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Episode 7: Working through Conflict to Enhance Personal and Professional Relationships
87 Plays4 years ago
Mark Borg joins us to reflect on years of co-authorship with Grant Brenner and Danny Berry. Hear different perspectives on the same experience to learn how the "Three Amigos" have produced two books together, with a third on the way!
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Transcript
Balancing Give and Take in Relationships
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And we define sanity in a relationship as a balance of giving and taking. If your relationship can stand that, then your relationship really can be trusted to keep you safe and feeling loved and being able to love.
Introduction to Doorknob Comments
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Speaker
Thank you for joining us on doorknob comments, a podcast that we created to discuss all things involving mental health. We take the view that psychiatry is not just about the absence of illness, but rather the positive qualities, presence of health and strong relationships and all the wonderful things that make life worth living.
Meet the Authors: Dr. Farrah White, Mark Borg, Grant Brenner
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I'm Dr. Farrah White. Here with Mark Borg and Grant Brenner, co-authors of the book, Irrelationship, how we use dysfunctional relationships to hide from intimacy.
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and their newly released book called Relationship Sanity, Creating and Maintaining Healthy Relationships. Welcome, guys. Thank you. Thank you, Farrah. This is Grant. I'm also one of the podcast hosts.
Transforming Dysfunctional Relationships
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Today, we'll be talking about our work with
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dysfunctional relationships and how to turn them into healthy relationships. The first question that comes to mind, just because I've worked with Grant, you've worked with Grant, and I know that you have another co-author. Next question, please. I want to hear some more stories. What was the hardest time during this collaboration?
The Origin of the Project: 'Human Antidepressant'
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How did you guys get through it? Did you employ any of your own techniques? Tell me a little bit about it. Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me here. I'm Mark Borg. And how have we survived eight years of working in out through around irrelationship together? You know, we actually came together
00:01:39
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on a project that was originally called human antidepressant eight years ago. And we started exploring what I was seeing in my work with couples and groups, this dynamic of compulsive care taking, what I was seeing in relationship after relationship, people who were actually using the way in which they were caring for other people as a way to protect themselves from allowing other people to give back to them. We actually thought that this was some kind of pathological condition. We thought that this was something that somebody in relationship
00:02:09
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was doing to somebody else that for instance somebody who was this human antidepressant or convulsive caretaker was finding this poor hapless victim and then just showering them or hosing them down with care and that we called human antidepressant but when we started really getting into the topic and we started really exploring it and especially when we talked to Gareth
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who would wind up being our literary agent, we started thinking much more along the lines of it not being a pathological condition and much more along the lines of it being a dynamic, something that two people were creating together. And that's when we discovered this co-created psychological defense system that we call irrelationship. Addressing that question, if it is the question of hand, the hardest part of co-authoring a book like this is that in the process of birthing, you know, a project from
00:02:59
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something that looked like something one or the other of us might have been doing to each other. Maybe I invited Grant Brenner into this project because I thought something was wrong with Grant Brenner because I thought that maybe the poor sad guy needed some help. Yeah, you have good instincts. But instead I found that in the process of inviting poor Grant Brenner and sad Danny Barry, first of all, not poor and not sad either one of them. Of course.
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But maybe unconsciously I'm picking up on something that I want to help in these guys. So I invite them into my project human antidepressant only to find that actually
Challenges in Co-Authoring
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I am the performer, I am there, and I am trying to treat these guys as if they need help totally distancing myself from whatever help I need, not allowing them to contribute, not allowing them to be full partners, cutting them out, running off, writing full books, writing blogs, not really accepting the contributions that each one of these guys had to offer. That's where I started in this process, only to find that this wasn't something that I was just doing to Grant and Danny.
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But these guys were joining me too. And in a funny way, at first at least, they were in the role of what we call audience. So they had to sit there week after week in these meetings and act as if all of this wonderful, magnificent care that I was offering them. Oh, aren't they so lucky? They get to write a book.
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Oh, aren't they so lucky? We got this great project. I'm doing all this giving, like sitting there as if maybe there is some truth to that. But that was how they were caretaking me, acting as if it was okay, acting as if being sidelined by some of the major elements of this project was good enough. And it wasn't until we had to start really looking at our contributions, each one of us good and bad, that we started balancing out and finding some sanity.
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where each one of us could actually accept the contributions of the other. And that's when relationships, you know, sanity started to come in, this balance of giving and taking. So the hardest part of co-authoring a book like this, the relationship dynamics that we're exploring, we're gonna come out and they still do in full force. And we needed to develop tools to actually work through them if we were gonna continue to be able to be in a partnership with each other. I had no idea.
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That makes a lot of sense. Eight years later, I finally tip my hand, right? That explains a lot. Well, for my part, I thought I had something to offer in terms of content, neuroscience and cognitive psychology, and some ideas about marketing.
The 40-20-40 Technique for Communication
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But I found as we were working together,
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Well, some of what I had to offer I didn't feel was heard and some of what I had to offer really was taken up readily. But we did use the 40-20-40 technique to communicate, which involves taking turns, speaking from the heart and listening to each other. But we ran into a lot of conflict in the process of doing that. I think one of the reasons is that we weren't ready to use that tool together.
00:06:01
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because we hadn't developed as much of a sense of compassionate empathy toward each other. And it became much more tense when the first book came out, when we had a business plan. And my feeling was, let's follow the business plan. Let's try to do more with this book, get it to a larger audience, start to get speaking engagements. But I felt like pretty quickly we ran into a roadblock where all of my performance, everything I had to offer,
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felt like it just screeched to a halt. And not only that, but I turned into like the bad guy for a while. And we ended up pulling back quite a bit, but still thinking about working together. And then when the second book came out, we started talking together a lot more and I think it's felt a lot different.
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You're making a good point, Grant, that I think that it took such a long time for me, at least in my role, because my role has always been this performer that I've always thought that I was sort of taking people under my wing. But I think you're exactly right. What that did was it disallowed me from taking in what you had to offer as a business consultant, as somebody who has a lot of understanding of the brain. And yes, a lot of that did get through in our first book, thank goodness.
00:07:11
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But I think that what we really, really describe in your relationship is a kind of giving that you're so forcefully pushing your giving onto someone else that it's like a fire hose. You're like spraying somebody with a full force of care and by doing so not allowing the very valid contributions that the other person has to offer in.
00:07:31
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In other words, I'm like, I'm giving and giving and giving and giving and giving. And you're like, yeah, knock it off so that you can actually take some of what I have to offer. And you just listed some very, very valuable things.
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that you were able to offer over the long course of time, that if I had kept giving in the way that I believed I was giving, the project would not have been able to incorporate these wonderful things that you have to offer. And I do think that for us to develop, interestingly, talk about like isomorpholot at William Madison White Institute, but which is like this way in which, you know, the things that we're talking about play out in action. So going from a relationship, the book, to Relationship Sanity, the book,
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actually required at least me and my position to drop my performance and start really taking in and accepting what you and Danny had to offer, not because I was being so generous and kind, like, oh, aren't I nice, like letting you contribute to this, but because you and Danny had things that were so valuable to offer the project that if the project didn't actually take those things in and make use of them, the project was coming to a screeching halt. And it felt that way several times. I mean, we really
Importance of Team Contributions
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got into some horrible interactions with each other.
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that if we were going to go forward, we were going to have to point blank, make use of our tools and primarily make room for all of us in the project. In terms of making use of those tools. So I think what's happening here, I really appreciate it. And then Grant mentioned something called the 2040-20. For the 40-20-40. Yeah. But sometimes it feels more like you're not getting enough.
Explaining the 40-20-40 Technique
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So can we maybe walk through it a little bit for readers that might have trouble figuring out exactly how to make use of this? Maybe one of you can coach and then just kind of like walk the other two through? Well, okay. So I mean the actual 40 20 40 is a couple inventory or even a group inventory where you take three minutes and you
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discuss your part of the current problem issue or conflict so you talk about that from the perspective of my party so you're not just talking about how horrible you are being self critical you're also including the good stuff that you're contributing so i guess if we.
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maybe role-plated. We don't even have a role-play. I mean, probably Grant and I could do a little mini 40-20 to talk about what we think our contribution is at this point, both to what has worked and what has not. And the big challenge for us would be not to take too much credit or too much blame, but actually to try to just take no more, you know, like go right up, maybe me as a performer. I like to go to 90. I like to go like, oh,
00:10:12
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Oh, I'm going to flail on all the responsibility I took for the problem. And yeah, okay, I'll take 90% of the credit for the good stuff too. But rather I have to back up from 60 because let's say I normally I'm going 100. So I go back to 60 and then I have to pull all the way back to 40 to leave space for Grant and I to join the middle there.
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You know, if I were to talk about, let's say the conflict in the, when we really like kind of skidded out and thought maybe things weren't going to go, I can say like my contribution to that was that again, I had gotten so caught up in my head.
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I had felt so much like I was doing all the work. I felt like I'd done the majority of the writing. I felt like I'd done the majority of the thinking. I felt like the things that the other guys were contributing,
Resolving Conflicts in Partnerships
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you know, might be valuable up to a certain point, but it didn't really fly without me. And so I felt like a lot of time, I don't know if I felt, and I don't know if I thought consciously, but I acted like
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you know, like a prima donna, you know, like somebody who was taking more than my share, I'll take the blame, but make sure to give me the credit. And I found myself how really willing to give up.
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And so I was almost in the position of taking my marbles and going home. But I had to go there. And we actually had sat down when we were thinking about doing the Relationship Sanity Project. We weren't sure. I mean, I don't think anybody was. In fact, I think we might have all been a little surprised that we were going to do the next book. But we sat at this diner on 23rd and 1st. We just talked. We talked about what we could give to the next project, time-wise,
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attention, money, you know, the things that we could contribute and all three of us in that interaction started to make room for each other. And we really did use this 40 20 40 and left this space in the middle where the three of us agreed to make certain contributions to the second book. Yeah, my feeling my feeling at the time was similar, but
00:12:05
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I think I'm not as effusive, though I have a lot to offer. And in addition to some of the intellectual content, I was doing a lot on the business side and I felt like what I was offering on the business side wasn't really being taken up. My feeling at the time was really feeling hurt and sort of falsely accused of a variety of things.
00:12:25
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There was a certain amount of money that we had all invested, and I felt like we did that as a joint decision. We had a contract with a lawyer. We agreed to terms. We talked about it.
00:12:38
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in great depth what the terms of the arrangement was. We kept track of the money we were investing in the website and in marketing and branding. Some things didn't go great. Our first PR group didn't deliver that great. But the assumption that I had was that we invested money with the idea that we would follow the business plan after the first book came out and try to do speaking engagements and earn that money back. What happened felt to me very confusing and frightening because what I had took to be the reality
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This consensus agreement we had about how to proceed turned into what felt to me like I had perpetrated some great harm against Mark and Danny and swindled them out of money and had tricked them into getting into these legal and financial agreements. And then all of a sudden, it just went dead. There was no effort after one or two speaking engagements to follow up with the plan.
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And instead of having this kind of victorious shared experience where maybe we would also be able to move forward with our project and offer it to more people in different formats,
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turned into an extremely hostile engagement I felt ganged up on by Mark and Danny. And again, confused and frightened because it felt completely rational to me that we made a business plan. We invested money. Now it's time to put that money to work and get a return on investment. It got so toxic that we took a break, which I think was the right thing to do. Yeah. And so we get to 23rd and first. Grant is hurt, as you said.
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I can't speak for Danny, but I am feeling also betrayed. I'm feeling like, you know, got ran through the wringer on this thing, spent money that I didn't have, even though we were agreed on what we were supposed to do. And so in a funny way, you know, at this dinner, you know, we actually somehow were able to talk about our willingness. We hadn't really had an overt direct conversation in a long time, since the lawyers and since the PR and since the
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speaking engagements and since the podcast. We had been a long time. The three of us hadn't been together. The three of us. We hadn't just sat down and had a discussion about what happened, about the couple of really extreme interactions that we had where we were not
00:14:59
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friendly with each other and especially Grant and I. Right. Danny kind of was, you know, on the side of this. Well, he had some choice words. He had a few choice words, but it was mostly, you know, Grant and I. A lot of festering, sort of suppressed rage. Yeah, Danny's his hulking guy. He's my dude. Danny's like this buff dude, you know, like this.
00:15:17
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He could stand up and look pretty intimidating. If we follow it through and we think about the fact that we did crank out the third book, I mean the second book, and we're talking about a third now, literally as of today, but if we think about that and we pull it back and we think about our own tools, we think about the 40-20-40 and we think about how Grant and Danny and I that day, after all this pain, Grant talking about being legitimately hurt and I'm talking about
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being legitimately hurt, and we're both talking about being scared, and how do we get to this place, this place in the middle, and for us it's like a 40, 40, 40, 20, you know, however you do the math, but the three of us had to create a space, and we had to quiet down, and we had to sit together for a couple of hours, and just talk about minoring. We weren't making like major vulnerability, we weren't like crying and writhing, we were there to talk practically about where we had been, what we had done,
00:16:13
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if there was value in the work that would allow us to keep working through the pain and the fear that we've been through together so far, especially at that acute moment about midway between irrelationship and relationship sanity, and could we make some agreements together to take responsibility for our 40%? Although it's kind of tricky with regards, but you know, our percent of whatever would allow it to go forward from that day,
00:16:39
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Because we had an idea of a contract with the publisher, Central Recovery Press. We had tasks that we were then going to have to agree to, again, each taking responsibility for our part of the project, which in a funny way, the project itself becomes us. The project itself becomes the 20% in the middle that we share. And it's scary. There is no guarantee.
00:17:05
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of what happens next for us. We were putting ourselves into the second book. We were putting ourselves into relationship sanity. We were communicating and taking responsibility for the good and the bad and everything in between that we've been through. Through the process of writing the book. Exactly. And at arm's length.
00:17:24
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Yeah. But focused on a specific task. That's right. And I think working on the primary task together was very containing. Yeah. And we, I'm sure I would imagine anyway, that we all were steering clear of the more inflammatory stuff. Right. Well, because we've gotten into the inflammatory stuff. And so far, the dynamic that the three of us had put into this had not contained that inflammatory
00:17:48
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material in us that well. What started to happen was that the inflammatory material kind of started to quiet down and it sounded and felt more like hurt and fear.
00:17:59
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than it did like rage and anger and puffing up and flexing muscles, it felt more like that. And I have wondered whether or not the bigger community that we exist within vis-a-vis this project, the agent, the publisher, the publicist, the public, the readership, the blogs, you know, if all this stuff has become a place where each one of us is challenged, the relationship sanity project, actually it's an irrelationship project, but the current manifestation is relationship sanity.
00:18:29
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If this whole project itself, it's big, it's been eight years, we've run through plenty of publicists and PR people and editors and agents and all this kind of stuff. I'm wondering if Grant and Danny and I have been able to actually use the bigger project to create a relationship sanity among ourselves that is allowing us now
00:18:51
Speaker
to keep going forward with a third book, which is already a draft, called A Better Relationship As of Now, with a fourth book that Grant has his great title, Making a Crazy Work for You, and even a fifth book where I'm addressing how a relationship manifests in society.
Parenting Insights and Relationship Sanity
00:19:07
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If this project can contain these three really incredibly intense personalities, like Grant said, it may not be so effusive, but Grant's like a ninja. Got a temper.
00:19:18
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I haven't really seen much of his temper, but I certainly love so much temper, but it's like, oh, man, we're like, we're like all kings of our own castle. I like a lot of spontaneity. I kind of like to know where things are headed. I like to be fairly pragmatic. I like to be, identify where we're headed and have something come out that's not as all over the place. Right. Right. Because you use the words, you know, that you birthed.
00:19:42
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this book. And so let's say that you guys are kind of trying to co-parent where this is going in the development of this project. I wonder how your work informs your own personal parenting, how it could maybe help people either co-parent together a little bit better.
00:20:01
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we had talked about having a better relationship, but let's say that people decide to separate and it's sad but amicable. What can relationship sanity offer to those people? Well look, the 40-20, that's really a great question and I think that Grant and I answered it. I didn't think it was going to have the kind of weight that it's having now that Grant and I are putting into this moment because it was really just a summer
00:20:25
Speaker
evening on 23rd Street and 1st. It's a great example of the question you're asking because the three of us sat down with the question of whether or not we go forward with relationship sanity and actually try to enact that in our own more distant way or we split amicably. The 40-2040 I think is a really powerful tool because it invites us to the table
00:20:51
Speaker
with people that don't feel very safe in that moment and take the risk of being vulnerable and talking to that person about my part of the problem. Do we survive? I mean, we didn't know. And we could have used the 40-20-40 to amicably decide not to. And what we would have left with, which is so wonderful of couples to do this, we would have left with a sense.
00:21:13
Speaker
of how we contributed to the end without blaming the other person, without pointing fingers, without leaving, you know, kicking the relationship in the teeth. What the 40-20-40 does and what relationship sanity does, and I think relationship sanity applies to any relationship, when there's a conversation which could become difficult, a conversation which could turn into a passive-aggressive exercise,
00:21:38
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attacking and blaming for all the problems in the marriage, rather than attending to the task of that conversation. If people are not really feeling the love, but they want to co-parent or they want to separate, then number one, the 40-2040, the practice of compassionate empathy, which is part of the 40-2040 is part of relationship sanity, sets some ground rules. One of them is, let's focus on the task at hand. We're here to talk about
00:22:05
Speaker
how to work together and move apart and still do the things that we need to do together, even though we're not going to have the kind of intimacy that we once had. And part of that task is mourning for the loss of that and acknowledging it. A second thing it does very pragmatically
00:22:22
Speaker
is it sets ground rules. You try as hard as possible. Everyone slips up here and there. But you're not allowed to attack each other. You're not allowed to interrupt each other. You're not allowed to make passive-aggressive comments in the disguise of how you feel. And you're not allowed to listen in a way where you're making a list of things to argue about later. We instruct people
00:22:49
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to listen with an open heart with hospitality as Danny says and to listen with
00:22:56
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the idea of understanding, not with the idea of getting ammunition together to retaliate. I mean, because I work with the 40-2040 with couples, and I literally have a list, I give them the list because it's got really, really direct instructions, I give them the list. And when they start, I give them sort of a minimal instructions, and then I watch them go. And what I hear within about three seconds of anybody who's starting is you, you, you, and I go, hey, stop, let's try that again. And my comment in the middle of that is,
00:23:25
Speaker
It is so natural for us to defend ourselves like that, that I want you to give each other space to really screw this thing up a few hundred times. Grant just listed a set of instructions that are almost unthinkable
00:23:41
Speaker
if it's not safe to do so. It has to be safe. And so the process of constructing and building and working the 40-20-40 out together as a couple requires an inclusion of what we call rupture and repair. We need to be able to see that every single time we get it wrong, we as a couple get to work together to write it. And every time it goes off the rails, it's the wrong to the writing, the realignment, the not giving up, the let's try it again.
00:24:08
Speaker
That part right there is essential to the development of what we would think of as relationship sanity or relationship health.
Applying Relationship Tools Beyond Personal Life
00:24:15
Speaker
I think the American political system, maybe Brexit also could benefit from our work in case anyone's listening. You can contact us at our website, yourrelationship.com. Here we go.
00:24:27
Speaker
What what conditions need to be there for people to be able to focus on the successful development of a child? On navigating stuff like the holidays, they're coming up a little bit. Well, it's a great question. But I think I mean, I can just give you a personal example. So I went through a difficult period in my relationship with my wife.
00:24:47
Speaker
And we needed tools. One of the ways that Danni and I started experimenting with and developing this is my wife and I started having these meetings, you know, like together. And we started, you know, doing this 40-2040 thing and looking at our part in it and the interesting thing that we did.
00:25:02
Speaker
I mean, it kind of happened naturally, but suddenly we realized that our children were very interested in what we were doing. What I think we can do for our children, I think we can show them relationships that have troubles, and we can show them the process of working through that together. What it also did is it helped us really contain some of the anger and some of the rage. I mean, of course, I don't want to be calling my wife, you know, foul. I don't want to be using foul language in a fight with my children. I don't want to do it anyway.
00:25:30
Speaker
but it's even more containing when the kids are there watching a process of repair. So to answer the question about the holidays, here we come, you know, holidays are right around the corner. I think what we can bring into our holiday season is the way in which we care for ourselves in our everyday lives. I think too often we get to the holidays, we think like it's no whole bars, you know, no whole bar, we're all of a sudden going for it, we're eating, we're drinking, we're doing whatever.
00:25:57
Speaker
you know, and we're not remembering to bring the processes that work for us to maintain our sanity throughout the year. We almost leave them behind. We forget like, here we go. I am going big family holiday in Southern California surfer that I am, you know, and I go down there like I'm just going to surf and hang out with all my old bros. And there I am thinking like hanging out with the bros and surfing and all that kind of stuff is going to cut it when I'm not really bringing the self care and the allowing to be in relationship sanity with
Advice for the Overworked: Using Relationship Tools
00:26:25
Speaker
me.
00:26:25
Speaker
I have one more question just because I don't know. I've had a really hard week. I've been working nonstop lately and sometimes the last thing I want to do when I get home is work more on my marriage. What advice do you have for those people who are just overworked and can't really, you know, they're trying to dig deep to kind of give their relationship what they know it needs. I love this question. I love this question. I love it because look,
00:26:52
Speaker
Grant and I have been working on this for eight years. Grant and I and Danny have done a lot of the work for you. I'm telling you, a lot of the work that we're doing is just like putting training wheels on your relationship. Yes, it'll seem hard.
00:27:07
Speaker
But actually, once you get this relationship sanity going, you get to go home in a much better state. If you're coming into your relationship and you know what you need from your partner, if you're coming home and you know how to communicate effectively, then you don't have to worry about going home in a bad mood. You believe because of the work you already did that your environment will take care of you.
00:27:28
Speaker
So you get to go home after you take the training wheels of relationship sanity and the relationship off, you get to ride, you get to glide. Look, we took the training wheels off our relationship and though we still have very different opinions about what should and shouldn't be done with this project going forward,
00:27:45
Speaker
One, we are going forward. Two, we are increasingly making room for ourselves. And three, we don't have to work our butts off on this project every day, like you're saying. We had to work really hard up to a point. But after you work so hard, you get to go home and go like, you know what? This world will take care of me. I'm done for the day. OK, that sounds good. Yeah, and along those lines, you have your own thing outside of the relationship. So we each have our own projects we're working on. There's more boundaries around it. There's more containment.
00:28:15
Speaker
And I think as Mark was saying, there's an expectation once you have a track record of not having the toxic conflict, that you're not afraid to go home. Though maybe you'll still feel some loneliness and maybe you'll still feel like certain needs aren't being met, but it'll still feel like it's contained and safer. And maybe that there's some hope for a positive change. Yeah. And even then, I mean, I agree with that. And I still think that
00:28:40
Speaker
just to add a little bit, if there's loneliness, or if there is a feeling that you're not completely getting your needs met, that you now have some tools, you don't have to work them tonight, let's say, but you do know they're in there and that your relationship is a work in progress. It doesn't require it, you know, again, going to birth, if each relationship is a third thing like a child, it doesn't need helicopter parenting.
00:29:05
Speaker
It needs to be held with an open hand, not held in a fist, not pushed away. And so if you get this stuff down and you have a partnership that can withstand sanity and redefine sanity in a relationship as a balance of giving and taking. If your relationship can stand that, then your relationship really can be trusted to keep you safe and feeling loved and being able to love.
00:29:32
Speaker
All right. Well, thank you both so much for being here today. I feel like I have a much better understanding of relationship sanity. In fact, I'm going to take another look at it and put those tools to use and maybe reap some benefits this holiday season. Cowabunga.