“My wife is downstairs, and I don’t want her to know I’m calling you.”
One of the greatest threats to any marriage that’s in crisis is how the people who are in pain and suffering can lose control of what their minds are doing to them, resulting in them making terrible life-changing decisions.
One of the great coaches born in the 1920s said, “The mind is like a fertile field. Whatever you plant, it will grow.” The mind can grow any belief or focus, good or bad, positive or negative, so whatever you focus on will become your reality.
It’s common for me to share with clients that their fears will be their focus, and therefore, without knowing it, it will be the reality they are leading themselves into without meaning to.
People who are afraid to be alone end up alone. People who fear they won’t be loved are not loved. People who are overly controlling will lose control.
Their fears create self-protective behaviours that lead them straight into the very fears they are trying to avoid.
Your thinking will create and grow your emotional reality, so it’s important to be careful what you plant in your mind. If you don’t, you can cause a chain reaction of feelings that leads to actions that can destroy people’s lives.
I see this very problem showing up in my sessions every day.
People who fall victim to these mind-altering problems can end up hurting themselves without ever meaning to.
Below are five examples to help you see what I see daily.
These examples cover affairs, separation, loss of love and connection, divorce and inability to invest in saving the marriage.
False Beliefs Can Erase Reality
One person can plant an idea in their mind that their partner doesn’t love them or they are feeling they are not enough. This is just one set of beliefs of many. I see people being convinced that it is true, with terrible consequences.
With this seed of thought, they can then start looking for proof to confirm their beliefs.
When they look for proof, they will find it, which compounds their bias and their fear. My partner looked at me strangely today and acted oddly. They used to call me more often. They seem so impatient with me these days.
The most minor things can in the end generate the most significant meanings if they plant and feed the negative thoughts.
Their mind now becomes hyper-vigilant, looking out for more proof every day, which, of course, they find.
If practised enough, this process, without the person’s knowledge, can help a person delete all the evidence that they are loved or have ever been loved, in some cases.
This can lead a person from being upset, into stacked resentments, into emotional disconnection or self-numbing.
I asked a lady who was convinced her husband didn’t love her to search for all the times she felt loved by her husband.
After 20 years of marriage, she literally couldn’t find one time.
In a session on his own, her husband brought in a box of love letters and cards they exchanged over the years.
He shared many stories and photos of their life, which they clearly enjoyed.
But she couldn’t access one moment in the session. It was like she had changed her personality and rewritten the story of their relationship.
The point here is she really wasn’t lying to me; this is how powerful a mind can be if you plant feed and water the wrong seed, which she did.
In this process, her mind didn’t need to hold onto any of the times of love and happiness when her priority was self-protection.
Most people are unaware that we all naturally spend a lot of time deleting and distorting information that our mind experiences in our quest to make sense of our world.
This is why expecting our mind to record facts accurately is almost impossible. What our minds record are actually perceptions and many of these are distorted perceptions based on highly complex emotional filters. These biases play a huge part in how a person feels.
How we use our minds and what we let in is critical to manage, or we could quite literally talk ourselves out of a perfectly good marriage – I’ve seen people do this, and I’ve had to bring them back.
Conclusion:
When pain takes over, the mind filters reality through fear and self-protection, often erasing the positive experiences. This distortion can destroy relationships by rewriting history. The problem is belief that “I am unloved” can become a self-fulfilling prophecy if left unchecked.
Mind-Reading + Assumptions Are Relationship Killers.
I saw a gentleman whose marriage was in crisis. He was convinced he understood his wife and had entered a process of mind-reading, assumptions and expectations about her emotional state and her decisions about the state of the marriage.
His thinking was disabling him from wanting to commit to saving the marriage, which he said he wanted to save.
In his mind, she wasn’t being predictable in a good way for him; he was assigning unhelpful meanings to her behaviours. Now, 2+2 = 47, and sadly, he was convinced he was right – he wasn’t.
I could clearly hear that he was translating her so badly that she would naturally react badly in response to him. To be fair, they were both guilty of this ping-pong effect.
Based on the perceived facts he had created in his mind, he would feel he had no choice but to protect himself from her, but he was unaware she was never trying to hurt him. This, again, was a badly formed perception on his part.
He was unaware his self-limiting beliefs were a big part of disabling their ability to connect.
If he stayed with this belief/bias, he would block their ability to reconnect but would still blame her. He would be right in his mind, but his marriage would have to end, and this would devastate the whole family.
Conclusion:
Assumptions create narratives that feel real but are, in most cases, dangerously inaccurate. If left unchallenged, they justify self-protection and emotional withdrawal, leading to the very outcome the person fears: losing the relationship.
Impulsive Decisions Can Lead to Regret
I had a gentleman come to me last year. He had been through a troubled time with his wife, which caused his mind to develop a powerful self-protection bias.
All he could see was the need to break free of the pain and suffering.
So at great expense, he divorced her and at the time he was 100% convinced it was the right decision at the time.
Very soon after the divorce, he was sitting alone in his new house, the drama had gone and a new thought hit him like a train:
Why the hell am I divorced? OMG, what have we done?
He then called me to help him get his marriage back, which I am thankful we did.
Sadly, this type of story has come to my office so many times. While getting the marriage back is possible, sometimes the other person has just moved on.
This is precisely what I’m talking about. People can become far too reactive to what their minds tell them and are unaware of how to hear what they are really trying to say.
They are far too reactive, which equals out-of-control. They do not ask the right questions and get bought into a short-term relief process.
Conclusion:
A moment of suffering can lead to life-altering decisions. But pain is temporary, while regret can be permanent. The key is to slow down, question the mind’s panic-driven conclusions/beliefs, and seek guidance before making irreversible choices.
Separation Feels Like Relief, But Is It?
Another situation is the concept of separation. One person tends to want to separate because they are not ready to divorce but have an overwhelming desire to break free and be alone or at least away from the marriage. They usually say they want time to think, but they usually do not know how to do this safely or constructively.
They feel they are doing what their mind and body is telling them to do, especially because they feel very uncomfortable physically and emotionally around their partner.
Their minds will be searching for “freedom” and “relief” from relationship stress, upset, and exhaustion. They will assume leaving is the answer, and this action is confirmed by them feeling better when they are on their own or away from the marriage.
Here is the problem with this thinking.
They will attach feeling better to their partner not being around, which makes sense, but it isn’t the core reason they feel better.
They will not see that their stress and exhaustion are directly connected to their need to self-protect.
The self-protection process builds a wall between them, which is exhausting to maintain. When the suffering person is at home with their partner, they automatically raise the wall, which won’t feel pleasant, but they will feel they need it.
When they spend time apart, the wall goes down, which creates instant relief.
So, the illusion is that time apart is the solution, but in many cases, this is the wrong conclusion and a kiss of death for many couples.
The real question is about the wall and whether it is really the right form of protection.
In many cases, people feel the need to protect themselves from a partner who is not trying to hurt them – I see many cases of self-protection to be routed in misunderstandings.
They sow the “I need to protect myself” seed, stop contributing and withdraw, and the ping-pong of destruction starts.
Again, can you see a person’s thinking is at the root of the problem? They buy into beliefs and convert them into facts that destroy their relationship.
Conclusion:
Relief from separation doesn’t mean the relationship was the problem; it often means the self-protection mindset was. Understanding the root of why self-protection is needed is the key here. If the root issue isn’t addressed, separation only reinforces disconnection, making reconciliation harder.
Affairs Solve Nothing – They Compound Problems
Too many people who have created poor dynamics and who use other people (affairs) to feel good again will not search for the real problem. Again, the brain takes over, creating highly addicted feelings they attach to the new person, feelings that never last.
My advice is never to trust a brain in an affair situation, which is why it’s called “crazy in love.”
I see so many couples in sessions who are married as a result of an affair but are now in their own marital crisis. This reflects the 95% divorce rate among these types of couples.
Affairs and divorce don’t teach relationship skills; all I see is them jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, seduced and addicted to chemicals that build the illusions of love and euphoria.
Affairs are probably the most influential activities that can collapse and destroy whole families, as a person can almost change personality without meaning to.
They are responsible for some of the most illogical and risky behaviours of all the problems couples face. I’ve seen wonderful parents turn into people who look like they couldn’t care less about their kids and become very self-focused.
The point of today’s post is to share that taking control of one’s mind allows people to effectively predict what will happen based on their behaviours, which allows them to make far safer decisions.
Most people live in outdated emotional patterns and react to poor thinking, poor parental models, and self-inflicted emotional stress; they are unclear on how to build a relationship dynamic that works and spend too much time looking for self-protection when looking for positive outcomes, which would be a much better option.
Because of all this emotional distortion, they can break up their family only to face the same problems with someone new, which is terribly sad, especially for any children involved.
Conclusion:
Affairs don’t fix a broken relationship; they distract from the work required to build a safe, functional one. The excitement of something new will always fade, leaving the person with the same unresolved personal patterns.
The Power of a Sanity Check
A gentleman arranged a call with me.
I’ll never forget it because he was whispering on the phone. I smiled at myself because his whisper caused me to whisper, too.
I asked him – why we were whispering?
He said my wife is downstairs, and I don’t want her to know I’m calling you.
He said many years ago, at great expense, I divorced my wife, the woman downstairs.
He said they were not getting on because of how she was behaving (his words), and he was unhappy for a long time. During this time, he met someone and started an affair.
He said it was amazing. I knew I had met the one!
He was so convinced she was “the one” that he divorced the wife downstairs and quickly married the affair partner.
Eighteen months into the new marriage, the new wife started to behave exactly like his old wife did.
He said he couldn’t believe it.
He said the rows were awful, and he couldn’t bear it.
So he said, yet again at great expense, he got divorced, and in a state of confusion, he was now back home with wife No.1.
I listened to this story and asked him why he was calling me.
He said, “I clearly have no idea what I’m doing and why I’m back here!”
This gentleman had spent years out of control of his own mind in the context of an intimate relationship.
He didn’t know how to think in a way that was safe or create something that could be successful, and he never saw his part in the problem.
He thought changing the woman was the answer but what he really had to change was his thinking about what a successful marriage looked like and how it was created.
Conclusion:
People often don’t realise that their thinking is the problem, not their partner. If they keep repeating the same cycles, they will end up in the same pain, regardless of who they are with. Seeking outside perspective before drastic decisions can prevent wasted years of heartache and very expensive divorces.
Final Thought: Don’t Trust Everything You Think
The point of today’s post is that many people in crisis are unaware of what their minds are doing and the future problems they could create for themselves and those they love.
This is why anyone in a marital crisis must be challenged in their thinking as a means to protect themselves from themselves.
So, getting a sanity check is a very good idea to ensure that the marital stress they are in doesn’t destroy these people’s lives and lead people into heartbreaking regret.
Remember, just because you think something is true doesn’t mean it’s true. The key is to get curious and learn fast.
- Some people give up on relationships that could be saved
- Some people stay in the wrong relationships for too long
- Some people attach the wrong problem to their emotional disconnect
- Some people think their success in other areas of life makes them effective partners
- Some people believe everyone thinks like them or at least should
- Some people use low-level ways to build connection
- Some people have never considered being in a successful relationship to be a skill to learn
- Some people believe they should just be loved for no reason
Beliefs are powerful, and most people who are in a suffering relationship will have unhelpful beliefs and won’t be aware of the consequences of their actions.
So, the key is to slow everything down and become curious.