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This is a counseling session for saving a marriage. If you would like personalized help with saving a marriage or another issue, click on the button to find out more:
The Counseling Situation
Give
a short description of the incident or situation that's bothering you. My husband also acted depressed frequently … but
I attributed it to his father’s death, which happened just after our
wedding. Then his mother passed away a year later. Now my husband was grieving from his mother’s death
too. I began to see
more serious depression. He spoke often of “life not being worth
living” and “wanting to die”. I was truly concerned for his safety and
mental health, and did some reading. A light bulb went off when I read about the
symptoms of a mild form of Bipolar disorder. It seemed to describe him fairly
accurately. I carefully mentioned it to him, but he became very
angry, and didn’t want to be labeled as having a mental health problem, or
feel that that’s to blame for our relationship difficulties. Then, serendipitously, a friend of mine recently spoke with his ex-wife (of 15 years, with whom he had 2 children). She shared that a main reason for their break up was his emotional ups and downs, and that she thought he might be bi-polar. So this was a very recent and important confirmation of what I have suspected. How can I save our marriage? Then
provide details on the situation you want help with.
How
do you feel about yourself? Allow feelings to free flow. Express
all the self-judgments you have in this situation. Is
there anything else affecting how you feel right now? If
there are other people involved, can you guess at what they feel about this
situation? Tell me
about any previous attempts to deal with the situation at hand. In
previous counseling attempts, my husband got very real about some of his deep
pain and emotions, admitted his fear and projections on me, stated his intention
for things to work. It felt like we were making great headway. But then, he
would “flip”. He has sought counseling for himself, but I don’t believe he
has discussed this with the counselors. What
results do you want from your counseling? Is
there a part of you you'd like to understand better or want to change?
The Counseling Response
As a society, we’re conditioned to believe that we’re only whole when we have a partner. We are desperate for love and forget that we are responsible for our own emotions. We make our partners responsible for our identity, emotional needs, and happiness. This is the primary reason why most relationships fail. You point out that you ignored many “red flags”, believing that you’d finally found love for the long-term. You sacrificed various aspects of your life in order to get
this man to love you in return, to save the marriage. You say he wasn't committed the way you hoped he would be. You tolerated behavior
from him that you probably wouldn’t have elsewhere. Your partner actually gave you everything he was capable of giving you. His ability to be a healthy
emotional partner is limited and you are taking his
limitations personally. We expect our partners will act a certain way with us, usually like we act with them. Whenever people act contrary to what we expect, we take their behavior personally. Another person can’t hurt you emotionally. It's a choice to feel hurt, based on the patterned behavior you developed as a child. You experience an
event, your mind interprets that event based on
your particular pattern, your emotions arise in reaction to the interpretation.
When you’re in reaction, you’re reacting in fear to a trigger and your
pattern causes you to temporarily lose the ability to understand what
you’re really feeling. The key is to look at how you’re reacting now, even as you choose saving the marriage or not. You can choose to understand that your partner’s behavior has everything to do with his patterned behavior and particular set of emotional reactions. Step away from the relationship for a bit to sort out your true emotions and feelings.
Can you identify familiar feelings of disappointment and rejection in your past? When
you look at your expectations, turn them around to see where you’re not meeting those same expectations with
yourself. For example, if you expected him to treat you well and with respect,
where do you not treat yourself well and without respect?
Where did you lose your personal boundaries? You made a series of choices that have left you where you are now. All relationships offer us an opportunity to learn about ourselves and to grow from our experiences. When we face our fears, we increase the opportunity to have good relationships. Take what you learn about yourself back into
the same relationship and save the marriage or put it into a new one. For things to change, you must be willing
to do a lot of emotional work to get clear about your patterns within the
context of your intimate relationships. It’s possible for just one person to make changes in themselves and bring that benefit into the relationship. What you feel about yourself shouldn’t be dependant on how your partner treats you or says to you. When you maintain your boundaries and self-esteem, you’ll act differently and make different choices. It is possible to go back to the old relationship and have it change and save the marriage. The probability of it happening is low until you make some
big shifts in your patterns. Right
now, allow the grieving process to take place. Losing someone you
love is painful; the hurt from the loss needs expression. The hurts
you feel from what has happened in the relationship are different from loss, and
need to be explored one by one to see where you need to change, so you can make different choices
in the future. It’s common to have a very high spiritual understanding while forgetting that emotions need the same level of understanding. Dealing with our deepest emotions usually involves re-experiencing hurt and anger from our past, an unpleasant experience at best. Yet once you identify and release the emotional patterns that cause you pain, you can experience the relationship you want. You changed your personal boundaries in this relationship to feel loved and to try to save the marriage. As a child, you learned from your parents how relationships worked. You picked up the same fears and patterns that they had in their relationship. The subconscious information you received about what it takes to be loved in a relationship are still in you.
With
some more work, you’ll be able to change your patterns in relationships and
break away from what you learned from your parents.
Intellectual knowledge isn’t sufficient to change a pattern; the knowledge
must be applied on an emotional level to change, whether you try to save the
marriage or not. I can’t give you any legal advice as to how to handle the divorce papers. I recommend that you contact a lawyer for that purpose. No matter what happens with this relationship, you will heal and learn to trust yourself and the decisions you make. Right now all the hurt is fresh and clouds your ability to understand what happened. When you feel like beating yourself up over the choices you’ve made, remind yourself that you did the best that you could in each moment. Tell yourself that you are making different choices even now. You have an opportunity to learn so you don’t have to re-experience pain again in the future. You can decide if you want to try again and save the marriage, but wait until the emotions are less intense. Even if the divorce goes through, there will still be a possibility for reconciliation later. If you make a decision while panicked, you will make the wrong one. Time is on your side; use it wisely.
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