NURTURING ONE’S MARRIAGE
Two principles are especially important in creating and maintaining a good marriage.
The first is that in a real sense, we create the world we live in. Not physically of course, but emotionally. We create by what we give importance to, and what we withhold importance from.
The more I give importance to worthwhile things, the richer and more rewarding my life will be.
But some people find it very difficult to do this. Many of the influences we grow up with – from parental training to cultural pressure (and yes, sometimes even certain religious influences) – lead us to regard the destructive things of life as those that are important. We often focus more on injustices, deprivations, and hurts than on things that nurture our lives.
I’m not saying it is always easy to choose to give importance only to worthwhile things. Old habits are very strong. But it is possible.
Two examples come to mind.
The first is Lou Gehrig. He knew some terrible illness was crippling him, and he could no longer play baseball. But at an farewell tribute, he said that he considered himself “the luckiest man alive.!” He then went on to describe many of the worthwhile things about his life.
The other is Dr. Viktor Frankl, an inmate of the German concentration camps. He emphasized the ultimate freedom that inmates possessed – the freedom to choose their attitudes. Those who survived were those whose world extended beyond the barbed wire fence. At a very deep level, they withdrew importance from the psychological impact of their imprisonment and gave reality to the broader world beyond. They gave importance to the riches of inner realities of fantasy, memory, and hope.
In my more mundane life, I do not want to give importance to a rude driver, or a rude clerk. If someone insults me (teen-age children are very good at this!), I want in my mind to translate the insult into a statement, and respond only to the valid content, and not to the anger.
There are exceptions to this, of course. Where there is abuse, it is crucially important to give importance to that and take appropriate action. But for most of us, we give too much importance to negative things, and will do better if we acknowledge that and change it.
For some people, this applies to their own memories. It is sometimes easier to give importance to things that we regret and are ashamed of, than to memories of things of which we are pleased.
Perhaps the foremost purpose of psychotherapy is to help people cultivate this power to create, and to re-arrange the things they give importance to.
The second principle is a kind of filter you put in your brain. This filter is a question: “If I do or say so and so, or it I do not do or say so and so, it this likely to make things better or to make things worse?”
I have been working on this for a long time now, and I think I’ve made a little progress! I can think of times when in my mind, I had the perfect comeback to a tense situation. But when I ran it through my filter, I realized that if I said it, I would make things worse.
Remember too the old adage, “If I can prove I’m right, I make things worse.”