It’s Springtime. Time to Clean Out That Closet Full O’ Relationship Clutter.

Ahh, March. It’s that time of the year again. Can you believe it? Have you been crossing your fingers hoping for a little bit more cold weather?

At least the annual rituals return: Spring Training, outdoor activities, St. Patty’s, March Madness, and spring cleaning (who, me?). Are you carving out some time to clean your mental closets, too, as well as your shed and closet? What about the other parts of your life - physical, emotional, work, financial?

I like to see this as the 1/4 way time through the year to assess and see how things are going in my life. I tend to get my annual physical around now, check the credit scores out and make sure I’m not a fraud victim, take the car, you know, stuff like that. Life’s maintenance work. It all seems to get worse when I put it off, you know?

Do you have Spring maintenance rituals for yourself? How about taking a temperature check on your relationship or marriage? How is that going these days for you? Not in one currently, you say, and want to be? I say take inventory of the things that you need to get yourself in one.

This edition’s “Mentality” includes:
- Retail Therapy 101 & an interview with a woman who knows (what you don’t) about your woman’s shopping habits
- Office affairs, and why it starts with the heart

So, what’s the biggest issue you’re currently struggling with these days? Would you like to see it appear in a future edition of “Mentality”?

E-mail me with the one elusive problem that is getting under your skin, and that you’d like to see addressed at jfierstein@mac.com. I’d like to write about the things that matter most to you, so send me your ideas. That’s why I write this thing - for you.

(Read more about Jason’s story here: http://phoenixmenscounseling.com/meet-jason.html)

Retail Therapy 101: Playbook for Guys
It might still be the recession, but she’s shopping like it’s 2007.

Do you like killing two birds with one stone? What if you could better your marriage or relationship while saving some money (and sanity)? What guy wouldn’t want to?

For the answers, we seek to understand a common form of self-help - retail therapy. The term was coined by the Chicago Tribune in the 1980’s to describe our culture in this way: “We’ve become a nation measuring out our lives in shopping bags and nursing our psychic ills through retail therapy.”

Retail therapy is shopping with the intention to feel better, or to temporarily alleviate stress, depression or emotional pain. We hide what is wrong in our lives with shopping, and is no different from any other drug when abused and used excessively.

Christy Miller is a Scottsdale-based image consultant, closet coordinator and owner of Desert Flower Does Workable Wardrobes (http://www.desertflowerdoes.com/) and knows what women are really seeking behind the compulsive drive to shop and collect closets full of clothes.

“Women live for affirmations,” says Miller. “We need to hear that we look good.” She observes that “men are visual beings and women are very aware about this. Men need to compliment us, let us know we look good, even if it is small or big, but those compliments are what we feed on - the positive affirmations.” Miller thinks that women that (listen up here, guys) feel good themselves directly affects their positive self-worth.

For Miller, retail therapy is no different from other forms of addiction for women. “It’s just like a drug, that quick fix, (to) feel good shopping for an item that will make them feel good,” she says. “But when they get that fix and have bought and get back home, that fix is taken care of. Once women pay…they most likely leave the store having mixed feelings because they had their ‘fix’ but now the guilt comes along and this is again, just like any kind of addiction.” The thrill is over, and the problems are still there.

So, how can we as men help? Not saying anything at all will keep you in the same place in your marriage - stuck and in the dark. Addressing the issue by simply saying, “You know, I feel really concerned about our finances and about us. Let’s sit down and talk about this.” It can be that simple. Including the “us” makes it better than just “you,” where she feels less alone because it’s just “her” problem. Validating her beauty and her as a person will give her self-esteem that doesn’t come from the stores.

If there are deeper issues that aren’t being addressed, then it might be time to seek marriage or couples counseling to work on the real issues. There’s more to your wife or girlfriend’s unhappiness than meets the eye.

The Office Affair Prevention Manual
Most likely, it’s more about thy heart than about thy loins.

Have you been in a compromising situation at work with a co-worker or boss, and secretly thought about cheating on your mate? Has your office set-up made it easy to have an affair, even if you didn’t act on it? Forty-three percent of workers in the United States say they’ve dated a fellow employee, according to a CNN poll, but exactly how many of those have been married people is not as well understood.

So many more hours are dedicated to the office these days. It makes it much harder to nurture what we’ve got at home with our mates, and to take care of the relationships we already have. Because we spend much time in an close environment like work, there is much more opportunity for work-based relationships to become personal, and then to develop into intimate or sexual relationships. If we end up spending more time in the office than in the home, the rift that separate spouses becomes greater, which encourages infidelity.

But here’s the key: the drive to have a sexual relationship is most often an expression of what’s missing in the original relationship or marriage. We’ve got to fix the problems in the marriage, because this is the foundational solution.

Office affairs are disastrous times three: your job is compromised, your marriage is compromised, and you have to experience the inner hell everywhere you go - work and home. Something has to give, and it’s bound to until some action is taken, by you or someone else.

Here’s four tips to help keep your marriage and prevent you from getting into an office affair:

1. Diagnose the problem in the first place: is there something missing for you in your marriage or relationship? Are you able to hunt down the problem with old-fashioned honesty and self-reflection? Would this require a hear-to-heart with your beloved, before you act on any impulses that you might regret later?

2. Recognize emotions as they are: if you are feeling attracted to someone at the office, make a note of that in your mind. Attraction, or lust, is normal, and everyone experiences it, but when you act on it, it becomes something else.

3. If you love your woman, put yourself in her shoes: Develop empathy for your mate, and ask yourself what they would do or think about any planned infidelities.

4. Get help: seek out professional counseling, either couple or individual. Choose someone you feel most comfortable talking with and can confide in with your secrets.

Until next edition, guys! Enjoy the beginning of Spring, and see you in April.

Jason
Counselor for Men
“The Man That Men Will Talk To.”

(This article appears in Psychology Today Magazine, Mar/Apr 2009 edition, by Jay Dixit)

Without doubt, there are big problems that afflict relationships; infidelity, abuse, and addiction are not perishing from the earth. A highly sexualized society delivers an alluring drumbeat of distractions. But it may be the petty problems that subvert love most surreptitiously. The dirty socks on the floor. The way our partner chews so loudly. Like the relentless drip of a leaky faucet, they erode the goodwill that underlies all relationships. Before you know it, you feel unloved, unheard, and underappreciated, if not criticized and controlled. Intimacy becomes a pale memory.

Yet irritations are inevitable in relationships. It’s just not possible to find another human being whose every quirk, habit, and preference aligns perfectly with yours. The fundamental challenge in a relationship, contends New York psychiatrist John Jacobs, is “figuring out how to negotiate and live with your partner’s irritants in a way that doesn’t alienate them and keeps the two of you connected.” When marriages don’t work, he adds, often the partners are fighting not over big issues but over petty differences in style.

We each have differing values and ways of looking at the world, and we want different things from each other. Such differences derive from our genetically influenced temperaments, our belief systems, and experiences growing up in our family of origin, explains Diane Sollee, family therapist and founder of SmartMarriages. “We think, ‘My father knew how to put the toilet seat down, so why can’t you?’ Or ‘My father never put the toilet seat down, so I’m not going to, either.’” Whatever the source, such patterns are deeply ingrained, difficult to dislodge.

Sometimes a sock on the floor is just a sock on the floor. But especially among longtime couples, little irritations may code for deeper problems. It’s as if ice cubes become an iceberg, says family therapist John Van Epp. Think of ice cubes as free-floating irritants —bothersome but meaningless: You hate the way your partner puts his feet on the furniture or exaggerates. Such behaviors might drive you up the wall, but they’re harmless.

But small problems coalesce into a vast, submerged force when they take on a different meaning in your mind—when you add them up as evidence of a character flaw or moral defect. You’re annoyed by the fact that your significant other hates sharing food from her plate. And that she hates planning in advance. And that when you try to share important news, she gets excited and cuts you off to share something of her own. When you consider them together, a picture emerges of your partner as selfish and self-absorbed, always putting her own needs first.

“You don’t really live with the partner in your home. You live with the partner in your head,” explains Van Epp. Gradually, you begin looking for evidence that your partner is self-absorbed—and of course you find it. Your perceptions shift over time: The idealized partner you started out with becomes, well, less ideal.

But if you want to stay in a relationship, something needs to change. In all likelihood, it’s you.

Every annoyance in a relationship is really a two-way street. Partners focus on what they’re getting, not on what they’re giving. But no matter how frustrating a partner’s behavior, your interpretation is the greater part of it. What matters is the meaning you attach to it.

Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20090305-000001.xml

There’s plenty of reasons to be commitment phobic if you’re a guy: afraid of losing your freedom, wanting to hold onto youth and your wildness, fear of intimacy, not wanting to have children, and on and on.

For evey guy, there might be new reason not to commit. Some guys I have talked to about fear of commitment talk about the fact that they are in a relationship that’s not really for them to begin with. I know that guys sometimes have very good reasons for not wanting to commit. It’s possible that the relationship is not fulfilling to them in some way, but that they have quieted and suppresed their voice of dissent, the voice that is telling them that their relationship is not really what they want.

Guys are afraid of devastating their woman if they break up with her. This may seem like care, and I’m sure it truly is, but not breaking up with someone because you’re “too afraid to crush” your woman by ending the relationship is not doing justice to her, or themself. Real care for your mate is being honest with yourself and with her.

Men are also afraid that if they get into a relationship, that things are going to be so different, because they’ll lose their voice and lose their old, former self. This doesn’t have to be the case. Nobody ever said that because you get married, you give yourself up to boring and complacent. You can if you want to, but it’s a choice. Usually, the mental fantasy of how it will be when “we’re married” is an excuse to become phobic of being in a relationship.

Some guys purely don’t want to grow up. They want to go out, drink, carouse with women, and do what they want to do. Most of the time, unless your girlfriend or fiancee is o.k. with you staying out all night and stumbling home drunk, sleeping with other women, and doing whatever the hell you want to do, it’s hard to be a guy that wants to have his cake and eat it, too. It’s selfish, and irresponsible, and doesn’t create a satisfying relationship for either party.

The silver lining to the recession is that I keep reading about stories of people, like you and me, who are forced into questioning what they do for work, and if it still has meaning for them after all.

I am reading about people who have used their layoff to re-examine their values and beliefs, and challenge the forces that brought them to choose the current work that they are doing. Maybe they are unfulfilled. Maybe their job never brought them their fantasy that they had pinned on this employer, or their field. Maybe they’ve burned out a while ago, and the recession is exposing them to that reality just now.

The idea of re-examination is fascinating to me. Rather, the forces at work that come together to create that re-examination are even more interesting. Why do people suddenly decide to do something different? Or maybe, it’s been a long-winded process, and the door just got kicked open to make a change.

Is this you? Are you happy doing what you for for work? Have you taken a status check with yourself and re-examined your level of happiness with your work?

I’ve been in jobs and a career or two that suck, that didn’t make me happy, and that forced me into a sustained daydreaming state. I don’t want to go back to that mental state anymore. I want to be afforded the continued opportunity to really savor my work and wake up in the morning enjoying what I am doing and feel proud of the work that I do. And I do have that now.

Our life energy is limited. We only have so much on this Earth. We work simply to earn income. And income is simply and expression of life energy. So, we trade our life energy in exchange for income. So, how can we start to maximize our experiences for the life energy that we trade away for - the most precious commodity that we have on this planet.

Maybe the recession is allowing you to re-examine these things. If you’re not in a position to leave your job, or your field, maybe you’ve begun to re-examine the things that you can change in your life so that you start to do more that is aligned with your values. If you value people and family, you might start to spend more time with family and prioritize them over other commitments. If you value music and art, maybe you dedicate more time to playing music or creating or viewing art. If you value sports, maybe this becomes the time to spend more energy and time playing them more.

In times of crisis, such as now, the quality of hope and transformation is always latent. I’m not talking about a Barack Obama-type movement, but I’m thinking smaller and more personal. Crisis always creates opportunity and re-examination, so this is a fine time to do just that. I know I am right now.

The thing about winning is that it also produces losers. Somebody’s gotta lose. We’ve been winning and losing since we were young. From our earliest experiences, from the kickball field to the career ladder, we have been confronted with opportunities to be winners and losers, and sometimes this becomes such as serious pursuit, that we wrap our sense of identity around whether we win or lose.

It’s hard for many of us men to wallow in loss, because it stokes our experience of shame. Shame as losers. Shame as men. Shame as people who are not the best.

Our development and our culture reinforce the idea that winning is superior to losing. Now, I’m not saying that to be a loser is an admirable quality. But, we learn early on that winning is everything. We have competitions and spelling bees and systems based on GPA that sets up competition from the beginning. We grow into men that seek winning in career, life and relationships above all else, and start to depend on winning for our self-esteem.

Are you this guy? Do you put winning above everything else? Do you have to win at all costs?

Feeling like a loser inside doesn’t change. Winning at all costs brings a lot of fame, power and external success, but men who strive continually for this end up subjecting their self-esteem to the forces at work on the outside. Competition ends up dictating how men feel about themselves, and they end up losing their “inner sense” of self. If you end up needing praise and validation from everyone else all of the time, then you lose that sense of ease inside yourself. Success becomes contingent on people and events outside of oneself, who are bound to disappoint at some point.

To deal with the shame of “being a loser” messages is what men who overcompensate by winning should do first. We have to first get in touch with the shame place, and deal with that face to face, instead of seeking out more people and events that validate our sense of “being a winner.” But does this happen in reality? No. I may be an idealist, but I’m also a realist, too. There is too much to lose in always striving to be a winner, too many material acquisitions and too much external power to have. Why work on it?

Also, just easing up that need to win at all costs is a practice that I would recommend. If possible, try to put some competition in perspective then next time it grabs you and doesn’t let go. The next competition should elicit some fun, whether it’s a pickup game of basketball or video games. Can you play for fun and not to win?

The cost of winning can sometimes eclipse the intial high of the win, especially when messages of shame and self-worth underlie the victories to begin with.

Men and Fear and Recession