The State of Marriage

Note: This article was first published in Life in the Delta in January 2005.

Since this is the month in which the President delivers his “State of the Union” address, I thought I would speak to what I view as the “state of marriage.” I was concerned a few months ago when the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, of which I am a member, sent out a survey to ask the members’ opinion about whether we should take a stance to maintain the definition of marriage as an exclusive union between a man and a woman or rather expand it to include same sex couples. I replied that I preferred to keep marriage as an exclusive union between a man and a woman and listed several reasons, including that marriage has provided the basic structure for society in all cultures since the beginning of civilization and that it also promotes the best growth and development of children in my opinion.

I was encouraged following the general elections in November that so many people overwhelmingly agreed that marriage should remain as a union between a man and a woman only. Yet while I am hopeful that marriage will remain as an institution in our nation, I am discouraged as a marriage counselor about the current condition of marriage in general. Couples therapy is the most difficult type of therapy I do because many couples tend to be so conflictual and in such emotional pain by the time they come to therapy that they tend to be irreconcilable. I even know colleagues who now refuse to see married couples due to the difficulty of this type of therapy. Yet because of the importance of retaining marriage as a vital structure of society, I will plod on – for now at least.

I will agree that in past centuries many couples stayed together out of necessity and socio-economic pressures, albeit many of these unions were not happy ones. The 20^th century opened the way for many unhappy couples, especially women, to have the freedom not to live in physically or emotionally abusive homes nor tolerate adulterous situations. Yet we may have taken this freedom too far with 50% of our marriages ending in divorce. Sadly this statistic is the same for Christians as well as non-Christians. I believe that most people take their vows seriously when they say “for better or worse,” yet when “the worse” comes they seem unable to stay in the marriage. Or if they do stay married, they find other ways “to stick it out,” including having affairs or a series of married relationships that start out with high hopes which later are dashed. Or two people stay in a long-term relationship by living separate but parallel lives under the same roof. Or some opt out of marriage altogether and just decide to live alone for the rest of their lives. These to me are all poor options and do not fulfill what I see as God’s original plan for marriage, which is the coming together of a male and female in an exclusive one flesh union in which they are intimately connected physically, emotionally and spiritually.

I would urge couples to assess their marriages, whatever stage of life they are in. No age group is invulnerable to divorce anymore. A huge mistake many couples make is to neglect their relationship due to busyness in their lives. They seem to be on track for living separate lives and do not learn to communicate with each other on a meaningful level nor resolve conflict in a satisfactory way. One of the partners then suddenly wakes up one day and gets mad that he or she is not experiencing the type of relationship desired yet has not made a committed effort to do their part to invest in the marriage along the way. Newlywed couples especially now seem to find marriage harder than they expected. It is becoming more and more evident that couples not only need pre-marital preparation but an on-going support system and good models to make marriage work.

While we may have preserved marriage as an institution for now, we as a nation need to individually address our own marriages in order to preserve marriage for future generations. If your marriage is not a mutually satisfying and supportive relationship, I encourage you to get help – read some books, attend a marriage conference, find a more mature couple to mentor you, or seek a marriage counselor. I challenge you: what is the “state of your marriage”?

How Close is Too Close?

Note: This article was first published in Life in the Delta in December 2004.

You may be wondering to what type of closeness I am referring. Specifically, it is closeness in relationships, especially in families. In other words, can you possibly love someone too much? I say you can. I would like to explain this because it is one of the main problems that I see in families who present for counseling. Often the parents bring a child or teenager who is having trouble fitting in at school or is unhappy. Of course, there are other reasons for these symptoms, such as trauma or abuse or illness. But generally, if these problems are not present, I begin to suspect what is called enmeshment – a therapeutic term for “too close” relationships.

The problem of enmeshment is difficult to explain because a parent is usually defensive of their close relationship with their child. And enmeshed systems appear so great because they offer a heightened sense of mutual support. Parents are loving and considerate. They spend a lot of time with their children and do a lot for them. However, children enmeshed with their parents can become dependent. The children become less comfortable by themselves and may have trouble relating to people outside the family. A test often comes when the child attempts to leave home to go to college and cannot adjust well. The opposite of enmeshment is disengagement, in which families are too independent and are not available to each other for warmth, affection and nurture. These families foster independent children but the children often lack the support and guidance they need. As you can perhaps guess, the balance lies somewhere between these two scenarios.

In enmeshed families, boundaries are diffuse and family members overreact and become intrusively involved with one another. The emotional world of one person becomes tied to the emotional world of the other. That is, your child’s bad day becomes your bad day, rather than your empathizing with your child about their feelings and helping them deal with them. Or worse, your child feels responsible for your feelings and for making you happy.

Enmeshed parents create difficulties by hindering the development of more mature forms of behavior in their children and by interfering with their abilities to solve their own problems. An example would be a father who jumps in to settle minor arguments between his two sons so the children won’t learn to fight their own battles. And a frequently encountered problem in the middle class family is the enmeshed mother/disengaged father, in which a mother’s closeness to her children substitutes for closeness in the marriage.

Ideally when children enter the family, the spouse subsystem should have a boundary that separates it from the children. A clear boundary enables the children to interact with their parents but excludes them from some activities. Parents and children can eat together, play together, and share much of each others’ lives. But the more that husband and wife are sustained as a loving couple, they are enhanced as parents. They need some time alone to talk, to go to dinner together, to fight, and to make love. Unhappily the demands of small children make it hard for parents to maintain a boundary around their relationship. And unfortunately, in our child-centered culture, the boundary separating parents and children is often extremely diffuse.

I encourage you to examine the nature of your family’s relationships. In a two-parent family, examine if there is time to cultivate the marriage as well as spend time with the children. In a divorced family, parents need to be extremely careful they do not depend on the children to meet their emotional needs. Watch for signs in your children of their not getting along with their peers or becoming depressed. Be aware that if you offer too much attention to your children that you may not be allowing them the room they need to become independent, even though this seems to be such a loving to do.

Maintaining Balance in a Busy Life

Note: This article was first published in Life in the Delta in November 2004.

Stress is unavoidable in our busy lives these days. But how much stress is too much?

Stress is a problem for several reasons. Emotionally it can lead to anxiety and depression. Physically it can lead to illness and pain, such as headaches, ulcers, and heart disease. It is estimated that 70% of all doctor’s visits are for physical or emotional problems that are stress related.

First of all, how do we define stress? Until 1950, stress was a physics term defined as “the load that is exerted on a physical structure, such as a bridge or cross beam.” But Hans Selye borrowed the term to use in psychology describing stress as “the load or tension exerted on individuals, which might alter an individual’s ability to respond or react normally.” Practically speaking, stress is being stretched beyond your limits and finding you cannot cope with your demands; it is overextending yourself without adequate time for recovery; or it is believing you can do more than your human form can take.

There are two types of stress – positive and negative. Positive stress can cause us to move forward and accomplish goals as a result of the force exerted, whereas negative stress manifests in adverse effects. It is very subjective – what is negative stress for one person may be a positive exhilaration for another.

No matter the source of stress – positive or negative – the body reacts in a similar fashion, preparing for emergency by sending out chemicals for “fight” or “flight.” The adrenal glands produce these chemicals, or hormones. First is the alarm reaction, brought about by hormone adrenaline. Next is the vigilance reaction, preparing the body to face the stressful event for the long haul, brought about by the hormone cortisol. Physiologically, the body responds with rapid breathing, sugars are released from fats into the blood stream for quick energy, blood pressure rises, acid is increased in the stomach, and you experience difficulty sleeping. But what happens if your body prepares for battle and there is none – that is, not one that is socially acceptable? Then you “freeze” with all those hormones floating around prepared for action.

Adrenaline and cortisol may be called “sad messengers” because they send signals to our brain that make us depressed, anxious, sleepless, or fatigued. They rush in like fighter pilots to defend us, for which we should be grateful should real fear or terror strike. Yet in our fast paced lives, we experience stress by living too hurried and hassled and overextended.

Stress also depletes our natural brain tranquilizers, which include serotonin, dopamine, noradrenaline, and GABA. These could be called our “happy messengers.” When the sad messengers overtake us, we must have some recovery time to build back up the happy ones. Stress is only positive when it is shortlived. Prolonged stress is never good. By paying attention to your shift in mood, you can discover how much stress you can tolerate.

Be warned, if you are an adrenaline junkie and thrive on the excitement of the fast paced life, you are at risk for developing physical and emotional disorders. The difference between now and 100 years ago is they had lots of recovery time from stress built into the natural life cycle. They traveled on camels or horseback, they had to gather and prepare food, and they had to sleep when it got dark. In our urbanized and industrialized culture, we think we can sustain compulsive activity, but we pay a price if we don’t pace ourselves. If you want to preserve your sanity and achieve a healthy life, you have to make some choices to live a balanced life. Also, remember to help your children do the same. The antidote to stress is tranquility, achieving a balance that is calming, peaceful and serene. So be sure to counterbalance the stress in your life with healing recovery time.

Navigating the Family Cycle

Note: This article was first published in Life in the Delta in October 2004.

The family life cycle has been categorized by family therapists as the normative stages through which most families pass. These stages bring inevitable changes which often involve grief and loss. Yet how well a family navigates through these sometimes stormy waters of life may be a sign of their flexibility. And usually, given time and the family’s resources and coping skills, the changes are accommodated with new adaptive growth responses. In fact, the ability to change is a sign of good mental health.

It is good to be aware, however, that families are their most vulnerable during the transition times. Some of the normative stages of family development with their tasks and vulnerabilities include the following:

1. Between families: the unattached young adult. Young adults must differentiate from their family of origin, establish their own personal system of values and beliefs, develop intimate peer relationships, and choose and establish a career. If they remain overly dependent on their parents, they may have difficulty with this stage.

2. The joining of families through marriage: the new couple. The newly married couple must form a marital unit and realign with their families of origin. This process tends to result in difficulties and differences being ignored, usually due to the covering over by romantic feelings, only to resurface later. Also, couples may marry in order to escape problems in their original families, only to bring them to the new system.

3. The family with young children. The family who has children, by choice or not, must make space for the children and take on new responsible parental roles, often in already busy lives. As the social lives of children expand, the family must be prepared for contact with other families.

4. The family with adolescents. This stage usually brings a jolt to families who like the sometimes comfortable and more carefree prior stage. Parents must permit the adolescent to move in and out of the family system and must allow more freedom along with increasing responsibility. This stage and the next require the couple to reinvest in one another and may be a time of increased vulnerability to extramarital affairs and divorce.

5. Launching children and moving on. The marital couple must renegotiate their relationship and develop an adult-to-adult relationship with their children. This is a time of rapidly changing roles, as children may marry and themselves become parents. Also, there may be a accumulation of unresolved issues from the previous stages that now may lead to divorce, a sense of overwhelming loss (empty nest syndrome) and general disintegration of health. Some families embrace their new freedoms and opportunities. Others experience only transient disruptions. And a few develop symptoms in an unconscious effort to cling to the last child. This phase is also a time in which many couples must deal with aging or dying grandparents and parents.

6. The family in later life. This is the stage in which couples provide support for the middle generation; face retirement; deal with the loss of spouse, siblings, and peers; and prepare for their own deaths.

The above stages are classified as normative events. Paranormative events are those which occur frequently but not universally, to which families must also adapt and change. Examples include miscarriage, infertility, marital separation, divorce, illness, disability, relocation of households, and changes in socioeconomic status. When these events occur close together, a family can experience what is called “cluster stress” and be especially vulnerable. I encourage people to assess where they are in their life cycle as well as any paranormative events that are adding stress in order to be prepared and to seek outside help if they feel overwhelmed. Remember, the stormy waters of transition are inevitable but you can choose whether you take the course of growth or that of dysfunction.

Grieving Our Losses

Note: This article was first published in Life in the Delta in September 2004.

In last month’s article I talked about the various kinds of losses we experience, from small ones to large ones, with the death of a loved one perhaps being the greatest of all. I stressed how each loss needs to be grieved or else the pain, though buried, remains constant. It takes so much energy to suppress pain and manage our feelings, but when we allow ourselves to share our grief with God and others, we release our pain, fears and heartache. As this occurs, our pain begins to subside and healing has begun. In this month’s article I want to discuss how to go about this grieving process.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her seminal book On Death and Dying outlined a 5-stage process of reactions. Others have described a similar process. My favorite book is Good Grief by Granger Westberg in which he describes a 10-step process. The steps common to most of these descriptions include shock and denial, anger, depression, loneliness, guilt, and finally acceptance and a return to joy. Conceptualizing these as stages is somewhat misleading since the reactions can occur in varying order and may overlap and recur at any time.

As we examine the grieving process, I will apply it to a death situation but remember that the process needs to be applied in a scaled down way to all types of loss. The intensity of grief depends on a combination of these variables, including how attached one is to the person, the way the loss came about, and whether it was sudden, premature, or violent.

In the shock and denial phase there is a numbness that allows us to lessen the impact of the initial loss because experiencing it all at once could be overwhelming. But to stay in denial by going on too quickly with our lives or by covering up the pain with addictions is not a good long term strategy. In order to begin to heal, we must come to accept grief as normal and unavoidable. A common myth that must be dispelled is that grieving is a sign of weakness or a lack of faith. Another common myth is that time, in and of itself, will bring healing. The emotions we feel inside need to be expressed. There are lots of ways to do this – by talking to close friends and family members, by writing in a journal, by praying to God – just to name a few. Thinking about our feelings and remaining silent are not the same as expressing them. By holding them in they only continue to churn and fester inside, only to come out someday, some how. Tears too are a wonderful release valve for emotional pain.

Though grieving is unavoidable, healing in and through grief is a choice. At some point we arrive at a partial understanding of grief – to grapple with the loss and adapt to it. Changes must be made so we can live with our loss in a healthy way. We can change from asking “Why did this happen to me?” to “What can I learn, how can I grow, how can God be glorified?” Some days will continue to be more difficult than others, with tears, fears, anger and confusion, but these feelings can continue to be released.

Grieving is a two-way process – the loss of a loved one and the recovery of our spirit. We want to return to the life we knew before the loss but we must live a new “normal.” Instead of locking ourselves away, we come to a place of surrender. We decide to re-organize our lives. We can develop a new identity without forgetting our loved one.

There is no prescribed timetable for recovery. For most people following a death it takes 2 -3 years to recover, and for some a lifetime. The peaks and valleys that are initially intense start to level out but not disappear. Be kind to yourself and diligent about your health. Grieving takes a lot of energy and your body needs more rest.

In closing, I challenge you with this question: “What is the loss in your life that you’ve never fully grieved?”

Not Cutting Our Losses

Note: This Article was first published in Life in the Delta in August 2004.

It is a prevalent belief in our culture that when we think we are losing we try to cut our losses and run, thereby minimizing them. This can be true of the stock market as well as our relationships. However, I want you to consider a different perspective – that our losses are of great importance and must be grieved, not dismissed nor denied. According to Norm Wright, a leading Christian counselor and expert on the subject of grief and loss, “We have to confront each loss whenever it occurs, because if you don’t and you bury it, you bury it alive – and someday there will be a resurrection.

It is important that we expand our understanding of loss. The death of a loved one, of course, is the quintessential loss. Death is truly our greatest enemy, as the Bible says, and the emotions it awakes are among the most powerful and overwhelming of all human experiences. But Wright lists the following as examples of the many other losses we experience regularly:

1) material loss – from a dropped vase to monetary loss

2) abstract loss – lost love or hope or ambition or control

3) imagined loss – we think a person no longer loves us or wants us around

4) relationship loss – the end of an opportunity to relate, such as divorce

5) moving – to a new house or community

6) end of friendship

7) intra psychic loss – lost image of oneself or death of a dream

8) functional loss – loss of ability to drive, of sight or hearing, of memory, etc.

9) systemic loss – a significant person leaves your workplace or group

10) child leaves home – family will not be the same

11) threatened loss – there is a likelihood of loss but nothing you can do about it, e.g., waiting on a biopsy report

12) disenfranchised loss – loss that cannot be publically acknowledged or socially supported, such as a secret lover, a co-habitation partner, a neighbor, a broken engagement, an abortion, a miscarriage, the loss of a pet

13) ambiguous loss – people cannot adjust but freeze, in such cases as deployment, MIA’s, kidnaped children, a coma, Alzheimer’s disease

This list can include many more things. One that readily comes to mind for me is transitional phases in our lives, such as leaving college or retiring from work, thus losing a lifestyle and group of friends. The important thing is to recognize these various things as real losses. The next step is grieving the losses. There is no way around the grieving process and no speeding it up. Some people try to stay in denial, either by returning to a normal routine and intellectualizing the loss, or by covering it up with drugs, alcohol, or various addictions.

A long-term study indicated that the death rate of widows and widowers is 2-17 times higher the first year following the death of a spouse. Another study discovered that about 25% of those who mourn experience a dramatic decrease in the body’s immune system 6-9 months after their loss. This is one reason why grieving people are more susceptible to illness. Denial may be a good short-term strategy that helps ease our grief, but as a long-term strategy, it is not beneficial. Recovery occurs when we face our losses and give ourselves permission to grieve. (See next month’s follow-up article – “Grieving Our Losses.”)

Overcoming Evil

In last month’s article, I described what I view is the problem of evil – that it is so common. All of us are capable of doing evil, but some people seem to hide their evil behind a facade of goodness. To repeat the definition of what I view as evil, according to Dan Allender in his book Bold Love, “Evil is present when there is a profound absence of empathy . . . An evil person is unmoved by the inner world of the other and has no respect for boundaries.” When their patterns of harm are exposed, evil people are not sorrowful nor open to feedback. Often they masterfully cause confusion and in turn make the victims of their abuse feel like the perpetrators of harm. Evil is fairly predictable in its efforts to intimidate through manipulation and shame. Evil wants control and absolute power over choice. An evil person wants not only conformity to their ways but almost an unearned devotion that borders on worship. An evil person, in a sense, seeks to steal the lifeblood from the soul of another. With this said, I would now like to address what what to do about overcoming evil.

One of the first things I suggest is to set limits on evil. I rarely have to worry about encountering evil people in counseling. They usually do not come because, according to them, they do not have the problem. But I see many of their victims, the so-called weak people who are depressed or addicted. I call these people courageous, because they are attempting to shine the light of truth on their entrapment. They often struggle hard to get free and do so at great costs. Often they must give up a relationship with a parent or other significant person while other family members and friends continue to relate to that person. Often it is the fear of abandonment that blocks most of us from setting limits and establishing boundaries. And sadly, many of the victims are powerless children whose choices are to become perfectionist conformists or to fall prey to depression or rebelliousness. Yet for those adults who have the freedom and courage to set limits on evil, they can find hope in knowing that they are doing the more loving thing by not continuing to allow an evil person to consistently and perniciously sin against them. Unfortunately, kindness and reasoning do not seem to work. It may take extreme measures, such as being willing to walk out, hang up the phone, or even call the police if the evil person intimidates through shame or manipulation.

Having suggested that to set limits on evil is all right, I want to quickly add a cautionary suggestion: hatred of evil in another may indicate our own evil propensity. In this case, we should examine ourselves thoroughly, as the Bible says, inspecting the log in our own eyes before examining the speck in another. Yes, we may want to avoid someone who has harmed us or, at least, limit their ability to harm us again. But if our motivation is vengeance, we need beware. Again according to Allender, “Evil knows the ways of evil. . . What evil cannot comprehend is goodness. Goodness offers life; evil seeks death.” So a better way to deal with evil is to overcome it with goodness. Good draws forth rage from evil because evil expects the good to operate according to its same principles, that is, in returning evil for evil. But if we desire in our hearts to root out evil, even in those who harm us, then we are doing good. We should want to put limits on evil in order that those who harm us would repent and change. It takes lots of wisdom, courage and creativity to do this.

As Scott Peck says in his book People of the Lie, evil spelled backwards is “live” – a person must want to come out from under the bondage to another in order to really live and become their true self.