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One Of Us Must Be Crazy - Part 2
 
 
By Tim and Joy Downs  
 
Oct 11, 2012                                                                       Issue 998            

 

Summary of this article

  

This is part 2 of 2 about the 7 things that almost always cause conflict between husbands and wives. It's important to get to the basic UNDERLYING causes of all conflict, regardless of what ever happens to be the surface issue at the time.

  

God bless your family and your marriage.

 

Jim  

One Of Us Must Be Crazy - Part 2

 

By Tim and Joy Downs

 

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. A hidden issue is almost impossible to spot until something comes along to reveal its contours. That "something" is usually conflict.

 

By this time in your marriage the two of you have probably negotiated and compromised on an exhausting number of minor preferences and desires. But have you noticed that a handful of stubborn disagreements still remains, and that those issues seem to crop up again and again with discouraging regularity? No matter what topic begins the disagreement, sooner or later you find yourselves on familiar ground. "Oh no, not this again!"

 

Recurring conflicts are a reality for all married couples, and they are a source of ongoing frustration and discouragement. Their very existence is annoying. Couples feel they should have resolved their differences by this time, and their failure to do so must mean something is wrong between them.

 

Not at all.

 

Psychologist John Gottman is a relationship expert who has studied the conflict styles of married couples for many years. He believes that all marital conflicts fall into one of two categories. "Either they can be resolved," he writes, "or they are perpetual, which means they will be a part of your lives forever, in some form or another."

 

Gottman estimates that almost 70 percent of marital conflicts are perpetual. "The majority of marital problems fall into this category-69 percent, to be exact. Time and again when we do four-year follow-ups of couples, we find that they are still arguing about precisely the same issue. It's as if four minutes have passed rather than four years."

 

If Gottman is correct, only three out of ten marital disagreements will have a neat and tidy solution. The rest will return to visit us again and again in some unexpected form. Couples often wonder if these unresolved issues reveal some secret weakness in their partner or their marriage. Each begins to suspect the other of immaturity, pride, or sheer pigheadedness. They know that whenever the subject shifts to one of those topics, there will be no resolution. They will end up, as always, in an angry stalemate, burying the disagreement like toxic waste until it surfaces again another day.

 

Our first disagreements in marriage are over a wide variety of issues as we adjust to each other and to married life. We gradually resolve these issues until only the more confusing and difficult ones

remain. Finally, after several years we whittle down our areas of disagreement to a handful that just won't seem to go away - the ones that really matter to us. These issues are far more than opinions or even values - they are a part of the way we see the world itself. Over the years, as we express our differences and resolve them, we engage in a kind of pruning process: First we cut away twigs, then branches, then limbs, until we finally come to the trunk of the tree itself.

 

When we lose hope of ever really resolving our deepest differences, they become the "no-man's-land" of marriage. We constantly check ourselves: Careful-don't go there. We begin to fence off those areas of the relationship where no one dares to tread-but we do this at a great price. The benefit of this approach is peace, or at least the absence of conflict, but the price of this evasion is the very thing we want most from marriage-true intimacy.

 

Understanding the Differences that Divide

 

The reason we need to talk about the issues of Security, Loyalty, Responsibility, Caring, Order, Openness, and Connection is precisely because they won't go away. They're always there, and they always matter.

 

Understanding our hidden issues helped us to put our differences in perspective. When it came to rearing the kids, one moment we thought that we disagreed about everything, from allowances to curfews to appropriate forms of discipline. Suddenly we understood that we only disagreed about one thing, but that one issue influenced our approach to dozens of others. That understanding alone changed our self-perception, from a couple that could never seem to agree, to a couple with only a handful of fundamental differences. That change in perspective allowed us to shift our focus from the superficial symptoms to the underlying disease.

 

Understanding our hidden issues helped us to understand each other's true motives. Joy was concerned about the children's safety, but Tim didn't seem to care if they got hurt. Tim wanted the kids to grow to independence, but Joy seemed to want to keep them tied to her apron strings. The other's perspective seemed so selfish and shortsighted, that it naturally produced anger in each of us. Why don't you care what happens to the kids? We both cared, of course; we both wanted the best for the kids, but that was hard to believe.

 

Finally, understanding our hidden issues helped us to work together as partners instead of battling as foes. Once we understood each other's dreams, once we each realized what the other person was valuing, our attitudes changed. We wanted to help fulfill the other's dreams rather than stubbornly defend our own turf. That change in attitude has allowed us to work together as partners instead of constantly shouting at each other from opposite sides of the fence.

 

 

 

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Jim Stephens
The Marriage Library
 20112011