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Day 1: Marriage & Thanksgiving

In light of this being the American week of Thanksgiving, I’ll be writing about the power of gratitude in marriage, and the encouragement it gives to relationships. 

Gratitude Jar

“Love keeps no record of wrongs” is way easier to say, than to do. Keeping a rolodex of what has gone wrong in the past is like a warm blanket that has never been washed. Sure it’ll keep you warm and cozy, but over time it’ll get crusty, and you’ll end up wearing a foul stench.

A record of wrongs is a predictable perspective to keep. We can always find something that is wrong, or hurtful about the relationship with our spouse. But, the flip side of that is true, too: We can always find something beautiful and loving. Always. 

When we’re struggling to stay a float, we can’t let go of the bar we’re holding onto until we have something else to grab a hold of. Some of us need to grab hold onto the bar of gratitude so we can let go of the bar of resentment. 

Today, start keeping a record of what’s right about your relationship. Get a jar, vase, bowl, or some other container. Put it on your kitchen counter, and start writing down what you’re thankful for about your spouse. About your marriage. About your life together. 

Fill the jar with things you need to remember when you’re hurt, feeling discouraged, or hopeless in your marriage. 

Tomorrow: Gratitude Prayer

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Are you Hopeless in Marriage?

Most people who have not done significant spiritual or relational work do not know how to do conflict well. Invariably, we will unconsciously adapt our conflict styles to what we were exposed to in our childhood homes. The saying “the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree” is true here, how are we to know a different way of being without the help of someone else to show us another way or to another place? A hopeless marriage doesn’t have to mean the end of the relationship.

Marriage provides the divine context for taking another person to another place. It offers hope that I can live alongside someone who will help me to become a better person, and I can do the same for them. The reality is that once the newness wears off (which happens at different rates of time for different people), couples often lose sight of the purpose of marriage.

I often hear, “I just want to be happy and live in peace” when asking people what they desire in their marriages. Generally this is in reaction to the growing disconnect and conflict that exists between husband and wife. However, when you don’t do the necessary maintenance and work, It decays and begins to break down. This is true of the material world just as it is for relationships.

Cleaning up and fixing something that has been neglected for a long time takes more energy and effort than the time it would have taken to maintain. In relationships, if you do not spend the time proactively working and engaging the faulty issues in your marriage, when it comes time to “fix it” or “buy a new one”, it’s going to feel overwhelming.

This overwhelming feeling coupled with the already everyday needs and demands of life make it even more difficult to find the courage, energy, and hope to dig out of the mess. If you’re at this place of hopelessness in your marriage, seek out a counselor. If you’re afraid you’re on the road to hopelessness, here are some suggestions to work on:

  • Do go on regular dates with your spouse.
  • Do monthly budget meetings to review and plan financial concerns and needs
  • Do yearly/bi-yearly marriage enrichment activities (counseling, retreats, books, etc)
  • Do not turn on the ’screen’ (tv, phone, computer/tablet) at least 2 nights per week
  • Do not blame your spouse for anything, ever. Take responsibility for your actions.
  • Do not use the word divorce unless you are in the process of filing.
  • Do not have an affair with work, alcohol, Facebook, video games, food, or the TV.
  • Do practice non-sexual touch without it leading to sex.
  • Do not hide behind your kids activities to avoid conflict.
  • Do not use your kids to fulfill your loneliness.

Regardless of how hopeless it might feel, no relationship is beyond repair. I have seen couples dealing with multiple layers of betrayal, lies, and brokenness work diligently on repairing their relationship.

When you married your spouse, they became the right one, don’t buy into the lie that there is someone better out there for you. If you’re willing to do the hard work, hope can be restored.

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Making Peace: Drop Your Weapons

You don’t walk into a peace treaty meeting with a machine gun. And if you do, the meeting quickly changes from a peace treaty to a tense stand off. One wrong move, and there will be a mess.

We all have weapons that we have access to use when we are threatened. After all, these weapons have long served us as faithful tools to bring about feelings of safety, control, and power.

What are the weapons you use in marriage?

  • Contempt?
  • Stonewalling?
  • Name calling?
  • “Calling it like you see it”?
  • Avoidance?
  • Manipulation?
  • Withholding?
  • Rage?
  • Silence?

Regardless of the weapon you can easily brandish, leave it at the door. It has no use in your marriage. None of these will get you what you’re looking for.

What weapon do you need to leave at the door?

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Knowledge vs Experience

There is a difference in the knowledge of reading about something, and the knowledge of experiencing something.

It’s the difference between the knowing in our heads and knowing from the heart. 

If you’ve been to the Grand Canyon, you know with your whole being the expanse of it all. There are no words to describe it. The grand scale of the depth is beyond what any wikipedia entry could ever help you to know if you’ve never been there. Yes, you can look at a picture, study the stats, and recount the history of how it came to be. But that will never get close to the experience one gets by standing on the South Rim.

This reminds me of the powerful scene in Good Will Hunting when Sean confronts Will that not all things in life is about knowledge from a book. 

Voltaire said it well, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Letting go of the perfect: The ideal; the manicured or curated social medialife. This might allow us to experience the good. 

What we know with our heads sometimes keeps us from knowing with our hearts. We think we know something because we read about it or watched a Ted talk about it. We are inundated with pictures, data, and the expanse of words that tell us about things in life. Yet we’re impoverished in actually experiencing these same things. 

What might we find — about ourselves, or others — if we moved away from the comfort of knowing, to the discomfort of experience? 

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A Near Miss

On my walk to the restroom the other day I was preoccupied with an email I’d just received. During my walk I was mulling over my response, or if I needed to respond at all. I was completely unaware of my surroundings, walking towards the restroom on auto-pilot.

I turned the corner in the hallway and I didn’t notice the woman coming towards me. She was now directly in my path. She’d just come out of the women’s restroom and had a book in one hand and a coffee in her other hand. We were going to collide if I didn’t move out of the way. In my head, I saw the coffee exploding onto the walls, our clothing, and the floor. This was not going to be good. 

I had two choices. One, to run into her (as gracefully as possible) and attempt to grab a hold of her so that neither of us fall. My other choice is to use the wall next to her to avoid the coffee collision. And that’s what I do. I quickly reach my arm past her face over her head and push myself off the wall to avoid running into her. It was an awkward move on my part, but the only one that I could do in order to keep the coffee in her cup. She passed under my outstretched arm, and I rebound off the wall.

Disaster avoided.

She scoffed at my clumsiness, making some sharp remark about my maneuver, and then disappeared around the corner to continue her day. I’m grateful for the near miss. I’m also reminded about the limitations we humans have, and how little grace I give others in their limitations. People have way more going on in their life than I can ever know.

This woman didn’t know me. She didn’t know that I have a lower leg disability that makes it entirely impossible for me to shift my walking direction as quickly as one who is able bodied. Her snap judgement of my ability was without curiosity or kindness. And that’s ok. Perhaps she herself was having an unusually difficult day. 

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a fierce battle.” ~Plato

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Understanding the Limitations of Others

This particular passage from Henri Nouen has been very helpful for me lately. We often mistake the limitations of others as a judgement of our own value. In doing so, we miss an opportunity to sacrificially love and care for these people in our life.

“You keep listening to those who seem to reject you. But they never speak about you. They speak about their own limitations. They confess their poverty in the face of your needs and desires. They simply ask for your compassion. They do not say that you are bad, ugly, or despicable. They say only that you are asking for something they cannot give and that they need to get some distance from you to survive emotionally. The sadness is that you perceive their necessary withdrawal as a rejection of you instead of as a call to return home and discover there your true belovedness.”

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Sacrifice What’s Easy

A millionaire who gives away $100 does not experience the same sacrifice as a factory worker who gives the same amount. It’s easy for someone wealthy to give away a few bucks, it’s not that significant of a cost to them. 

There is not much sacrifice when we give what is easy to give. Sacrifice is the surrender of myself for the sake of someone else. This how we know someone loves and cares about us. 

Gary Chapmans concept of The Five Love Languages is a great example of how this might show up in a relationship. For instance, one of my love languages is words of affirmation. It is relatively easy for me to show others that I love or care about them with words of affirmation. This comes naturally to me. 

My wife’s love language is acts of service. Words of affirmation might be the last one on her list. Acts of service is probably the last one on my list. If I only choose to love her out of what comes naturally to me, I am going to miss opportunities to love her. 

A great rule of thumb on this principle for Marriage: Work on growing your capacity to do what isn’t easy. This could be how you engage in conflict, your habits in talking and listening (Men speak about 10,000 words per day, Women speak around 25,000), or how you express love.

What do you need to sacrifice today?

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Marriage Assets

We tend to think about assets in terms of financial perspectives. How do we spend, invest, or save our money? Do we launder our money? How do I/we increase our financial assets? 

These, among others, are financial questions that every marriage deals with. Even if you’re not asking those questions, you’re still dealing with those questions. 

There’s a different kind of asset that needs just as much, if not more, attention: Emotional assets. 

Every relationship has an emotional bank account. Couples make deposits and withdrawals from that account, often not knowing how much is in the account. As is the case with money, when you run a negative balance, life gets really stressful. 

Some marriages live emotionally paycheck to paycheck. Every day there is a desperate need for some kind of positive experience in order to keep going. Others have invested well, and can go for a period of time through emotional debts and be ok. 

It takes a radical change to get out of financial debt. The same is true for emotional debt. 

Consider the emotional ledger of your relationship. Are you over spending your emotional deposits? What feels like a deposit for you, for your spouse? How about a withdrawal? Ask your spouse what their emotional bank account is with you. 

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Criticism

Criticism without hope will lead to contempt.Criticism with hope will spawn creativity.

It’s way easier to give the criticism than to receive it, but we all need helpful, loving, critical feedback in order to grow and change. We can be more receptive to hearing critical feedback if we feel secure, valued, cared about, and loved. If you hope for the best in and for me, you can say a whole lot to me, including critical thoughts. 

Tips for giving critical feedback: 

  • Ask for permission to share. “Are you open to me giving you some feedback about the situation?” If the answer is no, “will you let me know when you are ready?” Give it 24 hours, and ask permission again.
  • Tell them what you hope for in sharing the feedback. “I hope we can avoid this particular pitfall in the future.” 
  • Be on their team. “Here is what I want for us.” Rather than “you need to do ‘this and/or that’.”
  • Ladle it with kindness. Don’t feel kindness towards the other person? Don’t share the feedback. 
  • After sharing, ask for feedback about how you gave your feedback. “Did you feel like I was on your team?” “How could I have said this better to help you not feel attacked?”

Trying to enact change in relationships takes a lot of time, consistency, grace, and love. And love is inefficient.

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The Three P’s of Porn Recovery

Last week I wrote about the allure of Porn. As a therapist, I’ve interacted with hundreds of men, women, and teenagers about their sexuality and porn usage. They all desire sexual wellness but struggle to know how to find it. In working with them, there are three things that always show up when someone is wanting health and healing from pornography. Those that engage with these three categories always discover something greater for their lives. They find what they have been searching for. 

The Three P’s of Porn Recovery:

People
Shame tells us that we need to have life figured on own. This is a flat out lie. We have to have people involved in our recovery story. We need others to support, encourage, hold accountable, challenge, and believe in us (especially when we don’t believe in ourselves). This needs to include (with limitations) someone’s spouse, but not only their spouse.

Process
We need a process to follow that is beyond our ability to set rules and limitations on life. Helpful processes include therapy, 12-step meetings (AA, SA, Al-Anon, ACA), Celebrate Recovery, or a sexual integrity group at a local Church. This process needs to be facilitated by someone who has been down the road for a while. Someone who has already followed and is now leading. A doctor can’t perform surgery on themselves, they need another professional to care for them.

Protagonist
We need a hero to discover. Someone to believe in when we lose our way. A hero that can push through the cold of night, withstand the lonely of day, and resist the enemies who thwart the journey. A hero that has character, value, morals, and integrity. Recovery forces us to face the hero within and the ultimate Hero who can save us from ourselves. There’s a reason that the first three steps in the 12-steps is about admitting powerless and entrusting our lives to God for healing.

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