Relationships as Assisting Forces

A healthy and trustworthy partner is an accompanying ally. Here are some specific ways one can become such an ally.

Attunement

An ally is someone who attunes to us in an empathic way. In an authentic intimate relationship, this moves in both directions. Attunement is deeply grasping what someone is saying and feeling. Empathic attunement means feeling what someone else feels. It means, in effect, mirroring or reflecting the other’s feeling by feeling it too and affirming it, by word, action, or gesture, that we understand it. We do this by showing the five A's: attention, appreciation, affection, acceptance, and allowing.

• We pay attention to someone’s words, needs, feelings, and longings at a feeling level.
• We appreciate and value someone’s feelings, which means we treat them with respect and don't try to talk them out of their feelings.
• We hold and stay with the other’s concern or pain with physical affection that's appropriate to the nature of the connection.
• We accept rather than reject the other person, making no attempts to change the other in accord with our likes, demands, or expectations.
• We allow someone to be exactly who that someone is, rather than trying to be in control of his, her, or their behavior or choices. We are thereby doing what all allies do: honoring the other person’s deepest needs, values, and wishes.

Regarding acceptance, we may want love to be equal, in quality and quantity, between ourselves and our partner. Sometimes we even demand it or feel unloved if it is not happening. The mature question in a relationship is not about equivalence. It is about whether we can accept others’ limits and their different ways of showing love compared to our own. Maturity means saying: “I want to accept your brand of love, even though it is not the same as mine.”

With regard to allowing, our definition of control changes when we reach spiritual maturity. It is no longer in ego language; for example, “I am in charge here.” It is in sane, adult language; for example, “I can handle what happens.” We then step up to the plate and are ready to hear what an experience has to teach us. We follow with whatever action gets us through the situation. This is the healthy version of being in control.

When Misattunements Happen

Misattunements happen in all relationships. In an atmosphere of mended failures, the only atmosphere in which love can thrive, we see misattunement to our feelings not as a reason to blame the other. Instead, we tell the other what feeling or message of ours he or she missed. We do this in a non-blaming way:

“When I feel misattuned to you, I am glad to explain again what I feel.”

Or, “When I misattune to you, I ask that you let me know so I can try again.”

This helps us come to see attuning as a skill that any of us can learn. It is the skill of an assisting force. Also, when we fail to attune to a partner’s feeling, we might say: “I am not ashamed about this misattunement, though I am sorry about it. I am learning the skill of attuning and will keep practicing. I do not offer perfection, only the sincerity of my ongoing intention and efforts, however inadequate or tardy.”

If the assessment we are making about the other is irrational, we use a different protocol when asking for attunement: We ask for a partner’s presence while we do our own work, rather than ask to be rescued. Consider, for instance, if we suffer from insane jealousy and feel scared, even panicked, when our spouse has friendly contact with her ex-husband. She tells us there is no attraction left, no erotic component in her relationship to him. We know this is true, but we still feel fear. We know this irrational jealousy is a common pattern for us and that freedom from it is our personal work. So, we admit we are overreacting and ask her to hear about the paranoid shape our fear has taken. We also bravely ask her not to keep reassuring us that she is no longer attracted to him. That only coddles our fear and does not help us get over it. A true relationship/ally does not do that; she helps us face our fear, talk about it, feel it, but does not try to cancel it for us.

This is how an ally acts in an adult way and thereby helps us to be adult. In this situation, adult means letting go of jealousy that is not appropriate and letting go of the fear that is interfering with healthy relating. In our dialogue, our work is to admit our fear, to acknowledge it as irrational, and to show it verbally and bodily in a way that is appropriate. All our ally/partner has to do, and all we ask her to do, is listen. She is attuning to how we are triggered, but not jumping in to rescue us. She is thereby helping us move through it. Repeating this dialogue whenever we feel our irrational fear is the state-of-the-art adult way of releasing ourselves from it.

“Let me feel bad about this!” —Tim Hutton, in the film Ordinary People, asking his psychiatrist not to try to soothe him, only to stay with him as he experiences his suffering.

Adapted from my book By Your Side: How to Find Soulful Allies and Become One to Others (Shambhala, 2024).