How’s your relationship? Are you in an unhappy marriage?
Are you struggling with conflict or even worse feeling distant, indifference or apathy? Does it feel like your marriage is falling apart?? Do you two feel more like roommates than a married couple? Are you ready to be happily married? Let’s learn how to save your marriage, by using a technique called an emotionally corrective experience.
Well, without knowing the details of your relationship problems, I am going to guess you have fallen out of love, and you are having trouble communicating so it feels like you can’t fix your marriage.
I want to share some ideas of how to be happily married. But, most of what I want to communicate you already know deep down, but you have just forgotten it over years of bickering. Let me share with you what you did in the past to create your relationship and what will help you restore your marriage now.
Hi I’m Brett R. Williams, psychotherapist and executive director of the Gathering. The Gathering of Good People is a nonprofit that is dedicated to helping you with personal growth, and emotional healing. We want to help anyone and everyone get the emotional support they need to grow, be happy, and successful.
Our primary way of supporting your growth comes through our personal growth groups. And we also like to provide tools, truths, and insights to help as well, that’s why we create podcasts, vlogs and blogs like this one.
Today, I want to share how to save your marriage, by using a tool that comes from Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), called an emotionally corrective experience.
Let me start with a story of a couple I was seeing last week.
They had clearly turned a corner- happy, laughing, and holding hand. “What’s up?”
We just had a wonderful weekend together, playing, eating, and loving each other. “We’re feeling super connected.”
They had an emotionally corrective experience together. The quality of your relationship is made up simply of the quality of your interactions. When being together feels amazing and you both are enjoying each other’s company you become connected.
I am frequently asked by your married couples what’s the secret to a long lasting relationship. The answer is simple, keep doing what you are doing when you were dating. Your dating years are a testament of emotionally corrective experiences.
I suggest that all newlyweds should write down in a journal all the little things they are doing together in those dating years. Take note of how much time, energy, and attention you are bringing to one another.
Then when your marriage has moved into a state of decay, read your journal and begin doing all the things you did back then.
Our relationships heal as we have emotionally corrective experiences with each other. When I interact with you and we connect and enjoy each other’s company we feel close and connected. The more these experiences occur the better we feel.
Should we then avoid all negative topics or ideas? Should we just have fun and be on vacation together? Yes, no, I am mean no. I love loving my wife, and I love being loved. And the more of these positive experiences we have the better. But…, life is not perfect and we have conflicts. So what to do?
This is where I think our emotionally corrective experiences are the most important. If two people can disagree and feel safe doing so, and even better feel valued and supported for their thoughts and feelings this will create an even closer bond.
Intimate relationships are built on sharing deep and intimate feelings. When I only share superficial information with someone, like news, weather, and schedules, then I have a superficial relationship with that person. The more intimate my sharing the deeper and more intimate my relationship becomes.
Jim was tired of all the fighting his wife and him were experiencing, so he made a change. He decided that every night at 7, he would sit down with his wife and ask her. “I really want to hear you, tell me about how you’re feeling these days.”
As you can guess, at first his wife Samantha was suspicious and was not sure how things would go. But she shared and Jim listened. Jim simply focused his attention on his wife, and did his very best to hear her concerns, pain, and problems.
With each of these reparative experiences their issues of hurt, mistrust, and neglect were addressed. These issues were not directly talked about. Meaning Samantha didn’t have to go through some long list of grievances and one by one grind them out with Jim.
Healing came as years of negative experience were replaced with new positive experience.
Your brain is an association machine and we build connections or associations with people, places and things. When you smell chocolate chip cookies baking your brain may associate that smell to grandmother’s house and all the loving memories of helping her bake. Or it may remind you of the horrible summer you spent working at the bakery and having to deal with angry customers all day.
Your brain attaches feelings to those in your life, and those feelings are often connected to that person after being repeated over and over again. When I think of grandmother and baking I feel good because that was what I experienced with grandmother, time and time again.
I am sure there were moments when you were mad at grandma because she made you go to bed or she said no to eating any more cookies. But those are a part of your association with grandma, because that was not the dominant experience.
For Jim and Samatha the predominant feeling was anger, frustration, and disappointment. That loving feeling between them was slipping away as their experience. That’s when they started to experience marriage problems.
However, with Jim’s intervention and efforts at hearing his wife, the old feelings started to come back. They got married because they felt loved and connected when every either of them thought of the other person.
Frequent fights changed their experience of each other and the relationship. With these new emotionally corrective experiences, the old feelings of love came back. The feelings of being heard and supported emotionally corrected the negative feelings that came from their past arguments and conflicts.
The title of my book best reflects the choice Jim made. He made a decision to be happily married, to love and connect. He let go of his need to be right, to prove his point. I put the same choice to you. Do you want to “be right or be married.”
(Small plug. If you want to read my book, You Can Be Right Or You Can Be Married, it is on the resources page of the website Gatheringofgoodpeople.com.
If you want to be happily married I would suggest you make a shift in your focus. Look for ways you and your spouse can connect. Make sure you are connecting at least 5 times for every 1 time you disagree or fight.
The mind has a negativity bias so it will take time and effort to override those negative experiences. Be patient and know that your positive associations were the foundation of your relationship and it will be those core associations that you will be recreating with your emotionally corrective experiences.
So, how are you going to save your marriage? How are you going to shift from your unhappy marriage to being happily married? Use a tool from Emotionally Focused Therapy and daily practice creating emotionally corrective experiences.
I am Brett R. Williams and I am looking forward to meeting you soon.