Hi, my name is Paul Friedman. Today's topic is "How To Deal with an
Unreasonable Spouse" and some of you may know that I actually began my marriage
saving career as a divorce mediator. It wasn't until I was down the road a bit
that I realized I can be helping marriages instead of ending them. So how
to deal with an unreasonable spouse is something I had to learn early on while
I was a mediator. In fact, that's how I got into this. I thought through
communication someone can really transform their marriage into a great
marriage and I was a good mediator. I got people calm down, got him to be able to
articulate their point of view without emotions but boy, did I have a lot of
education afterwards? It's not just about communication. The key here is actually
emotions -- really is, so it doesn't matter whether you're male or female whether
your husband or wife, it doesn't matter because all of us are kind of cursed
with emotions. Now I know the psych community talks about, "Well, you have to
honor and respect your emotions." But that's just not true
I have a background also in developing myself spiritually and using all kinds
of methods and techniques and I applied them to
marriage. One of the fundamental key understandings that people have who are
spiritually minded and I don't mean just religious but spiritually minded
understand something very deep. You are not your emotions. You have emotions. You
see, you're not your mind. You have a mind. Your mind has emotions and emotions play
a vital role in our lives but for the most part, they should be controlled
absolutely controlled. Why should your emotions control you? And so, what's going
on when you have an unreasonable spouse is two things, one they are coming from a
place of emotion. It's all emotion whether it's anger, fear or whatever.
Having an emotional reaction to something that you may have said or you
may have done and they're not able to approach the topic purely, logically,
cleanly more importantly, they can't approach it lovingly so they get trapped
and that's where the unreasonableness comes in. Now in negotiations which is
what divorce mediation was all about everything was easy. I could use a
whiteboard, I could identify values, get them to identify values. Put a pros and
cons, pretty simple stuff but when you're married
you don't want to go there. You don't want to go into this realm of
reasonableness. Well, reasonableness takes on a different
context because in marriage your context is love. It's not whether he's right or
she's right or whether this happened this way or happened another way based
on how an individual sees it. Your marriage is based on love. I'm
seeing your spouse from a loving point of view from -- what does that mean?
It means having compassion, it means having understanding, it it means being a good
listener and it's not just men who are bad
listeners. Both males and females are bad listeners because what happens is we get
into our minds what is right, "Oh, that's not right. It's Joe, why not? It was just
not right." No, nonsense. If someone has that perspective it's right for them and
if you disagree with it, it means it's not right for you until you recognize
well, it's right for them. Then, what happens? When you have this perspective
of what is their point of view? Where are they coming from? What is their
perspective that what they're thinking or saying or insisting upon is
reasonable, and then you understand them better and you realize they're not
unreasonable. Maybe they are ultimately misguided because maybe your point of
view is based on pure logic but if you really love somebody, you don't point
that out. You work with it. You work around where
they're getting hung up. So you see, working within
"unreasonable spouse" is not so much in
finding a way to manipulate them, to get them to see it your way -- that's not what
you want to do. What you want to do is you want to change your perspective from
an analyzing perspective where you're weighing things to a loving
perspective where you're not even concerned that much about the outcome.
You're more concerned with how are they feeling, what's going on for them? Why are
they for instance potentially upset or potentially stubborn or stern? Or their
heels are dug in, why? And how can you help them be in a calm or place? Not help
them see it your way but help them be in a calm or place. Now if you're resistant
to their point of view, they're not going to go into a calm or place. They're going to
become more stuck in their perspective. It's natural -- that's how we are. We are
naturally defensive because our minds always resort back to one of two places
either the soul or the body, and the body is always saying survival. So until you
as an individual come into a place of "I am a soul so nothing can bother me."
There's going to be conflict. Do you see this? Because this is a very deep topic
the main point is that if you really want your marriage to have great
communication, it's not as much about learning communication skills which you
can learn, I teach them. They're in both of my books, they're in the courses but
more importantly is working on yourself to come from that place of love. That was
the genesis of you getting married. So if you learn how to become the soul because
you're soul mates, right? You're not going to have these unreasonable spouse
situations. You're not going to encounter confrontations, arguments, resistance all
these things go away when you're managing your marriage correctly which
means managing yourself correctly, which means learning how to understand what
marriage is, learning how to understand what you are. I use the term what for
reason and learning how to understand what your spouse is -- be you, are they male or
female. It's very cool. You know the thing that I
discovered about marriage when I started to help people with their marriages is
that there's a lot of moving parts to it but it's almost simple when you start to
understand certain things. Most people don't even ask, why did I get married?
They don't, they think, "Oh, I married him or her because..." No, why did you get
married in the first place?
Interesting question. You may be saying, "Well, I wanted a companion. I wanted to be
with my soulmate." There's a more basic reason. You wanted to be happy. You wanted
to be happy or every single day and when you learn how to live marriage because
you do have to learn. You can't just think, "Oh, I'm having this one problem and
if I fix this it's going to be better or everything will be okay." That's all
nonsense. You really want to learn about marriage. You really want to learn these
things and it'll change your life because your marriage will then be lived
for the purpose that you originally got married for, to be happy or every single
day and I'm going to take it a step further. You should be enjoy, enjoy like how can I
handle all these wonderful things that are happening to me. Joy, every single day
it should get better. Every day you should go, "Wow, if today is as good as
yesterday I'm going to be blown away." And when you know what you're doing every
day is better than yesterday. Okay, I hope this was helpful.
I really do. I hope it's given you enough to think about so that I know
what you wanted was an answer for a way I should say this or I should say that
or I shouldn't do this but that's all on the surface. Trust me. It is well worth
getting into marriage as a study. Your living marriage, it's the main thing you
do in your life. How could you not learn it and no one teaches us because most
people don't know. I hope this was helpful and don't worry about hitting
that like button and don't worry about sharing this
I think we've discovered things that other people are not aware of and it
should be spread. People should know about these things and I started The
Marriage Foundation as a non-profit foundation so no one would be getting
into how do I make more money on this but more like how do I spread this stuff
out further and how do we get more people into this because it's beautiful
and more people should be happy. I want you to be happy. In fact, blessings to you
blessings to your spouse, and blessings to your family. Thank you for spending
your time with me. God bless!