Alternatively, you may be asking “How do I save my marriage?”
Having worked with the military, crime investigators, brain surgeons, and dignitaries, one thing
they all had in common was they wanted to save their relationship. And one thing they all
agreed on is that relationships are way harder than even their hardest jobs. Who knows
how to deal with problems in a relationship? Women and men have instinctually
programmed different underlying needs. And even if there are no gender differences, how
can two people coming from two different pasts and histories ever really understand
each other and get along? I suppose it begs the cheesy old question, “Can’t we just all get
along?”
The answer is yes and only under certain conditions. One you must be willing to be
committed. It’s not going to be easy. You and your partner will want to give up at times. You
and your partner will at some or multiple points hurt each other emotionally or otherwise. It
takes grit and being willing to get past the pain points to get to the other side of things.
That’s one thing older generations, I’m talking 1950’s and earlier were better at, for better
or for worse. Now that doesn’t include being physically harmed or endangered by your
partner, if that’s going on you should definitely seek wise counsel and safety right away.
But for the emotional hurts, for most couples who are committed a way can be found to
overcome and atone for the hurts and love can be born again.
The second condition is you have to be willing to let go of your ego. That is the personal
defensiveness and self-focused viewpoint in your relationship. For emotional intimacy to
be and stay alive in a long-term relationship, that is past the honeymoon stage, and the two-year bonuses on oxytocin that you may have gotten from each baby you had, that makes
you feel high and in love, there needs to be a becoming one process. And that requires
generously seeing past yourself and actually seeing things from your partner’s eyes. Not
just from their perspective, but actually from their experience.
So if you are willing to be committed and willing to let go of your ego focus. There is a third
requirement to save your relationship. That is learning to communicate in an emotionally
intimate way. Now I don’t know about you but the only thing I learned about
communication in relationships growing up was that whoever is loudest and can argue the
longest wins. So I had to learn the skills of emotionally intimate communication when I had
relationship issues of my own as a licensed therapist. Talk about embarrassing right?
Surprisingly, they don’t teach how to do it properly in counseling grad school or in the
training for becoming a marriage and family therapist. So I had to venture out and figure
out how to do it on my own. And now it’s one of the things I love most about sharing with
couples and people. It involves being mindful of our own projections on our partner and
vice versa and being able to reflect to our partner their point of view in a nonreactive,
compassionate way sans ego. And being able to help our partners understand that we hear
their deeper underlying needs and that we want to help them fulfill those deeper human
needs. There is much more to the topic of emotionally intimate communication. Keep an
eye out for my future articles and talks on the topic. In the meantime, be gentle with
yourselves and each other. Stay tuned for more.