The Dream Sharing Sourcebook: A Practical Guide to Enhancing Your Personal Relationships (21 page)

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Authors: Phyllis R. Koch-Sheras

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BOOK: The Dream Sharing Sourcebook: A Practical Guide to Enhancing Your Personal Relationships
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only the joining of forces, but also the drawing together of resources from more than one source, using more than one perspective. Each person in the couple has something unique and useful to contribute. More ideas, more vision, more eyes and ears are only a few of the ways that cooperation increases the chances of a couple surviving and thriving. In addition, problem solving with two people rather than one helps to lessen anxiety and produce a special feeling of accomplishment.
Creating a Cooperative Vision
Jesse and Belinda were both career oriented when they met. Having each left previous unhappy and childless marriages, the commitment to their new marriage included having children right away. They felt the "biological clock" was ticking for Belinda, and Jesse, too, was eager to start a family. She became pregnant within two months of their wedding. At first they were ecstatic. Belinda planned to take off time from her law firm, but she realized that her career would suffer greatly from this change. At the same time, Jesse noticed that even during the pregnancy, they spent more time planning for the baby and taking care of Belinda than they did having fun together. Almost simultaneously it hit them that their family life would be quite different in a few months. And it was! They were so concerned that they began to have fears about their relationship surviving. They saw a need to cooperate immediately.
They sat down to create a vision. They imagined what their world would be like five years in the future and thought about what they needed to be doing now for that to occur. They actually "visioned" what it might be like. They closed their eyes and said out loud to each other what they could see: Belinda saw herself getting ready to go to work in the morning. They
 
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also pictured a baby-sitter coming to the house to take care of the children. They set a target date for Belinda's return to work part time and then full time, and planned when to begin to look for child care. They would need to hire help at home so that they could go out by themselves, and they would also need to leave some time for each of them to exercise and do activities on their own. They created a plan that outlined how specifically they would cooperate. They were committed to make it work. By being so dedicated, they became less anxious about what would happen in the future. Both agreed to speak about their plan every week to exchange feedback on how it was going. When they had their second child two years later, they modified their plan again.
The Couple as a Team
Teams work or play together. They try to understand the rules of the game to play it well. It may sound strange to say that being in a relationship is like participating in a game, but there are many similarities. If you can remember when you first started dating in your teenage years, you may have referred to it as "playing a game." In early relationships you may have said that you don't like "playing games" with others when, in fact, that is what was happening. What makes dating a game is that it has definite rules and a goal to achieve. Many people see life as a game. That is not to say it is not important or not significant; it is merely to say that it can be understood using games as a model. Just as players have varying talents, some people seem to be very adept at some part of this gameperhaps at meeting people or starting relationshipswhile others are not. Some of your friends seem to play hard and aggressively, always busy, involved, active. Others seem passive, reactive, and powerless. It is almost as though certain people are in the game while others
 
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are spectators. Healthy relationships are marked by those who play hard and don't give up.
Players who do the best are often those who not only have innate talent, but also get good coaching. Coaching is not just for those who aren't doing well; it is also for those who are exceptional performers but want to do even better. Great athletes, dancers, opera singers, and painters all have coaches.
Looking at your couple as a team provides an excellent model for developing and then evaluating your cooperative visions and efforts. Teams are designed to gain maximum results in reaching an agreed-upon goal or vision through collective actions. A team is made up of owners, managers, coaches, and players. The owners are those with the most at stake. They want to accomplish a particular goal. The managers are charged by the owners with designing and executing the enterprise so that the goal is reached. They, in turn, coordinate the personnel and strategize to reach the goal. The players perform the tasks needed to achieve the goal, and the coaches are there to get the most out of the players. This may not sound like your couple, but think about it a little and it will make sense.
If a couple is to cooperate, it must have more than just good players. It must include the elements of ownership and management as well. The owners of the team are the couple. They are the ones with something at stake, who are committed to the success of the relationship. Sometimes you might forget that you are the co-owners of your relationship and that, as such, cooperation is essential to your success. You must realize that ''playing hard" is a requirement and that you need to find good coaches. The couple also plays the role of manager. The manager coordinates the roles of the various coaches to meet the needs of the owners. In this capacity, you must constantly be looking to see if the methods of reaching your goal are
 
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working. These elements of owning and managing a team can be used regularly to help your couple perform to its capacity and achieve your winning goals.
Setting the team goalVisioning: At the beginning of a season, a team sets a goal to accomplish. Sometimes it is winning a national championship, finishing first in their league, having a winning record, or just doing better than the previous year. Whatever it is, it requires creating a vision for the future. It means imagining how you will feel at the beginning and what you will have done at the end. This is a visioning dream. A couple as a team can do the same thing. Imagine what you want your relationship to look like and feel like a year from now, five years from now, thirty years from now. Be specific. Many times this sort of visioning is never done until it is time to think about retirement or what to do after the children have left the nest. Present events often seem so important that there is little time or energy to think about the future. But unless there is a goal to aim for, there is no way to establish the direction in which you are going now, or what to do next.
Rita and Oscar had waited five years to have their first child. They had been trying for some time and were excited about her arrival. Lily was born early and weighed only four pounds. There were concerns from the beginning about her survival. For Rita and Oscar, Lily became the focus of all their thoughts and energy. Their lives were focused on meeting her needs, and their couple came second. It was nearly a year before they believed that everything would be all right and that Lily could look forward to a healthy life. As they settled into a more normal routine, they started feeling that they wanted more time apart to recover from their ordeal. They spoke less and became more absorbed outside their marriage in work and activities with friends. Except for parenting Lily, they did not experience themselves as a couple at all.
 
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One day, Rita's best friend asked her if she was thinking of leaving Oscar. At first Rita was surprised by the comment but realized that she had been thinking less and less about being with him. They had little physical intimacy nowadays, and their marriage seemed ''tired." When Rita brought up her friend's comment at dinner, it turned out that Oscar was feeling the same way. Right then and there, they began discussing what they saw for themselves as a couple in the future. They stayed up most of the night talking and planning. Some clear and specific things came up. They decided to attend a couples program through their church. In it, they were asked to describe what they would be doing at various points in the future. They visualized what they would do when Lily started school, when she grew up and left home, and when they retired from their careers. They made the proclamation "We can have it all, together."
Once Rita and Oscar created their vision, they saw they had plenty of things to do. They decided to plan for their next child. This meant they needed to think about a bigger apartment or buying a house. They set financial goals for the year and for the next five years. They also created specific milestones to be achieved in their relationship if they wanted to have another baby: time to vacation, finding child care, involving other family members. The visioning dream they created for themselves got them playing actively in their lives again. Instead of drifting apart, they became more directed and more alive.
Methods to reach your goalsPlanning: Once you have imagined your goals and proclaimed your vision, it is time to make concrete plans to achieve them. Like any good team, wanting to win may be a great idea, but unless there are plans of how to do that, the vision remains only a distant fantasy. Rita and Oscar learned that after creating a vision, it is important to sit down and outline a strategy of how to make sure
 
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that it happens. You may find that planning seems unspontaneous or unromantic, but that does not have to be the case. This is the time when your team can use the skills of each of the players.
One of you may be good at financial planning, another at understanding spatial relationships or design. Your different experiences in life and with your own families allow you to brainstorm from different perspectives. What is essential is that you make planning a part of your couple life regularly. During a vacation or on a particular night of the week, sit down and make a plan, and be sure to write it down. As with your couple proclamation, keep your written plan in a place where you can look at it regularly. Many personal effectiveness training programs for individuals emphasize this planning and recording process. Some trainers suggest making it a part of everyday routines.
Your dreams can show you how to reach a goal or allow you to see new opportunities for cooperation. They may even suggest the specifics of how to plan or implement your next move. This was true of Phyllis's "Eight Tennis Balls" dream.
Marcus was working hard to get a new business going. His new wife, Cam, wanted to support him but was feeling abandoned, playing second fiddle to the business. She kept asking how she could help, but he said nothing. Marcus had the following dream, which he told Cam about a few weeks later:
Just in Time!
I'm late for my softball game. I run out to left field to take my position when I realize that I have forgotten my glove. I feel panicked. I don't have time to run back to my car to look for it. I see a little girl over my shoulder and yell to her to bring my glove. She runs to the car, finds it, comes to the fence, and throws it to me. I hear a bat crack behind me and

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