Resilient Relationships: Overcoming Adversity Together (Episode #25)

On behalf of me and Marianne Michaelis, I'd like to thank you for being a listener of our Human Intimacy Podcast this year. It's always a privilege to spend time with you and I want to express my deep gratitude. If you are ready to take your healing and recovery to the next level, you're ready to deepen your healing and strengthen your connection and gain real tools for meaningful change. I invite you to join us and other Experts at the 2nd Annual Human Intimacy Conference where myself, Marianne and many other leading experts will come together for powerful teaching, live question and answer sessions and provide insightful pre conference conversations to help you get the most out of your conference experience. And right now you can save 50% when you register before December 31st. Please don't miss this opportunity. Visit human intimacy.com and reserve your spot today. Something about you that I can't help but smile when you smile. Welcome to the human intimacy podcast. Dr. Kevin Skinner with you. I want to thank you for taking the time to be with me this week. This is our 25th episode. 25 weeks we've been doing this podcast with variety of guests and I'm so grateful that you are taking the time to to spend this with us. This week I want to talk about how couples deal with difficult adversity in their relationships. I've observed this as a therapist over the last almost 30 years and I want to share some of the key insights that I've learned from couples who make it through very difficult times. So thanks for tuning in. Let's go ahead and get started. As we begin, I'd like to share A story of Dr. Al Siebert. A few years ago I had the opportunity. I was doing Internet radio, a lot of similarities to podcasts, and as he and I sat together we were talking about adversity and resiliency because he had spent 35 years of his life studying about resilient people. As we talked, he shared stories of overcoming difficult things. People who'd been through the Holocaust or natural disasters, or lost a leg or an arm or fought cancer. His did spend his entire life studying the individuals and how they made it through difficult circumstances. And what was most interesting to me is here's a guy that had his entire career was dedicated to learning about how to overcome difficult things. And today I want to share with you some of the key things I learned from Dr. Al Siebert and I want to apply it to couples dealing with adversity. At the end of our conversation, it was just a very delightful session and we talked afterwards and I said, thank you so much. That was so helpful. And I said, would you like to come on with me again? And he said, I would love to come on with you again. The problem is recently I was diagnosed with stage four cancer. And he said, now I'm having to apply everything that I learned about resiliency in my own life. Unfortunately, he died a few months later. What I want to share insights that I gleaned from him with you. Because resiliency is one of those things in life. It's actually a skill. It's not inherited. It's something that we learn to do. And as couples go through adversity, difficult times, one of the most important things that we can share with them is how to make it through difficult times. So in today's podcast, I'm going to share you some of the insights that I gleaned from Dr. Al Siebert and other professionals who, who've spent their lives studying about resiliency. A few years ago, I was reading a book by her last name's Fromm, and she said something that I would like to share with you just to get you thinking about it. When we go through adversity, she said, it either is going to pull us together or it's going to blow us apart. And she was talking about how adversity influences individuals, couples and families. In my career, I have found the same is true when we go through adversity. Issues can either make us fight and argue and really pull us apart, or we can learn to gel together, form new, better bonds. And I want to share some of the insights that I've seen in my work with couples who've had a lot of adversity, but they begin to come together even through physical issues like health issues, or maybe it's a challenge with a child. I have observed that when people pull together, there's usually specific things that they do. So as we think about it, I want you to think about what resiliency means to you. What, what is it to go through hard times? What does it take to really go through that kind of adversity and work together? I remember as I was looking at some of the most important findings of Dr. Sieber and others, one of the common things is that adversity common to everybody. So I think it's important that we start with a foundation of everybody will experience some kind of challenge and adversity in their life. Elizabeth Edwards, she wrote, resiliency is accepting your new reality. And here's the next line. Even if it's less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you've lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that's good. I really like that idea. Like we as individuals, we have a choice. When we go through adversity, when we go through it as couples, we have a choice. The choice is we can continue to argue, fight, it can pull us apart, as I mentioned earlier, or it's something that can draw us together. But it requires two people. When it is a couple issue or a family issue, it takes individuals who are willing to say, things have to change, we've got to learn things can't stay as they've been. And when we go through adversity and we do it together, we realize that together we are better. So how do we get to that mindset, Especially if one of us has hurt the other? As a professional therapist, my career has been spent working with infidelity and sexual betrayal. And it's to you couples who have made it through that that I put a shout out, because in my chair, so to speak, the therapist chair, I've observed couples who've been through infidelity, sexual betrayal, and they've made it. Not only made it, but in their lives when they get through years and years of the pain and the hurt, which usually it is years. One of the things that I hear from them is, you know, we would never wish this on anybody, in fact, not even ourselves. But we are better individuals, we are better people, we are a better couple. And what did they do? Well, usually there's an effort. Human intimacy requires tremendous effort. It's not something that just happens naturally. Some people think, you know, we just, you know, we get married and what kind of effort are we putting into making this relationship better? For example, how do we learn to communicate more effectively? How do we work through problems? How do we go through day to day challenges? It has been my experience that when it comes to adversity, either we learn how to do these things or we continue to do them in old patterns. When I was being trained as a professional therapist, there was a term that we were taught, and it is a term that has stayed with me. The term is homeostasis. Really what it means is that we go back to old patterns. We don't like change. We want things to stay the same. And so as we attempt to make changes, old things come back in. Patterns are harder to break. And so we want to go back to homeostasis, the way that things were done. But in our lives. When we've been taught unhealthy patterns, learning new patterns is required. And when we talk about resiliency, that is, again, I want to remind you, it's a skill that we learn. So Dr. Al Siebert, when he was talking about changing patterns or when he was talking about going through adversity, he said something that really stood out to me. He said, when people go through challenging times, it is not one way or the other. Even in resiliency, he said, it's not an end point. It is a place that I am today. Today I may be very resilient. Tomorrow I may be struggling. And if we're going to understand resiliency, that means that we go through emotional moods, ups and downs, and we respect each other through the ups and the downs. As I've gone through that with individuals, I'm trying to help everybody understand it's not always good or bad. It's not always sad and depressing, or it's not always happy. There is opposition in all things. Think about that for a second. There is opposition in all things. It's how we go through that opposition. Many of the people that I've worked with in my career, when they struggle in their relationships, it's usually because they've never been taught how to do things in an effective way. Think about what we experience in life. Who teaches us how to solve problems? To say I'm sorry. To overcome addictive family tendencies. One of the most impressive things that I've observed is when individuals, we sit down together in the intensives that I run or when I'm doing therapy, and I usually will go through what's called the family history. We call it a genogram. We look at family history over time. And I was talking with this individual, and he had been in a family where his parents, they had divorced. There had been a lot of conflict and fighting. And in some ways he was relieved when his parents divorced. But as we started looking at his family history, there was very little evidence of a healthy living. Addiction, violence, chaos, abuse. And now he's married and he's sitting in my office with his wife. His wife had actually grown up in a different kind of environment where she felt loved. And it was, you know, hard for them as a couple because he had a hard time trusting. He didn't know how to connect on a deeper level. As he sat with me, he basically said, I want to learn how to do this, but I don't know how. He had experienced being bullied in his childhood because his parents were Poor and obviously with addiction and abuse. And that's what he knew. If you're looking at life, that was the cards he was dealt. And he had struggled with his own addictive behaviors. And so as we sat together, here's a perfect example of teaching somebody resiliency skills. And it begins with learning how to go through difficult times. And he was open minded. He was willing to learn. And again, I look at resiliency. That's one of the traits that Dr. Siebert discovered, is that resilient people are almost asking the question, what's next? What's this next life lesson that I get to learn? Now think about just that mindset. What am I learning through this? Now think about that mindset. You ask the question, what am I learning? What is there to take away from this? And we begin by doing that ourselves. If I'm stuck in an addictive behavior or if my behavior is unhealthy in relationships, I'm angry. Well, I have the opportunity to get curious into my life. And that's one of the things that resilient people do, is they're curious, they're open to information and learning. So as we think about resiliency in couples, that's the same concept. What can we learn to do to overcome our barriers? How to communicate more effectively, how to listen more intently. And resiliency in couples relationships is what I refer to as deep listening. We learn to listen deeply to ourselves and to others. And so resiliency, one of the core parts is we're curious. We want to understand, how do we get through this. A few years ago, I was reading a book by James Stockdale, and he was a fighter pilot who was in Vietnam and his plane was shot down. And he was in the Hanoi Hilton, as they refer to it, for seven years. And his life story is a very challenging one. He was the running mate of Ross perot in the 90s. Anyway, James Stockdale, he shared his story. But in the Hanoi Hilton, he had been taken. His plane had been shot down, and he had, basically, because he had been educated and he was a leader, he was treated very poorly. And at one point, they wanted him to go on the television so others around the world could see that he was being treated, were being treated well. And just before they were getting ready to do the interview, he literally bloodied himself, beat himself up in the head because he wasn't willing to let them control and tell a false narrative about what was actually happening. And so here's this guy who's really representing all of the POWs at the time. And he just didn't want to let his mind be controlled by those who had taken him hostage. And so he created a communication system where he and the other POWs learned to communicate through pounding pipes. At a certain time, they broke his legs. After that, again, just so much physical pain. But he had a mindset, I'm not going to let you control my mind. That was such a fascinating thing because he said, it's more of a mind battle than it is this other physical thing. I couldn't let them control my mind. And so he was observing resilient people and, again, resilient soldiers at the time. And he said there were three specific types of people. He said there were the optimists who thought that they would get out by Christmas or they'd get out by the next holiday and they were going to get rescued. And what he found is that the optimists, they didn't do very well. And then there were the pessimists. They just gave up. In many situations, they died or got killed. And then he said, there's a third group, and this is the most important. They were the resilient group, what he referred to as the realists. And the realists, ultimately, they didn't know what the outcome was going to be, but they had a belief that they would get through it, that their minds would stay intact. And so he himself, he learned to go into stoic philosophy and writers, and he would spend time thinking through things that he had learned in his master's program at Stanford University. And he basically had gone through these incredible philosophers and thinking about going through difficult things and hardships. And he allowed his mind to think upon their writings. And that's where his mind went. He said, in the first few months, I wanted to go crazy. I wanted to lose my mind, but I couldn't. Resilient people, they don't give up. Resilient couples, they don't give up. They continue to seek information. They fight through the barriers and the challenges, and they don't give up. And so my invitation for couples, when I see this, these challenging situations, when I see them in my office, the message I want to send them is, you can make it through adversity, whether that's health issues, whether that's relationship challenges, whatever the challenges are, if you're willing to put in the time and the effort and be curious and learn. Now, let me share a couple of other things that Dr. Al Siebert said. One of the things that he emphasized is that individuals become flexible, not Rigid. If we stay in a rigidity of pattern, that means we don't allow change to occur. Even in our own minds, we can't get over what has occurred. People who adapt, he found, are the more resilient ones. It isn't necessarily the life that they wanted because it's not fair and it's not right. And it's not fair that I'm having this health issue, or it's not fair that my partner cheated, or it's not fair that we have addiction in the family, or it's not right. It's not. It's not fair. And yet, as we get through this and we become more resilient and we become stronger, that means if I'm dealing with my own addictive behaviors or if I'm an angry person, I learned to understand my emotions, so I'm not so angry. I learned to overcome these addictive behaviors. And I make a commitment that I'm going to be a resilient person because I want to be better in relationships. And if my partners hurt me or if we have unhealthy patterns in our relationship, we learn to communicate more effectively. And resilient people learn to be flexible, and they learn to adapt. That's one of the key things that Dr. Al Sieber discovered, is that resilient people are flexible. They learn to adapt to new information. And that, he found, is what most resilient people do. The other interesting thing that Dr. Siebert shared, he was sharing a story of talking with this little girl, and her family said, she's just so depressed. And so as he went in and he was talking with this girl, he said, this little girl had depressive times, but her family wasn't comfortable with the emotions of depression. And so they thought, there's something wrong with her. And yet Dr. Siebert, as he was sitting with his girl, he was talking with her about times that she had fun playing with friends. And he interviewed her, and she said, oh, yeah, every once in a while I get sad, and sometimes I get depressed, and sometimes I'm anxious. And as he looked at her, he thought, she's really developmentally quite normal. And yet, because the family was uncomfortable with these emotions of anxiety and depression, and she was more expressive than they were, it was uncomfortable for them. And so he went to the family, said, actually, I want to share a little bit about your daughter. And he shared these positive things in her life and the way she perceived life. And he basically said, if you'll step back and look at this, your daughter is teaching You a new way to be. These things are common. And as we go through them and as we talk about them, because they were so uncomfortable talking about difficult things, and the family was like, oh, okay. So instead of us thinking about, you know, everything's a problem, he said, if we can be open to the emotions that we're experiencing as we're having them and be this again, going back to this curiosity concept, he said, you can find greater happiness and joy because you're able to flex, be flexible and adaptable. And so, again, I invite you to think about this. How much are you adapting to your life circumstances? Rigidity keeps us in the old patterns, and I don't change in rigidity. If I'm dealing with addiction, I keep in my addiction, I keep doing the same things. If I'm dealing with my life's traumas, whether that's early childhood or relationship traumas, rigidity keeps us stuck in it. Adaptability allows us to learn information. One of the most incredible things that I've observed, I have the opportunity to do groups. I do groups for individuals who've been betrayed. And I have seen some incredible people coming through my groups. They absolutely are pain filled with what their partners have done, and yet they stay in there. They support each other. They continue to learn because they want different lives. And as I sit back, I'm so in awe and admiration of individuals who don't quit, which is another resiliency factor. I don't know the answers, but I'm going to get them. I'm going to find them. You know, recently I was watching with my family, this name is Kenneth Rooks, and he was running in the steeplechase, and he's running in the United States national finals because he wants to become an Olympian. And in this run, he, two laps into it, the guy in front of him stutters, which makes him slow down, and he falls over this barrier. Now, if you've ever seen a steeplechase, there's the barrier and then there's water. And he falls over this one of these barriers, not into the water, but he falls over. And so now he's, you know, a few seconds behind the lead at seven and a half laps, a little over seven and a half laps around the track. And so two laps into it, he's now behind by a few seconds. And his coaches are thinking, oh, boy, he's not, you know, it's too bad he's, you know, not going to make it. And in his mind, he said, I'd mentally rehearsed, you know, this Experience. If I fall, what am I going to do? And he said, you know, first of all, I'm not going to try to do it in a burst. I'm not going to try to catch up. Because he understands the way the body works. And so he says, my goal is just to some point, reattach to the group. And he did that. And then he slowly worked his way up, and he slowly worked his way into sixth place, and then it was fifth place. And as his coaches are watching, like, well, okay, he's actually in a pretty decent place. And then if you watch this, Kenneth Rooks in the last lap, he gets up there into the top three, and then he's in the top two, and they go over the final barrier, and he's headed towards the finish line, and he passes the guy. One of the most incredible things when you watch incredibly resilient people, they don't quit. They get back up. So type in Kenneth Rook's name. Just watch his story. You see this person who's incredibly resilient. He gets back up. He runs to catch the pack, gets in the middle of the pack and finishes strong, wins the race and becomes the United States national champion. He's now going to be running the Olympics 2024 in Paris. I look at individuals when we go through this kind of adversity, we just don't. They don't give up, they get back up. And that's what I find in couples when they do not know how to do things. Some key things that I've observed, they learn to be flexible because their rigidity doesn't work. That means that they step back when they don't understand each other and they don't know how to go through difficult conversations. They learn how to, and then they practice it. When I see resilient couples, one of the core things that I observe is that they're open to feedback. There's many times where I tell individuals, look where you've been. Doesn't work. Do you know that? You know that? So let's learn new ways. And so because of their openness, which is another one of the traits that Dr. Sieber found is they're open to feedback, they're open to learning. That's one of the core realities. We're open, we're curious. And then what happens is really interesting. He said, we begin to transition into a phase, that we begin to have more luck. He said, resilient people seem to find luck. What does that even mean? And he said just in the interviews, they would use phrases like I felt lucky or I was blessed or something positive happened to me. And he said, I began listening to their dialogue and people, person after person, and this happened, and this happened. And he said, what I found is when people don't give up, they eventually bump into this place where something positive happens, what they call good fortune. And so there's a. There's something that happens here to resilient people is they turn the tide. I've seen some people go through some of the most difficult things, and their mindset is, you know, when we don't give up, we'll find the answers, the solutions will come. That's what we learn about resilient people. That's what we learn. So I don't have all the answers of resiliency, and I don't have all the answers. There's some people who, you know, the relationship isn't going to make it. There's over too many barriers or too many obstacles to overcome. And yet I find that even people who go through difficult things and they do end up divorced, you still have to be resilient. You still have to be doing hard things. Life is filled with the many painful experiences and challenges. Sometimes we do them alone, sometimes we do them in relationships. But usually the people who do them alone find their people. They find a tribe, because we all need somebody. Thich Nhat Hanh, one of my favorite authors, everybody needs somebody, he said. And so resilient people also include people in their journey. Now a couple of concluding thoughts on resiliency. And Dr. Siebert, when he was talking about it, he said. When he said, it's either, not either or, it's both. And really what he's saying is, as we go through life, there are the ups and the downs. And when we recognize that we're going to be going through this, what we might call a roller coaster, when we're down, we realize that, you know, we just have to hold on, and when we're up, we're grateful. Resilient people find a way to be grateful and to express gratitude. Resilient people, interestingly enough, they learn to smile, they learn to laugh, they play. That's one of the interesting things that Dr. Siebert also found, is that resilient people, they laugh and they play. So even through their adversity, they find ways to smile, to tease. And if you think about it, I was talking with this individual this week, and the way that he goes through stress is he laughs or he's a little bit sarcastic. And as we started breaking it down, Because I like to stop and help people understand their own emotions. As we were talking about it, he said, that's just the only way I know how to get through this is I have to laugh. I have to. Because, as they say in Israel, if we don't laugh a lot, we cry a lot. And so we have to learn how even in our most difficult times, even there, we have to still maintain this attitude of play. That may be hard for some people, but it's better for us. They did research on people who are laughing, and in some cases, they're dealing with many difficult adversity, like cancer. And they found that people who laugh actually live longer. So we get into healthy habits. Resilient people develop these habits of being playful, teasing, inappropriate ways. And in those ways, they draw people to them, and they create unity and they create connection. Now, I realize that many of you who are listening to this may be dealing with some real challenges and adversity, but please understand that there are principles for getting through difficult times today. I've shared a few of them. Being flexible, learning how to adapt and change, being a person who commits to learning and personal growth. That. That going back to that curiosity, you are committed to learning and growing. And then what happens is when you don't give up, you create serendipity, luck, fortune. And as you do those things, you begin to be a model for other people and say, that person's done hard things. That couple. I admire them because they've been through these difficult challenges. You see, this is what we learn in life. We can control things even when we don't think we can. And what we can control was actually taught to us by one of the great researchers on this, Dr. Frankl, Viktor Frankl. Man's Search for Meaning. If you've ever read his book, you remember the story where he is a prisoner of war. He doesn't know if his wife and family are alive or dead. He's freezing. It's cold. He's on the ground. He's got a soldier with his boot on his shoulder and his gun on his chest. And he's looking up at him. And his mindset is, I am freer than you are. He said as I sat on the ground. That was the thoughts that came through my mind. I am freer than you are. Huh? What in the world is he saying there? How in the world in his mind is he freer? I'm not living with the anger. I'm not living with a hatred. I'm not being controlled by other people. I'm mentally free. He said, I didn't know if my wife was living or dead, but I felt her love and I felt her peace and the memories. And he thought upon her, come to find out she wasn't alive. But he spent his life teaching people about resiliency, taking control of their mind. To me, this is the example. Never give up, keep fighting. Learn how to go through these things because it's a skill. It's not inherited, it's learned. And that is what we do to create the type of human resiliency that allows us to be the people we can become. Now. In summary, resiliency begins with it being a personal journey. It means we have to do our own work, we have to face the demons of our past, the things that haunt us, the things that keep us stuck. And then resiliency transitions into how we are with other people when we don't know, have the relationship skills we spend the time learning, we pay a price. Resiliency, human intimacy is learned, not inherited. It's not given to us. Resilient people learn how to go through these things and realize I don't know how. And so they're willing to pay the price to learn how resilient people never give up. Resilient couples, they fight through these things because they care about their love and their relationship. And if that means I have to take care of some of my own stuff, I do it. And so my invitation to you, our listeners, when I think about you, I'm happy because I know that you're committed, you're learning, you're listening to podcasts just like this one. And whatever podcast you listen to, you want more information, Keep at it. Learn how to develop these skills and become the people who, at the end of your life, your children, your grandchildren, say, my grandma, my grandpa, they were incredible people. Yeah, they went through adversity, but they changed. They became what, in many cases, what we call chain breakers. They broke the chain of unhealthy living. Now, if you're stuck and you don't know how to do these things, you don't know how to apply these things, then go to therapy, learn how to do these things, get the knowledge, read the books, do the podcast. And when you get stuck and you don't know where to go, turn to somebody, get a lifeline, get the support you need, because it can accelerate your journey. Alright, I want to close today's podcast by just expressing my gratitude to you, the listeners. If you have questions, please send them to questionshumanintimacy.com if you feel stuck and you want more support, reach out. Our team, we do intensives. We do a lot of work to help individuals learn these skills and apply them in their lives and in their relationships. My invitation is never quit. Keep fighting, keep learning, so you can have the type of human intimacy that you long for in your lives. Thank you so much for your time today. May you be blessed.