Sunday, September 21, 2003
Your inner voice holds love secrets
Slow down. Listen to the voice inside you. Stop working at your relationship and start living and enjoying it.
Joseph Bailey was a marital therapist with a low batting average with patients and a failed marriage himself when he had an epiphany about why so many relationships were failing.
"So much of the way I was trained in conventional therapy was looking at and diagnosing the problem, labeling persons, analyzing and rehashing the past," he says. "It was a very painful process to go through. I could see what I was doing wasn't working.
"One thing I didn't realize is that the love you seek from the other is actually within you. It's in discovering the source of that love that we have the love to share with another person. It's in giving the love that we receive the love."
Bailey, a family and marriage counselor for 30 years and a former faculty member of the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine, is author of Slowing Down to the Speed of Love: How to Create a Deeper, More Fulfilling Relationship in a Hurried World.
All the work a couple might do on their relationship (learning how to fight, trying to work through past issues) can get in the way of a loving relationship, Bailey believes.
"It's all the doing that's causing the problems," he said. "The more we frenetically search for peace of mind, the more it eludes us. We're all looking for the quick fix, the six steps to love that's going to last.
"The only one step is to be yourself, know yourself. Once you can do that you're able to speak from your heart."
The key to knowing yourself, Bailey said, is to be willing to slow down.
"Once you're willing, it opens the spigot and you have insights to your own life," he said. "All (couples) have to do is take the time, reflect and listen deeply within themselves. There's this little voice that's in us, that's trying to guide us toward balance, toward health. We have to listen to it.
"The voice is in there all the time but we rationalize it away, we keep going faster to keep two steps away from it."
Too often, he said, people simply don't trust their inner voice.
"We think, 'If I said it, it can't be true.' We look to experts, doctors, psychologists, pundits to tell us what to think. We've had that trained out of us from early on. Most parents and institutions tell you to ignore your own voice and listen to them instead of yourself. We learn very early not to trust ourselves."
Sometimes grown-ups need to look backward, he said.
"You look at young kids under 4 or 5 - they have an amazing capacity for love. Everything is new to them, they're very curious, their learning curve is very sharp, they don't have insecure thoughts, they're not analyzing and processing everything. In that natural state, people have access to who they are, this feeling of love," he said.
"When they get in a fight they forgive each other. Married people keep stewing about it, reprocessing it. If we can get back to that childlike state we can be able to enjoy ourselves, have more of a sense of humor, don't work so hard to try to work through things, recognize that what binds and connects us is that feeling of love.
"The little things in life that seem so big are really just small stuff."
Knowing yourself, he said, starts with putting your relationship with yourself at the top of your "to do" list.
"I've preached for a long time that everything seems to come before my relationship with myself. Even if it's just five minutes before the day begins, take account of what's really important to today: Is there anything I need to be paying attention to? My health? My relationship?
"Taking time to reflect is the single most important thing you can do. People give a million excuses, but you can do it when you're in the car, at the gym, on a walk. You can always get quiet time when you need it."
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