Count your blessings now!
If you are going to count your blessings in this season...I’d suggest that you can include an always forgotten element: your own power.
What? you are going to say.. I’m here because there are so many aspects of my marriage that don’t work as I need them to...what can be a blessing here?
Well, there is a hidden power in us, sometimes ignored, but always there. We can’t destroy it; we can’t reduce it to nothing...is our own power.
Even when you tell yourself that there are so many aspects of your life that make you unhappy, I need to remind you that you are not helpless to change this relationship... when you're in a relationship with somebody, you're in an interactive pattern with them. You need the other person, but the other person needs you to play the complementary role in this drama.
What if, when the game is that the other person does his best to ignore you, you decide not to believe in playing that game? You can decide if this deliberate ignoring you can affect you. If you decide that it doesn't...well it will be less and less important with time. The key part is detach from the scene, see the game as it is, only a game between two people, and detach as if you paid a ticket to see a theater play.
Suppose that your husband is playing the game: “One of us is superior, so the other has to be inferior, and obey.” Is his decision, but you have the power to believe in this drama, and then play the part of the long suffering, obedient wife, or you can say: “what a silly idea! here we are all equal, and I will not pay attention to any put down coming my way!”
Funny thing is, when you give up the automatic belief that you need to follow other people’s play scripts, you are reclaiming your own power...of seeing reality as you want it to be. And when you do it, consistently, the other person has to change. He or she has not automatic compliance...so now he has to propose some game that you will enter willingly, or either has to play alone, which takes all the fun out of it.
When you change what you're doing, and don’t follow automatically but only when you are decided to, the other person has no choice but to change. If nothing is changing in your relationship, it means you're not changing the right aspect, that is your own response.
In this way, you can end up changing things for the other person without the other person realizing what is going on. Imagine that you have been proposing those hurtful games to the other person, and doing behaviors that reinforce both of you continue playing that game...
Remember the jokes about the nagging wife? well, she needs to be persistent in the nagging, otherwise the husband will have nothing to complain about...what if she decides to use appreciation, and finds something positive each day to say to him? You will see him first confused, and then grateful and then adoring her. If you drop the behavior that is rubbing your partner the wrong way, everything changes.
Use your power; change how you interact with others, use appreciation instead of nagging, meanwhile enjoy your own life...and in this way you can recover your own power of creating a decent relationship. And that's something to be grateful about!
Would you like to have a really interesting Thanksgiving gift? Watch out for our next posting...it's coming to your life!
I completely understand the benefits of this approach although for myself my anxiety was so high 4 years ago due to early abandonment issues that I wouldn’t have had the strength to have carried this out….staying at home for over 20 years turned me into a co-dependent. I discovered I had lost too much of my confidence and self respect sadly due to my unknown abandonment issue. I would however be in a much better position now to carry out this formula as I am in possession of myself finally. I am no longer insecure. But if this article can help one woman who has an abandonment issue I will be delighted!