I know things are rough right now.
But by being here right now you’re putting yourself in a position to create a better tomorrow. No matter how deep the hole you’re in feels there’s always a way out, you just need a plan.
Right now you feel one or two ways.
You either want to do everything in your power to save your marriage OR you are asking yourself if the marriage is worth it.
The thing is, shifts are difficult to create if you don’t know what you want. The steps I’ll provide that address how to improve your marriage and heal yourself are only helpful if you know what you want.
Take time to understand what your ideal future would look like.
Once you have an understanding of what you want you can begin to take steps to get there. It’s difficult to arrive at a destination if you don’t know where you want to go.
Once you have a clear vision of whether you want to leave or stay with your husband you can take a step toward the future you want.
Do so by following these steps.
Humans avoid discomfort at all costs.
We change the channel every time that animal cruelty dog commercial with Sarah Mclachlan’s song playing in the background comes on, purposefully avoid conversations that may make us feel awkward, and go out of our way to avoid people at the office.
Humans are masters of avoiding discomfort.
But if you really want to improve your marriage and heal you must learn to become uncomfortable with discomfort.
The reality is that you can’t escape awkward or unsettling moments forever. Eventually, you’ll be confronted by an uncomfortable situation.
When you are how will you react?
Problems are just a part of life. The better we become at managing them the better our lives will be.
When we feel uncomfortable we tend to make bad decisions. We panic, behave instinctually or flat-out run away from the conflict. But what if instead of reacting we took a breath and responded logically to the stimulus causing us discomfort?
Apply this to your relationship.
What if instead of avoiding the discomfort that arises when you try to voice your opinion you faced your fear head-on and told your husband, nope you don’t want to watch that show or hang out with those friends. If these situations are too fear-inducing start by addressing smaller conflicts.
Being at ease (or at least not running from discomfort) will help you not only improve your marriage but heal yourself.
This may sound odd, especially coming from a source you likely found at random on the Internet but allow me to explain.
When we are in confusing, unstable, or unhealthy marriages we’ll naturally look to the web for answers.
Quickly we’ll surround ourselves in a hyperbolic echo chamber full of all our worst fears. Social media companies and even search engines have a way of highlighting the most emotionally gut-wrenching information. The way to best capture our attention online is to feed us content that pulls at the heartstrings. The more level-headed, logical, and dependable content gets pushed down our feeds.
It’s easy to search for a couple things and quickly be bombarded with worst-case-scenario content about how your husband is a monster, how he is a flaming narcissist, and how he’s created a hyper-toxic environment.
Now don’t get me wrong, this may well be true. But at the end of the day what you read online and how you’re persuaded to feel is irrelevant. What should inform how you feel about your husband is your relationship. Not what you read online, not the echo chamber you’ve stepped in, or the TikTok videos from random people claiming to be experts.
What we read online quite often feeds our worst fears (unless we’re getting information from trusted sources).
I’m a proponent of having what Zen monks call a beginner’s mind.
A beginner’s mind is a clean slate. It’s a mind that leaves the past behind and is flexible and willing to behave in new ways. It’s not shaped by one’s history and instead is fully focused on the present.
Think of a beginner’s mind as an empty bowl.
It is empty and as such has zero preconceived notions or ill will towards anything. But most people (apart from babies and small children) don’t have a beginner’s mind. Instead, they fill their bowls up with grains of rice, each grain representing an experience that stays with them and affects them.
Having a zen mind allows us to hit the reset button.
It puts us in a position to create an internal shift.
This mantra is unsettling because no human likes the unknown. Rarely do we err from our routines. We enjoy living well-defined lives with well-defined routines.
Yet at the same time it’s liberating to drop your history.
We think our history leaves a permanent stamp on who we are. But the history isn’t some branding iron that we’ll carry around forever. Instead, we have the ability to shed our history and be reborn every day.
It’s all a question of perspective. If you believe your history is inescapable then you will never grow or heal. But if you allow our future to not be dictated by the past you can go on to build a brighter future for you and your husband.
The reality is that w have no idea what the future holds for us.
Allow yourself to be surprised.
For the clients that have succeeded in saving their marriage, they have the mindset of, “if this works out great, if it doesn’t I’ll be okay.”
In other words, they’re open to possibilities. They give themselves a chance to succeed and change their reality.
But hey, if things don’t work out in their marriage they’ll be in a better, more fearless place to push forward and build an even better future.
Everyone is worthy of love.
Everyone has the capacity to give and receive love. You have a right to feel amazing about who you are and to be treated fairly by a partner that sees you as the amazing person you are.
If you don’t feel as though you’re enough, don’t expect your husband to fill that void. Don’t expect all the compliments and kisses in the world to make up for how you’re feeling about yourself. Trying to fill yourself up from external love is like trying to keep a glass with holes in it filled to the brim with water.
Many a woman I’ve helped has felt as though they’ve lost themselves because they feel they’re not good enough and need validation. They do things to try to win the affection of their husband thinking that if only he’d love me more, love me better, and I’d be whole.
That just isn’t how it works.
A marriage will never make you feel full inside, that’s something you can only do yourself.
How to improve your marriage and heal yourself starts and ends with you.
Your husband isn’t a chess piece you can move whenever you’d like. He can’t be controlled or forced to love you the way you want to be loved. The only person you have control over is yourself.
That’s why healing yourself is the key to healing a marriage. Once you’re whole on the inside your external relationships will also heal.
But I can understand how all this can seem a bit abstract and difficult to implement.
That’s why I created the Authentic Relationship System.
My program goes into detail on how to create the impactful shifts you want in order to maximize your chances of saving your marriage. In my program, we don’t offer quick fixes. Instead, we offer a chance for long-term transformation and the ability to heal from within.
Via live sessions, an online curriculum, and online community full of women that understand where you’re coming from we can help you achieve your relationship goals.
Click here to schedule a 1-on-1 appointment with me as we talk about your goals and see if my program is the right fit for you.
Be part of a community of women who create shifts on a daily basis.