By the time most of my clients come to me they have stopped dreaming about their future with their partner, they feel stuck in both their marriage and their life. The foundation of their marriage has crumbled and the map they previously used to build their relationship no longer applies to their life so it is necessary to reformulate the new five foundations to building their marital belief system so they can create a sustainable relationship that feels better than they ever imagined it could. The one thing that seemed to lift them up has drifted so far away they feel overwhelmed with how to turn things around, often wondering if giving up and starting over would be a better choice. The interesting thing is that if given the option many think that starting over somewhere else is a better option than taking what they already have, what they have already built, and “starting” over with what is remaining. This is because we think that the solution is outside of us, in some perfect partner that we won’t ever feel awful around but the truth is, the same old problems are going to keep surfacing until we do the work of learning how to build ourselves up from the inside out. Until then, that perfect partner will be an elusive catch.
When we feel frustrated, disconnected, and uninspired in our marriage we are often in a state of avoidance where they are avoiding any sort of action that might open us up to that loving feeling we so desperately want. Instead, we are doing all sorts of other things to bring some sparkle into our lives while unintentionally pushing our partners even further away and then looking to them to do the changing. Our perspective only sees where the problem lies in them while avoiding the work of looking inward fearing “we might be the problem.”
Eventually, though, we determine is that all of these external stimuli only have a minimal effect in bringing the zing back into our lives. We feel restless in constantly seeking the thing that will make us feel like our life has a purpose again, we are stuck on a rollercoaster of new highs that eventually come full circle leaving us searching for that new something new while continuing to avoid our partner.
Today I’m going to share five necessary foundational marital pillars that I use with clients in my AwakenYou one-on-one coaching program to help create the foundational belief they need to start rebuilding the marriage that they are in and start recreating their new future dream life.
Pillar one: understanding your feelings
To begin you have to take an honest look at and identify how you are feeling in your relationship. You know you don’t feel good, maybe you feel bored, frustrated, disconnected, sad, hopeless, uninspired, avoidant, anxious, disappointed, what else?
In the book Attachment Theory In Practice, Susan Johnson discusses the nature of emotion where she writes that in itself, emotion is not an irrational response or simply a “feeling” that accompanies thought. Rather, it is a high-level system that integrates a person’s awareness of innate needs and goals with feedback from the environment and the predicted consequences of actions. Emotions are an information-processing system focused on survival.
Meaning: emotions are part of a superior bodily system that helps you create awareness of your primal needs and goals while we are getting feedback from what is happening around us while we are subconsciously predicting the consequences of different actions. Emotions are part of our processing system based on keeping us alive.
Once you can start to identify these emotions that you are feeling you can start discovering what circumstances in your marriage are causing these feelings and why. We can peel back the shades and see the underlying reason we are experiencing what we are feeling.
Pillar two: understand your perspective
Here you are going to discover what your story is about your marriage and why your situation feels so challenging. You will get your point of view out from inside of you, onto a piece of paper so that you can really see the truth of what you are struggling with. Once you see your perspective clearly it is from here that you can start being able to contemplate some new perspectives, different possibilities and dabble with what these different perspectives look like and how they could change how you are feeling about your current circumstance.
Pillar three: identify what it is you want
Once you have gotten your story out and written down all of the painful pieces on paper this is when you can start identifying what it is you really want so you can begin creating new pieces to your marital puzzle, pieces that you love, pieces that you think are missing.
When we are deep in sadness and disappointment it’s difficult to imagine anything different. Identifying what is most difficult about your circumstance helps you to start seeing what it is you might want and then start formulating future hopes and dreams for you and your partner. You get to throw out pieces of the puzzle that feel awful and recreate pieces you want to give a try, knowing that if a piece doesn’t feel right you can keep molding and shaping it into one that fits perfectly.
Pillar four: start understanding why these dreams matter to you
Beneath our pain and our desire is something more, a more profound why. Here is where you can start asking yourself why you want what it is you want. You can decide why that thing would make you feel better and then make you feel better about your marriage, and then see why that would be so much more empowering than where you currently are in your relationship.
Pillar five: putting it all together to create your marital future vision
As you start to understand how you are feeling about your specific marital circumstance and you can see and define your current perspective, you can begin identifying what it is you want in your relationship, why you want it, and why it’s important to you. Finally, from this space, you can get to the work of arranging all of these four pillars to create a vision of where it is you want to go.
As you work through this process, you will also need a big dose of commitment in order to continue to fully work through forming these pillars and making them a firm foundation that continues to bring a clearer and clearer view of what you, and your partner want. You are never finished building these five marital foundation pillars because life keeps changing and desires evolve but know that when you stop working on them they begin to slowly erode again, but the good news is this: when you learn how to build a solid foundation and do the work of building these five pillars, you see the importance of the maintenance work and it becomes a new part of your relationship that actually feels normal.
If you want help stripping your relationship down and building it back up in a way that is sustainable and feels amazing then I want to invite you to come join AwakenYou, I’d love to work with you through the process of creating exactly what it is you want in the marriage you are in right now.
I am a life coach who works with individuals to break down relationship barriers by awakening their true selves. My process isn’t about changing your partner, it’s about discovering who you are so that you can AwakenYou in your marriage. If you’re ready to take your life and your love relationship to the next level then schedule your program inquiry call today and let’s decide together if this is your next step to creating the life you’ve been dreaming of.
