Connections - The Glue For Relationships

Dallas Munkholm, B.A., B.Com., R.T.C.
Register Therepeutic Counsellor & Life Coach
Co-author of Marriage Prep: Beginnings a downloadable marriage preparation course
Co-author of Intimate Sex: Manual for Lovemaking, a sex manual for couples
Offers a free Nurturing Marriage Ezine

Watch Dr. Roland Trujillo talk about his books in this short video.  Dr. Roland also has a special offer -
For a donation of any amount get one of his relationships ebooks, with lots of tips and strategies for improving communication and reducing stress, for free as a token of his appreciation. Click  here to find out how to get your free eBook for a donation of any amount.

Reduce Stress To Improve Relationships

It is natural to feel stressed when we have to handle more than we are used to. When we experience a stress response, our body responds as though we are in danger. Our heart races and we breathe faster. We experience the urge to fight or flee.

A certain amount of stress is healthy and helps us feel alive. But if there is too much stress or it lasts too long it can take a toll on our health and on our relationships. Stress can narrow our focus down to ‘how do I make it through the next day, hour or minute’. Too much stress can make it difficult for partners to give each other much needed caring attention. It can make it difficult to be fully present with each other, since our minds are preoccupied with worries.


To reduce the negative effects of stress, it is helpful to first be aware of the source of your stress. Paying attention to when you are feeling stressed and noting what has been or is happening may help you find the source of your stress. At times we already know what is causing us stress and at other times it is not so clear. Next ask yourself: In what ways could I reduce the amount of stress in my life? What might I need to put on hold, delegate or let go?

It is also important to practice healthy ways of relieving stress or managing stress. Try some of the following:

• Make taking good care of yourself a priority. Get enough sleep, eat well, live a healthy lifestyle.
• Improve your time management. A schedule may help you get more done with less stress. Prioritize and do the most important things first.
• Be honest with yourself about how you currently cope with stress. Be willing to find healthier ways of coping. For example: consider exercise rather than eating; meditation rather than alcohol or drugs.
• Practice new ways of thinking. Choose to stop the worry mill. Work on changing what you can and accepting what you cannot.
• Be willing to say no and set healthy boundaries.
• Be willing to ask for what you need. Do not stuff or swallow your feelings. Stand up for yourself assertively.
• Delegate or ask for help. Strengthen your network of friends and family.

At times stress becomes more than you can handle on your own. It may help to talk to a friend or family member. Someitmes a counsellor may help you to see things more clearly.

Susan Derry, B.Ed., M.S.Psy., R.T.C., C.P.C.
Professional Counselor & Life Coach
Co-author of Marriage Prep: Beginnings a downloadable marriage preparation course
Co-author of Intimate Sex: Manual for Lovemaking, a sex manual for couples
Offers a free Nurturing Marriage Ezine

“You can’t just hope for happy endings. You have to believe in them. Then do all the work, take the risks.”
Nora Roberts

One of the saddest things I know is when two people desperately love each other and yet, can’t make it work, for whatever reason. Sometimes it’s beliefs that get in the way, others, it’s past experiences and at times it is not knowing what to do and how to do it. We often believe that relationships should be easy, that we should just be able to have a decent one because we are in love. Not always the case, in fact usually not.

Most of the things that make relationships work are, as I’ve stated before in this forum, learned behaviors. Some of it is that we need to learn about each other and how we tick. What makes us happy, sad, and angry and how do we do each of those? How does our partner feel loved, express love and the same for ourselves?

Another thing we need to learn is to deal with ourselves in the relationship. We need to ask ourselves what are we bringing to the party. In what ways are our actions, words and silences contributing to the success or failure of the relationship? As couples, are we dealing with the issues when they are just little? Do we deal with the hurts, pains and injuries immediately before they start to get infected and fester into anger, frustration and resentment? This all starts with me, the individual. I need to learn how to control and manage my anger, my frustration, my hurt and my resentment. This is what is meant by what we bring to the party.

I have seen couples where it is very evident that there is a tremendous amount of love for each other, yet they are talking about divorce, separation, about walking away and never seeing each other again. Why? In looking at most scenarios, it is the past, the history of the relationship. The hurts, betrayals, the anger, the inappropriate behaviors, the lies and mistruths and the not talking to each other or about certain things that are causing the issues. Every couple gets into times when things aren’t good, where the relationship takes second seat to other things and for some nothing is done to repair the damage.
Let’s review the order of things in a relationship. First, respect for each other leads to trusting each other. Trust leads to creating a deep and lasting intimacy, which is the keystone of love. So, respect, trust, intimacy and love; all need to exist in the relationship in order for it to remain fresh and vibrant and strong. It is the unresolved issues that begin to wear on these things.

It has been my experience that these types of issues left unchecked can destroy the relationship because they push at our own insecurities. So what happens over time is we begin to treat each other differently. We lose respect because we treat each other badly, unfairly or unlovingly. We begin to not talk to each other, not tell the truth, keep secrets and this is a recipe for breaking trust. Then, because we don’t trust each other the little intimacies become impossible and we lose that as well.
So there is love, very much so, but we have ripped the respect, trust, and intimacy out of the relationship. Love is strong and powerful but it can’t sustain a relationship by itself for very long. It is like trying to plug a leaky dam with your fingers, in time you run out of fingers and toes and the dam bursts.

Do you believe in happily ever after? Do you have a fairy tale love and all that it creates? Do you want to love each other forever and ever in that dream relationship? It is not impossible to have that type of relationship; first you need to believe it is possible, next you need to learn what is needed and how to do those things and lastly, you need to do it. Not caring whether your partner is doing their part or not, you do it because you love your partner and want this to work.
You need to ask yourself why you love your partner. Oh, there will be all the “normal” reasons: good looks, sexy, attractive, caring, hard working and on and on. But if you really truthful you will say you know you love your partner because of the way you feel when you are with them and how you feel when you think about them and how much you miss them when you are not together. That is the fairy tale love.

So take care of your relationship. Nurture it, feed it, pamper it, maintain and repair it; deal with what needs dealing with and do it immediately. Always be respectful and trustworthy so as to create and maintain intimacy which creates, nurtures, grows, builds strong, long lasting, love and loving relationships. Believe in fairy tales and happily ever afters and work like hell to achieve them.

“What is opportunity to the man who can’t use it?”  George Elliot

How To Stop Self-Sabotaging

How many times have you promised yourself that you would never do that again, only to find yourself doing it a short while later? Why is change so illusive and what can we do about it?

It may be helpful to recognize that the intent behind this type of behavior is actually to protect rather than to sabotage. There is a positive intent behind self-sabotaging behavior. Rarely is there a conscious intention to ruin things. People are often left wondering, “Why did I do (or say) that?”


Our stress response takes over, whether the expected threat is physical or emotional harm. False beliefs like, “I can’t handle stress,” “I’m not good enough,” or “nothing lasts” may be triggered and before we know it we are engaging in self-sabotaging behavior.

Overcoming this negative reaction, starts with an awareness of the self-talk and beliefs that are contributing to the self-sabotage. Step back and become the observer in your own life. What are the things that you are saying to yourself? Tease out the beliefs that are keeping you stuck.

Below are some strategies for reducing self-sabotage:

• Swap out your inner critic for an inner coach. Change your inner dialogue to one of recognition and gratitude for your strengths, offer yourself encouragement rather than judgment.
• Get a clear picture of what you do want. Create a vision board or a mind movie or simply visualize yourself behaving the way you want to behave.
• Give yourself the gift of self-acceptance and appreciation. Focus on gratitude.
• Recognize that you chose the false beliefs and you have the power to change them to self-empowering beliefs.
• Decide to bring your sense of self inside of you. Recognize that your worth is infinite and can be neither destroyed nor created by your failures or accomplishments.
• Accept that mistakes are opportunities to learn, remember there is no failure, only feedback.
• Be true to yourself. Refuse to give up who you are, in order to please someone else.

Step back, take a deep breath and focus on the bigger picture. Make decisions from the best in you. Be extremely cautious of fear-based decisions or impulses. These usually mean that your defenses have been triggered and self-sabotaging will often follow close behind.


Susan Derry, B.Ed., M.S.Psy., M.T.C., C.P.C.
Registered Therapeutic Counsellor; Life Coach
Co-author of Marriage Prep: Beginnings a downloadable marriage preparation course
Co-author of Intimate Sex: Manual for Lovemaking, a sex manual for couples
Offers a free Nurturing Marriage Ezine

I heard a radio program this morning about the graying of divorce and reference was made to a Wall Street Journal article entitled The Gray Divorcée. So of course, as soon as I arrived at Starbucks to do my morning work I looked it up.

 Here it is the Wall Street Journal article about the graying of divorce.

The information in the article is not surprising to me, since I've been in the helping couples line of work for 25 years. Nevertheless, it is eye opening. I recommend you check it out.

Basically the article states that it used to be that only 1 in 10 divorces was someone over 50 years of age. Just before the article was written the rate had skyrocketed to 1 in 4 divorcing people is over 50. In most of the cases, (men, take note) it is the woman who files for divorce.


Here is something I found interesting in the well written WSJ article about predictors for a late life break up:  According to John Mordecai Gottman, founder of the Gottman Institute in Seattle and author of "What Predicts Divorce?," the behavioral precursors to late-life or empty nest divorce are no different from those for younger couples—criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling."

Now that I think about it, I can see that when my mom and step dad began to have obvious issues in their marriage, the thing that I observed most clearly as an 18 to 22 year old was the contempt. I remember my mom criticizing everything that he did for years, though often behind his back. Meanwhile he scratched his head and could not figure out what was wrong.

Eventually the resentment built up until it came out as open unabashed utter contempt and resentful dirty looks and snickering at each other, even at the dinner table.

She was determined to turn everyone against him and then destroy what they had together. She almost succeeded in turning the kids against him, and she succeeded in destroying what they had. She lived out the rest of her life in poverty.    


The radio program where I had learned about the graying of divorce phenomenon was also informative. It was a Focus on the Family interview with a Ted Cunningham, author of Great Parents, Lousy Lovers. It aired on February 24, 2014. The author who was being interviewed talked about children centered marriages and how when the kids have left home, the empty nesters, for reasons I'm sure you can guess (and it's usually not infidelity), such marriages will think of breaking up.

What is mentioned in the radio program and which I agree with and have been warning people about in some of my other articles and posts is this: The empty nesters who decide to divorce rationalize that "since the kids are grown up it won't affect them." But they are wrong. Their divorce hurts the kids.

The sound byte version of why it hurts the kids is because their divorce is a broken promise. The parents have done their best to put up a good front and to act like their marriage is who they are and that commitment is what life is about. Now their infidelity to those values is like a broken promise, a lie, a betrayal.

Two books by adult kids of parents who divorced, even when they the kids were aready grown up, and about how they feel about their parents divorce and how it has affected them are

The Way They Were: Dealing with your Parents' Divorce after a Lifetime of Marriage and

Generation Ex: Adult Children of Divorce and Dealing with our Pain

But it goes far deeper than that. Marriage is more than you think. It is not about getting our needs met, nor is it just some sort of arrangement. It is sacred. It is a framework within which to work out our differences and learn to be unselfish.

But just as Rome was not built in a day, a marriage is not ruined in a day. The hurt feelings, undercurrents of resentment, and bitterness have been coming for a long time.

Can the marriage be salvaged? I cannot say. But one thing I can say, is that your emotional and spiritual health can be salvaged. It does not really matter what the other does--whether that person changes or not, whether they appreciate you or not, whether communcation improves or not.

If you remain resentful, it will undermine your well being. The emotion of resentment creates an inner atmosphere which you take with you everywhere. Even if the world were suddenly to become perfect, then you would still resent others for their joy, their superiority to you, the fact that they did not worship you or some other reason.

Here are some principles to reestablish a calm happy spirit

1. Let go of resentment and judgment. I cannot tell you here all the reasons why resentment is bad for you, I have 17 books on the subject.

2. Check out my meditations. They are designed to help people calm down, cope with stress, and get in touch with their own calm center of dignity. There you will find intuition, and when you follow what you know in your heart is right, it will help you sort through things and find your way.  
    The meditations don't work for everyone, but for some, they are a God sent.

3. Don't try to change others.

4. You must realize that you are surrounded by wall to wall temptation. There is a lot of error and deceit out there. You must learn how to get in touch with your intuition and follow it. Remember it is your little corner of the world, your home, your life, your health. Some so called expert who eggs you on to divorce will not be hurt in the slightest or even care if you follow her advise, throw away what you have spend years building and ruin your life.

5. Don't be in a hurry. First get centered. Take some time to get to know yourself and learn to overcome stress. If you are resentful, you are being conquered by stress. Don't let this happen. You have seen what not dealing with stress properly has done to others. Remember what I said - your first line of defense is to not become resentful. 

  



 

"My husband irritates me and makes me angry. He sits around and won't talk and I soon find myself nagging him just to get him to respond. He acts like everything is fine when it isn't.


I get so sick of him dumping all the responsibility on me. He won't help me discipline the kids.

He just won't listen to me. When I suggested counseling, he refuses. I don't want to resent my husband but I can't help it."


Hi, my name is Roland Trujillo and I am the author of 16 books. In a popular article I wrote almost 5 years ago, I made the statement that "all wives resent their husbands."

I could also say that all wives hate their husbands. Let me qualify the statement a little. What I mean is all wives resent their husbands. Resentment, you see, is hate--just a sneaky form of it. 


I am republishing the article because the topic is so important.  First people need to honestly acknowledge that they do resent. This is, for many people, a really big first step. 

Resentment (hate) is so sneaky, and it hides under judgment, and it also hides under false love. When we resent someone (like our partner) or are impatient (resentful towards) our kids, we assuage the guilt for the resentment by being extra nice. Observing ourselves doing so much for others, we can even convince ourselves that we are wonderful, and can resent others for not appreciating us. But remember, your false service began in resentment. 

Now you know why your family may react negatively to all your service. They sense the undercurrent of resentment. Plus, your service out of guilt then tempts them to take advantage (and weakens them too). Soon they hate you for your false love, and you hate them for not appreciating you or for rebelling.  

It might help some of you to admit your resentment, if you see others admtting it. So I would like to introduce you to one of America's greatest short story writers--Katherine Anne Porter--who won the Pulizer Prize and the National Book Award. In one of her famous essays, which often appears in anthologies, and is often used to teach aspiring writers the craft of writing, she talks of this hate that a young wife begins to see in herself.

The essay is called "The Necessary Enemy." Here are a couple of brief quotes for you to review and then perhaps go and read the whole essay. It is really good.


"She is a frank woman who married for love. She and her husband are one of those gay, good-looking pairs. They intend in all good faith to spend their lives together, to have children and do well by them and each other--to be happy, in fact, which for them is the whole point of their marriage. And all in stride, keeping their wits about them. Nothing Romantic, mind you; their feet are on the ground."
"Unless they were this sort of person, there would be not much point to what I wish to say;" "After three years of marriage this very contemporary young woman finds herself facing the oldest and ugliest dilemma of marriage.
She is dismayed, horrified, full of guilt and forebodings because she is finding out little by little that she is capable of hating her husband, whom she loves faithfully. She can hate him at times as fiercely and mysteriously, indeed in terribly much the same way, as often she hated her parents, her brothers, her sisters, whom she loves, when she was a child." "This was a thing that her parents never knew about her, never seem to suspect. For it was never given a name." "So it was her secret, a shameful one." "None of this really frightened her: the real fright came when she discovered that at times her father and mother hated each other."

The issue of hating one's husband is also candidly discussed by Iris Krasnow in her Huffington Post article "Help, I Hate my Husband."  Definitely worth reading. She is the author of The Secret Lives of Wives: Women Share What It Really Takes to Stay Married. 
  
A major takeaway for me was her reference to the Time Magazine front cover article "Who Needs Marriage" and the report of the National Marriage Project in which it is revealed that highly educated, more successful Americans are increasingly enjoying long term intact marriages. It's at the lower income level and the middle class that divorce and single parent families are most frequent and where the negative effects are most prevalent. I recall the old dictum that said if you want to be successful, then study what successful people do and do what they do. Getting married and staying together are what the highly educated, successful couples are doing.

In The Secret Lives of Wives: Women Share What It Really Takes to Stay Married, I particularly enjoyed the chapter "Separate Summers." Absence, I have found, does make the heart grow fonder.  I highly recommend her first chapter "Who Needs Marriage."   

Now back to the topic at hand. After admitting one's resentment, the next big step, and one that frankly many people will never make, is to let go of the resentment. Resentment is very destructive and contributes to many bad things, even depression and health issues. That is why I devote so much of my writing and lectures to helping people see and let go of resentment.

I'm republishing part what I wrote 5 years ago, excerpts from one of my most popular articles "What is the Number One Cause of Divorce" and which is also a chapter in my book The Myths and Mysteries of Marriage

"Are you stressed out? Have you noticed that when you are resentful, you become more sensitive to life's little issues? When you are stressed at work, do you come home and easily lose patience with your kids? Do you come home and resent your husband over some little things that he does?

Do you get angry at slow traffic or slow grocery lines? Would terms like "exasperated, nervous, irritated, or impatient" describe you?

If so, you are probably over-reacting. And the worst reaction of all is that of resentment. It sets you up for becoming increasingly sensitive to what you might otherwise take in stride. . . . . . . . . . . .

I can honestly tell you that the number one reason for marriage break ups and relationship problems is resentment. 
 
I understand why people become resentful. When things aren't going well or when others don't seem to understand us or our needs, that's when we need love, patience and understanding the most.


We don't have it within because we are already destabilized and not in our center. So we look for love and understanding from others. And when they don't have it: we become resentful.

What I have discovered in my 25 years of writing and talking to people about resentment is this: when things aren't going right, we look to change things on the outside.

And of course our most frequent first choice is to try to change our partner. But you have found that this doesn't work. Whether it is your partner, your child, or your parent--trying to change another person makes things worse. Either people resist our manipulations and rebel; or else they fall for our manipulations and become weak and dependent.

So here is the answer. Instead of looking to the outside for love, or looking to the outside to try to change someone, I have found that it is most helpful to first look at two things: one, your resentment; and two, your over-reactions that destabilize you in the first place.