This month’s podcast is based upon a video made by Terence Gorski and Claudia Black entitled Building Healthy Relationships. Mr. Gorsky and Ms. Black use the analogy that building healthy relationships is like building a house. When you’re building a house, the first thing you do is clear the land. The relationship equivalent of clearing the land is a program of personal growth: that is, you proactively working on you being as healthy as you can possibly be. You see this in 12-step programs when it is suggested that people not get involved in any new intimate relationships for the first 12 months of their recovery. Once you’ve established a successful program of personal growth, then you can set the foundation for your relationships. Gorsky and Black referred to the foundation of healthy relationships as the Three C’s: Communication, Caring, and Commitment.

Communication is the first C – the cornerstone, if you will – because without communication it is impossible to care about somebody as an individual. You can care about them as a human being – you don’t want to see them hurt, you don’t want to see them bleeding – but in order to care about an individual, you have to know somebody as an individual – and again, the best way to do that is through communication. After communication and caring comes commitment, and there are three commitments in any healthy relationship. The first commitment is to yourself; because if you’re not healthy, then there’s no healthy you to bring to a relationship. If you’ve ever flown on an airplane, then you’ve probably witnessed a really good example of this. Flight attendants will stand at the head of the cabin and say that in the event of cabin depressurization, a yellow mask will fall from above. They always tell you to put the mask on yourself first before you put it on your children or anybody who is sitting around you. The reason for this is obvious – if you’re not able to function, then you can be of no service to anybody else. The second commitment in healthy relationships is to your partner, because like a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, relationships are only as healthy as the sickest person in them. So if you’re healthy and your partner is not, then by definition your relationship is not. The third commitment is to the relationship itself. An easy way to remember the commitments in healthy relationships is “me, you, we.”

After you’ve cleared the land and set the foundation, you can begin to build. It’s helpful to understand that healthy relationships unfold in stages, with each stage representing a deeper level of intimacy. Before I describe the stages that healthy relationships go through, I’d like to refer you back to the March podcast entitled, “When Your Feet Hurt, Everything Hurts.” In that podcast there was an exercise where you were asked to describe the character traits that make up the perfect partner and the perfect friend for you. The Big Aha behind this exercise was that in actuality what you were doing was you were creating a blueprint for the person that you wanted to be. Because “opposites attract” works with magnets, not with people. So now, armed with this list of the things that you are looking for in a friend, by paying attention and observing other people’s behaviors, and gauging those behaviors against your list, you can determine how intimate you’d like your relationships to be, weeding out those that may be a detriment to your personal peace.

The first stage is casual contact, and that’s everybody that you come into contact with – everybody that you wave to, that you smile at, you nod at on the street. In the casual contact stage, your only obligation to these other people is that you do no harm. Before I describe the deeper levels of intimacy, it’s important that it be understood that as you graduate to deeper levels of intimacy, you don’t abandon the more shallow levels. Even the most committed relationships will have casual moments where your only obligation to your partner is to do no harm.

The next level of intimacy in healthy relationships is called companionship. The definition of companionship is when events are more important than people. And it works like this: You’ve passed the casual contact stage to the point that you are now involved in activities with these people. While you’re involved in these activities, you’re measuring their behavior against the list that you have for the people that you want to attract into your life. For example, if kind and compassionate are on your list, and you observe somebody berating a waitress because they got their order wrong, well then that’s a red flag, and you may not want to go on to the next level with that person.

The next level of intimacy that healthy relationships go through is friendship. And that is when the person is more important than an event. If you’ve ever given up a weekend afternoon to help somebody move – you’ve carted big heavy boxes up and down stairs – that’s a pretty good indicator that that person is a friend.

The fourth stage of intimacy in healthy relationships is what Gorsky and Black refer to as the romantic love stage. The romantic love stage includes passion as well as sexuality. This is where you might share some deep passion of yours; share some long-held belief – aspects of your life that you just don’t share with everybody. A lot of people make the mistake of jumping from casual contact right to romantic love. This is where you hear people say things like, “Well I fell in love,” and while I certainly don’t want to rule out the possibility of falling in love, a far greater number of people find themselves surprised and disappointed. Using the process that I’m describing in this podcast allows you the opportunity to grow into love.

The final stage is committed love. This is when you begin to make obligations and commitments to your friend or partner. At first the commitments start out small - yes I will have dinner with you, yes I will go away for the weekend – and eventually they work themselves into things of a much larger nature – yes I will marry you, yes I will go into business with you, yes I will buy a house with you – as long as the things that you are obligating yourself to do not undermine your commitment to yourself.

As I mentioned earlier, once you reach a deeper level of intimacy, you don’t abandon the more shallow levels. Another thing about these stages is that they’re fluid – not all parties in the relationship will be in the same stage at the same time. This is very important to understand, because it is the cause of a lot of conflict in relationships. You might be in a stage where you want to be with this person, friendship, and they might be in a stage where they want to go to an event, companionship. But if you understand that these stages are fluid, and you’re gong to be in one place, and they’re going to be in another place, and sometimes you’ll both be in the same place and that’s magical, but you allow for both parties and all parties to be where they are and can openly and healthily communicate about any discomfort that arises. That’s when you can be fairly certain that your relationship is healthy.

Before I end this month’s podcast, I’d like to share with you a couple of very common mistakes that people make in relationships. The first is staying in a relationship too long. If your partner has proven that he or she is unwilling or unable to maintain a healthy relationship, yet you continue to participate in the relationship, that’s a mistake. And in last month’s podcast I provided a process that will help you extricate yourself from such relationships. The second mistake that people make is giving up on relationships too early. If every time you have conflict in a relationship you leave the relationship, then what happens is you never learn to deal with conflict, which undermines your personal growth and well-being.

Healthy relationships are essential to personal peace. And as I’ve mentioned several times before, I’m a firm believer that world peace will become a reality when enough people find peace within their own heart.

While teaching this part of the curriculum, I developed a strategy that I refer to as a “Recipe for Peace.” To better understand this recipe for peace, I’d like to first share with you what our curriculum suggested was the process for anger. I used two metaphors for describing the process for anger to my students. One was an ‘anger stew.’ The meat and potatoes of anger stew is stress. The carrots and onions are triggering thoughts. The two main triggering thoughts are ‘shoulds’ and ‘blames.’ So the recipe works something like this: If a person is highly stressed and they can find somebody to blame for what’s going on in their life, it gives that highly stressed person an excuse, a rationalization, to act out in some dysfunctional, destructive, angry way. Likewise, if a person is highly stressed and they can find somebody that they think should be doing something and isn’t, or shouldn’t be doing something and is, it also gives them the rationalization to act out in some angry fashion. So again, the recipe for anger is stress plus triggering thoughts equals anger.

Now the constructive opposites for this anger recipe, what I call the recipe for peace, goes like this: Proactive stress management plus personal responsibility and acceptance equals peace. So let’s look at this recipe for peace in more detail.

To help my students better understand the connection between stress and anger, I gave them another metaphor. I suggested that they try to see themselves as balloons, and the air in the balloon is the stress. Every day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they are either putting more air into their balloon until they pop, or taking air out. The proactive stress management aspect of the peace recipe is just about that. Taking air out of the balloon. It’s important to understand that there’s no such thing as no stress. A certain amount of stress is necessary just for us to be able to stand. We call it ‘muscle tension.’ We’ve all seen babies who can’t even hold their heads up; that’s no stress – that’s no muscle tension. In future podcasts we’ll discuss this in much greater detail, but I would like to give you five simple things that you can do right now to reduce the stress in your life so that you can get further and further away from living on the edge of anger.

The fastest and easiest thing that you can do to be proactive in your stress management is deep breathing. To prove this point to you, let’s do an exercise really quickly. Keep track of your pulse for 15 seconds. Then multiply that number by four. … Ok, now take three long, slow, deep breaths. … Now take your pulse again for 15 seconds and multiply that number by four. … In the vast majority of instances when I have done this exercise with my students, they found that their pulse rates dropped – significantly in some cases – just by taking three deep breaths. When they took five deep breaths, their pulse rate dropped even more. So the most immediate thing we can do to reduce the stress in our lives is deep breathing. Something that works for me is that I have environmental cues that remind me to stop and take a couple of moments to re-center myself. Currently I’m working at a grade school with developmentally disabled kids. And as you might imagine in a grade school, bells are ringing all the time. So every time I hear a bell, I stop, take a couple of deep breaths, and that re-centers me. That re-focuses me. It allows me to reduce any stress that I might have acquired since the last bell rang.

There are other fundamental things that we can do, such as eating healthy, taking vitamins, getting exercise, getting the proper amount of sleep. If any or all of these behaviors are things that you are currently doing in your life, then I’m sure that you are well aware of the benefits. However, if you’ve had difficulty instituting these behaviors into your life, a previous podcast entitled “You Can Change Without Growing, But You Can’t Grow Without Changing” provide processes so that you can begin to institute these healthy behaviors.

The most beneficial thing we can do for ourselves is to have healthy relationships with healthy people. Dr. Drew Pinsky in his book, Cracked, suggested that healthy people use their relationships to regulate their emotions. Healthy people do not bottle up their emotions and then explode later because somebody isn’t doing something that they think they should be doing. Proactively managing our stress also benefits us in other ways. It keeps us healthy. If you look at the word ‘disease’ – d-i-s-e-a-s-e – disease – it’s in the word – dis-ease. Not at ease. The more stressed we are, the more sick we become. Stress is a major contributing factor for everything from the common cold to cancer.

Another debilitating aspect of being highly stressed is that it constricts our reticular activating system – the part of the brain that helps us see options. The more stressed we are, the less options we see. Conversely, the less stressed we are, we begin to see not only the black and the white, but all of the gray in between. Future podcasts will be devoted to processes, that when practiced, can have a profound impact on the quality and quantity of one’s personal peace.

The second aspect in the recipe for peace is personal responsibility. The December podcast entitled “Putting a Man on the Moon” is entirely dedicated to personal responsibility – being responsible for our actions, our thoughts and our feelings.

The third component in the recipe for peace is acceptance of oneself and acceptance of others. Acceptance is closely aligned with personal responsibility. It’s very important to understand that people change their behavior only when they see the benefit in changing their behavior. We can’t make people do anything that they don’t want to do. How many hours of our lives have we spent trying to convince somebody to do something that they didn’t really see the benefit in doing. How much stress and anxiety have we brought upon ourselves engaging in this fruitless endeavor? People change when they see the need to change. And we need to accept that. Personal responsibility in relation to the acceptance of others rests in how long do we allow ourselves to be exposed to behaviors and attitudes that we do not believe serve our best interest. If we have friends and family or acquaintances whose behavior we allow to adversely affect us, it is our responsibility to protect ourselves. And in some cases that may mean ending relationships. But we have to take the responsibility for being as healthy and as peace-filled as we can possibly be.

It’s been my experience that being accepting and tolerant of other people is often easier than being accepting and tolerant of ourselves. Acceptance of ourselves requires that we learn to forgive ourselves for our past transgressions. One of the videos that I used to show in my class was a Les Brown video. And in this video he said, “If you wouldn’t do it today, you’re convicting an innocent person.” When I heard that the first time, it was like a lightning bolt struck me out of the sky. I realized at that moment that I was beating myself up for things that I hadn’t done in 10, 15, 20 years. And that I’m a different person today. And there’s no good point to me holding myself emotionally hostage to behaviors that I haven’t done in 20 years. One idea can change your life, and that single sentence, “If you wouldn’t do it today, you’re convicting an innocent person,” enabled me to set down baggage that I’ve been carrying around with me for most of my life.

Many of my students when talking about stress and anger management had the misconception that once they had completed that part of the curriculum that they would never be angry again. Perfection is not the goal. Perfection is impossible. Jesus Christ, the Christian physical embodiment of peace and tolerance, snapped when he saw that money changers had turned the temple into a marketplace. The goal is to have reasonable responses. And lower stress levels allow a person to do just that – have a reasonable response. Something other than the ‘fight or flight’ mentality.

It is my belief, and I have seen it work in my life and the lives of others, that the recipe for peace is proactive stress management plus personal responsibility and acceptance of ourselves and others. When these three behaviors and attitudes are practiced we begin to develop more peace within ourselves, which ultimately leads to more peace in the world. We are responsible for creating the peace in our lives. And it doesn’t take much imagination to see that world peace can become a reality when each person finds peace within their own heart.