beneficial parts of yourself that help you beyond your conscious control.

2)      Give yourself permission to not be in total conscious control of your feelings. 

3)      Learn to influence your feelings instead of trying to control them. 

4)      Invite faith to give you courage and protection at the moment when your relationship begins to hurt or frighten you. 

5)      Accept, respect, and embrace your fears until they no longer diminish you. 

6)      Accept, respect, and embrace your dependence until it becomes your powerful ally. 

7)      Accept, respect, and embrace your anger until it becomes your beneficial tool.

These things aren't easy to do.  However, when we learn to do them we ‘re much better equipped to maintain emotional intimacy.  We’re better equipped to let go of our reactive defenses that perpetuate the old cycle:  defenses such as blaming, ridicule, raging, sarcasm, or just plain hiding.  When we apply the preceding principles, we’re more prepared to make constructive leaps of faith instead of destructive leaps of pride.  That’s a curious expression isn’t it? You’ve heard of the proverbial “leap of faith” but “leap of pride?”  What does that mean?  Think about it.  When we’re threatened or angry in our relationship, what do we do?  Of course we make leaps of pride. We do it to escape our shame.  We may leap to sarcasm or blame to accentuate how we’re on the superior side of the issue.  By contrasting ourselves with the crafted image of our partner’s inferiority, we’re leaping to a transient feeling of superiority.  Cheap pride!  When we raise our voices in an argument, we’re leaping to pride by displaying how important and noticeable we are.  When we try to show how little we care for our partner because we feel ignored, we’re trying to create an image of ourselves as being autonomous and strong.  Pride again.  A lot of what we do to sabotage marital change has to do with these little leaps of pride.  And when our partner does the same, we do a kind of dance in tandem – around and around, again and again. 

Leaping to faith affords us a passage out of the labyrinth of false pride.  It allows us to risk changes in our emotionally rooted behaviors.  But the faith to which I refer is not necessarily the same as “The leap of faith”.  This latter expression has by now been thoroughly claimed by the religious establishment.  As I previously said, promoting formal religion and deity worship isn't my concern.  I’m much more concerned with everyday leaps of faith, particularly in the context of intimate relationships.  When you look into your partner’s angry face and see their momentary contempt for you in their eyes, what’s going to save you?  What’s going to prevent you from feeling awash with shame, unlovability, and defectiveness?  What’s going to prevent you from desperately grasping at the straws of cheap pride already within your reach?  At that moment you really have a choice:  you will either choose control and pride or you will choose influence and faith.  And if you choose faith, it will need to be faith that you remain intrinsically connected to value, importance, and worthiness despite your partner’s contempt.  The faith you evoke will need to both support you and block the shame.

When it comes to relationships, try to think of faith in a somewhat unconventional way.  Most people think of faith pertaining to belief and a deity.  If you have such a faith that’s great!  You’re better off for it.  However, I encourage you to think of faith as also involving your felt connection to positive meaning.  And these positive feelings and meanings lie within yourself and your memories.  There’s a parallel here to what you’ve been learning about shame.  Just as the latter negative feelings can be triggered from memory, so can the positive ones.  The technical term is “affect” and there’s an extensive affect theory about how feelings are neurologically layered into different memory schemas.  It’s important to realize how much our ability to influence our relationships comes from our own inner emotional resources.  Let’s take the example of when your partner looks at you with contempt.  At the moment when their negative attitude begins to wash over you, you’re going to need to let go of them and focus into yourself.  To not do this is to subscribe to agony or to rage!  If you’re able to tap into positive affect it will feel like a sense of  “deservingness” or “OK-ness” for you to feel good even while your partner fumes.  If your connection to positive affect is strong enough, you can deal with your mistakes and personal limitations while refusing to adopt your partner’s negative attitude.  You can even avoid sabotaging your own efforts to improve the relationship. 

  Tapping into positive affect through faith is not an intellectual exercise.  It’s much more emotional and it also involves a different language with different rules.  That’s why the word “faith” is much more descriptive of the process than the word “belief.  How we make leaps of faith, how we speak to our unconscious with a different language using different rules, how we maintain feelings of our own intrinsic worthiness, and how we apply this in our relationships will all be woven into our future discussions.  These initial chapters were merely intended to introduce you to the true cost of change.  By now you’re probably clear about what that cost is.  To change our relationships, we must struggle with what we fear most about ourselves.  We get to feel both fear and shame while we carry on that struggle.  We get to make difficult choices between easy pride and more tenuous faith.  But while fear and shame are the cost of change, hope and faith are its inspiration.

  ã COPYRIGHT (12/2000) Allied Psychological Services.  All rights reserved.                       

I would greatly appreciate your suggestions and feedback below          

ã COPYRIGHT (12/2000) Allied Psychological Services.  All rights reserved.

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