The 'Dead Zone'

11^th June 2012 – Jake – Grow old with me!  The best is yet to be.

REFLECTION FOR TODAY: As we begin to look more positively at where we are, we will discover that all of our painful moments, if faced, lead us to learn more about ourselves. Everything we experience has its value. How much do we learn when things are going well? Don’t we just coast along? Often pain pushes us to risk or to challenge the things in ourselves which we need and want to change. As we become more in touch with our needs, our values, and our goals, we are pushed to a new adventure.

Remind me that pain is an opportunity for growth.

Our pain, if faced, helps us to find balance in our lives – the balance of self, others, and purpose.

I was reading an article of the Journey of the Apostles and Mary Magdalene really resonated for us.  She was the original perfect wretch!  Neytiri could be an incarnation of her; in fact, we all are1

Mary, from Magdala, followed Jesus after he cured her of “seven demons”. She stayed near him during the Crucifixion and was the first to see him after his resurrection. After the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene is the most important woman in the New Testament. This woman, who was a sinner, and was chosen by Christ as the first witness of his resurrection. Why? Perhaps because she was the first to ask, forgiveness.

One of her followers has this to say “In the beginning I compared myself a lot to her...My life before was a constant seeking for something different, for something else. For a great love – not just love coming from another person but a love which can only come, I believe from a spiritual dimension. There is some sort of Force everywhere in this forest – not just in the cave....It’s an energy which makes you stand up afterward. I don’t know how to explain it. There is a silence in the cave which is full of life.” Wow! Sublime!

by Jeff and Sue Allen
  An excerpt from their new book “How Love Works”

“Oh baby, baby, where did our love go?”  - The Supremes

There is a saying that opposites attract. If this is the case in your relationship, then you are likely to spend more time in the power struggle stage, working through and getting past the differences. Other couples who are more similar to each other end up spending more time in the dead zone, the next and final stage to be navigated on the way to partnership.

In the honeymoon stage we give everything we have to our new partner. We give our fun, our spontaneity, our sexuality and all this giving makes it a honeymoon. However, at some point we find we have no more great gifts to give. Instead, we have only the broken bits of our lives, the things we feel guilty about, our weaknesses, our failures, our strange bathroom habits and the things we did to small furry animals when we were children.

This isn’t what we want to show our partner. We fear they might leave us if we told them about all our human failings, if we scare them by rattling all the skeletons in our cupboards. So we hide our broken pieces and start acting out what we think we should be; an attentive husband, a loving supportive wife, a good parent. But these are not you; it is like you have made a cardboard cutout of yourself, someone who runs on autopilot, who has lost all spontaneity. The real you has stepped back.

You now live out a recipe, you now live out a role, you do the right thing but for the wrong reasons. This inauthenticity creates distance between you and your partner – and the loss of contact then creates deadness. We are so busy being who we should be, rather than who we actually are, it feels like all the fun, the passion, the enthusiasm, the sex and the sense of living a full life has been sucked out of you. Thus we enter the biggest trap in our lives, the place that relationships die in, marriages die in and we die in. We reach (cue foreboding music: dum dum duuuum) the dead zone.

Life in the Dead Zone

If you have reached the dead zone in your relationship, you have reached a place of some success. You have been together for a while. Mostly you are past the stage of telling your partner you are going to leave them every time something goes wrong. Maybe you have reached middle to top management level in your career or you own your own company or practice. Even if you have achieved a modicum of financial security or success, with some material trappings of stability, the partner, the kids, the house, the car, the dog, the cat – the key is that you can’t feel it.

We have reached a plateau, yet we feel more of a failure than before. At the very least, we expect feelings of worthiness, happiness and wellbeing to be the pay off for working so hard to ‘be someone’. But unless happiness and self-worth are there at the beginning, no amount of worldly success will provide it. Many capable, skilled, clever, successful people are secretly terrified of being found out for the ‘fraud’ that deep down they believe they are. Typical sayings of people who are trapped in the dead zone reflect this refusal to admit any failure: “when the going gets tough the tough get going,” or  “ I have to carry everyone”, or their view of leadership could be summed up as “it’s lonely at the top!” As these subtle feelings of deep failure take hold, we try several ways to keep this deadness as bay; we might make ourselves too busy to have to think about it by overworking, or become lazy, depressed or indulgent (alcohol, recreational drugs, food, shopping, shoes and so on). Left unaddressed the dead zone can lead to burn out – and the trap of working hard and then playing hard to compensate.

In the dead zone, sex is some form of duty and no longer a spontaneous, exciting encounter. In the dead zone we often need more and more stimulation to experience the briefest of feelings. We look for something exciting to do just to get some adrenalin going again. We become kinkier, take up extreme sports or buy a growling Harley Davidson motorbike – anything to inject some intensity back into our lives.

Some of us come home and provoke our partner. We yank their chain just to get a reaction because we can’t stand the deadness. Finally at some point, often around the age of 40, the deadness becomes too much and we hear that voice inside our head that says: ‘Run! Get the hell out.’ So we give up our job, we give up our family and we head for Australia to open a bar on Bondi Beach in the belief it will give us our life back. Sure, it will be great for a while, in the honeymoon stage, but as the old saying goes: ‘Wherever you go, there you are.’ It is only a matter of time before the old pattern repeats and the deadness creeps back. The problem is not out there. It is inside us.

Men are especially susceptible to a dead zone related mid life crisis, and the point of explaining it here is to show you what drives people to look outside their relationship for excitement. This is the time when couples are most susceptible to having affairs, when people are desperate to get some of those honeymoon feelings back.

Women’s and men’s lifestyle magazines are forever printing articles on ‘how to get the spark back’ into your relationship and your sex life. Yes, you can try everything from bondage to romantic getaways, but unless the underlying causes are dealt with, this is merely a distraction–-fun for a while but not a long-term solution. In the dead zone we have lost the ability to feel and without feeling everything and everyone become just objects.

OUR STORY: When Our ‘Spark’ Went Out

Jeff says:

When I was in the dead zone with Sue I was no longer attracted to her physically. At one time I saw everyone outside of our relationship as desirable but not her. I would have sworn on a stack of bibles that the spark had gone, never to return. Once I had got through my transformation and come out of the dead zone, all the passion and fun and physical contact came back and has continued over the years.

I often read articles about how to put the life back into our marriages, sometimes even by suggesting it is OK to have affairs. Thing is, I know that when you do that, you close the door on true happiness. You confuse success with adrenalin and you lock yourself even deeper into the dead zone.

Sue says:

When we stopped fighting outwardly, we just sank into this dreadful sameness. Every day, every conversation, every time we made love… it all seemed so predictable. There seemed no way out of it without fighting, so I just gave up. I retreated into my cardboard cutout of the resigned, mildly depressed but capable person, keeping it all together. Underneath I felt like a failure but I couldn’t admit it, so I covered it up and soldiered on. It took our break up to shake me out of the dead zone.

Many people have said to us how they get on better with their ex-partner now they are no longer together, and this is because they feel they can be themselves again without the mysterious dynamics of power struggle and dead zone seeming to run their lives. When Jeff and I split up we finally started talking more honestly than ever before, and once we understood why we had got into such an unhappy state we have moved on to find more authenticity, freedom and genuine excitement in each other.

When we are in the dead zone we have given everything except the one thing people really want, which is ourselves. We have given our roles and duties and a wide selection of cardboard cutouts but not ourselves: ourselves and our secrets, our fears, our broken pieces, our real feelings about ourselves or simply US.

So how do we get out of the dead zone?

Try this:

As we say in our book, the way out of the dead zone in any relationship is giving all of yourself, giving all the good bits and the bad bits. The way out of a boring relationship is not having an affair, it is taking an emotional risk by saying what is really on your mind; it is by giving yourself totally, warts and all, and it is by committing to your partner, again, at least 150%, committing to them, their mother, their past – everything. Only that will bring about a new honeymoon and new level of success in your life. If your commitment is less than 100% your relationship will fail, sooner or later.

Time spent communicating with your partner is never lost and having the courage to be yourself within the relationship is important because your partner should be your best friend, your lover, your resting place as well as your husband or wife. Once this is well established then you are free because why would you stop anyone from doing what they want if you had this close a relationship with them?

This is the big secret: freedom comes from a fully committed and honest relationship, and of course that is an oxymoron to independent people but let the experiences speak for themselves. Wasn’t the best time of your life when you were being totally intimate with another, withholding nothing? Wasn’t that the most exciting thrilling time, filled with passion and love and fun? We can all have that again, and again and again!