When Stress Goes Up, Relationships Go Down — The Solution Is More Simple Than You Think
Gallup recently released their latest annual update on the world’s emotional state and it shows that Americans’ Stress, Worry, and Anger Intensified in 2018. Highlights from the survey indicate that Americans are among the most stressed in the world. Nearly half of Americans are worried a lot, one in five are angry a lot, and younger Americans between the ages of 15 and 49 are among the most stressed, worried and angry.
When people feel stressed one of the main areas that is impacted in their life is their intimate relationships. So many clients come to me puzzled that they act their worst with those they love the most. I can relate. I have been humbled in this way myself in my marriage and even more embarrassingly with my daughters.
What can be done about these increasing levels of stress, worry, and anger and how do you minimize the negative impact on your relationships?
The key to suffering less and experiencing more inner freedom and peace of mind is understanding where suffering comes from. We are conditioned to believe that we are victims of our experiences of emotional suffering. We are told we get stressed, anxious, or angry because of things that happen to us. The prevailing belief is that outside circumstances or character defects within ourselves cause our upset.
When it looks this way, we work at trying to improve ourselves and our circumstances. Meditate more, balance your schedule, work harder and smarter, hold better boundaries … then you will feel better. There are so many things you can work on and an infinite amount of things you can do to improve yourself and your life, but they are not the source of happiness.
Happiness and peace of mind are your natural state. You come into the world present. You aren’t born worrying. As you grow up, the conceptual mind develops, you create a sense of self and along with it, an experience of separation from your natural state. Insecurity is inherent in the experience of a separate self. There is no fixing that, but there is no need to because it is a concept, not a truth.
The good news is that when you understand that the experience of insecurity is a normal part of the human condition, you can relax into your humanness and have compassion for yourself when you get lost in your insecure thoughts. Believing insecure thoughts is the source of stress and unwanted behaviors are the by-product of that. It is not people’s lives and circumstances that are making Americans more stressed. It is the misunderstanding of where stress comes from that creates more suffering.
Stress is an inside job. Believing insecure thoughts is the source of stress.
Insecure thoughts are not the enemy. We all have them. And you can have them without them having you when you understand they are temporary. They don’t mean anything. They are just an experience you have. Seeing this makes it easier to not take them seriously and to ride out the experience more gracefully. You are not a fixed state. Your experience is created in the moment. One moment you feel insecure and unworthy, the next moment you completely forget about yourself and feel free and at ease being in life.
They key here is seeing that when you are not in your mind you feel good, and when you are thinking about yourself and evaluating how you are doing, you experience some level of insecurity. When you forget about you, you lose the made-up concept of “I”, and you are free. You feel your natural state of happiness. When you remember the concept of “I” and the sense of a separate identity, you suffer. We all do this all day long. We go in and out of thinking about ourselves. We go in and out of being present in the moment.
This is how human experience works. There is no escaping being human.
Sydney Banks shared how we live in two worlds. The world of form and the world of the formless. Both are made of the same energy behind life. Understanding the world of form and our psychological nature helps us to navigate it more gracefully. We don’t need to change it when we understand it. We suffer less from our worry, stress, and anger when we understand they are the result of getting caught up in insecure thinking. When we see that our experience of insecurity is based on made-up ideas about life and ourselves, the insecure thoughts become less gripping. When we appreciate that we have a deeper nature beyond our constructed concepts, we can look beyond our personal thoughts in the direction of Source and Oneness. We identify less with our psychology which constantly changes, and more with the unchanging formless essence of who we really are. This is where the experience of okayness, safety, and security resides.
Experiencing your profound okayness independent of your emotions and circumstances is the key to having less stress and suffering. This is the solution.
Stress has nothing to do with your personality or what is going on in your life and everything to do with how much you take your insecure thoughts seriously. You can know you are okay even when you get caught up in insecure thoughts and have an insecure experience. You’re okay no matter what your emotional experience is. Having more perspective on your thoughts and feelings frees you up to be with what is more gracefully, no matter what your experience is. This will positively impact every area of your life, but in particular, it helps intimate relationships to be more graceful and enjoyable.
The quality of our experience in a relationship is always a reflection of our state of mind. We experience our own thoughts — our own state of mind — not the other person. Our hearts naturally open to ourselves as we understand that we live in a world of thought, but that is not all of who we are. It is only a small piece of a bigger picture. We will never comprehend the bigger picture, but it has a feeling quality that we recognize when we have less on our mind. Having the understanding that it exists allows us to identify less with the small self we create and look in the direction of the full self that simply is. Being with your humanity with an open-heart will have a ripple effect on all the relationships in your life.
The freedom experienced when you identify less with your thoughts, beliefs, and concepts allows you to experience your wellbeing. An open heart is a natural by-product of this. A little bit of understanding this goes a long way toward reducing stress and worry. With less stress and worry, there is less anger and navigating life and relationships becomes easier and more graceful.
Rohini Ross is passionate about helping people wake up to their full potential. She is a transformative coach, leadership consultant, a regular blogger for Thrive Global, and author of the short-read Marriage (The Soul-Centered Series Book 1) available on Amazon. You can get her free ebook Relationships here. Rohini has an international coaching and consulting practice based in Los Angeles helping individuals, couples, and professionals embrace all of who they are so they can experience greater levels of well-being, resiliency, and success. She is also the founder of The Soul-Centered Series: Psychology, Spirituality, and the Teachings of Sydney Banks. You can follow Rohini on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and watch her Vlogs with her husband. To learn more about her work go to her website, rohiniross.com.
Christine Heath & Judy Sedgeman – Spirituality and Resilience
When you no longer give authority to the fear-based thoughts in your consciousness, all you are left with is happiness. Through the teachings of Sydney Banks, you can see how your psychological functioning works, which makes you less compelled to follow those thoughts that do not serve you. Becoming more aware of the wholeness and integration of both your human and spiritual natures helps to ground you in the unchanging essence of who you are, and ride out the ups and downs of your emotional experience more gracefully. Accepting the normalcy of your humanness will naturally reduce your anxiety and fear and enhance your joy and happiness in each moment. By placing less pressure on yourself to feel a certain way or be hung up on self-improvement, you may find that low moods do not derail or debilitate you; instead, you will become much more attuned to your innate wellbeing and peace of mind and experience more happiness as a result.
Greater psychological freedom is the gift that keeps on giving. How grateful would you feel if you no longer had to listen to your negative, self-punishing and painful inner narrative, day in and day out? Understanding the role of thought and recognizing how it creates your feelings of insecurity and self-doubt is truly liberating! You will be better able to hear and heed your inner wisdom and become less driven by the noisy thoughts of fear and constriction. As an ongoing practice, this allows you to more fully experience your resilience and reach a greater sense of clarity about how you want to move forward in your life. As a result, you can live in a way that feels authentic and true in every area, including your career, family, home, creative expression, play, relationships and overall well-being.
Your ability to enjoy life comes from being present in the moment rather than caught up in habitual, negative thoughts that take you out of the Now. Sydney Banks’ wisdom supports you in becoming aware of how you get seduced by your limited personal thinking and thus, create a painful reality of misunderstanding, fear and restriction. When you recognize how and why this happens, you can step free of the pattern. This understanding assists you to dismiss unhelpful thoughts and not take them seriously. Unlike traditional self-help or therapy, experiencing more psychological freedom and enjoyment does not rely on techniques. There are no magic bullets on the path of well-being. All you need to do is follow an internal compass that points to the truth of who you really are—beyond transient thoughts to your unchanging, formless essence.
In our culture, success is often associated with hard work and narrowly defined as material gain. However, authentic success, as shared by Sydney Banks, includes such intangibles as happiness, well-being, love, joy, compassion, and peace of mind that are innate in each one of us, along with outward goals and achievements. It honors the whole person in all walks of life, whether you are a professional, leader, executive, solopreneur, employee, mother, teacher or student. From this knowing and experience, you can access the infinite wellspring of love that is your essence, then share your gifts with the world from a place of fulfillment and meaning, through a profound understanding of the interaction between your psychological and spiritual natures. While conventional success can deplete you, authentic success only fills you up.
Are you self-critical, hard on yourself, and constantly trying to “fix” whatever you think is wrong with you? Perhaps you have tried all kinds of different personal growth techniques and spiritual practices in the hope of solving all your problems. This cycle can be exhausting and never-ending, because there will always be something to improve about yourself, from that mindset. Sydney Banks’ teachings can help you to see how your humanness is normal and not something that needs fixing: as a spiritual person, you don’t need to change or eradicate your humanness! Seeing yourself as normal allows you to love and accept yourself exactly as you are—warts and all. Adopting this perspective naturally brings out the best in you and helps to find peace with your personality. Self-love and self-acceptance is your natural state, and any disconnection from your true nature is only temporary. What a relief!
One of the first areas people often experience profound transformation from the teachings of Sydney Banks is in their relationships, both personal and professional. While it often seems like another person’s irritation, anger, indifference, insensitivity, rudeness, etc., directly affects your experience, in reality your disturbance is a product of your own individual thinking. By making someone else responsible for how you feel, that person automatically becomes the cause of your suffering. Once you understand that you always have a place of well-being inside, independent of another’s behavior, it is easier to maintain equanimity through their changing moods and behaviors. Romantically, you may experience deeper love and intimacy with your partner, but the teachings benefit all relationships. This awareness supports more authentic connection and expression, while facilitating greater understanding, improved communication, reduced reactivity, more acceptance of self and others, and improved ability to work out differences and find common ground. Best of all, just one person shifting in a relationship is enough to transform it.
Barbara Patterson
Scott Kelly
Barbara Patterson
Clare Dimond
Michael Neill
Rohini Ross
Elsie Spittle – The Soul of the Principles
Spiritual Facts 
Chip Chipman – The Simplicity of Syd’s Teachings
Dicken Bettinger – The Spiritual Nature of the teachings of Sydney Banks
Heather Daly
06.05.2019 at 08:48Hi Rohini,
I would love to understand how the 3P’s apply to high risk teenagers who are exposed to “toxic” stress. Many are sexually and physically abused on a regular basis, are in environments of extreme violence and have witnessed relatives being killed. They are not in environments conducive to growth. The idea that stress is an inside job for these kids is a hard idea to grasp. I have found that there is a type of stress that is just simply toxic to young people’s developing brains. I would love your thoughts on this. Thank you!!
Rohini
06.05.2019 at 16:05Hi Heather,
Thanks so much for your comment.
The 3Ps are not a tool or a technique so they cannot be applied to situations. Instead, they are an understanding. When people have a glimpse of the truth of this understanding for themselves, change and transformation happens within.
The Principles are a description of how the human experience is created. We all work the same way no matter what our circumstances are. Just like our human bodies work the same way independent of where we live. Our experience of stress is always a reflection of our personal thoughts. People can be in the same situation and have different experiences and consequently, have a different physiological impact because their experience is based on their own thoughts in the moment.
When people understand how their minds works, this dramatically reduces suffering no matter what their circumstances and helps them to connect with their own innate resilience. This is in turn allows them to be as responsive as possible to their current circumstances.
As I’m sure you know from USM, experience is always an inside job for us as humans. Understanding this is the key to empowerment and less suffering. Viktor Frankel demonstrated this in his experience in the concentration camps. He is not an exception to the human experience. He is the example of how we work, what is possible and how circumstances do not dictate our experience.
In order to share this with others, it is important to see this for yourself in an experiential way. Seeing for yourself the clarity of how everyone’s mind works the same way and how experience is created internally and sharing from your personal experience of this is what has impact on others. If you would like to have a conversation about this, please let me know.
Here are some resources you might find helpful.
Love,
Rohini
Mara Gleason – Keynote at Chicago Peace Summit
GUNS + EMOTIONS = VIOLENCE
Dr Bill Pettit: PTSD and Trauma
Somebody Should Have Told Us by Jack Pranksy
Modello: A Story of Hope for the Inner City and Beyond: An Inside-Out Model of Prevention and Resiliency in Action