There are two major schools of thought on what makes a happy marriage. One that says the toxic environment is the issue and the other that says it’s the emotional immune system.

The most popular one (i.e. the one that’s easier to stomach) says that the toxic environment is the big problem and that individuals and couples must work to make their environments less chaotic and more loving. Prescriptions include having date nights, doing communication exercises, offering regular loving affirmations, and, oh yeah, doing your chores. There are also prescriptions for playing fair, being honest, and being kind. In addition, at its core, this view holds that we harm each other in marriage because of the toxic environments we grew up in.  A happy marriage (and successful marriage counseling) comes from having your partner help you heal your childhood wounds (and vice versa) by creating a more toxin free environment.

It has as its mantra: “Make me feel safe and valid and I’ll do the same for you”.

Here’s the flaw: Health cannot increase with a weak immune system. If safety is primary, immunity will not be challenged to get stronger and so the slightest exposure will make you ill. It’s the whole concept behind vaccination. In order for us to break out of our vicious cycles, we must get a little dirty.  On the whole, it’s not that we as individuals and married people and as a society have too much anxiety and “wounding”. It’s that we have too little ability to tolerate it.

This second major school of thought, and the one to which I adhere, can sometimes look the same as the first. Helping people find calm is integral – but we do it not by coddling them but by holding them more close to the fire that is their lack of integrity in crucial moments. This may sound harsh and, by all accounts, it is. But the people who go through it without running from it come out stronger, deeper, and more resilient. I can’t tell you the respect I have for my clients who show up, again and again, wanting to work through their own lesser natures to achieve something greater. It is truly a work of beauty and it inspires me to come to work everyday.

This paradigm holds that in order to have a robust mental health and a connected, meaningful relationship, individuals need to learn to hold their own, no matter what mean or disrespectful or base things our partners do.  It asks us to look straight at the ugliness of both our own and our partners’ behaviors.

It raises the question of narcissistic wounds in contrast to childhood wounds. Too often we look at our childhoods as having crippled us. But what if this is wrong? What if the theory (and yes, folks, it is a theory) of wounded children and a “shame based identity” are simply wrong? What if the bigger issue is resilience and our refusal at crucial moments to accept responsibility for ourselves and our actions?

This is not to say, by any means, that there aren’t terrible things that were said and done to us as children. Of course this happens and has a profound influence on our lives. But there are too many times that we remain stuck in the past via the very idea that was first proposed to help us – the idea that we are wounded or broken. When we focus on this, we kind of keep ourselves stuck in that mind set. We over focus on every little hurt and we lose ourselves in the process.  We start to think we are either too wounded to grow or too special to have to deal with our partners’ insults, craziness, or doubts about us. Our “wounds” actually become narcissistic rather than true.

What we also do with this idea is learn to deny the fact that what we learn most often from our parents is not how they wounded us. What we learn is exactly how to perpetuate the ugliness. It was not a fun day, as I’ve written about in other posts, when I could see my own narcissism and ability to hurt and pummel the ones closest to me. But it was the most important day of my life. I continue to learn.

I hope you found this post helpful! Let me know your thoughts! I love interacting with people here on the blog. Remember – you can respond anonymously!

As I began to read I was just a little bit excited that perhaps leaders in the marriage help industry were finally going to begin to approximate what real married people struggle with and to possibly offer some clarity or solution that made sense. However, the deeper I got into the article the crazier I felt!

The article starts out OK in acknowledging the normalcy of disenchantment in marriage. Terry Real, Boston family therapist, is quoted as saying “It’s an open secret of American culture that disillusionment exists. I go around the country speaking about ‘normal marital hatred’. Not one person has ever asked what I mean by that.” Good so far…

William Doherty, head of the marriage and family program at University of Minnesota, says that when we look to our spouses to make us happy, we engage in this compatibility (who’s the “right” person for me) based thought processes that make our differences “tragic and intolerable”. The point being that we shouldn’t look to our spouses to be the same as us in order to make us happy. We need to be responsible for our own happiness regardless of our differences.

Great…so how do we do that?

Here’s where I started feeling crazy. As a solution, Doherty suggests the following: “We tend not to think , ‘Maybe I’m not giving her what she needs.’ ‘Maybe he’s disgruntled because I’m not opening up to him’. Or, ‘Maybe he’s struggling in his relationship with other people.’ The more sophisticated question,” says Doherty, “is ‘In what ways are we failing to make one another happy?’”

Wait. I thought he just said that when we look to our spouses to make us happy we make our differences or incompatibilities tragic and intolerable. Now, he’s saying that it’s not about them making us happy but rather it’s about us making them happy. So the key to having a successful marriage is martyrdom.

What Doherty is saying can sound like good logic but in practice, when you’ve got a spouse who couldn’t be any less interested in “making you happy” you’re in a real bind.

In answer to this, Doherty concedes that spouses who aren’t interested in the least in making their partners happy are not great mate material. He says that “these are things that nobody should have to put up with in life.”

Wait…I thought this whole article was about how it’s not about having the right partner. But then he says it really is.

Well, Doherty says, these folks who don’t want to try are in a “completely different category”.

What category exactly is that?

I would put them in the category of folks who would really rather have their spouse change than themselves – which, in my experience, is every couple I’ve worked with in 14 years, every friend I’ve had, every family member, and, oh yeah, me too! Isn’t it the very nature of the beast that humans, by nature, kind of like homeostasis? We like change about as much as we like going to the dentist.

What category? Married human. So, who is this article written for?

I’ve worked with 100’s of couples where one spouse works to accommodate the “needs” of the other – very often for decades – and they are no closer to warming up their marriages than humans are to stopping the ice from melting in Antarctica.

What Doherty and the others are saying that makes sense is the fact that we are responsible for our own happiness. But the way they are suggesting we get there is fundamentally flawed and recreates the very problem they are trying to help solve. We do don’t become responsible for our own happiness in our marriages by asking what can we do or who can we become to make our spouses happy. Nor do we become responsible for our own happiness by “standing up for” what we want and need our partners to do as Terry Real suggests later in the article. We become responsible for our own happiness in marriage by…well…taking responsibility for ourselves.

What Growth in Marriage Looks Like

Taking responsibility for ourselves in marriage can be:

• Looking straight at our own dark sides without distorting them by saying we didn’t really mean to hurt our partners or by saying we may have been acting badly but it was all unconscious. (‘I didn’t really mean to not get treatment for my rapid ejaculation problem for the last 25 years. It was unconscious,’ is an example of a distortion.)
• Taking responsibility for ourselves can look like giving an ultimatum – this is what I mean by taking a firm stand regardless of whether your partner likes it – and doing it not because you’re angry or exhausted – but because you’re finally waking up. Things like: ‘That’s the last time I’m having sex with you because you ‘need’ it.’ Or ‘That’s the last time you are going to cheat on me and still be married to me.’ Or ‘That’s the last time I’m going to sit by quietly while you yell at the kids.’ There’s a great misconception about giving ultimatums. We think they are about doing something to our partners but really, they are about our own growth because for an ultimatum to mean anything at all the giver has to follow through. The most meaningful ultimatums in marriage are calm.

Doherty and the others propose that marriage is fundamentally an institution that is for meeting each others needs and achieving unconditional acceptance, etc. This idea is what sells.

But what happily married folks know more than anything is this: Marriage is not about making someone else happy or getting one’s needs met. Marriage is about growth and integrity and doing the right thing regardless of whether your spouse likes it. Very often, breaking the vicious cycle you are in requires just that – upsetting your spouse for the sake of your own integrity.

This approach includes the married couples that Doherty’s approach excludes. You can still be (or be married to) an addict, a cheater, a gambler, and whatever else and still have hope for your marriage.

Notice I’m not asking what you want your mate to do differently in 2012. I’m asking about you!

Those of you who are regular readers know that this blog is not your everyday marriage blog and so any kind of resolutions I might suggest will be a far cry from “5 Things You Can Do Right Now to Butter Your Husband’s Turkey” or “The Top 10 Things You Can Do to Get Your Woman Into Bed NOW”.   You can find that kind of junk in any Glamor or Cosmo magazines. (By the way, why do you think they have to keep essentially reprinting the same articles every month? Because the advice doesn’t work! More on that kind of advice later!) The hope people have is that, when seeking help for their marriages, they will find something more than what they can read about for $4.95 at the grocery check out line.

So what kind of resolutions am I talking about? I’m talking about the kind that require the depth and unstoppable force of a winter season – the kind that change the entire landscape – the kind that really have your attention and whole heart – the winter, spring, summer, and fall of it. I’m talking about the kind of change that is you standing up and saying I’m not going play house any more. I’m going to be real, honest, and brave in my marriage, in my parenting, in my family, or with my friends.

To that end, we must consider the winter side of things – that side that changes the entire landscape – we must consider the dark side. (Cue Vader breathing.)

Seriously, the more we avoid the uglier parts of our lives the more they seem to take charge. We are obsessed, especially now, in our culture with positivity at the cost of being honest about the pain we either inflict on others or others inflict on us. Make no mistake, folks. The institution of marriage – and the marriage help industry – have helped us to perfect our ability to hurt another and make it look like we care. (Cue Vader breathing)

Think of these common scenarios:

• Mercy-sex – it looks like the lower desire partner is trying to “have mercy” on the higher desire partner by “giving him” what he wants – but what he really wants is to be desired, not pacified. Not a kind move, but a controlling one.
• Other variations of saying yes to pacify your partner when really you’d like to say no in the name of what the latest self help book calls “compromise”. It makes it actually look like you’re doing your spouse a favor!
• Telling your partner you respect her but really you don’t – really you think she is a little nuts. You’re just going through the motions waiting and hoping that she will change so you don’t have to.
• Acting like the crimes your partner has committed are way worse than your own when what you have done – various psychological forms of “Chinese water torture” you can think of – would curl the toes of hardened street urchins.
• Telling your partner you agree with him on what he thinks your shortcomings are and telling him you are working hard at changing them – but really you have no intention of doing so. You have mastered the apology (delay and distraction).
• Relentless criticism – spoken or unspoken.

If you read these and can relate and if you think that these are simple problems that a few communication techniques, date nights, or kind words would fix, then there’s no need to read further.

If you believe something more is called for then continue.

That something more is courage. If you want to free yourself from the trouble your marriage is in, then you must speak the truth.

In the recent movie The Help, the character Aibileen has something to say about loving people who are hard to love. She says, “God says we should love our enemies. That’s hard to do. But we can start by telling the truth.” If you’d like to say that your spouse is not your enemy or that you never play dirty games, then you are a better human than I am. Most of us fall short of living our ideals and we give in to our desires for revenge or greed or the wish to control. The truth is harder to tell than we often think. Can you tell the truth about your marriage? It might be painful but it’s the most important place to start.

Maybe that is a good Become-A-Better-You Year resolution. Start with knowing what you know. Stop making excuses for either you or your partner – or your parents, your friends, your kids, or your in-laws for that matter. Start with the truth – even if it’s just with yourself. It will set you free.

I thought it might be important to talk turkey, this year, regarding our holiday gatherings with family. How many times have you or a friend complained about having to gather with family over the holidays? Why are some families easier to deal with than others?

I’d like to offer a lens through which we might answer that question; it is the lens of a field of study called Science of Mind which looks at the way human beings read other human beings. Scientists have coined this reading behavior “mind-mapping”.

This topic is going to take two blog posts – this one to explain further what mind-mapping is, the next one to describe how we use mind-mapping to make for interesting holiday fare.

What I mean by mind-mapping is simply what scientists call reading people. When we encounter people – strangers or family members – we create mental “maps” of what we think of them based on their actions, non-actions, voice, tone, carriage, facial expressions, words, etc. We make decisions about what we say and do with them based on these “observations” or mental “maps”.

Doing this mapping is so deeply wired into our brains that we can’t not do it. Our reptilian brains automatically map where and for how long eyes are looking at us or elsewhere – like a good frog. Frogs know where other frogs are looking because there might be a tasty meal or a predator close by that their froggy friends have already spotted. We do the same thing with our eye tracking – only the “tasty meal” we’re hunting might be things like sex, control of others, or our in-laws’ heads on platters! (Strictly hypothetically speaking here, of course.)

Our mammalian brains are on auto-pilot too! We are constantly making note of emotional tones and meanings, the emotional meaning of a look on someone’s face (like surprise, pleasure, anger, etc.). Our brains are mapping a ‘thank you’ said with grace and one said with sarcasm or strings attached. We can get very sophisticated in mapping meanings from others.

We can be right on target with reading others or we can make mistakes – sometimes big ones. This depends on a lot of factors – whether the people we are mapping are masking themselves from being mapped (keeping a straight face, for example, or lying outright), whether we are paying attention to our mapping, and whether and to what extent we have our neo-cortex involved.

The neo-cortex is the part of our brains that can think logically; it’s the part of us that, when engaged, makes scientific inquiry into what we are reading in others. Is my wife feeling inadequate because she over cooked the turkey again or is she feeling bad because the kids just ate Thanksgiving with their fingers and wiped them on their clothes and she mapped the look on my mother’s face OR is it something entirely different?

Here’s a great simple example of mind mapping in a parenting scenario that will show you that children are mind –mappers too. My younger daughter has always had some concerning gastrointestinal issues. My worries about her ebb and flow depending on how she’s doing. I noticed that during a time when my worries were heightened, she started to respond in a particular way when she was facing discipline. She started tearfully exclaiming, “Great! Now I’m crying! And you know that when I get upset I don’t want to eat!” (Yes, we’re in for it. I know. We’re learning the hard way.) What a perfect example of how she’s reading my “encouragements” (a.k.a. anxious pleading) to eat or drink more and using them to try to get her self out of trouble! Have her make these comments in front of an overindulgent grandmother at Christmas dinner and things get really interesting.

This example with my daughter leads to an essential aspect of mind-mapping; it has to do with desire! We map other people because we want!  It is human to long, to wish for, to hope! As kids we want to get presents and sweets, and immunity for our crimes. As teens we want freedom, friendship, fun, and immunity for our crimes. As adults we want peace, clean houses, sex, love, money, well-behaved in-laws, and, last but not least, immunity for our crimes. Mind-mapping is essential to achieving any of our goals or desires – above or below board as they may be.

So, we can’t not mind-map.

The premise of the next post is families that are easier to deal with around the holidays – or any time – are those wherein the individual members map others – and allow others to map them – openly. Bad behavior loses much of its sting when people can be honest about it!

Stay tuned…it’ll be out in the next few days…that is if I can get this damn house cleaned up from my in-laws’ visits for Thanksgiving…

Some of you know I recently traveled to California for a training with Drs. David Schnarch and Ruth Morehouse, authors of the Crucible Approach in the field of Sex and Marriage Therapy. What most of you don’t know is that I presented a case for consultation with this dynamic duo and they chose it to use for a live demonstration! What that meant (other than “Oh shit!) was that David Schnarch would act as the therapist and my newly chosen “husband” and I would act as this couple I presented – in front of a room of 40 other therapists. The role play lasted 2 hours!

Talk about a mind bender! (I REALLY enjoyed my post-role-play Margarita!) My brain is officially rewiring itself (now that I’m back and sober)! The world I saw before is different from the one I see now and I’m dying to share a snap shot of it with you!

What I got, more than anything else, was something I already knew, but was denying that I knew it. (Is your mind bending yet?) What I learned is that I can read people’s minds and I was hiding from myself and others that I could do it. (No, seriously! It was just one Margarita!) What I’m talking about is something scientists call mind-mapping. It’s what the general public calls reading other people – and many of us act like we’re not doing it.

Let me explain.

The basic and profound premise is that all of us are constantly reading the people we come into contact with – strangers and loved ones alike. We base our decisions of how to act and what to say on these “observations”. We map everything from where people’s eyes are to their tone of voice to the smallest of pauses. We map their silence, their level of “forgetfulness”, and their changing of the subject at opportune times. We map what we remember a friend said once about his marriage and we map how that does or doesn’t line up with how he acted last night at the party. Get the idea?

What gets really interesting is that most of us are not letting others see that we can see them.

Have you ever sat in a restaurant by yourself and kept your head low, appearing to be lost in your book, but you are popping up for quick glances at others nearby, here and there, checking out what they look like, who they’re with, whether they are looking at you? Or have you ever pretended to be lost in that book when you are really eavesdropping on the conversation next to you? That’s what I’m talking about! Mapping but acting like you’re not!

Think about your family growing up. If you had a mother who constantly got angry about the way the house was kept, then you knew, without a doubt, what her stomping around the house on Saturday morning meant. You knew what her deep, sighs were all about - anger. You knew that you couldn’t get away with watching Saturday morning cartoons anymore so you angrily got up - although you masked that you were angry knowing that if she saw it, she’d know you had mapped her and that would make her even more angry - and you started cleaning your room. All without ONE word from her. Mapping. And hiding that we’re mapping.

Thinking about mind-mapping in the context of marriage really gets interesting. A simple and common example might be the wife who has just enough sex to keep her husband from blowing. She knows exactly the tone of his voice, the tension in his gaze, etc. from the moment he walks in the door from work – that tonight is the night. She knows how to keep him burning embers rather than blazing the entire house down. The really interesting part? When he starts to suspect she doesn’t really want to be there in the bed with him and he asks her and she denies that she’s mapping him – and proclaims her desire for him as genuine or authentic. Folks, I have just introduced you to what, in clinical circles, is known as mind-fucking – inserting a false belief into her husband’s mind (making him believe she wants him) then, when he sees this, telling him he’s nuts and she really does want him.

What is terribly painful is when the husband retaliates with his own version of mind-fucking – whatever that may be.

Does this sound like you? Can you identify ways you use mind-mapping and mind-fucking in your marriage to manage your spouse’s moods, reactions, and self-hood? If you said ‘no’ you might consider that you are a “tracker” – one of those who has become an expert at mind-mapping and mind-fucking. Those of us who are trackers often come out of severely chaotic homes where we learned how to map and adapt with acumen, precision, and rigidity.

Not convinced of your abilities yet? Check this out. Scientists who research what is called “The Science of Mind” have been studying tens of thousands of children for the last 20+ years and they have established that children learn to map as early as 4 years old – anxious family of origin or not. Many scientists believe it’s even earlier – like at infancy. This is yet to be established but how many of us experienced a difference in our infants when we were calmer? They were mapping us! They still are!

What do we do with this knowledge in the context of marriage?

1. Start by asking yourself what you really believe about your partner’s behavior, explanations, rationalizations, or go-to defenses.
2. Work to stop yourself from minimizing, changing, or denying what you really believe about them. Quiet your mind.
3. Now, take a good long look at your true thoughts. Say them out loud – to yourself – not to your spouse yet. It usually sounds something like “I don’t believe what they are saying” or “I’m angry” (without trying to talk yourself out of the anger). Try to keep your focus on your own thoughts.
4. If you’ve gotten the tough reality of where you are and what you are really thinking, you might be in pain. Now it’s time to get Schnarch’s book (“Intimacy and Desire”) or give me a call.

Let’s unpack this and get you to a more honest relationship. It’s going to be a tough journey – but one that can be more than worth it.

Can you see yourself in this post? What can you see that you’ve been denying you can see? Remember, you can always share anonymously here!