Goals for a Marriage

Last updated on September 21st, 2023 at 01:27 pm

Relationships: The New Challenge in Self Mastery

One of the things I enjoy doing is reading a book with new perspectives and then applying those ideas to my own field. I just finished reading Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. It’s one of those books that allow us to see the world differently. It helps us understand the goals for a marriage better.

Of the many ideas it describes, one is that as humans, we are creative and seek autonomy, mastery, and purpose among other things. We don’t need to be controlled, managed, or manipulated. The use of the carrot and the stick as motivators actually reduce our productivity. If we have our basic requirements met (food, shelter, adequate money) we will seek to fulfill ourselves through meaning-making activities.

The old model of motivation, that we need to be managed, works with simple logical tasks, but our world is changing and these repetitive tasks are being outsourced or taken over by computers. This model doesn’t work with the duties of our current day, which tend to be the more creative and right-brained, rather than the more routine and left-brained.

Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

Another striking idea is the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. To be intrinsically motivated is to care about mastery, agency, and purpose. A focus on external success actually hinders motivation and ultimately success because you get caught up in the goal (making money, becoming famous, etc), rather than the process of developing mastery, giving back to the world, or having a purpose. People who tend to be external focused (Type X) can learn to become more intrinsically focused (Type I).

This is all very good news. Not only is our understanding of our world and ourselves changing, but our world itself and we as part of it are also evolving and developing.

Can these ideas be applied to self-growth? Can they be applied to relationships? Can they be applied to understanding goals for a marriage? You bet! The last thing a therapist wants is to work with someone who isn’t self-motivated or interested in exploring who they are and creating purpose for themselves. Or someone who thinks the world (and their self and life) is static and that it cannot, or isn’t going to change. That would be akin to dragging a bag of rocks up a hill.

There are people who find therapy shameful or stupid. This limiting belief has always bothered me. How can you possibly understand yourself, develop new parts of yourself, and work towards mastery of your life, if you aren’t willing to look at yourself? What is going on in our culture that this occurs?

Somehow feelings have gotten a bad rap, both experiencing them and developing our ability to “language” them and be aware of them.

But, back to the task at hand: as someone interested in helping people in this process of self-understanding and the development of self-mastery, these ideas are exciting. These ideas highlight goals for marriage. They mean that we want to grow, gain autonomy and mastery, and that given half a chance, we will.

And yet we have many “failures” in the creation of our lives: trauma, depression, anxiety, broken relationships. How can we use these ideas to create more success in our lives? How do we apply these ideas to therapy, both the practice of and also the client’s ability to metabolize it? How do we better understand our goals for a marriage or relationship?

Evolution requires the development of new capacities

First, I think it is important to recognize that the human race is not static but growing and evolving. Our relationships are one of those things that are bearing the brunt of this evolution, for we have not yet caught up to who we are becoming. As we evolve, we need to develop new capacities. As we develop new capacities, we need to learn to give them significance.

One of these capacities is in the area of relating. Relating involves many things including accessing and sharing feelings, understanding needs and gaining control of destructive behaviors.

The road to relationship mastery

Let’s look at couple therapy, which is a pretty complex process. As a client in couples therapy, we must learn enough about ourselves (among other things) so that we can untangle a bunch of behavior that simply does not get us what we want: an accessible and responsive relationship. We supply the courage and tenacity on the road to mastery of this challenge, but we need more than motivation, creativity, and desire for this purpose. We also need a map.

This is new and for us, uncharted territory. We will need assistance in this undertaking as well as an understanding of how a specific and possibly uncomfortable challenge relates to this goal.

Our symptoms (relationship dysfunction) are like the tip of an iceberg. It is the part we see. In the cold icy water below this symptom, we have a number of tasks,. These tasks are goals for a marriage or relationship and include:

Understand the intricacies of the negative cycle
Experience (not just understand) the deeper (not surface) feelings that feed our ‘cycle’
Become aware of the needs that fuel the feelings and how
Understand the interrelationship between all of this

This could translate to: I have to experience some pretty painful feelings that I am not usually in contact with so that I can access parts of myself that I don’t really know and expand who I am to a more feeling based being. This will help me understand how these parts are influencing my behavior, what it is that I really need, and (eventually) use that to be vulnerable and connect.

A couples dialogue showing their experience

Here’s a short sample dialogue of a couple fabricated from a number of people:

When you get mad, I feel unsafe, I feel as if I am completely alone, caught in a trap, whatever I do will be wrong and I am scared. I hate that feeling and I will do anything not to experience it, including not tell you the whole truth, cut off parts of myself, blame you, push you away, try to control you…. And I get mad at you for being mad and seeming mean…

It reminds me of when I was little and my neighbor was a bully. I decided then that being mean wasn’t okay, so now I take care of other people’s feelings and it embarrasses me when you don’t. I get confused. I love you, but you have this side of you that is so hard and I cannot stand it and I am afraid of it and so we end up in a fight over how I behave… and because you feel like I don’t respect your feelings and don’t support you and underneath you feel abandoned too…

Because you never had anybody put you first or stand up for you…. I want you to not be mean so that you are somebody I can love all the time and so that you feel safe to me…. You want me to stop standing up for other people; because it that means that I can’t stand up for you or myself…. I need to feel like you are safe and responsive and loving to me and when you act ‘hard’ you don’t feel safe to me …and then you need to feel like I am safe and responsive and loving for you, but when this cycle occurs you don’t feel as if I am there for you either.

So we get stuck and we don’t have a good way to talk about it, because we don’t even see this yet. It’s all underneath and it just happens and takes over our relationship. Our relationship is held hostage to this pattern and this is an area where it cannot breathe.

What is the solution?

This is how we get trapped in the cycle. What’s the solution? The only way out is to understand ourselves: emotions, needs, behavior, the way a surgeon understand how the muscles and bones and ligaments and blood vessels interconnect and populate a section of the body. We must have that level of self-understanding and with it, we can accomplish our goals for a marriage.

And we have to be able to experience our feelings the way a poet experiences the world expressed through language. Our curiosity about ourselves has to come to the forefront, as well as our ability to tolerate pain, to step deep into our feelings, to make our own development and growth, our own attainment of mastery paramount.

As we continue to evolve and to develop ways to support our evolution, we find new ways to think, experience, and be in our lives and relationships. As we do this, who we are changes in ways we cannot even imagine.

Learn how to get your marriage going again here.

Read Growing into a Bigger Heart here.

This article was originally posted here: https://www.jenniferlehrmft.com/relationships-the-new-challenge-in-self-mastery/