When you think back to the beginnings of your marriage, you might remember that time being one of giving all of yourself to that relationship; they were your everything, you’d do almost anything for them. Fast forward to now, where you feel like you are in a marital desert; you feel disconnected and distant in this relationship that you said “yes” to. Today let’s talk about how we get to what I’m calling marital shutdown and how we go from shutdown to alive in our marriage relationship.
Getting to marital shutdown
Let’s start with what marital shutdown is. A marital shutdown is when we stop taking action towards developing a relationship with our partner that matters to us. We maybe make half-hearted attempts to connect, but when things don’t go our way, we use it to reinforce the thought that our marriage is failing and has stopped growing.
Marital shutdown comes from a series of actions that either you take or your partner takes that create a feeling of hurt and has you pulling away and maybe even taking actions that might cause the other to pull away. It’s a slow process of each of you giving a little less of each other, not clearing up what got in the way of relationship growth and having one or both of you withdrawing a little bit here and there. Over time you find yourself in a place that you never wanted to be, not really knowing how you got here or how to change directions. You feel lost in a distant marriage, surface level, and disconnected.
How we get to an alive marriage
Let’s start with what an alive marriage looks like. An alive and fully awakened marriage is not a marriage where we behave “perfectly” all the time, whatever perfect marital actions are. An alive marriage is where we own our actions, understand why we took those actions, and share with our partner what happened and why. When we share, we share from a place within, taking full responsibility for why we responded the way we did and using the experience to learn, grow and create a more intimate relationship with our partner/
How we get to alive is honestly the same way we got to shutdown, by taking small steps of vulnerable actions. We start taking steps that feel super uncomfortable but help us understand each other better. We begin to feel empathy for what the other person is experiencing and have compassion instead of judgment.
Our marital relationship and any relationship will be stuck at a level of closeness based on our mutual willingness to be vulnerable and expose ourselves. If we want to get to a higher level of closeness in our marriage, one of us needs to be willing to be a little more vulnerable. When we take small steps of vulnerability, it leads our partners to feel comfortable following us, and this is why AwakenYou is so powerful. In the program, you learn how to take the steps you want to take in the marriage you want to create, and as you do that, your partner will follow, I promise!
Examples of vulnerable steps you can take to move from marital shutdown to an alive marriage
- Holding their hand
- Setting your phone down when they talk and engaging with all of your attention
- Planning a date and inviting them
- Telling them what you appreciate about them
- Sharing a compliment
- Giving them a small gift
- Writing a love note and tucking it into their work bag
- Inviting them to help you with a project or asking if they’d like help with a project they are working on
- That thing you wish they would do for you, you do it for them
- Making them their favorite meal or snack
- Letting them pick the movie and not complaining about it
- Inviting them to join you in a game
I’d love to hear your ideas of how you could take a tiny, powerful step forward in your marital relationship. Every little step you take will empower you to feel more courageous to take the next step and what you will see is how your partner is following in your footsteps. Join the other women who have joined AwakenYou and brought their marriage from shutdown to thriving by implementing the processes I teach in the program. You, too, will be one of the women who learns that they have the power to actually shape their marriage into exactly what they want and live a life of dedication to their truth.
I am a life coach who works with individuals to break down relationship barriers by awakening their true self. 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.
