Relationship Alchemy, Part 4. Heart Field, Calibration & Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

In this final blog post on relationship alchemy, I’m going to tell you about three tools for transforming a relationship from one which is prone to conflict into something deeply connected and loving.

What do you actually want for your relationship?

Do you want to be deeply connected with your partner? Or do you just want to be able to get your way all the time? Because you really can’t have both. That would be like trying to ride two horses at the same time.

If you just want to get your way all the time, then you might as well stop reading this now. This is about relationship alchemy. It’s not about how to make your partner give you what you want.

I’ll be honest with you. For most of my life I was trying to ride both of those horses. When I realised what I was doing, I had to choose. The choice was obvious. More than anything I wanted love, so I chose that.

Of course I am getting a lot of what I want for myself and so is Mark, my partner, because it flows naturally from the kind of relationship we have. I guess it’s about what is freely given, rather than being extracted by nagging, guilt-tripping, shaming or wheedling.

We’re lucky. We both had a period of being single before we met, and that gave each of us a chance to reflect on the mistakes we’d made in our previous relationships. And we had both reached the realisation that what we truly wanted was a deeply connected, loving relationship.

It hasn’t been easy all the time, but there is something about knowing what you really want that makes a huge difference.

So let me take you through the three tools.

1. The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

It’s a bit of an adage in coaching circles that we create our reality.

My mother used to refer to this phenomenon as a self-fulfilling prophecy. We get what we expect from people – no more and no less. She was referring to what teachers expect from pupils. But it works just as well in relationships.

Many years ago, when I was a psychology student in the US, I had a part-time job doing door-to-door fundraising. We all ‘knew’ that the Italian-Americans were stingy and you’d be lucky to get anything from them.

After a few weeks I came to believe that this was true. Every time I approached a house with an Italian name on the doorbell, I left with a couple of dollars or worse still, empty-handed.

Then one day, I remembered my mother’s wise words about self-fulfilling prophecies. So the next time I spotted an Italian name on a doorbell, I made the decision to approach with the expectation that whoever answered the door would be generous. And they were!

That evening I collected way more money from Italians than I had in all the preceding weeks.

So this is the first step. Recognise that your expectations are more powerful than you ever realised and change them!

2. Heart Field

I use the expression ‘heart field’ partly metaphorically when I’m talking about what we bring to conversations with other people. It’s simply about the kind of feeling you bring to the conversation.

But in fact the heart does have a powerful electromagnetic field, which is 100 times stronger than that of the brain, and this field appears to convey emotional information to anyone in close proximity. So even if you have a perfect poker face, your heart will be transmitting whatever you’re feeling.

I suspect that when I was fundraising back in 1984 my heart field was transmitting my expectations about those Italian-Americans. And when I changed my expectations, so my heart field changed, replacing negative feelings of ‘I don’t know why I’m even bothering, they won’t donate anyway’ to ‘this time they’ll be generous because I’m expecting them to be.’

Yeah, I know that those are thoughts, but they come with emotions which are either positive and welcoming or negative and repelling.

If your relationship has been a bit of a battlefield and you want more love and connection, you can change your expectations and your heart field will do the heavy lifting. It may not work the first time, but keep at it.

Every time you expect something different, you reinforce a new neural pathway, and that makes it easier to avoid the old pathways which led to negative expectations & emotions and poor outcomes.

3. Calibration

One of the things I hear over and over again from clients is that they’re constantly walking on eggshells. They don’t want to trigger their partner into a meltdown or an angry outburst, so they keep quiet. And on the occasions when peace has broken out, they don’t want to disturb that peace by bringing up something contentious.

If you find that you’re walking on eggshells a lot, be glad that you’re aware of your partner’s moods. That means you are doing some calibration. Calibration simply means being aware of the other person’s emotional state. And that’s how we know to avoid triggering them.

The trouble is of course that if you don’t know how to speak for yourself without triggering your partner, nothing ever changes.

So calibrating your partner is important, but it’s not enough!

You also have to calibrate yourself. That’s the piece which is often missing.

I’ll use another example from my own story. Back in 2003, I had recently qualified as an osteopath. At the time I was very keen to learn the skills needed to work on the digestive system of certain patients and a course on treating IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) came up. I wanted to tell my husband that I’d like to do this course, and that as it was on a weekend he would have to look after our daughters.

I kept waiting for the right moment and it never came. I was either walking on eggshells or afraid of disturbing the peace. In the end the weekend of the course came and went, I had never raised it and I didn’t go.

I may have done a good job of calibrating him. But I had completely failed to calibrate myself. I reasoned that I wasn’t saying anything because he would be annoyed and give me a hard time about it. That may have been true. But the real reason was that I was afraid. I was afraid of his anger, I was afraid of a “No.” And moreover I was being a people-pleaser, trying at all costs to get his approval.

Had I calibrated myself I could at least have been honest about my reasons for keeping quiet about the IBS course. And I might have reasoned that getting a “No” wasn’t so terrible. I also might have considered what would be best for our relationship.

Putting it all together

When you put your relationship ahead of everything else, you create a heart field which is different from the one you create when you’re simply trying to get what you want. It resonates with love, generosity, compassion and a desire for intimate connection.

Your new expectations about how you, your partner and your relationship could evolve will call forth the same from your partner: love, generosity, compassion and a willingness to be a safe space.

It probably won’t happen over night. Even if you have talked about this openly, there will be days when you revert to old patterns. But now you know you can do this! When you trip up you can engage in repair. Apologise, make it clear you love each other, forgive and move back into your new loving space. Your heart field will change too as you move into that space.

And remember always to calibrate yourself as well your partner. When you find yourself believing that your partner is responsible for your feelings, remind yourself that this cannot be true. And likewise if you think you’ve made your partner feel a certain way, remember that that isn’t possible either.

Recognise that sometimes you will say something hurtful. You can apologise and take your words back. But don’t make a victim of your partner by taking responsibility for their feelings. If they feel hurt it’s because they forgot that you’re just a human being who sometimes makes mistakes and drops back into old patterns.

And the same is true for you. If you feel hurt, you can say so, but don’t blame your partner for your feelings. You can ask for a change that would mean your partner being careful to avoid making little slights, as well as big put-downs.

When you calibrate yourself you’ll realise that the feelings you have when your partner says something hurtful – or perhaps doesn’t listen to you – are a result of the meaning you give to their behaviour.

Instead of playing the blame game, speak about what you’re thinking and feeling and ask for a change.

This may not be as easy as you would like, and it does help to have someone to guide you and your partner (if they’re willing). This is something I can help with. If you’d like to find out more, we can have a chat about it. Just find a time in my calendar that suits you!