Author Archives: Gregory Burns, MA, LMFT, LPCC

Marriage Bottom Line: “I Need Your Support”

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A marriage is an attachment relationship for adults. As in childhood with one’s primary caregiver, attachment is a relationship bond to a thoroughly supportive other. In human evolution, that person was the advantage that helped you to survive and raise children. Psychologically, this parent or partner helps regulate your emotions and connect you to your strengths.

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Woman Pinning Boutonniere on Man – Norman Rockwell, 1922

Marriage, or any committed romantic relationship, hinges on a simple question. When I need your support, are you there for me? The question is not of money or housework, but of emotional support and three types are essential:

  • Affirmation – Will you, can you, reassure me that I am a good and worthy person? We are hardwired to doubt our original dignity. Thus we need a person to mirror our strengths and goodness back to us.
  • Encouragement – Will you remind me of my strengths, resources and potential when I feel weak?
  • Consolation – Will you hold me when I feel defeated or lost? Will you stand by me when it feels like others have abandoned me?

Couples who sense that their relationship is in serious trouble have come to believe that their partners will no longer support them in these basic ways. At that point you start pulling away because you have to shore up your independence. Your friendships become more valuable than your marriage. Your partner cannot lessen your pain and cannot deepen your joy.

Why This is Harder Than it Sounds

Why do so many relationships deteriorate in this manner? Three factors pose steep challenges:

  • Insecure adult attachment style – If you did not experience security in your first attachment relationship (with your primary caregiver) then you will have over-sized or under-sized needs in adulthood that most people cannot satisfy or cannot reciprocate.
  • Insecure self-identity – You are so wounded yourself that you cannot muster the presence or the empathy to support your partner, or you quickly suspect that your partner’s needs are a critique of you and you get defensive.
  • Projection, displacement or scapegoating – Your partner decides that you are the problem, lashes out at you and again you get defensive. This situation is most difficult even for the very mature person.

How Do We Get Back to Supporting Each Other?

A great number of books have been written on this subject.† Here is a emotional recipe to get started. All ingredients are for both partners.

  1. Dare to be vulnerable – In a “make-up” phase or with a marriage therapist, be rigorously honest and thoroughly subjective about your pain, your needs, your weaknesses and self-doubts.
  2. Find your compassion – See your bleeding, broken partner with your heart, without judgment. Listen and feel as if you are meeting this person for the first time.
  3. Be charitable – Make allowances for your partner’s shortcomings, slightly easing your ethical and moral demands, even trimming your own needs. This is real self-giving love. Ubi caritas est vera, Deus ibi est.

(†) A few recommended books:
Johnson, Sue. Hold me tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. Little, Brown, 2008.
Borys, Henry James. The Sacred Fire: Love as a Spiritual Path. Harper, 1994.
Yerkovich, Milan & Kay. How We Love. WaterBrook Press, 2006.

6 Attitude Rules for Co-Parenting

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There are many practical rules for healthy co-parenting, largely focused on consistency and cooperation. Underneath the practicalities is the basic attitude towards the co-parent. Here are six firm rules that demonstrate the right disposition.

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Mary Astor & children

  1. Never, ever, criticize your co-parent in front of your children. Children need to idealize their parents in the early years and respect them in the teenage years. Criticism of the co-parent only induces your child to take a stand against you, overtly or silently.
  2. Show no interest in your co-parent’s private life. Your kids will inevitably talk about the other parent. Never discourage children from saying what is on their minds, but do not encourage co-parent reports, with questions or otherwise. Besides, such disinterest is healthier for you.
  3. Defend your co-parent when the opportunity arises. Give him/her the benefit of doubt when your children are complaining. Do not tolerate disrespectful talk about either of the children’s parents, as if you were still living together.
  4. Be courteous and kind towards your co-parent at child activities. Sit together, if possible. Your child does not need the anxiety of any parental friction, or the temptation to manage your conflict. For an hour or two, the child might touch the experience of a united family.
  5. Do not negotiate or even communicate through your children. Never put your child in the position of arbiter or mediator. That role, if needed, is for adults, preferably professionals.
  6. Support and promote your co-parent’s (compatible or at least harmonized) goals for your children. Start with the goal of a loving and supportive parent-child relationship.

The Single Life – An Alternative Path

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I have said that consummate love in a monogamous, lifelong partnership is my life’s greatest goal. Marriage is the school of love. By working at union with this one person, I am practicing and growing towards union with One and All.

What about the single life? How and where does the un-paired person seek union, both temporal and eternal? There are strong anthropological and spiritual drivers for mating. Yet any philosophy that is not inclusive of every person’s bio-psycho-social circumstance is flawed and falls apart, just like any scientific theory that ignores some portion of natural phenomena is rather pointless.

For the single person, more of the unitive path runs through community and solitude. Without the demands of a primary commitment, you can nurture many more relationships. Instead of focusing on meeting the needs of one person, you can be of service to countless others in group settings. In the midst of several long-term, deep friendships, a true family emerges. You rightly call each other sister and brother, just as the vowed religious do.

The Fishing Trip - Norman Rockwell, 1919

The Fishing Trip – Norman Rockwell, 1919

Community is the blindside for couples. They tend to “put all their eggs in one basket.” When suddenly faced with divorce or death of a spouse, they can suddenly be very alone with no practice of developing friendships. Without the possibility of neglecting community, single adults are better prepared for a single elderhood.

Solitude is another healthy part of living that couples often either fail to schedule or regard with much suspicion. Periods of silence and solo retreat, preferably in nature, are practice for union with the more-than-human world and with the Spirit of your understanding.

It is this unity in Spirit that we all seek, married or unmarried, coupled or single. Maybe marriage is the “El Camino Real” to unitive consciousness, but community-based persons also get there and experience more of the world along the way, figuratively and often literally.

Convincing Employees to Quit

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If you have been practicing personal management, you know your direct reports on a personal level. You have a good sense of their strengths, their interpersonal style, their values and priorities. You even have some idea about what’s going on in the rest of their lives – the larger context of their work performances.

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Thus, when there is a downward performance trend, you’re in a good position to assess, collaboratively, whether this person needs help (resources, counseling, encouragement, motivation) or if s/he is (no longer) in the right job. Often, he is not even in the right profession.

Instead of firing this person (adversarial and often too much trouble) or waiting to cull him in the next lay-off (disingenuous), put the effort into convincing him to quit. “Guided quitting” is positive for both parties. How do you execute it?

  1. Maintain an attitude of total positive regard. The problem is with fit and both parties are losing. However, the employer has survived less-than-optimal employees in the past, so this is really all about what’s best for the employee.
  2. Do the help versus placement discernment in collaboration with the employee. Work until he agrees that the issue is placement. He’s in the wrong job for his strengths and/or his desire.
  3. Emphasize authenticity in the employee’s career. “Do what you like and like what you do.” Moreover, “play to your strengths; nobody else has quite the same set.” Also, authenticity is the argument against simply compensation-driven job calculations.
  4. Highlight opportunity cost. While he stays here, his better placements are left undone, unattended, unfulfilled.

Sure, there will be many/most that you will not convince, but they will have an alternative storyline for their dismissal that they cannot easily discard. It may just change their lives later on.

Employee Retention? Or Detention?

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Part of the manager’s job description is to retain the (better part of the) staff. Long-term staff accrue intimacy with the organization’s unique products and services; they are fluent in the local culture and know how to get things done. Naturally, the stars and even the solid players on the team are highly valued, especially by their direct manager whose personal success they most directly impact.

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When one of those people comes into your office, closes the door and announces that s/he has decided to leave the team, shock and panic can be the automatic response. The sympathetic nervous system (fight/flight/freeze) is yelling inside your head, “We’re screwed.” You feign composure and then you proceed, on the spot, to try and rescue yourself and your team by changing the employee’s mind. If you have been asleep or disinterested in personal (not personnel) management, this is the first time you have ever asked the person what would bring her true job satisfaction.

If, instead, you have practiced personal management all along, you are not really surprised. Though you could never have predicted the exact timing, you knew this moment was becoming because you, like the employee, appreciate that most of the professional development available to this person in this job has already been realized.

Ethical employee retention is a continuous process and is not so arrogant to think that it possess an employee forever. The best employees are only passing through on their career journey. Pressure, persuasion and bribes at the last minute are disrespectful to the delicate discernment that brought the employee to this point. If you are successful at swaying her, you are not practicing retention, but detention. Detentions tend to be short and the employee leaves anyway.

Any Executive Can Give a Good Speech

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First comes the shock, plus sadness or relief, that the old leader is stepping down (to “focus on other pursuits” or “spend more time with family”) and a new name is being installed. Then comes the requisite staff or all-hands meeting. You listen to a polished presentation – encouraging, opportune, fresh, articulate – and you come away thinking that this new person might really be OK, might actually address the organization’s challenges and exercise good governance over the business and its employees.

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All Hands

Your breath of hopefulness means that the executive has accomplished the presentation’s main goals: settle nerves, hasten adjustment, and spark optimism – all of which promote a return to productivity in the work force. The broad term for this mass mood management is politics. In fact you have learned nothing about the leadership style or effectiveness of the new boss.

Giving a speech to the masses (defined as people you do not know personally but whose support you need) is the ultimate stage for the persona, that part of the psyche that is well-behaved, unoffensive, even likeable. People marvel at how they can encounter the same person in a smaller meeting, more so in a 1:1, and see a completely different, much darker character. That’s the shadow side of the psyche, the accrual of developmental defects piled on a base of shame. Balancing this darkness are the person’s gifts and virtues. Political speeches within organizations are neither good nor bad; they are just completely unrevealing.