One Of Us Must Be Crazy - Part 1
By Tim and Joy Downs
Joy: When we got married, Tim naturally expected that his wife would share not only his tastes and opinions, but his dreams as well. What he never counted on is that I would have dreams of my own - very different dreams. This difference in our mental images, this disparity in our "shoulds" and "oughts," was what originally attracted us to each other. But in marriage, the same differences became the source of many of our disagreements. He had his dreams, and I had mine. It took us quite a while to understand that our biggest conflicts would come when we were both right.
We all have dreams - fuzzy mental images of how our lives are supposed to look and feel. Marital researcher Scott Stanley calls these unconscious longings "hidden issues". "Hidden issues," he writes, "are the deeper, fundamental issues that usually lie underneath the arguments about issues and events. For all too many couples, the hidden issues never come out. They fester and produce fear, sadness, and resentment that can erode and eventually destroy the marriage."
The problem with hidden issues is precisely that - they're hidden. How do you locate the Invisible Man? You don't discover his presence directly; you only become aware of him through something he affects. A hidden issue is almost impossible to spot until something comes along to reveal its contours. That "something" is usually conflict.
But at its best, conflict is when you both fight for what you really believe in - and, in the process, come to a better understanding of one another.
Throughout our married life, we have often disagreed in our approach to raising our kids. Joy thought our son should wear his bicycle helmet to simply ride around the block; Tim thought it was an unnecessary nuisance for such a short distance. Joy thought we should remind the kids to take a jacket every time they went out; Tim thought they should learn to remember for themselves, and a little frostbite just might do the trick. Joy thought we should install Internet filtering software on our home computer to protect the kids from accidentally going to inappropriate sites; Tim thought the kids should know that the sites were there, but develop the self-control to not visit them. At times, we seemed to disagree about everything. Over time, we began to recognize the outline of the Invisible Man.
We began to realize that our individual disagreements were like the leaves on a tree, obscuring the trunk behind it. Our disagreements about helmets and jackets and software were all the result of a single fundamental difference between us. When it came to the children, Joy instinctively placed their security above all else, and Tim instinctively valued their autonomy - their need to take risks in order to grow in confidence and capability.
There's nothing wrong with either perspective. The problem was that each of us instinctively approached all child-rearing decisions from our own perspective - the "right" perspective. Neither of us could explain exactly why our perspective was right - but then, why should we have to? Isn't it obvious?
It took years of lengthy "discussions" before we finally realized two critical things: that we were not really battling about bicycle helmets and jackets and computers at all, and that we were really on the same side. We just chose different paths to a common goal: a mature and thriving child.
Once we understood that the issue of Security was the underlying cause of many of our disagreements, we began to search for other hidden causes. Was it possible that there were more fundamental issues
like this, more instinctive blind spots that were the root of our other disagreements?
Sure enough, others began to emerge, and after many more discussions we were finally able to identify seven fundamental differences between us.
Then we began to discuss our conclusions with other couples and ask if they had observed a similar phenomenon in their own marriages. To our surprise, we found that other couples had recurring disagreements over the very same seven issues we did.
Our next step was to test our theory with a larger audience. Over the next two years, as we traveled and spoke at marriage conferences across the country, we began to take a survey with our audiences. We
asked more than a thousand couples a series of questions about their own experience with conflict, and wherever we went our findings were consistent. We discovered that there seem to be seven common underlying issues that are the root cause of most of the conflict in married life.
We call them Security, Loyalty, Responsibility, Caring, Order, Openness, and Connection.
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