Marriage
and Relationship
Counselling
I
love you; you’re perfect; now
change.
Isn’t that how
many relationships go?
We get very attracted by someone and then somewhere
along the way we discover that they are not the ideal
man/woman we thought them to be. And so we become
extremely certain about how we think they ought to be and set
about to bend them to our will.
How on earth can
a relationship predicated on such a certainty survive, I ask
you?
Would you be
inclined to grow and change if you were met with judgment and
love withheld?
So what’s the
solution? The solution is to give up
that certainty about how you think your partner ought to be
and replace it with an insatiable curiosity about how they in
fact really are.Relating to
potential is never a good idea. Relate to what you’ve
got.
Spirituality is an attitude that
reveals life’s meaning
through
everyday experience, however, don’t
bother looking for
sanctuary in your marriage. Seeking protection
from its
pains and pleasures misses its
purpose: marriage
prepares
us to live life on life’s terms…
Facing relationship
realities like these produces the personal integrity necessary
for intimacy, eroticism and a lifetime, loving
marriage.
~ David Schnarch in Passionate
Marriage
The other big
piece of this bewildering puzzle that becomes our intimate
relationships is centred around a capacity called
differentiation (Bowen, 1965).
Differentiation is the
power to hold onto our version of the truth in the face of
someone else’s conflicting version of it.
So, if your partner
thinks you are disorganized, for example, do you have to let
their opinion define you? And why would anyone
else’s opinion be more valid than yours? Everyday, intimate
relationships wash up on shore because we take what our
partners say personally and give their opinions more weight
than our own. Therefore differentiation is also the capacity to self validate rather than seeling the validation of other on every
score.
It is disturbing
when our partners feel compelled to point out our flaws. But
one of the great gifts of relationship is the blessed
opportunity to see the world (this includes ourselves) through
the eyes of another (Hendrix,
1990).
The purpose of
marriage counseling, as I see it, is to deepen one’s
compassion for the other, for their perspective, for their
experience of the relationship. It is also to grow in
one’s capacity for emotional intimacy, to become more
self-validating and thus less anxious about coming forward
with who you really are which in turn heightens intimacy which
in turn heightens passion -- the perfect marriage
circle.
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