This morning, while reaching towards a kitchen plate that was a gift from my father, after feeling grateful to him, I then found myself in a sadness… that I had not, at the time, let him know how much I appreciated his gift. There were so many disappointments and barriers in our relationship while he was alive, I was so often blocked from expressing my love and appreciation towards him. I was so aware of what I wanted and did not get from him, I had long since formed a habit of resentment that kept me from telling him how much I loved and celebrated him. For a moment I indulged in the fantasy that he was still alive and I could finally let him know that my love of him was more fundamental than my hurts; that I could finally bring to him the perspective of age. Sitting with this, I dropped into the thought, “things are what they are.” Somehow, in this moment, this was okay… strangely okay.
I then found myself feeling into those words… “things are what they are.” — into the foundational reality of of my life. In these moments I realized that I was “strangely okay” because I could feel all of the good intentions and feelings richly present inside of me, and that, though I had so many regrets, I had within me the full banquet of what life was about.
Sitting with these thoughts, I then realized that this situation between my father and I, also occurs in a profound way between husbands and wives. Often, with our partner, we are so aligned with what we want different, we fail to deeply experience how we already have so much of what we need in the relationship… just as it is. Commonly, we so minimize and devalue the “is-ness” of the relationship we have, that we do not take in the nourishment that the ongoing relationship brings to us.
These words are all preamble to an important point concerning marital therapy. It is all too easy in therapy to be caught up in discussions about how each in the marriage want things to be different, implicitly minimizing and under-appreciating how things “just are” in the relationship. This failure to depthfully dig into how things “simply are” can lopside the therapeutic work into an ungrounded quest for change, that ends up not integrated with the couples daily reality. To address this potential error I increasingly move back and forth between both arenas as I conduct each couples session… between longings and disappointments on the one hand and the daily realities on the other hand.
How “things simply are” is where the attachment in a marriage vitally lives. In the midst of the negative cycle, in some way, couples often forget that they are, after all, attached! Each partners disappointments… coupled with the inflated size of conflicts, disconnects each partner from appreciation of what they already have. This becomes a disconnection from the very foundations the couple stands upon, and this understanding must be included alongside the work to bring down the negative cycles.
