The Art of Possibility
Wife asked me last night, "If neither of us are going to change our behavior, why are we in couples counseling?" I didn't have an immediate answer, but I didn't believe it came down to behavior. It wasn't until she read a passage from, The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life that I realized she'd asked me the wrong question:
You look for thoughts and actions that reflect survival and scarcity, comparison and competition, attachment and anxiety.
Oftentimes what causes us stress and worry is not the situation, rather trying to force the situation to fit our paradigm. Spoiler alert: It often can't, or won't. Situations are funny like that, and so is our ability to immediately and unconsciously reframe them to work to our advantage. Another spoiler alert: That's not how reframing works. Instead it's a purposeful, active, oftentimes uncomfortable and lengthy process.
We struggle because of our perception of the situation, not the situation itself. The therapist asked each of us how we could change our behavior to alleviate the other's concern, not how we could individually reframe our perspective to alleviate those concerns on our own. Off the top of my head the opposite of survival, scarcity, comparison, competition, attachment and anxiety is to look for thoughts and actions which reflect thriving, and abundance, collaboration, connection and peace. Difficult to pull off? Sure. But what wouldn't we do to thwart suffering and fear in our life? Because if asking this is too much, then asking anything will be too much.
Change of behavior should happen, yes. But only when it embraces the abundant, collaborative, connective, peaceful mindset rather than wielded as a weapon. I can only speak for myself, but I'm in couples counseling to restore the lines of communication in order to examine expectation management through guided instruction and gain new tools to aid in that endeavor; to hear and express concerns, to validate and be validated, and to discover my own shortcomings I may have overlooked to ensure a path to resolution <3