More Marriage Counseling Homework

[thewindrose]

Describe your parent’s relationship, in story form, as you experienced it, using at least one positive and one negative memory or experience. What do you wish to take into your marriage and what do you want to leave out of your marriage from your parents’ relationship?What do I want to leave out? Oh, just about everything

Comments

[rednfiery]

i completely agree with you about lifelong physical affection and the effects it has! i love touch -- both touching and being touched. it's one of the things i miss the most now that i'm on my own. (snuggling with kids is lovely, but not in this context....)

i've yet to achieve the kind of control over my anger that (i think) you're describing. in the meantime, i try my best to not do or say anything i might regret. ultimately, though, i think you're right on about communication. it's difficult to do well, but it's worth the amount of discipline it takes.

this is really well written. what a thought-provoking homework assignment. your parents' "bad" marriage is similar to my own parents' it seems, at the root of their problems, specifically.

[thewindrose]

Thank you. I really struggled writing this one, I had a hard time wrapping my brain around the assignment - which is why I left it until last. I have to turn it in tomorrow to the minster.

The control of anger was something I always wanted, but never achieved until one day when I sat and thought long and hard and tried to remember a situation where anger got me whatever it was that I wanted... and I couldn't think of one. The closest was that occasionally anger motivated me to do something I had wanted to do for awhile - get political, quit a job, etc.. But the anger itself was really counterproductive, especially in relationships. It is just too easy to slip in the heat of the moment and say something I'll regret for a lifetime.

[inishglora]

I saw a lot of myself in what you said about controlling anger. I once found a book by the Dalai Lama about this very subject. He teaches that it is useless to get angry about anything, because the thing that makes us angry was caused by something else that took place earlier, which in turn was caused by something else before that, and so on. His explanation is much more eloquent than this, of course.

Myself, I have a chancy temper, most likely because most of my family members do as well, and I had lousy role models as a kid in this respect. So it's a struggle, but I am learning the difference between anger/frustration when stuff goes wrong and real anger/indignation when I see people mistreated or see George Bu$h's ugly mug on TV.

Mark, on the other hand, is calm and steady and rarely angered by anything. I wish I could be more like this.

[thewindrose]

I like what you wrote about the Dalai Lama - I hadn't thought of it that way, but that certainly makes sense. I ask myself a lot of questions

[waringfaction]

i read this last night and didn't comment, but wanted to think on it.

but now i know what it is that strikes me about this post, and kid's bad upbringing or at least seeing bad things in childhood in general.

when i was a kid, i had no idea things could be so fucked up for other kids parents. Not only that i didn't know, it wouldn't have been something i could have even imagined happening. I did see some divorce with other kids parents early but i didn't notice any of the side effects or pain it must have held. I guess that is what a pretty perfect childhood does for you, it makes you feel it must be like that for everyone.

[thewindrose]

I think people are pretty good at hiding it too. We aren't allowed to talk about things like that, and like you, sometimes it doesn't even occur to us that it should be any different.

I will say that although there were some bad times, overall it was a good childhood. Individually, my parents were mostly wonderful to Meg and I. But I honestly don't see one spot of genuine happiness in my parent's marriage - which is why it is so important to me to have a completely different relationship for myself.

[archiedavis]

its always interesting to see what people take away from their parents. some people become a carbon copy of them, some use them as a template of what not to become.

the older i get the more i can appreciate my own father, and look past all of his faults and eccentricities, and see him as something other than an obtrusive, overbearing authority figure.

its definitely a work in progress.

[thewindrose]

I certainly appreciate them individually as people and as parents, but they were a terrible role model for how to build a lasting meaningful relationship.

But like you said, it is a work in progress and maybe someday I will find more value in them as a married couple, for now I definitely see them as an example of what not to do.