There was this guy who would not look at me. He sat in our session with his arms crossed, looking elsewhere. He admitted he was “irritated.” His wife was sitting there in tears, and through her tears, she said, “This is what it’s like for me! Now you know!” And the guy wanted to be sure I knew how much he was not interested in participating in our session.
When a person puts on a show of not talking and putting down “therapy” (even though I’m doing something radically improved over therapy right now), I take it to mean they are afraid to look at themselves. All the complaints about therapy are a cover-up of that.
Here’s the question I did not ask him – but I’m asking you:
Do you have the guts to face yourself?
Do you have what it takes to feel your feelings? To express your deepest wishes to your life partner? To actually see them — and yourself — as a human being and not as your obstacle?
If you do, you just might have what it takes to work on getting The Marriage You Want.
If you want instead to read yet another self-help book, spend hours complaining in therapy about your spouse, have weekly meltdowns, or continue cheating . . .
…my program isn’t for you.
BUT…if you’d like to not only stop fighting, stop ignoring each other, but actually become best friends AND restore the passion in your marriage – and you have the guts to face yourself in the process, then book a call to speak to me.
But I must warn you: Working with me is not for those who’d rather complain than roll up their sleeves and do the sometimes difficult work of looking at themselves.
So let’s ask this question: Who would not want to look at themselves? Why wouldn’t they?
The answer is obvious, right? – They’re scared. They’re scared because deep underneath the hostility, the avoidance, the drinking, the neglect, the verbal abuse, the cheating, they do not like who they are.
But here’s the catch: they aren’t even aware of all that. If you asked them, they wouldn’t know how to respond; they’d think you were nuts. That’s how deep the denial goes. They literally don’t know. It’s out of their conscious awareness.
And I will be honest with you. I am sorry to say, I can’t help them. If they won’t look inside and they won’t talk to someone like me on the outside, I can’t perform magic. I wish I could.
So if your spouse has vanished emotionally or actually and won’t talk to me, the next question is this: Do you want to look inside yourself?
Do you want to fix your own end of things? Like for instance figuring out why you’re in a relationship with someone who will not open up?
It takes guts to look at ourselves, let’s face it. Even the nicest, best, kindest of us have made some serious mistakes in life. And we generally don’t get to notice them until we get really old.
And then it’s too late.
So what’s worse – facing yourself now and repairing things that got broken along the way or waiting til you’re about to die and realize you didn’t live the best life you could? I’d opt for diving in now, wouldn’t you?
Oh, and I should mention that if you were to work alone with me, even though you will have to face yourself, you will never have to share what you discover with me. It’s for you. It’s your journey and my only job is as a guide along the way.
Okay, okay, I’ll take credit for hacking down the brambles and creating the path that you will follow. I’ll take credit for giving you the best tools for self-examination – and self-healing.
I’ll take credit for that but you will have to roll up your sleeves and do the work.
Let me give you a peek at the tools, so you realize why I’m so proud of my program.
It’s a 9-week intensive group and private therapy/coaching hybrid called Love Yourself. Here are the Pillars of it, what you come out with at the end:
*Inner Authority. This is the foundation on which everything else is built: Knowing who you are. Knowing your feelings, your wants, your needs, and what causes those feelings to change. It’s knowing yourself.
*Emotional Agility. One of the things you need to know in order to heal is what triggers you. We all get disturbed by certain things. We can hide it, even from ourselves – but it is doomed to come out somehow anyway. So this part of the program is to get clear on it. And to take the next step – conquer it. We can’t go through life having hurt feelings or exploding, or being depressed because something triggered all that. We need to have tools to make those feelings sweetly dissipate. Without sweeping the dust under the rug.
*Intentional Self-Adoration. We suffer from limiting beliefs. We know who we are but don’t like who we are. That’s got to change. The road to change is intentional. We learn to disarm harmful messages buried within ourselves. We intentionally replace those with the self-love and even adoration that is rightfully ours. Developing this self-compassion readies us for the next step.
*Compassionate Honesty. The strong framework of the above three pillars of the program gets us past resentment and bitterness. We now can clearly, honestly, and openly communicate in an assertive way what we think, want, need, feel, and offer. But it is filtered through a heart of compassion. This is key for a relationship and it deepens the connection between you. This is how you get the marriage you want out of first developing Self Love.
How do you do all that? With daily written, verbal, and thinking exercises, as well as exercises to change your body’s state (for Emotional Agility). By the time you get to Compassionate Honesty, you’ve laid the foundation to have a good conversation, one of depth and kindness – and truth. Those three together: depth, kindness, and truth, are the foundation of intimacy. And we make sure you do all the work, too, with the Accountability System that I have in place!
When you book a call with me, you will learn what no one else has told you about yourself: the real causes of the breakdown in your marriage. Then we will map out a strategy for correcting it. Simple?
Talk to me together if you have the guts: https://drdeb.com/book There’s no charge for this meeting.
When you’ve booked, be sure to fill out the application that is on another page you will be taken to. That info will help us in our meeting and it probably saves 20 min of talk time.