Psychology Today Blogs - Steven Stosny

Political Opinion and Professional Ethics

Steven Stosny — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:29:03 -0700

There is a serious ethical issue with political opinions expressed in these blogs under the guise of psychological expertise. Psychologists may have the right to express political opinions and make partisan interpretations as much as anyone. But posting them on the Psychology Today website implies that they are something more than opinion and interpretation.

Other blogs and even legitimate news media can recycle sensational quotes from psychologists about so and so being a psychopath or depressed or a congenital liar or suffering PTSD or afflicted with anger or anxiety problems. When a professional psychologist expresses these opinions they necessarily imply clinical expertise and empirical support, which, of course, they do not have.

No ethical clinician or researcher would make a diagnosis of someone he or she has not examined and tested or about whom he/she has strong emotions or biases. And none would want to give the impression that personal opinions have professional expertise and empirical research supporting them.

You are The Way You Value and Devalue

Steven Stosny — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 11:02:24 -0700

Self-value is a far more useful construction than self-esteem. The latter is, at best, a function of what you think about yourself -- mostly in comparison to others -- or, worse, a depiction of your ego. Value is more behavioral than conceptual, more about how you act toward what you value, including yourself, than how you regard it. To value something goes beyond regarding it as important; you also appreciate its qualities, while investing the time, energy, effort, and sacrifice necessary for its maintenance. If you value a da Vinci painting, you focus on its beauty and design more than the cracks in the paint, and, above all, you treat it well, making sure that it is maintained in ideal conditions of temperature and humidity. Similarly, people with self-value appreciate their better qualities (while trying to improve their lesser ones) and take care of their physical and psychological health, growth, and development.

Now here's the tricky part. People with high self-value necessarily value others.

Although hard to see in yourself, you can probably notice the following tendency in other people. When they value someone else, they value themselves more, i.e., they elevate their sense of well being, appreciate their better qualities, and facilitate their health, growth, and development. When they devalue someone else, they devalue themselves - their sense of well being deteriorates, they violate their basic humanity to some degree and become more narrow and rigid in perspective, all of which impair growth and development. In other words, when you value someone else you experience a state of value - vitality, meaning, and purpose (literally, your will to live increases) - and when you devalue someone else you experience a devalued state, wherein the will to live becomes less important than the will to dominate or at least be seen as right.

It's often hard to notice that you are in a devalued state, because devaluing others requires a certain amount of adrenalin, which creates a temporary feeling of power and certainty - you feel right (although you are more likely self-righteousness), but it lasts only as long as the arousal lasts. To stay "right," you have to stay aroused, negative, and narrow in perspective: "Every time I think of him I get pissed!" In contrast, when self-value is high, you can easily disagree with someone without feeling devalued and without devaluing.

The impulse to devalue others always signals a diminished sense of self, as you must be in a devalued state to devalue. That's why it's so hard to put someone down when you feel really good (your value investment is high) and equally hard to build yourself up when you feel resentful.

If you doubt the latter, think of things you say to yourself and others when resentful: "I shouldn't have to put up with this; I deserve better, just look at all the good things I do...." When you value others, i.e., when your self-value is high, you do not think of what you have to put up with and you certainly don't feel the need to list the good things you do. Rather, when confronted with life or relationship challenges, you shift automatically into improve mode - you try to make bad situations better.

The great swindle of devaluing others is that it never puts you in touch with the most important things about you and, therefore, never raises personal value. On the contrary, its whole purpose is to make someone else's value seem lower than your own. If it works, you're both down; if it doesn't, you end up lower than where you started. In either case, your personal value remains low and dependent on downward comparison to those you devalue, creating a chronic state of powerlessness in regard to self-value. The motivation to gain temporary empowerment by devaluing others occurs more and more frequently, until it takes over your life. This could be what Oscar Wilde meant by, "Criticism is the only reliable form of autobiography."

Valuing others makes self-value soar. It also carries substantial social reward; showing value tends to invoke reciprocity and cooperation, while devaluing inspires reciprocity and resistance. Worst of all, devaluing others makes us look for something to be cranky about, so the low-grade adrenalin can inflate our egos enough to get us through the day.

Emotional Reality

Steven Stosny — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 10:52:16 -0700

Emotional reality, unlike physical reality, is created rather than observed. By and large, people create the emotional reality in which they live. Unfortunately the choice of which reality we create is usually made by default, a kind of habitual automatic pilot derived from temperament, metabolism, and experience. The human brain filters information within its default choices, processing that which conforms to them and excluding that which deviates from them. The result can keep us pretty much stuck in a rut.

When we try to make changes in emotional reality, we tend to think in terms of problems and challenges, as if these were rocks to be removed from a garden. This approach often fails because the emotional reality we create is more like a broad cityscape than a particular rock or garden within the city. Emotional reality is general; problems and solutions are specific.

In creating the reality of intimate relationships, for instance, we tend to choose among the following cityscapes:

A dark, cold, nameless place, where no one is welcomed and no one missed
A boring, listless, meaningless terrain of low energy and little conviction
A place of threat and alarm, where there is little respect or affection, only attempts to manipulate or dominate
A place of light, promise, and connection.

Meaningful and lasting change requires alteration of the entire cityscape, not merely rearranging a few rocks within a garden somewhere in the city. For example, consider the common relationship problem of pursuer-distancer, where one person wants more closeness than the other can tolerate. Removing rocks from the garden of love would likely take you into therapy, where you would try to improve communication, reduce fear of abandonment and engulfment, learn intimacy techniques, or delve into childhood issues. You would find these efforts to be of limited value when the fault lies in the cityscape of the relationship, rather than in the details of the garden.

Create Light, Promise, and Connection
The key to lasting positive change lies in creating mental states of connection. That's right; you create connection in your head. (It doesn't even require that another person create it with you, as so many parents of estranged children or survivors of deceased loved ones know.) You choose to feel connected or choose to feel disconnected. The choice you make will go a long way to determining the response you get from loved ones. Coincidentally, you will more easily solve relationship problems connected than disconnected. The alternative - you cannot feel connected until you solve the problem - devalues the connection.

When you choose to feel connected and forsake excuses to feel disconnected, you create a cityscape of light and promise. You see then that there is enough power in the human heart to light up the world.

Marital Discord: Substituting Power for Value

Steven Stosny — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:59:49 -0700

When people are falling in love, they rarely have fantasies of power: "I'm going to make this sucker do whatever I want!" Rather, they have fantasies of value, of loving and being loved. We marry for value, not for power. Yet most marital discord is a substitution of power for value.

It is easy to confuse power with value in love relationships. Humans feel empowered in basically two ways, through:

• Adrenalin arousal - prepares us to exert power, i.e., manipulate the environment or other people. This gives a temporary sense of power, confidence, and self-righteousness, but sets us up for frustration if we fail to exert power, i.e., manipulate the environment or other people.

• Creation of value - making something or someone important and worthy of appreciation, time, energy, effort, and sacrifice. This gives a sense of meaning and purpose over time.

When falling in love, you don't think in terms of power, yet you feel empowered, because you are creating value for the person you love. You feel empowered, but you are not exerting power.

Of course, societal issues have a great deal to do with the confusion of power and value. We are more likely to feel powerless today because:

• We are saturated with information and confronted with choices of little significance. This subverts the natural hierarchical processes of the brain, making everything equally important and, therefore, equally unimportant.

• Although we have more pleasure and convenience, we create less value and put large amounts of emotional energy into things we do not believe are important and, therefore, do not produce meaning and purpose.

• We try to separate feeling good from doing good things, i.e., behaviors consistent with our deepest values, and, worse, we expect to feel good when we ignore or violate our deepest values.

• We are subject to an increasingly vast contagion of negative emotions. We suck up emotional pollution from the environment.

Because feeling empowered depends on creating value, we are likely to feel less empowered when we stop. When we stop showing value to loved ones, they are likely to reciprocate, because they feel less empowered and, usually, more vulnerable. Powerlessness/vulnerability stimulates one of four impulses in virtually all social animals:

1. Avoid
2. Submit
3. Control or dominate
4. Affiliate or cooperate

If we choose the fourth alternative, our relationships will thrive. Many couples avoid or submit but do so resentfully. The resentment eventually moves them toward control or dominance. In other words, they substitute power for value. The exertion of power sometimes gets them compliance, sometimes fear, always resentment, but never value. You cannot criticize, stonewall, nag, manipulate, coerce, or threaten someone into genuinely valuing you.

The secret of feeling empowered without exerting power is to focus on creating value, through interest, compassion, and care. In general, when people feel valued they cooperate, when they feel devalued, they either resist or submit with resentment. If you want value in your relationship (if you want to feel empowered beyond the temporary adrenalin arousal of anger and resentment), you must create and show more value.

When feeling adrenalin arousal -- usually experienced as anger or resentment -- you must ask yourself:

Do I want to exert power or create value?
Do I want to value this person or devalue this person?
Do I want this person to value or devalue me?

In short, you must get in touch with your core value.

Verbal Abuse and the Mirror of Love

Steven Stosny — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:28:47 -0700

Verbal abuse is the use of words or tone of voice to demean, devalue, or otherwise hurt someone's feelings. Though rampant in distressed families, all those who love each other are susceptible to verbal abuse. The culprit is the Mirror of Love.

Attachment relationships - those held together by strong emotional bonds - serve as mirrors of the inner self. We learn how lovable we are and how valuable our love is to others only by interacting with the people we love. Young children never question the impressions of themselves they get from their parents. They do not think that their critical, stressed-out mothers or their raging fathers are just having a bad time or trying to recover from their own difficult childhoods. Young children attribute negative reflections of themselves from their parents to their own inadequacy and unworthiness.

Suppose you had internalized your body image based on reflections from a fun house mirror, which made your hips look a mile wide. You would think you were in deep trouble and that no diet could help. Once you've internalized a negative self-image, you distrust even accurate mirrors - people who are gaunt from eating disorders see themselves as fat when they look in a mirror that reflects little more than skin and bones. Even those who do not have eating disorders but who were told repeatedly as children that they were too thin are likely to see themselves as thin adults, despite mirror reflections that show a few extra pounds.

When it comes to physical appearance, at least we have lots of other mirrors to compare to the distorted funhouse reflection; this gives us a good chance to overcome an internalized negative image of the body. But there are no reflections of love other than those we get from the people we love. If you judge how lovable you are based on reflections from someone who cannot love without hurt, you will have a necessarily distorted and inaccurate view of yourself.

The instinct to believe the information about the self that loved ones reflect weakens somewhat as we grow older, but it remains active throughout life. You would probably laugh -- or at least not get angry -- at someone who implied that you have green hair, but if your husband or wife says it, you're likely to run to a mirror. The default assumption is, if your partner is displeased, there must be something wrong with you, and you need anger or resentment for protection. No matter how much we argue with loved ones about their criticisms and put-downs, we are likely to believe them, at least unconsciously. We might not agree with the particular flaw pointed out, but on some deep level, we'll perceive a defect that must be defended. Some part of us buys into the "blemishes" reflected in the mirror of love, even when we know intellectually that our loved one is distorting who we are. This hidden pressure from the mirror of love is why successful and powerful people are just as vulnerable as anyone to verbal abuse and to walking on eggshells in their love relationships.

Of course the mirror of love also reflects good news. If you learn how lovable you are and how valuable your love is from compassionate caretakers, you will naturally have a more realistic view of yourself in love relationships. You'll be disappointed and saddened sometimes, but you will hardly ever feel inadequate, unworthy, or unlovable. Just as important, when you feel sad or disappointed, you will know that you can do something to improve your emotional state, if not your situation. Your sadness will be short-lived - you'll feel bad for a while, then regroup and do something that will make you feel valuable once again. The mirror of love generates energy when it reflects value, and depletes energy when it doesn't.

In verbally abusive relationships, the mirror of love reflects mostly flaws and defects, in the form of criticism, sarcasm, resentment, and anger. Everyone in the family begins to confuse "function" with value and "task-performance" with love. The pain is never about the facts or specific behavior -- no matter how your loved one puts it, no matter how much he or she claims to be talking "facts" or "logic" or "tasks," the message reflected in the mirror or love is:

"If you don't do what I want, I can't value you. And if I can't value you, you are not worth loving."

Why We Hurt the Ones We Love: Blaming the Mirror
A distressed or misbehaving child can make us feel like failures as parents and thoroughly inadequate. A raging or rejecting parent can make a child feel powerless, inadequate, and unlovable. A distracted, demanding, or hostile lover can make us feel disregarded, devalued, and rejected. After working for many thousands of hours with people trying to overcome painful relationship problems, I'm convinced that we use resentment and anger to punish loved ones, not so much for their behavior as for our painful reflections in the mirror of love. We want to attack the mirror because we don't like the reflection.

The only way out of this morass is to stop viewing emotional pain as a punishment inflicted by someone else and learn to act on it as an internal motivation to heal, correct, and improve. This will lead to a deeper self-compassion and put us more in touch with our deepest values, which will, in turn, inspire more compassion for one another. You can love without hurt, but only if you use pain as a signal to heal and improve rather than punish.

CompassionPower

Effects of Emotional Abuse: It Hurts When I Love

Steven Stosny — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:13:05 -0700

The simplest definition of emotionally abusive behavior is anything that intentionally hurts the feelings of another person. Since almost everyone in intimate relationships does that at some time or other in the heat of an argument, emotionally abusive behavior must be distinguished from an emotionally abusive relationship, which is more than the sum of emotionally abusive behaviors.

In an emotionally abusive relationship, one party systematically controls the other by:

Undermining his or her confidence, worthiness, growth, or trust
"Gaslighting" - making him/her feel crazy or unstable
Manipulating him/her with fear or shame.

Here are examples:

"You shouldn't spend so much on clothes, you don't look good anyway."
"Don't complain about how bad you have it, no one else could love you."
"Working and taking courses is too much for you; you can't handle what you need to do now."
"Your friends and family just want something from you."
"I have to drink to be able to stand you."
"One of these days you'll wake up, and I'll be gone."
"You don't know the first thing about raising kids."

It's important to note that most emotional abuse is not as direct and verbal as these examples. All the above can be implied with sarcasm, irony, or mumblings and can be communicated with body language, rolling eyes, sighs, grimaces, tone of voice, disgusted looks, cold shoulders, slamming doors, banging dishes, stonewalling, cold shoulders, etc. There are a myriad of ways to be emotionally abusive.

Gender Distinctions
In more than 20 years of working with abusive relationships, I have noticed a consistent gender distinction in the kind of abuse perpetrated. An emotionally abusive man controls his partner by manipulating her fear of harm, isolation, and deprivation; he threatens or implies that he might hurt her, leave her, or keep her apart from the things she loves. An emotionally abusive woman controls her partner by manipulating his dread of failure as a provider, protector, lover, or parent: "I could have married a man who made more money, I had more orgasms with my last boyfriend, you're not a real man, and you don't know the first thing about raising kids."

This difference in vulnerability to fear and shame is why the gender symmetry present in emotionally abusive behaviors vanishes in emotionally abusive relationships. In other words, women engage in as much emotionally abusive behavior as men, but the systematic use of emotional abuse to control another person is usually the domain of men, simply because it is easier to control someone with fear than shame.

A typical defense against shame is to tune out the person provoking it. Although we never forget humiliation, it is relatively easy not to think about things that cause shame. (The root of the word, "shame" means to cover or hide. That's one reason we tend to make the same mistakes over and over, by the way.) The cliché of the numb husband ignoring the nagging or strident wife isn't far from the truth. The abuse, though inexcusable, is not as painful for him. He is more likely to describe himself as adaptively following the path of least resistance than as a victim living under the thumb of someone more powerful. In my experience, emotionally abused men do not live in fear, even though they are ill-treated and far from happy.

In contrast, fear is an alarm system whose threshold of activation is designed to adapt to a dangerous environment. In other words, the more you experience fear, the more sensitized to possible danger you become. (That's why you might be unnerved by a moving shadow after seeing a horror movie.) The usual reaction to fear is hypervigilence. Thus women notice more of what the abusive partner is doing and are more likely to have their thoughts, feelings, and behavior controlled by the abusive partner. Indeed, it is almost impossible not to think about things that make you afraid when they are in proximity - just try to ignore the sleeping saber tooth tiger in the next room.

Effects
In many ways, emotional abuse is more psychologically harmful than physical abuse. There are a couple of reasons for this. Even in the most violent families, the incidents tend to be cyclical. Early in the abuse cycle, a violent outburst is followed by a honeymoon period of remorse, attention, affection, and generosity, but not genuine compassion. (The honeymoon stage eventually ends, as the victim begins to say, "Never mind the damn flowers, just stop hitting me!") Emotional abuse, on the other hand, tends to happen every day. The effects are more harmful because they're so frequent.

The other factor that makes emotional abuse so devastating is the greater likelihood that victims will blame themselves. If someone hits you, it's easier to see that he or she is the problem, but if the abuse is subtle - saying or implying that you're ugly, a bad parent, stupid, incompetent, not worth attention, or that no one could love you - you are more likely to think it's your problem. Emotional abuse seems more personal than physical abuse, more about you as a person, more about your spirit. It makes love hurt.

If you suspect that you are in an emotionally abusive relationship, take the Walking on Eggshells quiz. If your score indicates that you are walking on eggshells, the test will lead you to information on what to do about it.

Eliminate Abuse by Increasing Compassion
Although occasional instances of abusive behavior do not constitute an abusive relationship, they certainly raise the risk of ruining health and happiness. Unconstrained by compassion, they can lead quickly to chronic resentment and, eventually, to contempt. That's because we tend to form emotional bonds with an expectation that those we love will care about how we feel. When loved ones fail to care that we are hurt, let alone inflict hurt upon us, it feels like betrayal. Failure of compassion in a love relationship feels like abuse.

Merely refraining from abusive behaviors will do nothing to improve a relationship, though it may slow its rate of deterioration. To repair the harm done, there must be a corresponding increase in compassion.

That means both parties have to return to caring about how the other feels, even when they disagree about the ideas or interpretations of the facts that go with the feelings. The inability to distinguish objections to a loved one's behavior from value for the loved one is at the heart of emotional abuse. You can and must negotiate about the behavior you don't like (you can even condemn it) without devaluing the person you love.

Developing self-compassion is the key to increasing compassion for loved ones. Self-compassion is the ability to recognize when you are hurt, with a motivation to heal or improve. Of course, the latter is complicated with people you love. With them, you must recognize that when you are angry, you feel devalued or unlovable -- you perceive your loved one to have said or done something to devalue you. With self-compassion, you have two alternatives to anger and retaliation. Since the real problem is that you feel devalued or unlovable, you will move toward a real solution, i.e., doing something that will make you feel more valuable and lovable. In the history of humankind, no one has ever felt more valuable and lovable by hurting loved ones.

The other alternative to angry retaliation that comes with self-compassion is an understanding that your loved one, like you, feels devalued and unlovable beneath his/her angry, resentful, or irritable behavior. Hurting or devaluing him or her further can only make it worse.

Neither anger nor compassion solves problems in love relationships. But compassion puts you in a position where you are more likely to solve the problem to everyone's satisfaction. At the very least, you will never be emotionally abusive with compassion.

Think of times when you have been angry at someone you love and compare those times to when you have felt compassion for those you love. In which emotional state were you more likely to get the most favorable outcome?

Which do you prefer?

Which feels like the real you?

CompassionPower.com

How Can I be Me When You're being You?

Steven Stosny — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:09:45 -0700

Most people get married because they like the way they are with their partners - loving, compassionate, engaging, supportive, sexy, and flexible. They get divorced because they don't like the way they are with their partners - resentful, turned off, frustrated, rigid, or bored, all of which they blame on their relationship.

In the course of this death march, many go into marriage therapy to find better ways to manipulate their partners into, at best, doing what they want or, at worst, becoming who they want. The self-defeating flaw in this strategy, apart from the fact that it hardly ever works, is cognitive dissonance -- the discomfort generated by holding contradictory cognitions.

In marriage, cognitive dissonance is the difference between how you would like to be and how you are. For instance, "I am loving, compassionate, supportive, sexy, etc., yet I am not these things with you."

This aspect of cognitive dissonance isn't bad; it can act as a motivation to be true to your deepest values, by making you behave in more loving and compassionate ways. Unfortunately, most people who divorce or go to marriage therapy choose to resolve their cognitive dissonance with something like this:

"Since I am unable to be my loving and compassionate self with you, you must be too selfish, insensitive, withholding, demanding, emotional, rigid, sick, or defective in some way."

This ill-fated resolution of cognitive dissonance only makes you both feel like victims and sends you searching online or in self-help aisles for a checklist that validates your suffering and a diagnosis that nails your partner.

Cognitive dissonance can undermine marriage (and marriage therapy) in sneaky ways, even when you are successful at getting what you want, namely, change in the other person. If you do get what you want by changing your partner, your self-concept is reduced to:

"I am loving, compassionate, supportive, etc., as long as you do what I want."

Do you really want this on your tombstone:

"As long as I got what I wanted, I was great to the people I love," ?????

The irony is that the last thing you need is an externally regulated self concept, i.e., one determined not by your own behavior but by what your partner does for you. Externally regulated, your sense of self becomes totally dependent on your partner, not just for consistently doing what you want but for doing it with love and joy in his/her heart, since resentful submission is far from satisfying. Externally regulated, self-concept needs more and more validation, if not submission, from the partner to stay afloat. This sends satisfaction on a downward spiral as it necessarily destabilizes both the sense of self and the relationship.

Successful marriage is not about getting your partner to do what you want; it's about being who you are, i.e., behaving according to your deepest values. For most people, this means being loving and compassionate to the people they love.

Happily, you have the best chance of getting your partner to do what you want by being who you are.

Consider the effects of positive reciprocity and negative reactivity. Which of the following is more likely to inspire cooperation?

1. Approaching your spouse as your authentic, loving and compassionate self
2. Approaching your spouse with entitlement and demands (even if couched in the rehearsed language of "behavior requests")?

Marriage (and marriage therapy) run into a brick wall of cognitive dissonance when they focus on "getting your needs met," or "getting the love you want." They are more likely to have lasting success with focus on each of you being the partner you most want to be.

A Struggle for the Soul

Steven Stosny — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:57:39 -0700

The death of 12 week-old Camryn Wilson, as a result of shaken baby syndrome, made national news only because he was the first baby of 2008 born in Summit County, Ohio. Otherwise the tragic death of this child would be just another instance of America's deepest shame - our failure to protect our children. (Child abuse statistics)

The psychological dynamics of shaken baby syndrome reflects how the formation of emotional bonds sustains the survival of the species. The distress cry of the infant sets off an internal distress alarm in all adults in proximity, especially in those who have formed an emotional bond with the infant. The only way the adults can relieve their internal distress is to relieve the distress of the infant. (If they try to run away from it, they must fight a powerful guilt designed to pull them back.) The mechanism usually works well to protect the most vulnerable members of a species whose young are helpless much longer than those of other animals.

But this species-preserving mechanism can be short-circuited when the adult interprets his/her internal distress alarm as a signal of failure and inadequacy. In that case, the rising anxiety in the adult caregiver spikes the distress in the child, who cries more intensely, making the adult feel more inadequate. The child is no longer a precious loved one in need, but an anxiety-provoking alarm clock that can't be silenced. What do you do with an alarm clock you can't turn off? You shake it or throw it or smash it.

All parents experience feelings of inadequacy when their infants let out distress cries. For the vast majority, the distress of the infant overrides the feelings of inadequacy - the pain of the child is more important than feelings about the self -- and trips us into a gut-level compassion. This gut-level compassion breaks the prison of self by sensitizing us to the needs of the child, which allows the child to teach us how to comfort him or her.

But some people become frozen in their feelings of inadequacy and are unable to make the transition into gut-level compassion. For them, shame is not perceived as a motivation to escape the disorganized and painful self by focusing on the needs of the distressed loved one; it is perceived as a punishment inflicted on the self by the loved one. At the instant of the abuse, they feel entitled to "defend themselves." Such gross misinterpretation of internal motivation is a predictable byproduct of the age of entitlement.

This tragic dynamic is at the heart of all attachment abuse, from harming children to the emotional and physical abuse of intimate partners and parents. The classic power and control tactics of batterers, for instance, is really a warning:

"Don't make me feel something I can't handle."
"Don't let your needs set off the alarm system in me that will make me feel inadequate."

Abuse of loved ones is a struggle for the soul of individuals and for the soul of the society that fails to protect its most vulnerable members. It violates our basic humanity and our capacity to form emotional bonds. It is an assault on the human spirit more fundamental than any other.

But we cannot respond to this assault on the human spirit by becoming less humane. Most abusers can be trained to act on shame as a motivation to become more compassionate and sensitive to the needs of others. The shame we feel as a society for allowing abuse to continue is not telling us to punish abusers any more than the shame abusers feel is telling them to punish their loved ones. It is telling us to work as hard as we can to train them in the power of compassion.

Healing Unseen Wounds of the War on Terror

Steven Stosny — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 10:39:04 -0700

A lot has been written about the enormous adjustment that wounded and maimed servicemen face in coming home to their families. Seldom mentioned is the fact that their wives often walk on eggshells. In the course of their arduous physical recovery, more than a few wounded vets create marriages that are rife with resentment, anger, and emotional abuse.

In many respects the wounded servicemen I have treated share the same characteristics of chronically resentful, angry, or emotionally abusive men in general. They feel inadequate, unlovable, and riddled with self-criticism, which invariably mutates into criticism of their wives and children. They manage noxious states of jealousy and shame by alternately withdrawing from and controlling their loved ones, oblivious to the fear of harm, isolation, and deprivation their behavior invokes in the most important people in their lives.

But wounded vets differ from most men with chronic resentment, anger, or emotionally abusive tendencies in an important way. Civilians with similar emotional regulation problems will say that they want compassion from their partners, usually meaning that they want a free pass for their angry outbursts, cold shoulders, and controlling behaviors. Although receiving compassion is empowering to them, they have a hard time giving it or even seeing loved ones apart from their own emotional reactions. Treatment consists primarily of helping them regulate the shame and guilt that makes them perceive compassion for loved ones as powerlessness.

Wounded vets, on the other hand, are more likely to perceive the emotional support of their partners as pity or condescension and react negatively to sincere gestures of compassion. (See the difference between pity and compassion.) Yet they more easily feel compassion for their wives, as long their wives don't try to reciprocate. They see giving compassion as empowering and receiving it as powerlessness.

Wounded vets who are resentful, angry, or abusive, like their civilian counterparts, must learn to regulate guilt and shame to feel the true power of giving and receiving compassion. Once they learn this essential skill to convert self-obsessed feelings into pro-social emotions, they no longer deny their loved ones the healing power of receiving and giving compassion.

A personal difference for me in working with wounded vets was the inspiration I felt in watching them recover. With courage that surpassed any they could have shown in combat, these young men came to understand that losing a limb could not diminish their core value or their innate capacity for love and compassion, as they struggled to become the husbands they had wanted to be before their service.

Is Marriage Hard?

Steven Stosny — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:12:21 -0700

Probably because I lucked into a few key TV shows as an "expert," I am asked all the time by the press why marriage is so difficult. To back up the question, interviewers cite the high number of divorces, persistent reports of distressed marriages, and horrendous rates of abuse.

I usually reply to the inevitable "marriage is hard" question with another question: "For whom is marriage hard?"

In fact, marriage is only hard for those who:

• Try to make their partners into someone they are not

• Believe they have superior rights, tastes, preferences, beliefs, or morality

• Are unwilling to use binocular vision to see their partner's perspectives alongside their own

• Are convinced that their partners are selfish, mentally ill, or defective

• Are unwilling to admire their partners' strengths and regard their vulnerabilities with compassion and support

• Are unwilling to appreciate the value and meaning their partner's add to their lives.

If you are one of those people, marriage will seem impossible. If you're not, it's just about negotiation.