Rediscovering Love: An Intimacy Restoration and Growth Journey Guide

By Roy C. Rawers

Rediscovering Love is written as a guide for those people who refuse to accept the idea that the best days of their relationship are behind them and who have the courage and willingness to try and repair or strengthen their partner relationship. Learning why relationships deteriorate and helping the reader take a hard, interpersonal look at ways they may be sabotaging their relationships creates a pathway toward new levels of communication and tools for improving the quality of an existing or new relationship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543441284

Roy C. Rawers

Roy C. Rawers, MA, LMFT, CSAT Mr. Rawers is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist with a Southern California private practice focused on working with individuals and couples longing for more satisfying relationships. Specializing in the treatment of Intimacy Disorders (Sex Addiction, Sexual Anorexia, Love Avoidance, and Love Addiction). Mr. Rawers has been trained and certified as a Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT) by the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Profession (IITAP). He can also be heard discussing more Intimacy Disorders related topics as the host of Rediscovering Love Radio, available on many podcast services. Mr. Rawers lives in San Diego, California with his wife of over 25 years and their three children.

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Copyright © 2017 by Roy C. Rawers, MA, LMFT, CSAT.

Cover Image by Jennifer McArtor at McArtor Designs

Library of Congress Control Number:         2017911913

ISBN:                  Hardcover                  978-1-5434-4126-0

           Softcover                    978-1-5434-4127-7

                             eBook                         978-1-5434-4128-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 08/16/2017

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CONTENTS

Disclaimer

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I

Preparing for the Journey of Rediscovering Love

1   The Courtship Phase

2   Unmet Expectations

3   Unresolved, Unmet Expectations   The Rocks in Our Backpacks

4   Resentment   Grieving Gone Awry

5   The Downward Spiral

PART II

Embarking on the Journey of Rediscovering Love

6   New or Old Choices?

7   Fight or Flight

8   Family-of-Origin Patterns   Where We Learned to Fight or Flee

9   The Power of Habit

10   The Victim/Victimizer/Minimizer Triangle

11   A New Healthy Triangle

12   I Got This Syndrome and Sealing the Grout

13   Pitfalls   Roadblocks to Rediscovering Love

14   Pitfalls   Donkey Riding

PART III

Continuing the Journey of Rediscovering Love

15   Listening with Love

16   Reflecting with Love

17   Negotiating with Love

18   Living in the Gray

19   Active Decision-Making   The Captain and the Terrorist in the Mind

20   Creating Door B Options

21   Ending Isolation

22   The Upward Spiral

Afterword

Suggested Readings

DISCLAIMER

The individuals in the case studies are composite characters that do not represent any one past client but are a collection of actual challenges and situations that many past clients seeking reconnection with a partner have faced.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Once again I’ve found myself in another life situation I never thought I’d experience, which is ironic because for most of my younger years, I was content to graduate from college with a business degree, get a job, and work for the same company for the rest of my life like my father did. Marriage wasn’t part of my master plan, nor was having children. Long story short, none of my original plans came to fruition, but as in the past, with the assistance of many special people, something better was waiting for me when I was ready to let go of my fear-based script and accept the help of those precious others who would not only help me manage the curveballs that life throws but also learn how to hit them out of the park now and then. When you’re fortunate, you find a few special people whom you can call true partners, whose help brings out the best in you, and without them, you wonder if your potential would have ever been fulfilled.

I’d like to thank the following true partners for their helping make Rediscovering Love possible.

To my wife, Annette, who endured seemingly endless rewrites and still kept a tone of optimism that one day a book might actually emerge from my unfolding process. Not to mention that, as an English teacher, I saw her cringe every time she came across my poor grammar in many of my chapter drafts. Having someone who believes in you even when the challenges mount is invaluable. Thank you, sweetie!

To my children and their patience after one of my wake up in the middle of the night writing sessions, followed by a grumpy dad the next morning. And for tolerating banishment from the movie room that holds most of the electronics they love so that I could get a few lines or pages on the desktop. More than being well-mannered children, they are the inspiration for the legacy I hope Rediscovering Love will create in our family for generations to come.

And to those in my inner ring communities—those in my life that I choose to openly share my story with on a regular basis. They are the ones that hear my pleas for rest or inspiration, absorb my pity parties or rants, and offer acceptance, understanding, and encouragement along the way.

Thank you all for your authentic and true partnership.

Roy

INTRODUCTION

At best, I think it can be safely said that it is often very difficult and demanding in today’s world to maintain stable and close relationships with other people and that maintaining the quality of a relationship over time is challenging, if not impossible. I have often heard both men and women make comments such as It used to be so easy or We don’t get along like we did before.

Why, then, do people often find it difficult to continue to feel close and connected to their partner? Why do they express thoughts such as My partner has really changed or My partner isn’t the same person as before?

While these statements may contain elements of truth, they often ignore the possibility that the person expressing them might have also changed, so that what may have started as a relatively minor feeling of disconnection between the partners may have developed into a major sense of discontent and dissatisfaction.

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When this happens, couples often drift apart, not knowing how to repair their relationship and feeling as if any love they once felt is now lost. This often results in the continuation of a relationship fraught with emotional pain, an affair or series of affairs, or the end of the relationship.

Rediscovering Love is written for those people who refuse to accept the idea that the best days of their relationship are behind them and who have the courage and willingness to try to repair the relationship. In the chapters ahead, I explore with the reader why relationships deteriorate; help the reader take a hard, personal look at ways in which he/she may be sabotaging his/her current relationship; and offer tools that can be used to maximize the opportunities for improving the quality of an existing or new relationship.

This book, then, is an invitation to embark upon a journey to recapture a relationship that has been desired all along but that may currently be disrupted and jeopardized by fears of either not knowing how to get back on the right path or not being able to.

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Often, those who think of themselves as unqualified for this journey are the best candidates for successfully completing it. Such is the case with three individuals who the reader will come to know during the course of the book: Robert, a thirty-three-year-old single man whose relationship with his child’s mother is dominated by passion, joy, and closeness mixed with jealousy and rage; Donna, a sixty-seven-year-old woman who is estranged from her husband of forty-six years because he claims to be experiencing PTSD symptoms as a result of something she did forty-five years ago; and Stan, a thirty-six-year-old man who is having problems being sexually and emotionally intimate with his partner.

During the course of this book, we will explore their stories and describe their efforts to rediscover love using the concepts, tools, and exercises introduced in the book. Their only prerequisite for undertaking the journey was to have enough humility to begin to take the first step and the courage to continue the journey by taking each successive one.

To all the courageous readers, then, who are willing to embrace the idea that failing to love is failing to live, I say, Bon voyage!

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PART I

Preparing for the Journey of Rediscovering Love

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1

The Courtship Phase

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There are few experiences in life that are as fulfilling to most people as the sense of feeling connected to another person. When we have the experience of feeling connected, we can also experience what it is like to be appreciated, loved, and accepted by another person. And we often, as a result of that connection, can develop or enhance our sense of positive self-worth, positive self-esteem, and competence. Given all the positive experiences that can result from a strong emotional connection, one might ask, What could possibly be more important than finding and maintaining this connection?

As important as this experience can be for most people, however, there is often another need that can compete with the desire for connection—the desire to avoid emotional pain. In fact, the desire to avoid psychological and emotional discomfort can be so strong that it can overshadow the desire to connect and, as a result, the process of establishing and maintaining a strong and stable emotional connection often involves resolving that conflict, a conflict I call the lover’s dilemma.

I am often asked When can this conflict first appear in a relationship? and What are the signs of this conflict?

The best way to answer this question is to understand what takes place at the beginning of a relationship and how the lover’s dilemma can develop during that time. This beginning is called the courtship phase and consists of four stages: initial attraction, accommodation, testing, and disclosure.

The Initial Attraction Stage

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The initial attraction stage is the period during which two people discover that they have a mutual attraction to each other and both are on their best behaviors, minimizing or hiding those personality characteristics and/or behaviors that they fear may turn off the other person. For example, most people would typically suppress a big belch on a first date because that behavior might be seen as a lack of manners, common courtesy, or respect for the other person.

Robert, the thirty-two-year-old man who was experiencing a wide range of emotions in relation to Laura, the mother of his child, admitted that during this phase of their relationship, he had never shown any signs or hints of potential aggressive behavior, especially the shouting matches he had with his mother. It wasn’t, he told me, until she had moved in with me [during the second half of her pregnancy] that she witnessed one of those calls between me and my mom. She was shocked that I spoke to my mother that way [loudly, sometimes screaming at his mother, using profanity, making threats never to speak to his mother again]. Until that time, Robert had actively gone out of his way to make sure that he did nothing to jeopardize the impression he wanted to give Laura about himself.

The Accommodation Stage

The second stage of the courtship phase is characterized by a heightened interest in the other person in such a way as to make it clear that one’s partner is a high priority and the focus of attention. Examples of behavior typical of this stage are making phone calls to the other person from work, being available for dates to the exclusion of other activities that previously may have had a higher priority, or helping the other person with tasks that would not normally be of personal interest.

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In the case of Donna, the sixty-seven-year-old woman, and her husband, Bill, this stage lasted through their four years of college. Bill typically drove two hours each way almost every weekend to see her, sometimes coming to see her twice in the same weekend, as spending the night together was not an option for either of them. She characterized this stage as ideal, citing the following examples of their activities together: picnicking by lakes, going for bicycle rides, watching movies, walking hand in hand, and making future plans.

Robert recalled spending more time tending to his new relationship than was beneficial for his work. Dating was taxing his finances and affecting his amount of sleep, leaving him unusually tired at work and, at times, attracting the attention of his superiors. Yet he felt confident that he wanted to be with Laura for the rest of his life, and he let her know that by sending flowers to her office. By helping one of her friends move to another apartment two months into their relationship, Robert was letting Laura know that he was doing something for her that he ordinarily would never do.

The Testing Stage

During this stage, each person begins to test the relationship by starting to reveal behaviors, thoughts, feelings, interests, and attitudes that could potentially be disturbing to their partner. As time goes by, it is normally very difficult to consistently keep one’s best foot forward so that eventually the desire to be oneself can strongly assert itself. This is when what I call the lover’s dilemma—the conflict between the desire to connect with one’s partner and keep that person satisfied and the emotional discomfort that can result from wanting to be oneself without pretending to be otherwise—can first appear.

Robert first experienced the lover’s dilemma when he began to notice that he became irritated when Laura left her chilled plastic water bottles on his wood tables when she came to visit him at his house. It bugged the crap out of me, he said, explaining how much trouble it was to deal with the watermarks left on the tables and how he would go back downstairs after they had made love to look for any stray bottles. At first, it didn’t seem that big of a deal to him to get up, grab the stray bottles, wipe up any residual water, and put the bottles on the kitchen counter. But the more time went by, the harder it was for him to remain quiet, even though he didn’t want her to think that he was being petty. Yet he chose to say nothing to her about this behavior and, instead, endured the discomfort he felt policing her stray water bottles.

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The Disclosure Stage

This last stage of courtship takes the testing stage to the next level. If the third stage represents a period when small breaches in the ability to present an ideal self to a potential long-term partner occurs, then this stage is where many, but often not all, of a person’s behind closed door behaviors, thoughts, feelings, interests, and attitudes are disclosed to the partner. This is a critical stage in a relationship because each person is gathering new information about the other and may be looking for deal breakers—that is, potential flaws in the other person that can affect whether or not the relationship continues.

The threat of emotional pain is greatly influenced by how familiar we are with the setting we are in. The more comfortable we are, the greater the likelihood that we will expose our feelings in their raw or primitive states. Similarly, the more familiar we are with others, the more we are likely to become insiders who are privileged to information others are not likely to have.

Why is it, for example, that when you’re at work, you are more able to keep your cool even when you might be strongly affected by something someone else said? Perhaps it is because you want to keep your job, so you react in a way that gives others a good impression about you? So you mask your true feelings in order to avoid the possibility of experiencing derision, sarcasm, anger, shock, or shaming, for example, from those around you.

It is understandable, then, why we might mask our feelings at work. But why would we hide them when we are with those we love the most?

Once again, the element of fear plays a part in these situations, for even though we are typically more comfortable in the presence of those we love, there may still be a part of ourselves that fears that loss of love if we were to do or say something that seriously upsets our partner.

As time passes and the discomfort of multiple lover’s dilemma incidents potentially increases, however, our ability to control our reactions in these uncomfortable situations can decrease, especially because, as we become more and more familiar with our partner, we are more likely to drop any pretenses and allow ourselves to express feelings, behaviors, etc., that we would not have expressed during the earlier stages of courtship. The risk in this phase of a relationship, then, is that one or both partners will have information that can now influence, more than ever, the desire to pursue the relationship.

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Six months into her relationship with Robert, while on a weekend getaway with him, Laura witnessed Robert excessively belittling and berating a car rental clerk after he found out that the car he had reserved wasn’t available and that his only option was a model he did not want. Laura was angry with me and embarrassed by the way I was handling the situation, Robert said. She didn’t understand that I had put a great deal of planning into this trip and was thinking about asking her to marry me if it felt right. The car rental company completely jacked up my plans, and there was no way I could explain what was going on to Laura. Their actions were totally unacceptable, and I wasn’t going to let them get away with it. She was standing right next to me, and I knew that she was not happy with me, but I could not stop myself from grilling the rental clerk. And when the manager showed up, I gave her a piece of my mind too. That’s when Laura stormed off [and] I had to call her on her cell to find her. She didn’t even care that my actions resulted in not only getting the level car I wanted but a complimentary upgrade. I agree it wasn’t pretty, but look at the end result.

In Donna’s case, the first sign of any disruption in the courtship phase took place after Donna engaged in a one-night stand in Paris three months after she and Bill had become engaged. This event took place after both had graduated from college, while Bill was in flight school. It was an event that affected their lives for over forty years and eventually led Donna into counseling.

"I was with my girlfriends. They were all single. We were drinking wine that night, [and] while I’d had a drink a few times before, I wasn’t an experienced drinker. We met some young men at a club. It was really the first time I’d ever been out without Bill, [and] I guess I got caught up in the moment. We all wound up at a nice apartment nearby, and I slept with him.

"When I woke up the next morning, I felt terrible, dirty, disgusted with myself. I was wrought with guilt. My girlfriends all tried to make me feel better, promising that none of them would ever reveal what had happened that night, but it didn’t make me feel any better. I flew back to America three days later. I was three months away from getting married to Bill and felt so guilty. He [Bill] deserved to know that truth about what happened in Paris, or would that destroy everything?

"After two weeks of back and forth in my mind, I decided that I couldn’t let him go through with marrying me without confessing my actions to him. At least he would have a chance to back out if it was too much to bear.

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"So when Bill came to visit me while on a weekend break from flight school about two weeks after coming back from Paris, we were sitting in the car, [and] Bill was dropping me off at my apartment [. . .]