Maria Arpa
Maria Arpa is a London-based mediator and counsellor who helps couples to mend their relationships. She’s just released her new book The Heart of Mindful relationships and when we got the chance to interview her, we jumped at it. Here are her interesting and thought-provoking answers.
For those who haven’t read the book can you tell us a little about it?
Maria – I’m a mediator and counsellor specialising in relationships and I decided to write a book that was about how to have dialogue with your partner, because the biggest issue when I meet couples is that they actually don’t know how to speak to each other. Also what’s happening is that there is more than one conversation going on at once and this is a societal problem. From 0-2 years, we’re taking in words, we’re listening, we’re trying to make sense of our world and then from two to four we want to use those words, to explore them as much as possible and adults spend most of the time telling us to shut up, putting us in front of videos, or DVDs. Then we go school where you are in a room full of people and there is a person of authority who holds the power so we never actually learn what a dialogue is. Everything we learn and all the example we set are debate and this is an infection is society, everything is a debate. When we’re talking about interpersonal issue and the things that keep us emotionally unsafe we have to dialogue and dialogue is a case of slowing conversations down, who is the listener, who is the speaker, having time to reflect, not reacting to our triggers, doing our own development, understanding who is responsible for what in the relationship. People just go heading crash long into relationships not realising the unspoken contracts and agreements that they are making, and this book is all about that.
In the book you speak a lot about having to work on yourself, how important is that?
M - It’s fundamental, because we often pick people who are going to present us with the challenges of the things that we don’t want to look at in ourselves. It’s that phrase isn’t it, ‘what you resist will persist’ and what you tend to find in a relationship is it’s the same problem over and over again.
You also speak of maintenance, would you say that’s one of the most important parts?
M - I think as much effort as one puts in to one’s career, multiply that by ten and that is probably what you need to make a relationship work. Relationship is not what you get when you were a child with your parents and that’s what most people think they’re going to recreate. Maintenance is looking in one’s self and recognising your own process from the places you are stuck and communication with your partner and recognising the difference between a discussion and an announcement. An announcement is ‘I’ve just done this’ ‘well why didn’t you tell me?’ ‘I’m telling you now’, that’s not a dialogue that’s an announcement after the event. A dialogue is ‘I’m thinking about doing this’ ‘I’m feeling vulnerable in this relationship’ or ‘there are some things you do that are annoying me, it’s leading me to think about retaliating in this way’ that’s a dialogue.
You mention in your book that people have a happy ever after mentality; do you think that’s naïve for couples to think that way?
M – Absolutely, the most important thing to remember, and this is another infection within society, is that we’re conflict avoiders and what we need to do is realise conflict as a learning resource and when we recognise conflict as a learning resource, then we understand the power of dialogue and the power of collaboration to work things out. A lot of people they get together and they have projects, so they get married, plan the house, the baby and these are masks over what’s really going on and then one person will say ‘you know what, I’m fed up, I’m leaving’.
Do you think that being mindful in a relationship can repair any relationship?
M – No, what it does is it brings out the question of can we be together or can’t we? Do we have the resources to do this? I’m not suggesting that you could repair anything what I’m suggesting is that you can decide together whether this is going forward or not and if it isn’t going forward, break it up with the least amount of suffering, break it up with care for each other. You know the couples that come in and their relationship is breaking up because they see that they’ve put up with so much and now they’re enemies. That again is another part of our social conditioning is to see somebody who isn’t cooperating as an enemy.
So even if the book can’t mend the relationship, it can improve the relationship whether it lasts or not?
M - Yes, what I would say I specialise in is helping the couples to either put the relationship back together and then helping them through that work, or whether to break up and then if they’re going to break up to do that with the least amount of human suffering. Particularly when children are involved, the phrase that I will often use with couples that can’t sit in the mediation room and they’re giving it ‘I’m going to see my lawyer’ is ‘you know what, this is really horrible for your children, whatever way it goes, this is horrible for them and the one gift you could give them out of the process if the conflict/resolution model you want them to learn’.
What’s next for you then Maria?
M – I’ve got three directions I’m going in, because of this book I’m hoping to increase the training sessions for couples because I think if the family structure isn’t right then the family structure can’t work, that’s fundamental. Secondly I’m writing a book about mindfulness at work because we spend so much time at work and many people are so unhappy. And then thirdly the charity I run is setting up the first youth dispute resolution service because we’ve got to help these kids understand conflict/resolution and we want to take that out to street level where the kids are really suffering because we’ve taught nothing about conflict/resolution.
Maria’s book, The Heart of Mindful Relationships: Mediations on Togetherness is available to buy now through Leaping Hare Press for £7.99.
Cara Mason
tagged in relationships