Be a Compassion Warrior in Your Close Relationships

As a practicing psychologist, like the characters from the famous “Jack and Jill” nursery rhyme, I meet others and march together up the hill in pursuit of happy pales of water. Inevitably, life knocks us in the head for our assumptions, reactions, and expectations, and the relationship, twisted up tight like a knotted ball, comes rolling down. Here’s a pattern I’ve witnessed many versions of on innumerable occasions:

• Jack loves Jill, and Jill loves Jack, so they get married with little shared understanding of the family traumas and unskillful emotional habits each was bringing to their joint venture.
• Jill becomes pregnant, and now they have a child and wait…here comes another! Before long, they are quite busy with kids, household duties, and careers.
• Jack becomes resentful of Jill’s focus on the kids and pours his energy into his career, much to Jill’s sorrow.
• Jack and Jill stop having sex because Jill feels disconnected and “disregarded” by Jack, and Jack resents her for being “cold” and “not getting him.”
• Both feel unseen, unfelt, and drowning in the vast reservoir of resentment spanning the few feet between them on opposite sides of the couch in my office.

As psychiatrist R. D. Laing says of us as the “Jacks” and “Jills” in relationships with each other in his aptly-title book Knots, “Jack and Jill both want to be wanted.” Whether in romance, friendship, family, or professional tethering, we also want to have control over one another’s behavior, of the good and bad outcomes.

The Difference Between What We Want and Need in Relationships

Clients come to my office wanting me to make their partner want them again. They want me to make their relationship a love like their parents had or should have had. They want me to take up their cause in proving their partner wrong once and for all. They want me to offer a buffer zone for breaking their partner’s heart, my office a box for depositing the shards of their loved one’s life. They want a lot of things—none of which I can provide.

What’s interesting is how people keep showing up for couples or family work at my office after I not only tell them I can’t produce these outcomes, but also after I mention I’m divorced, remarried, and a child of divorced parents whose siblings and grandparents are also divorced.

They return, they risk, and they pay for the discomfort of doing so because of what they need, regardless of what they want. People need presence, not points made or scored against others. It is my role as the therapist to foster the conditions of presence—of authentic contact—between my clients. It’s in that presence, that experience of the “we” of the relationship, that they get what they need and are really paying for (in dollars and discomfort): compassionate clarity.

With compassionate clarity, relationship partners learn to listen to the emotional pain points sparked up within them during interactions, to the biased, distorted, survival brain thought stories as well. This listening is observational, without believing, without following, without reacting.

It is compassionate because partners learn to look at all that’s happening in them in their partner. It’s clarity because this looking at what’s happening inside us and the situation with the other person is unflinchingly raw. It’s unweighted and not warped by past resentments or future fixations.

Compassion Warriors Win Moments of Creation and Connection

The listening provides the full aroma, the raucous and the melody, of what’s happening in moments of the relationship. The looking sees behind the habits of mental screw-jobs of offense and defense, of the neglected longings in yourself and the other to the raw meat of things, just as they are.

Compassion warriors give the gift of their presence to one another with enough listening and looking that they feel the pain of each other’s needs unmet. Jack and Jill now rest in a compassionate we-space, feeling what was as it ripples into now, of what will only continue to ache if allowed to continue into next. Jack and Jill, with this compassionate clarity, can leap. Together, they can decide what course resonates. They can compassionately end the storied journey of rigid expectations.

Perhaps they stay together but with a renewed, shared purpose. Perhaps they go their separate ways, but with shared respect and healing. Perhaps they, as heart warriors, stop fighting against and start leaning into what is needed.

Softly, and with the knowing certainty only compassionate clarity provides, Jack and Jill can speak these wounds and wantings in the present moment and resonate to them in and for each other. Whether the relationship is with a romantic partner, a long-time business partner, or the “opposition” in a family feud, the goal is not controlling something you or the other person is doing, but how willing you are to “weaponize” love in the relationship and aim for compassionate clarity.

Relationships Essential Reads

Married to Two People: The Romantic Life of Widows

How to Tell If a Friend or Partner Is a Leaf, Tree, or Root

Try This: Resonate, Don’t Detonate

Take your relationship and set it before you in your imagination. What are the outcomes you’re targeting? Are the targets of a “Jack-and-Jill-tumbling-after-an-outcome” variety?

If compassionate clarity became the target, imagine the following being listened to, looked at, and ultimately leapt toward between the two of you:

• “What has mattered to each other that you’ve each been missing? What have you each needed that you’ve neglected in your rush to evade discomfort?
• “Have you each been able and willing to show effort toward addressing that which matters, that which is needed?”
• “If one or both of you is not able or willing, is one or both of you willing to own this, to leap toward specific changes or an ending of the relationship?”

Own your experience of the answers. Resonate with what is. Leap for “we’s” sake!