It’s never too late to reignite your passion and to restore the love between you and your partner. Stop rehashing the same issues, figure out what you’re really fighting about, and start enjoying a happier, stronger relationship today.
The Love Fix
Dr Tara Fields
Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: 276; Price: $ 16.99
The title of the book — The Love Fix — suggests how to break free from the most common marital discord and help the relationship thrive. Author Tara Fields believes marital discord can be repaired and restored to a happy and satisfying relationship. Her peers feel with three decades as a couple’s therapist, she has combined cutting edge thinking to bring about change and real transformation. The fact is no one was given a rule book on how to communicate and create a loving relationship. Instead of playing by a common set of rules, one is pushed and pulled by the patterns created in childhood and earlier relationships.
There is widespread concern as more than 50 per cent of the marriages end in divorce in the United States. It is discernible that divorce is on the increase in India. It is common to see couples mired in conflict — individually feeling hurt and lonely — that they have resorted to assigning blame. Too often the couple end up feeling angry or misunderstood and react hurting each other or retreat into hopelessness and growing apart in the process. Each half of the couple can become so invested in trying to be “right” that knee jerk reactions begin to take precedence over being loving and kind. They get to the point where to lose an argument seems like it means losing an essential piece of themselves and they can’t let that happen.
They lose all perspective and the ability to see they’re actively losing the chance of “winning” or putting their relationship back on the rails. Love brings up everything that one has hidden away: unresolved wounds and traumas, fears “letting love take the lid off Pandora’s Box frees these demons — and once they are free they can be healed,” observes Dr Tara. She has seen couples find peace, come closer together, save their relationships, and build relationships that last by simply understanding how they handle their problems and making some pretty straightforward changes to how they communicate.
The book explains and explores the five most common fighting patterns couples fall into, offers insight from couples who have broken out of those conflict loops, and provides the tools to help build a lasting relationship. It can be a guide and give one the “courage to reach a beautiful relationship that is within one’s power to create.” The author draws attention to “Five Conflict Loops and the Five Circles of Love. In relationships Dr Tara likes to think of couples coming together in a circle of love. Healthy relationships have a certain amount of back and forth, give-and-take. You give your spouse or partner love, and your love is returned. You put energy into the relationships, and you gain energy in return.
Circles symbolise more than inclusion and collaboration. Not only can one be contained and protected in a circle, but you can also be stuck in one. Recurring arguments can turn your circle of love into a conflict loop. In all there are five conflict loops matched with five circles of love:
The number one reason relationships fail is due to sarky remarks, cold indifference, anger, and rude behaviour generally don’t come from a place of contempt. However counter-productive these behaviours are, “protections” are the ways to avoid more uncomfortable emotions, like fear or pain or shame. Most of us have good reason for occasionally shutting down or lashing out. “It takes understanding your role and that of your partner in your relationship for the two of you to make the necessary changes that will help find your way back to each other. If you want to save your relationship you have to be willing to do the work. How you behave is linked to how your partner will behave, and changing how you direct your energy has the power to change the entire cycle.”
Dr Tara promises that “If you have a strong commitment to change, you can rebuild, restore, and rekindle the passion and companionship you once had. If you can manage to take a vacation from the “Land of Me” where one or both the partners are shouting, blaming, shaming, accusing, being inflexible or walking on eggshells among other things, the entire dynamic of your relationship will begin to shift, little by little.”
That in turn leads one to the first big question — Are You In or Are You Out? Just wanting to be in. Of course this a way to ensure that both partners are committed to what will be a rigorous process of discovery and change. It also creates a visual goal. Is one willing to step into a circle of love, or are you committed to the conflict loop, which has become so habitual, so comfortable in its toxicity? Sometimes the act of falling in love is the catalyst for the emergence of the very barriers to love — it takes being in a circle of love to open up enough to let these issues leak to the surface.
The author says in her work she has found that profound love can leave one feeling vulnerable. When one loves deeply there is more at risk. That feeling of unease or uncertainty can tap into fears that lie at the very core of your being. Unresolved trauma and pain from the past are the primary barriers to being able to maintain healthy relationships in the present. Rather than healing these wounds, however, we often project them on to the partner. And by inadvertently pushing each other’s buttons, it has the makings of a perpetual conflict loop.
Clearly working on a relationship is not easy. It is much easier to postpone working on a relationship until the “right” time or till one is “ready.” The problem is till one is ready or willing to change, “it may already be too late or, at the very least some water may have accumulated under the bridge making it much harder to go back and fix what’s been wrong for so long. Conflict might be an essential part of a story and at the same time it is an inevitable and normal part of any relationship.
“What is important in strengthening your circle of love is how one handles the conflict. It’s when these conflicts aren’t resolved and left to fester that they can grow into loops that keep one stuck.” Fortunately the author insists there are common ways to diffuse conflict. These can be helpful no matter what type of conflict the partners are encountering. Dwelling on the negative long enough, however, one can get stuck in the negative rut. Cultivating gratitude is more than showing your partner respect and appreciation. It entails retraining your brain so that you home in on the positive. “Spend some time focussing on the positive and you can reinvent the entire dynamic.”
It is amazing how revisiting happier times can open a couple up emotionally, and restart powerful feelings of generosity, empathy and hopefulness. Plus if one has children, this is a wonderful activity to do as a family. Don’t underestimate how much kids love to hear stories about how their parents fell in love.
Dr Tara provides insight from real couples who have repaired their relationships. Written in a simple and direct style, she outlines her three minute fixes dealing with “Role Reversal,” “Broadening Your Horizons,” “What Does Love Mean To You,” “Replace Testing With Asking” and “Total Transparency” among others. An interesting book having portends of turning around soured relationships which have seemingly reached the stage of no return.
