Forgiveness has a tremendous number of religious overtones and moral implications. Many people want forgiveness, and those they seek it from frequently have a price tag of performance or penance attached to granting it. This is obvious in marital counseling where one member or the other of a couple have strayed from the fidelity expected in marriage.

The couple may be wanting to stay together and move forward, but one of the perplexing challenges is that the wronged part requires some form or restitution or redress from the one that has strayed, and the one guilty of infidelity frequently wants to be forgiven.

Offering forgiveness, or holding it aloft as a beacon for the guilty almost always has a behavioral or emotional price tag which frequently keeps the problems from being resolved more quickly.

Many times those that are in extreme pain fail to see the benefit of forgiveness. A partial reason for that attitude toward forgiveness is an immature view of forgiveness as an action associated with acceptance that would act as a psychic stamp of approval for the negative and hurtful behavior of another.

It might be helpful to develop a better definition or at least offer a broader definition of forgiveness that can illustrate the psychological benefits of forgiveness.

What is forgiveness?

Fundamentally it is a letting go or releasing of resentment and feelings of emotional demand around wanting revenge or justice as well as a freedom from requiring a price or performance from another. This is not a lessening of the responsibility of the offending party or the personal or society accountability that drives consequences toward the offending party.

To be continued…

Letting go of pain and resentment is not always easy to do. Forgiving and forgiveness can be difficult offer, allow and accept. If afflicted by the symptoms of depression, anxiety, or trauma we encourage you to call our office at (480) 478-4221 or schedule a complementary thirty minute consultation with one of our therapists at Psychological Health and Wellness, meet with one of our psychotherapists and learn how our trauma counselors can help you live a life free from the suffering effects of anxiety, depression, trauma and conflict. We are located in Mesa, AZ.

One of the most significant aspects of this book is that it presents a structured way to form and maintain positive therapeutic relationships between the client and the therapist. It shows a frank and straightforward way to be respectful and help the client find the strengths and abilities to navigate problems and build a future of positive possibilities.

Harsh start-up leads to the  shutting down of meaningful connections and leads to people feeling like they are being rejected.

When feeling rejected this frequently overwhelms people with negative emotions that they do not want to feel and in turn it is not uncommon to see one or both members of a married couple withdraw and become defensive which leads to responses that minimize, discount or create avoidance between the spouses in a troubled marriage.

Another common yet troubling habit can be a pattern of avoiding conversations that really need to take place so that realistic and effective problems solving can be accomplished. When this happens repeatedly in a marriage then there is a spreading discontent, frustration and conflict within the marital relationship.

Marital discontent can occur because problems are never resolved in effective ways.  Frustration may arise because the same problems repeatedly and intensely reappear.  Avoidance of issues can increase marital conflict which erodes the quality of any marriage or relationship.

Avoidance, frustration, conflict, marital discord, if these are attributes that you experience on a consistent basis in a troubled marriage, you might want to find someone to help you work through these habits and to develop some new, more effective ones.  Marital therapy can greatly improve the above mentioned areas and help save your marriage and avoid divorce

If you find yourself in a troubled marriage that is afflicted by marital problems we encourage you to call our office at (480) 478-4221 or schedule a complementary thirty minute consultation with one of our marriage therapists at Psychological Health and Wellness, meet with one of our psychotherapists and learn how our marriage counselors can help you live a life free from the suffering effects of avoidance, conflict, mindlessness and discord. We are located in Mesa, AZ.

To learn more about John Gottman’s concept about the Harsh Start-Up read The Relationship Cure: A 5 Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family, and Friendships

For the next ten minutes we talked about his marital difficulty; what he had already attempted to resolve the conflicts in his marriage, what he noticed about what made things worse or better.  As we discussed his particular marriage issues it became increasingly clear that there were some marital problems that needed immediate attention.

As I was thinking about his call I thought about things that might prove helpful not just to him but to anyone that is feeling like their marriage is in trouble,  things that many couples struggle with, that lead to conflict and discord, and even divorce.

One should note that this young man is a successful professional with an eight year marriage, after speaking with him it seems apparent that he is more mindless and oblivious than he was intentionally mean, hurtful or hostile. He simply doesn’t seem to be paying attention to the preferences of his wife.

His marriage seemed to come to a crisis point when he bought her a costly gold bracelet for Valentine’s Day. He was angry and hurt when his wife responded with frustration when presented her gift. The bracelet was large and heavy, with bulky links, which she didn’t appreciate as he felt she should.

When asked how he made the decision to purchase this particular bracelet, he said he just asked the clerk for the most popular bracelet that they sold. There was little thought put in about what his wife might like or what her preference in jewelry might be.

This leads back to a discussion of thoughtless, mindlessness behavior. Sound marriages generally have partners that are attuned to each other whereas being out of tune or unaware of your partner’s preferences conveys a feeling that one is disconnected or doesn’t really care and may lead to marital problems.

Avoidance, frustration, conflict, marital discord, if these are attributes that you experience on a consistent basis in a troubled marriage, you might want to find someone to help you work through these habits and to develop some new, more effective ones.  Marital therapy can greatly improve the above mentioned areas and help save your marriage and avoid divorce

If you find yourself in a troubled marriage that is afflicted by marital problems we encourage you to call our office at (480) 478-4221 or schedule a complementary thirty minute consultation with one of our marriage therapists at Psychological Health and Wellness, meet with one of our psychotherapists and learn how our marriage counselors can help you live a life free from the suffering effects of avoidance, conflict, mindlessness and discord. We are located in Mesa, AZ.

I’m using geography as the metaphor of the problem at hand. If you think about geography you want to know about the latitude and longitude, the weather, what kind of flora is growing there, who lives there and you want to know the basics of what is going on in that geographic region.

If you’re having anxiety we might say that that is a “desert” problem for you and your geography is like a desert. Another person might have anxiety that is an “arctic” problem.

One of the things that often times happens is that people start therapy too soon and they try to apply polar bear, penguin intervention to a desert problem.

My goal is to make sure that I understand the geography of your situation before we ever start to intervene in it.

The better we can come to an understanding for the geography before we begin treatment, the faster and more efficient therapy is for most people and it actually ends up saving the patient time and money and we can have efforts that are really focused on what we need to accomplish.

To learn more about problem geography we encourage you to call our office at (480) 478-4221 or schedule a complementary thirty minute consultation with one of our therapists at Psychological Health and Wellness, meet with one of our psychotherapists and learn how our trauma counselors can help you live a life free from the suffering effects of anxiety, depression, trauma and conflict. We are located in Mesa, AZ.

He was an engineer; he talked very logic-based, very reason-based. She was all emotion and everything was an emotional thing for her. He was really attracted to that in the beginning and she was attracted to him because he was organized and  logical guy.

Eight years later, they’re no longer attracted to each other. So they talked about what they felt like they needed to do which was work on their ability to communicate with each other and hear each other in the language that they used.

So I took their idea of what they felt they needed to do and built an intervention around it. The intervention was that over the next two weeks to pick one topic each time they had a discussion, go some place where they could be alone, take a bag of marshmallows, divide it in half, and start talking about the problem at hand.

Every time the engineer slipped into “engineer talk”  she was to hit him with one of these marshmallows. And every time she slipped into emotional language he was to hit her with a marshmallow.

It sounds kind of silly but when they came back in for the following session they had done the assignment five or six times in a two week period of time, they told me that they could never get through the task, “we just start laughing, and it’s just too funny”.

“After four or five hits with the marshmallow we get to laughing and start talking about other things and now we’re at the point where if one of us or the other one catches the other kind of not comprehending the other we say oh is it time for marshmallows. And that brings it right around”.

After four sessions they were done. They never needed to come back for another session.

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If you are experiencing problems in your marriage or relationship and feel that couple’s therapy may help your marriage or relationship, we encourage you to call our office or schedule a complementary thirty minute consultation with one of our therapists at Psychological Health and Wellness, meet with one of our psychotherapists, and learn how our relationship and marriage counselors can help resolve the conflict in your life. We are located in Mesa, AZ.