I work with some of the toughest cases of marital crisis globally. These are the cases most people have almost given up on – even the professional advice can be they should walk away.
I conduct this work with individuals and couples to help them find ways to rebuild their marriage and learn the real causes of their disconnect.
What I commonly see is the thinking of the couple and each person has not been challenged enough to help them understand their situation, why they are in trouble and what they can do about it.
Do we blindly accept a persons thinking, or do we look at the process of what created their thinking? You see many people are unaware their unpleasant feelings have a foundation in ineffective thinking.
This can come from poor parenting models, or disconnection from their values construct. They could have ineffective relationship-building models or an unhealthy expectations of others.
Some are running self-protection models and others need to control others so they are emotionally safe.
So from the person who is using a marriage to heal a childhood trauma, to the person who is using depression to protect themselves from their real relationship problem.
Most people come to me with the same message, “you are the last chance saloon for us”.
It’s not uncommon for couples to have done the rounds with all kinds of help and are still no further forward.
To be clear this doesn’t mean that I believe everyone can or should be fixed.
What I do believe is if you have committed in good faith to someone and you can’t make it work, it’s a good idea to see what the best of you both can really achieve.
The worse of two people is usually where the couple ends up, and it’s not their fault because the knowledge they both must-have is not common knowledge.
When I say “best” what I mean is two people with the knowledge of how to get the best out of themselves and each other, after all, you cannot be any more than the best of yourself.
So the best means two people changing their thinking around all the areas of influence that will give the couple the best chance to connect and grow together.
Imagine being in a position to positively trigger and influence your partner no matter what problem comes knocking.
Imagine knowing that life is full of problems, but none of them are a worry because you now know what to do when they strike, because they will.
So let’s accept that all couples have problems, the skill most couples are missing is how to deal with those problems in a constructive win-win way.
Most couples are in a destructive win-lose model, if your team member loses then the team loses.
Learning the win-win model
People become uninvested over time because the thinking they are using was always going to lead both people into destructive bouts of self-protection.
The couple will need strategies that can help them develop firstly the knowledge of the problem they face and what each person has to bring to the table to overcome their challenge.
It usually takes 2-3 months to develop the couples knowledge and then 3-6 months of them applying that knowledge to gain the truth of their connection.
The key is the ability to see their problems in solvable terms.
This is a repatterning exercise to help them to stop the destructive behaviour and replace it with constructive actions that honour each person’s natural differences.
Their process must NOT change who these people really are. The goal is to help each person to become better and more effective partners.
To help people out of crisis the most critical part of their process is in the strategy that helps an uninvested person(s) find a way to safely reinvest so both people win.
So if you are at a dead-end, there is a valuable process of understanding the problem in a way that empowers each person to bring something valuable to the table.
At the end of the day, once an individual has the knowledge of how to translate the situations effectively and now knows what they must bring that is of value to their partner.
The next step is a choice, good people, in the end, want the best for their partner once they can see how it works.
People who are not good to be with will always put themselves first, but this can get lost in the distortion of two people self-protecting.
These are critical life skills for anyone to learn and pass on you can do this as a couple or as an individual, remember the process is about how can I get the best from myself whilst bringing out the best in my partner.
Discovering these skills is probably the most valuable training a person can invest their time in because at the end of the day connection and love is what most people want more than anything.
Win-win!