The topic today is a very
useful one for you. I think you'll find
that the
answers that I give you to three
important things that your
husband needs from you will be valuable
and that you'll be able to apply some of
what you learn.
My name is Paul Friedman, I founded The
Marriage Foundation
and I founded The Marriage Foundation
in response to what I had seen
was an ongoing disaster in our country.
I was literally a divorce
mediator before I transitioned into
helping marriages.
This is before the year 2000 and 2001
is when I did my research in response to
what I was seeing
and came up with a whole different way
of helping couples with their marriages.
As a divorce mediator, when I look back
with now with what I've learned I
realized
none of the couples who I helped get a
divorce
should have gotten one. Their marriage
marriages not only
could have been saved but they could
have gone
on to have incredible marriages.
I realized that western psychology
which is basically what marriage
counselors use
is so flawed especially when it comes
to marriage. It's all about finding
excuses
for not behaving well. They refer
back to when you were a child. They refer
to traumatic events
in your life. They label people
which leaves out a very important
principle
that the teachings that I share
all focus upon.
That principle is that you have free
will, free choice. Everyone knows you have
free will free choice
but nobody really takes it
to the level that it is meant to be
taken to. You have a mind.
This mind belongs to you. It's your mind.
You also have a body. Now we all agree
that the choices you make about your
body
have cause and effect. If you have a good
diet,
if you eliminate deep fried foods for
instance
and eliminate too much starches,
too much sugar. Your body will be
healthier
cause and effect -- it's your body. You're
the one who just -- I'm not judging
but you decide what's going to happen to
your body.
If you exercise it, it will be healthier.
If you
care for it according to modern
principles of medicine where research
backs up everything virtually these days,
you'll have a healthy body. The mind is
also a possession of yours. You possess
your mind.
It isn't you, it's yours.
There's a huge difference so what you
do with your mind
it's up to you because you have free
will.
You can entertain negative thoughts.
You'll become a negative person.
You could decide not to ever entertain
any negative thoughts overriding
habits that could be as old as you are
and you could change yourself completely.
So all these ideas that western
psychology
imposes upon us and our marriages
are wrong because they don't
include this idea of free choice.
Now they may say they do, but then they
wouldn't make all these excuses for
behaviors.
They would merely say, "You're too
critical.
Stop being critical." You go, "Oh no,
I can't help it. I was raised in
a household where everyone was critical.
These influences turned me
into this critical person." Well, then you
don't have free will, do you?
You either have it or you don't. I say
you do.
So when we get into this topic,
this topic three important things your
husband needs from you.
I'm not suggesting, I'm telling you
that you can deliver and when you do
deliver
you are upholding your end
of the bargain that you made, I hate
using that term because
marriage isn't a business but you're
upholding your end of things.
You're giving your husband what you
promised,
the love, the respect
all of those things that let him know
how important he
is to you, to your children,
to your happiness. You want to make your
husband happy
and you don't want it to be a business
deal. So we're going to go through these
three things,
this is going to be a multi-part
topic. And so we're going to begin
with number one, recognition
and appreciation for who
he is. You want to
show him that you love him all the time
that's a bottom line thing in marriage
is expressing love
all the time, not just when he does
something for
you all the time, not just when you're in
the bedroom making love
all the time, not just when he's in a
good mood
all the time. Isn't that what you want?
Don't you
want to feel loved all the time?
So you could say at the top line
that you want to show your husband
love and happiness constantly
because that's what you want your
marriage to be.
You want your marriage to be happier
every single day of your life,
don't you? Isn't that why you got married
to be happier
every single day of your life? That's why
we get married.
And the second, which actually drives the
first
is we want to feel that unconditional
love, that marital love,
that love that you cannot get in the
world because the world is a brutal
environment
but your marriage is just the two of you.
Two of you in what I call the sacred
space of marriage.
Why not make that it's a container,
make that container so filled with
sweetness
that it's separated from the rest of the
world.
It doesn't have to react to the rest of
the world.
Imagine that you have a jar and you put
water in it.
Now you have a substance that will hold
virtually anything.
If you just put in sweet things:
honey, sugar,
chamomile, mint
that container is going to be filled
with sweetness.
But if you put in toxic things,
in this case, if you put in complaining,
criticizing, those kind of things
and there's only two of you putting
those things
into the container of your marriage. Okay,
so recognition and appreciation,
those are virtually
beautiful conveyances
of how much you love him. Now you may
say, "Well, sometimes
I'm not proud of him."
We go back to, it is your mind.
In your mind, you have thoughts that are
positive about him
and you have thoughts that are negative
about him.
If you want that container filled with
sweetness
then you express the positive. In fact,
I'm going to go so far as to say
eliminate the negative
thoughts about him. They don't serve any
purpose.
What purpose do they serve? He's your
husband.
You will be together for the rest of
your lives. Why
carry negative thoughts
about your husband? Carry only
positive thoughts when the negative
thoughts come in.
Use your free will. Your free choice to
push them out their only thoughts.
They're habitual and
you have to learn how
to change your habits. In this
world of ours,
there's this idea that we're not able to
change our habits. We are who we are
and I used to think that too.
But then when I started helping people
with their marriages,
I came up with a system started with
always employ positivity in all
of your actions, all your communications,
all your thoughts,
all your speech. Everything should be
positive because it's a binary choice.
Am I going to behave in a way that's
going to encourage love and happiness
or am I going to go the other way? And my
very
first clients
totally bought into this idea
but I'm going to call him John, came back
to me later said, "Paul,
this stuff is so clearly
accurate and right but I can't maintain
positive thoughts. My habits are kicking
my butt.
What should I do?" And I told him, "I don't
know,"
because at that time I didn't but what I
did was I thought about it,
meditated on it, asked for help from
God. You can calm your higher power. You
could call me
your consciousness whatever
and it came to me.
And what came to me was very beautiful,
it was a technique, I call it the SEW
technique.
Stop, Evaluate, Act with wisdom which
slows
down the mind, puts it under your control
and gives you the ability to
literally change your habits.
Now The Marriage Foundation isn't just
here for me to talk on videos.
We have courses and we have books and in
the course,
there's a step-by-step process for
learning how to control your mind. It's
the
very very first thing that everyone has
to learn
how to do or all this other stuff
is just cool talk
so that's what we now have. You are able.
It is doable. You are able to take
charge over your own mind which gives
you charge
over your own life, which gives you
charge over your marriage,
and your marriage should be off the
charts wonderful.
So this very first important
thing that your husband needs,
and the reason he needs it is not that
deep. He needs your recognition
and appreciation because a man's ego,
I'm going to put it simple. A man's
ego requires that to encourage him
to keep being a better man. Now the
reason that it's like that because
I say it to you without judgment. I don't
have any negative judgment about
it but in my research.
I discovered that a lot of why a man is
a man.
and a woman is a woman. and regardless of
all this nonsense these days of picking
your gender.
Your biological gender
has so much to do with
how your mind is
pushed, compelled to do things
by your biology. We
all are innately souls
that's what we essentially are but we
have a body and we have a mind.
And the physical body is driven by the
drive to survive by
every single one of the trillions of
cells that comprise the body,
that's how we know when something is
alive, isn't it that it has a drive to
survive.
So a soul is neither
male or female, but when it comes into a
human body,
then the body will compel
the psychology. So the physiology
compels the psychology mostly
in accordance to the gender
ergo, the male body
pushes the male psychology
into having a sensitive ego.
So you didn't marry your husband to be
critical of him
that would be like marrying someone who
lost their arm
and saying, "What's wrong with you? You
only have one arm."
No, you're there to give him love and
support to be proud of him,
to acknowledge him, and that's one of the
things
very important thing that your husband
needs from you
which means he certainly does not need
the opposite of that berating,
being told when he's doing something
wrong, criticism.
Now, you have to learn how to communicate.
Obviously, if he's doing something that
is not working for the household or for
the family, you have to communicate it
and you have to do
it in a loving way without being
critical.
It can be done. You can do this.
So time moves on so quickly that we're
going to
have to go to part two from here.
Now I hope you've subscribed to this
channel because it's
all about a different approach to
marriage, a very
positive approach to marriage where
I say to you, you should expect
to be floating in your marriage, floating
in love,
floating in happiness and you can do it
just by applying particular ideas,
ideals and techniques to your marriage.
You have the right to
expect to have a phenomenal marriage.
We'll give it to you. All right. Thank you
for listening!
Go to part two and we will
take up the second
thing that your husband needs from you