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Gary explained, "Well you told me that women don’t want their problem ‘fixed’, that they just want us to listen. So I’ve been good. I’ve stopped offering solutions. It makes me cranky when she asks if I understand what she’s talking about. I’ve sat there with my mouth shut, which I admit sometimes I don’t find easy. I’m often wondering why she’s worried about what she says she’s worrying about and doesn’t just get on with life, but I don’t interrupt and I am listening. Can’t she see that?"

Gary only has part one of intimacy handled. Linda could be talking to the picture on the wall. It also wouldn’t interrupt and could look like it was listening. ‘Listening’ with his ears only, is passive. It isn’t interactive. ‘Hearing’ on the inside with his mind and heart is what is needed. I explained to Gary that added to not interrupting and listening there was another dimension needed. He needed to let what Linda was saying ‘in’. He had to take her information into his mind and heart and pretend that what she was describing was happening to him. He needs to ‘walk a mile in her moccasins’. Only then can he relate to what she is communicating. This is what ‘empathy’ is. This is what sharing is. It is an inter-active perception, acknowledgement and response to another person’s experience.

Out of doing this he will know what an appropriate response should be. Gary looked confused. He said, "I’m not really good at responding on the spot. Sometimes I need to sit with information for a while until the penny drops before I know what to say."

He is looking in the wrong place. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer. He has switched his focus from her to himself. All she needs is for him to ‘get’ what she’s said. That’s all. While he’s listening to her he’s been more focused on what he’s supposed to say back when she stops talking, ‘what do I need to say?. It’s not about him. It’s about her. The answer to ‘what to say’ always lies with what experience she is describing, not with what a right answer would be.

Linda and Gary have a 9-month-old baby and she is pregnant with their second child. She was trying to communicate that she felt terrible. The baby was sick and had been up all night screaming. She’s breast-feeding, feeling early-pregnancy-miserable, and her back is playing up. After delivering this to Gary, she felt he’d tuned out.

He admitted that although he listened, he didn’t see what the solution to that was. He offered to stay home from work and take care of the baby. Linda said she didn’t want him to do that. She just wanted to share with another human being how she felt. When he realized there was nothing he could do, he admitted that he zoned out.

What Gary was indicating was that he was having a problem focusing. I asked him, as a computer programmer, to picture what his mind is like when a computer he is working on crashes. He answered that he blocks out everything and goes through in his mind what could possibly have been the cause and what might be the solution and then he starts to implement those procedures until he’s found the right solution. I ask him if he would be capable of wondering who was winning the Australian Open at that moment. He said no. He’d be too absorbed.

I explained that it was the same degree of intensity of focus he was going to have to bring to his listening skills in order to understand Linda. It’s simply a matter of discipline.

I asked Gary what an appropriate response would have been this morning. He played it back in his head. His penny dropped. He said, ‘You poor thing. I’d hate it if I were saddled with that. I wish I could have it for you. If I could, I would.’ Without having to go away and think about it, he reached over and put his hand on hers. He got it. Linda looked like she just pulled the ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card. Bingo!

I explain that intimacy calls for:

1. Turning the volume of listening with their ears up to ‘hearing’ on the inside.

2. It takes intense focus of attention.

3. It takes the willingness to take her information in and process it as though it were happening to him.

4. It takes letting her in. Letting her happen to him, like he’d do with children or pets or sports results.

5. He needs to learn to focus, like he would if his computer crashed. Or his accountant was explaining a tax loophole to save him thousands.

6. He shouldn’t try to figure out the ‘right’ thing to say. The answer is in the computer. What is it trying to tell him?

7. He needs to say what comes naturally in answer to how he would feel if he were going through what she’s going through.

8. Walk a mile in her moccasins.

I told my men’s room group that a good default line if they experience paralysis about a response is, "What a bummer." Or "That must have been terrible for you." "Of course you feel bad. I don’t blame you." "You poor thing." Ph.D. grads get to say. "Is there any more? Anything else you need to get off your chest? Go ahead. I’m here. I’m hearing you."

6. Ok she’s happy. Now lets get some benefits for him. How to win with women in conflict.

Here’s the story of Doug and Anne. (insert story)

(947) I have been seeing Doug and Anne for a while. We’ve worked through their issues like peeling an onion. Anne is a wordsmith from way back. She’s one of the best fisherwomen I know. She knows exactly the mood of the fish, what bait they will snap at, how to wind it on the hook in a way that no matter how resistant the fish, she’ll snare it in the end. In response to feeling snared with a hook through his lip, Doug will at times snap. Doug is a big guy, who’s fought a few battles on the sports field in his day and no doubt won most. He’s a gentleman, but not used to losing. So when Anne works him to snap point his default defense mechanism is to say quite forcefully, "P… off, you bitch!" He’s not proud of this and we all agree there is a better way. Slowly but surely he has been able to curb his temper and Anne has learned not to bait as much.

She’s telling me their most recent argument is about his failure to put the alarm system on before following her to bed after she’s explained a million times how important it is to her. They were recently burgled while he was away on a business trip. In the morning when she discovered he hadn’t done it, she exploded. "You never listen to what I say. Because it’s not important to you and only important to me you won’t do it. I’ve explained how I feel about feeling unsafe. You never give a damn about how I feel only how you feel. Etc. Etc."

Doug is listening to her retell me this story and seems pretty calm. He even has a smile on his face. I ask him how he responded. He says he didn’t ‘snap’.

What he related, explained my question of why a man is willing to get killed on a battlefield, is willing to allow a team of huge men to jump on him with the intention of inflicting bodily harm if he doesn’t relinquish an oval pig skin, but turns either to jelly or Rambo when being yelled at by a 7 stone female.

He explained, ‘The trouble has been working out the enormous difference between the kind of conflict that happens between men and between a man and a woman. Men fight for an outcome. At the end of the battle one army gets to put their flag on the mountaintop. At the end of the game one team wins. At the end of the fight one man is left standing. We fight for a result.

When a 7 stone female is verbally thundering down on you, you know you are in danger of some sort. The ferocity of her demeanor makes you automatically go into ‘fight or flight’. You feel frightened, threatened, frustrated, impotent, confused, and angry. You are fighting a battle on a strange battlefield. She’s using weapons you’ve never used before and don’t understand. You know no physical damage is going to happen to you, so don’t necessarily want to run, but you also know that you are not allowed to use any of your natural, given abilities to stave off the damage. You have to sit on your hands. And you can’t figure out what the result is supposed to be other than to make me wrong, punish me, and for me to feel bad about myself.

When we started therapy with you I could only get to a point of going numb. I’d freeze. I worked out that if I just stood still and nodded she would eventually stop. Of course all this time I was simply surviving. I didn’t hear one word she said. All I knew was that I at least hadn’t told her to "P… off".

Now I’ve become a lot calmer. It’s like lifting above the battlefield. I can be objective when she’s rampaging. I see her as a wave. She builds and builds and eventually crashes on the sand. I know she will run out of sound and fury and abate. While that is happening I can look down on it and separate my emotional response to what is going on from my intellectual response, like stepping back and seeing what’s happening. I can separate out her rage from what she is saying and can hear her. Now that I’ve got that the purpose is to punish me for not doing what she wanted me to do, I find it easier just to apologize and be willing to be wrong. Hell, if that’s all it takes, why not.

I asked him, "How do you feel about what you’ve mastered up to this point? Do you think it’s meaningless and just one more thing a guy has to do to ‘keep the little missus happy’? Doug said, "No I’m proud of myself. I feel more adult and in control. I also feel much closer to Anne."

Combat techniques:

1. Stay present. Don’t disappear mentally or physically.

2. Rise above the battlefield.

3. Separate their emotional response from their intellectual response.

4. Validate her argument. Try to understand what she’s talking about. Repeat back to her his understanding of what she’s saying. "What you’re saying is it really annoyed you is that I left my wet towel on the bathroom floor, that I take you for granted, that I don’t respect you."

5. Don’t turn it into a contest or get defensive. If he’s wrong, be wrong. Apologize. "I’m really sorry."

6. Don’t get stuck being right about the issue. It’s better to win by having the argument over than to fight on in order to be right. I’m not guaranteeing if he picks up his towel she’ll feel respected and loved until he does the next thoughtless deed. I really do empathize with the joke, "If a man is alone in the forest, is he still wrong?" That degree of sense of humor goes a fair way.

And finally 7. For those who wonder if it’s always the male who has to back pedal.

Many of my male clients have serious deal breaking issues in their relationships. They can feel undervalued, used, taken for granted, undermined in front of children, overly criticized, put down, as though they can never get it right.

Do they say anything forceful to her about this? No. Do their women respect them for this? No.

He has all of the skills in place we discussed above. He still feels like he’s in a no-win situation. He needs to define what issues are deal breakers and if confronted with one, be able to take a definitive and non-negotiable stand.

I show them a place I call the solarplexis, the power base, the engine room. This also has a voice. They need to be able to go there and what they’ll find is that sometimes what’s called for is, "Stop! That’s enough!"

They may never need to access that button, but just think how powerful they’d feel if they could.

Ok so,

1. They’ve found themselves and committed to that.

2. They’ve committed to her and found out who she’d be if she were the best she could be.

3. They know how to meet her need for intimacy.

4. They can stay centered in combat.

5. And now the icing on the cake. They can find that place inside themselves that’s able to say, ‘That’s enough!’

6. They have found the courage it takes to commit to that line in the sand that enables them to say, "This is as far as I go. I don’t go one step further than this. Even is the price of that is the woman I adore. If the cost is my real self, it’s simply too high a price to pay."

With these 7 skills mastered, they regain their dignity, their integrity, her respect, his own self-respect.

1. They’ll get their needs met while at the same time meeting hers.

2. It will make their relationships greater than the sum of its parts.

3. It will help create a new era of gender equilibrium.

4. It will give men a role model to pass on to their sons.

5. It will give them their balls back.

Are my clients unique? Do they have these issues on their own? I don’t think so.

I really feel for men. The male gender has copped the most unrelenting hiding over the past 30 years. You’ve been criticized, ridiculed, put down and underestimated long enough. Truly, what’s needed is manpower.

Gentlemen start your engines!

www.tobygreen.com 
How to contact Toby Green:
Consulting Office
194 Military Rd
Neutral Bay, NSW, 2089
Australia Ph: 02-9908-4461

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