Follow-on to Counseling 24

The night after we met with Counselor for session 24, I discussed the outcome on the phone with D. We came to a couple of conclusions.


At one point, I was telling D how hopeless I felt about the prospects for following Counselor's advice, and I used the example I gave in the preceding post: that if I tell Wife "I'm feeling blamed right now" her answer will be "No, I'm just defending myself against you because you are being so controlling and dominating." (In other words, "Yes, that's right, I'm blaming you.") As I summarized it to D, I am afraid to name my feelings to Wife because I am afraid of being smacked down. D laughed and asked two questions. First, very specifically, how much worse could the smack-down possibly be than what I am already living with every day? Second, more generally, how well do I think our current methods of communication work?

Ummm, ... OK, fair enough. Point taken. They don't work at all, so I guess I have nothing to lose by trying something else instead.

In the ensuing days, I tried to put this into practice. What I found was that it was difficult to remember the whole ritual of saying, "When you said X it made me feel Y." So I opted for something simpler: to pay attention, closely, to what I say to Wife; to try to avoid saying harsh things so far as I can; and to replace words with gestures (hugs or other physical contact) when I can't think of anything nice to say.

The idea to hug Wife more often is one I took from Kathleen Norris's Acedia and Me. In chapter 10 ("The Quotidian Mysteries") she writes about the power of repetition:

A recent study that monitored the daily habits of couples in order to determine what produced good and stable marriages revealed that only one activity made a consistent difference, and that was the embracing of one's spouse at the beginning and end of each day. Most surprising to Paul Bosch, who wrote the article about the study, was that "it didn't seem to matter whether or not in that moment the partners were fully engaged or even sincere! Just a perfuctory peck on the cheek was enough to make a
difference in the quality of the relationship." Bosch comments, wisely, that this "should not surprise churchgoers. Whatever you do repeatedly has the power to shape you, has the power to make you over into a different person -- even if you're not totally 'engaged' in every minute."

So there.... Let's hear it for insincere, hurried kisses, and prayers made with a yawn. (pp. 187-188)

Of course I'm not quoting this article that Norris quotes (and that I have never even read) as a panacea for everybody's marriage. But I also figured that it doesn't cost much to implement. If it turns out to have any benefit, so much the better.

The short answer, though I may be getting ahead of myself here, is that it did seem to work some. Or at any rate, there seemed to be some kind of positive correlation between my increased levels of affection and Wife's improved reports about our life together when she talks to Counselor (and D). Of course there were bumps along the way, but they belong in a later post.