save my marriage Archives ⋆ Chana Pfeifer

Don’t give up yet!

Most of us entered marriage with some sort of picture in our minds of how married life would be. For some individuals, the picture is very clear and easy to describe. For others, their ideal image of marriage won’t become clear until they begin to think about things that aren’t happening.

Things can slowly deteriorate, and learning how to save your marriage seems impossible. That’s when they realize they really did have expectations for what married life would be like.

Life happens! Within a few short years of getting married (and the time seems to pass very rapidly), our time and energy are taken up by many things.

Once children are born, they have many needs; and as they develop, they get involved in lots of activities that take up parental time — shopping for them, helping with homework, arranging doctor appointments, attending concerts, school events, recitals, and so on. Even with the best intentions and with determined intentionality, it can still be difficult for couples to maintain closeness, intimacy and enough time together to grow the relationship.

If this is descriptive of your life, you may find yourself wondering if this will ever change, and if your marriage has a chance to make it long-term.

The answer is, “yes, your marriage can last!” if you take some of the following steps:

1. Take time to think.

Take some time with the following questions, and write down your main conclusions so they are not forgotten and evaluate your relationship.

Depending on your personality and thought patterns, you may be able to do this while driving or involved in an activity, or you may need to have time alone with no distractions. You know what works best for you.

Ask yourself this: Just how bad does it feel to be in your relationship right now Does it feel simply like you are drifting apart, but it could easily be fixed? Does it seem like you are living as roommates? Do you find that you are arguing way more than ever before? Do you or does your spouse seem to have tons of anger and resentment which make it difficult to ever engage in meaningful conversation?

Come up with a number on a 1-5 scale regarding your relationship. You are a 1 if it feels like it could easily be fixed, and you are a 5 if there is a ton of resentment and someone has dropped the “D” bomb (divorce).

Think about the approachability of your spouse. As stated earlier, “Life happens!” Think about what is happening in life right now. If either one of you is under undue stress or facing gargantuan deadlines, it may be better to postpone an intervention or to carefully plan it out. However, don’t put it off for long, or it may never get done until it is too late.

2. Take time to plan.

Based on your evaluation of things, it is now time to plan your next steps. This step may take some time, depending on how damaged you feel, and how damaged you believe your marriage is at this point. If you are a 4 or 5 on the relationship scale, you may have difficulty believing that things can be any different than the current status.

Here are some things to think through and jot down:

What do I want? You don’t like things the way they are, so what DO you want? Even if it does not seem possible, at least think through and answer this question: “What do I want in our marriage?”
What do I need? This could be another version of the previous question, or it could have a different answer. However, think it through and write it down. What does my spouse want? You have been married for a while, so put on your thinking cap. Write out what you believe your spouse wants in your marriage that is not there right now. The answer to this one may be as simple as making a list of the common complaints you hear from your spouse.
What does my spouse need? This can be a very different answer from what they want. You know this person; you know their life, their personality and the way they approach life and the stresses of life.

What are the top 2 or 3 things that you KNOW would be helpful to your spouse RIGHT NOW with the things being faced in life?

Strategize how to discuss these things with your spouse. If things are going to change either way, for the better or for worse, someone needs to try to get things out on the table where they can be discussed. If the two of you have not had much success in attempting discussions of this type, then you need to do it in a different way than you have in the past.

You could discuss this with a friend to get some input, but be careful in doing this. Your spouse may not like the fact that someone else knows the struggles you are facing, and you don’t want to discuss it with a person who has trouble keeping confidences.

If you are involved in a religious community, try turning to someone who has been a mentor or adviser in the past. The goal is to come up with a way of entering into a discussion regarding your evaluation of the relationship and determine how to change it for the better.

3. Take time to act.

At some point in time you will need to suck in some air, say a prayer, and initiate the discussion. When you do this, do not be surprised if things take off in directions that you never expected. In fact, you should be prepared for this and fight the tendency to defend yourself.

If you want to understand how to save your relationship, you have to take time to think this through. Your preparation should mean that the emotional edge has been taken off of your presentation, and it is now a little more factual than it was at first. Your spouse has not had the time to do that, so strap yourself in and hang on and allow for some emotion to be blown off at first.

Let your spouse know you have been thinking about things they may want in the relationship. When you give them the list of things you thought would be important to them, ask what you missed and allow time for the discussion.

Tell your spouse that in addition to wants they may have, you believe there are also things they need. Make it clear how you will be able to help with those needs.

These are some initial steps in addressing a relationship that is drifting apart. Don’t expect to solve everything in one discussion, and don’t be too hurt or let down if there is little to no change in your first attempt at this.

Both of you are caught up in life as it has been for a while. You both have patterns to your day, week and month. Even if you both want to make small or even major changes, it may not be possible for a period of time. Appointments, meetings and activities tend to get scheduled far ahead, so try to bear in mind that it can take weeks and even months to free up time and energy to do something as important as investing in each other again.

Save Your Relationship

Don’t give up. If you’d like more info. on couples or individual counseling, contact me today.

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Learn the skills to sustain a strong, emotionally healthy, and loving marriage.

Marriage rescue for couples facing marriage problems…

When couples first contact me for marriage help, they typically feel distressed and even hopeless about their relationship. If they can look back and remember earlier good times however, that usually signals a marriage that can be saved. In fact, this kind of marriage has potential to become the kind of partnership the couple had hoped for when they said, “I do.”

What transitions couples from desperation about their difficulties to delight in sharing their lives together?

Here’s the 8-step pathway along which I guide my therapy clients, and which you are welcome to take as well:

1. Make a list of all the issues about which you have disagreements, including the issues that you refrain from talking about out of fear that talking might lead to arguing.

Your self-help treatment will be complete when you have found mutually agreeable solutions to all of these issues, and also have learned the skills to resolve new issues as they arise with similarly win-win solutions.

If the list seems interminable because you fight about everything from time of day, to where to live, odds are the problem is less that you are facing some challenging differences, and more that your manner of talking with each other needs a major upgrade.

2. Fix your focus solidly on yourself. Attempts to get your partner to change invite defensiveness. No one likes being told they’re doing things wrong or, far worse, that they are a bad person. Better by far for both of you each to use your energies and intelligence to figure out what YOU could do differently.

Here’s a question that can get you started. What would enable you to stay loving and good-humored even if the frustrating pieces in your spouse’s repertoire never get an upgrade? That’s how to become “self-centered” in the best sense. If both of you are seeking to do your own upgrades, the marriage will blossom.

3. Cut the crap (pardon my language). The point is that negative muck that you give each other is totally unhelpful. It only taints a positive relationship. That means no more criticism, complaints, blame, accusations, anger, sarcasm, mean digs, snide remarks.

No more anger escalations either. Stay in the calm zone. Exit early and often if either of you is beginning to get heated. Learn to calm yourself, and then re-engage cooperatively.

Research psychologist John Gottman has found that marriages generally survive if the ratio of good to bad interactions is 5 to 1. Do you want to barely survive? Or do you want to save the marriage in a way that will make it thrive? If thriving is your goal, aim for 100,000,000:1. That means, don’t sling mud at all. Cut the crap.

4. Learn how to express concerns constructively. A simple way to do that in sensitive conversations is to stick with the following sentence-starter options. In my clinical work I give couples a handout that includes these starter phrases. I encourage them to use the handout frequently, checking how to start each comment that might be sensitive or on topics that they know could be prickly.

I feel (followed by a one-word feeling such as anxious, sad, etc) …

My concern is ………..

I would like to … [note, NEVER use “I would like you to ….”]

How would you feel about that? or, What’s your thoughts on that?

5. Learn how to make decisions cooperatively. I call collaborative decision-making the “win-win waltz.”

Win-win decision-making aims for a plan of action that pleases you both. No more insistence designed to “get your way.” Instead, when you have differences, quietly express your underlying concerns, listen calmly to understand your partner’s concerns, and then create a solution responsive to all the concerns of both of you.

Practice this skill-set on all the issues you listed in step 1. You may be amazed to discover that, even on issues that seemed intractable, you will be able to co-create solutions that will work for both of you.

6. Eliminate the three A’s that ruin marriages.

Affairs, Addictions & Anger are deal-breakers.

They are out-of-bounds in a healthy marriage. Fix the habit or game over.

If you or your spouse has these problems, saving this kind of marriage could be a mistaken goal. Better to end a marriage than to continue a marriage with these hurtful habits.

Better yet is for each of you to figure out what you can do differently in the future. The one with the A-habit needs to figure out how to end it. The partner needs to heal, and also to learn alternatives to tolerating the habit.

Most importantly, especially if you have children who need you to learn how to be more emotionally healthy as individuals and as a couple, is for the two of you both to commit to building a new kind of marriage.

That is, end the old marriage. Build a new one with the same partner. Build a marriage where there are zero affairs, addictions or excessive anger and instead, abounding love and trust.

7. Radically increase the positive energies you give your partner.

Smile more. Touch more. Hug more. More “eye kisses.” More sex. More shared time and shared projects. More appreciation. More dwelling on what you like about your partner.

Respond more often with agreement in response to things your partner says that in the past you might have answered with “But…”.

Listening is loving, especially when you are listening to take in information, not to show what’s wrong with what your partner says or to show that you know more.

Help out more. Give more praise and more gratitude. Do more fun activities together. Laugh and joke more, do new things and go new places together.

The best things in life really are free. And the more positives you give, the more you’ll get!

I wrote above about Gottman’s 5:1 ratio. Increasing the positives is every bit as important as decreasing negatives to hit a 100,000,000:1 ratio.

8. Look back at your parents’ marriage strengths and weaknesses. Decide what you want to do differently.

When people marry they bring along a recording in their head of how their parents treated each other, and also how they were treated by their parents.

These relationships are where folks learn patterns of interacting for intimate relationships. Decide consciously what to keep from your folks and what to do differently.