Plenty of guys deal with problems with sex. From heavy porn use, to erectile dysfunction, to general intimacy problems with their wives and girlfriends, men struggle with what it means to be sexually intimate. Watch this 2-min. video on Men and Sex Problems, where Jason talks about some of the problems men have with sex.
In your relationship or marriage, maybe you’ve found yourself getting caught up in a rollercoaster-type experience where you and your wife, girlfriend or partner fight for some time, and then all goes back to serenity, and then it happens again and again, with constant repetition and no solution.
Fighting and conflict happen repeatedly, in a cycle format, and usually it’s tough to see what triggers your fall into fighting, conflict and attacks. When we’re in the fighting, we have no perspective. How can we help ourselves get out of it?
We’re going to talk about how to stop conflict and fightingthrough better understanding your negative relationship cycle.
As a fundamental component of the model of couples therapy known as Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), developed by Canadian psychologist Susan Johnson, PhD., identifying your negative cycle consists of looking at certain layers that exist behind the conflict you get into and actually see.
The negative cycle you and your partner get stuck in usually consists of negative behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that causes distress. We get sucked into this “vortex” and have a difficult time seeing ourselves when we get lost in our “cycle.” We often resort to reactive – and hurtful – words, actions and facial gestures when we are upset, needing something from our partner, or not feeling connected or understood.
When you get lost in conflict, look out for these things that you might be doing to aggravate your negative cycle:
Here’s a free worksheet on identifying your negative relationship cycle. Download and print two copies, one for you and one for your partner or spouse. Open up a conversation around your results, and you might be really pleasantly surprised. And you might just surprise her, too.
For further help, read Sue Johnson’s “Hold Me Tight,” an excellent read to help you start to make sense of this confounding cycle.
If you’re a guy, and you cheated or had an extramarital affair, chances are that you have found yourself stuck in that place between wanting to be with your wife, and wanting to be with your partner in the affair. A lot of men that I talk with find themselves in that very space once they started an affair, and through avoidance and denial, tend to keep themselves there to not have to make a choice.
Cheating men now find themselves in a compromising position: do they try go back to their wives and children, or do they leave their family for their mistress?
Some guys don’t want to deal with this all. They get stuck between two women, and don’t know how to get out. Some guys I talk with want to keep treading water for as long as possible, until one of the women in AA in your decision for them. This is avoidance, and it’s making a decision by not making a decision.
What can you do if you find yourself in this position, between your wife and your girlfriend?
Cheating and infidelity are complex, and these bullet points don’t profess to get you to where you need to be. Ideally, you’ll invest some time and energy into counseling, whether that’s with your wife or alone. Like I wanted to counseling alone, and don’t really want to start to deal with talking about the issues with their wife quite yet. It’s important that you start to consider making some decisions, even if their minor, for your own happiness and everyone else’s.
When our lives don’t turn out exactly how we want them to, men have a certain way of stagnating, or freezing themselves in time. We become like Icemen, psychologically trapped in the confines of our own memories and unable to live in the reality of the present. This inability to contact our lives as they are unfolding now means that life passes us by, and a lot of times we don’t even know it.
Why does this happen Why do we get stuck in time? Is it possible to unfreeze ourselves and start living our lives?
A lot of men stay trapped in periods of their lives that were more glorious: when they were captain of the football team in high school, in their party years in college, in their adolescence. Some guys stay emotionally and psychologically trapped in these periods of their lives because this is when they felt good about themselves and about what they were doing. They were getting acclimated and validation for being a superstar, and the dreary reality of their present lives today doesn’t provide them that same sense of accomplishment or identity boosting.
Who wouldn’t want to relive their glory years? Which guy wouldn’t want to feel good about those points in their lives where things were working well, where they were successful in work or with women, or where they felt really good about themselves?
The problem comes when we stay stuck in this alternate dimension, and never unhook ourselves from those past memories. It’s like we can never make contact with our lives as they are playing out in the present.
A lot of times, our lives are too difficult to deal with, or to even look at. We may be unhappy with our careers or our work, our spouses may be making us miserable, our children may have constantly disappointed us, or we may feel like failures to ourselves. As human beings, it’s to want to avoid pain and suffering, and strive for pleasure. When we get stuck in the past, were living in a faux reality that is out of touch with the present.
The first step to waking up from this disillusionment is to become aware that were actually residing in our memories more than we are in our lives. If we can recognize that, if we can start to shake off the past, no matter how seductive it is over us, we can start to turn to face the reality of our current situations, even if that brings pain, grief, fear or other negative emotions. We may need to deal with people who cause us pain, or with situations, such as work, relationships, or depression, if we start to wake up from living in that alternate reality.
It’s also important to seek out professional help, because it’s difficult to see your situation when you’re smack dab in the middle of it. And, on top of that, if you’ve been living your life in the past, you may need some professional support to help you navigate back to your life.
It’s critical to know that dealing with the pain of the present doesn’t mean you’re fated to live a life of unhappiness and misery. You’re not. Plenty of guys can successfully work through their problems or issues and get to feeling better again while living in their present reality, not in their past. Just because you were a successful student athlete, or popular with the women, or were you stand out in your career, all of those things are fleeting and won’t bring you lifelong happiness. If you start to live more in the present moment, and in your current life as it unfolds today, you’ll learn to ease up on gripping the past four your sense of self-worth and happiness.
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Whether in relationships, at work, or with oneself, there are a multitude of ways to sabotage yourself from getting what you want in your life.
In undermining our own success, we set up scenarios in which we fail, or hold ourselves back unconsciously from what we really want, often out of negative emotions or beliefs that fail to hold up under scrutiny in the real world. In effect, we hold ourselves back, and often don’t know how we do.
If you think you self-sabotage yourself, might any of these things characterize your behavior?
Lacking in self-support and inner resources, those men who self-sabotage seem to constantly make decisions that are bad for them, or at the least, make them deviate from their own path to success in life.
What does self-sabotage look like?
People are attracted to those guys who are confident and not at war with themselves. Self-saboteurs are in a war with themselves, so it’s going to be difficult to attract healthy, growth-oriented people into the realm or the self-saboteur. Even if we say that we want them in our lives, we may be attracting the wrong kinds of people, whether those be women, jobs, friends or the like.
To want health is different from attracting health: if we’re still at war with ourselves, we end up attracting others (read: intimate partners) that conspire in our self-abuse. And that’s not what we want for ourselves. That’s not how we see our lives as healthy and growth-promoting.
What can you do to stop the saboteur in you?
People pleasers are more interested in pleasing others than in taking care of their own needs and concerns. They usually say ‘yes’ when they really mean ‘no’, because they’re afraid of letting others down or upsetting them.
Plenty of guys that I talk with fall into this category of people pleasers. They’re the ones that usually are so attentive to the needs of others, most especially intimate partners, that they neglect themselves. People pleasers who spend their time and energy trying to make others happy – to the detriment of their own happiness – are on a crash course for unhappiness.
People pleasers usually end up stuffing their anger, or intermittently exploding on others, or both. Anger and frustration builds up, and, over time, it needs an outlet. It usually comes out periodically, when it should have a ongoing release valve in the form of good communication with others.
Learning to say ‘no’ is essential for people pleasers. This is the hardest part. Saying ‘no’, for people pleasers, risks a rejection by others who people pleasers think don’t want to hear their ‘no’. It’s a risk. In the mind of the people pleaser, it can be terrifying to say ‘no’. But, like many other things, the reality is often quite different from our fantasy. Usually, people can accept the ‘no’ you give them, once you summon the courage up to finally spit it out.
Here are some more tips to stop people pleasing:
We learn how to people please at an early age, and just because we’ve been dealing with this for most of our lives, it certainly doesn’t mean we have to continue to. There is help, and recovery is possible. I know. I used to be a people pleaser, and not doing it is a hell of a lot better.
When it comes to dealing with others, learning how to communicate effectively is the single most important tool you can use. Whether it’s with coworkers, service providers, your wife, or your friends, saying what you want to say in the way that you want to say it is critical. In intimate relationships, communication between partners can deepen your relationship together, or it can disrupt it to the point of a breakup or divorce.
For men who have a difficult time accessing their emotions, communication can be difficult. Usually, if were not in touch with our emotional state at the time we’re speaking, words come out wrong, and we usually end up acting in ways we don’t mean – reactively and mindlessly. Learning to access our emotional state in the present moment can transform poor communication skills to superior communication skills. This requires training, and development of personal awareness, about the fluctuating moods and experiences one has from moment to moment by checking in with their body, feeling state for their mood.
Speaking from the “I” perspective (as in “I’m moody for irritable, and I need personal time alone.”), as opposed to blaming or criticizing others, including your wife or girlfriend, turns the table around and automatically creates a better trajectory for delivering the words that you really mean. I can’t think of a quicker way to shut people down than by blaming, scapegoating, criticizing, shaming, feeling superior, or generally attacking other people, whether that be your brother, mother, wife, boss, or best friend.
Lastly, having a really clear picture of what you want – whether it’s where you want to eat on Friday night or how much of yourself you want to share in a conversation – is really important. A lot of men struggle in this area, and many guys simply don’t know what they want in terms of short, medium or long term goals. If we don’t know what we want, it’s going to make it impossible to communicate those desires to others, and we may end up getting frustrated with ourselves or others because we can’t spit out what it is that we want, sometimes, we don’t even know what we want and expect that others will. This is a false assumption, and it can impede good communication between people.
Developing better communication skills takes time. Have patience with yourself, but keep working towards developing the skills that you need to get the point across, get what you want, and learn to help others get what they want. Communicating with others is a two-way street: communication is just as much about empathy, understanding and listening as it is the above suggestions. Best of luck, and know that developing better communication skills is well within your reach.
Jealousy and insecurity go hand-in-hand: when were feeling insecure about ourselves, it usually is expressed in the form of jealousy about our partner. We may fantasize that they are cheating on us, not in love with us, or seeking out affirmation or attention from other people. In fact, we may go to great lengths to legitimize those irrational concerns, by checking phones, e-mail accounts or the like. But, the bottom line is, we have to learn how to take responsibility for our own fears and insecurities, and open up to them to be able to forge a deeper connection with our partner.
How can we deal more effectively with jealousy in our relationship? Here’s some ideas to consider:
Jealousy is as old as human existence. We fear “mate poaching,” or someone coming in and swooping up our partner. Aside from the evolutionary function of this fear, this type of thinking is irrational and can distance ourselves from the ones we truly love and want to be close to.
If you’re like most men, it may take you a while to come around to the realization that there are problems in your relationship or marriage. some couples think that if they don’t fight, all is well. But is it? Are you both really okay, or is that what you’re telling yourselves?
For guys, the thought of going in the couples counseling is comparable to getting a root canal. The thought of showing up in the counselor’s office and starting to take a look at the problems, and ultimately, their role in the problems, is no picnic. Added to that, most guys think that the therapist is going to side with their wife or girlfriend, and end up attacking them.
Most of the myths that we generate about couples counseling are false. The right counselor can understand these things, and work with you to help you feel comfortable and not like you’re on the hot seat. The right approach to couples counseling is also critical for the successful goals you want to accomplish with your wife or girlfriend.
One extremely effective orientation to marriage counseling comes in the form of what’s known as EFT, or Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples. The success rate is quite high: studies are coming out that show couples have a better than 70% repair rate from EFT.
Developed by Susan Johnson, Ph.D, a Canadian psychologist, Emotionally Focus Therapy looks at the attachment bonds between couples. This is an approach that looks deeper than just building better communication skills or developing more effective negotiation or coping skills. EFT helps couples connect in an emotional way. And yes, men do want to connect with their wives in the emotional way, even if they don’t say so. It’s this emotional bond between partners that is sustainable, and many of the reactive behaviors and emotions that result are part of a complex “dance” or chronic negative cycle that emerges between partners.
The idea is to bring awareness to that negative cycle, and all work together in therapy to help couples stop fighting, reduce conflict and connected and more animate an emotional way. The negative cycle becomes the problem, and therapist and couple work towards understanding and reducing the negative cycle together.
Even guys who are hesitant to dive into their feelings talk about really making progress with this form of marriage counseling. a lot of guys really enjoy it, and not only turn around the destructive path of their relationship, but are able to improve it in ways that they never thought that they could.
Here’s a free worksheet on identifying your negative cycle with your partner. Download this and do it together to begin the process of identifying how you both get stuck in your own relationship patterns: http://phoenixmenscounseling.com/clinicalforms/negative-cycle.pdf
You don’t have to feel hopeless and trapped in your relationship or marriage situation. There is help, and options for you to explore instead of a breakup or divorce. You might be really surprised with the results.
