In my last post I mentioned strategies for changing the course of our relationships to ourselves, to our partners and to the world.
There’s a lot of talk about compassion in relationships, and the world needs more of it, for sure.
But first I want to talk about an idea harder to digest than compassion: Contempt.
Let me begin to explain how essential an understanding of contempt is to our relationships and how it functions in them.
In our culture, we’re constantly inundated with the message that we're not enough, that we're inadequate, or could be better if only…
This gives rise to un-healthy self-esteem, borne of a collective drive to feel good about ourselves. But it leads us into shame-spirals that pull us into a one-down feeling of inferiority or into a judgmental feeling of one-up grandiosity, superiority. Both positions are unhealthy and both hurt our relationships.
Terry Real states over and over again that "the core energy in both, shame and grandiosity, is contempt."
Let’s unpack that for a sec…
When contempt swings inward, we call that shame. When contempt swings outward onto those around us, we call it grandiosity. The energy itself is fundamentally the same. We may even use the same words to berate others as we use to berate ourselves.
In his book, the New Rules of Marriage, Terry Real says,
“You know you’re in a real relationship the day you look at this person and realize they’re exquisitely designed to stick the burning spear into your eyeball. This person is going to throw me right back into the soup that I thought I was going to avoid. And that’s the good news, because that’s where the healing lies.”
Often we work our whole lives to avoid feeling pain and then we meet someone who has a unique power to trigger us! And we think that bolstering ourselves or blaming our partner is how we avoid feeling the pain. We think we’ll be better off if we escape pain and go into blame and shame…the truth is, we won’t be.
We won’t be better off if we indulge, justify, mount a case, punish or withdraw; if we walk around huffing, puffing, yelling, finger-pointing, or turning our homes into war zones.
We're just perpetuating and replicating the cycle of contempt.
The practice of bringing awareness to how contempt is showing up in your relationship, and within your Self, can change everything. Life can become more manageable, and more, well, life-sized. Dynamics can change, loosen, transform.
We all know what a life lived in fear motivates people to do on the world stage. What does fear make you do in your relationship?
Wouldn’t it be easier to step into an honest reckoning with your deepest fears and learn how to ask for what you want?
If you’re ready to find out how, consider joining myself and two fabulous certified relational life therapists a 2-day online weekend Relational Bootcamp for couples, individuals and also therapists training in the Relational Life model.
Speak Soon,
