Creating Happy Relationships

SAGE Publications

Richard Nelson-Jones

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781446225516
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicoterapia

?Relate counsellors interested in extending their learning about cognitive therapy will find this manual a comprehensive guide?- Jan Hobbs, Relate News

?An easy-to-read, comprehensive text which provides a practical guide to skills for starting, maintaining and cultivating successful relationships, whether of opposite sexes or the same sex? - The Australian Journal of Counselling Psychology

Creating Happy Relationships is written in a comfortable non-academic style, using simple everyday English, and incorporates recent research and theory. In addition to many vignettes of partners creating and cultivating happiness there are plenty of practical activities for improving partner skills. This book is a major resource for prospective partners, couples, for marriage preparation and counselling courses, and human communication and relationship education courses in schools, colleges and universities.

PART ONE
INTRODUCTION

1

Creating and Developing Your Mind

Something we were withholding made us weak
until we found it was ourselves.

Robert Frost

Nearly all humans become partners, and frequently fall out of becoming partners, in close relationships. When asked what makes for happy relationships, often partners answer ‘good communication’. This answer is certainly correct. However, a further question is ‘What makes for good communication?’ The main assumption of this book is that your mind influences and creates your communication. Put another way, how you create your mind, your internal communication, influences how you create your actions, your external communication. Your mind is a powerful tool that you always have at your disposal to use for good or ill. A simple analogy is that of driving a car: barring unforeseen circumstances, how skilfully you think determines how well you drive. The expression ‘As goes the horse, so goes the cart’ provides a more old-fashioned analogy.

Relationships are processes that take place both within and between partners’ minds. In any relationship, you develop and react to your thoughts and pictures about one another. Furthermore, since relationships are two-way processes, how you think and communicate influences how your partner thinks and communicates towards you. However, you need not stay stuck in repetitive patterns of communication that do not work for you. You can empower yourself and your relationships by developing your mind. The good news is that each of you is capable of bringing out the best in yourself and in one another by training yourself to think effectively. By thinking skilfully, you are more likely to engage in the kind of communication that brings love, joy, happiness and contentment into your lives.

CREATING YOUR MIND

The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitude of mind.

William James

What is mind?

Let’s start our task of helping you become mentally tougher and more loving by exploring how you create your mind. The word mind has many meanings. The word brain is a possible synonym for mind. One way to view your mind is that it is the psychological component of your brain. An important meaning of mind is that of intellectual capacities or powers. The noun intellect refers to the faculty of reasoning, knowing and understanding. An intelligent person is quick of mind. However, people with high IQs do not always fare well in the practicalities of life. As anyone who has spent time in universities knows, high intellectual intelligence is no guarantee of communicating well to others. Also, such people can use their quickness of mind against themselves: for instance, avoiding personal responsibility by being facile at making excuses.

A debate exists as to whether there are other types of intelligence than quickness of mind. For example, Gardner has proposed six types of intelligence: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic, and personal. The personal ‘intelligences’ consist of two aspects: access to one’s own feeling life and ‘the ability to notice and make distinctions among other individuals and, in particular, among their moods, temperaments, motivations, and intentions’ (Gardner, 1993, p. 240)

Similarly the concept of emotional intelligence has been proposed by Salovey and Mayer (1990). Emotional intelligence can be broken down into five domains: knowing one’s emotions; managing emotions; motivating oneself; recognizing emotions in others; and handling relationships. Goleman (1995) proposes that in a sense people have two minds and two different, yet overlapping, kinds of intelligence: rational and emotional. Carl Rogers, the founder of the Person-Centred school of counselling and psychotherapy, adopted a similar position on the role of emotions in being rational. The more you are open to your significant feelings and experiences, the more likely you are to be rational. Rogers’ ideal was that of wholeness rather than living in a compartmentalized world of body and mind (Rogers, 1980).

Biological contexts for creating your mind

You create your mind and thoughts within three important contexts: biological, social and cultural, and from the learning influences of your past. How you as an individual learned, maintained in the past and currently maintain strengths and deficits in creating your thoughts is the subject of Chapter 3. In this section I focus on some biological considerations that can provide limitations or boundaries to the notion that you are totally responsible for creating your thoughts.

The human brain weighs about three pounds and is composed of cells and neural juices. Human brains are about three times the size of those of non-human primates, our closest relatives in evolution. The brainstem, beginning at the top of the spinal chord, was the earliest part of the brain to evolve. Goleman writes: ‘From the most primitive root, the brainstem, emerged the emotional centers. Millions of years later in evolution, from these emotional areas evolved the thinking brain or “neocortex”, the great bulb of convoluted tissues that make up the top layers’ (Goleman, 1995, p. 10). The size of the neocortex or cerebral hemispheres increases up the phylogenetic scale from reptile to non-human primate to human. Goleman argues that the underlying emotional brain has both positive and negative repercussions for rational thinking. On the one hand, humans as animals have the propensity to react emotionally to situations without the cortical centres fully understanding what is happening. There can be a failure to activate the neocortical processes that lead to balance and impulse control. Colloquially, if you are in the grip of strong emotions like anger and anxiety, you can fail to think straight. Indeed, your thinking may be positively dangerous. The emotional brain can also be a force for rationality and work in cooperation with the thinking mind to guide decisions – what Rogers might call being open to your experience and inner valuing process (Rogers, 1980).

The instincts provide another biological context for how you think. You are subject to instincts of varying degrees of strength, such as survival, shelter, sex, belonging and aggression. Other instincts may operate less strongly and be what Maslow (1970) refers to as instinct remnants. The human capacity for altruism may be one such instinct remnant.

Humans seem biologically programmed to search for meaning. Your brain instantly attempts to pattern or organize random stimuli into figure and ground – foreground and background. When situations or sets of stimuli defy patterning, you experience an uneasiness that persists until you fit the situation into some recognizable pattern. Your search for a meaning to your life represents this need to fit situations into a pattern. This search is your response to being acutely unsettled in a chaotic, unpatterned world (May and Yalom, 1995).

Humans may be subject to evolutionary templates, though their existence is more speculative than that of the instincts. In Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious evolutionary history feeds forward into present thinking. The collective unconscious represents memory traces from humans’ ancestral past, including when humans were not a separate species. All humans have roughly the same collective unconscious (Jung, 1939).

Your capacity for thinking is influenced by individual differences: for instance, humans can be grouped according to biologically influenced personality types, such as introversion and extroversion. For the purposes of this book, the degree to which people differ in their biological propensities to irrational as well as to rational thinking is a very important consideration. For most people, biological propensities to irrationality fall well short of recognized psychiatric disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 1994).

Sexual and affectionate orientation – whether you are gay, heterosexual or bisexual – represents another important area of individual difference that influences how you think. The fact that homosexuality has existed in all known cultures across all periods of time suggests that it contains a large biological element.

Social and cultural contexts for creating your mind

Throughout history, people’s minds have been influenced by contextual considerations such as the time in history in which they live, technological change, culture, race, and social class, amongst others.

First, let me illustrate this point by briefly examining differing views of the concept of love. There are huge variations in how love is defined across the ages and across cultures. For example, in some periods and cultures, love has been viewed as a lofty asexual experience, whereas other cultures and periods have included a sexual component. Also, how people view the beloved is shaped by culturally defined patterns of acceptability. In addition, the function of love varies across cultures. For instance, love is the foundation for marriage in individualistic cultures; in collectivist cultures, kin networks and economic pressures loom larger (Beall and Sternberg, 1995).

Social and cultural considerations are also relevant to attitudes towards homosexuality. For instance, no longer do the psychiatric professions in America, Britain and Australasia categorize homosexuality as a mental disorder. Furthermore in these cultures, though still far short of universal acceptance, there is increasing tolerance of and understanding of gay and bisexual people. Thai culture is even more accepting of gay and lesbian people, though again there are limits to this tolerance. Also, engaging in homosexual behaviour does not automatically imply that you think of yourself as homosexual. For example, some Thai males manage to retain a heterosexual self-concept so long as they are the penetrators or ‘kings’ rather than the penetrated or ‘queens’ in sexual encounters.

The prevailing economic system is another social and cultural context that influences the content of your mind. Prominent among capitalist values are those of competition, consumerism, and accumulation of wealth. Arguably, such values permeate personal relationships. For example, people may judge themselves and one another by the size of their wallets rather than the size of their hearts (De Angelis, 1997). The purpose of life may be seen as acquiring and conspicuously consuming more possessions rather than developing what the Buddhists call the four Divine Abodes of Mind: loving kindness, compassion, sympathy and equanimity. Capitalism may also encourage virtues as well as vices in relationships: for instance, a sense of self-reliance and of responsibility for providing for dependents. The values of any prevailing economic system will influence how you think and hence how you relate.

MIND SKILLS

The happiness habit is developed simply by practising happy thinking.

Norman Vincent Peale

Inasmuch as mind ‘drives’ communication, relationships are mind games that partners can play with varying degrees of skill. How can you control your thoughts so that you can beneficially influence how you communicate? First, you can understand that you have a mind with a capacity for super-conscious thinking – or thinking about thinking – that you can develop. Second, you can become much more efficient in thinking about your thinking if you view your mental processes in terms of skills that you can train yourself to control. Third, in daily life, you can assiduously practise using your mind skills to influence your communication.

What are skills?

One meaning of the word skills pertains to areas of skill. For instance, albeit overlapping, broad areas of skills include: relating skills, study skills, leisure skills, health skills and work skills. A second meaning of the word skills refers to level of competence or expertise. For instance, in a specific skills area you can be skilled, unskilled or a mixture of the two.

The third meaning of the word skills is less common. This meaning relates to the knowledge and sequence of choices entailed in implementing a skill. The main way that I can help you to acquire, develop and maintain satisfactory levels of competence in specific skills areas is by training you in their required sequences of choices.

The concept of mind skills is not best viewed in either/or terms in which you either possess or do not possess a skill. Rather, in any skills area, it is preferable to think of yourself as possessing either good skills or poor skills, or a mixture of the two. If you make good choices in a skills area, for instance in the mind skill of perceiving accurately, this is a strength. If you make poor choices in a skills area, this is a deficit. In all mind skills areas, in varying degrees you are likely to possess elements of both good skills and poor skills. For instance, in the skills area of perceiving accurately, you may perceive moderately accurately, but still possess systematic errors or ‘tricks of the mind’ that distort information. The object of working on your mind skills is, in one or more areas, to help you shift the balance of your good and poor skills more in the direction of strengths. Put another way, the object is to help you affirm yourself and your partner by making better relationship choices.

Some central mind skills

Below are brief descriptions of the six central mind skills targeted in this book. These skills are derived from the work of leading cognitive therapists, such as Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis. Rather than descr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: Empowering Your Mind
• Part Three: Developing Your Communication
• Postscript: Cultivating Happy Relationships
• Bibliography
• List of Activities
• Name Index
• Subject Index