Do Your Parents Run Your Marriage?

We’ve all got parents, right? Here are two facts that illuminate the world of parents as related to their adult children:

1. They live in a generation apart from us with values and cares of their own.
2. They can’t run our lives or our marriage without us becoming messed-up.

You may initially feel more loyalty to your parents than your partner. The challenge, though, as Jesus says, is to leave your parents and become one with your spouse (Mt 19:6). Placing Christ at the center of your marriage, and utilizing the Couples Family Compass will help you in this process.

If you want to qualify for intimacy with someone who is your peer, you must cut the psychological umbilical cord to both parents. This is called growing up, and means that, like the thirteen colonies, you declare independence and write your own constitution. You may have to fight a brief war, because some immature parents want to continue their unchallenged policy of taxation without representation. Nevertheless, to share your life with an intimate partner requires that you gain full possession of your selfhood.

Declaration of Independence

What happens when a parent lays a guilt trip on you about attending a family function, or worse yet, makes a snide remark about your partner? It’s simple, really. You align yourself with your partner, let your parents have their views, and don’t honor their commands.

You’ve got to work out all the logistics, but keep in mind this one thing: parents are formidable foes to couple’s intimacy precisely because they can feel entitled to claims of family loyalty that supercede your intimate relationship. 

They may object, but these behaviors will diminish to the degree that they come to accept that you are your own person, and that your highest loyalty is not childlike obedience to them, but healthy love of your partner.

How does the Couples Family Compass help you do this?

Couples Family Compass

From the Love compass point, you place your marriage first. Nurture your love for one another. At family gatherings, step aside for a moment and touch base. Share a hug, a smile. Make sure you feel connected with each other as you interact with others.

From the Assertion compass point, you stand up for your spouse if need be. "Mom, I can't help what you think about my husband. That's your choice. But please treat him respectfully. I like him."

From the Weakness compass point, you talk with your partner about family issues to get them off your chest. Acknowledge the frustration or sadness you feel. Be careful not to explode at your spouse, and be tactful if it's about their family. But sharing feelings will bring you closer and help you form strategies for handling family issues together.

From the Strength compass point, plan ahead for family contact. Take charge of what works for you as a couple. What invitations will you accept or diplomatically decline? Compromise about the length of time you'll stay, or number of times you'll see family. 

You may actually enjoy family times more, once you priorities are straightened out. Jesus wants no false alliances in the marriage bond, so that couples intimacy can grow and thrive.

Find Peace with the Couples Finance Compass

Do you and your partner fight over finances? All too common, all too painful. The Self Compass shows you why and what to do about it:

Dependent trend spouses stuck on the Love compass point buy too many things to make too many people happy. They say, “Sure, honey” when asked about a purchase when they really mean “No, it’s too expensive for us right now.” They want their partner’s approval, and can’t stand the prospect of their anger. Yet they feel secret resentment toward their spouse.

Aggressive trend spouses stuck on the Assertion compass point buy what they want when they want it without much consideration of their partner’s perspective.  They are suspicious about their spouse’s spending habits, yet will lie about how much they’ve actually spent themselves.

But when each spouse balances Love with Assertion, they learn to diplomatically stand up for their financial preferences and to be generous and trusting of their partner’s. This takes a willingness to be honest yet tactful, compromising yet realistic.

Couples Finance Compass

Withdrawn trend spouses stuck on the Weakness compass point avoid taking financial responsibility. They see themselves as incapable of learning how to handle finances and feel defeatist and apologetic when their spouse gets exasperated with them. Which is often.

Controlling trend spouses stuck on the Strength compass point like to take over family finances; they know it all and judge their spouse as less competent than they. Their down-putting remarks about spending habits results in their spouse feeling financially inept, thereby confirming their incompetence. 

When Weakness and Strength are combined in couple’s financial issues, each spouse balances fair-minded responsibility with discerning compromise to reach ongoing workable principles. This takes a willingness for both partners to admit they don't know everything about finances, that they can make mistakes, as well as a willingness to ask for outside help, learn how to balance a budget, and exercise discipline in keeping it. 

Couples Finances

Love with Assertion brings freedom to discuss individual financial priorities honestly, yet with a generous heart. Weakness combined with Strength promotes financial competence without being judgmental about mistakes. Couples end up with a practical budget and room to enjoy life, while revisiting spending decisions as family circumstances change.

For more on how to transform these personality trends, read:

The Self Compass: 

Charting Your Personality in Christ

How To Stop Arguing With Your Spouse

The Self Compass offers growth tools that really work for improving couples’ communication. The four compass points of the Self Compass (Love and Assertion, Weakness and Strength) provide the framework for a growing and healthy couples' relationship.

In a nutshell, when you utilize all four compass points for couples' communication, you:

Love: Act considerately

Assertion: Express self tactfully

Weakness: Own up to blowing it

Strength: Listen respectfully

On the Self Compass, it looks like this:

Couples' Communication Self Compass

Here are some pointers to help you utilize your whole Self Compass in couples' communication:

Love and Assertion:

1. Avoid escalating a disagreement: restate it diplomatically in the here and now; agree where possible, and work toward a compromise.
2. Get rid of putdowns or sarcastic remarks (that read as aggressive to the unconscious) that make a partner self-conscious.
3. Instead, watch for ways to praise your partner, including around other people.  
4. Avoid painting your partner in a negative light, because the unconscious will always remember it.
5. Just as in car maintenance, keep your marriage well oiled and lubricated by a generous supply of basic kindness:  “Thank you.” “You’re welcome.” “Excuse me.” “Good morning.” “Sleep well.” “How are you?” “I need you.” “I’m sorry.” “I love you!”

Strength and Weakness:

1. Offer your opinion or preference with humility.
2. Give each other the benefit of the doubt. 
3. Assume you don't know everything.
4. Warm up your spouse up to the communication you wish to have. 
5. Realize that you experience things that your spouse has no way of knowing about, unless you tell them. Avoid the trap of believing that if a person really loves you, he or she will be able to read your mind. 
6. The only tools available for communication and communion are words and body language. So whatever you want to say, especially if it has a strong emotional valence to it, break it to your partner gently.
7. Avoid arguments and misunderstandings by willingly repeating whatever you’re trying to say in fresh new words. 
8. It is only natural for couples to mishear a communication, or to take something personally and react defensively, instead of continuing the communication. 
9. With practice you can learn to let your partner finish whatever they are trying to say without interrupting them, or short-circuiting the communication with an emotional reaction. 
10. The more grace you extend to your partner, the more grace they become willing to extend to you. 
11. Taking the time to humbly clarify any misunderstanding builds mutual goodwill.

And finally, bring God right into the center of your relationship. Couples need all the help they can get to develop creative caring, ongoing respect, and emotional intimacy. Hold hands together and pray out loud for God’s will in your relationship: “Dear God, please bring blessing and guidance in our couple’s life. Help us grow closer than ever through this. Thank you.”

How To Know If You're Being Manipulated

You manipulate others when you treat people as “things” in ways that defeat sincere communication and communion. Everyone does this to some degree. Manipulation results from a rigid personality trend or pattern in which your interaction with others contains a hidden agenda that sabotages honest and open interaction. You do this at mostly unaware and automatic levels.

How?

The Self Compass reveals four manipulative trends that correlate with exaggerated misuse of the four compass points:

• Love: the Dependent trend
• Assertion: the Aggressive trend
• Weakness: the Withdrawn trend
• Strength: the Controlling trend

Why?

It is fear of other people's disapproval that propels the Dependent trend: you avoid Assertion and Strength by pleasing and placating others, even if the price is your sense of self. You are manipulative in these ways:

• Seek others' good opinion and require them to be reassuring. 
• Everyone be nice now. 
• Everything is fine. 
• Be responsible for everyone’s happiness. 
• Suffer guilt for anyone’s unhappiness. 
• Keep the peace, no matter what the cost, even sacrificing your self-hood if necessary. 
• Feel secretly resentful.

For the Aggressive trend, it is fear of intimacy that blocks Love and Weakness. You manipulate others in these ways:

• Forestall the risk of loving by getting mad, getting even. 
• It is others who make you angry, after all. 
• Make others walk on eggshells by arguing over trivial issues. 
• Be charming on occasion, to bring others under your power. 
• Feel secretly lonely.

In the Withdrawn trend, you avoid Strength and Assertion by pulling back from life out of fear that others will discover and ridicule your inadequacies. You manipulate others in these ways:

• Believe that only others get to enjoy living. 
• Dream dreams, but take no risks. 
• Feel numb and detached. 
• Worriedly read others' minds, assuming their dislike. 
• Be helpless. 
• Require others to take responsibility. 
• When others express impatience, feel confirmation of your unworthiness.
• Experience secret superiority.  

 

The Controlling trend avoids Weakness and Love by being in charge. You might feel vulnerable otherwise. To feel out of control brings core fear, something to be avoided at all cost. You manipulate others in these ways:

• You should always know better than to make mistakes or feel at a loss. 
• Always keep busy. 
• Require others to be as perfect as you are. 
• Judge self and others as never quite good enough. 

And the underlying effect of this manipulative stance? Insensitivity to others' feelings and, occasionally, a sense of the hollow impossibility of it all. 

For more on how to outgrow these manipulative trends and personality patterns using the Self Compass growth tool, read:

THE SELF COMPASS: 

CHARTING YOUR PERSONALITY IN CHRIST