Is the utilization of MB principals to "motivate" really "manipulation"?

Manipulation- defintion (courtesy of m-w.com)


According to the definition above, manipulation doesn't have to be negative. There are parts of the definition which focus on the skillful art of handling, mananging, or operating. But I realize that when most of us think about manipulation, we think of it in terms of the negative parts of the definintion.

I highlighted the key words on the negative parts because I wanted to underscore the idea that manipulation, as seen by most people, is "unfair" and "insidious". When we use MB prinicpals to improve the quality of our interactions with our spouse - to eliminate LBs and meet ENs on both sides we are not "manipulating" because we are not using "unfair" tactics for "insidious" purposes. Yes - we hope to get what we want (a better marriage). That want does not make our actions manipulative.

The manipulation (the negative def) was what we were doing before we knew better ...with the LB behavior: AO, DJ, SD etc...

Just my $.06

Actually, the word manipulation would accurately characterize what was going on when we �fell in love� the first time, if one can even call it that. I was never honest with myself or with him even when we were dating. Not that I was actively lying. I was just not being honest about my likes and dislikes because I thought that to have likes and dislikes was being superficial and selfish. I would �go along� because I wanted a relationship, ANY relationship. Eventually I�d blow up and then he would make a few changes to try to �keep� me, and instead of holding fast to my boundaries, I stayed even when they were crossed. There was manipulation going on from both sides of the relationship, just to keep it from ending.

I realize that I�m �reacting� to that term �manipulation.� I think that�s because I would define manipulation as �attempting to force an outcome.�

Here are some other definitions of �manipulate� found at dictionary.com


I think the last one is what strikes me the most. Changing someone to suit my purpose, or changing myself to suit someone else�s purpose.

Or, changing myself to motivate someone to change themselves to suit my purpose.

I know we are talking about the �ends� being romantic love, but as I said, I do not believe the ends justifies the means if we are talking about attempting to force an outcome to my own or someone else�s advantage.

What makes it NOT manipulation is that in marriage, it is assumed that both parties have a shared purpose, as well as mutual advantage.

Yep - Dishonesty (a big LB)...like I said before, LBs are attempts at manipulation

Anyway...if you both have the same purpose - to keep the relationship alive - what's the harm in adapting new behviors and ways of thinking so that it works out?

As I said above, the word "manipulation" (mostly) implies deliberate evil intent. It implies that we are fooling someone or duping them. MB is about loving with honesty & truth.

Darn it - What's the word for deliberate good intent?

"Deliberate good intent" . . . . hmmmm

The only thing I can think of is "that which paves the road to Hell."

Is "keeping the relationship alive" a suitable purpose, a proper end goal? Don't get me wrong, I think keeping the relationship alive is a good thing! I just see it as more of a necessity to meeting an even greater end goal of spiritual and emotional intimacy through mutual self-discovery to become the best versions of ourselves.

(Yes, I do write mission statements for a living!)

For me, keeping the relationship alive is not enough. Even romantic love is not enough. They are just mileposts on a greater journey. He wants to get to those mileposts of "staying together" and maybe even "romatic love" but that is enough for him. He's said so. He is happy to let me go off on my little journey of self-discovery, as long as HE doesn't have to change as a result.

If he doesn't want to "go all the way," then I need to decide whether to journey to those mileposts or not. On the other hand, I will never get "all the way" with him if I don't go to those mileposts first. Maybe he will want to go forward when we get there. I won't know until I get there. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

As I take these steps, I must motivate myself, not rely on him for motivation. I can encourage him to join me. I can use MR2 to reward him for the times he chooses to come with me. But eventually, he will need to motivate himself to go on the journey, just as I am doing.

I feel that this is negative.

I'll step back and see how this discussion works out.

Think,

You keep coming up with reasons to avoid going all in, but only by going all or nothing can you really give the 100% effort.

MB can offer you both a marriage that is fully alive, not just barely breathing and on life support, but on that is growing, getting better, getting to be deeper and more fulfilling with time. So when we talk about saving a marriage we aren't talking about keeping the same old crap flowing day after day, we're talking about a paradigm shift that blows the old way of thinking about marriage to bits.

Mark

No, just the snarky side of my sense of humor. I'm just being difficult

You're right Mark. I am stuck in "if he won't, then I won't." I am trying to fight this mentality, but I haven't fully beaten it yet, so I'm just practicing the best I can, which I fully know is not "good enough" but is better than what I had been doing.

I think I need a little break from the forum for a while. To much focus on the problem, not living and practicing the solution. Kinda cuts into the potential for UA time too

I'll be back in a few days to check in. Best to all as I "fly blind" for a few days!

Had a nice couple of forum free days over the weekend, and it's nice to be back today!

I posted over on one of Chris's threads (how many you got girl?) that I'd give a little update about finding an IC myself.

Another piece of Think's puzzle:

I have an eating disorder.

It's not anorexia in the traditional sense of dieting, exercising, vomitimg. I don't do any of those things. And I don't think I'm fat. I need about 5-10 more pounds on me and I see it. But I do starve myself or undereat for many various reasons which I only became aware of in the last 2 months. I've gotten help from a nutritionist this month and have the name of an IC that my sponsor gave me who is very well versed in 12 step recovery, so I expect she will be more of the "2x4" type counselor rather than the "tell me about your father" type

I'm lucky because the two other IC's I had were very good. One was a 2x4 type, the other was a very "mothering" figure and was a good one for when I was single and trying to navigate some of my less than stellar behavior and consequences. Oh to be 23 again! HA!

Anyway, thought I'd share (for Chris more than anyone, since she and I came in here around the same time).

On the marriage front, my husband is doing a lot more AO, not aimed at me specifically, but definitely venting to me and putting me in a position to enforce boundaries. I find it very hard to find that line between enforcing a boundary and meeting an EN or committing an LB. I think I'm doing pretty good, but it is hard because I have to choose my words and actions so carefully and it feels forced. That's not to say it doesn't feel genuine at the same time. I am genuinely glad that I am choosing instead of reacting. It's just not something I'm used to.

If I were to fully do Plan A (no half measures on my part, no holds barred) with my reluctant husband, how long does it last theoritically? I saw someone post about 6 weeks, and saw somewhere else 6 months. Which is it? (OK, I know that there is also my own discretion too, just wondering what the guidelines are.)

LOL Thinking, I do have a few. The main one is where I first joined & I received the shock of my spouse planning a divorce, but that's over for me now.

I have the recent one where I had a mini mental meltdown, and the others are specific questions about MB principles & the MB Home Study Course. I also revewed a book written by an MB "competitor" plus I asked LA how she got so smart & Still Standing why she keeps telling people to get a divorce. I also have one where I ask about applying MB to active duty military marriages & one where I gave some feedback in the appropriate area about something I felt was mising from the site's newsletters & books.

I read Plan A for a woman is 4 - 6 weeks and for a man it's ~ 6 months. I recall reading is that the danger of doing Plan A too long is the risk of the person doing the plan of losing their love for their spouse.

I feel your pain on the AO-boundary thing.

Also, w/re to your eating issue - glad to see you're taking care of you.

A month? Really? I don't think a month of being the perfect spouse would be enough to convince my husband that it's "real."

Mark, what's your take? I know your perspective seems to be that people don't give MB enough time to work, and your own story definitely shows how patience, perseverence and longsuffering are sometimes required to go the distance. Then again, you are a man, so maybe that makes a difference.

Keep in mind that "Plan A" is really specific to an affair and how to deal with that set of conditions. The reason for the short Plan A is that there is NOTHING coming back in most cases and all effort is purely one sided, not just symbolically, but actually only one spouse giving anything at all.

In addition, in an affair, the Love Bank of the faithful spouse is being repeatedly hit hard by the disrespect, the fog-talk and the other actions that people involved in an affair seem to impose on anyone with whom they have contact.

In order to preserve any Love Bank balance the WS might have in the BS's Love Bank, Plan A must be short in order to prevent all remnants of love from draining away.

So Plan A for someone fighting an affair is about learning to meet ENs, identifying Love Busters and learning to eliminate them and trying to lure back a spouse who is more than halfway out the door.

But that isn't the case with a couple who is simply trying to improve a marriage, even one where one spouse doesn't participate in "Marriage Builders" programs. In this case, most couples are like most other couples who have never heard of Marriage Builders. They can be a lot better by following the program, but life isn't really awful, impossible to keep living the way it is or dangerous to remain married to each other.

So while the attempt to draw a withdrawn spouse back from the brink of oblivion by putting our own Taker on hold while making a concentrated effort to meet ENs and avoid Love Busters, we aren't really talking about the same type of dynamic as Plan A. The spouse normally isn't trying to destroy the relationship while you are trying to improve it. You are usually even getting something in return, even though it might not be enough or even exactly what you would like to get back from a spouse.

So when we talk about Plan A being 3 to 6 weeks long for women or as long as 6 months for men, we are really talking about a situation where you are not just putting your Taker on hold but also taking huge daily hits against your Love Bank and the stress of holding your tongue, walking on eggshells, and constantly being hurt on purpose by the person you are trying to show your best to can cause so many emotional and health related problems that it is very hard to do even for a few days.

But for a marriage in crisis, due to one or both having slipped into Conflict or even one into Withdrawal, what is happening though similar to Plan A is not really the same kind of thing. And I will say what I keep saying; in most cases where a person's spouse does not respond, there is likely some other factor that is being missed or ignored since if we meet our spouse's ENs and avoid all Love Busters, our balance in their Love Bank should increase rapidly to exceed the romantic threshold. If it does NOT do that then something is missing from the equation somewhere on either the EN side or the Love Buster side.

However, there is one more dynamic at work in many of the relationships that can make improving the marriage unilaterally impossible. That is a spouse who is happy with the way things are and does not desire to change anything. Maybe "happy" isn't the correct word since I think it has more to do with payoff for continuing like things are rather than attempting to chnage the overall dynamic in the marriage.

This, I think, is most often seen in men who are only too happy to allow their wives to become Stepford wives, meeting every need, being perfect in looks, actions, support for her man etc. These guys have no reason to change a thing. They do in fact have the perfect marriage, at least from their side of the fence it is perfect. The fact that their wife is unhappy doesn't count for much with them and they will just keep doing what they have been doing all along and as long as the wife keeps doing her best to make him happy, he has no reason on Earth to change a damned thing.

This is where Townsend and Cloud et al come into play. Making the problem HIS problem is the only real solution. As long as you keep making his life better and allowing nothing in return, he is perfectly happy with the way things are.

Here's the difficulty in making something happen...

You have two basic options: 1) Stop doing anything for him and see if he can be brought to a place of being willing to negotiate fairly to find a solution to YOUR problem by taking on HIS problem. 2) Keep meeting his ENs and avoiding Love Busters but try to find another way to get him to realize "We have a problem..."

Meeting ENs and avoiding Love Busters is not just a part of Plan A. It is in fact what makes a MB marriage what it is. Once we learn to meet our spouse's ENs and get control over ourselves and learn to stop love busting behavior, learn to work POJA, include PORH and find a way to make UA time a priority in our busy lives, that is the way we live for the rest of the time we are together, ideally, until one of us dies. Meeting ENs and avoiding Love Busters NEVER stops in a MB marriage.

But when you have a spouse who will not get on board, has no desire to fix anything because from their side nothing is broken and doesn't care if you are happy or not as long as they are happy, just meeting ENs and avoiding Love Busters will not get them to want to change. Turning it into an adversarial situation probably won't help much either, since while you will be able to stop meeting his ENs and not worry any longer about Love Busters, this position is not likely to lead to a good marriage.

And if there is an addiction such as drugs or alcohol, then meeting ENs and avoiding Love Busters is pretty much worthless until the addiction itself is dealt with. Addicts really only love themselves and only respond to their chemical of choice. In these cases it might be better to treat the addiction like a mistress and do an intense and short Plan A while negotiating to get the addict into a treatment program and if after a short time nothing is changing, then Plan B all the way until you can gain emotional equilibrium and decide if continuing the relationship is even worth the effort. For addicts with a very low bottom, the prospect of losing you won't have much benefit to your cause so permanent separation and possible divorce is usually the end result.

But in that middle ground, since meeting ENs and avoiding Love Busters is really the way you want to live the rest of your life, you continue to do those things and try to determine if what needs to happen has more to do with learning to make his problems HIS problem or if things are bad enough to separate until he makes some changes.

I don't think people end Plan A too soon. In many cases I think they never really begin a good Plan A. They love bust from the first day by having AOs, using DJs to leverage the separation from the affair partner and generally set unattainable expectations for how things should progress. They burn out very quickly because they are looking for that magic bullet that will turn everything around and make the WS want to return to the marriage.

The problem of course is that the marriage was bad enough from the WS POV that it was better to leave than to fix it. Much of this is just fog and entitlement run amok, but it still is the POV of the WS. So expecting a sudden turn around leads to dashed hope and dashed hope leads to falling off the program/wagon and then we scream and shout, make disrespectful judgments an every day occurrence and generally undo anything we have accomplished in the last few days by meeting ENs. It is usually Love Busters that have caused the decline in our spouse's Love Bank to begin with and not just a lack of meeting ENs. Meeting ENs by someone else when our balance is so low or even worse negative due to continued Love Busters is what causes a great many affairs to begin so any love busters defeat us before we get out of the gate.

The problem is that while we are trying to fill a bucket with an eyedropper, any leaks that still exists have to be plugged or no progress is ever made. We shoot the bucket full of holes and then can't understand why is doesn't hold water. If the bucket doesn't fill up then either we aren't filling it fast enough (meeting wrong ENs) or as the old song goes..."There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza."

So, assuming that in your case, Think, your husband isn't on board with MB, but isn't involed with anyone else and your efforts are seeming to make things worse from your POV rather than better, you need to first be absolutely certain that you are in fact meeting his ENs properly and that all Love Busters are gone from your daily life. Annoying habits are hard to fix without input. IB is difficult to see when we are struggling unilaterally to change things and getting nothing back since that leads to entitlement which is the kindling for the flame of IB. DJs are hard to identify without someone pointing them out to us and it is the ones we take most offense at that we need to deal with first.

So if you are working the program perfectly, or pretty much on target at the very least and nothing is happening in return, then some other leverage has to be used somewhere to change what is happening. If he is happy and you are not, you making him happier is not going to work all by itself.

The hard part is that for most marriages that have been around a while, neither of us is happy and we use words like "OK," "normal," and "pretty good." What we mean is "I wish to God he/she would stop X or would do Y and Z." When one spouse tries to make things better, the whole improves if they do the right things. The result can be a marriage that is better than ever even though it is still not satisfying to one or even both.

Something else I often tell people early on in trying to help them is this...

CALL THE COACHING CENTER AND TALK TO STEVE OR JENNIFER...

When we have no way of figuring out the proper motivation to get our spouse to do things differently, they can supply the trigger that starts the whole thing in motion along the right trajectory. They can also very quickly in only a few minutes of conversation identify holes in the process that we might not see ourselves and fine tune what we do so that it works instead of letting ourselves flounder along, repeating the same actions over and over while expecting the results to change.

And one more piece that must take place for any of MB to work at all...

WE MUST SPEND AT LEAST 15 HOURS PER WEEK TOGETHER DOING FUN THINGS AND MEETING THE INTIMATE ENs. Until we are doing that, we aren't really making massive Love Bank deposits. And if we can meet those IENs then we are not missing the rest of the program since those are the keys to creating intimacy and compatibility.

If you struggle at meeting the intimate emotional needs you withhold from the relationship and are never really all in. So if you can't meet his EN for RC because you don't enjoy his sports or you can't meet SF because you have some aversion to sex, then you are avoiding meeting the ENs and so will never create intimacy in which your IENS of Affection and Intimate Conversation can be met since you are in fact avoiding intimacy.

So first make sure YOU have the whole program firing on all cylinders and then decide if what you need to do is set conditions for remaining married. It takes BOTH sides to make it work.

And once it pays off and the marriage becomes spectacular...

We still have to meet those ENs and avoid Love Busters for the rest of our days together. Those parts never end.

What will NOT work is "being extra nice" or becoming a doormat without the substance of actually beginning to meet the IENs and allow our own IENs to be met by our spouse. In order to meet the IENs, we have to spend time together without other people around and without distractions of any kind. The carnival might be a lot of fun, and it might even meet the ENs of Affection, Conversation and even Recreational Companionship. But unless you are really adventurous, SF isn't going to happen on the Tilt-A-Whirl or the Farris Wheel.

15 Hours per week UA time.
Meeting top ENs,
Meeting Intimate ENs of SF and RC.
Avoiding all Love Busters, especially IB, DJs, AO, SDs and lying.
Following POJA.
Following PORH.

There's the check list. If you are doing all of these and nothing is happening, then something else needs to be leveraged and another motivation to change must be found.

But if you can't wholeheartedly agree that each of these things is absolutely true then those are the places to start.

Mark

Really? I thought I read somewhere in Harley's articles that he uses plan A and plan B even in cases without an affair. Specifically with a spouse's refusal to meet an important intimate EN like SF.

I think this is really important. Is Plan A/Plan B just for affairs, or is it part of MB as a whole? If you don't mind I'm going to start a separate thread on it.

I know you come at this from the perspective of a BS, but even though I am not a betrayed spouse, this is what I experience in my marriage a lot of the time. Holding my tongue, walking on eggshells, bouncing back from experiencing his withdrawl. I want to know how long do I have to keep bouncing back, because I don't know what a reasonable limit is. Some days I want to draw the line right there, other days I believe that I should never draw the line because marriage is a perpetual committment. All or nothing thinking. I'm looking for a reasonable alternative, because the two alternatives I see right now both appear to be too extreme.

Sorry Mark, your posts are so long that I don't read them through before responding

Still reading . . .

These are the two that I struggle with the most. I usually don't catch a DJ until after it comes out. Fortunately, I now recognize them quickly, as opposed to justifying myself before (progress, not perfection!). And I apologize, not generally, but specifically for what I said, and I also state what I could have done better and what I will strive to do in the future. The IB is an even bigger challenge, because he encourages my IB. As long as I have other friends, other activities, going to alanon, going to church, spending time on the computer, then I will leave him alone to have HIS IB. On this front, I am doing my best to put him first, invite him to be a part of my separate activities, and schedule them around times when we wouldn't be together anyway.

I too believe this is the key to making any relationship work, whether using MB or not. Until he and I both make a commitment that our 15 hours is more important than anything, then really I'm just typing to see what I can write. It's meaningless dribble. And until we BOTH make that commitment, anything either one of us tries to do will be just a half measure. If we aren't willing to do the 15 hours, well, I might was well just call a lawyer now.

I just reread that, and I know it sounds sarcastic. But I don't intend it that way. I'm serious; without that 15-20 hours, what is the point of wasting my time and energy?

Think,

I guess what I meant was that the idea of Plan A being limited to weeks or a handful of months at most is assuming that infidelity is involved. If nothing is coming back and our spouse is not responding going on is really hard. In an affair, not only is our spouse not responding to us like we would hope, he or she is actively trying to undermine our efforts to unilaterally save the marriage. This is the biggest cause of stress in Plan A.

But even in cases without an affair lack of reciprocity is probably cause for separation at some point. The alternative is usually to allow someone else to meet our ENs in some way and THAT leads to infidelity and then we are on the other side of things all together.

Dr Harley does talk about an all out attempt to bring a spouse back from Withdrawal, but he doesn't call it Plan A in the section where he talks about it.

Mark