I HAVE MY CLIENTS DO THIS TO HELP SAVE THEIR MARRIAGE

I was sitting in my office in deep thought (apparently I do that often) trying to answer the question,

“What is the most impactful thing that I have my clients do to help save their marriage?”

It was a lot harder to come up with the answer because honestly there are many impactful things combined that contribute to the high success rate of the married couples in my practice.

There are a number of mindset shifts, behavior modifications, tool implementation, connecting exercises, healthy habit creation, and marriage education that takes place – so trying to pinpoint that ONE thing, is nearly impossible.

HOWEVER, if I had to choose…

I can tell you that the one exercise I have every single client go through from the very first session and encourage them to do DAILY for the rest of their marriage is this:

I have them spend 10-20 minutes each day thinking about (or meditating on) something they appreciate, admire, or respect about their spouse.

Now I’ll be honest and tell you that it’s usually initially met with an eyeroll and often one of the following objections:

• “I don’t remember the last time my wife/husband did anything I admire.”
• “Really? 10 or 20 minutes? I don’t think I can think about anything for that long.”
• “I’m not sure I have time to fit that into my schedule.”
• “That’s not gonna help our situation. We have real marriage problems.”

I tell my clients to humor me and just promise to go along with it no matter how silly it sounds. I also let them know that I’ll be asking about it at our next session so they need to make sure and not just blow it off.

So why do I make them do this exercise? 

Well there are actually many reasons, but here are my top 3.

1. Your brain will believe what you tell it most.

When you focus only on the negative, you’ll inadvertently communicate to your brain only negative things about your spouse.  It’s extremely challenging to make any headway into repairing a relationship when your mind is tainted with negative thoughts and beliefs about the other person.

These negative thoughts will continue to fuel your distress, sometimes even causing you to mentally re-writing history of events in your relationship. These will lead to negative expectations that will, sadly, become your reality, and eventually lead to contempt. Contempt is poison to a marriage.

Fortunately, when you choose to see your spouse’s positive attributes, your brain will believe the things about your spouse that are worthy of your appreciation, admiration, and respect. Not only is this a great habit to develop, it’s also the antidote for contempt.

2. What you look for is what you will find.

This goes along with the one above. Here’s the thing, your mind cannot be without thoughts, and you get to create and control those thoughts.

If the thoughts that you choose to feed your mind about your spouse are negative, then it will BELIEVE those things. When it believes those things, your brain will begin to scan for those types of behavior from your spouse. And, unfortunately, your brain will find them.

In fact, a study on this found that couples who were so tuned into seeing their partner’s mistakes, missed up to 50% of their positive actions! 

>>That means that if you do nothing else but start searching for positive qualities in your spouse, you can experience up to 50% more positive actions without making any other changes to your relationship!

This is why I have my clients regularly scan for qualities and behaviors that they can appreciate, admire or respect about their partner.

3. It sets your marriage up for re-kindling the friendship that’s been lost.

Friendship is one of the greatest foundational components of a healthy marriage. It’s the key ingredient necessary to help defuse tension and increase the likelihood that repair attempts will work during times of conflict.

It also helps fuel the romance and passion in the relationship, which is crucial to increasing connection.

It’s such a critical component of marriage that researchers often look to the strength of a couple’s friendship to foretell the relationship’s future.  

When couples make it a habit of recognizing and appreciating the positive behaviors of their spouse (along with other tools I teach in our coaching sessions), they begin to feel optimistic about each other and their marriage.

They begin to have positive expectations about their lives together, and to give each other the benefit of the doubt.

Soon their positive thoughts about their marriage are so common that they begin to supersede their negative feelings. This is known as “positive sentiment override,” or PSO, a concept first proposed by University of Oregon psychologist Robert Weiss.

Once your marriage achieves a high degree of positivity (think back to when you were newlyweds), it will take far more negativity to harm it. 

 >> So back to the question of why do I make my clients do this silly exercise? 

Because it helps them to begin establishing the critical daily habit of seeing positive behavior and developing a heart of appreciation for their spouse. This will lead to increased positive thoughts that will ultimately prepare them to effectively work on the areas of their relationship that need strengthening, without negativity overwhelming and sabotaging their attemps.   

 And to address the most common objection I get from my clients who claim they can’t come up with ANYTHING they can appreciate, admire, or respect about their spouse, I tell them this:

>> Go back to a time when there was something. You may not be able to come up with anything that has happened recently, but there is something from the past. You did marry them, after all. So if you have to go all the way back to your wedding day, so be it.

Think about something they used to do and meditate on that every day until you can come up with something else.