Should I surrender or should I fight on?

Should I surrender or should I fight on?

by Stephen Martin, MFT.

In May 1988 my father died of prostate cancer. His last words before his consciousness left his body were, “I’m distressed. Do I surrender, or do I fight on?” What a wonderful to express the greatest dilemma we all face. We face death every day but when death is at the door, it becomes paramount to examine. 

When do we surrender, and when do we fight on?

The Eastern philosophy tends to guide humans into acceptance, not into struggle. Surrender does release stress, and stress is essential for change. Change is traumatic. In times of change we cannot surrender, we have to fight on.

Of course there are two ways of fighting. Violence has been mankind’s default position for mastery over others and self-defense. However, nonviolence became popular with Gandhi and he worked magic forcing the British to leave India in the 20th century.

After Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King succeeded with nonviolence. Of course, such leaders were excessively persecuted, jailed and spied upon. Martin Luther King was placed in jail over 100 times just for asking for equality whinin this country, which promised liberty and justice for all. But in the original U.S. Constitution, those promises didn’t apply to women, slaves, homosexuals or non-land-owning white males.

For my father, whether or not to continue to live on was his dilemma. Fighting on was difficult, as he was at the end stages of prostate cancer. He was a dead man walking. So at the end he mused aloud about whether to slip quietly into that long deep sleep of separation from his body and consciousness, or stay in the human form and fight on.

I believe Alcoholics Anonymous has the most accurate answer to this question. It’s called the Serenity Prayer, and the original version is often attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr.

"God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change; 
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time; 
enjoying one moment at a time; 
accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; 
taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it; 
trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life 
and supremely happy with Him
forever in the next.
Amen."

What a beautiful description of dilemmas such as my father’s. The conflict is within us all — when to fight for change, and when to surrender to what is.

Stephen Martin is a marriage and family therapist with offices in Moss Beach. He can be reached at 650-726-1212 or by email at stephen@healmarriage.com. His website is www.healmarriage.com.

The Winter of our Days

The Winter of our Days

 

by Stephen Martin, MFT.

 

I know, I know.

·      “Growing old is not for sissies.”

·      “I have no energy.”

·      “My entire body aches.”

 

Yes, we have all heard the disconcerting comments about aging. And of course they are one side of the aging process. What is there to look forward to in the winter of our days?

 

The lessons we have learned are not truly formed until we reach the season of winter. First comes spring, a new birth. Then comes summer, the young adult phase. This is followed by autumn, the adult preparation time necessary for us to face the winter of our days.

 

Without spring, summer and autumn, winter would have no meaning. Winter can only be understood within the context of four seasons. It is the winter that it all begins to make sense and we begin to learn to finally live with ourselves.

 

Self-acceptance begins to sprout, and we feel more joy and love for others than we have ever felt before. It is not until the winter that we realize that every day really counts because there are fewer of them before we reach the end. The capacity to living in the “now” is one of life’s major lessons, and without that capacity, we will never truly with at peace with ourselves. For it is living in the present moment that allows everything to be sharper and clearer. We learn how to focus and truly enjoy “now” rather than multitasking and ending up doing nothing while going around in circles.

 

Winter is also a time for solitude and self-reflection — not so much solitude that we become fearful of other people, but enough that the time to think is completely available. It is during winter that the conclusions to all our stories finally arrive and the plot of our lives finally makes sense.

 

In winter, we as humans are less hostile. They say it is testosterone in the male that creates war. With age, testosterone decreases in the male. Maybe with aging we finally wake up to the utter stupidity of war, and the destructive competition where others are hurt just so we can feel like champions. Older people are nicer people. They are not looking for a fight.

 

The best part of the winter of our lives is spending time with our friends and family. Most people give and receive such love and support in their families and circle of friends. In winter, many of us find grand parenting. Being a grandparent is said to be one of life’s greatest joys.

 

In winter the concept of love is completed. Love is the fascination of poets, writers and singers. I have felt love for others and I have felt it from others. I assume everyone else has had the same experience. We cannot physically see this thing we call love, but we can feel it. It can motivate us to action. It can cause us great pain. Love is the ultimate glue that holds a group of people together, while war and fear are what drive us apart.

 

As we age, we generally yearn for peace. Gone are the days of outrage. Gone are the days of war. Old soldiers fade away and furious males become gentler.

 

It is in the winter of our days that it all finally comes together, it all begins to make sense, and we finally face the wall where our consciousness and our bodies are separated.

Why Good Marriages Fail?

                                    WHY GOOD MARRIAGES FAIL:

                                        

                                          Stephen Martin, MS. MFT.

Having spent the past 32 years working as a therapist guiding marriages, I have watched too many good marriages turn sour. I continually ask myself what causes this disastrous turn of events. No one gets married thinking it will fail, yet the divorce rates are too high.

My observation is that three causes are the predominant reasons for the failure of otherwise good marriages. If these three aspects of a marriage are understood and negotiated, marriages can escape the disaster of a divorce. If however, you let your relationship drift into neglect, this could destroy your relationship whether you get a divorce or not. Many couples elect to have an unhappy, lonely marriage rather than find a solution to their issues or get a divorce.

Why do so many marriages fail? First observation is that married couples begin to lose sight of their common purpose, the reason they got married in the first place. The couple had solid reasons for their marriage when it began. Most people use their wisdom and intuition to select a partner. Some might call this intuition romance, but romance alone will not sustain a marriage for a lifetime. With the passing of time and the inevitable growing apart that all marriages experience, you can lose sight of your original purpose for marriage. Some people accept divorce as a natural conclusion to losing their purpose. Others, who wish to continue their marriages, fight to regain that purpose and in so doing they can negotiate their way back into harmony instead of the continuing power struggle that occurs when two people are not working as a team, but rather are competing with each other and fighting most of the time.

If you have children together that is an excellent reason to stay married. Family is the original noble purpose for marriage. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, it was fashionable to get divorced and assume the children would be better off if they witnessed their parents happy rather than unhappily married. The research doesn’t support that conclusion. Children are often emotionally crippled by divorce if they are less than 18 years of age. Children crave security, especially in an unsafe world. If their parents cannot work out their problems, how can they imagine they can work out their issues? Children are the silent victims of divorce, and the current research proves this to be true.

Secondly, the couple loses the gentle art of communication and begins to be nasty and dishonorable towards each other. Just look at the two party systems in politics in the USA today. There is not gentle communication in politics. It starts out mean and nasty and only gets worse. Political parties have become enemies. Politics is now an internal war. If America was a marriage, it would need to be divorced. Both parties are equally responsible for this behavior. They blame the other and refuse to compromise, while saying they are both willing to co-operate. This is not good for the country, and is disaster for a marriage. 

Marriage requires a gentle loving communication system, not a make no compromise position that the current political system has descended into. Marriage requires romance and civility, kindness and respect. Romance isn’t a one way street. Men require romance and civility just as much as women. Something is rotting inside politics today and we all know it. If you run your marriage the way politics is run, you will have nothing left but hatred, anxiety and chaos. Politics is for the political junkies to watch, not quiet, civil people who want harmony and respect in their lives. Politics will bring you emotional pain and fatigue, and so will a marriage that uses the tactics of politics within their marriages.

Third, marriages start to lose trust and belief in the sincerity, compassion and the love of their partner. This distrust begins in small areas and over years can develop into complete distrust. But once distrust sets in, it is like termites infecting your house. Termites are everywhere, and if infected, your home will need a tent with heavy duty chemicals to remove the millions of infesting insects. Trust is hard to re-establish. It requires honest communication and complete transparency between the couple. But without trust, marriages will eventually fail.

So, if you wish to have a good marriage, go in the opposite direction to politics as it is currently practiced. Find and renew your common team vision as a marriage, speak kindly and lovingly with each other, and compromise with honest communication to rebuild the trust in your partnership. Finally, leave politics to the politicians and the political junkies and rather than follow their example, use them as a lighthouse deacon warning of dangerous rocks that can ship wreck your marriage.

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.

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.

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

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.