Totally agree lildoggie. Giving (and Taking) is an equal opportunity employer!

Well, I think that is a small part of it, but that misses the larger point that bad communication is a RESULT of falling out of love. Please note that people who are dating and in love rarely have a �communication� or an �empathy� problem. That is because the real issue is the romantic love in the marriage. When THAT is fixed, the �communication� problems resolve themselves because couples who are in love are emotionally bonded have no problem empathizing.

Your typical counselor does not get this and does not even believe that romantic love is a possibility. This is why Marriage Builders is so much more effective than traditional methods.

here

From his article on How I Learned to Save Marriages, he addresses the issue of focusing on �communication� problems at the expense of the real cause:

"By 1975, I had finally discovered why I and so many other marital therapists were having trouble saving marriages -- we did not understand what made a marriage work. We were all so preoccupied with what caused them to fail, that we overlooked what helped them succeed. Many marriage counselors, myself included, thought that a lack of communication was causing these marriages to fail. So my goal had been to teach these couples how to communicate, to stop fighting, and to resolve conflicts.

But when I asked couples why they had married in the first place, it wasn't because of great communication. It was because they were in love. And over the years, they had somehow lost their love for each other. In fact, some had even come to hate each other.

When I asked couples what it would take for them to be happily married again, most couldn't imagine that ever happening. But I persisted, and as the couples reflected on it, they came to the realization that they would need to be in love again.

The poor communication that was apparent in many of these failed marriages had contributed to their loss of love, but it was also a symptom of their lost love. Couples who fall out of love tend to fight instead of resolve their conflicts the right way -- with care and respect. So if I wanted to save marriage, I would have to go beyond improving communication -- I would have to learn how to restore love." How Dr. Harley Learned to Save Marriages

I completely agree. Communication is not enough. Mrs. Hold and I had no trouble telling each other what we wanted. We also had no trouble telling each other that we had no intention of providing what the other person wanted. Effective communication. Lousy marriage.

We now have lousy communication. We both hide our true selves. Nevertheless, our marriage is "better" than when we were busy communicating openly and honestly. We have vastly lowered our expectations of what the other can provide. So we are much less actively disappointed.

Communication is a tool. It is not the result or the objective.

Love the discussion and love the fishing line analogy. Our MC loves to use analogies, so maybe I'll throw this one back at him some time, LOL.

This really helps me see what our MC is trying to accomplish and it's useful to know how his approach differs from MB, and how it may compliment it.

I began to go into depth about where I am with my wife right now, but I deleted it as this thread is not really the place. I just want to reiterate that I do believe in MB and am already trying to meet EN's and stop LB's. Getting her on board will take a little more work and the help of our MC. The arguements on this thread will be most helpful for me to remember.

Or we may know what the needs are, but be ignorant about how to meet them. We may lack knowledge in general about how to meet them, and we may lack knowledge about how our spouse in particular would like those needs met.


Or it may be the other way around: withdrawal may cause them to choose not to tell us, because communication is painful and nearly always leads to love busters.

This is what it looked to me like my wife was doing before I came to this board. But from her point of view it was not "deliberately short-circuiting." It was mere self-preservation.

I was love busting her horribly without realizing it and failing to meet at least two of her important emotional needs, and had been for six years.

A few really very simple tips from the folks here helped me to discover love busters I didn't know I was committing and start learning how to effectively meet my wife's need for conversation.

Guess what? This alone has turned things around tremendously. Enough days of showing her I was learning some things about meeting her emotional needs and curtailing the love busters, as she alternated between withdrawal and conflict, were enough to move her back into intimacy, for the most part.

btw, does the term "Plan A" really apply in situations without an affair? And are all such situations a case of a "renter" mindset? I think my wife has a "buyer" mindset in that she's not going to leave me, ever; she doesn't have the mindset that if things are bad she can just go somewhere else. But she does seem to have the mindset that fixing things is impossible and that if something is wrong you just have to live with it, possibly in mourning for the rest of your life.

True, true. But men tend to empathize with men who do that, and women tend to empathize with women who do.

Am I the only man here who was moved to tears watching Fireproof? And then moved to anger a few weeks later when someone suggested that acting like that would solve the problem?

Our second one wasn't. I think she would've taken me straight to divorce. She never came right out and said it, but she said I had a "big decision" to make, and sounded ominous about it.

And she kept telling us about her divorce. A lot.

Think,

I don't know if Giver and Taker the way Dr Harley uses the terms are tendencies toward one personality or not. I feel probably not. Renters are willing to Give, just not willing to change and adapt to accommodate anyone else. They give, but only what they feel like giving or just what they feel the contractual obligations require of them. Buyers are more willing to adapt and change but still aren't going to be giving all the time while nothing is improving in their conditions. If the house gets bad enough even a buyer will get rid of it and look for a replacement.

According to the MB model, the Giver and Taker are two sides to our personalities. One side, the Giver, is willing to make other people happy, which at first comes across as being a good thing in our culture. The problem is that this Giver is willing for us to be unhappy in order to make other people happy. This can help protect other people from being hurt by us if we were to just take whatever we wanted and didn't care about their feelings, but it does so by letting us be hurt instead.

The Taker OTOH doesn't care what anyone else wants and wants us to have what we want even if it hurts somebody else. Now again, this sounds like it would be the bad part but really the Taker's main job is to prevent us from being unhappy and to make sure that we get what we need to be happy.

So while the Giver takes care of others, the Taker takes care of us. Both can be good; yet both can be bad as well. Both of them have tools that they use to accomplish their goals for us.

Our Taker has a tool box that includes the instincts that it wields with abandon, the triple threat of selfish demands, disrespectful judgments and angry outbursts. When we want something, our Taker jumps in and demands that we get it. This might be a great negotiating tool in business, but in marriage it causes our spouse's feelings to get hurt and so destroys the romantic love they feel for us, or did before we went all demanding on them.

When the demand doesn't get us what we want, then the disrespectful judgments start, "If you really loved me, you would let me have my way." Or "You seem like such a smart person. Why can't you understand this?" Our taker tries to invoke shame and guilt when direct appeal to our spouse's Giver failed.

When we still aren't making progress in negotiating, we revert to angry outbursts. We throw things, beat our chest as if standing up to a challenger in the rain forest and attempt to use our pride as a show of superiority, even though we haven't gotten anyhting yet.

On the Giver side of things, it might sound great that a person would always be willing to give. We talk in our culture about how taking care of others is a sign of real love. We raise up the status of people who sacrifice to make others better off. The problem is that we only have so much we can give emotionally and after that, we are not just sacrificing what we have but trying to manufacture what we don't have the raw materials to produce. This usually results in resentment, especially if we are getting nothing in return.

Our Giver too has certain tools it uses to leverage things. When we first consider not giving to someone it pulls out the guilt card. When that doesn't work it calls forth shame and judges our behavior as wrong. And when all else has failed it calls for sacrifice and appeals to our pride to do it and prove that we are better than those we are giving to.

When you look at these it would seem that a pure Giver could satisfy a pure Taker quite easily. Both use the same methods and techniques, requiring something that should be fulfilled. Both call upon shame and guilt when things aren't going the way they think it should and both lead to prideful feelings of superiority. If one just takes and the other just gives, both should be happy.

Now none of this matters when we are dealing with the neighbors, the guys at work, the women in the bridge club or anyone else with whom we come into contact. We can negotiate world peace with no problem but when it comes to what color to paint the living room my wife and I end up in a meltdown and not talk to each other for days. This is because we are emotionally involved with each other at a much deeper level than we are with the neighbors (that better be the case).

When we are both feeling satisfied from the relationship, that is our ENs are getting met the right way and our spouse has done nothing that has hurt our feelings for a while, our Giver, that part of us that wants them to be happy, is willing to give anything at all. The problem is that it is willing to give even if it isn't something we really want.

When we are not feeling so satisfied, we find that we aren't so willing to acquiesce and want to get something in return and in fact we don't really care what our spouse wants as long as we get what we need at the moment. "Just do it and we'll talk about your problem later." Of course later never happens.

Where the breakdown in a relationship begins is when either person begins to allow one side or the other to dominate all interactions with their spouse without regard to the emotional damage being done. A Renter is not pure Taker since he is willing to pay for what he gets. And a buyer isn't necessarily a pure Giver, since while he might be willing to change things and modify behavior to accommodate things in life, there is still a limit to what can be given.

So Giver and Taker are not the signs of buyers and renters but simply two sides to each of us. One side wants us to be happy and the other side wants our spouse to be happy. The tricky part is in learning to not allow either side to have free reign in negotiating resolutions to conflicts.

BTW, when the tools of the Taker arrive in daily interactions between husband and wife, it can often be fixed easily by some serious recreational time together. One date night can top off a Love Bank if it hasn't been allowed to slip too far. The appearance of our Taker indicates that something is lacking or that something needs to be addressed. Now if the problem is Love Busters by our spouse, that can be a sign that his or her taker is ramping things up because they have something lacking as well. So just running away for the weekend can turn things around as if by magic. I always knew this, before MB, but until I learned about the Love Bank model I never understood exactly why it was the case. (See Three States of Mind)

I also knew that if things got bad enough and we didn't take time to resolve some of what stood between us, before long we hates even being in the same room together and going away for the weekend became a struggle.

Giver and Taker aren't one good and one bad. Both are both good and bad. One wants to make our spouse happy and one wants to make us happy. One protects our spouse from our own selfishness and the other protects us from our spouse's selfishness.

A side note in all of this: POJA addresses all of this interaction. It allows resolution of conflict to not override maintaining the love we have for each other. Since being in love is what will keep us together and falling out of love will cause us to become further apart, the most important part of the process in resolving any conflict should be remaining in love with each other. Preventing us from growing apart is even more important to our relationship in the long term than a solution to our problem.

Yes we need to learn to communicate better without hurting each other and resorting to the tools of our Taker, but unless we are in love with each other nothing is going to save our relationship. The problem isn't the communication skills. The problem is that we are hurting each other and have fallen out of love with each other and so don't want to negotiate fairly since our Taker is running the show.

The ANSWER is to be in love, not to get better at solving problems. Nobody fell in love because they could negotiate better or understand each other better or resolve conflicts together. Some couples are walking world war III every day of their lives. They have one problem or disagreement after another, yet if they are in love with each other both of them are happy and caring toward each other.

The inability to solve problems is a symptom of not being in love. At the same time failing to protect our love for each other while trying to solve a problem can destroy our love for each other. It becomes a catch 22 situation. If you aren't in love solving problems becomes impossible. But unless you strive to remain in love with solving problems, you'll never get the problems solved.

Those who learn to negotiate better but fail to fall in love, can negotiate child visitation schedules with ease.

Those who learn to communicate better but fail to fall in love again can very quickly explain what they want in the property settlement.

Those who learn to resolve conflicts better but fail to fall in love with each other, have a conflict free divorce hearing.

When the marriage is broken it is the LOVE that needs to be fixed. None of the rest of it matters if you don't love each other. What fixes a marriage is caring for each other, spending time together, being honest with each other and protecting each other's feelings from our own selfishness and stupidity.

Mark

Wowsers! I love that. The ultimate riposte to MCs who say that communication is the cure.

Great post, Mark!

Most counselors are, at best, just hoping to end conflict. Moving the marriage back into the realm of romantic love is beyond the scope of their project.

Many of them only focus on one thing to change in each spouse.

"There! You do a better job of paying the bills and she'll keep a tidier house - problem solved."

That's why they fail most of the time. You cannot improve a system without treating everything in the system.

Right. And most don't even believe that it can be achieved. I found this article written by Dr Harley's daughter, Dr Chalmers:

Romantic Love: Is it a Realistic Goal for Marriage Therapy?

Different states have different, but similar licensing laws.
I have been exploring this, not to become a marriage counselor, but avoid a tripwire when doing management counseling. Specifically, some of us in our church are trying to set up a counseling program for those out of work or with financial problems or questions. I can give all sorts of advice to companies, and even manage things for them. But to give financial advice to an individual, I have to be very careful. To give financial advice to a couple, you really have to be careful not to cross into the areas "owned" by the licensed counselors.

Psychiatrist = MD + graduate and clinical work in psychology

Psychologist = PhD + clinical work

Counselor = MS + clinical work under one of those above

Clergy = degree from seminary + continuing ed

(end of threadjack)

I think there might be a disconnect happening sometimes that relates to accepting the notion that if we do things the right way our marriage will improve, barring one of the conditions that makes responding to our stimulus impossible.

Marriage Builders is NOT a bunch of solutions to a bunch of problems. It is a process by which romantic love can be created, restored or maintained. We learn this process one step at a time and for those in crisis upon arrival, dealing with the biggest part that is wrong to begin with gets a lot of us hung up on certain steps in the process.

But part of the problem I think is that they aren't really steps that each one can be executed and see a positive result. You can't meet random ENs and have someone fall in love with you. You can't meet the right ENs in the right way and continue to love bust all the time and have that person remain in love with you. You can't spend your time hanging with friends and meet the IENs for your spouse and you can't hide things from your spouse and cause them to love you. All four pieces of MB must happen, and continue happening, for the process to have any sort of lasting effect and change the status of the relationship.


You don't have to be PERFECT, but you DO have to be consistent at trying.

If your spouse is having an affair and you say you are "in Plan A" yet constantly have conversations about how selfish the WS is or about how you're sick of them not just ending the affair or do something right and when it doesn't elicit the response you wanted go down the list of all the things you have done yet you get crapped on and spell out all the resentments over never getting anything back from them ... yada yada yada... That isn't Plan A. It is Plan T for Taker.

When you are trying to win a game of tennis, you can't do it by running your mouth, certain superstars exempted...

You have to serve, recover fast enough that when the ball comes back into your court you can return it to your opponent and be ready to respond if they again make an adjustment to your return and send it back into your court. There are no time out situations as long as the ball is in play. Somebody is going to score, either you or your opponent.

And if you miss the return and your opponent scores, the match isn't over till it is over. Unless of course you decide to forfeit out of frustration.

The problem in an affair is that the opponent isn't real. Your opponent is a fantasy. It is someone who only has to be around every once in a while, doesn't have to avoid love busters, doesn't have to overcome annoying habits and doesn't have to do anything beyond meeting one or two ENs for the WS that maybe you were'nt meeting just right. You're playing tennis against a computer. You can't win the match by pulling hair and hurling insults.

On the back end, you attack the computer. You deliver a virus (exposure to anyone who can pressure the affair) and make contact between the affair partners as difficult as possible. (This requires a strategy that gives you steps to take that do not depend on what your WS does or what exposure targets do or what OP does.) You mess with the power source. You try to force a disconnect from the Internet....You attack the AFFAIR and not your WS.

But while all of that is going on you have to serve, set up, return, set up, return...respond, focus, execute...keep playing until you lose.

What makes it different than tennis is that you don't have to play the entire game if you are losing. You just finish out the set, walk off the court and let the affair stand there alone until it stops and falls down. This does NOT mean that you concede the match. It means that you stop actively returning the ball and just go sit in the shade until your odds improve.

How's that for mixing metaphors?

I does NOT mean that you will win the game. But if you don't play with every strategic advantage you can summon to your disposal, you WILL lose the game.

Make being with you fun, enjoyable, better than being with OP. If you argue, fight, try to educate the WS and make life around you hell, the fantasy is going to win every single time. Shift the hell and high water to Affairsville and make Safehaven be with you.

Again, this does NOT guarantee that you will succeed. But if you don't get it right, or at least close, I can guarantee that you won't.

Mark, are you saying that Plan A/Plan B is intended ONLY for situations where there IS an affair, to be used in conjunction with exposure?

If that is the case, what does someone with a spouse who is in major withdrawl but not yet an affair do?

For some reason I am thinking that many people without affair situations use Plan A/Plan B, but I could be wrong on this as I'm really not a vet at all.

Clarification on that would be good

I think I was misunderstood on the Buyer/Giver, Renter/Taker thing.

I wasn't saying that ALL buyers are givers, or that all renters are takers. Merely giving a hypothetical marriage situation in which one spouse has a renter mindset (therefore resistant to making changes to begin with) who also happens to be controlled more by their taker than their giver. I do think one can have a renter mindset and have their giver be more in charge, especially during that "honeymoon" period.

Good explanation of the differences, though.

So back to the original hypothetical, if one's spouse has a renter mindset to start with, they are not very willing to make changes and adapt to the demands of marriage and their changing spouse. And if they tend to be a bit more of a taker than a giver, isn't more giving just going to feed their taker even more? How is one to achieve re-establishment of romantic love if the "cause and effect" of meeting EN and avoiding LB actually "enables" the taker?

Does that question make sense?

Another quick thought to "chew" on:

It seems the goal of MB is to establish Romantic Love through the meeting of EN and avoiding LB (the cause and effect).

It also seems that another goal of MB is to create compatiblity through POJA.

Can romantic love be sustained without compatibility? I would contend the answer to that question is no.


Now if we go back to when a couple first meets and falls in love, I would think that in most cases where the romantic love leads to a long-term relationship there is compatiblity BEFORE there is romatic love. The idea of water rising to its own level. Compatibility leads to romantic love leads to commitment leads to marriage.

Then something changes. A baby enters the picture, a job starts to requre travel, a family crisis. It' rocks the compatility boat. Or, let's say it wasn't a very healthy relationship to begin with and one starts to address their problem. Compatiblity is gone, and romantic love declines.

But in MB, once compatability and romantic love have broken down, the goal is to first establish romantic love, THEN re-establish compatibility. Isn't this backwards when compared to how the stimulus happens in nature?

TTT, Plan A and Plan B are intended for affairs and that is how they are most widely used.

But it can also be used in situations with a spouse who REFUSES to meet the needs of the other. Another non-affair situation would be active alcoholism or addiction, where Plan B can be helpful.