A couple consulted me. They married because they had been friends for ten years and had fallen in love. Immediately after their wedding, he moved in with her and her four children and the marriage fell apart. They argued constantly over the discipline of the children and their relationship took a back seat. He says that blood is thicker than water and that it is right that she should put her children first. She agrees and they are stuck. He has left several times due to this dilemma and now they want to reconsider reconciling.

They say that their main problem is poor communication. I discuss the Magic Formula with them. The formula goes like this: when differences and conflicts arise, remind yourself that you care, your partner cares, you are anxious, your partner is anxious. This is the self-reflective aspect of communication. It is inner-communication with yourself which must precede outer-communication with your partner. When any stress arises, confronting your partner is not as important as first confronting yourself with this formula as a question: Do I care right now? Does my partner care right now? Am I anxious right now? Is my partner anxious right now? Only if you can honestly answer "yes" to all four of these questions are you ready to move into outward communication. If you answer "no" to any one of these four questions, you are not able to see clearly and you are not being truthful with yourself and you will mis-communicate. Much of what you say at that point will misfire, and may lead to further conflicts.

Why are these four questions important? Because when you assume that you or your partner (neighbor) doesn’t care, or that you or your neighbor is not anxious, you are denying that the victim-villan story of separation, lack, and entrapment exists in both party’s minds and you are assuming that this story is true, and you are denying that Love is the only Reality.

A. The story of separation, lack and entrapment is present, and it is your only problem, so it does not work to deny that we are anxious. If we deny that we are anxious, we get a more severe symptom. It is always okay to pretend we are not "cool" when we are anxious

B. This villan-victim story is an illusion, confront it. If you confront your story, you will have less confrontations with others. We don’t have to continue pretending that we are merely finite, merely a body. So when you are experiencing anger, stress, or some other symptom, realize that you are experiencing anxiety about your story. You are experiencing anxiety about your belief that you are a body, that you are merely human. Confront your story and admit your anxiety. It is okay to be anxious and it is okay to admit it. If you do not admit it to yourself, you will continue to take the Hero’s Journey under protest, feeling like an alien in an alien world. You will drag yourself every step of the way, and continue your fight against some outside authority who is telling you what to do. Confront your illusory story and then you can take the Hero’s Journey consciously and with grace.

C. Love is present, look for it. Oneness is present, claim it. Freedom is present, enjoy it. Infinity is present, embrace it. Each person you interact with cares all the time, even your spouse. Everyone you have differences with, every enemy you have, is your unconscious lover, your mis-understood friend. That enemy, that stranger, carries the gift of your symptom for you.

D. Love is the only reality, blocked from view only by the fear story, the villan-victim story.

You and I are anxious, every time and all of the time, because of our story; you and I care, in each instance and every instance, because we are not our story. This formula applies to any dyad, to any relationship, whether between partners, parent and child, business associates, neighbors, or even groups.

Everyone has a villan-victim story which contaminates communication by its unconscious presence. It does not help to condemn or condone, to blame or excuse, this story, which only drives it further underground, requiring a more insistent symptom. If I condemn my neighbor’s story or condone mine, I am still stuck because if it is in my mind, it is actually all mine. Any story I have about me or another, about me or the world, about me or nature, about me or god, is about "me" as I see me.

All stories are essentially victim/villan stories and if we pursue the meaning of these stories to their depth, they evaporate under the bright light of truth. If you want to really mine gold, don’t just scratch the surface a couple of inches, where you will find more dirt, but go deeper to where the gold is. You may be able to "pan" a little gold here and there in the streams of life, but for the veins of gold, you must go deeper. Superficiality of judgment won’t get you what your really want. On the surface of yourself and the other, you will mainly find the story and its symptoms. Search deeper. Realize that all relationship and communication problems and addictions are symptoms of our story, and our symptoms are unopened gifts for our self-realization.

I explain to my stressed out couple that we devise a story which implies that someone is not love. We do that for self-protection, but it does not get us what we want. We want self-protection and self-fulfillment and we cannot have both. The woman gasped and said "But we would be so vulnerable!" And I said that is what love seems to be, vulnerability, and that we have to risk coming out of our fortress of being judgmental and right in order to find the fulfillment we want. This formula will help you reduce the notion that you can be attacked and hurt. If fact, you can’t be attacked and hurt by another, only by yourself. This formula helps you to crack through your story that the world is a dangerous place and that you must protect your best interests at all times. If you begin to realize that the world is composed of misguided lovers whose perception and communication is flawed by fear and stress, then you will do not have to be a resister and a controller. Resistance and control cannot deliver you what you want. You are stuck and you blame it on others.

So I ask them to practice the self-reflection formula. I warn them that they will get mixed results at first, that they may slip back into their old story, but that they can quickly recover if they use the four-question formula. I offer to see them again in a week to review their failures and successes in the practice of the formula for inner-awareness and outer-communication. This formula is based upon the awareness that true God-awareness and true self-awareness is love-awareness, and that our story about separation, lack and entrapment is the exact cause of our suffering. This unconscious story keeps us locked into a self-replicating and self-fulfilling prophecy of things that we don’t want to experience. Every frustrating situation then is a gift of good news, of mis-understood love, which is created and sustained by our false story about who we are. Awareness of our conjoint divinity is necessary to crack the grip of our story upon our every thought, feeling and communication.

Am I aware that both my partner and I are anxious right now? If the answer is no, what does that mean? If the answer is yes, what does that mean? Am I aware that both my partner and I care right now? If the answer is no, what does that mean? If the anwer is yes, what does that mean?

Consider the Seven Fearful Responses versus the Seven Caring Response (A summary of Wm. Glasser, by Ellen Michaud)

FEARFUL RESPONSES        CARING RESPONSES

Turn     Blaming                         Into   Accepting

Turn     Bribing                           Into Encouraging

Turn Complaining                      Into Listening

Turn Criticizing                          Into Respecting

Turn  Nagging                             Into Negotiating

Turn Punishing                           Into Supporting

Turn Threatening                        Into Trusting