A harmonious relationship uplifts the spirit, heals and vitalizes the body, fuels the heart with inspiration and helps the mind to clearly focus. It empowers you to tackle every challenge in life more easily and more effectively.
Disharmony in a marriage, in contrast, poisons the spouses’ moods and attitudes, distracts their mental focus and undermines their physical health. It lowers their levels of performance in every area of life. It contributes more strife to the world.
The children of a couple in discord receive the brunt of its disturbing impact, in part because the child’s personality is shaped by every aspect of her surroundings, including the quality of relationships to which she is exposed.
A 3-year old attacked another child at preschool the day after his parents had a severe argument. A 5-year old yelled at his teacher after one of his parents’ typical screaming matches. During one of his wife’s extended silent-steaming periods of deep feelings of resentment toward him, the father of an eight-year old endured his child disrespectfully ignoring his greeting and sneering at him hostilely when he asked her what was wrong, appearing like a young mirror-reflection of her mother’s darting, angry glance. A 14-year old bullies his younger brother in a manner that matches the condescending, bossy way his father rules the roost. His mother sadly observed that the younger sibling shows morose signs of demoralization that reminds her of how powerless she feels to change the situation.
A child’s problematic behavior can often be traced back to the strife in his parent’s relationship. Even the way a child’s divorced parents relate with one another can send a child’s behavior and attitude into a negative spiral. As long as his parents squabble, or one parent mistreats the other, the child has more difficulty demonstrating higher potential and finds it easier to demonstrate lower potential. If your child is getting into trouble, but you believe your marriage to be harmonious enough, you may want to check with your spouse to see if you are in agreement. If your spouse disagrees, and you belittle her point of view, at least a part of the problem with your relationship has surfaced. While no relationship is perfect, because a marriage is a manifestation of life, and life is fraught with challenge, you can always improve the quality of your relationship to make a more positive experience and influence.
And the influence of the quality of the marriage of a child’s parents proves lasting. Take a close look at the ways that you relate with your mate and you will most likely see characteristics similar to the weaknesses and strengths displayed by the ways your parents related. When you belittle your spouse’s viewpoint, you teach your child to relate similarly with that parent, as well as with others. When you express genuine kindness, sensitivity and respect toward your spouse, your child learns to express those finer qualities in all relationships.
One of the most negative results of an inharmonious relationship is the challenge it poses to the self-esteem of the couple and the children involved. We all have a dream, an ideal, of the perfect relationship. And children have a dream for their parents’ relationship. When that dream goes bust, we consciously or unconsciously feel a sense of inferiority, inadequacy, unworthiness. This further lowers or level of motivation and makes it impossible for us to bring our best to life.
Because the relationship between the parents demonstrates so much authority over the child’s feelings and behaviors, both now and long into the future, the harmony of their relationship equates with a primary parental responsibility. To improve your child’s level of performance in any area of life, including school, bring more stable, loving, mutual respectful harmony into your marriage. To improve your own results in any area of your life, reduce the strife and increase the harmony in your marriage. If you struggle financially, for instance, that may be a result or reflection, to some extent, of the draining impact of your conflict with your mate.
Now that we have established the crucial importance of a harmonious relationship, let’s examine how to achieve it.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to marital harmony has to do with the belief that our mate has to change. This distracts us from our true source of power to improve things, and ends up keeping us feeling stuck in the same old cycle of marital strife.
To experience more harmony in your marriage, concentrate on being more harmonious in your marriage. You leave your own harmonious state when you fall into a cruelly critical, condescending attitude toward your spouse. You leave your harmony when you feel like a victim of your mate, regarding your mate as your villain. You leave your harmony when you feel like your marriage is some kind of trap. Believing that your spouse makes you fall into such discordant states keeps you stuck in them.
The instant that you express harsh, cruel, cutting criticism, your mate begins to shut down, erect a wall and distance. You may express your negativity passively in the form of intense disappointment, discontent, or even a depressed and defeated attitude toward yourself for being stuck in the relationship. Or you may express it aggressively by shouting, arguing endlessly for your point of view, issuing angry verbal put-downs or through intimidating, even violent action. You may express it passive-aggressively by having a secret affair or being overly flirtatious outside the relationship, or through self-destructive abuse of alcohol, excessive eating, shopping, or workaholism. However you deliver your attack, your negative reactions to your mate send your mate away, psychologically or physically, making him less accessible to work with you on any problems or issues that trouble you. You may be able to logically justify, rationalize, or excuse your discordant tactics, but you will only receive less cooperation, consideration and support as long as you remain a source of discord.
The fact is that the attitude another expresses around us, or toward us, has an impact upon us. When another feels depressed, nervous, insecure, it draws on our own feelings to enter similarly discordant states. When we receive another’s verbal put-downs, it becomes more difficult for us to feel and do our best. But this does not mean that we are justified in resenting our mate and feeling victimized. As you meet this challenge by improving your response, seeking to deal with the situation in a loving, harmonious, constructive way, you bring out your higher potential. You grow. You become more capable of creating and maintaining a healthy, harmonious relationship. This has a positive affect on your mate, and on your children.
No matter how kind, caring or sensitive your manner of interacting with your mate, she will not want to listen to your issues all the time. You may have too many issues, meaning that you depend too much on your mate for your happiness. But to receive the most consideration and openness from your mate, reduce your harsh, cutting criticism from your verbal, tonal, attitudinal repertoire. No one can be for you while you are against him. A belittling, humiliating attitude assaults the feeling of self-worth and self-confidence in your mate, forcing her to close her mind out of self-protection. One can only handle so much personal attack without it causing damage. As long as your angry, emotional tirades spin out of your control, the quality of your relationship with your spouse remains out of your control.
Taking total responsibility for your emotional reactions begins improving your reactions, because when you leave your harmonious, loving balance you then feel a sense of humility that instantly redirects the energy that would have gone into attacking your mate and sends it into repairing your own emotional state.
If you examine your angry, dissatisfied feelings toward your spouse, you will see that you regard your spouse as responsible for those feelings. But more honest and intensive self-examination reveals that how you feel about your spouse is rooted in your own habitual mental and emotional reaction patterns. You cannot feel angry with your mate without thinking of your mate in a way that makes you feel angry. This means that your thinking, how you use and relate with your own mind makes you angry. Also, when you feel angry, you feel threatened; your angry reactions, then, stem from your insecurity, not your spouse’s behavior. And your angry reactions most probably reflect or represent the angry relationship pattern displayed by at least one of the people who raised you. The proves true for all inharmonious feelings you might have for your mate or your marriage, including disappointment, disapproval or dissatisfaction.
As long as you blame your spouse for the chaotic emotional blow-outs or seething, critical attitudes you express you doom yourself to return to those unhappy conditions that promote marital discord. The moment you begin paying closer attention to how your angry, insecure, unhappy reactions affect you, you begin seeing these as conditions you are giving to yourself, and, by extension, to your mate and children. From there, you see your freedom and power to change.
But change only happens by small degrees. You have to make peace with the slow pace of improvement. If you insist on demonstrating total control over your situation, you will pass up the opportunity to make small changes that lead you along the path of improvement. Focus on what you can do to make a difference, however small that difference might seem. If you continue doing the best you can, your confidence in your ability to make big change will grow, and things will improve at least as much as you really can improve them. You can apply this wisdom to any area of life to shift from a demoralizing feeling of futility and defeat into a motivated, pro-active stance.
Growing into a more harmonious mate does not mean trying to placate your mate or attempting to manipulate him into treating you more nicely. It means being in more harmony with yourself, with your life, when your spouse chooses to conduct herself in ways that used to disturb you right out of a heart of peace. This does not mean pretending to like whatever your mate does, or keeping silent about changes you would like to see. It means relating with your mate constructively, rather than destructively outside of your own harmonious balance.
Taking responsibility for your reactions does not mean launching into a personal attack on yourself when you slip up and fall into one of your own destructive patterns. Simply focus on the present moment with aim of restoring your balanced, harmonious state. By focusing attention on your own feelings, instead of focusing on what you or your mate just did or said, your feelings will guide you toward harmony. Your feelings lead you to feel better. They operate as an internal guidance system. Just as you naturally sense how to shift your body from a posture of discomfort into comfort, you can sense how to gradually shift into a more comfortable, positive emotional state. Think about what you can do to feel even slightly better and you will get an idea.
In the heat of anger, though, we believe that the only way to feel better is to lash out at the person who “made us angry”, but doing this only compounds and complicates the conflict. You actually end up feeling worse. Though a momentary sense of relief might follow, you soon begin feeling confused and insecure, because you know you have done damage to the relationship, and now that your anger has passed, you realize how much you really care about the relationship.
Angry reactions masquerade as a genuine sense of urgency. Under the influence of an angry reaction, you believe that nothing is more important that getting back at the one who angered you. But when you feel calm once again, you realize that many things are infinitely more important to you than that, like your mate’s love and your children’s well-being, even your own happiness, success and well-being, all of which are undermined by your angry attacks.
The urge to lash out in anger at your mate indicates that you believe you need to improve your mate instead of improving the way you relate with your mate. Angry reactions arise to shield your feelings of vulnerability in response to hurt feelings. But this shield conceals your true feelings from you. Then your feelings cannot guide you into what you can do to feel better. The hurt remains, poisoning your attitude, compromising your health, depleting your energy, lowering your performance and limiting the success you achieve in life.
Practice relating with your mate more consciously, with more attention focused on the present moment. Otherwise you relate somnambulistically, unconsciously, without realizing how your thoughts, feelings, speech and actions actually function in the relationship. You then you feel powerless and blame your spouse for the displeasing conditions you create or contribute to. The next time that you feel tempted to complain about your mate not helping out more around the house, or about your mate seeming too self-absorbed and absent, focus on how you feel. If you seek control from a state of internal discord, you will most likely generate more discord in your relationship, not more understanding, consideration and cooperation.
Your harsh, angry criticism will backfire every time. It triggers defensiveness and sparks resentment, incites distrust. Even if you force your mate to change his behavior, you will lose closeness; the depth of your intimacy will diminish. If you have created damage in your relationship, waste little time beating yourself up for it. Focus right now on getting into your harmonious, balanced emotional state and on relating more consciously with your spouse.
If your spouse seems to have caused much damage through destructive ways of seeking control over you, the same solution applies. Your priority is to get into harmony yourself. In a state of balance and harmony you have access to your best judgment and can proceed from there in line with your true interests.
When you feel harmonious and balanced within, you exert a harmonious and balancing influence on your mate. This does not mean that he will become perfectly harmonious, aware, loving and kind. But you will be making it easier for your spouse to express his loving nature.
When your mate expresses offensiveness or defensiveness, however, make it your goal to focus less on how she is behaving and to focus mostly on how you are feeling, with the aim of regaining or maintaining your own harmonious peace and poise.
When marital strife erupts in your relationship, instead of trying to fix, correct or control your mate, focus your attention to how you are feeling, thinking, speaking and acting. This will gradually make you aware of what you need to do for yourself, and what you have the power to do for your spouse and your relationship.
As a general rule, no matter how right you may be, communicating kindly works better than communicating in a cruel way. One client I had surprised me when she argued, “But I have tried speaking to my husband in a kind way. It doesn’t work. He doesn’t change.” Well, what is the alternative? If kindness does not work, will angry, cruel put-downs win you more loving cooperation? The point of relating harmoniously is not to demonstrate magical domination over your mate. Your mate is free to live her life as she chooses and you have to learn how to live with that or without that. Harmonious relating is the best you can do to bring out the highest potential of the relationship. If your mate does not fulfill his responsibilities you have to determine whether you can live harmoniously with that, or must live harmoniously without it.
But don’t give up on your mate or your marriage too easily. It takes two strong individuals to remain in a relationship long enough to pass through the tests and trials and fulfill its loving potential. You have to go through challenges, some of which will cut you to the core. Life puts you through that. Don’t take it personally. Don’t expect a relationship to save you from that. Sometimes you have to let go of your relationship in your mind for a while and focus on living your life your way, in line with your fulfillment, as you allow the wave of contention to simply pass. Everything changes naturally in time.
We set the stage for energy draining, antagonistic conflict when we make it more important to convince our mate of how right we are, than to relate with our mate in a kind and loving, respectful manner. Being right does not compensate for being unkind, nor does it really justify it. You will never create a happier marriage by relating with your mate as your inferior.
To the extent that you put others down and relate with them as inferior or inadequate, unworthy of your respect you express your own fear and feelings of inferiority. This is as good as an absolute law of life. The next time that you feel the urge to put your mate down either verbally or in the privacy of your own mind, take a good look at how you really feel about yourself. Until you let go of your own feelings of inadequacy, you will continue trying to make your mate feel inadequate.
As long as you regard your mate as inadequate you conceal from yourself your own feelings of inadequacy. This prevents you from feeling any better, and from treating your mate any better. So how do you release yourself from feelings of inadequacy? First, be on the alert lookout all the time to recognize when you express a derogatory attitude toward anyone. Hiding our feelings about ourselves behind an attack on another becomes habitual. Then, when you notice yourself expressing that derogatory attitude, instead of thinking about that other person, focus on your feelings, just your feelings. As stated earlier, your feelings will guide you toward feeling better. You will see your freedom and power to let go of your feelings of inadequacy and returning to your naturally harmonious and loving state.
Practicing more self-awareness in the present moment is really the most central key to a couple’s harmony.