Motivate - Create - Succeed

MARRIAGE - A RANT BY DOCTORDAN

A story in the news recently was about a billboard in Chicago that said, “Life is short. Get a divorce.” Underneath those words were pictures of a man and a woman; the woman was in a silky bra with deep cleavage. The man was flexing his pectoral muscles. The implication is that you could leave your spouse and find someone young and beautiful like these people. And then you would be happy. Oh, and our fine lawyers can help you. Nothing could be further from the truth.

With divorce rates running at about 5O% of all marriages, it seems to be a big risk to get married at all. I mean if 5O% of the time you left your house you got hit in the face with a baseball bat, you’d probably learn to stay inside. Yet people get married in droves. And people get divorced and get married again. And sometimes again. It’s like we are born to connect. The billboard implies that we would be happier if only we connect to the right person. If our marriage doesn’t work, it must be because we chose the wrong person. We need to choose someone who will make us happy. Right? Wrong!

There are these myths about happiness. Number one is that we should all be happy. I think the Buddhists got it right when they said, “life is suffering.” Yet we in Western culture feel like we have a right to happiness. We have a right to pursue happiness. Another myth is that other people can make us happy. This myth affects marriages. Spouses often feel like they’re supposed to make their partner happy. Why did your wife cheat on you? Weren’t you keeping her happy? If you are a man and your wife cheats on you, your friends will ask you these questions. Ridiculous.

When one spouse cheats everyone looks for reasons. Reasons are not causes. Reasons are just the verbal behavior you get when someone tries to justify what they did. There are unwritten rules to every marriage, and there are written rules sometimes as well. Having grown up in the 70s, I used to feel that married people should be able to do whatever they want as long as they don’t hurt anybody and they both agree it’s okay. Yet, you don’t hear too much about the “open marriage” phenomenon these days. It didn’t work. The fact is, in Western cultures no good can come out of infidelity.

Marriage is hard work. Anyone who has been married can tell you. Yet we act as if marriages run themselves. We get our cars tuned up every 6OOO miles, yet we go years (or a lifetime) without getting a tune-up for our marriage. Movies would have us believe we live happily ever after. It ain’t so. Again, happiness is a myth. Good marriages are not happy all the time. Good marriages take a lot of time and energy to sustain. Laundry, dishes, and yard work aren’t romantic.

Life is short. Which is why we usually choose one person to share it with. We have the opportunity to become deeply attached to that one person and share the innermost aspects of our souls. You aren’t going get there if you marry somebody new every three to five years. Knowing somebody for 25 or 3O years, who is not a sibling, is very interesting. You know them better than anybody. And, they know you better than anybody. That may be scary to some and wonderful to others. And if after 4O or 5O years you both still love each other; that just might be a miracle. That’s the happiness I want to pursue. How about you?

Dr. Dan Opdyke is a Clinical Psychologist in private practice in Hickory, North Carolina at Brian Hissom and Associates.
You can reach him at danopdyke@yahoo.com Or call 828-485-2195. He does Marriage Counseling!

You might have to sign up for Medscape but it’s free and well worth it. This is a valuable clinical resource for ADHD and all things clinical~psychiatric. Click anywhere on this message and you will go to the site. _danO

Who is driving your bus?

The Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) therapists have an exercise that compares your MIND to a bus. Let’s see how this metaphor plays out.

Suppose you are the driver of a bus and there are some really unruly passengers in the back. Let’s say they are dangerous gang members. But really these gang members are thoughts, memories, and feelings we have that are unwanted. Now these “gang members” start telling us where to go, when to stop, how fast to go, etc. What happens if we don’t listen to these thugs? Well they might come up front and get even louder and scarier. If we don’t do what they say, they will make lots of noise.

We make deals with these thugs and end up going where they want to go because it makes the route go smoother, at least in the short run. We ask that the thugs scrunch down in their seats in the back so they don’t bother the other passengers. Yet they still make noise and pull pranks occasionally, just enough to keep us on edge and distract us. Sometimes they tell us which direction to turn, and we do so in order to avoid trouble. Before long we are driving all over the place and we lose sight of our destination.

Now we stop the bus and go back there to throw the thugs off the bus. But they are stronger now and they refuse to leave. We wrestle with them but we give up and go to the front again. We avoid looking in the mirror so we can pretend they aren’t really there. We are now taking these thugs where they want to go even before they ask us to, just because it’s easier than fighting with them. We have made them stronger through all the little deals we made with them.

The real power these thugs have over you is 100% this: “If you don’t do what we say, we’re coming up front and you will have to look at us.” That’s it. They look dangerous. We shrink away from them. The truth is we never really had to go where they wanted us to go. We never once tried to defy them. Their threats are vacant and nothing bad can ever really happen as long as we keep driving the bus. We can look them in their eyes and tell them NO. “I am driving this bus, not you!”

Therapy helps us deal with the thoughts and feelings we don’t want to feel by making it safe to confront and actually feel and experience the things we fear. Once we do this and realize that the world is not going to come crashing down all around us, we can truly take our lives in the direction we want to go. We are driving the bus. And nobody can stop us.

The blog here is for suggestions and~or just plain fun. It’s for New Directions staff. Please comment or start your own thread.

Regards,

DanO