Trust & Betrayal in Marriage

The success of marital relationships and other types of relationships whether business, community, or intimate relationships is based on trust.  Trust is what makes the relationship work.  Without trust, a relationship will deteriorate and eventually it will die.

Trust is one’s confidence in another person that what he or she says is true and that his or her intentions are for your best interest and the welfare of your relationship.

Betrayal by definition is a violation or breaking of a promise or agreement that erodes one’s confidence in the trustworthiness of the other person in a relationship. 

John Gottman, an expert in marital relationships, has studied the science of trust and betrayal and how to build trust in our relationship.  Gottman says that trust in another person slowly erodes any time there is a turning away from meeting the need of ATTUNEment to a loved one. 

Gottman’s colleague, Dan Yoshimoto has created an acronym to clarify the meaning of ATTUNE:

• Awareness of your partner’s emotion
• Turning toward the emotion
• Tolerance of two different viewpoints
• trying to Understand your partner
• Non-defensive responses to your partner
• and responding with Empathy

That slow erosion of trust from turning away from a partner's need for ATTUNEment can cause great damage over years, but individual events of turning away from needs of ATTUNEment do not define a relationship because everyone does it at some time or another.  When we fail to attune with our spouse or the person we love, we are allowing the basic building blocks of a strong and healthy relationship to erode.

For Gottman, betrayal begins after you have turned away from the need for ATTUNEment in your partner and then begin to distance yourself from your partner by saying to yourself, “I can do better.  Who needs this garbage?  I am always dealing with their negativity and I’m fed up.”  This ruminating on that idea that there is someone or something better is the initiation of betrayal. 

Many marital conflicts begin with small things such as forgetting to wash the dishes, coming late for dinner, forgetting to communicate, etc.  The offended person sends signals that something bothers him or her.  (Gottman calls this the sliding door)  These sliding doors, like a small reaction of sadness, a sudden silence or coldness are opportunities for the other person to ATTUNE to the person who is hurting or bothered.  When we choose to ignore sliding doors because we are tired or we don’t want to be sidetracked or distracted, we ended up destroying the trust that we could build by simply pausing and ATTUNE-ing  to our partner.

Lack of ATTUNE-ment turns to betrayal when we choose to believe that we can do better without them which usually leads to resentment, becoming uninterested and jaded.  Our level of commitment drops and we stop investing in and sacrificing for the relationship.  Without significant intervention, this relationship decline will lead to the ending of the relationship. 

Gottman created a “betrayal metric” where he defines the extent of the couples’ interaction.  When a relationship interaction is characterized by the thinking that I win when my partner loses known in game theory as “zero-sum game” trust erodes quickly.  During Gottman’s 20-year study,  many couples who engaged in this type of interaction dropped from the study.  When he started to investigate why, he discovered that many of them had died.  And it was usually the male partner who had died.  Creating a high trust relationship is very significant not only for the emotional wellbeing, but also for the physical health of the couple.

John Gottman explains how to build trust through ATTUNE-ment in this video:

Building and maintaining trust can be accomplished the paying attention to and investing the time to ATTUNE to our spouse or loved one.  This has tremendous emotional and physical benefits in the long run, both personally and relationally

Gottman’s full article and accompanying lecture videos can be seen here:

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/john_gottman_on_trust_and_betrayal

Intercultural Marriage Counseling

    In my counseling practice, I work with intercultural couples (particularly Filipinas married to foreigners here in the Philippines).  Foundationally, we want to understand the couples’ cultural differences by clarifying the values of each culture and their impact in the budding intimate relationship.  The first thing we do in counseling is “Getting to know ‘me’ as a Filipina or a foreigner:  my values, my hopes and my dreams, as well as, my fears.”   I do psychoeducation on how differing values and cultural patterns will clash.  Then we work together to explore ways to proactively face them.  By understanding both cultures, the couple becomes aware and equipped to develop their own family culture, unique to their relationship.  This also provides the couple a framework to set limits and boundaries especially in dealing with cultural obligations and cultural values that cause them to see each other as rivals.   Secondly, I teach the couple how to bond and create an environment where feelings of falling in-love can be nourished and grow.  Thirdly, I teach Emotionally Healthy Skills (developed by my mentors Pete and Geri Scazzero) that will help make them feel listened to and loved.  We go over how to confide both positive and negative emotions; how to have a fair fight for change; and how to make a complaint and ask for what one needs.  These skills provide a point of reference when they are caught in the middle of these clashing and seemingly irreconcilable cultural differences.  They can use Emotionally Healthy Skills in order to lovingly communicate their struggles without hurting each other deeply from collateral damage.

    Pfeil (2010) in her book, Counseling Intercultural Couples, highlights cultural values that cause gaps in intercultural marriage.  For instance, the Filipino cultural value of” Utang na Loob” (debt of gratitude) has very good aspects, but it brings a heavy load to children who are expected to provide for their parents and help their parents to raise the younger siblings as soon as they have income.   Pfeil (2006) stressed that the Filipino family system is bilateral with closely knit family ties, generational hierarchy, and respect for seniority.  Children owe their parents a debt of gratitude for giving them life and raising them.  Younger siblings owe their older siblings for having cared for them.  The failure to fulfil this obligation causes bitterness and broken trust.  The younger one who owes the debt will be incapable of expressing love and respect to parents and elder siblings if they ignore this debt of gratitude and the relationships will fracture.  This Filipino cultural value of financially supporting the Filipino family of origin is a big issue of marital conflict in a Filipino marriage and even more so if the Filipina is married to a Westerner who does not share that cultural value.

Here are some of the intercultural issues that I discuss in counselling Intercultural Couples:

• Punctuality
• Child rearing
• Organizational patterns
• Communication patterns
• Staple food preferences
• Personal Health Habits
• Ideas of loyalty
• Ways to ask and extend forgiveness
• Financial stability vs. Obligation to sharing financial resources to the extended family.
• Straightforwardness vs. Smooth Interpersonal Relationships (where it is ok to lie or make a cover-up story for the sake of saving someone from shame)
• The values of personal reward/enjoying the fruit of my labor vs.  The value of self-sacrifice for the sake of other’s happiness and well-being.
• Inner oriented vs. Other oriented (where I care so much about what people think or say, that most of what I do is motivated to do exactly what others expect of me or to prevent them from saying bad things about me)
• Personal responsibility vs. Group responsibility
• Respect as earned vs. Respect as ascribed (based on status)
• Group culture vs. Individualistic culture
• Nutritious diet vs. Cultural diet 

    The rising phenomenon of divorce is very alarming both in Christian and Non-Christian marriages.  The strength of society depends on the stability and emotional health of families.  A couple’s marital relationship deeply influences the couple’s emotional health and intimacy, as well as the self-esteem of their children.  When couples are in conflict, the children usually suffer as they are caught in the middle of warring parents.  When couples are unable to communicate about small annoyances, the frustration is usually repressed and eventually causes destructive emotional explosions or deep resentment expressed in passive aggressive tendencies.  The passive aggressive partner distances him or herself to avoid the struggles and pain of the relationship.  This will eventually lead to a loss of bonding in the relationship, which raises the risk of the partner seeking solace in an extramarital affair. 

    People do not get married hoping to divorce someday.  But when two people come together there is a great potential for conflict.  Conflict resolution and skillful communication are necessary in order to safely navigate these difficulties common to relationship.  Being married is one of the most difficult relationships, but it is also the most significant relationship where one can experience the deepest joy of what it means to be truly loved, cherished, and desired.  The marital vow provides boundaries and limits that protect the loving relationship, but often these boundaries are misunderstood and violated. 

    There are whole slew of marital issues that are common in both same-culture marriage and intercultural marriage.   Many divorced couples separated due to incompatibility.  That’s why instruments like PREPARE have been created to detect the differences between the prospective marriage partners in areas such as personality and personal values on finances, children, sex, and religious orientation (David Olson et al. 2000).  According to Gottman (1995) though compatibility is a significant issue in staying married, the most important thing is how the couple works out their differences.

Help Offered at Harner Marriage and Family Counseling Center:

Couples Counselling Intervention Program for engaged couples

For Pre-marital couples, I have designed a 10-session Counseling curriculum with specific inventories to identify major cultural value differences for discussion.   Even couples of the same culture find this enlightening and very helpful in preparation for their marriage. 

Couples Counselling Intervention Program for married couples

For Filipino, Chinese and intercultural couples I have developed a 10-session culturally relevant Couple’s Counselling Program.  This program has been particularly effective for a Filipina married to a foreigner here in the Philippines.  During the counselling, the couples develop their own goals and together we work toward achieving those goals.   The counselling sessions provide a place for the couple to look at the factors affecting their relationship:  hidden expectations, differing visions for their marriage, creating boundaries, unlearning bad relational habits, learning emotionally healthy skills and appropriate language for communication in intimate relationships.  In the end, the goal is to establish a new norm for the couple that will enhance intimacy and maintain strong attachment.  After the 10^th session the couples decide where they will continue the counselling or stop and evaluate the impact of session after few months.

Your Role in Making a Difficult Person Difficult - When Dealing with Your Difficult Person, Don’t Overfunction

This is part 2 in my review of John Townsend’s Handling Difficult People:  What to do when people try to push your buttons.

My wife asks me to cook for her, massage her, and fetch her a drink.  If I don’t do what she asks, she will sulk for days.  I am feeling used and manipulated to do what she wants.  I feel like I have no choice.  To keep the peace, I yield to her constant demands for my time to do things for her.  I am concerned that if I stop doing these little things for her, we will fight and she will keep me at a distance for too long.  I feel lonely and in pain.  She is too strong for me to stop.  I am thinking of our 4 kids. I don’t want them to be exposed to heated discussions, bickering, and my wife running away from home.

When you hear this story, you might feel pity for the person sharing their problem and feel irritated with the difficult person who is taking advantage of them.  We might see the person as a victim who has no option in the relationship.   We might see the difficult person as the whole problem.  However, the difficult behavior of the difficult person does not exist in a vacuum and we must consider the whole system of relationships in order to understand why the difficult person continues to behave in this way.  There are things that we do that will reinforce the difficult behavior.  Many times the difficult person has people in their lives that are very “caring” and “loving” toward them and willing to sacrifice for themselves for the difficult person.  But they are also afraid of conflict and not willing to confront the difficult person strongly and allow him or her to feel the true consequences of their behavior “because they care too much.” 

But the only way that the person will begin to change is feel those consequences, and feel them for a long time to the point where they realize they are no longer going to be rescued by that “caring” individual.  Difficult people will not change their behavior on their own out of a good heart.  So if they will not change, who will change?  Whoever is uncomfortable is the one that needs to change and must seek to create healthy space for himself or herself. 

So when the difficult person displays toxic behavior, instead of being caught in an ambush of her mood swings and feeling out of control and angry about yourself or feeling guilty for giving in when this difficult person displays her toxic behavior, you need to be able to be aware of the discomfort you are experiencing and evaluate the situation.  Difficult people have the tendency to push you until you break, then blame you for victimizing them.  This is their strategy to make you feel responsible for their problem by making you reap what you did not sow.   We feel manipulated, guilty, angry, helpless and hopeless to change our situation. 

We have proven many times that when we do things to pacify the situation, it does not yield a good and lasting change.  Many times in our feelings of helplessness we simply deny our reality and hope that the problem will simply go away.  We try to understand, cover up or even lie for them, hoping that they will see our effort and in turn, they will consider our feelings.  But when our hope does not come true, we get angry and threaten them or we completely give up on them.  By doing this, we become part of the problem.

Townsend gives very good advice in dealing with this kind of situation: 

1.  Identify your inability to separate yourself from this difficult person.  His thoughts, feelings, and actions are his.  Since it is his, he is completely responsible for it and completely in control of it.  You and he are completely different persons even if you are twins or he is your spouse.

2.  Pause for a moment; evaluate the situation; differentiate yourself; identify you goal; and plan your course of action.

 

3.  Take a specific behavior & examine it:  How severe is the problematic behavior? Then rate it. 

• Not very severe (annoying but not damaging and only occurs sometimes)
• Moderately severe (happens often causing prolonged chaos)
• Extremely severe and urgent (Infrequent but violent; or the person is enraged much of the time)

4.  Evaluate the person’s sense of personal responsibility.  Then rate it:

• Minimal problem – the person response accepts and change the behavior
• More serious problem – when the person accepts but makes excuses or minimizes it. 
• Severe problem – when the person is unaware and blames others.

5.  Be aware that there is a big difference between “I can’t” and “I won’t.”  Difficult people tend to confuse these.  They would say, “I can’t.” when they actually mean they won’t.

“I can’t” means the person really has no ability. 

“I won’t” means the person is simply resistant. 

6.  Empower them by teaching them what to do and how to do it once or twice.  Then let them do it themselves.  Be consistent and stand on your ground.  Do NOT do things for them because you are happy this time or because it makes them have a good attitude (That is manipulation and they will manipulate you back) Do not nag or remind the difficult person what to do – he knows what to do and how to do it right.  (You already showed him and taught him.  Also, he has already done it himself before when he was in the mood).

Examples: 

If your mother is staying in your house and constantly complains about your situation and change the way you run your house.  It is important that you consider the validity of her comments and concern.  She might be giving you better ideas about life and discipline.  Comparing you to your other siblings and accusing your husband of something he did not do is really not acceptable and must be confronted.  Be careful the way you do this because it will cause a heated argument.  This requires some communication skill and self-control not fall into the trap of guilt tripping.  Even when you approach it slowly difficult people has a hard-time accepting the possibility that they could be wrong….

If your 17-year-old daughter refuses to cook, then don’t cook for her so that she does not have a good cooked meal to eat.  If she did not clean her room, let her room stink.  Do not cover it up.  Do not be afraid of what other people say.  Do not clean it yourself or let the maid or helper clean for her. 

If your son is already 7 years old and refuses to feed himself, then let him go without eating.  When he is hungry, he will decide to feed himself.  (This is very common here in the Philippines because we spoon feed children even when they are older.) If he cries or pouts give him space for his emotion and let him deal with it.  But do not allow any tantrums or damaging of property. 

We might tend to nag because we believe that this difficult person needs to be reminded to do the right thing.  However the problem is, they don’t see what you are doing, instead they see you as controlling.  They may be reminded of an authority figure like their mom or dad that they did not function well with and regress into a childish state and rebel against your authority.  

Loving and enabling are not the same thing.  Love can be very kind and caring, but have zero tolerance toward irresponsibility, selfishness and manipulation.  On the other hand, enabling allows the person to get away with their misbehavior while protecting them from the pain that their misbehavior causes.  When you are enabling, you may do what they ask of you when you are in their presence, but deep inside you want them out of your life or may even have developed a hatred against them. 

The transformation of a difficult person requires the whole system to change.  It starts with you (the one who is bothered) restraining yourself from over-functioning and enabling their immature behavior.  When you choose to stop over-functioning, you will engage in a real battle for a while, but it is very important that you are consistent and do not over-function.  Instead allow this person to reap the consequence of his behavior.  The goal is not to punish them.  And you don’t want to quit on them.  Instead the goal is to help them develop a maturity that is appropriate for their age and expected developmental tasks.  If you over-function for them, you will cripple them and set them up for failure. 

For example:  A parent may really value the education of their child.  The parent always helps with homework and sometimes ends up taking over.  The student gets good grades on his projects, but is not learning how to be a good student.  When the students goes away to college, he may not have the perseverance necessary to finish difficult assignments because he never hard to before. 

In short, it takes a lot of hard-work and self-discipline to restrain yourself.  Be committed that you will not be a part of problem by separating yourself and holding this difficult person accountable to choose good behavior.  It is a temptation to jump back into the cycle when they are showing progress because you think the problem is over now.  Be sure to find ways to reward them fully with praise, appreciation and encouragement, but DO NOT begin to take on their responsibility again (this would sabotage their recovery).  This kind of discipline will bring about emotional health, personal growth and maturity.  If they are less than 18 years old, it is your responsibility to make them follow your household rules and the order of your home.  If they are above 18, they are already capable of feeding and supporting themselves and they can live on their own and have their own personal rules if they do not want to abide by your rules.

To be gracious and kind is what we desire, so as we wait and expect this difficult person to change we also provide space, time, and more affirmation when they achieve the desired behaviors. 

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.

September 2014 Emotionally Healthy Church Seminar Philippines

*This seminar is highly recommended for couples in ministry.

When:  3 Saturdays – September 13, 20; Oct 4

Time:  9am-4:00pm

Where:  Baptist Theological College

AS Fortuna, Mandaue

Space limited to 50 registrants.  Registration includes snack, lunch and notes

PRE-REGISTRATION with payment

All 3 Sessions P350  (P400 at the door)

Individual sessions P150 per session (P200 at the door)

*Early Bird Discount expires September 1 - All 3 sessions P300

Phone: 423 4720 (landline)   0923 458 4753 (sun)   0916 746 7715(globe)

Website:  http://rickandjijiharner.wix.com/ehc-php

Session 1 – Sept 13 – Looking Beneath the Surface; and Breaking the Power of the Past

Session 2 – Sept 20 – Living in Brokenness and Vulnerability; and Receiving the Gift of Limits

Session 3 – Oct 4 – Embracing Grieving and Loss; and Making the Incarnation your Model for Loving Well  

In 2003, Pastor Pete Scazzero won the Gold Medallion for Evangelical Writers with this challenging book.  Pete tells his story of planting New Life Fellowship of Queens, NY - a very “successful” church on the outside, but seeing his own soul wither in the midst of conversions, baptisms and explosive church growth.  This seminar will focus on a biblical understanding of emotional issues like fear, anger and seeking the approval of others that have the potential to undermine our ministries.  He challenges evangelicals to return to Scripture for their theology and engage biblical topics that seem to have been lost in current evangelical teaching. 

PRESENTERS:  Rick and Jiji Harner are missionaries with New Life Fellowship (Queens, NY) serving in Cebu since 2006.  They will be presenting this experiential seminar that will encourage you to go deeper in your relationship with God and to search your own soul as David expressed in Psalm 139:23-24 - Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.  See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.  Rick and Jiji attended New Life Fellowship under Pastor Pete Scazzero and have been sent to Cebu as missionaries of the church.  Rick is part-time pastor of Olive Grove Christian Ministries in Mabolo, in addition to directing a community tutoring program in Consolacion called G1:27.  Jiji is a graduate of Alliance Graduate School of Counseling in Nyack, NY and is a faculty member at Cebu Graduate School of Theology in AS Fortuna, handling their counseling courses in addition to her private practice in counseling.

Developing Emotional Health Workshops

Dr. Jiji Harner has developed a series of experiential workshops to address problems of emotional health commonly seen here in the Philippines.  She integrates her American professional training with her Filipino cultural expertise to address these issues in a unique way.  She has developed a Series of experiential seminars to equip those working with people struggling with mental health issues.  Each of these one-day experiential seminars provides a brief theoretical framework for counseling with explanation of major Do's and Don'ts, as well as specific skill sets and techniques related to the specific emotional struggle being considered.

Equipping Helpers Series

•  How to Help Overcome Depression  -  Caring for the Depressed
• Caring for the Anxious
• Working with Perfectionism and Low Self-Esteem
• Coming Alongside the Grieving

She has also developed the following one-day group counseling and workshops for those who are suffering with any one of these emotional struggles.   The one-day workshops start registration at 8:30 am and begin promptly at 9 am to 4:00 pm.  Lunch is included on site.  The day will consist of 4 sessions.  Each session will consist of approximately 35 minutes of lecture and education about the issue:  its symptoms, its causes and how to overcome it.  The lectures are biblically based and also bring in current psychological information and research to open our understanding of what is really going on inside a person who is struggling.  After the lecture, there will be about 1 hour for participants to process the information in a small group setting.  Questions will be presented to engage participants with information and techniques of the lecture.  The purpose here is for participants to gain self-awareness of how the issue strikes them and its roots, along with skills for self-regulating and self-soothing when they are on their emotional roller coaster.  The group process follows the rule - Invite, not inflict - meaning you are always invited to participate with questions, but never required to or forced to participate.  After the time of group process, there will be a short break before the next session. 

One Day Group Counseling and Workshops

• When Depression Hits Home –  Finding help through my Depression
• Breaking the Power of Anxiety
• Finding Meaning in My Loss
• Help! I’m a Perfectionist - Breaking free from life-controlling perfectionism
• What if I really don’t like myself? - Dealing with my Insecurities

Leading out of an Emotionally Healthy Marriage - Eagles' Leadership Conference 2013 - Singapore

Guest Post by my husband Rick Harner

While in attending Eagles' Leadership Conference 2013 in Singapore, my wife Jiji and I had the opportunity to assist Pastor Pete Scazzero and his wife Geri in their seminar:  Leading out of an Emotionally Healthy Marriage.  The seminar was packed out, and it was quite exciting to be a part of building marriages of couples from many different countries throughout Southeast Asia.  There were translators working in 5 different languages, facilitating the learning and understanding of the material.

Pastor Pete started the day with 3 ideas.  First, marriage is bigger than you think.  Your marriage as a Christian leader impacts future generations of your family and it bears witness to the loving relationship that Christ has with his Church.  Second, marriage is harder than you think.  (I don't think I need to explain this one . . . )  Third, marriage is greater than you think.  When we invest in and build our marriages, they can bring more joy than any other earthly pleasures.

After the inspiring talk, Pastor Pete and Geri demonstrated a Community Temperature Reading (CTR).  This is simple communication tool developed by Virginia Satir designed to be used regularly that increases emotional openness (a vital aspect of bonding) in a relationship.  The CTR is one of the skills presented in Emotionally Healthy Skills 2.0.  After the demonstration was the fun.  Everyone got to try it.  Many different languages sharing things in their hearts with their loved one.  But above the din of languages I did not know, universal languages could be heard:  Laughter, tears, joyful smiles and loving embraces . . .

The next topic was assumptions and mind reading.  Pastor Pete reminded us that we are not to bear false witness against our neighbor.  When we assume we know what someone else is thinking and we are wrong, we are bearing false witness against our neighbor.  And contrary to our favorable opinion of ourselves, when we assume about others, we are frequently wrong in our assumptions.  This hurts people we love, causes conflict and general chaos in relationships.

Another New Life couple Kelly and Shirley Ng traveled from New York to assist and facilitate in the seminar.  They demonstrated the Emotionally Healthy Skill to combat assumptions:  Stop Mind Reading.  In this skill, a partner asks permission:  "Can I 'read your mind'?"  When the other partner gives permission, the first partner proceeds, "I think that you think  . . . .  Is that true?"  To which the 2nd partner can respond either "Yes, that's true," "No, that's not true."  or "That's partially true.  Let me clarify . . . "  This brings hidden assumptions into the open and allows us to let go of assumptions of issues that were bothering us that were not even true.  It also opens a place to discuss issues that are bothering us that we are keeping inside and often assuming the worst.

After their demonstration, couples experimented with the simple tool to replace our natural tendencies to assume things about our loved one. 

After lunch, we worked on speaking and listening.  Geri gave us 4 criteria with which to evaluate and improve our speaking.  Be respectful.  Be honest.  Be clear.  Be timely.  Participants were asked to consider a recent experience of frustrating communication and evaluate.  Then they were asked to form a request to their partner. We had quite a laugh as one volunteer shared that his wife was usually late for lunch.  As Geri coached him, she prodded him with a few questions.  He came to realize that he had not really even given her a time or an expectation, but he just felt like she was always late . . . 

Next, Shirley and Kelly demonstrated the art of Incarnational Listening - to listen at the heart level like Christ did, with empathy, being attuned to another person's words and non-verbal communications.  This was a very moving time as Kelly demonstrated his vulnerability and shared a deep pain with his wife Shirley who listened in a way that communicated a lot of love and support. 

After the participants practiced Incarnational Listening, Jiji and I demonstrated Clean Fighting.  The purpose of clean fighting is to resolve conflict as emotionally healthy adults by eliminating dirty fighting and taking responsibility for the issue.  Jiji confronted me in a very considerate, respectful and loving way with how the mess of my working papers infringe upon her living space (specifically our kitchen table)  It was very interesting and even comical to see as other couples began their own Clean Fights the similarity of themes that couples struggle with.   

The day ended with couples being encouraged to develop their own Marriage Rule of Life.  Basically, they were encouraged and coached to consider and plan practical ways and routines that will build a healthy marriage for the long haul.  We were asked to consider how our personal habits impact our marriage:  overworking, not sleeping enough, poor communication skills . . . These types of things drain us and then we come to our marriage drained with very little to give.  Then we were asked to consider things that we can do together on a regular basis that will breath life into our marriages.  Being married becomes so much a part of us that we can take marriage and our partner for granted, not investing the time and energy we did at the beginning of the relationship.  A healthy marriage requires learned skills, intentionality, time and good will to make things grow.

The seminar was meant to be a seed planted into marriages that will grow, flourish and develop into emotionally healthy marriages of Christian leaders throughout Southeast Asia.