Transcription:
Making Relationships Last

Scott Vyverman (Host): Even the best relationships require patients, understanding, and open lines of communication. Of course, all of that can be easier said that done. Despite their best efforts, many couples require the services of a relationship expert. Let’s talk to Dr. Chelsea Wakefield, director of the couple’s center at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. This is UAMS Healthtalk from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. I'm Scott Webb. Dr. Wakefield, or should I say Dr. Love, how do couples make relationships last?

Chelsea Wakefield, PhD, LCSW (Guest): Making relationships last is an incredibly important question for the people come and see me—Because loving and being loved and finding someone to love and someone who will love you is really at the center of many people’s lives. It almost resembles a religious quest for some in terms of just finding that central important person. What we actually need to do to make relationships last is to develop a set of capacities. Most people think that they need to find the right person, but I emphasize that people need to become the right person. When you develop these capacities for love then whoever you're with, if you've chosen halfway decently, that relationship is going to develop into something meaningful.

Host: So that’s so interesting. I think about myself. I'm 51, but I think about my younger self. I think about who I was then and what I was capable of. I feel like through the years, through experiences, that I'm so much better at this relationship thing than I was then. What are the capacities of love?

Dr. Wakefield:   So I have something called the six C’s. Those are the six capacities that we need to develop. The first have to do with commitment. The commitment needs to be to the relationship rather that just to the person because we’re going to change over time. That’s what most people don’t understand at the beginning of a relationship is that people are going to continue to evolve and things are gonna happen. So the relationship is actually a third entity that needs to be nourished and created by those two people. So the commitment is to the relationship. That’s the first one. The second one is courage. We all need a little bit of grit to stay in the game with somebody because there’s going to be moment of mis-attunement. There’s gonna be moments where we look at the person and say, “Oh my gosh. I don’t understand you. I don’t even know how I could live with a person like you.” Usually those states are transient which moves us into the next one which is curiosity.

Curiosity is such an important relationship capacity. Ellyn Baeder once said you need to be curious instead of serious. That is a really important thing that when we get upset with our partners, we need to start asking questions. We need to inquire of ourselves why am I so activated here? What is going on with me? Then we need to ask some questions of our partner. Why is this so important? What's going on with you? I don’t understand your reaction. Tell me a little bit about the meaning that you're making of this. What's the story you're weaving around it? What’s the history around why this is such a sensitive issue for you? So that’s the curiosity aspect of it.

Then we have compassion. I find that compassion occurs with people after they actually gain some understanding. So the curiosity aspect has to happen first. Once we understand something about why something is either so important or so sensitive to another person, then we develop the capacity to be compassionate. Compassionate encompasses all of those dimensions of whether or not I'm going to make an adjustment in what I'm doing because it lands poorly over there in you. Whether I'm going to forgo something that really is something that you would prefer that we not do, or whether I'm going to embrace something and maybe develop something about myself that is something that is important to you. That’s the compassion piece.

Then we come to communication, which is largely about listening and asking questions and really trying to see through the other person’s eyes. No, it’s not just talking to the partner because they tend to be quiet a lot or just kind of withdrawn and behind their little turtle shell, but really listening deeply to what the person is trying to convey and who they are.

Then there’s another relationship capacity called creativity. That means that, again, we’re looking at this third entity of the relationship, and together we are cocreating how we’re gonna operate, what the story is that we’re living in, who I am, who you are, where you're going, and the meaning of this relationship.

Host: That’s all really fascinating. The C’s. I love that. Do some people just end relationships too quickly? Do they just simply lack the courage, that grit, the toughness to stick things out?

Dr. Wakefield:   I think the greatest enemy of lasting relationships is actually fear. The reason people can't maintain any sense of engagement and staying in this is a lot of people feel like they've reached the end of the road and they don’t know what else to do. These are the couples that I often see in my office. I frequently say to myself, “Oh, I wish this couple had come in five years ago before these patterns had become so entrenched.” Once patterns get entrenched, people tend to lose hope. One of the things that I try to do with people is to reawaken hope by giving them a new context and a set of skills.

Host:  Do couples ever come in before there's trouble? Do they ever just get the sense that before things ever come off the rails, before we start trending in the wrong direction here, let’s talk to Dr. Wakefield. Let’s make sure that we don’t step on any of those landmines that other people tend to step on.

Dr. Wakefield:   There's a recent trend that I'm really enjoying, and it has to do with people coming up early. It makes me so happy. I think the stigma around couple’s therapy has really reduced in the past few years. So I’ll often see couples who are in the early stages of the relationship. I call it getting off to a good start. So one of the things that I've developed over time is what I call the roadmap of relationship. The first stage is the enchantment where we’re really in this state of—this lofty mythological realm or euphoria. It’s actually associated with a set of neurochemicals that download in our brains including things like dopamine, which is the feel good neurochemical.

Then we hit this phase of disenchantment. That occurs when we begin to live with someone that we’re committed to and we discover things about them that perhaps we didn’t know at the beginning. Or the living together becomes much more difficult than the dating process because perhaps in the dating process we didn’t realize that one person is a neat Nick and the other person tends to leave coffee cups all over the house and piles of paper and things like that. So those kinds of things are difficult to work out in couples, the actual living together and building a life. So yes. I love it when couples come in early to get ahead of the entrenched patterns that can develop over the years.

Host: Yeah. That’s a really interesting trend. I'm wondering if you could tell us about the relationship enrichment series that you’ve got coming up on Saturday, September 28^th. That sounds like a perfect time, a perfect event for many of the couples whether they're trying to get ahead of things or catch up on things. That seems like a perfect event for them. Tell us more about that.

Dr. Wakefield:   The relationship enrichment series is something that we've been doing a couple times a year at UAMS. It really has to do with making the bond strong and the experiences being a couple happier and healthier. We’re doing an all day Saturday format this time. So we can really get into some exercises between the two people in the couple. No one is being forced to share in public. We’ve got lots of spaces that people can spread out into and talk to each other.

There’s four topics that we’re covering. So we’re going to do the all day Saturday workshop and then two follow up Monday evening workshops from 6:00 to 8:00. You can register for this in Eventbrite. The topics that we’re gonna cover is number one, relationship is a path of personal growth. So if we stop looking at relationship as delusions then we begin to look at them as this unfolding discovery process. That really shifts the context of the relationship. The second topic is about communication. About communicating in ways rather than alienate. So we’ll really get into how to speak so that you're most likely to evoke a cooperative response.

The third topic we’re gonna talk about—and this will be on that first Monday evening—is working through sexual difficulties. Most couples at some point in their relationship have some sort of difficulty with desire or with really coordinating their sexual life and cocreating it together in a way that is engaging and pleasing for both people. So we’ll talk about sexual difficulties and sexual engagement on that Monday evening. Then the final Monday evening we’re going to talk about meaningful connection, how to get there and stay there.

Host: So this is a special event. But on a daily basis, on a regular basis, what can couples expect when they walk through the door? What's that experience like for them?

Dr. Wakefield:   When a couple comes in to see me, they have already filled out some paperwork with questions on it that will cause them to look into their lives and into the history of their couple hood. When they come in, I always acknowledge that people are usually anxious. I always let them know that in the first session—which is a two hour session, the intake session—we’ll actually do some work so that they can leave with something they can immediately apply into their relationship to have an experience that this can be turned around.

Host: Dr. Wakefield, your work is so interesting and fascinating and so helpful. I just love listening to you. I love doing my research for this episode about you. Anything else about relationships, the couple’s center, the enrichment series. Anything else listeners need to know?

Dr. Wakefield:   I think that it’s important for us to understand that relationships are actually activators of personal growth. If you engage that process of personal growth, the relationship continues to unfold in meaningful ways. You learn more about yourself. You learn more about this person you're building a life with. That process can be incredibly meaningful.

Host: That’s great. What a perfect way to end. Thanks doctor. Thanks so much. That’s Dr. Chelsea Wakefield, aka Dr. Love, director of the couple’s center at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. For more information on the couple’s center, please visit uams.edu. If you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels and check out the full podcast library for topics that may interest you. This is UAMS Healthtalk. Thanks for listening.