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their vacations in places where they can do both. Last year they
booked a week at a dude ranch with lots of trout streams. Even
though Stella had her own horse, Dusty, at home, she felt it
would be an excellent time to relax and learn new skills that she
could take home and teach him. Steve was looking forward to
days of wandering down trout streams and having the luxury
of spending the evenings with Stella. The plan was a good one,
but they didn t account for the infl uence that the other guests
and the proprietors of the dude ranch would have upon their
relationship.
This ranch, owned and run by a couple, tended to attract
mainly female guests. So in the evening, when Stella and Steve
would go to dinner, many of the women there would comment
on how they would love it if their husbands would join them on
vacation; however, there was really an undercurrent of discom-
fort at having a man in their midst. It was as if Stella had invited
the enemy on vacation. She found herself wanting to be liked
by the other women and, without realizing it, started rejecting
Steve. Not only did she reject him, she started rejecting her
whole lifestyle, as if she were doing her life wrong. She even
began to be embarrassed that she worked in a big city rather
than living in a rural area.
When Stella returned home, she found herself inordinately
annoyed with people in general. She no longer wanted to chat
with the local newspaper vendor or the fellow who sold her cof-
fee in the morning. She began judging her job and co-workers.
Nothing appeared right anymore. Perhaps, she thought, I should
just quit everything and move to the country. And an odd thing hap-
Ho w t o Cr e at e a Magi c al Re l at i o ns hi p
122
pened. She was no longer passionate about riding her treasured
friend, Dusty. She began to say things like,  I have to go ride
the horse. The heart connection between Stella and everyone
and everything in her environment had been disrupted.
In an individual consulting session with us, Stella and Steve
took an anthropological point of view. Together, we nonjudg-
mentally looked at what had interfered so dramatically with
their relationship and with Stella s relationship to herself and
her life in general. They saw that, while at the dude ranch, she
had ignored the undercurrent of anti-male sentiment among
the other guests because she had wanted to be liked. They also
saw that the husband and wife who ran the ranch bickered as
a way of life and were competitive with each other. Stella had
shut her eyes to the discomfort of being around them.
By simply seeing and recognizing that in her attempt to
fi t in she had inadvertently rejected her own truth, Stella was
immediately reconnected to herself, her husband, and even
her horse. With simple recognition and without being hard on
herself for getting lost in the first place, her sense of well-being
came flooding back.
Further, Steve and Stella realized that if they go back to
that ranch or others like it, they need to be more aware of the
undercurrents in their environment.
THE RELATIONSHIP FLU AND THE
CURRENTS IN YOUR ENVIRONMENT
If you were to contract a fl u virus, you wouldn t expect to feel
its effects immediately. There would be an incubation period
before the symptoms showed up. With many disturbances in
a relationship, it is difficult to sort out what caused the upset
because people look at what just happened and blame the upset
on that rather than looking back at where they went off course
twenty-four to forty-eight hours before.
It has been our experience that people are rarely, if ever,
upset by what has just happened. They are actually pushed off
Re l a t i o n s h i p Sp l i t t e r s
123
course or driven out of sync by events that occurred earlier of
which they are, for the most part, unaware.
We have noticed that when we are riding in a boat, a wave
coming from one side or a crosswind can push us off course.
But we don t necessarily notice it until we have gone far enough
that the change in direction is apparent. So, too, it is with
upsetting events. By the time you realize that you are off track,
you may have been for some time.
There are people who say or do things that can profoundly
affect your relationship and you will not be aware of it at fi rst.
You will only notice the effect of their disturbing infl uence
when an upset erupts. At that point, you will have already
missed what initiated the upset and are likely to assign causality
to something or someone in your immediate environment or
the last thing that happened and that something or someone
is often your partner. Just by virtue of the time you spend with
your partner, he or she is likely to become the focal point of
upsets, because chances are he or she will be in your proximity
when you realize that you are upset.
Tyrone and Ayesha s Story
Tyrone had been divorced for three years when he and Ayesha
started dating. He had two children from his previous mar-
riage, a ten-year-old boy and a seven-year-old girl. Ayesha and
Tyrone s relationship grew closer, and eventually they set up a
home together. His children lived with their mother and came
to visit on a regular basis. Although the kids liked Ayesha, they
still wished their parents had not separated and they quietly
lobbied to get their mother and father back together. As a
result, Tyrone and Ayesha began to notice a pattern in how the
two of them related to each other in the days prior to, during,
and following visits from the children.
In their normal, day-to-day way of relating, Tyrone and
Ayesha were harmonious, but in the days surrounding and dur-
ing the kids visits, they bickered. With coaching, the couple
Ho w t o Cr e at e a Magi c al Re l at i o ns hi p
124
came to expect that as soon as the children s attention turned
to coming over to their house, even though Tyrone and Aye-
sha hadn t spoken with them yet, this was enough to start the
dynamic.
At fi rst, it was diffi cult for the two of them to sort out this
situation. To begin with, Tyrone did not want to see that his
 sweet, innocent children had brought with them a relation- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]