Step Six, Part Four---Readiness

I really was willing to let go of my "defects of character,: but I was in no way ready. These failings were nothing less than my barrier of defenses against the world that I had vigilantly erected during my thirty-five years. I could not let go of them until I could put something else in their place.
Laura S, 12 Steps on the Buddha's Path

Before I got clean and sober, I knew very little about how to be in a good relationship. In my first marriage, I had remained silent about my doubts and concerns. I made decisions that had a huge impact on my relationship either by making them unilaterally or by going along with my wife's wishes without saying how I felt. I was quite unwilling and unable to let my wife in and allow her to influence me in any significant way. By the time I got seriously into pot and alcohol, we had already begun to live increasingly separate lives. Pot and alcohol only made our emotional separation that much greater.

My experience with relationships during a decade of being single after divorcing my first wife only confirmed how little I knew about making relationships work. Since my focus was on drugs, sex, and rock and roll, it's no surprise that none of my relationships during this period lasted very long. Before I surrendered and admitted my addiction to alcohol and pot, I had come to the conclusion that I would be single the rest of my life.

Then I met S. She not only helped me realize the nature of my disease and the need for a program of recovery, she also taught me the fundamentals of being in a relationship and how to make it workable. Fortunately, I was finally ready to learn. And the most important way I showed that readiness was my willingness to listen to what S had to say and to take her seriously. Another way of describing this is that I was willing to be influenced by her.

Turns out that John Gottman has identified the willingness by a male partner to be influenced by his girlfriend/wife as the single most important factor in predicting which relationships will be successful. In his research Gottman saw that when a man is willing to listen fully and carefully to his female partner and to consider seriously what she is saying, the relationship thrives. Gottman is careful to say that he does not mean a perfunctory "Yes dear!" or the man not voicing his own desires and preferences. But he does mean that in successful partnerships, men are ready and willing to let their behavior and decisions be influenced by the wants and needs of their partners.

Let's face it; most of us men don't know learn much while we're growing up about how to make intimate relationships work. If we are lucky, we learn how to compete and strive to win, how to work hard to attain a goal, how to play when work is done, and other behaviors that ensure success in the world of work. But we don't learn much about what it takes to make a relationship be successful until we are taught by our partners---if we are willing to listen to them and take them seriously.

Gottman emphasizes the readiness of men to be influenced by their wives because he found that most wives most of the time are willing to be influenced by their husbands. But there is a way of being ready to have a defect removed which is important for women to learn and understand: the willingness to engage their husbands with what Gottman calls a "soft startup." By that he means that when a women brings up an issue for discussion (and 90% of the time, it's the female in a relationship who expresses a complaint or wants to talk about an issue), it is important that she do so in a lowkey, "soft" way if she wishes to be reasonably successful in engaging her husband.

Gottman found that when women start out with a lot of anger or other strong emotions, men almost invariably respond defensively and seek to end the discussion even before it has begun. He speculates that this may be because men are much more physiologically reactive (i.e., increased pulse rate and blood pressure due to increased adrenaline in the bloodstream) than women to strong emotions so that their "fight or flight" response is more quickly activated. But he also points out that when women feel they are being listened to and taken seriously, they are much less likely to be coming from a place of strong emotions when they begin an interchange with their husbands.

Those of us in recovery, both men and women, were usually guilty of these serious relationship defects when we were still practicing our addictions. We men were especially prone not to take the women in our lives seriously. And our partners had usually gotten to a place of being in a state of constant anxiety and anger long before we surrendered to recovery. It takes, therefore, a good deal of surrender and readiness to have our Higher Power remove these defects of our character and a lot of work on our part to adopt a stance of allowing our partners to influence us while letting go of our angry demands and criticisms. It is almost always a humbling experience.