(Stillness in the Storm Editor) Relationships are one of the most important aspects of human life. No matter who you are, or what your spiritual status is, you need to interact with other people, to help you realize personal goals, express yourself in ways others appreciate, and enjoy the rewards that come from fellowship and togetherness. Yet in our world, the science of what makes relationships work has been hidden to the detriment of all people. Ultimately, all relationships are contractual, based on the laws of social interaction, the mechanics of free will and consciousness. Understanding these laws and how to use them in social settings empowers us to have authentic, rich, and deeply satisfying relationships. It all starts with honesty and a dedication to the truth.
The following article discusses one of the most crucial factors in nurturing good relationships: the airing of grievances.
In order to understand the importance of this practice, let’s consider some fundamentals.
Accurate Knowledge and Life
Life is a dance of exploring the world and experience that results in the development of knowledge. Our knowledge acts as a map or guide for our behavior. In this sense, we’re each explorers seeking to map out reality in our own minds. The more accurate our knowledge the more likely we are to realize our dreams and desires. And more importantly, accurate knowledge is essential to ensure our emotional reactions are founded on truth. In this way, dedication to the truth means recognizing the potential for inaccurate emotional responses, and that knowledge of the truth helps guide us back into balance and harmony.
Let’s face it, most of the problems we encounter in relationships are due to miscommunication and misunderstanding.
How often have you reacted strongly to something someone did or thought about you, only to discover later you were wrong or that you might have overreacted? It happens all the time.
Rarely do we reflect on what we did to contribute to a tense situation. This avoidance to take responsibility is reinforced culturally, as the propaganda media encourages us to assume our emotional reactions and thoughts about others should never be questioned, and if they are, then someone is trying to manipulate us. But if we don’t learn humility, if we don’t develop the ability to recognize when we were wrong and learn, we’ll project our untruthful response onto another, causing turmoil and hardship for all involved.
In relationships, knowledge shapes the field or playground in which two or more people behave and interact. Learning about the wants, desires, and joys of your partner (whether friendly or romantic) helps you meet their needs as they meet yours. Thus, the knowledge we have about others literally shapes how we feel and what we desire in relation to that other. As such, learning how to align oneself to the truth, at all times, is extremely beneficial.
Staying on the Same Page
When both people are on the same page, when each individual’s knowledge matches the other’s, both can aspire to do things together, and it’s this sense of togetherness, comradery, that we derive incredible satisfaction from.
The quality of a relationship is directly related to how well we can maintain this shared body of knowledge, what we can describe as mutual trust.
When we’re not on the same page, when we expect our partners to do something and they didn’t, this causes relationship tension that can only be alleviated by restoring trust via authentic communication.
Our knowledge is always limited, always imperfect. As such, when you present your knowledge, your perception, your experience, it should be presented as your best guess at the time, subject to change as you learn more. And you should think about it this way too.
If you describe your experience and feelings as 100% true, even though you aren’t sure they are, you deny another person from sharing information that could expand your perspective. In relationships, this rigid and close-minded way of thinking causes a lot of problems.
Ultimately, you can’t be 100% certain of anything, even your own personal experience and feelings. Resultantly, being humble with your knowledge, recognizing that it is your best guess, is extremely helpful in relationships because you avoid being attached to your limited beliefs.
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Communicating Non-Violently
Communication is the key. How do two people ensure they’re on the same page? They have to talk to each other. Thus, learning how to communicate effectively is one of the most important skills we can develop in cultivating truly beneficial relationships.
Communicating your feelings, and what you think is happening in a situation related to another person is best done as a kind of investigation or mutual exploration.
Instead of presenting your views as 100% true, share it as what you think or suspect is happening, within a space of being open to the insights of the other person. Of course, the other person has to be doing the same, that is, if you are authentic and honest about the uncertainty around an emotionally triggering situation, the other person needs to respect your stance and follow it. If not, they might try to manipulate you via your honesty, so be careful to ensure your fellows are capable of authenticity, and if they aren’t, do your best to describe what it is and hold them to it.
When communication breaks down, when someone tries to gaslight or manipulate us into accepting their perspective as the only valid one, this is a form of subtle abuse and manipulation that needs to be called out. The reality is, most people don’t know how to share their perspective in an open way, so if you observe manipulation happening, forgive them and speak to it, encouraging them to be more open with their views.
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In relationships, there are two general categories of communication: unilateral (closed minded) and bilateral (open-minded).
Unilateral Communication is when we speak as if our opinion or perspective is unquestionably true—we expect and even demand that the other person believe us. If they don’t we take it personally, we get offended and often react defensively.
Here’s an example, “When you didn’t compliment me on my outfit, you basically called me ugly. You’re not allowed to call me ugly.”
Notice that the way they shared their experience was accusational. They felt ugly and attempted to pin this internal feeling on you as if you did, in fact, call them ugly. Here, one needs to defend themselves from the fallacious accusation, saying something like “I’m sorry you felt as if I was calling you ugly. That isn’t how I wanted to make you feel. But I don’t actually think you are, and the way you said it assumed I did, which isn’t right. Me not complimenting you on your outfit isn’t the same as calling you ugly. Let’s see if we can both work together to figure out what happened and ensure how to avoid it in the future?”
It’s important in controversial situations like this to avoid taking responsibility for something you didn’t do. If you did, now the other person’s contribution to their experience isn’t acknowledged, they will feel like a helpless victim and you were the perpetrator. This creates a codependency contract wherein future situations like this will automatically be blamed on you, even if you had nothing to do with it. And now, because the precedent has been set, it will be very difficult to show the other person that they were wrong.
Only take responsibility for things you caused, and ensure you dispel any blame that isn’t yours to accept.
Bilateral Communication is when we speak as if our view is open to discussion, we share it as an observation of what we think is happening, asking the other what they perceived and what they think of our views on the situation.
Using the same example, “When you didn’t compliment me on my outfit, I felt like you were calling me ugly. I don’t know if you really do think this, but it made me feel this way. What do you think about this? I want us to sit down together and try and figure out what happened.”
In this form, we spoke to what we felt and what we thought might have caused it, but we were open to being wrong and seeing a grander perspective.
The frame or foundation of bilateral communication is mutual truth-seeking. Each person shares their personal take on what they think happened, both engaging in a discussion to get to the bottom of things. The goal is to explore the truth together, not to force one person to accept our view.
This kind of communication style is important for the airing of grievances because it is often a tense situation.
What’s Happening When We Air Grievances?
A grievance is a real or imagined wrong that we associate to another person in some way. For example, if we were at dinner with our partner, and they burped loudly at the table, feeling embarrassed, we can share this with our partner in an effort to solve the problem, which is namely, how we define and value the experience of hearing burps.
The airing of grievances is ultimately a process of resolving discord or disharmony. It often involves one person experiencing something they don’t value or like that might have been caused by their partner. Or it might merely be a less than ideal situation that their partner could work with them to improve. In this sense, grievances are disharmonies that can be harmonized to improve the quality of life for all involved.
Psychologically, when our expectations aren’t met, we feel dissatisfaction. In relationships, we can’t avoid expecting things of our partner, it’s a part of the dance. The key is to communicate our needs and desires to our partner and negotiates with them to ensure they agree to meet them. The more effectively we can do this the more satisfied we’ll be in the relationship. This is called honorable negotiation, and it is essential to ensure harmonious interaction in all relationships.
But sometimes we expect or want things we don’t even know about ourselves. These are unconscious expectations. In the above example, we might not have consciously thought to ourselves “I don’t want my partner to burp at the table,” but when they did, we became palpably aware that their behavior dissatisfied us.
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Resentment and Blame
Dissatisfaction, left unchecked or addressed leads to resentment. Resentment is toxic to any kind of relationship, it’s like a festering sore on the side of your cheek, it nags at you an distracts you. Eventually, if resentment builds up enough, the person we used to love becomes someone we hate. Almost everyone can think of some annoying habit our friend has that gets under our skin. That feeling of annoyance and irritation is the feeling of you being dissatisfied because they aren’t behaving the way you think they should.
From a contractual perspective, you’re holding them to an expectation you never told them about and they never agreed to. So who is at fault here? You are. You have to take responsibility for the fact you never communicated your expectation, therefore, it isn’t right to hold someone to something they never agreed to. This means the source of your dissatisfaction is your failure to negotiate, not their failure to perform. Thus, the solution is to renegotiate, recognizing that you never gave them a chance to meet your needs, speaking to them compassionately. Conversely, if your need is unreasonable, then you have to do the inner work of letting go of an unreasonable goal or desire. Here, it helps to look for the desire behind the desire, and see if you can satisfy it using a more reasonable goal.
The airing of grievances allows you to discharge the energy of hatred by speaking to the issue. It is best done when the goal is resolving the problem, not just voicing your irritation. You should come to the table looking for a solution, and focus on that. And make sure you’re sharing your grievance in an open bilateral way.
Some grievances we can’t share, either because the topic is too taboo or because we know the person isn’t capable of hearing it without freaking out. In these instances, forgiveness is extremely helpful. In this sense, forgiveness is the act of discharging obligations or expectations placed on another by you.
Create the Space Before Things Get Ugly
The best practice for relationships is to consciously develop a space for the airing of grievances.
One problem almost everyone deals within relationships is the temptation to avoid saying hard things.
We don’t like to be the person to talk about a tense issue, we don’t like bringing down the vibe or being called negative. So we might resist the urge to air grievances, but this creates a false impression in the relationship.
If something is bothering you or another person and you’re avoiding a discussion about it, how real is whatever sense of happiness you feel? It’s ultimately illusory. If two people can only be nice to each other as long as they avoid talking about the things they’re dissatisfied about, how authentic is the relationship?
Now imagine that years have gone by, and a kind of false relationship has grown between two people. What happens when the tide of dissatisfaction can’t be held back anymore? A blowup fight usually occurs.
Thus, if we want to maintain peace, harmony, and the most ideal relationship conditions, we have to nip things in the bud before they get out of control. We have to share our grievance before we’re so emotionally charged it ends up becoming a fight.
The more we hold back sharing our grievance, the more invested we get emotionally in our limited point of view. Additionally, we start to forget details and this makes critically analyzing what happened difficultly. Most people know how hard it is to discuss something with someone when the original event that caused it took place a long time ago. The longer we wait the harder it is for each person to see things clearly.
The key is to develop the airing of grievance space before resentment builds.
Here are some tips.
- Go to your partner, talk to them about the benefits of airing grievances.
- Discuss the topic enough so that they intrinsically recognize the value of doing so.
- Tell them that once a week you want to sit down and calmly discuss any grievances they had during the previous seven days, no matter how silly or unimportant.
- Make a list of grievances and conduct the hearing with your partner at the end of the week.
- Attempt to be humble, compassionate, and tactful, during the session.
- Carefully work through any issues, using bilateral communication.
If you can do this on a regular basis, a space of healing and nurturing around controversial issues will begin to form. This will act is a solid foundation for deeper issues in the future. It’s literally training each of you how to resolve conflicts without having a destructive fight.
What you should begin to notice is less stress and anxiety in your relationships in general. You feel more free and open to being yourself, without worrying if the other will accept you.
In closing, from a deep spiritual and psychological perspective, the grievances we hold are actually opportunities for greater connection and fellowship. If you don’t share your grievances resentment and bitterness are assured—you’ll feel less love and satisfaction in life. But if you can share them authentically, with a trusted fellow who can do the same, your relationship will grow stronger and richer over time.
The more you practice this skill and develop these truly loving and authentic spaces in your relationships, the more uplifting and rejuvenated your life becomes. And you’ll discover that relationships you barely valued due to resentment in the past might just become your most treasured.
This is the art of what might be called spiritual alchemy and collective healing. So much on our world divides us, but there are tools in hand to solve these divisions if we’re willing to do the inner work to invoke humility and be authentic.
– Justin
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by Richard Enos,
One of the great challenges of long-term relationships is how we deal with things we simply don’t like about our partner. In the early courtship days those were the things that we could overlook amidst the bliss of a budding romance. But as time goes on and the early excitement slowly wears off, we are confronted with those recurring habits and behaviors of our partner that cause us anything from minor irritation to explosive anger.
Self-Responsibility
The first key tenet here is accepting the notion that you are 100% responsible for your experience in your relationship. That can be a very difficult concept for people to accept, since one of the reasons many are in a relationship is to be with someone who will ‘make them happy.’ Yet, paradoxically, if you are truly going to be happy in a relationship, especially one that you hope will last, you need to stop believing that the other person has a responsibility to do things that will make you happy. Not only does this give your power away, but it sets you up to be able to blame your partner if they are not doing the things you ‘need’ them to do to make you happy. And herein lie your grievances. And a lot of your unhappiness.
Grievances
A grievance is not just something we don’t like about what our partner says or does; it’s something we hold in our minds as ‘wrong’, often subconsciously. When our partner does something that we don’t like, we may just bite our lip and try to ignore it. However, it is important that we don’t just bury our feelings about it–we need to admit to those feelings and then we need to forgive them for having done that thing.
But here’s where it gets subtle. Even if you forgive your partner in one particular instance, if you still hold what they did as bad and wrong, you will continue to hold a grievance about that kind of behavior. If your forgiveness is predicated on the belief that your partner should never do it again, then you are setting yourself up for disappointment, blame, even rage. Beyond your decision to forgive any particular action or behavior on the part of your partner, you have to be willing to let go of your judgment that said behavior is wrong.
True Acceptance
If you want to free yourself from the misery of blame and judgment, and in the process free your relationship from suppressed anger from the past, then you will endeavor to get over your pride and truly accept your partner as they are, and accept the things they do. True acceptance means that your underlying belief is that their behavior is not wrong–it just ‘is’, like a rainy day or the color blue. And there is no need to get them to change that behavior.
Now–stay with me here–this is not to say that you need to condone behavior that you feel is clearly harmful to you. What you consider ‘harmful’ is really up to you, but verbal and certainly physical abuse falls into this category. What is imperative in this case, if you do not condone certain behavior, is to be fully willing to leave the relationship if that behavior continues. So don’t condone what is not acceptable to you, and fully accept the rest.
Note that tolerance is not full acceptance. Tolerance plays out in behaviors that you often don’t bother to comment about, but inside you find them annoying, frustrating, and essentially wrong. If you ever find yourself saying ‘Why do you always–?’ then you are dealing with a grievance based on past behaviors that you haven’t truly accepted although you may have tolerated. The frustration behind your complaints about your partner’s habitual behavior will be a good clue about how deep your grievance is in that matter. And it’s important to recognize that it is your grievance, not your partner’s behavior, that is the true source of your frustration. This is the way of thinking of people who are self-responsible.
If you are truly willing to examine your grievances, with a clear intention of letting go of them, self-honesty and awareness are the key. If you happen to have a partner who is of the same mind, and you are ready to work together in bringing back freshness and intimacy to your relationship that has been stolen away by grievances, here is something you can do.
Working Together On Your Grievances
1) Make a list of ALL the things that bother you about your partner, all the things that you feel have caused you pain in the past, all the things that you put up with but you don’t like, are annoyed with, angry about, even things that seem minor to you. Take your time, even if it takes a few days, and make a serious, comprehensive list, scouring your mind for all signs of resentment, bitterness, and disappointment. And of course, have your partner do the same thing.
2) Set some significant time aside to sit privately with your partner, at least two hours, even if it doesn’t end up taking that long. Let your partner list all their grievances they have against you; allow them to explain in as much detail as they want, and allow them to experience any emotions associated with those grievances. Listen carefully and don’t interrupt. When the person is finished, tell them “I heard you.” Then switch roles.
3) Now you can have a discussion on it. But that discussion will only be fruitful if you and your partner both have the desire to let go of your grievances against each other. You must be prepared to forgive each other for each grievance you have against them, and furthermore, let go of the judgment that any particular habit or behavior is wrong. In other words, you have to demonstrate that you are willing to love what you don’t like about your partner.
In this type of conversation, you are likely to find yourself much more inclined to listen to your partner’s grievances against you rather than resisting them, and you may even feel the desire to commit to your partner that you plan to stop doing some of those things or at least be more aware of them. This can be a nice byproduct of the conversation, just remember not to go into the conversation with the intention of getting your partner to change the behaviors you have grievances about.
Working By Yourself On Your Grievances
Now, in many cases, you may not have a partner who is willing or ready to go through the exercise described above. No matter. In realizing that you are 100% responsible for your experience in your relationship, you realize that letting go of grievances is really an internal process, even when you work on it together. And you know that in letting go of your judgments about what’s ‘wrong’ with your partner, you will get out of the habit of complaining and blaming your partner, and liberate yourself from the anger and frustration attached to some of your partner’s habits.
You may work on it in a formal way, making a full list of your grievances, and then reading them over, one by one, making an effort first to forgive your partner’s past behaviors, understanding they are human like you, accepting that they were doing the best they could at the time. And then, remind yourself that there is nothing wrong about this behavior, it just ‘is’, and you will endeavor to meet it with compassion the next time it happens.
A less formal way to practice is to notice your grievances as they arise, and try to step back from the judgments behind them after you notice a buildup of anger or resentment towards your partner for habitual behaviors you may have already told them you don’t like. At first, this will often happen only after you have complained (i.e. ‘Why do you always leave the lights on?’), but reminding yourself that you no longer hold this behavior to be ‘wrong’ will help dissipate your negative feelings and move you back into harmony with your partner. Eventually, you will remember that you don’t believe these behaviors are wrong even before you utter a word of complaint, and will experience more flow and peace in your relationship in general.
Now it must be said, that even if you let go of all your grievances against your partner, you may find yourself feeling unhappy, unsatisfied, or unfulfilled in the relationship. In this case, it may become clear to you that it is time to end the relationship. Having let go of your grievances, you are able to make a clear choice, not based on a buildup of anger and frustration that has become intolerable, but based on a deeply grounded perception of your relationship that tells you whether or not you want this partner to continue to be a part of your journey.
The Takeaway
Having grievances about some of your partner’s habitual behaviors is ultimately a prison of your own mind, and can be detrimental to your personal happiness and damaging to your relationship. If you are able to take the big leap–and indeed your ego will resist this every step of the way–to fully let go of the perceived ‘wrongness’ of any and all of your partner’s habits and behaviors, you are paving the way to greater inner joy, as well as providing the relationship with its best opportunity not only to survive but to thrive.
About The Author
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Whoa! So true, and such a good challenge :)