Heroes of New York
Heroes of New York
#6 Part 1 - Haruna and Mark Borg - Toxic Positivity and Conflict Management in relationships
Haruna Borg and Mark Borg are both couple therapists who understand very well the impact of the lockdown on our mental health. Personally, they have lost patients to the COVID, and they also saw couples virtually, even when they came down with the COVID, . And at the same they are parenting their two school going kids. The couple is no stranger to the fact that tempers tend to flare when you are living 24/7 with someone you love locked up in a tiny space that serves as home, office, play area and gym.
In this episode, the Borgs, share openly the negative impacts of toxic positivity, the technique they use to handle conflicts in their personal lives, why apologies never work and how to effectively strike a balance in our every day lives.
00:01:38 Toxic Positivity
00:07:02 Forced Gratitude
00:14:00 How to handle a conflict
00:31:32 Rules of handling a conflict
00:38:01 Deep listening
00:39:31 Apologies versus Amends
How to reach Mark: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/mark-b-borg-jr-new-york-ny/188295
And Haruna: https://lcswharuna.com/
Hello and welcome to heroes of New York, a podcast about everyday heroes who have refused to let the pandemic stop them from serving others. In every episode, I will introduce to you someone who has risen about the odds to uplift people around them. I'm your host on Athena. I'm very happy to have mark and Haruna. with us here today. Mark and Haruna are both psychologists. Mark is a community community psychologist and a psycho analyst. And he's a founding partner of the community Consulting Group. Haruna is a couple of psychotherapists in New York City and she works with couples from all walks of life, and she tries to understand the covert influence of culture on their relationships. And Mark is an author. He is extensively written about the intersection of psychoanalysis and community crisis intervention, and he's also the author of Don't be a dick. co author of a relationship and its follow up book relationship sanity. Oh, but the most important thing is that mark is an avid surfer. He is, in his own words, an extreme thrill seeker. I hope we touch upon that today. Welcome, guys. How are you doing? Good.
Unknown Speaker :Wow. Yeah, thank you for asking us to to contribute to your podcast today.
Unknown Speaker :We're happy to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to a lot of friends have already expressed interest. They're looking forward to listening to this episode and most of those friends are, you can guess they're all married so they have a lot of questions. And a few hours before recording this episode I posted on my Facebook page on what toxic positivity means to people. It generated a lot of interest. A friend even called me up he spoke at length. And so there's a lot of interest in this area. And I'm I'm so curious to know what you both thing and what you have seen. Since this lockdown has started, there's been a lot of pressure, I think on people, you know, and there's a lot of talk about toxic positivity. And what is your take on that?
Unknown Speaker :Well, I mean, one of the things that I am seeing in the couples especially that I'm seeing is that a lot of times the pressure of toxic positivity, which is that pressure to perform in a particular way, sort of we were even talking about it today how to non-i that we were thinking that toxic positivity as we might describe it today is this expectation that we are going to perform effectively, our current roles the same way we did with the baseline of behavior from before the lockdown. So we have all these hoops, that before the lockdown were actually pretty large. You know, I go to work. We cook breakfast, we take care of the children, we do homework, we take care of each other, and those who were rather large back then because they were routine because they were happy because we We're used to doing these things without thinking. But as the lockdown occurred, and as the quarantine has extended, we're finding ourselves less and less able to function at the same level as we did then. But our expectations haven't really lowered for ourselves. So rather than accepting, what I'm finding a lot of times in couples is we keep keeping that bar the same place it was for all those years. That's our expectation. That's a baseline. And so rather than accepting that, we keep trying to hit that bar and missing it, and then really telling ourselves nothing's wrong. Nothing's wrong, nothing's wrong. I'm okay. Everything's fine. And that is really just not taking account of the circumstances. It is for us right now. It's not allowing us to be having a human response to the stress and the anxiety that we're experiencing all over our lives right now.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, in addition to what Mark described, I think that sort of bar a performer month increased after COVID 19 hit us in March. And not only we our partners to each other and parent to our children and now, we are expected to be teachers, full time teachers we are expected to cook and prepare food. Used to be maybe three times a week, maybe if you are a full time working couple, but now it's three times a day, we prepare food for ourselves. For our children and this added roles that we have and also diminished time just to for you know, just just for ourselves that we used to, you know, be able to step out of our apartment and, you know, really socialize With our friends, coworkers that we really like. That diminished. So I think finding ourselves after COVID-19 really more anxious, more depleted, maybe perhaps more irritable, with, you know, with these condition, it's hard to kind of be the self that we were before COVID and that, you know, yes, we want to be maybe perhaps one of the examples of positivity is be grateful. But yet, you know, finding ourselves really depleted and, you know, feeling that really, at times it's hard to beat. It's helpful to acknowledge that we are not who we were before and that this is reality - on day to day basis, this is happening. Yes.
Unknown Speaker :I think that's a really good point. And in fact, gratitude is the word that Haruna and I both kind of threw back and forth in terms of comparing some of the couples that we're working with. And we're fine. Of course, it's wonderful to be grateful. I mean, we have a roof over our head, we have a partner who cares for us, our children are healthy, let's say. But when we hurl the kind of the imposition, the we in, in force gratitude, then what we're trying to do, again, is we're trying to push ourselves to feel something rather than that we might not feel all the time we're trying to use the idea of gratitude, in rather than to accept that we're not feeling very good today that we are feeling stressed out that we are worried about our health and the health of those around us. In fact, Haruna and I even were talking about sort of a funny use of the term performance anxiety, because performance anxiety as a lot of people know is usually related to erectile dysfunction. When people as it relates to a sexual relationship, meaning that usually a man is overly anxious and can't perform well sexually, but at this point there is a parallel and that we get very anxious. We're not really allowed to feel anxious because we're supposed to be performing like good soldiers. You're on Memorial Day. And so our performance diminishes and we become somewhat impotent. If we push ourselves too far with this in forced positivity.
Unknown Speaker :Mm hmm. I hear you said forced gratitude, right? What does force gratitude look like? I've been speaking to friends and they say, we do gratitude thing every day. I do it to like in the morning, write 10 things that I'm grateful for. And my friends say, I will do it. But there are days I don't even feel it.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, and again, I mean, look, I think, I don't know I both I know we both work with a lot of 12 step people and 12 step people are renowned for using gratitude and what I think is a very healthy way. They're able to look at a life that they do. didn't live there able to do that there. But for the grace of God go I and they see a version of themselves continuing with an incredibly destructive behavior. And so they're constantly able to pull back into the moment and say, This version of myself is not going off the cliff, this version of myself is not heading toward death, and therefore I am grateful. But it is a living, breathing, experienced empirical gratitude that they can actually hold on to based on the fact that they were heading toward death and have now you know, allowed themselves to find a way of no longer being destructive. And that kind of gratitude, I think, is very healthy and it's very alive. I think it's when I'm feeling very anxious, I'm feeling very nervous. I'm worried about my income. I myself have had patients who have died from the corona virus. I myself was very sick in the beginning of this as was Haruna. And so to just say, here's a bullet point list of things that I should be grateful for because I have haven't died because not everybody I know has died because all of my patients aren't dead. I mean, that's the kind of enforced gratitude that you use against your anxiety in a way that is not helpful. Because what it does is it It forces you to suppress or repress or dissociate, anxious feelings that might very well be informing you and telling you that your feelings aren't to be accepted. They're not just to be gratituded away. They're not to be wished away. They're part of the full range of experience of being human. And if we have someone that we love that we can share our feelings of uncertainty, our feelings of anxiety, our fear or sadness, then we can be more alive and we don't just have to use gratitude to shunt off and, and really lop off that part of our human experience.
Unknown Speaker :Mark, I'm just like hearing you and I had to quickly point out you know, where we don't have to always put them in the face of positivity and we can share it with our loved ones. A lot of parents and families around the world are probably doing that for the sake of the children who are also going through a lot of mental stress and you don't want them to take on more stress. So you want to put on that face of positivity.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that. Go ahead.
Unknown Speaker :Yes, I think that when positivity becomes toxic. I think we are not allowing us personally and relationally here as a couple, and maybe perhaps as a family to, to not allowing us to really have the space for no real feelings, real lived experience. It's not been easy for us to deal with the situation with COVID-19. We are really dealing with a lot of unknown for the last almost, yeah, this is, we are in the 11th week of lockdown, and that this is getting longer than, than we actually anticipated. So a lot of kind of a breakdown happens that I myself, you know, some days experience a lot more sadness, a lot more anxiety, which is very warranted considering what we are dealing with, you know, in, in our society that not allowing that, you know, feelings to really be acknowledged on on my own own, you know, in this relationship and in our family a life is is really very detrimental. That I think, really it's it's good to have a gratitude, yet it's always a balancing work. We really need to acknowledge our lived experience here. Yes.
Unknown Speaker :And you're right. I mean, they're always there are distinctions and there are nuances. And there are things that we want to be careful about. But I think even with our children, we want to be careful because our toxic positivity can send a message to them, that it is not okay for them to be scared, it is not okay for them to feel that it's not okay. In fact, I have written extensively about what happens. One of those books that you mentioned irrelationship is about what happens when children see that their parents aren't functioning very effectively and take on caretaking roles. And then they really, they really slopped themselves into these horrible compulsive caretaking roles that they go on an into in their adult relationship. So, again, we don't want to overwhelm our children with our emotion. We want to be careful of that. But we also don't want to role model for them, this kind of Teflon plating, emotional dissociation that gives them the message that they must learn how to pretend like everything's okay. And everything is not okay. Doesn't mean that everything is falling apart all the time either. So obviously, you want to have a balance. And it's not always easy to achieve the balance. But I think that sometimes you can be very, we are very fortunate when we have partners that we can be in a kind of conversation about our emotions. And that's a real gift.
Unknown Speaker :Yes, coming back to balanced view of life, right? If gratituding is not the exact solution, I am not saying you should give it up, what should be the alternative?
Unknown Speaker :The alternative is ongoing, healthy communication about where you are, in the moment, if possible, and I know that's not always easy, but Haruna and I actually work very, very diligently over the 15 years that we've been together to take every single bumps in the road, every single conflict, every single difficulty, every single will go so far as to say fight as an opportunity for us as we go off the rail to commit to working together to get it back on the rail. We don't say when we get into a fight when we hurt each other's feelings. When we step on each other's toes, we don't say, oh, but you're so beautiful, therefore, I'm just going to be able to let go of the pain that I just experienced when I felt kicked in the gut. That's not what we do. We both do. everything we possibly can to take accountability and responsibility are part of that conflict, and put it together to realistically reestablish a living sense of gratitude. And actually, we invite our children sometimes into this process, so that they know that when things fall apart, they can actually see how they come back together.
Unknown Speaker :Interesting. Can you show us how you handle a conflict?
Unknown Speaker :Yes, maybe perhaps. You know, I think gratitude is a third of all, you know, identifying what's working For us, right and sort of going over a list of things that we are, you know, we we are happy about, and maybe perhaps, you know, just thinking about this dialogue with this idea of balancing work. So with that, you know, a list of things that we are grateful for. And we also want to list of things that we are honestly feeling about and experiencing that maybe, you know, in this relations that with Mark that, if I force my toxic positivity onto him, I will basically deny his experience deny his feelings if he's feeling depleted, but if I say, how come you are not feeling grateful, you know, total denial and demeaning saying of his, you know, his experience. So I would, if I were the one to force the toxic positivity onto him, I would basically look at what I said and say I'm sorry for what I said. You've probably felt really dismissed or denied.
Unknown Speaker :Go ahead. Worse I think, Anu and I are both smiling, because Anu just actually invited us to do the difficult thing. Oh, I think she just invited us to actually
Unknown Speaker :Enact. Just enact. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker :Give an example and I was kind of smiling. I kind of thought I caught you smiling too. I knew because you know, I know. Just asked us to do that difficult thing. And you you did answer the question, but you know, like. Yeah, which is all theory, which is great. But so let's get down to the to the brass tacks. I think we have a, I hope we have a very good example where I can say that I was the culprit of the positive toxicity crime, right? So a month ago, less than a month ago on May 5, it was Utah's birthday. She actually shares Freud's birthday, May 6th. Yeah, I think I think that I'm still sort of stirred up by this. So it's probably a very good talk. On May 6, you know, we're still relatively adjusting to this period. And, and I have it in my head that our poor daughter who's turning nine years old, we're gonna have his beautiful birthday as we possibly can for her right. We're gonna get a cake and I woke up early and I made a card and we're talking about getting cats until we bought a little cat cage and we started getting into the adoption process and yet it was a busy work day for me so I walked out of, of this office slash bedroom slash playroom slash school, you know, this is where we work, this is where we sleep, etc. and Hannah had told me that she was upset because our babysitter, which is Utah's babysitter had written both of us earlier in the day about three hours earlier, and said that she had made something nice for Utah and she was going to bring it over. So I came out three hours later, Haruna had called the babysitter three times, had written her seven times and the babysitter still hadn't brought over this treat whatever it was, and Haruna had to get the cake, she had to see people. She had to take care of the kid. So it was really important for her to know when the babysitter was coming over. I texted the babysitter and three seconds later she said, 'Oh, I'll be over in 10 minutes'. So I went downstairs. 10 minutes later with Utah. I got this beautiful little cake. I came back upstairs. And Haruna was unhappy. Haruna was flipping her lid. Hannah was whatever she wants to call it, but I knew she wasn't happy. She knew she wasn't happy and Utah started crying because she loves the babysitter and mommy was very upset. So I started imposing my will and telling Haruna, 'Listen. It's your daughter's birthday. It's May 6. Freud's birthday, and you know, not basically knock it off, knock it off. Like you're blowing it. You're ruining your kid's birthday party, your birthday, whatever. And go figure'. My wife didn't just simply didn't let go of her anger at our babysitter. So go ahead. So you would like to know how we repair that right?
Unknown Speaker :I don't think we're done though I thought maybe you'd go into what what it was like for you what I did, you can say what you did and I'll tell you what I did next to complete that if you want, right. Okay, so then we sat down at a table, Utah was just bawling. She's upset. I keep telling her not to knock it off. And I mean, these good couples therapists that we are in this moment, right?
Unknown Speaker :The truths revealed go on.
Unknown Speaker :There you go. I'm telling her to knock it off. I'm telling her that it's not fair. I'm telling her that its Utah's birthday and finally, the ultimate bottom that we hit was I said, 'You are an embarrassment'.
Unknown Speaker :You said that?
Unknown Speaker :Yes. And I can barely wait to hear what he has to say now.
Unknown Speaker :So I I was really upset to begin with that somehow, um, you know, it was Utah's birthday and the morning started was like special breakfast and I wanted to pick up flowers for her and we didn't know this that the babysitter was going to come and drop this cake off for Utah. So I ordered a cake 24 hours in advance and we needed to go to the bakery and pick it up. But she didn't communicate with me at all. But somehow when Mark wrote, she responded right away. And then the whole, you know, a conversation happened between us. So I was really upset to begin with, but I was fuming after Mark made the comment and it really, I could not bring myself back to where I was. This time for a long time. I mean, I couldn't really it was a really cold rainy day. So I couldn't really go out to like, take a big you know, breath. My friends were all kind of frightened by the COVID. So I remained at home but, you know, kept really hard. I was hurt and fuming. Yeah. Yeah. And it took us many hours. to kind of, yeah. Talk we didn't talk for for yeah. I don't know, how many hours would you say 36 hours, 48
Unknown Speaker :hours.
Unknown Speaker :It was a real relapse for us. We used to have fights like this back before we really got into our own work. We did join a peer group for couples. We are both couples therapists. We've done immense work. And I mean, yeah, I mean, this was a relapse into an older time where we did not have this set of tools that we've been implementing. And one of the most important tools that we implement when it comes to this is something that is a meeting that we that we when we're willing, when we're ready, what we do is we make an agreement that no matter how bad it is, and this was bad. You know, I had used the E word which was horrific. And I and I pretty well knew it was somewhere in the midst of this fight. I'll just say, we wound up losing our wedding rings.
Unknown Speaker :That was actually part of this fight. I'm telling you,
Unknown Speaker :Was it taken away? Was it taken?
Unknown Speaker :Nobody fights like couples, therapists, I mean, everything, everything that you think might be true, because people ask me all the time. Oh, what's it like being married to another shrink and I'm like, you don't want to know. So now here your listeners are actually finding out in the midst of the Corona virus, in the midst of lockdown, in the middle of quarantine, birthday parties and mayhem, we have a relapse back to how we behave 12 years ago when we first really committed to this process that will tell you gets us through even something as dramatic as this. The process is first. We both hit pause. We hit pause, we hit pause. And after the most extreme example, mine was the comment embarrassment. Hannah has her own whatever she did or didn't do that day. But we both get to a point where we can hit pause and after pause we call moratorium. And we don't try to work it out. When we're raging at each other. We don't try to work it out when we're terrified that the thing is falling apart like it used to. We don't try to work it out when we are so hurt. We can't even think straight we give ourselves a break. It's the opposite of a stone wall. Stone wall's when you freeze someone up. Moratorium is when you have a consensus on actually taking a break until the warmth of the relationship can come back. When the warmth comes back. Our daughter who was so worried about us that when it was time for us to sit down and have our meeting. And we have these regular scheduled meetings, Utah actually sat down with us and said, she didn't exactly say she was going to be our referee. But the main rule of the meeting is you can only talk about your part of the conflict. You can only talk about how you contributed to this problem. You cannot tell your partner how she or he, you know ruined your life. You cannot talk about how they were the reason why you said such a horrible thing. You have to go into your heart and in my heart of hearts, to speak from my own position when I was willing to come back to the table and have this meeting with Haruna. I was willing to say I was out of control of my emotion. I was out of control of my situation. I was putting toxic positivity on you and I would putting toxic positivity on myself. I was expecting myself to be this person who in the midst of this horrible nightmare that we're in, can create, out of the blue, this wonderful, beautiful birthday for our daughter. Not a realistic expectation on that day, especially given the curveball of the babysitter and everything that we had been through. So I sat down at this meeting, and I told my wife, that here's my part in this, this is what I do. The other thing that we do in these meetings, is we time ourselves, we give ourselves just a few minutes each, to talk about our part in it so we don't get overwhelmed. So we don't go running off on tangents. So the other thing we also do is that if in this meeting, we start to, instead of talking about our part, we start to tell our partner what her part was. We stopped the meeting, we start all over again. Sometimes we've had to start the meeting 10 times. But when we're on a roll, when we're actually taking responsibility for our part of the nightmare, and this day was a nightmare for us. It was we genuinely hurt. We genuinely ached, we genuinely took it out on each other. And we genuinely were able to do what we call rupture and repair. The rupture was the embarrassment, the rupture was the terrible fight that happened afterwards and it was terrible. And the repair was the pause, the moratorium and the meeting that we came back to, and each took responsibility for our part of the mess.
Unknown Speaker :Oh, yes, that's, that's exactly what we did. And that, but it took us a while. Ah, it took me a while to find myself again, that I was, you know, we when I hurt and when we hurt, the hurt can manifest as anger and rage. I was fuming. And I was you know experiencing a lot of anger and rage for a 24 hours 36 hours maybe up to 48 hours. And I think what I was also experiencing at the time given that we are in the situation with COVID-19 that a lot of helplessness and anxiety around dealing with lots of unknown. When the school is going to reopen. When we when can we go back to to work? When can we see our friends? All this unknown can, you know, when we are feeling also helpless, we are prone to anger. So not only was I angry at what Mark said. What happened that day was really upsetting to me. The fact that the babysitter didn't respond to me after calling her three times and texting her seven times. She just responded to Mark right away. But I think I was also feeling a lot of anger related to a situation that we are in. And so after I but I did reach out to my friends and talk to them and having some support from them just kind of being listened to and really getting a lot of sympathy brought my, you know, brought my myself back, I found myself again, the self that I am very familiar with. And at the time, I asked Mark to see whether he's, you know, willing to talk to me willing to have this meeting with me and initially he said no. So I waited for another, maybe half day. And he finally said yes, and again, I was really fuming, but my anger shifted from How dare you talk to me? How dare you talk to me and treat me in this situation to What did I do? What did I do? How did I contribute to to this mess that we created that, you know, we were going to celebrate Utah's birthday, but that we couldn't and on top of that, we ended up fighting, having a blow up fight with each other. And, and you know, when we took turns and you know, really shared what was going on with me and making, you know, apologizing to Mark that I think we are able to repair our bond, our relationship with one another. But it's hard. It's not been easy. Yeah. So it's a whole process, I would say.
Unknown Speaker :And it's really the opposite of toxic positivity, it is the opposite. Because it is a commitment to not pretending like everything's okay. There's a commitment to sharing our part in the mess. So that as we get through a mess, and we don't have these messes very often, it's kind of, in a funny way fortuitous that we happen to have a mess of this extreme nature, you know, prior to coming on your show, because I mean, these are messages that we used to get into years and years and years ago, prior to really working through all of this difficulty in developing this technique, this meeting that we have, sometimes we call it a meeting in the middle, sometimes we call it a meeting of two, but we have this meeting, in order to reset. We have this meeting to sincerely work through what we're actually going through together and like Haruna said, I think really importantly, we were able through this meeting to reset in a way that wasn't just about completely wiping out our daughter's ninth birthday. It was about not being completely honest with ourselves about the impact of being shut down and being locked in and seeing all of our patients on video where we've never done that before of worrying about patients, of patients dying, some of my patients, I mean, just all of these things. That suddenly when I said 'I'm embarrassed' was horrible right, what a horrible thing to say. But I think part of what I was really saying, as we went through this meeting together and came to some terms is I'm embarrassed, because I am so out of control of all of these things that I am quite normally in control of. I am, at least in my own fantastical world, you know, historically, I do believe that when I wake up in the morning and take my shower and get dressed, I will make it to my office and have an effective day working and, you know, treating patients all day long. I don't live in that world anymore. And there's a funny kind of impotence that comes along with this performance anxiety, that toxic positivity enforces and, and it's like a straitjacket that it puts on us when we were able to get through that day when we were able to have that horrific meltdown, and then come to terms with the situation that we're actually in that goes well beyond the birthday. We were able to accept our own humanity in this relationship. We were able to accept our own humanity and how uncomfortable it is to live in our own skin. And then we were able to share that with each other and make more room in our relationship for an authentic love between two people who know that no matter how much Haruna and I love each other, sometimes that humanity is so hard to bear that we will take it out on each other. I'm just so grateful that we have a reset.
Unknown Speaker :This is amazing. Thank you for sharing this with us. If if any couple has to do this, what the rules to trying this technique
Unknown Speaker :I would say, yeah, if we because I think we have this tendency, maybe we you can, you can call it a quick fix, kind of blaming your partner, you don't have to look at your own contribution to our, to an argument or fight that you know you did this to me, you know this you know, finger pointing. So, this conversation we have is about doing a 180. Different you know, sort of approach that I, you know, I did this I was in this. I was feeling this way I was under this much pressure. I felt hard to start with I, I, I, I, I, I. And I think you can look at what I did impacted that relationship. You know, how I what I said, you know, upset you or upset. that argument more?
Unknown Speaker :Yes, it sounds to me like you need some kind of training to speak like this. A lot of us I used to say you did that today. It's hard to see what I did to you.
Unknown Speaker :It's a total reorientation to how we normally think. In fact, it's totally counterintuitive for us to actually put the put the responsibility and accountability on ourselves, especially when it doesn't feel safe. That's why one if there are rules, here's rule number one. Rule number one is if you think about it as inventory, take your own, right, take your own. Now that doesn't mean all inventory taking is not done in red ink. So taking your own inventory doesn't mean when you're listing your responsibility and accountability for what went on, you're not just listing how you contributed to how you screwed it up completely. You can also list how you are willing and able to use your resources to help fix it. But the focus has to be on yourself to focus. The most important part of this meeting is it cannot be a finger pointing like she said so. So number one is focus on yourself. Number two is speak from 'I' like Haruna said. Number three is speak from feelings. Don't be, I think you did this and I think you did that. I feel I'm this, was what it was like for me. This is what it was like. A brilliant brilliant brilliant psychoanalyst who just passed away last week. Name's Philip Bromberg. He was my instructor years 20 years ago. And he said the most wonderful thing he said, Don't ever ask somebody how they feel. Because it's too much. Like the mind shuts down. Don't ever ask somebody. How do you feel? Ask them when they're describing an experience what it's like, because you get so much more mileage. You get to talk about the actual contours of experience. So that so pointless. So that's another thing. You talk about from 'I', you take your own inventory. And we also just have some of our own things that we've developed over many years, we put a time when we actually use the timer, we take a cell phone, we hit three minutes, because we just feel like if you go beyond three minutes, it's easy to just kind of get into your head, and instead of your heart, so we're trying to speak from the heart. And after each person has the three minutes, we just check in and say, Okay, how are we doing? And if we want to go again, we go for another three minutes, and we can go for 10 three minutes if it's necessary, that we keep the process going, until both of us feel like we have really accounted for, honestly, our part in what just happened.
Unknown Speaker :And does that solve the problem?
Unknown Speaker :It really creates a whole new way of relating, because think about it. Just about every fight you have is about again is what you did, I am here to convince you that you did it wrong. I am here to convince you that you screwed up that you hurt my feelings that you were angry. You you you you you. When you focus on me, and your partner in a few rounds of this meeting shows you that she accepts this version of you. Not that she accepts, you're going to keep saying awful things to her. But did she accept what motivated that wasn't that you hate her. It wasn't that you want to hurt or destroy her. It was that you were scared, or you were hurt, or you were sad, or you were feeling out of control that completely reorients you. It completely takes the ammunition out of the gun. If you take responsibility, you're taking all the bullets out of your weapon, you have no more ammunition and all you have is a level playing field where you can do what we finally think happens when the rupture becomes repair. You do what we believe creates and we use this almost as a slogan which is we are allies.
Unknown Speaker :And yes, and this of course when we do this conversation and have dialogue with each other, you know, starting with 'I'. And you know, I say, I share my experience of what was it like to have that the fight from that position of I. Really. But we also want I also, you know, think that this, sort of like in this dialogue we have this agreement, a very sincere genuine agreement that we both are going to speak from the place of I. Well, yeah, that creates a really safe environment. It doesn't, Yeah, work, If I am saying I did this, I contributed to our fight in this way. And my partner is saying Yes, you did that because yeah, you are right. So, we know that's how people naturally have this agreement that, you know, we both are going to look at ourself, you know, from like look at myself, and, you know, really think about what went on. And so that, you know, we can we create a safe place. Yeah. Um, that you know, we can be responsible for our actions and that, you know, I think with that we can be authentic. So, authenticity is also the key here, honesty and authenticity.
Unknown Speaker :Well, and that and deep, deep, deep listening because eventually what happens is, you start this deep listening process where rather than, you know, having the focus on your partner, you've got to focus on your vulnerability and as your partner responds with something other than a good whacking, you know, when when our response to our vulnerability is our partner still accepting and loving us, then we actually start to feel empathy toward each other, we start to relate to each other. When I tell my partner that the reason I said this horrible thing about being embarrassed was because I felt out of control that I opened myself up for my partner to empathize with me, and join me in that place of feeling helpless. Like she said, that's one of the first things that Haruna said today, feeling helpless in this circumstance. When I'm saying I'm embarrassed and putting myself above her and acting all hottie. I'm not there's no room for empathy. I'm completely cutting myself off when I tell her from my own position. And again, like she said, This took a while for us to hit that pause button and then have the moratorium. This didn't happen later that day. This happened a couple of days later, we were so hurt. But when we came back to the meeting, with our hurt and our vulnerability, we were able to reconnect through empathy, because we both understood what it was like to feel helpless. And all of the toxic positivity had washed away, at that point. There was no more edifice of this fake, I know how to pretend like everything's okay, facade.
Unknown Speaker :It all broke down.
Unknown Speaker :Wow. When did the apology come?
Unknown Speaker :Okay, it came on Saturday. You know, we had the conversation on Saturday afternoon we finally had the meeting. And, you know, the apology is not really the important part of this. I mean, apologies are nice, and they usually are sort of an opening round, but much, much, much more important than the apology is the amend. See an amend isn't I'm sorry. An amend is, I understand why I did what I did, and I am committing to not do it again. It's wonderful that there's an apology, but that's just the icing on the cake. The amend is, I know why I did what I did. I have learned through this whole process about what I do when I'm helpless, and I'm feeling hurt and scared and don't acknowledge that first to myself. And then to you what I do is I act out my anxiety, I act all big and strong, and I might put you down and think that that's a way of distancing myself not just from you. But from my own feelings of helplessness. So I feel like an amend is almost the opposite of an apology. Because apologies are just so facile and they're just so easy to dole out, and amends is, I am committed to fixing this, and I can only fix this with you.
Unknown Speaker :Wow, Mark, I feel as I'm listening to both of you, that a lot of couples are gonna thank you for sharing this wisdom. I can see that this can be used this technique can be used in any relationship, right? As long as you're mature enough to sit across the table and admit to what you've done and how you feel. We're not all trained to talk about our feelings and embrace them. That's one of the places I think that's also one of the reasons why toxic positivity is such a big thing. You're not allowed to express any other feeling other than gratitude and say yes, I can acknowledge it, and I can accept it.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah,
Unknown Speaker :yeah, yes. Yeah. Well, even telling you this tale to you, I can tell you has been at times in the last what, you know, half an hour or so has been pretty embarrassing. Like, I'm listening to myself talk and I'm like, Oh, my God, this is gonna be like, posted somewhere. Am I sure about this? But you know, I mean, like you said, I think we all need hope right now, we need to know that even the people who are the the experts, the professionals in this are only professionals and experts, because we're in it together, Haruna and I can only treat couples, because we are a couple who go through this and if we bomb our relationship out, we know we have to reset and this is how we do it.
Unknown Speaker :Yes, and I think that being in the relationship, and I think, you know, apology and self reflection of how I contributed to you know, the fight And you know, really owning a very cute, you know, humility, my own embarrassing moments that, you know, Mark said what he said but I said what I said to I was really angry that I've said so many things that are hurtful t back to him and owning them. And, you know, sort of having empathy for me, having empathy for Mark, and coming back together as a couple. That has been a really difficult challenging but a very special and important and I would say, intimate experience I have had and that experience always makes me relate to my clients who go through that difficult moments in their relationships too. That we all at times, yes lose control. But you know willing to repair, willing to look at what, you know what was happening to me. It's easy to see what he did, what my partner did, of course but yes, that kind of owning myself in that fight or in this relationship.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah. Do you also journal your thoughts and feelings during the pause period?
Unknown Speaker :I do. I mean, I have since I was about, gosh, maybe 15 years old. You should see that I've scribblings like you know, like, mad, you should see that.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, I don't keep a journal but.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah women have it in their head, like we can tell you any minute how we feel. Exactly how we made us feel. Awesome. This has been great. I know we're running out of time. And we had a whole bunch of topics to discuss. Maybe we can do a second part later on?
Unknown Speaker :Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. This feels like this. This absolutely feels like enough. You know, it is such a big like, I mean, I think that we're going to need to go and take a walk, you know, maybe we'll actually see you.
Unknown Speaker :I guess. So, for our listeners who don't know we live in the same building. We are neighbors on different floors. And obviously the lockdown has forced us to switch to virtual meetings to see each other. So hopefully we'll see you down but thank you so much. I respect you for openly sharing your own conflicts and showing us that no one's perfect. That you are under more stress than anyone else probably because you are listening to your patients who are going through a lot of crisis. There are a lot of couples out there who are facing conflicts. And your advice and all of the guidance that you provided is truly valuable. You told us how to handle conflicts, and why toxic positivity is so unhealthy for us and to embrace our other feelings and talk about them and strike a balance, strike a balance, show your children, it's okay to not be okay. Let them see that there are different challenges and how to cope with it. So thank you so much. It's been a great pleasure to have you and see you back soon on the show. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I know.
Unknown Speaker :Thanks for joining us this week on heroes of New York. Make sure to visit our website on cnn.com where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes. If you love the show, please leave a rating on iTunes so that we can continue to bring you amazing episodes. Thanks for listening and see you in two weeks from now.