Relationships Survey #3 Answer

For those of you who have been following the results of my relationship survey, this installment should be fascinating for you. The number 3 most often asked question was basically, “How to we attract the kind of people we attract?” In other words, what are our selection criteria or what ability do we use to pick a partner?

My answer may surprise you. Here is a hint: It has nothing to do with what the two of you “have in common!”

In order to explain this, I have to talk a little bit about what happens to a baby’s brain in the first year of life. Humans, in order to survive, must bond with the mother or some other attachment figure in the first year for the purposes of survival. This means that the relationship with our mother’s is of utmost importance since everything from there on out depends on it.

In order to insure the success of this bonding, the baby develops a highly specialized ability. He or she must learn to read the mother’s central nervous system by looking at her gaze. In many studies, researchers have found that there is a complimentary “dance” that goes on between the mother and her baby. Should anything interrupt this bonding and associated “dance” the baby goes into an attachment crisis and will generate an entire series of behaviors to insure the bond with mom is re-established.

So the baby learns to carefully study the mother’s face as its first developmental task. This means that as humans our first talent is reading faces. We can look at a face and tell someone’s emotional makeup simply with a glance!

Here is the interesting part. This learning, this expertise in face reading takes place in the right orbital frontal cortex. This is an area of the brain that is roughly above the right eye socket. Now my purpose in pointing this out is not to make a brain scientist out of you. However, consider this; the right hemisphere is NONVERBAL!

What does this mean? This means that all of the emotional information we gather looking at a person’s face is nonverbal. So when we read a face we have a vast amount of knowledge about them, but we have no way of telling ourselves what that knowledge is! We know something and we almost immediately know if we are attracted or not. But we cannot articulate what this stuff we know is!

Okay, let’s set that aside for a moment. The limbic system is a primitive part of the brain which is completely wired up before we are five years old. It is the emotional brain. As a result of early childhood interaction with one of our parents we develop emotional needs and one or more strategies to attempt to meet those needs.

Later in life when it is time to select a partner, the limbic system scans the people we meet trying to find someone just like that parent so we can go back to the struggle of meeting our particular emotional needs. How does it, the limbic system, do this? It uses the same face reading ability that we learned as children to select our mate.

Since all of this is nonverbal and since most of us are totally unaware of our emotional needs and strategies, we pick this person claiming that “we have so much in common.” Of course, the sinister truth is that they picked us for the same reason. What ensues is a “dance” of complimentary emotional issues that gradually takes over the relationship leading to disaster!

Next Saturday at 10 am pacific time, I will be exploring this and other relationship issues in my free teleclass - How you can move from Frustration to Fulfillment. Learn the top three qualities of a successful relationship.

I hope you can join us. Click the link to be placed on the VIP list for that class.

Relationships Survey - #2

The other day I told you about the number one response to my survey about relationships. Today I want to talk about the second most asked question that came up. Really it was two questions that I have combined into one. Those two questions were basically the flip sides of the same thing: What makes a relationship succeed or what makes it fail.


In the special Teleclass coming up in about a week I will be talking specifically about those things that are key to success in a relationship. For now, I would like to talk about the one thing that results in failure.

The number one question that came up was why people tend to change so much for the worse from the time we meet them and start dating until the relationship is well into the committed phase. I stated that there is a part of the brain called the limbic system that eventually hijacks the relationship. Well, this is the key to understanding why relationships fail. You see the limbic system is our emotional warehouse where we store our pain and our defenses against our pain.

All of us carry woundedness from our childhoods. That is the pain I am talking about. Later in life our relationships and marriages become the theater for that pain since the limbic system really does not know the difference between our current relationship and our family of origin. We come to the partnership with our pain and we expect our partner to heal it for us. But there is a SECRET. We want our pain to go away without ever knowing what it is! So what we do is act out our pain in the form of a defense.

Meanwhile, our mate is doing their version of the same thing. To us, their acting out and defensiveness looks like and attack. Simultaneously, our acting out of our pain looks like an attack to them. This complimentary behavior forms a cycle of acting out, defensiveness, and lack of fulfillment that results in the inevitable breakup.

It boils down to this. People with no personal insight are unconscious to the emotional forces inside of themselves. What doesn’t get worked out gets acted out! Relationship failure is the result. Until we confront the emotional forces in our own lives, we will never fully understand what goes on in another person.

So you see failure in a relationship is not about sex, money, communications or any number of surface factors. These are symptoms of the underlying problem that we brought with us into the relationship.

What makes a relationship succeed? Please join us for the Teleclass: How you can move from Frustration to Fulfillment. Learn the top three qualities of a successful relationship. If you can’t make the class you will be sent a link to download the recording.

Relationships Survey #1 Answer

Recently I conducted a survey that asked one question: What is your greatest question regarding relationships? The response was immediate and somewhat overwhelming. I have done a number of surveys in the past, but never had the volume or the quality of response I go this time.

I got so many thoughtful responses that it was hard to categorize them. Over the next few weeks, I am anxious to visit all of the topics that came up. For instance, one of the less frequent questions was how do we know when to leave or end a relationship. Only 2 people asked that question, but it is so important that I will make a point to cover it either in my blog or in an upcoming call. So be watching for that.

Several responses were what I call “blame the mucus” questions. This is when we blame the other person and refuse to acknowledge the “swelling” of our own egos. I am even going to answer those.

So, what was the number one question about relationships? “Why do people change after they get into a relationship?” “What is it that happens to this wonderful person that I met and fell in love with who over time is transformed into seemingly another person who is far less desirable?” “Why does that initial love sometimes turn into disgust or hate?” One person even asked why people lie so much and hide the truth about themselves only to be found out later on in the relationship?

My answer may surprise you because it is so counter intuitive. But after years of marriage and relationship counseling, I can tell you that the two people who met and fell in love were actually the “real” people. There was no lying or pretense. The hideous truth is that after the relationship reaches a certain level of closeness that there is a primitive part of the brain that literally hijacks the relationship. This primitive part of the brain is called the limbic system. It is basically a hurt, angry, fearful, five-year-old that has an agenda of its own. It is all about fight or flight, anger/fear, survival and emotions. Until we confront this primitive part of our neurology, we are destined to have our relationships and our lives constantly disrupted.

So it is not that we are liars or that we misrepresent ourselves when we first fall for another. The problem is that there is something much more sinister and pervasive lurking inside of us that distorts our reality and takes over our situation.

Can we predict when this will happening in a relationship? Yes, it happens when the relationship moves from being casual to committed. In other words, when we get married or when we move in together, when the emotional distance closes and we find ourselves in “the relationship.” This often is right after the wedding. Sometimes the process is gradual, sometimes sudden. Sometimes these changes are triggered by the loss of a job or the death of a parent, when we can no longer hold back the emotional forces deep within our psyche.

The only way out of this condition is insight and personal growth. However, many people think the way out is to get out of the relationship only to find, ironically, that the next one has the same pattern – over and over.

Look for my blog post in a few days where I will be revealing the number two most frequently ask equation in the survey. Also, I will be conducting a Teleclass on Saturday, February 12th called “From Frustration to Fulfillment. The 3 Greatest Qualities of Successful Relationships.”

Click here to learn more about that class.

Violence - What is it?

As I write this a congresswomen lays gravely wounded in a hospital in Tucson – a number of others are dead. We are all shocked and sickened by the violence driven by madness that seems to be all around us in our world. Meanwhile, before knowing any facts, pundits, politicians and commentators have blamed everybody from Sarah Palin to El Niño for the violence.

I thought this would be a good time to talk about and define violence. But first let’s compare ourselves to the gunman in Arizona. At this point it appears clear to me that this person is legitimately psychotic. Many of the facts that have emerge point to Schizophrenia which is characterized by a disintegration of the process of thinking and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social or occupational dysfunction. The onset of symptoms typically occurs in young adulthood. This very closely describes the young man who allegedly fired the gun in Tucson.

The bottom line is that, if my assessment is true, this individual would never be expected to be normal or to exhibit normal behavior because his brain simply does not work correctly. Schizophrenia is a dysfunction of the brain that produces psychosis rather than an emotional issue like anger, depression or anxiety. This does not excuse violence. It’s a good thing you and I are not psychotic. We are not psychotic are we?

But what is violence and where does it come from? The course in miracles says, “I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts.” And we know that Jesus said, “Anyone who even looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his mind.”

So violence all comes down to thought – the voice in your head that sounds like you talking to you. Those of you who are familiar with my work know that these thoughts come from the Limbic System, the Monkey Brain, which is only concerned with survival. Violence and attack thoughts are the stock and trade of the monkey.

Here is what the Course in Miracles says about the result of this: “Because your attack thoughts will be projected, you will fear attack. And if you fear attack, you must believe that you are not invulnerable. Attack thoughts therefore make you vulnerable in your own mind, which is where the attack thoughts are. Attack thoughts and invulnerability cannot be accepted together. They contradict each other.”

But what, in fact, are attack thoughts? Any thought that has its roots in survival. Judgment, criticism, comparison, intolerance, hatred all are attack thoughts. The Monkey Mind is a violent place indeed. It believes it is special. My monkey is more special than you. Ultimately my monkey wants you to die so I can live and be special.

As long as we indulge violent, attack thoughts, we will live in a violent world. The answer to violence is internal transformation. We simply cannot longer tolerate our own attack thoughts if we want to live in a peaceful world. That means we must free our minds from violence, blame, hatred and the cesspool of vitriol we carry in our heads and that ultimately spews form our mouths.

I am making a moral equivalency here. There is fundamentally no difference between the shooter in Arizona and the pundit on TV blaming, making judgments and accusations. Both are attacking. One is just using a different form of ammunition aimed to kill. Both are dangerously insane with minds filled with violence and attack thoughts. The only difference is that the pundits, politicians, and commentators should know better. But they are dominated by the Monkey as well.

I urge you to learn Witness Thought Transformation. It is the only way you will ever become fully aware of your own attack thoughts. And then maybe you will join with me to help create a less violent world.