Real Advice

THE MYTH OF QUALITY TIME

By Terry Real

This article was featured on The Huffington Post. Become one of Terry's fans on that site.

Each year, parents resolve to yell at their kids less and spend more so-called "Quality Time" as a family. The reason why these resolutions don't stick is because when it comes to our life's priorities, we tend to vote with our feet.

I hate the term "Quality Time."  I would like to take the person who coined the term behind the barn and flog him.

"Quality Time" is nothing more than a self-serving Yuppie rationalization for not being there for your kids.  The fairy tale of "Quality Time" is that you can make up for the time you don't have to be a good mom or dad by scheduling short doses of time intentionally focused on your kid. Let me tell you, kids do not like being intentionally focused on. The entire idea is a fallacy.

We live in a culture that is built for production and consumption. Our society is about business. While we give lip service to cherishing our marriages and our kids -- and although we do a far better job at this than our parents or any generation in history -- most of us are living over-committed lives trying to get ahead.

By the time we're done with work and taxes and bills and arranging our kids' activities, there is precious little energy or time left over. Mentally it's very hard to turn down that next work commitment because you promised your kid to play Monopoly. You think, "Good grief, that's four hours of 'Passing Go' -- I need a 'Get Out of Jail Free Card'!"

Real parenting occurs when you're just hanging out or in the kitchen when you're cooking together. The best conversations are when your kids are in the backseat and you're the chauffeur. There's a world of difference between chatting with your kids and making an appointment for ice cream and asking, "So...how are you doing?" That's not talking to a kid, that's talking to an adult.

One of the reasons we speed over being with our kids is because their pace is so different from the rest of the world. They're slower. You have to put your crack-berry away, and you have to slow down. It's the same sort of transition (and just as difficult) when you go from running around chasing work issues to being sexual with your spouse. You have to get off the hyper-conveyor belt of the adult world, and you have to slow down.

No doubt, it can be a shock to your system. Adult daily life has a lot of action and stimulation. You experience a shutter when you transition into kid-time. You're trying to listen to your kid, but you have 53 other things on your mind, and frankly, kids are kind of boring -- and you feel guilty about that thought!

Give yourself a break, literally and figuratively. Kids, if you let them, will pull you into their slower, more nourishing kid-time. Now that my kids are older, I dedicated one of my books to the sheer joy of burning away an afternoon playing Monopoly with them. I can't think of anything that made me any happier in my whole life.

You have to yield to their world which is simpler, less stimulating and slower and open up to the subtle richness of it. The reward is that when you enter into that relationship with your kids it's so much fun and so nourishing for you. It is such sweetness, and when you get to be in your mid-50s like me, you'll just wish you had more of it.

Look, it's perfectly O.K. to schedule time to be with your kids. There's nothing wrong with saying I'm going to coach my kid's baseball team or Thursday night is dad's night to take the kids to the movies, but this should never take the place of just hanging out. Put your work aside and cut your 53 errands down to only the essentials.

In today's structured world, just hanging out is gold. As children what they want, and they will tell you they want to just hang out with their parents. No agenda, no purpose, just chillin'.

10 TIPS: Resolving to Resolve

By Kim Leatherdale, LPC, ATR-BC, NCC, guest blogger

Kim Leatherdale is a state licensed and nationally registered therapist based in New Jersey. She has trained in Relational Life Therapy with Terry Real, and she counsels on relationship issues, stress management, men’s issues, disordered eating, addiction, anxiety, depression and more. For more info visit Kim Leatherdale's website.

People use the turning of the year as a time to make changes; however, less than 15% of resolutions come to fruition.  Here are ten ways you can help your New Year’s resolution succeed.

1.  Examine your resolution.  Who you are doing this for?  (Hint, the answer should be you.)  Make sure you feel energized and excited by the resolution, not frustrated by the thought of it.  If you feel negative about it before you even start, you will never finish.  If you have failed multiple times on a goal, how can you change it so it motivates you?

2.  Write your goal down.  All good planners know writing something down helps it happen.  As you write, put some thought into it, look at what exactly you want to achieve, and make it specific.

3.  Make it a commitment not a maybe.  Put your energy into making it happen.  Having a clearly stated and specific resolution helps.  For example: “I will have X amount of money in the bank by the end of the year” is more motivating than “I want to save money.”

4.  Tell others and check in with them.  Find positive and supportive people who will ask you how your steps are coming.  Plan to meet with them regularly, even via email.  Talk with others who are strongly working on their resolutions; help each other.  Motivation can be contagious.

5.  Make a step by step plan including timetables.  Once you have a clear goal stated, you can break it into steps, a perfect way to track your progress.  If planning to save money, divide the total amount into fourths and check your balance every three months for your quarterly goal amount.

6.  Remind yourself daily of your goal.  If you are computer savvy, have your computer prompt you each time you sign-on.  Tape it to your mirror so you see it each day.  Keep it on the top of your mind so each thing you do will move you toward the fulfillment of your resolution.

7.  Reward yourself for completing each step.  If you wait a whole year to see progress, it can get frustrating.  It is important to recognize each success so you energize yourself to keep moving forward.  Set rewards that are meaningful to you in order to energize yourself.

8.  Utilize resources.  Look into the supports related to your goal; for example, live or online groups, books, or someone you know may have ideas to keep you going.  Keep an open mind about anything that will move you forward.

9.  Visualize steps and success.  Your mind doesn’t know the difference between what you imagine and reality.  Take a few minutes each day to actually visualize yourself happily achieving your goal.  You’ll be surprised how motivating this simple step can be.

10. Don’t give up.  At the beginning of the year energy is high, and it is easy to be motivated.  Later, you may find you have forgotten for a week to do what you planned- don’t give up.  You have the whole year to fulfill your goal, and each day is a new day.

Remember each day is a new day; small changes add up in time to larger life altering patterns.  You can make a change (or resolutions) any time of the year and make life dramatically better.

TERRY BLOGS NEXT on, "The Myth of Quality Time"!

CONTEMPT: My search for a cure for this relationship killer

By Donna Blethen, Guest Blogger

Donna Blethen is a licensed California marriage and family therapist specializing in individual, couples and family therapy practicing in San Francisco and Pacifica since 1978. For more info, visit www.donnablethen.com.

When I was training with John Gottman, I enjoyed his theory of the Sound Relationship House and his description of the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of relationships". He called one of the Four Horsemen, "Contempt".

He also said there was no antidote for contempt in a relationship.

Indeed, I thought, more often than not there is some form of contempt in most relationships: One or the other partner feels superior or better-than the other. Yet, I didn't quite believe there was not antidote.

I was not satisfied.

I bought Terry Real's book I Don't Want to Talk About It for a girlfriend -- a mom in my playgroup of nine year olds at the time. At our playgroup Friday gatherings, she often complained that the line, "I don't want to talk about it" was her husband's frequent response and that it drove her crazy. I put Terry's book on the shelf without giving it to her, thinking I was being presumptuous. Then, on a cold rainy day some months later, I pulled it off the shelf, and I began reading it.

I was spellbound.

Every man in my life is in that book. Terry so clearly describes, with gripping storytelling, the wounding legacy of our patriarchal culture for men and the women who love them. Our culture lands men or male-identified women (a.k.a. the progeny of the feminist movement) into emotionally walled-off, achievement-oriented, grandiose places -- or if they fail to make the cut, they are doomed to become shame-based failures. Either way, our cultural imperative is a relational lose-lose.

I personally resonated with the truths in that book. Never before had they been so clearly described. I wept for my father, my brothers, past lovers, my husband. Contempt and grandiosity is the main theme throughout this book, but, for the first time in our profession, Terry dealt with it straight-on.

I began to feel hopeful.

His second book, How Do I Get Through to You?, takes on the women involved with grandiose, contemptuous men (or if the roles are reversed, the men involved with those women), and teaches how a loved one can break through that wall of "better-than".

I found a pathway in Terry's stories and experiences, and I wanted more. As I read his books, I saw many references to Pia Mellody. She was part of his recovery work. I began to read everything I could of hers. Then, I found out that Terry was conducting a workshop in Napa, CA. I went to it, and not only did I gain tremendous personal insights, but I decided I wanted to begin professional training with Terry to learn how to apply Relational Life Therapy (RLT) to better counsel my clients and help them achieve healthy relationships.

That was seven years ago.

As a result of my training with Pia and Terry, I have gained a systematic, easy to understand, step-by-step pathway to help couples and families understand what thinking and behavior trips them up relationally. If they are serious about change and healing, with RLT they can learn to love and understand themselves and their partner, as well as learn to identify self-defeating behaviors and employ healthy alternatives.

RLT also provides normalizing insights like: the Three Stages of Coupledom (the Honeymoon, the Raw Deal, and the Real Deal), and that all relationships are constantly shifting between harmony, disharmony and repair.  Fundamentally, RLT is based on the idea that relational skills are teachable and learnable.

RLT has been a boon to my personal life and my professional life. I teach it, and I live it.

The couples I treat love the clarity. The "less-than" person in the relationship loves the support because they get someone (me, the therapist) who is on their side to call their "better-than" mate down from his/her overtly toxic high horse. Believe it or not, the grandiose, "better-than" mate likes it too because RLT does not assume that the "less-than" partner is all that innocent in the equation. Instead, this person has work to do to clean up their own passive toxic behavior.

No one is innocent in these powerful couple dynamics, they are just playing out immature relational behaviors that were usually modeled as they were growing up. I find that most people are hungry for the connection that Relational Life Therapy teaches.

Finally, there is a cure for the relationship killer we know as contempt.

SEX THERAPY: Through the lens of Relational Life Therapy

By Dan F. Pollets, Ph.D.

Dr. Pollets describes himself as "an enthusiastic practitioner" of Relational Life Therapy (RLT). He is a faculty member of the Relational Life Institute, and an ASSECT certified sex therapist.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The names of all clients as well as any other identifying information in the REAL Advice blog are changed to protect their confidentiality and privacy. Also this post discusses the topic of sexual intimacy in a frank manner.

THE CASE:

Alissa and Matt are a late 30s couple with no kids. They are not married. They have been together for three years and living together for two. They are both successful business people. Alissa and Matt presented with the major complaint of dissatisfaction with their sex life. They were in a rut of sexual avoidance. They told me they only have sex once every six weeks, and they were increasingly angry and resentful towards each other.

We discussed their sexual history individually and together, and they revealed dramatic differences in what they like as far as arousal goes. Alissa states, "We have different warm-up interests." She expressed that she needs more romance and extended foreplay other than genitally focused.

Alissa said she has a history of pain upon intromission -- a medical condition called vulvodynia. At the time, she had not had this thoroughly evaluated, in fact, according to WebMD, physicians are only now addressing this as a real gynecological disorder, so for most of her life, she has had the shame of doctors telling her the pain is not real.  I referred Alissa to a gynecologist who specializes in sexual medicine who prescribed sessions with a physical therapist who uses biofeedback in order to re-condition the pelvic floor muscles and help her relax during intercourse and feel less pain. A thorough test of her hormones by an endocrinologist was also part of the medical piece of this case.

By contrast, Matt said he is not all that interested in foreplay and likes to "cut to the chase." He acknowledged that this might have to do with his difficulty sustaining his erection, especially when he has to stop midstream and put on a condom. He said, the wind goes out of his sail. I encouraged Matt to get his erectile dysfunction evaluated. He was prescribed Viagra.

The combination of her pain and his E.D. left them both frustrated and only increased their anxiety about sex, and this spilled over into the other aspects of their relationship.

Alissa wished for more sensuousness; Matt wanted to just get down to business. She believed that her painful intercourse and sexual avoidance would be remedied by a change in Matt's behavior towards her. She said that their difference in sexual needs played out in their relationship in general in so much as she wished that Matt could be more expansive, social, and more interested in her world. Matt said he wished that Alissa would not be so anxious and "compulsive." He felt that her anxiety about things being out of place made relaxing -- and sex in particular -- very difficult. He said he finds this off-putting, and acknowledged that he escapes from the tensions between them by watching cyber-sex and masturbating.

THE RLT SEX THERAPY:

In this case, as in all sex therapy cases, the first move is to get a very detailed picture of the sexual dysfunction and how the relationship dynamics interact to create what Terry Real calls "the more, the more" -- an emotional dance which means the more she pushes, the more he retreats.

Sex couples therapy from the perspective of Relational Life Therapy (RLT) is as didactic as it is emotionally focused. It is predicated on what Terry calls the "Golden Rule" of relationship: Tell me what I need to know so that I can give you more of what you want. RLT helps the therapist identify the obstacles that hinder each partner from articulating what they need sexually and how to guide them in making direct requests of each other -- how they transmit.  The other half of the equation is to elevate their understanding of how each partner receives the information that is being shared. This is about "listening to give what you can," versus finding ways to defend, rationalize, blame or retaliate against your partner's request. In RLT, therapists teach these winning and losing strategies to develop the couple's communication skills. It is taught and practiced in the therapy session.

THE OUTCOME:

Using this technique, Alissa was empowered to articulate her sexual needs more clearly and was taught how to accomplish this using good boundaries -- in a way that isn't pushy, off-putting or nagging. We call this "speaking relationally." Regarding Matt, we first had to address his grandiose behavior -- his determination to want to have sex his way which resulted in his resentment of Alissa's need for foreplay and special considerations. Much of this due to his lack of knowledge about the female sexual response. We remedied this by educating him and having Alissa speak about her arousal needs. We also addressed Matt's avoidance of creating a romantic environment. The RLT therapy helped him re-frame foreplay from an "obstacle" into a way to get what he really wanted -- more and better sex! He learned that a little of "this" would get him a lot of "that".

What should be obvious but is often obscured in these cases is that a good sexual relationship (as with the relationship in general) is about Cherishing, being empathically attuned to the other's physical needs, not judging or going "one-up" and then "walling off" or disconnecting. This skill can be explicitly taught using Relational Life principles. You can see how the sexual dance between Alissa and Matt is a metaphor of the relationship dynamics in general. As a RLT therapist, I will often make this explicit by suggesting the connection between effective sexual communication in the bedroom and what happens (or could happen) in the other rooms of the house.

Alissa and Matt have done extremely well in just three months of treatment. They have more frequent sex (now two times per week). An interesting note is that Alissa has found a way to move through her discomfort by changing positions. She continues to pursue medical treatment for her vulvodynia and hormone issues. Matt has "come down" from grandiosity and has turned off the "misery stabilizers" (TV, cyber-sex) and is more present in the relationship. He is able to give in his sexual behavior toward Alissa and not judge or criticize her needs. He appreciates it when Alissa give him more specific feedback and verbal/non-verbal cues as to what she needs to become aroused, and he enjoys her. In turn, Alissa has attempted to give Matt more of what he wants which is less anxiety and compulsion on her part and more relaxed playfulness. The tension and conflict in the relationship overall has been reduced. As we would expect, their overall level of intimacy has improved along with their sex life.

I have found that Integrating the powerful techniques of RLT with traditional sex therapy has proved extremely effective in my treatment of couples presenting with sexual complaints.