Senior Relationships' Self-Talk

One of the really dangerous things about senior relationships is that we have such a storehouse of self-talk that we've developed over the years that our automatic cognitive/emotional central computer figures that it knows what just about everything means.


Notice that I said that our automatic processing figures it knows. It does have a lot of data from which to make educated guessed. Maybe they are even very educated guesses, but they are still just guesses.


Anything that we can do to stay where we are right now and not get ahead into what we remember about what happened before in a situation just like this one, or what we remember someone told us about a situation just like this one, or what we are sure is going to happen next, is a great accomplishment.


In other words, to get the good stuff, we have to be present.


This was portrayed incredibly in the movie Rainman when Charlie Babbit, one of the two main characters, is being read his wealthy father's will in which he learns that he has been left his father's prize rose bushes and a car with the remainder of the estate going to an unnamed third party. After reading it, the lawyer asks if Charlie has any questions to which Charlie replies that he missed the whole thing and needs it read over. His mind went to the rose bushes, the car, the 3 million dollars that someone else was going to get, what all this meant and completely left where he was.


It was so clear what was happening in that scene. Alas, it is almost never so clear in intimate relationships. We're always hearing things that weren't said, missing things that were said, and "knowing" what it all means and what we "should" do based on automatic retrievals and processing that is going on all the time and that in many cases has very little to do with what is right in front of us.


What to do? Well,. . .

• it helps a lot just to realize that this is something that the human mind, the human organism tends to do


• it is possible to change it by just noticing when it is happening


• using listening skills can make a difference


• and, . . . regular mindfulness practice can make us better and better at it

"Be here now" just about sums it up. There is lots of good stuff that we miss when we let ourselves go on autopilot; especially as we get older and our autopilot gets more and more data in its memory banks.