Children don’t listen to their parents, but they never fail to imitate them.

I recently spoke with Regina Pally, M.D., Co-Founder and Assistant Director of the Center for Reflective Parenting about how and where children learn to do what they do and beyond that to where they get their sense of security or insecurity.

Goulston: Regina, how and where do kids learn to do what they do?

Pally: Childhood is so much about learning. Kid’s brains are literally sponges for soaking up new information. But HOW they learn can often surprise and frustrate parents. Kids are phenomenal imitators. They are keen observers of what people are doing, and they are excellent at copying it. And in fact it turns out children learn much more by imitation than they do by instruction.

The easiest example of this that people can relate to is learning how to speak. Kids just pick it up. You don’t have to teach them vocabulary or grammar; They just absorb by imitation, the language they are exposed to.

So when it comes to learning other behaviors it is not much different. As imitators they are more likely to do what they observe than what they are taught. When parents say do what I say not what I do, it is a recipe for failure. Because kids do what the adults around them do, particularly their parents. It is a kind of osmosis so to speak, in which they soak in and internalize what others they care about are doing.

 This is the main way they learn how it is they are supposed “be” in the world- what the rules are at home, and at school, how they are supposed to get along with other people, and also how they are supposed to control their behaviors and how they are supposed to control and express their feelings, and even things like how they are supposed to work hard for what they want.

Goulston: So telling your kids what to do is not as effective as many parents would hope?

Pally: Parents should keep in mind its more ‘Do what I Do’, and less ‘do what I say’. And when I say Do, what I mean is how parents behave toward their child as well as with other people. Do they get easily frustrated with their child and impulsively lash out with hostility. Are they patient and listen carefully to what their child is feeling? Do they impose their power over the child or do they allow the child some autonomy in making decisions.

As much as parents wish they could teach kids how to behave simply by instruction….’Now listen to me young man, you can’t just go around the house yelling you have to think about other people in this house too.’…more often than not they will be more successful in getting their children to learn these important lessons by how they behave themselves.

Goulston: Can you give some specific examples?

Pally: If Dad does a lot of yelling himself, and gets easily frustrated when he does not get his way, it’s no surprise if his child acts that way. If Mom gets hyper-anxious when her child is frustrated or disappointed, the child will get hyper-anxious as well in the face of these strong emotions. A mom who is able to be a little calmer will be more likely to be able to help her child internalize calmness in the face of frustration and disappointment. I am not saying that parents have to do this perfectly. But when parents misbehave in ways they don’t want their kids to misbehave, I encourage them to at least be honest and apologize…because that is after all how they want their children to act when the child misbehaves.

Goulston:  That’s a good point about children imitating either parent, especially how that parent reacts to upsetting situations. I also remember from my psychiatric training how destructive it can be to a child’s development to live in a highly conflicted household. What are your thoughts about that?

Pally: You’re right about that.  Children learn how to act and react and even what to feel from watching what their parents do. And this can be particularly important when kids are watching how their parents handle conflict with each other.  Not only are they learning but it also affects their sense of well-being.

Goulston: What happens when a young child watches their mother and father having a difference of opinion and it escalates to a disagreement, an argument or worse (with either leveling hyperbole, screams, sullenness, “you never’s” and “you always” at each other)?

Pally: Kids in families with this kind of tension and unresolved conflict, feel anxious and insecure but end up learning this is how to deal with conflict.  These kids can then pass on to their kids this tendency to go from purely rational to explosively emotional within seconds.

Goulston: Can you describe what parents who deal with conflict act like?

Pally: A good example of healthy parents are those who respect and treat respectfully the differences in their spouse. And when they do have conflict and the emotions flare, they are able to finally talk it through and make sense of each other’s point of view.  Then they can see how reason (not to be confused with coldly, disdainfully and dismissively delivered logic) and emotion cooperate. This way that child is internalizing and then hard wiring into their brain how their own thinking and talking things through and their emotion will cooperate with each other. This is what some people would call the left brain and right brain working together in an integrated fashion.

Another example is a couple who shows mutual respect and valuing of their differences by suggesting their child go to their spouse if the other can provide what that child needs most. For example a father who is better at solutions than emotional comfort might say to an upset child, “I can see that what you want and need most now is someone to make you feel less upset and feel better.  Your mom is terrific at that.  Go talk to her to help you feel better.”  And alternatively, the mother who may be better at comforting than solutions might say to a child who needs a plan, “You know, your dad is terrific at figuring a way to deal with the situation and help you come up with what you should say or do to make it better.  Go to him and he’ll be great at helping you figure that out.”

When a young child sees parents respecting, appreciating and utilizing the different strengths in each other instead of shaming the child if they need something that each parent is bad at, it fosters a sense of security within the child.   Following that they will internalize it and turn to it unconsciously during times of conflict in their later life and know that things will turn out and that differences don’t make you wrong.  They just make you different.

Goulston: You’re preaching to the choir.  What about parents who think this is a bunch of hooey and then talk about how their parents argued and it wasn’t so bad?

Pally: Show me a parent who thinks this is a bunch of hooey and I’ll show you a parent who would rather be right than make a situation better.  And you’re right, those are the people we need to be speaking to.

Goulston: I don’t know if this would make the point, but many years ago during my training I remembered hearing about a study conducted at a psychoanalytic child study center in Philadelphia in which parents were interviewed and the researchers made some correlations between what the parents said and their disturbed children’s behavior in the playroom.  Since it was a psychoanalytically oriented center they asked parents about their dreams which the parents hadn’t told anyone about.  To their amazement they then discovered that some of these parents’ children were acting out the dreams in their play.  So if a parent had a dream about a plane crashing, their child was crashing planes in the play room.  What do you think that means?

Pally:  It means your children are always watching you and taking in not just what you say and do, but what you feel.  Kind of makes the hairs on your neck stand up, but it doesn’t surprise me. I can’t explain how it works, but we know kids feel and intuit somehow, even things that parents are completely unaware of feeling.

Goulston: And the takeaway from that?

Pally: If you want your children to feel good about themselves and life from their inside out, get yourself better from your inside out… and learn to handle conflict better.

Goulston: Thank you for helping us better understand how parents can raise their children be secure in anxious times by turning a conflicted home into a more loving one.

Pally: My pleasure, thank you. Maybe that’s why we used to refer to it as “home sweet home.”

Goulston: Amen.

Oprah: For all those couples out there who are having problems or going the first time around and want to avoid some of the disasters that we’ve heard about today, what’s the number one thing they can do today to turn things around in their relationship?

Dr. Mark: Be yourself as soon as possible in the relationship and get your spouse to be themselves, because why would you want to be with anyone who doesn’t like you for you?

Oprah: Yeah (surprised), and oy, we like that!

Watch video/audio clip for more

Why is that?  In the case of the reformed a-hole it’s because when you suddenly no longer have to fear and hate such people, the high is as powerful as pure grade heroine.

Also getting love and caring from a nice person doesn’t feel very special since they give it to everyone.  But getting love and caring from a dyed-in-the-wool b-itch or a-hole… that’s a real prize (especially since love and caring from such a person doesn’t exist).

But in addition to how special love and caring from such awful people can feel what else causes them to be treated better?

One of the things that b-tches and a-holes possess or more accurately don’t have is the neediness and whininess that emotionally needy people demonstrate.  And rightly or wrongly, emotional neediness is the kiss of death in both personal and professional life.

Why is it that emotional neediness so offends and even more so than the demanding behavior of b-tches and a-holes?

One reason is that you know where you stand with b-tches and a-holes and you know where their anger is.  I once heard someone say at a self-help meeting that you don’t really know someone until you’ve seen how angry they are capable of getting at its worst.  Until you see that, they are always holding back something.  In some way there is a relief to be able to see it so transparently in b-tches and a-holes, whereas with nice people the hurt has to reach a very high level before they will show their anger.

Perhaps the more powerful reason it offends is that you often have what is referred to as a transference reaction to whiny and emotionally needy people.  That reaction unconsciously conjures up the memory of an invasive, passive aggressive, guilt tripping parent who may have driven you crazy growing up and the kind of personality you always said you would steer clear of as an adult.

How offensive emotional neediness can be may explain why many financially independent, but emotionally needy people are treated so much worse than very financially dependent, but non emotionally needy and demanding b-tches and a-holes.

Now it gets a little more complicated as you grow up.  For as the title of this blog entry implied, often the b-tches and a-holes do better initially, but if you have a brain in your head you will do everything you can to get away from them after you realize that they’re just not that into you as much as they’re into dominating and controlling you.

A wonderful example of this played out in the finale in the hit sitcom Mad About You starring Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser.  In that long running show Helen Hunt’s character was always the b-tchy one to Paul Reiser’s ever consoling, ever calming and ever reassuring character.  She was always the one to suggest breaking up and the one threatening divorce.  He was always talking her out of it.  In the finale, the show focuses on the couple 22 years later when their daughter had grown up and when they had finally become divorced.

Interestingly, Helen Hunt’s character shared with her friends, “Can you believe it? After all those years of my threatening divorce, he divorced me.”  On the other hand Paul Reiser’s character shared with his friends essentially that after years of focusing on her being disappointed in him (a.k.a. a negative b-tch), he didn’t realize how disappointed he had become in her for being so critical, negative, unforgiving and unloving.  And in the end it corroded his loving feelings from the inside out.

What’s the takeaway?

Nice guys may finish last early on, but if they persevere, they will attract people that value them for their kindness and so in the end, they often get the chance to finish first.

Too bad it takes one or two marriages to get it straight.

This may also be true for men, but it is especially true for women. Women are more in tune with their connectedness to other human beings than men. That may explain why many mothers can hear the sound of an infant toddler in another room and know what’s going on, whereas most fathers would need to go and check it out. It may also explain why more mothers than fathers can tell when their child has a temperature by pressing their cheek to their child’s forehead than is true for a father.

When a woman separates from her family of origin to attach to a man and to begin a marriage and then a family, she is much more in tune with and it is much more important to her that she feel she can trust the man in and with her life both explicitly and implicitly.

Not being able to do so shakes her to her core. That may explain why prenuptial agreements are so offensive and hurtful to so many women who feel pressured to sign them. What a prenup means to women if she is the less monied party, is that if he changes his mind about wanting to be in the marriage and decides he wants out, he gets to keep what was his before the marriage plus whatever is agreed to by virtue of the agreement. Makes sense from the man’s and their lawyer’s point of view, but it doesn’t exactly help the woman’s need to trust.

Since betrayal by cheating on a marriage is such a violent assault on the spirit of wedding vows, I think all prenups should have written into them that if either party has an affair that they forfeit something big. And while I’m on my soapbox that nobody will listen to, I would also add the stipulation, should either party ask for a divorce that both parties must agree to a minimum of six months of marriage counseling or marriage therapy, or else the person seeking the divorce also forfeit something big from the prenup (see: How Prenups Kill Romance).

What’s can be done to heal this wound?

If you have been betrayed, you need to decide whether you want to get over it.

If you decide that you would like to heal from it, you will need to tell the person who betrayed you to offer you the 4 R’s to respond to your 4 H’s (and then watch closely how earnestly they do it).

1. To ease your HURT they will need to demonstrate REMORSE to show that they know they damaged or even broke something in you, by looking you directly in the eye and admitting they’re truly sorry and that they were wrong, with no excuses or explanations (this is the stumbling block for very narcissistic people and something Bill Clinton and John Edwards couldn’t do to the satisfaction of their wives or the rest of us).

2. To respond to the HATE you feel at their taking away trust, they need to show RESTITUTION and offer a payback for what they took away from you by giving up something that matters to them or letting you verbally punch yourselves out at them  for making you feel crazy while they lied to you.

3. To lower your HESITATION TO TRUST they need to REHABILITATE themselves to let you see a new way of dealing with those situations that caused them  to stray and that they actually prefer to their old destructive behavior.

4. To get you to stop HOLDING ONTO A GRUDGE, they need to REQUEST FORGIVENESS after practicing those 3 R’s for a minimum of 6 months so these new mindsets and behaviors can become a part of their personality.

The level of resistance that the other person has to providing you those first 3 R’s is directly correlated to how justified they felt their behavior was. And since most interpersonal problems have two sides to the story, you should also own up to — with your 3 R’s — any and everything you may have done to trigger their behavior.

If you decide to not forgive, that of course is your choice. However, holding onto a grudge and dwelling on it can turn you into a bitter person (possibly like one of your parents who you swore you didn’t want to end up like).

What it comes down to is that if you’d rather be right, self-righteous and stay a victim, you really are damaged goods and not relationship material, because one false move from your next relationship and they will die for the sins of your past one.

Stay Tuned: Humiliation – The Wound that Won’t Heal for Men

- Dr. Mark Goulston appearing on Oprah
to discuss “Recoupling Therapy”
on a show about divorced couples that reconciled

When you buy a computer it comes preinstalled with software.  And when you get it out of the box, plug it in, you hear those wonderful chimes on a Mac or on PC Windows that signal you’re good to go.

Then your honeymoon starts and you are zooming through the Internet and using all your productivity software.  But then you hit a glitch.  A screen freezes, documents go unsaved, time to reboot.  Over time the glitches get worse.  Sometimes you have to reinstall the software and sometimes you even have to reinstall the operating system.  I’ve actually reinstalled software, but when it’s a matter of operating systems or even motherboards, I get a little sick to my stomach as I quickly feel in over my head.

When that happens you can rapidly begin to feel vulnerable and exposed (especially if you fear you have lost non-backed up information forever) and that vulnerability can cause you to hate the technology that just months ago you loved taking out of that box when you got home from Best Buy or the Apple Store.

When you fall in love, that comes preinstalled with “loveware” and an operating system called love.  I have used the mnemonic CREATE (as in CREATE love) to make each program easier to remember.

• C = Chemistry is about sex, romance, passion and excitement
• R = Respect and is about both feeling it towards and from each other and proud and lucky to have this other person as your spouse
• E = Enjoyment a.k.a. “fun” is pretty straightforward… you know that’s where you each put a smile on each other’s face
• A = Acceptance where you unconditionally accept and feel accepted for each other’s essence, based on who you each are, not what you each do (but feeling so loved causes you to want to do all sorts of loving thing to show your gratitude)
• T = Trust where you can not only rely on their doing what they say they’ll do, but you can entrust your fears and even your deep doubts about yourself regarding your competence, worthiness or even how good a human being you are.  It’s baring your neck and expecting them to respond emotionally with the reassuring touch of their hand instead of sticking a knife in it.
• E = Empathy where you understand and feel understood by each other.  This goes far beyond feeling figured out.  It’s walking in the other’s shoes and if when you’re there you see they need comfort or reassurance, giving it to them. At its best you feel “felt” and unalone in a world that seems to conspire daily to make you feel alone.

Yep.  When you fall in love, all of these feel present.  In fact it is the felt presence of all of these that often gives us the courage to finally break the ties of dependence or over dependence on our parents.  When we feel all of this loveware is in tact, we feel an emotional safety net that will catch us if we start to fall through the cracks when we finally making that break from our families of origin.  And feeling exuberant and safe is our honeymoon.

But alas.  Just as with our computers, each and sometimes all of the different loveware programs develop glitches.

He or she starts to relax their best behavior that they may have shown during the courtship and starts to burp or even fart, thinking it’s endearing (yougottabekidding).  Loving touch crosses over to groping.  Can’t wait to get into bed becomes, “I’ve got a headache.”  And voila.  Say goodbye to Chemistry.

He or she starts to interrupt, be curt, shut down or nit picky and poof, say so long to Respect.

And when Chemistry or Respect are on the way out, it becomes increasingly difficult to give or get a smile and so bye bye Enjoyment.

Pretty soon Accepting and giving each other the benefit of the doubt turns into being judgmental, offering advice when neither wants to hear it.  And when Acceptance feels most gone, a woman can often feel repulsive to her husband while her husband feels as if everything he does is wrong to his wife.

By now each spouse has probably started to act out passive aggressively so it becomes difficult to Trust them to do what they say they’ll do or if they do, to do it without resentment.  More insidiously is that the ability to bare your neck to the other goes away where each is afraid that if they did, they will be met with a cold, “What do you want me to do? You’re the one who messed up.”

As for Empathy and walking in each other shoes.  You can’t walk in their shoes if all you do is step on their toes.  And neither person has much of a chance of feeling felt when mostly what each feels is contempt.

The challenge is that when these inevitable glitches develop, couples do not have a way to reinstall their loveware.  And when the operating system falls apart and they not only stop loving each other, they barely tolerate each other and neither knows what to do to make it better.

The joke about where sex takes place in a marriage becomes all too true: anywhere when you first fall in love, in the bedroom after you’ve been married a few years (and certainly after children) and finally in the hall when you say, “F**k You! to each other” (and if not in reality, certainly in you mind) when you pass each other.

Sadly very often couples don’t repair those rifts early on before they become too entrenched, not because they lack the will.  It’s because they lack the way as the opening quote said: “to stop hating each other.”

Hatred is the result of hurt and disappointment not being addressed early enough to prevent it from turning into frustration, anger, hostility and in the end, bitterness.

I will address the steps to reinstalling the loveware program and love operating system in your relationship is subsequent blogs.  If you’re anxious to get started, check out The 6 Secrets of a Lasting Relationship: How to Fall Back in Love … and Stay There (Perigee, $15.95). As it says on the back cover, “If you ever lain in bed beyond arm’s length of your partner and thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ or lain in bed by yourself, beyond the reach of anyone, and asked, ‘Will I always be alone?’ this is the book for you.”

And until you and I have a chance to visit again in subsequent blogs, try to be nice to each other.

After decades of working with married couples, I have realized that there’s not much I can do if peoples’ mindsets are focused on being right instead of  making their relationship better.

As a result I now focus on partners that are motivated to make their marriage a success and are willing to give up having to be right to do so.  Those couples are often the ones where both partners are marrying for the third time or at least one is for the third time (usually the moneyed one) and the other for at least the second.

It doesn’t always hold true, but it seems that a couple in a first marriage often doesn’t know what to do when each person grows in a different direction and apart from the other.  Rather than accepting this as a reality, they launch full bore into making the other person wrong when in fact they are just different and growing into who they are meant to be.

Then the second marriage is about doing the opposite of the first as a reaction to the other person being wrong.  It is not about admitting and actually taking personal responsibility for problems in that first marriage.  In other words, the narcissistic part of each person’s personality is alive and well and entitled.  If they haven’t taken that personal responsibility for problems, they are often just as likely to run into problems –maybe different ones, but problems nevertheless – the second time around.

The third time may be the charm because after being a two time loser, it becomes more difficult to keep blaming the other person entirely.  What’s the saying?  “Have a failed marriage once, shame on them; have a failed marriage twice, shame on you.” And when you get older, just not wanting to fight is a legitimate resolution to arguments, whereas when you are younger that would seem to be too avoidant and there is often an obsessive need to deal with and resolve all the issues. Also by the time you’re on a third marriage, you’ve gone from believing you’re invincible to wanting to make it to the finish line of life with peace of mind.

Now there are many who will not remarry a third time.  For the ones that do, there are usually habits they have learned that will help their third marriage to succeed (and ones that first and second marriages would do well to learn as well).

12 Habits of Healthy and Happy Third Marriages

1. Talking “with” instead of “at” your mate. Let their body language be your guide. When you’re talking “at” your partner, they’ll tense up. When you’re talking “with” them, they’ll most certainly relax.
2. Tuning in — instead of tuning out — to what your mate is saying. When your mind begins to wander, stop and remember that what your partner is saying is important to them whether you’re interested or not.
3. Remembering to thank your mate. Not thanking your spouse for being considerate, thoughtful or kind makes them feel unappreciated and foolish for caring about you.
4. Saying, “I’m sorry,” instead of becoming defensive. When you mess up, the sooner you sincerely apologize the sooner your mate can stop resenting you.
5. When you say, “I’m sorry,” follow through. An apology buys you another chance. However, if you keep making the same mistake, apologies not only seem empty, but annoying as well.
6. Being on time. Frequently keeping your spouse waiting is not only inconsiderate; it’s arrogant.
7. Not Jumping to conclusions. Presuming that you know what your partner feels — and why — without first getting all the facts is only going to push them away.
8. Not playing the victim. This behavior not only accuses your spouse of hurting you, but adds insult to injury by implying that they’re doing it intentionally, when that may not be the case.
9. Not making the other person wrong. Rather than realizing and accepting that it takes two to make a mistake, they always blame problems on the other.
10. Talk well about your spouse behind their back. When you bad mouth your spouse to others, this not only adds to the list of secrets you keep from your mate, but also tells others how little you respect them.
11. Have ground rules for dealing with a difference of opinion – Having ground rules such as agreeing to not use words like “never” and “always” or agreeing that neither person can become abusive and unrelentingly accusatory – a couples’ disagreement will prevent a disagreement from deteriorating and sometimes reaching the point of cruel words or an action that can’t be taken back.
12. Knowing that doing something once is not enough. If you only temporarily do the above — and don’t continue to monitor yourself to keep from slipping back into bad habits — you’re teasing your partner with changing. You’re also kidding yourself that you’re committed to improving your marriage, when really you’re not.

The 6 Secrets of a Lasting Relationship: How to Fall in Love Again…and Stay There (Perigee, $15.95)

“When you fall in love in your 20s, you’re swept away by all the passion. However you often don’t know who it is you’re going to grow up to be. And if the two of you grow up to be people who are merely different and simply not compatible as a married couple, it makes no sense to make the other person wrong and destroy what was once good.”

This was told to me by a very wise woman who discovered this with her first husband. He agreed and not only did they amicably divorce they have remained very good friends and successful business partners. And because of the cooperation, mutual respect and not making each other wrong, their child has thrived much more than kids from many conflict ravaged, intact marriages.

I also think that possibly in the case of the Gores ambition can become a very jealous mistress. When both partners have a taste of professional efficacy and success, it is often difficult to keep their personal relationship strong, because each partner is busy relating to fulfilling their professional aspirations. At that point each person begins dancing to and even racing towards a different drum. That may be the case with the Gores in which Al and Tipper have each enjoyed separate successes and may be feeling closer to those supporting those successes than to each other (we will of course be severely disappointed if we discover that one of those supporting either of them has crossed over into an affair since the last thing we want to think of the Gores is that they have descended into the sordid ranks of John Edward/Rielle Hunter).

Ironically it may be that what has kept the Clintons together is that they have been so supportive of each other’s professional ambition and success that their personal/emotional relationship has lost its importance to either of them.

Another contributing factor might be that the identities of men and women have spread out to women being much more driven to achieve professional success than in prior generations. In the past the man’s “mastery” in the world didn’t conflict with the woman being the “master” at home. In a sense the man was the CEO in the world, the woman was CEO in the home. With this division of labor a wife could support her husband’s role in the world just as a husband could support his wife’s role at home with minimal conflict. But now with women wanting to have their own role in the world, you have two CEO’s trying to work together at home. And just as co-CEO’s rarely survive in the work world, it may be that they are not surviving at home.

One way to not only survive but thrive in a marriage in which each of you grow into different personalities is if you share core values to which your commitment is much more powerful than your personality incompatibility. If for instance your love, devotion and commitment to God or family in your actions vs. words is much more important than getting your way, there is more than enough room to live happily ever after regardless of who each of you grow up to be.

If you and your partner are in danger of drifting apart, one great preventive strategy is to formally schedule a time every month to sit down with each other and each share what is going on in each other’s personal and professional life and in their marriage and family and where each would like it to go in all those areas and how to each can help the other.

What do you think?

MarkGoulston.com
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The 6 Secrets of a Lasting Relationship: How to Fall in Love Again…and Stay There
MarkGoulston on Twitter‘

What it says about you as the person seeking one

• As right as you thought you were about something is as wrong as you turned out to be.
• You’ve been burned before and don’t want to risk it again.
• You’ve become aware how so many things are up for grabs, so focus on the details.
• You don’t mind giving, but you don’t want to be taken from.
• When you leave things to chance, you believe it usually works against you.
• You’re defenseless and inept against emotional reactions to conflict.

What it says to your partner about you

• You don’t trust them to be fair and reasonable if you get divorced.
• You’re trying to control them.
• You don’t think the marriage will last.
• You’ve lied about how you would take care of them, and are now back peddling.
• You’ve gone from a giver to a taker.
• You may want them to unconditionally love you, but there are conditions to your loving them in return.
• You don’t have confidence that you and they can rationally discuss and work out conflicts.
• You’ve put a dollar amount on the value of their love.
• You don’t care about the humiliation they may face in admitting this to friends and family.

You put a much higher value on preserving your pre-marital assets than you do on their sacrificing a “window of desirability” and lessening their next marriage prospects based on their non-financial assets that may be diminished after the marriage by virtue of their being older.

You’re crazy if you think this will not impact your relationship negatively.

All this said, I am in favor of prenuptial agreements for a reason not usually discussed. Prenups offer each partner the chance to see the other at their worst*. This enables each party to say, “No thank you” up front before they get married and thereby prevents having to say, “I want a divorce” later on.

* Years ago I was a preeminent international expert on helping divorced couples get back together with their ex’s, remarry and live happily ever after (see/hear Oprah clip). When I was doing that, one couple told me, “When you go through a divorce you see your ex at their worst, whereas when you get into a new relationship, you have yet to see them at their worst.”

The 6 Secrets of a Lasting Relationship: How to Fall in Love Again…and Stay There (Perigee, $14.95)

This was told to me by a very wise woman who discovered this with her first husband.  He agreed and not only did they amicably divorce they have remained very good friends and successful business partners.  And because of the cooperation, mutual respect and not making each other wrong, their child has thrived much more than kids from many conflict ravaged, in tact marriages.

The trouble arises when one or the other or both partners requires the other person to grow in the same direction in order to remain psychologically stable.  The people who have the most difficulty and create the most havoc in allowing the other person to become a different person are often what we refer to as being Narcissists* or having Borderline Personalities**.  Narcissists are driven by a need to psychologically dominate others to serve their ego; people with Borderline Personalities are driven by a need to control others to serve their own psychological survival. When either of these types of people sense their partner is not conforming to their psychological needs, they become enraged.  The rage of Narcissists is a reaction to the other person having the impudence to not do want the narcissist wants.  The rage of people with Borderline Personalities comes from the terror that they will fragment if the other person either controls or threatens to abandon them.

Should you remain in a marriage if the two of you have grown apart?  Each case is different and comes down to what in the long run you are getting and what you’re not by being with someone who is not doing anything wrong, but is just being true to themselves.

One way to not only survive but thrive in a marriage in which each of you grow into different personalities is if you share core values to which your commitment can override personality incompatibility.  If for instance your love, devotion and commitment to God or family in your actions vs. words is much more important than getting your way, there is more than enough room to live happily ever after regardless of who each of you grow up to be.

What do you think?

* To learn more about Narcissists check out: Freeing Yourself from the Narcissist in Your Life by Linda Martinez-Lewi.
** To learn more about Borderline Personalities check out: “I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality by Jerold Kreisman.

Try to see your partner at their worst before you get married,
because you will certainly see them at it afterwards

In the 1980’s one of my specialties and claims to fame was that I was the creator of “Recoupling Therapy”* where I helped couples that had divorced to remarry their ex- and live happily ever after.

I appeared on Oprah, Today (see mini-videoclips) in the New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Rebook, Los Angeles Magazine , the Los Angeles Times to discuss my work along with couples who had “recoupled.”

In actuality it was much easier to recouple a divorced couple than keep a miserable one together.

All that it required was that each partner:

1. had learned how they contributed to the problems in the marriage and took full responsibility for it.
2. had learned what they would to do different to deal with disagreements, disappointments and hurts before they deteriorated into a “scorched earth” War of the Roses and was actively using those approaches.
3. was willing to agree on a set of ground rules for managing disagreements that were more important to each of them than being right or winning.
4. made forgiveness rather than begrudging their default mode even when they couldn’t sort out the issues behind a conflict.
5. routinely expressed gratitude and appreciation to each other.
6. (and pertaining to the “”usable insight” above) realized that during the divorce they had seen and knew the other person at their worst, whereas that was something they had yet to discover in any new relationship.

What can you learn from this if you are going the first time around or even before you get married?

Don’t make a commitment to each other until you have gotten into three full scale arguments where each or both people have felt disappointed or hurt by the other to see how each person handles it. The more quickly either person goes from disappointment or hurt to anger, defensiveness, or emotional withdrawal and remains stuck there, the less that person is capable of having a relationship and the more the other person will have to walk on eggshells. Over time, doing that will have a cumulative effect, suck the vitality out of the relationship and corrode it from the inside out until it caves in on itself and dies. My advice just say “Goodbye” to such a “high maintenance” (easy to upset, difficult to please) person and if that person is you, fix it.

* I didn’t stay with that specialty because at that same time I was also involved intervening with suicidal and violent individuals, which seemed more critical at the time.  I often feel that I may have done more good had I continued with “Recoupling Therapy” given the families it would have saved and future suicides and violence it would have prevented.

ALSO Sign up and heck out the latest “Two Questions to Get Closer to Your Partner” at FREE RESOURCES

AND stayed tuned for the launch of HappierCouples.com, “coming to a relationship near you” in September and where I am thrilled to be the Chief Relationship Officer.