It was four Labor Days ago, in early September 2007, when I opened this counseling practice and began seeing clients as a private practitioner. Each year has been both challenging and rewarding…and more successful, in various ways. I have truly enjoyed specializing in relationship counseling, both for individuals and couples.

For the nine years I worked as a therapist before opening my own business, I worked with hundreds of clients on a host of different issues, and since then it’s been great to focus my work on the relationships in people’s lives—not just their romantic/spouse/partner relationships, but their friendships, family relationships, and even co-worker relationships—and how we all can learn so much about ourselves when we take a close look at the many ways (for good and ill) that we relate to others.

In the coming year, I am planning a few changes to develop my practice and expand its scope. I’m working this month toward certification as a Myers-Briggs Typology Indicator practitioner, which means I’ll be working with individuals, couples, and groups on their personality types, using the MBTI as a lens that reveals where we focus our energy, how we perceive information about the world, how we make decisions, and how we relate to the outer world. I’m very excited about this. Exploring my own type has been a great way to learn how I function, and also how I run into conflicts with others…and it’s also helped me understand how others are different, and how those differences are gifts and strengths that other people bring to the world, and to my own life.

I’ll also be setting up new ways to schedule appointments, plan your course of treatment, and reflect on how our time together was helpful for you. And I expect that after another four years, I may be in a new location! (But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

Happy Labor Day, and may this day be an opportunity for you to celebrate the contributions we make to the world through our labor, and to hold in our consciousness those who are unemployed and underemployed during these difficult times.

See you soon!

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Lots of people go to couples counseling (or seek counseling as individuals) because they want to decide if they should break up with their partner. “Should I stay or should I go?” goes the song. And lots of people sing that song.

Often enough, I counsel people to break up … in small ways. If you’re not ready to end the relationship, then it’s possible there’s still something worth saving in the relationship. It’s possible. But it may take a while for you to discern whether that’s true. In the meantime, why not ‘break up’ with portions of your relationship—the smaller pieces of your relationship that you don’t like, that aren’t consistent with your values, that just aren’t you?

Here are some examples.

If you’re not ready to break up in a complete way, try ‘breaking up’ with these things—

—’Break up’ with behaviors of yours that undermine your happiness in the relationship. For example, when your partner says something provocative, something that seems to be an invitation for another unproductive fight, ‘break up’ with your instinct to go on the defensive, and choose instead to say, “I don’t want to fight like this anymore.”

—’Break up’ with shyness—with your tendency to sweep things under the rug, or silently tolerate things that truly bother you. Choose instead to tell your partner, “I’m sorry, but I can’t put up with this anymore. I need the two of us to change how we handle this…”

—’Break up’ with patience—with your (understandable!) habit of putting up with interaction patterns and relationship dynamics that get you down. “I know you’re going through a hard time,” you might say, “but I need to insist that we talk about some of our problems…”

Breaking up is hard to do. (Yeah, that’s another pop song.) And sometimes it’s not what you want to do. There might be many things worth saving in your relationship. But to do so—to save what’s working—you might need to ‘break up’ with a few of the things that are broken.

What are some pieces of your relationship that you want to break up with?

UPDATE: A reader writes, “Your examples sound a lot alike. Are they really different?” Good question. Answer: yes and no. Some people have trouble in their relationships because they behave automatically, unthinkingly, when they’re upset (the first example). Others have trouble because they’re being what I called “shy” above, but could also be called basic fear or anxiety (#2). Still others are impatient and their issue is more in the area of anger than anxiety (#3). In all cases, people can find themselves in the same general place: unhappy with their relationship, and wondering if it’s worth it. And in all cases, there’s likely at least one part of their relationship that they can “break up with” rather than ending the whole thing.

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John Gottman, the UW researcher who is (deservedly) famous for his decades of research on what makes a happy couple, well, happy, likes to say that happy couples tend to have high standards. They have high expectations for their level of satisfaction, and high expectations of one another.

But often people assume that it’s a bad thing to expect “too much” from your partner. But the research (and Gottman is a thorough, painstaking researcher!) disagrees. “I don’t know,” you might be thinking. “I’m probably too impatient, to idealistic. I should just be more accepting.” That sounds…kind, I suppose. You’re lowering your expectations because you don’t want to be “high maintenance,” or intolerant of another person’s flaws. To a certain extent, that kind of humility can serve you well. There’s certainly a place in any happy relationship for tolerance, discretion, and patience!

But… don’t take that too far. Don’t sell yourself short. And here’s a metaphor I came up with to explain what I mean. Whenever I go to San Francisco I try to make it to the Top of the Mark on Nob Hill for a cocktail. It’s the swanky bar on the top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel. (Usually I can afford only one cocktail!) The views are breathtaking, the room is light and elegant—it’s a fun San Francisco experience. And it’s my metaphor. Here’s my question: in your relationship, are you at the Top of the Mark? Or are you settling for the sleepy little bar on the main floor with no views?*

A ‘Top of the Mark’ relationship looks something like this (for me, I should say—your own definition might be different!): in my vision of a ‘Top of the Mark’ relationship, you’re with someone who builds trust with you over time, and you’re doing the same thing. You’re with someone who cares about your dreams. You’re with someone who delights you, attracts you, even ravishes you. You’re with someone who sometimes inspires ecstatic love that feels almost dizzying. You’re also with someone who’s a great friend, an ordinary partner, a comfortable old shoe. You can be ‘family’ with this person. The two of you are cultivating something beautiful, and something serene. You laugh a lot. You laugh at yourselves a lot.

And here’s the snag, the thing you and I could work on in counseling: to have a ‘Top of the Mark’ relationship, you have to be okay with your right to want one. You have to be okay with the idea that it is not unreasonable to expect this. And to do that, you have to see yourself as ‘Top of the Mark’ material. This can be hard because you may not have thought of yourself in such a healthy way, or you may have learned that when you have high standards, the number of people interested in dating you dramatically drops. And you may have failed to see that the biggest reason for that drop was probably that non-Top people sensed you were too good for them and pulled out of the race! But if you’re ‘Top of the Mark’ material, then being on your own is preferable to being with someone who doesn’t meet you at the highest level.

So… do you want to go to the Top? If you do, there are no guarantees that you’ll find a lot of people up there. Lots of people are settling for less, both in their relationships and in what they expect from themselves. And having high standards can be scary: it forces your partner to step up (or step out), and it requires you yourself to be a high-quality partner!

But it is one hell of a view.

—–
To be honest I don’t know if there’s actually a little bar on the main floor of the Mark Hopkins. I’m just taking a little metaphorical license here…

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Happy August 17, which is (of course) Robert DeNiro’s birthday! (And … mine.) It’s my 41st this year, and I feel … fine. I’m doing all the usual “you’re-as-young-as-you-feel” stuff, and dinner out this evening will be fun. But I’m also reflecting on my work, my relationships, my future… and the Work I’m doing (capital W) right now.

Not long ago, as a client got up to leave at the end of the session, I said, “You know, this is the work of your life.” I’ve actually said this to several clients. People often go to counseling because they have a specific problem—their relationship is in trouble; they feel depressed; they have problems with anxiety; they don’t know what to do about their parents, or their kids. But I say that the deeper reason they come to counseling is to do the work of their lives.

Your relationship is in trouble? It’s a good bet that one reason for that is a missing piece in your own development: you’re still having trouble telling the truth when the truth hurts; or you’re still afraid to ask for what you really want because you think the other person will reject you; or you’re replicating patterns of interaction you learned from your first family, patterns that can sometimes be useful but often enough get you into trouble. For example, maybe you deal with conflict or stress by “shutting down,” and when you do that, your partner gets upset and pulls you into a fight. This is the work of your life. It’s something that, if you worked on it, could be a major step forward for you, something you remember at the end of your life as something new and significant and courageous that you finally learned how to do. “I learned how to stand up for myself,” you might say later on. That’s the work of your life.

So when you think about coming to counseling, by all means think about the immediate problem that’s upsetting you. We need to attend to that. But allow yourself to reflect a little more deeply. What is the Work of your life?

It’s an excellent birthday question!

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This is a simple concept I learned from a therapist long ago – twenty years ago, actually. Like lots of simple concepts, it’s something that makes a lot of sense, something we all know, and…something we easily forget.

It goes like this: let your friend be your friend. Let your spouse be your spouse. Let your mother be your mother.

And here’s what it means: we often get into trouble when our expectations of another person don’t line up with their role in our lives. It’s not wrong to have high expectations–in fact, John Gottman says that couples are happier when they have high standards for their relationship and for one another. This isn’t about high vs. low expectations. It’s about lining up expectations with the people in your life.

For example, you may have a friend who, like any good friend, has been there during your rough times. That’s what friends are for, as the pop song says. But are you expecting more from your friend than she can reasonably offer in her role? Are you expecting her to be your therapist, or your parent, or your rescuer? It’s one thing for you to expect her to be supportive, and quite another for you to expect her to be your savior.

And roles shift over time. Your mother needs to have a different relationship with you once you’re an adult and she’s an older adult. “Let your mother be your mother” means something quite different now than it did when you were a kid. It’s no longer appropriate for you to expect her to be perfect (something that’s only natural for small children to want in their parents), or “there for you” in quite the same way. Your roles are shifting, and though it’s fine to expect your mother to be a helpful person in your life, your roles are actually trading places–which means her expectations of you to “be there” will eventually overtake your expectations of her.

Sometimes it helps to realize that the conflict we’re having with someone, or the heartbreak we may feel when someone doesn’t meet our expectations, is happening because we’re just not letting our friend be our friend, our sister be our sister, our co-worker be our co-worker…

Again, it’s a simple concept. But simple concepts often elude us!

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I don’t know if this is a good idea, but I’d like to wade into this discussion. It’s a short blog post by Dan Savage, with links to previous threads he’s having with The Dish, the Times‘s Ross Douthat, and others.

Here’s my take.

First, I mostly agree with Savage’s advice to this guy (“Do what you need to do to stay sane”) even though I would qualify that advice in a couple of ways. And I say this as someone who is in a long-term monogamous relationship and (as a couples counselor) appreciates the many benefits of sexual exclusivity between two people. I also work with non-monogamous and polyamorous clients, and can see the advantages to those arrangements too. But I admit that monogamy has always enjoyed a privileged place in my beliefs and assumptions.

Here’s what I would tell this guy. First, you are being harmed by this arrangement with your wife. Your needs are valid, and these many years of sexual dysfunction in your marriage have taken their toll on you. Let’s honor that, and honor it deeply. Second, your need—and your simple desire—for a healthy, fun, ecstatic sex life is also valid. It is a basic human need. It is not a sign that you’re shallow, and your vigilant adherence to the vow you took with your wife proves that you are not—you are not!—shallow. And finally, third, let’s talk about that vow. Did you really promise your wife that you would endure unending sexual unhappiness? If you’re like a lot of monogamous married couples, you promised something along the lines of “richer and poorer, sickness and health…” And the assumption everyone had on your wedding day was, well, that that’s that. But the bad news for your wife is that if “that’s that,” than that’s not healthy, it’s harming you, and you being harmed with no way out is unethical. Even immoral. So here’s what I think you should think about doing:

First, tell your wife that despite the frustrations and failures you’ve suffered in the past, you need to bring up the sex topic again. Tell her that you are not interested in simply complaining about your sex life, and that you are fully aware—and sympathetic—of her physical situation. But you also must express your legitimate needs and desires. You’re a man; you’re a sexual being. You love her—and you’re on record living that love for thousands of days despite all the troubles you two have had—and you have a legitimate need to talk about sex problems without being accused of not loving her. (Bringing this up is quite the opposite: it is another sign of your love for her!)

Second, tell your wife that you insist on doing this in a careful, planned way. If counseling has failed in the past, you may not want to try that again. (Or you could, but if so, tell the therapist that you failed in the past and are quite afraid you’ll once again be wasting your time and money.) Alternatively, John Gottman has well-researched ways for couples to talk about difficult problems like this. Order his “repair kit,” or better yet delve more deeply into his materials for couples. You’re not asking your wife to instantly transform herself into your ideal sexual partner. You’re not telling your wife that you don’t respect her dilemma. You are only saying that you also have a valid dilemma, and it needs to be addressed for the sake of both of you.

Finally, if you carefully go through this process and it leads to continued frustration (or worse, disaster), you can tell yourself that you did everything you could. You can then decide whether to end the marriage, or whether to “do whatever you need to do to stay sane.”

One last note: Dan Savage likes to say that monogamy is not natural. It’s a big theme of his. I both agree and disagree. I agree that monogamy is a social, cultural construct. It is not natural the way, say, a redwood tree is natural. It’s something humans created in their social, cultural contexts. But I do think that a desire to be with one person is, like all desires, natural. Not everyone feels that desire, and not everyone who feels it feels it strongly. But it is as natural as any other desire we have in our complicated, sentient lives.

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It’s common for people to say they’re going to therapy to “get an objective perspective,” or “have someone objective look at this and tell us what we should do.” So I suppose it’s unfortunate that therapists—all 100% of them, including me—are human beings. Human beings can’t be objective.

They can’t be objective because, well, they’re subjects, not objects.

Imagine the most objective-appearing human you know of, or have heard of…someone like a scientific researcher, or an accountant wearing a green-shade hat. I spoke to an accountant just this past week who joked, “In my line of work, creativity is discouraged!” You may think that these sensible folks are objective. But they’re not.

They all have distinct temperaments, inclinations, preferences, points of view, and social locations (‘social location’ includes things like sex, cultural background, ethnic background, personal experiences, the generation in which one was born, sexual orientation, birth order, and so on). An accountant is not supposed to be creative, and yet isn’t she creative, in lots of ways? She develops relationships of trust with her clients, runs a complicated business, searches for (hopefully legal) ways to help her clients save on taxes… She is not an android.

And therapists? Well we’re even more subjective than that. We can’t decide if our field is a science or an art (and I personally wonder if science vs. art is even a valid dichotomy), and as much as we might want to give you an “objective” perspective, we can’t just turn off our cultural background, ethnic background, and all the rest. We are not objective. So…what good are we? Great question.

As a subjective therapist with my own biases, preferences, experiences, and social location, I can offer you this:

1. I continually work to be conscious of my subjective perspective. If I react to your story in a certain way because (just to take one example) I grew up in the Midwest, I’ve been trained to notice that reaction, to be conscious of it, and to work with it. Maybe my reaction is benign, maybe not. Maybe it helps me understand you—maybe you’re from the Midwest too!—or maybe it doesn’t. My consciousness about my subjectivity allows me to work with it, to play with it, and even to change it.

2. Because I have my own social location, I am better able to respect and honor yours. I’m not “Commander Data,” so I can deeply respect your own biases, preferences, etc. You’re human; I’m human. If you say something that is radically different than something I would say, I don’t have to be reactive or resistant to it. And if you’re a couple, I can respect all three subjective realities that exist in the room—mine, and the two of yours.

3. My subjective perspective is subjective, but it is also potentially more useful to you than the subjective perspectives of your friends, colleagues, partner, family members, and acquaintances. I’m not an objective robot, but my subjective reality has been shaped by 13 years of work as a therapist, my own work as a therapy client, and years of training and education. So…I’m biased, but in a way that can potentially help you.

4. I try to cultivate humility about all of these things. Because I know I’m not objective, I tread carefully when I sense that my way of seeing things is fundamentally different than another person’s. Or if I don’t tread carefully—if I screw up and get reactive and unconscious—I am able to challenge myself and remember that I am just one human among many. I know how to get over myself.

I encourage you to hire a therapist to get…well, to get a subjective perspective!

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(I can’t get Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” out of my head.) What good news! New York became the sixth state to legalize marriage for all persons, no matter their sex. Like California, New York is a major state, a center of USA culture, a very visible place. I expect now that I may live to see marriage rights be given to everyone in all but a very few states.

I can find no better take on this than the reflections of Andrew Sullivan, one of the earliest (if not the earliest) advocates for marriage rights. This is, as he says, a “BFD.” States granting full marriage equality are simply getting out of the way and allowing any two people to choose their relationship, to choose their kin. It is a triumph of freedom. The legislators who voted for it are patriots.

But my main reaction is more personal. I am married—at least in the eyes of God and our families and friends. We were “married” (damn those quotation marks!) in 2003. We became “registered domestic partners” (really, can’t we just say spouses?) in 2007. If Washington becomes the next state to get out of the way of its free citizens, will my partner and I get married? I don’t know. I’ll have to discuss it with him. But my first answer—just speaking for myself—is no, with an asterisk. No, we won’t be getting married, because we’re already married. We had a delightful liturgy of blessing followed by a splendid bash at Salty’s overlooking the skyline as it dazzled in the evening sun. Why would we do that again?

But here’s the asterisk: again, speaking only for myself, I would find it odd not to get a marriage license if it were available. And that’s a cause for celebration, no question. But the whole thing would have to be done with the clear acknowledgement that we are celebrating Washington state’s transformation, not our own. We’d be raising our glasses to a guest who arrived quite late to the party, offering them a warm welcome and discreetly not mentioning their rudeness.

So yes, New York has a lot to be proud of today. Most of its citizens have been ready for this for quite a long time now, and it’s great that their state caught up with them. So hand the state of New York a glass of champagne, suppress the desire to say “Took you long enough!” and propose a toast to the Empire State.

As Frank’s song goes, If marriage equality can make it here, it can make it anywhere!

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In the summer of 1998, with some trepidation—but probably not enough, given the challenges that lay ahead!—I saw my first client as a therapist. I was working in the behavioral health division of Good Samaritan in Puyallup. As you can see below, I looked somewhat younger.

In the early days, I did lots of child and family therapy. I worked with kids diagnosed with ADHD, did home visits for kids with serious behavioral problems, and for many years had a caseload of folks on Medicaid in agency settings where I did school-based therapy. Then I moved to Group Health in 2004 to work mostly with adult individuals on depression, anxiety, and other issues. I still saw several kids and families during my time there. But I couldn’t shake the itch I felt to try my own hand as a small-business owner. I wanted to run the whole operation, and design a way of being a psychotherapist that better expressed who I am and what I want to do. And I wanted to shift my emphasis to relationships—working with both individuals and couples on how their relationships are shaping who they are, how they can change, and what might be getting in their way.

So in the fall of 2007 I took the plunge and opened this practice. That same month, after I had left Group Health, invested an unsettling amount of money in my new business, and moved into my new office, I came down with appendicitis and was grounded for a month! I remember going to my therapist (I believe I’m better at what I do when I regularly sit in the client’s chair myself) and she laughed and laughed (in a really good way). “Appendicitis!” she said. “The universe wants to know if you’re really serious about this, if you really want this!”

Well, I did, and I do. I’m closing in on four years now as a private practitioner, and it’s been going well. I’ve got plans for some updates and changes to how I do things, so stay tuned for some new items on my website and more convenient ways to schedule and keep your appointments. But the ship is sailing along!

Thanks to all of my clients who have entrusted me to join them in some of the hardest work of their lives. You teach me a lot, and I hope I am returning the favor!

Finally, a snapshot of my ID badge from Good Sam (click photo to enlarge). Now be nice!

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As I mentioned in the previous post, I spent three days this past week attending a human-interaction-skills lab, a training program that offers participants the opportunity to experiment with new behaviors in a group setting, and get feedback about the impact of those behaviors. The goals are to increase your awareness of the way you behave with others, improve your relationship skills, and, in general, stretch and grow in the area of human interaction.

And this was my goal: to 1) not use charm to get what I want; and 2) tell the truth. It sounds immodest, but I can be very charming! I have a natural friendliness, and a desire to be liked by others. I’m an extravert, and I enjoy the company of other people. If you’re my friend, or my client, or my sibling, I will rely on my natural humor and smiles and generally buoyant personality to connect with you. It’s not fake. I truly am a nice, sweet guy! But there are times when that sweetness can get in the way of my personal growth. Specifically, there are times when I might use a joke to diffuse healthy tension, or rely on my own personal warmth to avoid an important confrontation that I need to have with someone who is important to me.

So…for this training, I followed a few basic rules. If I didn’t think a joke was funny, I wouldn’t laugh at it. Even if I thought it was funny, but also thought that all the laughter was getting in the way of the intensity I needed to learn something new, I would not only resist laughing, but I wouldn’t even smile. I did nothing untruthful: I was not negative or hostile in a fake or artificial way. I just peeled back the warmer side of my personality so that I could be more direct—and more intense!—with my group members.

Well. This certainly got a reaction. The content of our group process is confidential, but I think it’s okay to say that I was not a very popular participant in the group. It was interesting to see how my usual good humor and sweet personality really softens the experience I have with people, and how, when I strip that away, I put myself in hot water. This was difficult, but I really, really wanted to learn from this! A growing edge for me is ‘speaking truth to power,’ to borrow a common phrase. It can be hard to confront both myself and others with the painful truth of my honest reaction, my challenging opinion, my hard-to-hear concern.

For example, when I felt the group was getting off track, I would say something like, “I feel frustrated, because right now my experience of the group is that we are avoiding our task and just taking care of each other. I wish we could get back to the real reason why we’re here.” That was hard for me to say! I felt a ton of social pressure to just go along, be sweet, suppress my frustration.

Why did I do this? Well, one good reason is that I expect that my clients will tolerate pain for growth, so I can’t dodge that same pain myself. I need to practice what I preach. And, as odd as it sounds, I felt true pleasure in stretching like this. On the final day, after our group processes were finished, I relaxed and let my fellow participants see my full personality. I joked and smiled again, and thanked them for working with me on my goals. But I felt a lovely feeling of satisfaction that I had really taken this training seriously, and pushed myself to make the most of this laboratory learning.

Now that it’s over, I’m glad it’s over! But I move forward with more insight about how I can continue to stretch myself, to challenge myself, in my truthful interactions with others.

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