Emotionally Healthy Couples Conference (guest post by Rick Harner)

Jiji and I finished our first Emotionally Healthy Couples conference today with 15 couples who are in leadership in the Nazarene Church here in the Visayas region of the Philippines.  It was a tremendous joy and we believe that God will use this tool to bring a deeper level of connection in many marriages here in the Philippines as we continue to sharpen it. 

Jiji began by challenging the couples with a biblical view of marriage:  Marriage is our life’s highest calling.  Our marriage demonstrates the love of Christ for His Church.  Like a sacrament it makes visible that which is invisible.  Our children’s security, self-esteem and view of God is rooted in the stability of our marriage.  Christian marriage should give singles a picture of something beautiful to aim for as the navigate the mixed and deceptive messages of our culture about marriage and its importance and viability.  Marriage has the potential to make us into our best person.  We become our best person when we are in love.  And if we can fan the flame of passion in our marriage, the love for our spouse will permeate our lives with its fruit in all of our relationships and endeavors.  Because of its central importance, it also becomes the focus of our life’s greatest spiritual battle.  The forces that tear at our marriage are immense. 

We introduced 4 Emotionally Healthy Skills, which are extremely practical tools to improve our communication patterns in our relationships. These skills come from the material produced by Pete and Geri Scazzero and Emotionally Healthy Spirituality.

The Community Temperature Reading is tool of confiding.  We practice sharing appreciations, puzzles, complaints with recommendations, new information and wishes, hopes and dreams with this tool.  Appreciations, wishes, hopes and dreams are the fuel that keeps the fires of our passion burning brightly.  The world around us fails to appreciate us and often crushes our wishes, hopes and dreams.  It is vital that our most intimate relationship values and protects these integral parts of us.  The structure also provides a place to share small complaints in a non-threatening way so that our partner can know what is bothering us in a time and place where we are not bothered.  This allows the partner to put off defensiveness and listen so that he or she will be able to objectively hear our point of view.  Puzzles is a great piece that allows us to check out things that we might normally make assumptions about.  Assumptions are destructive in relationships so instead of jumping to conclusions about your partner’s behavior (with an assumption) you can simply state a puzzle – like – “I’m puzzled why you didn’t pick up your phone when I was trying to get a hold of you earlier.”  This leaves space for the other person to provide explanation and context before we make a judgment.

Mind Reading is a very simple tool to check out assumptions.  We often mistreat people we love because of wrong assumptions.  If you look carefully at we assume you will notice 2 things:

1.  When we make assumptions about other people’s motives, they are more often than not negative assumptions.

2.  When we make assumptions about other people’s motives and try to just “sense” them, we are frequently WRONG. 

How do we feel when someone makes a wrong negative assumption about our motives?  We feel mistreated and judges.  How dare they!  But we do this to others without much of a thought.  Mind Reading is a simple tool to keep us from the sin of (mis)judging others. 

The tool Clarify Expectations also helps prevent hurt feelings in relationships.  Expectations are a powerful influence of our reactions to the people around us.  Consider this:  If I give you 500 pesos, would you be happy with me?  Of course you would be happy with me if you weren’t expecting me to give you anything.  But if you were expecting me to pay you back 10,000 pesos that I owed you and I gave you 500 pesos, you might be very upset.   When our expectations are not met, we are frustrated and often angry, feeling cheated and wronged and find ourselves unable to respond lovingly to those who have not met our expectations. And often our expectation of other people that cause us to be upset are not even valid.  To be valid, expectations should be conscious, reasonable, spoken, clear and agreed upon.  The Clarify Expectations skill helps us make valid expectations with the people we love so that we can release our frustration from the invalid expectations we tend to make.

In Incarnational Listening we listen only to understand our partner and put our feet into their shoes and feel the feelings that they are dealing with.  Normally when we listen to our partner, we find ourselves trying to fix them or their problems, giving advice or joking, distracting and trying to change their emotion.  These things do not make the other person feel heard and in the long run they will not make the other person feel loved.  Imagine the following statements:

My spouse is so wonderful, for the last 20 years he has always fixed all my problems and made me feel cared for.

My spouse is so wonderful, for the last 20 years he has always given great advice for all my problems and made me feel cared for.

My spouse is so wonderful, for the last 20 years he has always made light of all my problems with funny jokes and made me feel cared for.

My spouse is so wonderful, for the last 20 years he has always listened to all my problems and made me feel cared for.

Which one sounds like it could be true?  We cannot always fix another’s problems.  We are not wise enough to always give good advice.  And making light of the struggles of another will lose its funniness over the years.  But we can always listen and listen deeply.  With Incarnational Listening, we seek to listen deeply to not only the problem, but even more importantly the emotional experience of the person as they face their problems.  We want to feel what they feel.  This make them feel loved and that is the most important thing.