The 5 Essentials
The essentials summarized:
1. The First Essential:
Choose and follow a strong, positive stance in how you regard yourself and live in the world.
2. The Second Essential:
Practice the many forms of skillful loving.
3. The Third Essential:
Practice unconditional acceptance.
4. The Fourth Essential:
Treat other people as they would like to be treated.
5. The Fifth Essential:
Give what you hope to receive.
Relationships that thrive and last for years never prosper by chance. They are created by people who are determined to succeed and, through trial and error, have learned to use versions of the five essentials of skillful love to build solid relationships with others.
Many people live day-to-day. They do their best to deal with whatever comes along, make it to bedtime, and start over again the next day.
Their resources are limited, and often their problems are great. For example, they are challenged to survive on a minimum wage. They are in poor health. Or they experience seemingly insurmountable family problems.
Contrast this necessarily haphazard way of living with a life in which you set goals for yourself and work to achieve them. Even if the going is tough sometimes and your aspirations are limited, still you are in command of your life, at least in some limited way.
Understand and practice these essentials, in the important relationships in your life. It will begin to make a difference in the relationship. They are bound either to enhance your relationship or to bring it to a gracious close if love is truly gone.
1. The First Essential
Choose and follow a strong, positive, loving stance about how you see yourself and live in the world. Think of “stance” as what a batter does in a World Series game. His stance has both an external and an internal component. The way he stands physically holds his bat, and looks at the pitcher are meant to communicate strength and self-confidence. His body language says, “Throw me your best pitch, and I will knock the ball out of the park!”
Internally, the batter focuses on the present moment. He does his best not to consider his failures to get a hit earlier in the game. He gets his breathing under control. He shuts out the roar of the crowd. He waits for the pitch.
In baseball, and elsewhere in life, having a strong stance is not a guarantee of success. Nevertheless, combined with determination and skill, a strong stance is your best approach to all of life’s challenges.
In my personal and professional experience as a couples therapist, your best stance by far is a commitment to behave lovingly to other people and to yourself, in as many relationships as possible. The reasons are many and are discussed throughout the book. Here is one: A generous, friendly, accepting stance toward another person inevitably reduces suspicion and resistance. It is a clear “yes,” especially in dealing with strangers and with people with whom you have had a troubled relationship in the past.
In most encounters, people hope for acceptance and approval. If your habitual stance is a friendly, caring one, you communicate what most people need.
You devise a plan
Imagine that you are about to greet an old friend for the first time after a harsh argument that prompted both of you to abandon the relationship several years ago.
You have decided to try again, and you want this encounter to be a success.
However, you are uncertain about your ability and about the wisdom of even trying. You find a quiet moment in which you can be alone with yourself. You center your attention in your heart. You breathe calmly– in four, hold one, out four. You continue this pattern until you feel calm and centered.
Then you ask yourself, how would my old friend like me to greet her after our long absence? You find the answer by imagining yourself to be her. You experience the tentativeness that, as your friend, you would feel in anticipation of meeting again.
Let’s imagine that you would like your friend to greet you warmly with a smile on her face. You would like her to ask you positive questions about your life during the time that you were distant from each other. You would like her to be quite deliberate about not bringing up past difficulties. You imagine the relief that you would feel should your old friend greet you in this manner.
Then you behave exactly the same way with her.
You deliberately assume a strongly positive stance in relation to your friend. You tell yourself, “I am going to recall a time when we were close and strongly accepting of each other. Then I am going to ride that recollection into this meeting. In doing so, I am going to feel warmth in my heart and behave warmly to her.
Your deliberately-chosen stance in relation to your friend is that your whole attention will be to give her the experience of acceptance and welcome. You are the gift-giver, and you welcome the role. Because you have prepared yourself in advance, and because you have tested the strength of your stance in other situations, you are confident.
2. The Second Essential
Love is not sentiment, nor is it various conditions often confused with love, like enthusiasm, desire, and need. Love is not primarily feelings, although behaving lovingly always includes warm feelings.
“Love” is best understood—and is most powerful—when it is used as behavior that can take many different forms.
Love is kindness, openness to someone else’s point of view, and the willingness to help when help is needed. Love is empathy, listening from your heart. It is striving to understand what being with you may be like for the other person. Love is forgiveness and ongoing encouragement.
Love also is just about anything that aims to promote the well-being of someone whom you care about.
Love is capable of healing emotional wounds. Love can break down barriers of suspicion and resentment. Love provides a sound foundation for rebuilding a broken relationship.
Love is so powerful that all of us who want to have positive relationships need to understand love and behave lovingly often.
3. The Third Essential
Practice unconditional acceptance.
In an intimate relationship between partners, unconditional acceptance does not mean that each person accepts all the other’s behavior without protest. It does mean that each person embraces the other as a valuable person, whose rights and needs are as important as one’s own.
Is unconditional acceptance easy? In my experience it is not easy at all, hence the importance of skill in finding and promoting an area of shared experience in which unconditional acceptance might work.
In my experience as a couples therapist, having some area of full acceptance provides partners in a distressed relationship with some positive “place to stand” in repairing the relationship. Certainly doing is much better than starting an attempt at reconciliation by reliving everything that went wrong.
I had a cat named Rufus. His nickname was Woofie. Making the best of my years with Woofie taught me unconditional acceptance.
Woofie and I accepted each other unconditionally—within the range possible for us. Because he was a cat and I was a human, the range was small.
Woofie and I shared a bedtime ritual that lasted for many years (Woofie lived to be seventeen.) I would gently push him up the stairs, one step at a time. All the way, he would mock growl at me. That was our bedtime ritual. As far as I could tell, we both enjoyed it immensely.
You are following the third essential when you identify the range of total acceptance and regularly meet the other person within that range. Doing so guarantees that, in this one area at least, you fully accept each other. Using this approach, you can slowly expand the range of acceptance.
Imagine that you were half of a separated couple, willing to explore reconciliation. You are understandably suspicious of each other. You both carry bad memories of the past.
You could benefit from spending some time together exploring an area of total acceptance for both of you.
Maybe you were Red Sox baseball fans. You spent many summer afternoons watching the action from the bleachers in Fenway Park, Boston. You loved baseball, the Red Sox, and Fenway Park. After the games, you would often hang out in a little restaurant nearby that you both loved.
Watching Red Sox games from Fenway Park are among your most cherished memories as a couple.
The great thing about unconditional acceptance is that, when you and the other person say “yes” to each other, you both feel fully accepted, at least in this one area, and the range of acceptance is likely to expand.
One day you won’t agree. But the dialogue then is likely to go like this:
“Would you consider this possibility?” said politely and with the expectation that, at worst, you will be turned down politely.
“Yes that is a good idea, and yes we may use it later on, but for now I need to wait. And thank you for your suggestion. I see your warm interest and appreciate it.’’
Will such politeness always arise from sharing the equivalent of Red Sox games in Boston? Probably not, but if you share any hope for reviving the relationship this emphasis on pleasurable memories will help.
In any new or renewed relationship, find out your positive commonalities and give close attention to affirming and developing them. Consider that if the other person relaxes in your presence and you do the same in her/his presence, this emphasis on shared experience will have been a success.
Then using the foundation of mutual acceptance, you will be able to tackle the areas of disagreement.
4. The Fourth Essential
Treat other people as they would like to be treated.
In understanding and applying this essential, begin with those primary social needs that almost all people share. People need to feel emotionally safe with one another. They need to feel accepted. They need power—not power over others but power to maintain their safety and get their views heard and considered.
People want to like themselves in their relationships. If they are at all self-respectful, they feel uncomfortable in relationships in which they chronically act in selfish, self-promoting ways.
If you have these needs, then quite likely your partner in a relationship will want the same. The challenge is to create an environment in which his or her need to feel accepted and valued, for example, is met through your own behavior.
Add to that the wants and needs your partner has that you don’t have to the same degree.
Imagine meetings along a continuum from “whatever happens happens” on one end to totally scripted on the other end. Your meeting should fall somewhere in the middle—well-planned initially and much less so later on.
Think of yourself as the designer and host. Your task is to see that the other person’s primary needs are met, along with your own. If you anticipate that the other person will want to feel understood and appreciated in serious conversations, then act accordingly.
Behave in quite deliberate ways in the first several get-togethers. Look for an internal sense of “yes” or “no” after each get-together and correct in the following meetings.
If your initial behavior is well-planned and mindful of the other person’s needs and your own, then in these initial meetings you will set standards for behavior and attitude that will persist in subsequent encounters.
Such planful relationships are easy for someone with a strongly positive and loving stance to maintain. Expect to experience the satisfaction of helping to build a productive, caring relationship in which two similar and different people can thrive.
5. The Fifth Essential
Give what you want to receive.
To follow this essential, you must love yourself. Loving yourself is entirely different from indulging yourself or having an inflated ego and thinking that you are better than other people.
Loving yourself includes taking good care of yourself physically and emotionally. For many of us, it also means having an active spiritual life.
Loving yourself means accepting that you are a work in progress and refraining from harshly berating yourself for your mistakes. Loving yourself means learning from those mistakes and your other shortcomings.
Loving yourself is a prerequisite for maintaining a strong, loving stance in the world. Your effort to maintain a loving stance may be sorely tested by life’s difficulties if it is not firmly based on self-acceptance.
Do this work on yourself well: Get clear about what you want in an important relationship. Then treat the other person in the same manner that you want to be treated. The more you understand and accept your own needs, the more readily you will be able to respond to the needs of other people.
Be alert for the inner critic that most of us know well. The “inner critic” is that part of yourself that seeks to improve your behavior by pointing out in a harsh manner all that you are not doing well. In a real sense, the inner critic is a primitive function, because it is ignorant of the role of self-acceptance in changing behavior.
An antidote to the inner critic is a function that I call “the inner friend.” The inner friend is watchful for what you do right and gives you the equivalent of a little pat on the back. Cultivate your inner friend, and make sure that s/he is ever alert for opportunities to support and encourage you.