Loved: Relationship Rules for Women Who Thought They Knew the Rules

By Julie Shafer

Extraordinary relationships don't break the rules, they embrace them.

There are thousands of relationship self-help books that offer countless magical techniques for how to get a man: what to say to a man, how to behave, what to do and not do to reach your relationship goals - but if you've tried to follow their instructions and fa

• Language: English
• Publisher: Julie Shafer, PhD, LLC
• Release date: Aug 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9780960009114

Julie Shafer

Portland psychologist Julie Shafer wrote her book Loved: Relationship Rules for Women Who Thought They Knew the Rules after two decades working with women on their relationships and going through a few struggles of her own. Julie's work and writing focuses on getting the connection with others you want and deserve, whether it is with an intimate partner, friend, or family member. She has a PhD in clinical psychology from Ohio State University and has helped hundreds of people improve their relationships and their lives through her down-to-earth, personal style. You can get in touch with her at www.drjulieshafer.com.

Book preview

Loved

Relationship Rules

for Women who Thought they Knew the Rules

Julie Shafer, PhD

© 2018 Julie Shafer, PhD.

The stories and anecdotes in this book are based on Dr. Shafer’s work. In all stories, names and details have been changed to protect client identity and confidentiality. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is unintentional.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below.

[e-mail]

www.drjulieshafer.com

Ordering Information: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address above.

Loved: Relationship Rules For Women Who Thought They Knew The Rules / Julie Shafer, PhD.—1st ed.

ISBN 978–0–9600091-0-7

Book layout: ©2017 BookDesignTemplates.com

Contents

Introduction      1

If What You’re Doing Isn’t Working,

Do Something Different      3

Rule #1: Tell the Truth Sooner

Rather than Later      7

Rule #2: When Someone Shows You

Who They Are,  Believe Them      39

Rule #3: Always Assume the Best in

Your Partner      59

Rule #4: Understand Yourself      73

Rule #5: Own Your Own Emotions      99

Rule #6: The Past Plays a Part, but the

Present is Primary      125

Rule #7: Above All Else, Be Kind      147

Epilogue      167

Summary of the Rules      169

Acknowledgments      171

Appendix      173

For my clients

who bravely confront their truth

and discover they are capable of so much more than they thought.

Before you speak,

Let your words pass through three gates:

Is it true?

Is it necessary?

Is it kind?

~Rumi

Introduction

FOR THE PAST TWENTY

years, I have been working with women who struggle with a wide range of life issues. Despite their many differences, the one thing almost all of them talk to me about is their relationships. They all want to move beyond the hurts of their past and stop being afraid they’ll never have a good relationship. They want to show up, be seen, and have a great relationship with a great guy.

I could relate. My first marriage ended after my husband refused to support my desire to go back to school. We both wanted a family, but I wanted a career, too. My second marriage lasted twenty years, but we were only happy for the first couple of years. He was out of work and we didn’t understand each other, and as a result we were miserable.

After being single for two years, I decided to start dating. I wanted to set myself up for success. I wanted to move beyond the pain of my two marriages and have a great relationship with a great guy, so I made two rules for myself: First, I would own my emotional reactions and not blame my dating partner for how I was feeling. Second, I would pay attention to and believe his actions more than his words.

As I paid attention to my relationships and helped my clients with theirs, I added more rules. Eventually, they coalesced into seven rules that made amazing things happen when I used them with clients. My clients started verbalizing their experiences, taking better care of themselves, and gaining confidence. They confronted their partners, made changes, or ended relationships. Along the way they gained self-confidence and self-awareness they didn’t know they’d been missing.

These rules are about doing relationships in a healthy way. If you are unhappily married and practice following these rules, your relationship will change. If you are divorced or widowed, these rules will help you find a great relationship by making troublesome behaviors more obvious early on. In either case, the rules will help you conduct yourself with confidence and integrity.

The secret is as you practice these rules, you practice loving yourself. I don’t mean the mushy-gushy feeling of falling in love or being in love, but rather the beliefs, awareness, and actions that show love and support. You do it for other people all the time. Now it’s time to start doing it for you.

If What You’re Doing Isn’t Working, Do Something Different

YOU’RE MOST LIKELY READING

this book because you are unhappy with one of your relationships. You want the kind of relationship where you feel supported and loved. If you haven’t felt loved recently, it’s natural and right that you would want things to change. I wrote this book to give you a way to make different choices about how you conduct relationships so you can have better outcomes. I want you to be happy, and this book will walk you through seven rules that help you be more honest, more responsible, and more compassionate toward yourself and others.

By the time we reach adulthood, we all have emotional wounds. There’s nothing wrong with that, but they can get in the way of healthy relationships. Even if you are a rational, thoughtful person, your wounds may be clouding your perspective and driving your reactions. Reading this book and going through these exercises will help you become aware of your patterns and emotional triggers, as well as teach you how to talk about and change dysfunctional patterns.

You will learn to be truthful, especially with yourself. Being truthful is extremely difficult, even though it sounds easy. The difficulty lies partly in the expectations of how people should behave versus how they actually behave, as well as what they think and what they believe. Interestingly, problems with telling the truth result partly from our inability (or unwillingness) to handle the truth, but denying the truth only leads to more unhappiness.

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

~C.S. Lewis

Since the truth can be quite difficult to communicate, you will learn a strategy for assertive communication that will help you tell your truth with compassion and kindness—not aggression.

You will learn that being compassionate and kind does not mean you will get your needs met. Neither does it mean you will be taken advantage of. Many of my clients tolerate bad behavior from their partners because they believe they need to be understanding and agreeable to get their needs met. This mistake costs them their ability to stand up for themselves and leaves them vulnerable to being taken advantage of by their partners and others. The rules in this book will teach you how to be compassionate and kind while at the same time asking for what you need to be happy and healthy, even if it conflicts with what your partner wants. You will learn how to be compassionate while not tolerating bad behavior.

The rules appear in a specific order and build on each other. They start with the importance of telling the truth (Rule #1) to others as well as yourself, which becomes important in the second chapter on believing people when they show you who they are (Rule #2). Rule #3 discusses the importance of assuming the best in your partner in the absence of information to the contrary.

Rule #4 encourages readers to pay attention to their limitations, which is another form of being intentional with the truth. The limitations I outline span the physical and emotional and encourage self-compassion for those limitations. Whether limitations are the result of failing on our part or are the result of things that happen to us, there is no point in being overly harsh towards ourselves. We are better off learning how to take responsibility for our emotional reactions (Rule #5). Doing so will also help us better handle our partner’s emotional reactions, something nearly every client asks about at some point.

Our emotional limitations are often the result of experiences from our past that intrude into the future. Our emotional brain wants to keep us safe and quickly recognizes patterns, even though the players in the pattern are different and will inevitably behave differently. Thus Rule #6 talks about recognizing past patterns and outlines the importance of using the other rules to take ownership of your reaction, be truthful, be compassionate, and communicate effectively so you can challenge ineffectual reactions and create new ones.

Finally, because there is an exception to every rule and because this book cannot cover every situation, I included a rule to guide you when the rules don’t apply. Rule #7 is to be kind, which isn’t necessarily as easy as it seems, just as the first rule is not as easy as it seems. This rule circles back to Rule #1 because being kind often means telling the truth, even when it is uncomfortable to do so.

These seven rules and the accompanying exercises are presented with an intention to guide you toward healthier relationships. The overarching themes of honesty, responsibility, and compassion are threaded throughout the rules and exercises. When you have finished the book and completed the exercises, even if you don’t fully recall all the rules, remember these themes. They will serve you well.

Rule #1:

Tell the Truth Sooner Rather than Later

Three things you can never hide:

the sun, the moon, and the truth.

~The Buddha

Tell the Truth

IT SEEMS SO SIMPLE

—tell the truth. We were all taught as children that lying is bad. But navigating the intricacies of any relationship is tricky and you know it isn’t always as simple as just telling the truth. No one likes to be lied to, but people lie a lot. Some of the lies are little white lies and some are whoppers. The kinds of lies you tell and the reasons you tell them are varied. In this chapter, I’m going to cover ways people lie, reasons people lie, and what to do after you have lied. And because telling the truth is hard, I’ve included a section on effective communication.

Remember the oath taken by witnesses in every courtroom drama scene on television? Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? This simple oath covers all the ways we have of not telling the truth—three ways to lie.

Three Ways to Lie

The first type of lie is what you would call a bald-faced lie. It is covered by the first phrase of the oath: tell the truth. This is your standard lie of I didn’t do it when you did do it. The second type of lie is a lie of omission and is covered by the phrase the whole truth. This is the lie where you say you went to lunch with a friend, but failed to mention that the friend is your ex-boyfriend, which would upset your current boyfriend. Finally, the phrase nothing but the truth covers those statements that aren’t lies but are designed to divert your attention from the truth. This is when, rather than admit that you didn’t get a particular task done, you redirect attention to three tasks you actually did complete.

Just as we have several ways to lie, we also have many reasons to lie.

To Protect Ourselves

We lie to protect ourselves from the judgment of others, the consequences of mistakes, and to avoid feeling ashamed. Have you ever said you had a headache to avoid having to go out? Rather than just telling your friend you weren’t up for getting together, you made up a story that took the blame off you.

We lie for the sake of our own safety or the safety of others, whether physical or emotional. If you find that you need to conceal the truth to be safe, it’s important that you recognize what you are doing and why. If you feel threatened physically or emotionally, tell yourself the truth of the situation. If you’ve been in this situation for a while, stop telling yourself the situation will change (see Rule #2). A substantial number of women across the world find themselves in situations where they are being controlled, manipulated, and abused. If this is you, I encourage you to find help. You can find a list of resources in the appendix.

To Manage People’s Impressions of Us

This kind of lie is meant to give the liar a gain of some sort. For example, Bernie Madoff lied to his friends and colleagues for years to create a Ponzi scheme that pulled in millions of dollars to support his luxurious lifestyle. While his lie was a real whopper, it’s not uncommon for people to engage in lies like insurance fraud, shoplifting and then returning the item for cash, or getting married for immigration purposes only.

People lie to give others a more favorable impression than the facts would support. Consider boasting politicians, spouses who have affairs, and people who set up charities to make money for themselves. Impression management is in play if you’ve ever blamed traffic when in reality you left the house late, if you’ve ever claimed you sent an email you didn’t send, or ever called in sick to work when you just wanted a day off.

Sometimes people lie to fit in. We go along with our friends so we don’t have to look like the oddball, defend an unpopular opinion, risk being ostracized, or risk being embarrassed.

Impression management is also important for people who are up to no good.