Managing Relationships in Turbulent Times

2012-01-16T14:17:00.001-08:00

Three Keys To Achieving Your New Year’s Resolutionsby Stephen MartinNow that the new year has arrived, many people are thinking about changes they want to make so that they can be happier or more effective — or just better people.A new year seems like a good time to begin assessing the coming 12 months, just like midlife is a good time to assess how you are doing with your life. New Year’s resolutions are common in our society and they can be very effective in producing change.So what changes do you want to produce this year? Do you have financial goals? Relationship issues you want to explore and change? Or are there dark sides to your nature that need to be examined, cared for and nurtured into a healthier place?New Year’s resolutions usually fail because most people do not give the goals and objectives much thought. They are merely a passing fancy. “I want to lose weight.” “I want to make more money.” The trouble with these types of statements is that they have no depth of intention, no specific details, no thoughtfulness or determination to produce results. It becomes like people buying lottery tickets and fantasizing they will win big and end all their financial troubles. Good plans must have character. They have intention, procedures, insight and follow-through.First, you must know what you want to achieve. That can often be hard, especially if you prefer to live in the moment and not plan for the future. Goals must be realistic, not pie-in-the-sky wishes. Remember, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Make certain you have achievable goals that are measurable and realistic.Second, you must establish measurable steps that will carry you towards your ultimate goal. If you want to make more money, define the small steps that will lead to achievements along the way towards the ultimate goal; that way you can measure your progress. Once some small progress is made, the goal begins to have character and it gains momentum. Most goals aren’t achieved because they are too broad and too unrealistic, and there’s no plan of action to reach the end result.Finally, achieving resolutions requires visualization of the results and the unity of the unconscious and conscious mind working in harmony to produce the result you want. Always remember that the unconscious is the most powerful part of our consciousness. Setting the unconscious on course requires visualization, affirmations and daily meditation towards the success you want. No easy task. And that is precisely why most people fail in their resolutions. They do not have the determination or follow-through to achieve the objectives they think they want.So if you want to succeed this year with goals and objectives, make certain they are measurable and clear, that you have small goals to achieve before the big goal is reached, and that you work every day with both your conscious and especially your unconscious mind to achieve what you want for your life. Stephen Martin is a marriage and family therapist in Moss Beach. He has practiced on the Coastside for over 30 years. He can be reached at 650-726-1212 or by email at stephen@healmarriage.com. His website, www.healmarriage.com, offers more information.

2012-01-15T18:13:00.001-08:00

Psychology Today published chapter 5 of my book "The Everything Guide to a Happy Marriage".
Check out the article and the chapter.
Also take the free marriage test at my web site www.healmarriage.com.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/awakening-psyche/201201/how-not-ruin-marriage-veteran-counselors-ten-rules-fair-fighting

Marriage is like a three-legged race.

2010-07-15T21:22:00.001-07:00

When I was a child I remember picnics where we ran the three-legged race. Two people had their middle legs attached, and the objective was to run in unison with your middle legs tied together, so that between the two of you the couple had three legs. The race required coordination so the couple ran together in harmony. It was not an easy task, but eventually the couple learnt how to run together by coordinating their bodies as one.

Marriage requires a similar skill. Marriage is a team effort, where the two of you are stronger than each alone. A good marriage can be defined as a union where two people are stronger as a couple, than as two separate individuals. If however, the two are divisive, and competitive with each other, you weaken the team. And thus a poor marriage is where two are worse for being a couple, than being a coordinated team.

The secret to running as a three-legged team is collaboration. Being critical of your partner only slows the team down. It is like your right hand hitting your left hand and pretending your body is not hurt. When you attack your partner, you attack yourself. If after running a three-legged race, you lose and criticize your partner for not helping, you are guaranteeing that the team will fail. Better to look at the problems that caused you as a team to fail, than criticizing your partner individually. In a three-legged race you either win together or you lose together. So too in marriage. You either both succeed, or you both fail. Blaming your partner for a marriage failure is like the left leg criticizing the right leg for not winning the race. It may make the left leg feel better, but it will not remedy the failure.

Marriage is not for everyone. Some people prefer to be single than to work together as a team. Unfortunately we as a society have pathologies singleness. We assume single people are lonely, unhappy and looking for a marital partner. This is simply immature, excessively romantic and idealistic. I know many people who are happier as an individual than as a couple, and assuming this is unnatural for humans is ridiculous.

If you wish to be married, then you must work at becoming a team. You must learn how to be a couple, as two people have to learn how to run a three-legged race as one. The key to running a three-legged race is to move your combined middle feet together as a unit, not separately as an individual. This requires coordination, a spirit of teamwork, and patience as you learn how to support each other rather than criticize and tear each other down.

All team sports require the individuals give up most of their personal ego for the benefit of the team. For example, on a football team, it is imperative for a quarterback to be blocked by his front line. Every successful quarterback always congratulates his front line when they win, and when they lose they are very discrete about criticizing in public their team members. Successful football teams work together as a group. With group sport teams, they all succeed or they all fail together.

Marriage is the same as team sports. Team is the essence of marital success. The team cooperates, coordinates and collaborates. In so doing they either succeed together or they fail in their mission as a team.

Communication is difficult to achieve

2010-07-15T21:22:00.000-07:00

Effective Communication is Complicated.
Stephen Martin, MS.MFT.

“What we have here is a failure to communicate”…….so goes the most famous line from the movie Cool Hand Luke.

Communication should be simple, right? Perhaps if we are thinking of the communication of simple facts, but when it comes to emotions and aspects of a personal relationship, communication is in fact extremely difficult.

When humans develop an intimate relationship they never consider how difficult communication really is. Most of us expect our communication system to be easy, uncomplicated and rarely misunderstood. In reality, good communication is a skill the majority of people never acquire. And then, we wonder why other people misunderstand us so often.

In my experience listening to couples attempting to communicate with each other in couples therapy, the number one reason people misunderstand each other is because of what therapists call ‘projection’.

Simply stated, projection is the taking of our own attitudes and feelings, view points and emotions and believing because that is how we feel then other people we are communicating with will feel the same way. In other words, we unconsciously assume everyone sees the world just as we do.

Not so. We are all unique and none of us has the same experiences as anyone else. This requires we understand that everyone we talk with does not think and feel what we do, that in fact taking our thoughts and helping another understand them is very complicated and often misunderstood.

The largest arena I see this dysfunction is in the belief that our partner is criticizing us, when they are not. What happens is we are actually critical of ourselves and assume because we are critical of ourselves, so are other people, especially loved ones. We then attack these people for feeling the way we feel ourselves about ourselves.

Now that is a mouthful. But let me give an example. Perhaps you have poor self esteem. Meaning, you do not value yourself accurately, but have negative images of yourself. Because you feel this way about yourself, you will often read other people as feeling the same way about you, when in reality they do not. But because we are so invested in believing others view us negatively, we assume the worst when in reality we ourselves feel badly about ourselves and assume everyone else does as well.

This continually occurs in therapy. People believe their partner sees them in a negative light, when if checked out by an impartial therapist, we find their partner does not believe what they negatively believe about themselves. It takes much time and is slow hard work to correct these misconceptions. But in truth many couples project their own negative feeling about themselves onto their partner and believe they are hostile towards them, when in truth it is our own thinking we are doing battle with.

The only way out of projection is to ask and then believe what your partner really feels about you. Just because you feel negatively about yourself, does not mean they do as well. However, the game of projection is so powerful it takes many sessions to correct these misconceptions. And it can only be done if you analysis what you feel about yourself, and then checking out with your partner what they really feel about you.

This is not easy work. Thus many couples fight about issues that are not real; they are projections from one party onto their partner. Once you see how this works in human relationships, you can begin by questioning yourself first before you project your own feelings onto your partner. Then, communication while more complex has a chance of being more accurate and the fighting can begin to slow down.

2009-03-04T17:16:00.000-08:00

THE DAY I FELL OUT OF THE SKY.

Or

The Near Death Experience of Worldwide Capitalism and what we all can learn from this financial crisis.

In 1993 I learnt how to fly off the cliff’s at Fort Funston, San Francisco with a paraglider. A parachute with a built in harness that one sits in while riding the wind along the Pacific Oceans cliffs. What a thrill. To fly like a bird. To become totally one with the experience. This was what the Buddhists call living in the present moment. The excitement was so intense; there is no time to think of anything but what I was doing right NOW.
I had skied for many years at Lake Tahoe. Beginning in 1969 at Mt. Rose, I learnt on the bunny slopes. Eventually I advanced to the black diamond areas. But as with most experiences, after many years of skiing, I grew bored and decided to find a replacement that would take me to new dimensions, new heights, with new thrills.
Paragliding is flying without wings. You ride the wind along the cliffs turning the paraglider with hand held straps. Soaring like a bird, I felt I was in heaven. And in a sense I was. Until, on Memorial Day 1993 I hit turbulence and my paraglider stalled, and I fell out of the sky.
I was seventy feet up in the air, and the wind blew my parachute back off the cliffs into the place where there is not wind. A place of no wind is hard to conceive. Wind, like water has a predictable path. You can see water as it moves downhill. You cannot see the wind as it follows its predictable flow like water finding the path of least resistance.
Back twenty feet from the cliffs I entered the dangerous calm. As soon as I entered this space my paraglider collapsed as the air that kept me aloft left the paraglider. I instantly fell 70 feet onto my back landing in a bed of ice plant. I recall the turbulence before the fall. I do not recall the fall. The next moment I was lying on the ground falling to earth doing spinal cord injury to my body as the disc between C-6 and C-7 exploded onto my spinal cord when I broke my neck.
I recall my first thought well. “I never anticipated this in my life time. This is something very new for me. What is this about?” I could not move. I was paralyzed. Immediate other paragliders were by my side keeping me still. Someone called 911 and in minutes the ambulance was there to take me to Seton Hospital in South San Francisco.
It was six months before I learnt how to walk again. Kaiser Hospital in Vallejo, California has a state of the art facility for spinal cord injury patients. In Vallejo, I began life all over again. Learning first how to sit upright without fainting, then how to use a wheel chair, and then slowly learning how to walk again. Finally after 6 months I learnt how to live in harmony with my life altering injury and the continual pain associated with incomplete quadriplegia.
I learnt many lessons from this experience but without a doubt the most important lesson was that when confronted with a life altering experience, self pity is self defeating. Somehow I instantly knew that if I climbed down into the self pity pit, no one could come and get me out. Self pity is a deep dark hole in life that only you can extricate yourself from. Not only that, but self pity gets old and boring to you and your friends and family. If you sing the song of poor me for too long, you will end up friendless. Besides, you cease learning what is always present within life’s major lessons when stuck in self pity.
Years later I came to learn that the word Nirvana means “place of no wind”. What I now know is that with this accident I visited Nirvana, the place of no wind. In that magical place of no wind (Nirvana), the paraglider collapsed, and I came crashing down to earth in my fall from the sky.
Like all survivors of near death experiences, the catastrophe was also my greatest blessing. I learnt lessons I could not have leant any other way. I know this because until I broke my neck and produced spinal cord injury, my thinking was very different. This was life altering. This was a life lesson given to me in seconds that enabled me to change my entire view of life. Even my mother acknowledges that this experience changed my personality. Instantly, life long issues vanished. I began anew.
Every crisis has within it an enormous opportunity. The economic disaster the entire capitalistic world is currently going through is a near death experience of capitalism. This is our once in a life time event. It is being compared to the great depression. Maybe it shall be worse, maybe it shall be as bad, but either way, experts tell us this is our 1930 experience happening to us in 2008.
Now we collectively will change. For many it feels like the end of economic prosperity. For many it is joblessness and then possible homelessness. Everyone is affected. No one is immune or safe. For the optimist, it is however an opportunity to change our lives and live in harmony with the new economic situation that has been delivered to the entire capitalistic planet. This is our once in a life time experience to change. Like all catastrophes, this is too rich an experience to allow ourselves the feelings of self pity. Now we will all learn what we are supposed to learn from this financial crisis. We shall all be different when this is complete, just as the generation that went through the great depression was permanently affected by that great event.
We do not yet know what is really happening. No one knows. No economist, no prophet, no magician, no politician, no President. We are all flying solo, and we are in the midst of a major event that will support us all to become different than we have been before.
This is our collective Nirvana. This is our visitation of the place with no wind. This is our once in a life time chance to change. This is our collective fall from the sky. And when it has passed, we shall all know why this has happened and we shall all be different than we were before this occurred. 2008 was the beginning of our collective near death experience.

Divorce may end a marriage, it should never end a family

2009-01-31T13:44:00.000-08:00

Death ends a life; it does not end a relationship. Divorce ends a marriage; it does not end a family. Upon death the relationship continues to live inside the living. Upon divorce, the family lives on while the parents separate from their children.
No family escapes the pain and damage of a divorce. I teach a workshop that teaches how that damage can be limited.All divorce creates trauma for children, just as all war creates PTS (Post Traumatic Stress) for all who fight in battle.
Your children are wounded by your divorce. How deep the wound is depends upon how the divorce is handled.This workshop teaches the skills needed to limit the damage from a divorce. There will be damage, but the extent of the damage can be modified with thoughtful guidance and learnt skills. This workshop is about teaching those specific skills.The end result is to hold the family unit as a team as much as possible while the marriage ends.
Divorce ends a marriage, it never ends a family. Whether the family is severely damaged or the damage is limited is the responsibility of the two parents. This workshop teaches the key principles that limit the damage from a divorce.
E-mail me or call at 650-726-1212 for the next available workshop on this topic.

Divorce ends a marriage; it never end a Family

2009-01-31T13:36:00.001-08:00

Death ends a life; it does not end a relationship. Divorce ends a marriage; it does not end a family. Upon death the relationship continues to live inside the living. Upon divorce, the family lives on while the parents separate from their children. No family escapes the pain and damage of a divorce. I teach a workshop that teaches how that damage can be limited.All divorce creates trauma for children, just as all war creates PTS (Post Traumatic Stress) for all who fight in battle. Your children are wounded by your divorce. How deep the wound is depends upon how the divorce is handled.This workshop teaches the skills needed to limit the damage from a divorce. There will be damage, but the extent of the damage can be modified with thoughtful guidance and learnt skills. This workshop is about teaching those specific skills.The end result is to hold the family unit as a team as much as possible while the marriage ends. Divorce ends a marriage, it never ends a family. Whether the family is severely damaged or the damage is limited is the responsibility of the two parents. This workshop teaches the key principles that limit the damage from a divorce.E-mail me or call at 650-726-1212 for the next available workshop on this topic.

Turning Off The Worry Machine

2008-12-16T19:01:00.000-08:00

The secret to loving and living well is not to allow worry to control your thinking. In other words, not to give into the human emotion we commonly call fear. That is easy to understand. What is truly a riddle is how do humans turn off the worry machine? Saying, “stop worrying” doesn’t do cease worry and fear. Declaring you will stop worrying, is just an argument you have with yourself about this behavior. Worry will not stop with mental will power. So how do you turn the brain worry process off?

Wait. If worry cannot be controlled by thinking “don’t worry”, why attempt to turn it off? Why not laugh at it. Why not be the observer of the machine and watch your own thinking. When you recognize that you are not your mind, you can begin to see the ridiculousness of worry. It is a mind puzzle set up inside the human psyche, similar to the rat chasing the cheese inside a maze in a psychological lab.

To understand that you are not your mind, begin by observing your finger. If you lost that finger, would you still be you? Yes, of course. Then you are not your finger. You use your finger, which is directed by your brain to obey your thoughts. Just as you are not your finger, ultimately you can recognize that you are not your mind. You use your mind, but you are the consciousness using your mind to receive and give your being information.

You are however trapped inside your mind. Some of the information you receive in your mind is wrong. To counteract the capacity to believe fearful thoughts, you can accept that you are not your mind, but that you use your mind, and right now your mind is misbehavioring by worrying. You are the consciousness observing and deciding all that is occurring in your experience. You use your finger and your mind but you are not your finger or your mind. Understanding this is essential to turning off the worry machine. You can only manage the mind with your consciousness.

Now to understand worry. Worry is false thinking. Worry is based upon fear, never is worry based upon love. Worry is a dress rehearsal for a possible disaster created by the mind as a mental preparing for such possibility so you can be ready when disaster strikes. This worry creates stress and does harm to your body. It also interferes with your relationships. Fear is not a healthy basis for good relationships. Love is the better choice over fear and worry.

Worry defines who you are. Those important things you worry about define who your personality is, how you respond, and how you show up in life. If you worry about your appearance, then you place all your attention to that, and everyone knows that about you. When you worry, stress appears, and you move out of harmony with yourselves.

Turning off the worry machine requires you begin to live in the present moment rather than allow your mind to race into the future. When we race into the future and worry, we allow fear to consume us. Pulling your mind out of this futuristic negative thinking, allows you to recognize that worry is a fantasy of the future based upon your personal fears. Living right now you will see that nothing is wrong. But thinking about the future being wrong produces worry, fear and stress. This projection of your thinking into the future is worry or fear. Love is based on living in the present moment. Fear is based upon living in the future.

Truth is worry is a psychological disease that is epidemic within our Western society. The media feeds us information to stimulate fear in the news, movies and other entertainment. This is because fear is a powerful motivator. The media uses fear to sell us the commercials that feeds the fear-producing machine called your thinking or your mind.

Not only does the media feed the public fear, politicians and religious fundamental charismatics also use fear to sell people their products. Be careful of fear mongers. They usually have something to sell you, and once purchased you end up the worse in the deal. They feed you fear and you respond, as they want you to respond.

Worry is a negative aspect of the human mind that can be lessened. To do this, you must accept that you are the consciousness observing the mind’s thoughts. You do not have to yield to the fear and worry. You can choice to laugh at the thoughts and dismiss the topic as soon as your conscious mind will allow the topic to disappear. Always remember the conscious mind is similar to a chattering monkey sitting on your shoulder always judging and always commenting upon everything you observe. The conscious mind is not always your friend. When you worry, you do not love yourself.

Bio at end of article:
Stephen Martin is a marriage and family therapist with offices in Moss Beach in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a 26-year member of the Half Moon Bay Rotary International Club, and past President of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapist, the largest association of marriage and family therapists in the world. Stephen can be reached at (650) 726-1212 or by email at stephen@healmarriage.com.
For a free marital assessment and more articles and information about Stephen Martin go to www.healmarriage.com.

Divorce may end a marriage, it should never end a family

2008-12-09T23:00:00.000-08:00

Make no mistake about it; divorce is a profound emotional, financial and spiritual disruption for all involved. Many men and women consider it one of the worst experiences of their lives. No matter who makes the final decision, both partners are profoundly affected by it.
Usually, the spouse initiating a divorce carries the guilt, while the one not wanting the marriage to end assumes the anger ¾ and the role of victim. Truth is a divorce is produced by both parties, so the guilt and the anger are actually misplaced. When one searches deep enough, you will find the guilt and the anger is towards yourself. It is just simpler to aim your feelings at another target than yourself. In reality, both spouses suffer enormously before, during and after a divorce occurs. No one, not even a therapist, can tell someone if and when she should seek a divorce. The decision is organic, springing forth from the complexities within the relationship that has become incapable of one more adjustment.
Divorce is decided upon many moments before the actual choice occurs, and when it is fully understood both parties have made the choice for the marriage to end. Both parties can feel it coming. It is like a sickness that begins and begins to turn worse. Eventually it becomes fatal, and the marriage dies.
Once upon a time, when a bride and groom stood at the altar and repeated the vow "Until death do us part," they meant it as a lifetime, unbreakable commitment. Divorce laws of the past reflected this black and white meaning, and there was enormous social pressure to stay married. Now, for many, this notion of permanence now seems old fashioned. Putting aside the historical inequities of traditional marriage and property laws that harmed women and children and required reform, there were unforeseen and largely unacknowledged costs that came with the change in the definition of marriage from a permanent to an impermanent union ¾ with consequences that continue to shape the lives of men, women and children today.
Increasingly, the idea of divorce (or the contemplation of divorce as an option) functions as the "solution" for personal unhappiness within marriage. It's also fair to say that divorce as an idea serves as a rationalization used by one or both unhappy spouses for giving up on the commitment they made at the altar. Arguably, this revised concept of marriage as inherently impermanent and divorce as a solution for all things that go wrong in the marriage relationship inflicts a sizeable amount of harm on the husband and wife and, especially, on the children who must face the real, lifelong consequences of the dissolution of the family they hold dear. A bit of history enlightens.
During the 1970s, divorce, and by extension the institution of marriage, went through a major transformation with the introduction of the legal concepts of no fault divorce and community property. Prior to this time, fraud had to be publicly proven in a court of law in front of a judge who would then decide who was "at fault" in the marriage and whether or not to grant the divorce. He could then award custody and make financial dispensation of any and all marital assets. This system of divorce produced shame, and embarrassment and, often, the public ridicule of an entire family. The burden of proving marital fraud in a courtroom became so acrimonious that divorce tore many families irreparably asunder.
No fault divorce allows two people to dissolve a marriage without any evidence of fraud, with the most common, often perfunctory legal reason for divorce now given as irreconcilable differences. In most states, after the impersonal processing of a few official documents, each divorced spouse walks away with half of the marital assets. At first this approach seemed humane as it reduced the disastrous affects associated with the public humiliation of divorce trials. However, it produced other challenging ramifications.

What now appears clear is that after divorce became legally easier and more socially acceptable many people didn’t include the idea of "till death do us a part" in their thinking about the marriage vows. They may have said the same words, but either didn't take them seriously or, didn't think through their implications, leaving millions of husbands and wives psychologically unprepared for the difficult times all marriages bring.
America's divorce rate began rising in the late 1960s and jumped during the '70s and early '80s, as nearly every state enacted no-fault divorce laws. The rate peaked in 1981 at 5.3 divorces per 1,000 people. Since then it has dropped by one-third (The National Center Health Statistics, NCHS).
It seems that many who stood at the altar and spoke the words "until death do us part" meant instead “until this gets too hard, or until I get bored with you and someone better comes along.” This is not to say that the millions of people who married and divorced over the past three decades ¾ including both authors of this book ¾ were being dishonest or deceptive while going through with those marriages and subsequent divorces. What is far more likely is that (with the help of the larger culture) many were deceiving themselves.
Women, since the 1960s have been working in greater numbers and are thus less economically dependent upon men. During this same period women have sought divorces much more frequently than before. The most recent data shows that nearly 70 percent of divorces are female initiated. While economic and legal changes have allowed more women to consider divorce, there are other, strictly emotional dynamics that may be pushing women from simply considering taking this step to going through with it.
Women have a deeper sense of what is possible in an emotional relationship, and with greater independence, many have been less willing to tolerate inadequate marital relationships. Men on the other hand seem more content inside a marriage especially if they are physically cared for by the female whom many have unconsciously come to relate to as mother replacements. Also, in many cases men who are unfamiliar with emotions have permitted the female to carry the emotions for both of them ¾ a burden that can become very difficult for the woman in a marriage.
At the most simplistic level, one which women often find offensive, many men tend to see marriage as an exchange of services. They take out the garbage, take care of the cars, and mow the lawn, while the woman tends to the inside of the house, offers sex and takes care of the children. For many men, this seems like an equal exchange, while women, when asked, tend to see this as too much giving on their part and not enough receiving.

When June and Stan came into therapy, June explained that the giving and the receiving in their marriage were out of balance. They both worked full time, yet June felt the burden of the housework and caring for the children. As the unconscious assumptions of this relationship were further exposed, it appeared that, at first, June gave these gifts without resentment, and Stan was only too happy to receive them. But with the passage of time, June began resenting the imbalance and, as her resentment grew, she began to close down emotionally towards Stan. With this emotional shut down, their sexual lives ceased, and Stan began to store up resentment towards June for withholding sex.
This is the stalemate June and Stan had reached when they began marriage therapy. But, it turns out, the reason they came at all was June's ultimatum to Stan. "Come with me to marriage therapy or I'm leaving you and taking the kids." Stan had to be shocked into seeing the problems in the relationship as real and threatening to the marriage itself. But as Stan was unwilling to go through a divorce, June’s decree that either they went into therapy or she wanted a separation worked to move the relationship towards healing.
The process of marriage therapy eventually helped Stan realize that the shutting down of sex was his responsibility as much as June's. Stan came to realize that June needed emotional satisfaction before she could open up to Stan sexually. He accepted the need to engage in foreplay, something he generally resented and avoided. Slowly Stan learned the harder lesson of how to pay attention to his own feelings, which allowed him to be more receptive to June's. As he became more knowledgeable about emotional connectedness, June became more available to Stan for sexual activity. She felt loved and reassured that Stan cared for her emotionally. With these changes the marriage began the healing process, with all the richness that is available when two people emotionally care about each other’s feelings.

Stan's ignorance of his own internal emotional life is very common. Men often have to learn about emotional connectedness after they get married, while women understand these principles naturally, although some women can be said to feel too much; they can find themselves flooded with emotions. For a marriage to work harmoniously, this imbalance has to change. Often, a wife can teach her husband about emotional satisfaction, and a husband can teach his wife about controlling her emotions when it's necessary to do so. Many men tend to be dismissive of emotions in human beings, and this attitude can make a man unwisely see his wife's emotional display as manipulative, and then harden himself towards her, which is the very thing you do not want to have happen if the marriage is going to improve.
The decision to dissolve a marriage is extremely personal. And while divorce is always a failure, sometimes it's a necessary one. Physical or emotional abuse is the main reason people should seek a divorce. Physical abuse is easy to assess, while emotional abuse is far more subjective. But this type of abuse is real and severely damaging to its victims. Emotional abuse can include one spouse making degrading remarks, being very controlling or emotionally neglecting the other spouse.
If one parent is violent or verbally abusive towards the other, the children will always side with the one who's been hurt. If you are the victim of spousal abuse, your first job is to find a safe place for you and your children. Try to avoid painting the image of the other parent as a perpetrator. This will ensure the children distrust the entire sex of the offending parent. Where a mother has conditioned a daughter to see her father as “evil”, she can grow up to view all men as “evil,” severely limiting her chances of having a good marriage.
Addiction is another extreme, potentially abusive situation. In cases where one spouse is in the grips of an addition to a substance, or to a behavior such as gambling, or sex, and refusing professional help for his addiction, separation or divorce may be necessary for the protection of the spouse and children. Many spouses dealing with an addicted partner find support and suggestions on how to help the addict without endangering themselves from the Al Anon twelve-step program. Associated with Alcoholics Anonymous, these all-volunteer organizations are in every community (check your phone book), and offer their valuable services anonymously and free of charge.
Before you make a decision to divorce your spouse, you should make at least one visit to a marriage and family therapist. Like a dentist is trained to understand what is happening to your teeth, therapists are trained to understand the difficulties within a marriage and family. Seeking outside guidance before making such a large decision is obviously desirable, just as it is better to go to the dentist than take a pair of pliers to extract a tooth from your own mouth because it is painful.

According to the NCHS, the divorce rate for people with higher levels of education has fallen slightly over the past decade, while the number of divorces for those without a college degree has stayed the same. Noted author on marriage, sociologist Stephanie Coontz attributes this difference to education giving people better communication and negotiation skills ¾ both essential for a marriage. Coontz also pointed to studies that show a wife's work outside the home tends to stabilize a marriage.
If you feel the need to divorce your partner but he does not wish this to happen, your first step should be to let your partner know what behavior of his is bothering you, and see if he can change it, and whether you can change your responses. Often, the best way to try to effect such changes, particularly if communication between you has broken down, are through marriage therapy. Better to pull out your own teeth with pliers than take on a divorce without outside guidance and counseling ¾ especially when underage children are involved. Still, the majority of divorces occur without any outside help sort, whether that help comes from a minister, Rabbi, or from a licensed therapist.
Before the legal and social sea changes that fundamentally altered the institution of marriage in the 1970s, unhappy spouses stayed married "for the sake of the children." In the decades since, this view has often been derided and denied as unnecessary, even antiquated. But, as one out of two marriages end in divorce, up to one million children per year experience the trauma of divorce. Only within the past ten years has it become undeniably clear that the negative impact on divorce on these children has been disproportionate (compared to their parents) and dire.
One landmark study on the impact of divorce on adult children conducted by Judith Wallerstein caused major reverberations when it was released in 1999. In it, Wallerstein and her colleagues resoundingly demonstrated that parental divorce caused heretofore unacknowledged emotional and behavioral negative consequences ¾ including mood disorders, school failures and relationship problems ¾ in 25 percent of adult children of divorce who were tracked in many cases into their forties. This was compared to 10 percent of adult children from intact families who experienced these problems.
Judith Wallerstein's study demolished a popular myth advocating the view that it is less harmful for children to experience the "temporary" trauma of divorce than to witness their parents' ongoing marital unhappiness. In reality, the degree of damage to children depends upon the level of unhappiness, or abuse they witness.
A good case can also be made that when children witness divorce they are seeing a harmful example of their parents' failure to keep a commitment. Which is the worse behavior for a child to witness first hand, marital conflict or the avoidance of commitment? Only you can decide, based on your own marriage, and personal experience.
This all assumes under age children are involved in the marriage. When two adults without children come to such a volatile crossroads in a relationship, the bar is obviously much lower. Personal growth can be valid reason for a divorce when one of the parties believes he has worked extremely hard to bring improvement to a marital relationship and is frustrated by a lack of effort by his spouse or a lack of results. But if children under eighteen are involved in your decision, the decision should be examined with much more care and concern for the children's welfare.
If there are under age children involved, perhaps other arrangements can be made so the marriage can continue until the youngest child reaches eighteen. You may be remain husband and wife and parent your children while maintaining quasi-independent lives. One of you may have an additional residence. Remember there are no longer any or many hard and fast rules for marriage. Each man and woman create most rules independently in a marital relationship. Seeking outside therapy can assist you find other ways to remain in relationship for the purpose of keeping your family intact until the children are older.
Once the youngest child is 18 years of age, any married person who has put up with a failed marriage should be entitled to follow his own inner calling and end the marriage, if he so desires. To take this idea to its extreme, perhaps all marriage licenses should expire upon the 18th birthday of the youngest child in a family. The couple that then wishes to continue being married would have to formally renew their marriage license, and reinvest in their union for the second half of their lives. With such a decision, perhaps a re-marriage ceremony and community celebration should take place.
This perspective, although radical, is presented to underscore the physic and practical benefits ¾ to you an your children ¾ of treating your original marriage vow as both real and permanent. The completion of the commitments you made when you married and especially after you created a child together contains an integrity that is often overlooked, worse, scorned as "old fashioned" in today's culture. Once again, underage children are the real victims of a divorce. It is their well-being that must be considered before the decision to divorce is made final, or before a family is dissolved.
Every marriage has good and bad times. Some don't make it through one year. Many others succumb at the aptly named "seven-year itch." If you thought your marriage had made it through these familiar pressure points, but now find it very troubled, first be aware that you're probably not thinking clearly right now. Emotions, from hurt and anger to grief or fear can be overwhelming. So how should you make the difficult emotional decision to divorce if you are currently weighing the possibility?
One deceptively simple method is to write out a list of the positive and negative aspects of your marriage and carefully weigh the pros and the cons. Put all the reasons for ending a marriage on one side of the page, and the reasons to stay married on the other side. Then attempt to give a weight or point value to each point, from one to ten, so that you rationally see what the choices are, how important each is, and why you ranking it thusly. The fact that your husband is a great father to your children might be given a point value of 10 and lead the "pro" column, while his inability to share his emotions may receive a six and go in the "con" column.
The idea is to slow down the decision-making process behind a divorce. When divorce is frivolously chosen, your experience of commitment is shortchanged. It is a dangerous romantic fantasy to believe that a good marriage is an easy one, free of conflict. The opposite is often true. A marriage that looks calm and peaceful on the outside can be stagnant, or even rage-filled on the inside. A good marriage provides a safe container for conflicts to be worked on and resolved. The only way to create this safe container is for both of you to make a rock solid commitment to keep working at it ¾ especially when the times get tough. It's not that divorce should be abandoned. Just because it is slowed down, does not mean divorce should be or could be taken away as an option.

Temporary separations can help a troubled marriage. The problems and the stress they cause can be mitigated with a little space from your togetherness. A separation can provide new insight into what is valuable and what cannot be tolerated in the marriage. Because many people fear that a separation always ends in divorce, they avoid it as an option. But many couples gain new vitality from spending some time apart from each other. Think of it as a trial divorce. Then you will better know what is best for you, your family and your children. In Stephen Martin's 30-year marriage therapy practice, roughly half the couples who tried trial separation got back together after six months. A trial separation may also help expose the real, perhaps hidden issue underlying one partner's desire for a divorce. For example, an issue that frequently leads to divorce is the deep unhappiness within one of the partners in a marriage. Often, that unhappiness is self-created, but, while living with his wife, the one feeling unhappy cannot completely understand his reasons for it. By the point at which he is considering divorce, he could be projecting that unhappiness on his partner. He may believe that if he were no longer married to her, he would find happiness.
If this is the case, it's best for the one feeling deep unhappiness to perhaps spend some time living alone, and/or seek individual therapy to see if the problem can be corrected within himself, thus making a divorce unnecessary. If, on the other hand, the problem is toxicity within the relationship, and he is convinced that the toxicity cannot change, perhaps a divorce is the only reasonable alternative.
Divorce ends a marriage, but should it end a family? Everyone needs the safety and support of a family, and when it is torn apart by a divorce, the consequences can be disastrous. In order to minimize the damage to the children should a divorce become necessary, marital issues between Mom and Dad should be kept out of view from the rest of the family. The relationship between two married people is distinct from the relationship between a mother and a father of a family. Wise parents who need to divorce know that divorce does not end a family, and they struggle to it together while they let go of their marriage.
To facilitate this, each parent should obviously refrain from telling the children her personal grievances with the other parent. Unfortunately this rarely happens as emotions spill over and inside the emotional disruption, parents tend to complain about the other parent in front of the children. Immature parents either consciously or unconsciously wish to force the children to make choices between mother, and a father. Nothing can disrupt a child’s life more than siding with one parent over the other, and to have the parents encourage this alienation from one parent. Children never want to choose. When this happens it inevitably is the result of either parent forcing this decision, unless the children witness extreme abuse.
When telling children of a coming divorce it is best to have the child see her own therapist to handle the emotional disruption she is experiencing. Give as few details as you can, and only answer questions she asks. Attempt to have children remain non judgmental about the coming divorce. Teach them it is not their fault. Most children blame themselves when a divorce occurs. If only they had been better children, their parents would not need to divorce. Whatever the situation in a family or stepfamily, divorce is never a child's fault; it is the failure of two adults to get along as husband and wife.
Let your children know you will always be a father and a mother to them, that what is changing is simply the role of husband and wife. Again, the family is not divorcing; the husband and the wife are changing their roles inside the marriage, not inside their family.
After a divorce, emotionally mature parents try to get along as parents, and let their marriage go. This means your conversations as parents should (at first) be limited to just the children and their well-being. Sensible parents know that you never divorce a child, even if you have to divorce the child's other parent.
The key to success in this difficult transition is making a distinction between your roles as husband and wife and separating those roles from mother and father. Healthy families navigate a divorce by understanding the different roles, and never destroy the role of the other parent in the eyes of their children. If you need to complain about your ex, never do it with the children. Find friends or seek professional guidance to grieve the loss of the marriage and release the anger of a divorce. Usually a divorce will take at least three years to heal from. Allow yourself the time to grieve, be angry, to feel hurt and disappointed, but keep this from your children. Children never want to choose between good parents…. they always want their parents to get along and love each other. Sometimes it takes a divorce to accept the other parent of your children. If this is the case, and you've tried many different approaches, unsuccessfully, to save the marriage, perhaps the divorce was necessary. Better to get along as Mom and Dad than hate each other as husband and wife.

Should your marriage be saved?

2008-12-09T22:56:00.000-08:00

Should Your Marriage Be Saved?

One of the most troubling questions I encounter during the first session of therapy with couples is "Should we work on our marriage or should we end it?"

My answer is always the same. "I assume if you have taken the time to call me and discuss this question with a marriage therapist then their answer is 'yes.' Otherwise, you would be seeing a divorce lawyer."

Never go to a marriage therapist and expect them to answer this question any other way. To do otherwise, is like going to a doctor and asking whether or not you should live, or give up and die. A doctor is in the business of saving lives. It's the same with a marriage therapist who assists couples in repairing marriages. I never presume a couple wants to end their commitment, and let their marriage die.

Divorce is often a lack of imagination about how to live in a committed relationship. The real feeling that exists behind a couples' statement that they wish to end their marriage often is, “We are exhausted by trying the same old patterns and encountering the same failure. Can you give us any ideas how we can be different in this relationship?”

Now that is an excellent place to begin. So lets explore the possibilities.

After thirty years of doing marriage counseling, I have found that, in most cases, within thirty minutes of listening to a couple, I can see what needs to change in a marriage. Of course, most couples are not ready to hear what I can see after listening to them for just thirty minutes.

They first want to complain, release their anger, and express their frustration. Then, perhaps, they're ready to hear what is needed to repair the damage.

Marriage counseling is not rocket science. It involves a basic comprehension of couple dynamics and the skills to help the couple see what it is they need to do differently in order to heal their marriage.

Although marriage counseling may not be a complicated process, I would say that marriage is the most complicated human relationship I know of. It is more complex than parent / child, employee / employer, or any other family relationship. Why is this so?

It's complicated because, in order for it to work, the modern institution of marriage must be an equal relationship. In the work place, democracy doesn’t rule. The boss is in charge. In the parent child relationship, the parents are in charge, or they should be. As many parents have found out the hard way, setting boundaries for one's children is the only parenting style that enables children to feel secure enough to become responsible, self-confident adults.

But in marriage, the two partners need an equal relationship. If your relationship is not equal, it will breed a power struggle. When one spouse holds more power than the other, eventually that relationship must come unglued. The reason is simple. An imbalance in the distribution of power will create disrespect and passive aggressive behavior. The more powerful spouse will disrespect the weaker one, and the weaker one will express their hostile feelings in a passive-aggressive manner.

This imbalance of power is at the heart of most marital problems. It affects the self-esteem of both individuals in the relationship and results in the one who is weaker sabotaging the one who is more powerful.

Many marriages of this kind are held together by the negative use of power. For example, traditionally men have the power over money, while women have the power over sex. As a result, in marital therapy, sex and money are the two most disputed issues. But, most declared problems are not the real problem. The real issues lie under the surface and have never been deeply examined. The couple must look beyond their money and sex issues to see the underlying power struggle that has created their dsyfunctionality. Until they see this deeper dynamic, they will go around in circles fighting and struggling, complaining and hurting each other, but never really knowing what is at the route of their problems.

In my experience, most couples blind themselves to their real issues, preferring to instead fight about issues that are merely symptoms of these underlying issues. Until the real issues are addressed, the couple will never heal.

Enter the competent marriage therapist. He should see the underlying dynamic of a marriage and have the experience to guide the couple to heal their original wounds.

Not getting to the bottom of the real issues is like the story of the princess and the pea under the mattress. No matter how many mattresses she placed on top of the original mattress, until the pea is found and removed, will she not be able to sleep. Good marriage therapy finds the pea under the mattresses, and teaches the couple how to remove the disruptions that are causing their strife.

Stephen Martin is a marriage and family therapist in private practice since 1980 with offices in Moss Beach and San Francisco. He has served as President of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapist, the largest association of marriage therapists in the world. You can read Stephen's blog at his web site www.healmarriage.com or he can be reached at (650) 726-1212, or by e-mail at stephen@healmarriage.com