OK To Be Not OK

One aspect of a good relationship is the "I'm OK, You're OK" feeling. When you're with people who make you feel this way, you can relax inside and your good qualities will flow strongly. When you're around people where you regularly wind up feeling like you're not OK, even good interactions become stressful and you're more likely to out act out your weak sides.

I think of issues as having several levels of acceptance:

• Fully OK The issue is never a problem for you and often is a joyous part of the mutual bond.

• Not Perfect, Not a Problem Things might be better for you if someone changed, but the issue doesn't cause more than momentary hard feelings.

• OK to be Not OK The issue causes recurrent unhappiness. However, the main points involved are known to all involved. It isn't going away any time soon, but you can talk about any resulting pain or fear and receive genuine sympathy.

• Not OK You're seriously unhappy about the issue, and you can't express your feelings without causing more unhappiness.

Some ways of dealing with "Not OK":

• Internal Change If you can look at things differently, figure out why the issue is hitting you so hard or understand the other person's motivations more clearly, you may be able to see it in a different light. Once you do, the "punch" is taken out. If it works, this is the best method for dealing with a troublesome issue.

• Swallow It If exploring the causes isn't going anywhere, suppression is always worth a try. Sometimes it works. However, suppression can easily blow up in your face and become a stupid travesty of acceptance, where you pretend the issue is gone while you constantly express it covertly. So, you have to watch your own behavior and switch tactics if this fails to alleviate stress.

• Ask for Help Talking with other people about an issue is often very helpful. They may help you see what is going on in a different way which allows you to feel better about it. Or they may assist you in understanding any pain buttons of yours which are being punched, so that you can separate what's happening now from what Mom did when you were five. As with "Swallow it", you have to watch behavior even it this seems to work at first. If you let myself be talked into thinking things are OK but your guts don't agree, you'll continue to be eaten up inside by the problem and you'll show it.

• Mutual Change Some issues are best handled by all involved moving on it a bit. Maybe you've tried to accept and can't do it honestly. However, you see ways that you can adjust a bit if the other person has some room to move without doing violence to their own needs.

• Demand Change You are flat out not going to feel OK unless the other person can change. This is inherently unfair, because within real intimacy the goal is to accept the other person as is. However, if what's going on is causing deep turmoil inside you and you've tried to deal with it via other methods, this is more fair than anger, depression, or covert attacks on the other person.

• Change the Relationship Given the people involved, this may be that a relationship isn't going to be good while in its current structure. This usually means reducing the level of intimacy.

In my personal life, I've have relationships survive some incredibly tough "Not OK" issues, things where even my usually optimistic self was saying, "We gotta give it a try but this isn't going to work." I've also had relationships founder completely on relatively small issues, things I initially regarded as "No sweat". The success of a relationship isn't determined so much by whether there are hurtful issues or how big they are, but rather by whether the people involved can find some way to bring those issues out of "Not OK".

10/5/97: A couple months ago, I heard an NPR interview with a guy who has book on on long-term relationships. He said that while good problem resolution skills are important, durable relationships always have unresolved and maybe unresolvable problems. Those involved have found ways to bring the problems into the discourse of the relationship such that people can express their feelings without inflaming any sense of injury on either side. "OK to be not OK." Interesting. Wish I remembered the name of the guy's book.