When it comes to maintaining healthy relationships, we are often our own worst enemies.
When we are in a relationship, much of our time is spent interpreting the words and actions of our partners. We observe them, we listen to them -- sometimes carefully and sometimes superficially -- and we tell ourselves stories about what their words and actions mean.
Sometimes we can understand the same words and actions in very different ways. One spouse asks the other if they remembered to do something important. The gesture can be seen as supportive or controlling. If you see yourselves as a team, the action is supportive. If you see yourselves as individuals struggling for equality in the relationship, the action is controlling. Therapists call this framing.
We were thinking about this because a funny thing happens in this week' Gospel. A woman is healed not because Jesus lays hands on her, or even speaks to her. She is healed because she believes that she will be healed by just touching his clothes.
Lots of people are jostling up against Jesus and the disciples, and touching them. So many that the disciples are incredulous that Jesus would even ask, "Who touched my clothes?" But none of these were healed.
The woman told herself a story: that touching Jesus' robes will heal her. That's a frame, a story about her relationship to Jesus. And when she manages to touch his robe, her story comes true.
Much of Dawna's work with couples over the years has been helping them to reframe their marriages, to come up with mutually agreed upon narratives about relationship on which both can agree.
This is important because these frames literally create the kinds of relationships we live in. We are a team, or we are a set of individuals vying for control. Our spouse is acting out of love or they are acting out of self-interest. The whole emotional tone and lived realities of our relationships are created through the stories we tell ourselves about our partners' behaviors.
Changing frames sounds deceptively simple, but it is not. Most of us have deeply rooted patterns that govern how we frame our relationships that spring from our families of origin and the ways we learned to deal with early childhood traumas like abandonment, fear of punishment, or mistrust.
For example, Martin Seligman and others discovered that when children are subjected to bad things over which they have no control repeatedly, they learn to believe they are helpless. Subsequently, when they have opportunities to take control of adverse situations, they will often not take advantage of them because "helplessness" has become their standard framework.
Similarly, Carol Dweck described people as having "fixed" and "growth" mindsets based on early childhood experiences. People with growth mindsets tend to frame situations as manageable, problems as solvable, and challenges as opportunities to learn. People with fixed mindsets tend to experience difficult situations, problems, and challenges as largely outside their control.
The good news is that both Seligman and Dweck have evidence that people can, and do, change even the most deeply embedded negative frames. Decades of experience with troubled marriages likewise confirms that couples can learn to tell themselves stories of love and healing.
And when they reach out to one another with these new understandings, the stories can come true.
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