Being an adult is hard and sometimes we find ourselves sounding like our parents,feeling or viewing our partner as a 5 year old version of the adult self. ” OMG stop acting like a 5 year old..Act your age….You sound like my Mother/Father.I feel like Im turning into your Mother/Father” are comments and thoughts most of us can relate to at some point in our lives.

Now if we are 5 years old or the persons Mother /Father then these comments are accurate and fine. When however our partner is 45 grown adult and we find ourselves either saying or thinking  these things then we have a problem with the art of adulting.

Setting the scene is a couple Robyn and Chris ( notice gender neutral )just home from a long day of work /wrangling kids/work colleagues traffic and getting the wrong coffee order etc etc.

Chris- “Im so tired Im going to watch tv and just blob out for a bit with my beer/wine/chips/socks/Facebook/blanket fort”

Robyn- “But what about the rubbish you havent put it out yet and whose making dinner???”

Chris- “mutters under breathe- OMG just give me a break Im tired and just want a moment to chill.”

Robyn- “Oh great if I want anything done I have to do it youre like a teenager!”

Chris- “Well stop acting like my B%#$$Y Mother/Father  you’re  no fun.”

Robyn- ” Typical. Now I know just how your Mother/Father/geography teacher felt I always have to be the grown up”

This type of dialogue can keep continuing unresolved with ruptures in relationship and everyone being unhappy and no rubbish  EVER getting put out. Dinner tends to be a plate of hot resentment with a side salad of contempt.

So lets take a side step and look at some theory .

Based on his observations of people in his own clinical practice in the 1950’s psychologist Eric Berne developed the idea that people can switch between different states of mind and behaviour—sometimes in the same conversation and certainly in different parts of their lives, for example at work and at home.  He found that these states of mind fell into three types which he named Parent, Adult and Child and helped us respond to life in automatic ways. (Also known as PAC)Berne further broke these down into positive and negative roles within the parent and child states as in the diagram below.

The Parent state reflects the absorption over the years of the influences of our actual parents and of parent and authority figures such as teachers, bosses and so on.   One is to enable people hopefully be better actual parents of their children with the two main characteristics being critical or nurturing in a positive( teaching/boundaries/caring for appropriately) or negative way (blaming or smothering/rescuing).

The Adult state is where we hope to be as adults.  It is our adult selves, dealing with the never ending interesting facets everyday life. Its more logical, fair, solution based and It also has the function of regulating the activities of the Parent and Child, and mediating between them. IE Child- ‘I hate you and Im not going to eat my carrots’, Parent ‘You are so naughty and never do as your told. EAT YOUR CARROTS OR ELSE’. Adult ‘Hate is a pretty strong word , how about we mash them with sauce?”

The Child state consists of parts of ourselves which hark back to our childhood.  It is childlike but not childish. This child can be spontaneous, fun loving, rebellious ,trying to please or inquisitive IE  How does the moon not fall out of the stars….why are stars twinkly….why is twinkly called twinkly. You get the idea.

The above scenario highlights how individuals can get triggered by each other into unhelpful parental/child states and get caught in the drama triangle which I wrote about in a previous blog. Dreaded Drama Triangle

If as a child we had a critical parent we can SWITCH into this child rebellious/or over pleasing state when we perceive a criticism, equally if we see someone coming from a child rebellious state we can switch into our learnt parental roles of criticism or over nurturing. We can get stuck in these negative transactions and all our adulting goes out the door!

How it can look.

Chris- “Im so tired Im going to watch tv and just blob out for a bit with my beer/wine/chips/socks/Facebook/blanket fort”(child response)

Robyn-  goes over to Chris on sofa, gives a hug/head rub/kiss.( nurturing parent) “Was it a tough day Chris? How about we both get our selves sorted and think about dinner later?( adulting response)

Chris- “Yeah it was Im so tired can you make me dinner and bring it to me? (A mix of some adulting and still in child)

Robyn- ” No I cant as Im busy finishing a call but when your ready we can do it together or just have cake and pretend to be super heroes? ( mix of adulting and some healthy free child).

Chris- “Oh sorry I wasn’t thinking but ooooh  I love you I can get the ice-cream and fruit for us?”( adult,nurturing parent and healthy free child)

As you can see its not always about being firmly in the  ADULT, because the art of adulting includes having some positive child aspects and some healthy parent characteristics in the mix.

The art of adulting means we understand when we are getting triggered or coming from one of these unhealthy but automatic states and having the tools to shift gear. Important also is helping our partner get back on track and having healthy ways to discuss this.Try some homework question with your partner

• What did you learn about being a parent from your parents?
• How were decisions made? What were the rules?
• How were boundaries set, critical or fair? What did they say do?
• As a kid what was your way of dealing with this? Did you rebel or try to be the good kid?
• How do you think this plays out with us?
• How can we have more of the healthy child/parent roles?

Use these questions as a way of getting to know each other more and understanding that each of us is a product of our learnt relationship patterns which are often unconscious. When we can understand our selves and our loved ones we can communicate more effectively and build stronger connections together. These tools are also incredibly useful in other relationships whether work, family or friends.

Remember no matter how old we are its so important  to enjoy that positive child state with others as life is short and often far too serious! If you would like to learn more or work with Caroline to make this year the one that counts contact  Caroline now.

I woke up one Monday morning and it dawned on me that my “get up and go” had actually done exactly that. It had got up and slipped off without me realising it had happened. I was shocked and wondered  “was there a moment or conversation which was the crucial point when my motivation just stopped?”. I know I’m not alone in this because it’s a topic which rears its lethargic head  regularly with clients or friends.

Have you ever found yourself waking up in the morning and after you have shuffled out of bed to get your coffee thinking “Oh no here we go again”?
Do you have a list of “things to do today” which was really a list of things to do last month?
Are you finding much of your time is spent “forcing yourself” to do things or trying to enjoy activities?
Often it creeps up on us and slowly but surely we find ourselves just getting by rather than living a life which has meaning and joy at its core. We all have times when we feel that our motivation has somehow drained out of us while we were asleep, or suddenly found ourselves living a life of quiet discontent. Have you ever found yourself waking up in the morning and after you have shuffled out of bed to get your coffee thinking “Oh no here we go again”? Do you have a list of “things to do today” which was really a list of things to do last month? Are you finding much of your time is spent “forcing yourself” to do things or trying to enjoy activities? Often it creeps up on us and slowly but surely we find ou selves just getting by rather than living a life which has meaning and joy at its core.

So how can we change this slow shuffle to the grave and start to re engage with our passion, motivation and joy again? To help create change its important to understand that our thoughts,feelings and behaviours are all interconnected . Habits are  created by our behaviour and thinking in the moment which is reinforced by our feelings,these feelings are often mistaken for fact and override our logical goals and needs.
While we have “control” over what we think how we behave we don’t have this same control over our feelings, often people mistake feelings for being “fact” when actually they are merely just signals to our brain and body to:

• Interpret the world
• Warn us of danger
• Are hard wired to seek lifes “ings” (eating, sexing, drugging, shopping,facebooking, gambling, relationshiping etc)
• Communicate and understand
• Prepare us for action/inaction

Heart ache of being dumped

“Parting is all we need to know of hell.” Emily Dickinson got it right. Almost no one in the world escapes the feelings of emptiness, hopelessness, fear and fury that rejection can create. Among college students at Case Western Reserve, 93% of both men and women reported that they had been dumped by someone they passionately loved; 93% also said they had rejected someone who was deeply in love them. And these men and women were still young—with decades of love, and possible disasters, ahead of them. Ain’t love grand? You bet…when your passion is returned and things are going well. But when love is unrequited, it’s a whole other story.

Why rejection hurts so much?

Brain studies confirm that love can be described as an addiction.  It is a natural addiction.  Maybe drugs like cocaine just hop on the natural addiction systems needed for hunger, thirst, romance and attachment.

Indeed, the passion we feel after rejection shows all of the traits of an addiction.

The Cycle of Love Addiction

Foremost, like all addicts, recently rejected lovers display intense energy and motivation to get their drug: the beloved.  They focus their attention and think obsessively about him or her–intrusive thinking.   When we asked our rejected participants what percentage of the day and evening they thought about their departing partner, most replied that they thought about him or her some 85% of their waking hours; others said they never stop thinking about their rejecting mate.  Someone was camping in their head.

The besotted man or woman also craves emotional union with their sweetheart.  Sure, they’d love to have sex with him or her.  But foremost, they hope their disappearing lover will call, write, invite them out, rescind their decision to depart and say those precious words, “I love you.”   Like any addict, abandoned lovers hunger for their drug—their mate.

Rejected lovers also express personality changes, as do other kinds of addicts.  Some change their hair or clothes to look sexier or more romantically appealing; some adopt new interests to attract or appease; some even change their careers or move to a different state or country to follow him or her.

And as the cocaine addict becomes highly anxious without their drug, the lover suffers “separation anxiety” when out of touch.  Even worse, when rejected they often love even harder–frustration-attraction. Alas, barriers increase romantic passion.  Terrence, the poet of ancient Rome expressed this aptly, saying “The less my hope, the hotter my love.”

Rejected lovers distort reality, too.  Most can list all the things that went wrong in the relationship.  But they sweep these truths aside–believing they can overcome almost any obstacle to win back their lover and make their dreams come true.

Like the cocaine addict who will do just about anything to get their drug, lovers are emotionally andphysically dependent.  Most are willing to do dangerous or inappropriate things to regain their mate.  They lose their self-control, a central trait of any addiction.

Indeed, rejected lovers show all three of the central characteristics of any addiction: Tolerance; Withdrawal; and Relapse.   Like the addict who needs more and more of their “drug of choice,” the lover must see the beloved endlessly.  When rejected, they plummet into excruciating mental and physical pain as well, withdrawal. And long after the relationship is over, even the slightest reminder, such as a song on the car radio or any other external cue, can re-trigger their intense craving for him or her.

Most revealing, all of the primary addictions engage the brain’s Reward System.   So does romantic love.

Love as a natural addiction:

Individuals in the early stage of intense romantic love show many symptoms of addiction, including euphoria, craving, tolerance, emotional and physical dependence, withdrawal and relapse.  We have proposed that romantic love is a natural (and often positive) addiction that evolved from mammalian antecedents by four million years ago as a survival mechanism to encourage hominin pair-bonding and reproduction, seen cross-culturally today in Homo sapiens.  Brain scanning studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) support this view:  feelings of intense romantic love engage regions of the brain’s “reward system,” specifically primordial dopamine pathways, including the ventral tegmental area, caudate and accumbens also activated during drug addiction.  Thus, because the experience of being in love shares reward pathways with those associated with drug addiction, romantic love may influence drug craving.  Indeed, a study of nicotine craving has shown that feelings of intense romantic love attenuate brain activity associated with cigarette craving under some circumstances.   Could other socially rewarding experiences be therapeutic for drug addictions?   We suggest that “self expanding” experiences like romance, and expanding one’s knowledge, experience and self perception, may also affect drug addiction behaviors.  Further, because feelings of romantic love can progress into feelings of calm attachment, and because attachment engages more plastic forebrain regions and the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, there is a rationale for therapies that help drug addiction by promoting activation of these forebrain systems through long-term, calm, positive attachments to others, including group therapies such as 12-step programs.  The medical community currently considers addiction as a negative (harmful) disorder that appears in a population subset; while romantic love is often a positive (as well as negative) state experienced by almost all humans. Thus, researchers have not categorized romantic love as an addiction.  But by embracing data on romantic love, it’s classification as an evolved, natural, often positive but also powerfully negative addiction, and its neural similarity to many drug induced states, clinicians may develop more effective therapeutic approaches to alleviate a range of the addictions, including heartbreak–an almost universal human experience that can trigger stalking, clinical depression, suicide, homicide and other crimes of passion.

Here are some suggestions we have written about for dealing with romantic rejection:

Clinicians have a host of strategies for helping lovers and drug addicts.   However, when data on romantic love and substance abuse are considered together, some approaches have a strong rationale.

Perhaps most important, rejected lovers should remove all reasonable evidence of their abandoning sweetheart, such as cards, letters, songs, photos and memorabilia, as well as avoid contact with their rejecting partner, because reminders and partner contact can act as cues that induce craving and are likely to sustain the activity of brain circuits associated with romantic passion and thus retard the healing process. Self –expansion research also finds that positive outcomes such as personal growth and positive emotions are possible (even likely) following a break-up if the relationship had offered few self-expanding opportunities and if the newly single person engages in rediscovery of the self (Lewandowski and Bizzoco, 2007).

Close, positive contact with a friend or friends is rewarding and may also help to replace the craving for substances or a rejecting partner, because looking at a photo of a close friend activates the nucleus accumbens, associated with reward (Acevedo et al., 2011).   Looking at a photo of a close friend also activates the periaqueductal gray, associated with oxytocin receptors and the calm of attachment.   This suggests that group therapies, such as Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12 step programs, are successful because these group dynamics engage the brain’s reward and attachment systems.

Data suggest that rejected lovers should also stay busy to distract themselves (Thayer, 1996; Rosenthal, 2002).    Physical exertion may be especially helpful as s elevates mood (Rosenthal, 2002), triggering dopamine activity in the nucleus accumbens to bestow pleasure (Kolata, 2002).   Exercise also increases levels of β-Endorphin and endocannabinoids which reduces pain and increases feelings of calm and well-being (Dietrich and McDaniel, 2004; Goldfarb and Jamurtas, 1997). Also, engaging in a new form of exercise can be a self-expanding experience (see Xu et al., 2010).  Because of these benefits of exercise, some psychiatrists believe that exercise (aerobic or anaerobic) can be as effective in healing depression as psychotherapy or antidepressant drugs (Rosenthal, 2002).

Further, smiling utilizes facial muscles that activate nerve pathways in the brain that can stimulate feelings of pleasure (Carter, 1998).  Focusing on the positive may be effective too.  A study by Lewandowski (2009) found that writing for 20 minutes on three consecutive days about a recent relationship break-up was beneficial when people wrote about positive feelings as opposed to when they wrote about negative feelings or wrote without expressing any feelings.  Perhaps most important, time attenuates the attachment system.   In our study of rejected men and women, the greater the number of days since rejection, the less the activity in a brain region (the ventral pallidum) associated with feelings of attachment (Fisher et al., 2010).

As disappointed lovers use strategies originally developed to quit a substance addiction, their love addiction is likely to eventually subside.

But here is the problem, and probably why it hurts so much.

It appears as if evolution has overdone the negative response to romantic abandonment.  But romantically rejected individuals have wasted precious courtship time and metabolic energy; they have lost essential economic and financial resources; their social alliances have been jeopardized; their daily rituals and habits have been altered; they may have lost property; and they have most likely experienced damage to their personal happiness, self-esteem and reputation (see Leary, 2001; Fisher, 2004; Fisher, 2014).  Most important, rejected lovers of reproductive age are likely to have lost breeding opportunities or a parenting partner for the offspring they have already produced—forms of reduced future genetic viability (Fisher, 2004; Fisher, 2014).  Thus, romantic rejection can have severe social, psychological, economic and genetic consequences.

But all the feelings are totally natural and mark us each as human beings who can love– and will love again.  It is a rite of passage into the next phase of our lives.