The Role(s) of Control in Life and Loving Relationships

It is amazing how frequently I see that people tend to think of “control” as being a less than good (or even bad). Yet let’s remember two things: (1) control is the ability to purposefully direct, suppress and/or change; and (2) if we didn’t exercise some controls in our lives, our lives would be in total chaos. When talking with my “pro bono clients” about control issues in their lives, I frequently challenge them with two questions: (1) are you controlling things in your life in ways that make your life and the way you live it better? and, (2) are there any other controls that you could exercise that would improve your life and the way you live it?

In my 33 years of work as a licensed psychologist, specializing in working with couples, one of the primary problem areas people in troubled loving relationships had to attend to was their “control issues” – within themselves and their loving relationships. “Control problems in relationships” typically are related to the couple’s boundaries and associated controls. For example, in my co-authored book with Dr. William A. Lambos, Our Loving Relationship, we discuss these two latter phenomena directly:

Boundaries are the limits of how far you can go and remain comfortable with yourself. Boundaries define the “space” in which a given individual is not invited or welcomed at a given time.

Controls are those things you do to assure that you stay within your boundaries and assure that other people do not violate your comfort zone.

In two of my three novels, “control” is directly and portrayed. For example, In My Sweetpea: Seven Years and Seven Days, as Sheila and Troy’s marriage starts to fall apart, his “active control” and her “passive control” quickly turns their relationship dance from a foxtrot to a Macarena. And in If Ever Again… It’ll be for Love, after Diane divorces her over-controlling husband, recovers and then starts to fall in love with Michael, she subconsciously perceives many of his loving gestures as controlling. (As I discuss in Chapter 4 of my pop-psych book, Living Life, Anyway – 2^nd Edition, “…we can control things actively by ‘what we do’ and we also can control things passively by “what we don’t do’.”)

Interestingly, when my “clients” who are in recovery tell me that they are staying sober because they “gave up control” (e.g., “Let go, let god.”), I ask them: “When you choose to give up control, isn’t that a form of control?”

Aspects and phenomena regarding “control in life” and “control in loving relationships” easily could entail a book’s worth of address and discussion. To wit, this herein discussion doesn’t even scratch the surface. Nonetheless, I hope my musings have challenged you to think about the issue(s) of control and how it interfaces with your life and the way you live it... as well as your adult loving relationships.

Question: How was or has been “control” been good (or bad) aspects of your life and your loving relationships?

Bill

Humor: A Nice Spice in Novels

Humor tends to play an important role in my life… in addition to the entertainment factor of good old “funny,” comic relief can be very relieving in daunting and stressful situations. To wit, I spice up my novels with humor; my reading fan tell me that they appreciate the humor in itself and also recognize that the placing of the humor releases some of the tension they are feeling for and with the characters at that respective moment. There are, moreover, different kinds of humor.

In Chapter 6 of My Sweetpea: Seven Years and Seven Days, for example, we can see what I call “funny yet sad” humor. Frank, the hero’s father – an alcoholic who treats his wife, Doris, in ways that would make Archie Bunker look like a saint – treats the hero and the heroin and her parents to dinner at a fancy restaurant. When everyone has finished eating and is readying to leave the restaurant, Frank asks everyone to go to the bar so he can treat to a round of drinks. Everyone politely says, “No thank you…” The scene ends, however, in a humorous yet sad way:

As the waitress returned to the table with a stack of Go-Boxes, she neatly set Henry and Susan’s two boxes in front of them. “Frank, thank you again so much for dinner. This was a wonderful opportunity for all of us to finally meet,” Henry cordially said to Frank.

“My pleasure I assure you. And you sure you don’t want to join us in the lounge for a nightcap? I don’t want to have to go into the lounge with Doris and be by myself.”

In Chapter 18 of Fear of Feeling Loved, we can see what I refer to as “funny wording” humor. Marcia, the heroin, and the hero’s (Jack’s) teenage daughter are at Jack’s house trying to be helpful by doing some house painting. While in the garage they accidently spill a can of green paint on Jack’s beautiful Harley Davidson Road King motorcycle. They decide to wait until he returns before trying to clean it up. The scene is described as follows, humorously describing Jack’s reaction:

Twenty minutes later, they heard Jack pull up to the garage. Then they heard the garage door open and the door to Jack’s SUV close. They also heard the faint sounds of the opening and the closing of the backdoor hatch as he got things out. Marcia and Christine looked into each other’s eyes, visualizing Jack entering the garage.

Then they heard it – the sound coming from the garage was somewhere between a coyote howling at the moon and an opera singer passing a stone.

And in Chapter 9 of If Ever Again… It’ll be for Love, we can see what I call “cute” humor. Diane, a divorced single mom, is on a five-day vacation at a resort in Jamaica. She meets the hero, Michael, and before leaving her room to meet Michael for dinner she is missing her little girl terribly, calls home and speaks to Carol (her friend who’s been watching her five-year old daughter, Rebecca) and then Rebecca:

Diane’s heart glowed when she heard Rebecca say, “Hi mommy!” A few minutes later, after hearing Rebecca tell her all about how Teddy was being good and taking care of her, Diane said, “Mommy has to get ready for dinner, so I have to go. I love you, honey. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

“I know,” Rebecca replied excitedly.

“And what are you doing tonight, honey?” Diane nonetheless asked.

“We’re not making a chocolate cake for you.”

“Oh, okay.” Diane could hear Carol laughing.

In my latest pop-psych book, Living Life, Anyway, I have a chapter on “Living Life, Humorously.” Simply said, there are many speed bumps and pot holes in the road of life – the ability to appropriately laugh at them, and at times even at yourself, indeed can make ones life-journey more pleasant, happier and functional, as well as less stressful and more meaningful.

If you have a humorous experience that was simultaneously funny and helpful in some way, please share it.

Bill

E-books, Old Dogs and New Tricks

One of my Christmas presents from my girlfriend, Sharon, was a Kindle e-book reader. Being an “old dog” who for the past half century has been a veracious reader of “tree books,” I approached my enjoyment of e-book-reading suspiciously. To my surprise and delight, however, I have been enjoying my Kindle immensely. Then a couple of weeks ago, I attended an excellent Florida Writers Association “E-book Publishing Workshop” conducted by my friend and fellow writer, Jim Swain, and left with my enthusiasm for e-books ratcheting onward and upward. This is the future!

Regarding some basics, an e-book is an electronic book (also e-book, ebook, digital book) is a text and image-based publication in digital form produced on, published by, and readable on computers or other digital devices. E-books were originally developed by Project Gutenberg, abbreviated as PG, a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to “encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks.” Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, PG it is the oldest digital library. During our Workshop, moreover, Jim mentioned that:

• by 2009, sales of digital books were 2.5% of the book market;
• in September 2010, Publisher’s Weekly announced that sales of e-books in the United States had reached 8.5% of the total book market, representing the only growth segment in the book industry, worldwide; and,
• in November, 2010 Publisher’s Weekly reported that the sale of e-books will reach $1 billion by 2011, and may account for 50% of the total book market by 2015.

This indeed is the future!

My own relatively brief research on e-books revealed numerous websites and assorted information – such as poignant articles on advice and information; copyright resources; e-book compilers, promotions, readers and resellers; e-publisher services and associations; and web publishing. I also enjoyed a very interesting online article on “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write.”

As my fan-base readers know, three of my 27 published books are novels – romance novels involving assorted, pivotal and psychological aspects of loving relationships between a heroin and a hero, and interwoven with family issues, courtship, marriage and divorce, and single-parenting issues, among others, and spiced with wit, humor and what has been described as “subtle steamy sex.” Having the digital rights for such, I worked with an excellent e-book formatter, Michael Campbell, who did a superb job of formatting my three novels into Kindle and e-Pub formats. Then I posted the three novels on the Internet and they now are available from amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com:

· My Sweetpea Kindle NOOKbook

· Fear of Feeling Loved Kindle NOOKbook

· If Ever Again… It’ll be for Love Kindle NOOKbook

You also can see these three novels are now spotlighted on the first page of my Website: http://emenerbooks.com/default.aspx

I invite you to check them out… and remember: if you have a Kindle, you can download a Sample of each of these novels: if you don’t like what you’re reading, no harm, no foul; and if you like what you’re reading, you can purchase them (for about 20% of what they cost in their “tree book” versions).

In closing, let me remind you of something I have said on numerous occasions – verbally as well as in writing – something very pertinent to the essence of this blog:

“Old dogs are capable of learning new tricks…

sometimes it just takes a little longer.”

Ciao for now,

Bill

My New Website -- One among Billions

As many of my blog fans have reminded me, it’s been awhile since I posted a Post. Procrastination and a few softball games and motorcycle rides notwithstanding, over the past few months I have been very busy (e.g., the typical and customary University tasks, the post-publication shepparding of four books published early in 2009, and the writing of the first draft of the 15 chapters of a new, under contract textbook with my co-author, Dr. Bill Lambos). I know many of us in today’s society have redefined the term “multi-tasking,” yet at times my recent multi-tasking felt like it was on steroids. Nonetheless, with the tremendous professional assistance of a good friend and colleague, Ms. Barbara Lofrisco, I now have a new website – new yet still at the same URL: emenerbooks.com. Barb did an excellent job (and as part of our two-person team, I did my job: I asked the many pesky questions such as “How about if…?” “Why? and “Why not?” Hey, somebody had to do it…!)

In doing some recent research for my and Dr. Lambos’ textbook – regarding the impact of electronic technology and the Internet on loving relationships and couples and marriage counseling – I found some interesting data regarding “websites.” First, however, let’s define and discuss the term. For example, according to wikipedia, a website (or “web site”) is a collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are hosted on one web server, usually accessible via the Internet. A web page is a document, typically written in (X)HTML, that is almost always accessible via HTTP, a protocol that transfers information from the web server to display in the user’s web browser. And, all publicly accessible websites are seen collectively as constituting the “World Wide Web.”

The pages of a website can usually be accessed from a common root URL called the homepage, and usually reside on the same physical server. The URLs of the pages organize them into a hierarchy, although the hyperlinks between them control how the reader perceives the overall structure and how the traffic flows between the different parts of the site.

Some websites require a subscription to access some or all of their content. Examples of subscription sites include many business sites, parts of many news sites, academic journal sites, gaming sites, message boards, Web-based e-mail, services, social networking websites, and sites providing real-time stock market data. Because they require authentication to view the content they are technically an Intranet site. And by now you may be thinking about how smart Bill is? (No, not true. Remember, I was the one asking Barb the pesky questions.)

According to about.com, in 2005, Google reported they indexed 8,058,044,651 web pages on the Internet. This did not include the millions of pages they did not index. Today, the number of Google-indexed pages is estimated to be closer to 9 billion and thousands of new websites go live every single day (like mine did last night). Royal Pingdom reports that it was 6 years from when the first website appeared in December 1990 before the Internet had 100,000 websites. In 2008, Royal Pingdom estimated there were more than 162 million websites (not web pages). Yikes!

I’ll be back soon with another Post. And in the meantime, to help you find my new website among the 162 million others, here’s a link to it: emenerbooks.com.

Enjoy!

Bill