Healthier Marriages Posts

Love and relationship give real meaning to our lives. We find our fulfillment in giving and receiving love. As we have talked about before, it takes time to understand how to love our partners well. It can sometimes be equally difficult to receive love from others, to actually believe that we are worthy of love. There have been many messages from childhood from those we have loved as well as cultural messages both to men and to women that make it difficult to accept love and to let it nourish us. These same messages make it challenging to genuinely love and respect ourselves. Loving ourselves is a prerequisite for loving others well. For the next week, look at love as presenting us with a never ending prospect for self transformation and as the core spiritual issue of our humanity. Enjoy the view and ask yourself what change you are being nudged to make today.

Love and relationships give real meaning to our lives. We find our fulfilment both in giving and receiving love. It can be seen as the core spiritual issue of humanity. As we have talked about before, it takes time and effort to understand how to love our partners well. It can sometimes be equally difficult to receive love from our partner and others, to actually believe that we ourselves are worthy of love. There have been many messages from childhood as well as cultural messages both to men and to women that make it difficult to accept love and to let it nourish us. We get these same messages from ourselves and that critical voice inside today. Additionally, these messages make it challenging to genuinely love and respect ourselves. As loving ourselves is a prerequisite for loving others well, this is a cycle we want to be continuously growing out of. For the next week, look at love as presenting you with a never ending prospect for self transformation. Enjoy the view and ask yourself what change in the area of love are you are being nudged to make today.

In the past week I was privileged to go away and do some soul care for a week. It was very renewing for me! During the week we spent a little time looking at our personality preferences and I was reminded of my training and fascination with this when I first began my career. Understanding and self acceptance is one of the most important aspects of being a good partner in relationship. If  you would like to understand what I am talking about in more detail, you can use this link to give you the basics of the Meyers Briggs Personality Preferences which is based on Jungian theory. I think this test is the easiest to see where you are and where your spouse might be. This is a good link to send you to other information on personality as well. The link is www.developandgrow.com/lifecoach/blog/free-on-line-myers-briggs-personality-tests. If you would like to go straight to the test itself, use this link www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp.

How is this helpful to couples? Once you understand your own preference type, you can begin to see the gifts and the challenges that you bring to your relationship. For instance, how you want to style your life and how that might be different then the way your partner’s personality preferences would choose. You might notice how your preference type will tend to orphan a part of you when you are stressed or fearful in your relationship and life. These awarenesses keep the focus on what you need to be doing differently in the relationship and provide an avenue for you to share what it is like to be you with your partner.

How positively you use your personality variables has been linked to success in marriage in many studies. The likeability factor of each partner is critical to intimacy. If you have become withdrawn, critical, controlling and contemptuous, you are obviously not very high on the likability factor in your marriage (Deal and Olson, The Re-marriage Checkup, 2010). Imagine yourself as being your own ideal partner for the next 2 weeks and then practice those ideals as we celebrate love in February.

One of the most difficult things to overcome is negativity in relationships when it has become a set pattern. It hurts the relationship to have negativity as the overriding theme for the relationship, but it also hurts the person who is using negativity to frame their relationship. It hurts them on all levels, their biological self, psychological self, social self and spiritual self. One questions that I have found helpful to ask my clients is, If I didn’t have that negative belief, Who would I be and What resources would I have that I do not have when I can only see the negativity in the other? Think about it. Hope this helps you too. Go forth and be wonderful in your relationships today.

Hopefully you have made it through the wonderfulness of family and Christmas as well as the competing sentiments that the season brings. We are now in our last week of 2010 and looking towards the year 2011. Take some time to imagine what you might want in your relationships for this year and how you will change in order to bring that about. Write your endpoint down and start at the first opportunity. Don’t get stuck in waiting for the other person to change. Or don’t remain in the “fixing to get ready” stage of change! Don’t be there at this time next year. Writing your ‘why would I want to make this relationship different’ down on paper as well as your ‘how’ are more powerful in reaching for change. Start now. Go forth and be wonderful!

Christmas holidays can be challenging times as well as wonderful times for most people.  Christmas is my favourite time of year. I love my family rituals, time with friends, a candlelight church service, Christmas plays, the glitter and lights and the happy faces of my grandchildren as they anticipate the big day. I love the way that the snow changes the face of my neighbourhood and creates a stillness and beauty that is wonderful.

This is not everyone’s experience, however. Sometimes there is loss associated with Christmas and as the season approaches, those losses seem to intensify. It is often most helpful to create new rituals in times like these while still leaving some time for grieving. Increase your self care. Sound impossible in the busyness of the season?Reduce your shopping stress with a thoughtful list and ask a friend or family to help you buy items on your list. When entertaining, buy good prepared foods and use fancy Christmas paper plates to reduce the workload of entertaining while still experiencing the benefits of social times with friends and family. Have a dessert and coffee party instead of a dinner or have a ‘bring your favourite appetizer’ party. These are just a few suggestions that can reduce your stress. Limit your grieving time. Make space to experience the loss for 20 minutes (you choose the amount of time for where you are in the grieving process). Don’t let it take up your whole day. Grieving is healthy and so is living in the present moment. Make time for a massage. The body has its own memory of hurt and a massage can help to heal body memories. Have a pajama day. Engage with someone outside of your hurt for a lunch. Allow yourself to be nurtured and loved by others. Hopefully you will be able to institute some of these suggestions to help with your loss.

One of the difficulties we have with loving someone is our acceptance of who they are. What we believe about our partner in the “in love” stage, plus the changes people make over time can be difficult in long term relationships. Change is really constant in life but we can be impatient when our partners are not in sync with our own personal change. Those couples who are able to honour their partner’s journey of change as well as work on the emotional intimacy in the relationship are most likely to find happiness in their relationship. A great quote by Thomas Merton is something to move towards –

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves,

and not to twist them to fit our own image.

Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

So many things grab our attention today. Many of them are great and worthwhile occupiers of our time.  But what about our relationships? They take time – they take effort. Sometimes we get bursts of energy to improve our relationships, sometimes we get overwhelmed and brush the challenges under the rug … and time passes. We have longings to love and be loved – to develop a soul mate in our marriage but often the competing pulls in our lives take all our time and energy. Sometimes hope is lost and our vision moves towards looking at the challenges in our mate instead of our own challenges.

Today – start again. Be encouraged. The changing of the seasons can be a reminder for you to move towards change in your own life, allowing your personal leaves to colour and drop away and to make room for the beauty of springtime…