Category Archives: Default

Just Because You’re Quiet Doesn’t Mean You’re Listening

While listening takes as much skill as talking and it’s just as big a part of communicating, it’s something most of us have not been well schooled to do. We were taught something about trying to make ourselves understood when communicating, but nothing about opening ourselves to receiving messages from others with as little judgment as possible.

Here are some “how-to’s” for listening techniques:

  • Mirror back what you’ve just heard. “So you think we should give our money away and move to Chile?” Listening to what you thought you heard may enable your partner to clarify the original message.
  • Paraphrase. “So you mean that you think we should give up what we have to help others?” Paraphrasing helps both of you figure out whether you have gotten the message straight from the original speaker.
  • Summarize. “Let’s see if I have this straight. You’re tired of working in a dead end job and you’d rather do something that is more meaningful. Is that it? Have I understood?” See if you can put together a brief summary of what you think you heard and how you understand it.

It’s impossible to respond appropriately unless you’re responding to what was said and unless you pin down the intention behind the words. This takes a lot of discipline, but it pays off when you’re able to act in a way that gives you a bit of emotional distance. Families have different ways of processing information too, so learning how to really hear your spouse may be like learning a foreign language. Be patient with yourself and forgive yourself if you make a mistake. And by the way, be patient with your spouse too!

Top 10 Reasons to Communicate

10. Saves You Money
There’s no doubt about it, poor communications can be costly. Flowers, candy, gifts large and small are regularly offered by a spouse who said the “wrong thing’ or failed to say the “right thing.” When you look at costly mistakes in a marriage the majority of them are a result of poor communications.

9. Saves Time
“Yeah” “Sure” “Whatever” may seem like an efficient way of dealing with your husband or wife when they want to talk but it’s not. Sooner or later an unresolved issue must be discussed. So taking the time the first time your spouse wants to talk with you will ultimately prove to be a time saver. You won’t have to go back to the beginning and start again, because you communicated clearly and honestly the first time around.

8. Earns Points For The Future
Every time you and your spouse have a satisfying conversation you build credit toward future communication. Both of you know and expect that you will be able to share because you have a record of success.

7. It’s Good For Your Health
Good communications in marriage reduces stress for two reasons. First, it allows you to resolve the tension between you, and second, it allows you to “vent’ some of your anxieties from other areas of your life. Many couples report that their partner is the first person they could fully trust. “I can tell him anything”, one wife said recently. “I know he will listen and understand how I feel.”

6. Allows You To Concentrate On Other Things
Have you ever found yourself continuing a discussion you had earlier while you were at work? “I should have said this” you say to yourself. “Oh yeah? Well what about the time you did…” Perhaps you’re so upset about an unfinished conversation earlier in the day that you call your spouse to either apologize or get one more point across. Listening and talking effectively resolves the issue and frees your mind to concentrate on other tasks.

5. Builds Up Your Relationship
Couples who don’t communicate are in danger of losing love and affection for one another. All relationships are nourished by communications. If you don’t communicate with parents, siblings, co-workers, children, or your partner, you lose touch with them and your relationship withers.

4. You Learn More About Yourself
Have you ever tried to explain your thoughts or feelings to someone else and during the conversation you end up in a different place from where you began? Putting your thoughts into words forces you to clarify them. Talking and listening also allows you to fine tune your ideas.

3. Less Hassle
“Why won’t you talk to me?” “I know something is bothering you-what is it?” “Don’t just walk away. Talk to me. Please!”

Be honest. Avoiding communications is as much work as communicating. So why not just talk, or do you like being pursued? Does being silent give you more control over the situation? While it may seem that way, ultimately you’ll have a spouse who will trust you less. Giving your partner the gift of your time to talk things through will make your life simpler in the long run.

2. You Might Learn Something New
The person you are married to is not the person you first met. Neither are you the same. Every day brings new experiences, thoughts, dreams, plans. It’s a guarantee that if you work at communicating you will discover new things about each other.

These new discoveries stretch out in two directions from where you are now. You will discover experiences from your spouse’s childhood that you never knew. You don’t know them because the person you love has them hidden away in their memory. They don’t remember until some new experience triggers a recollection.

You see a child run into the street and your husband says, “I almost got hit by a car when I was that age.” What follows is a story of childhood excitement, parental fear, and lessons learned that come pouring out from the distant past. It might explain why he drives so slowly in areas with children, or give you insight into how he will react when your child does the same thing years from now.

1. It’s Fun!

Adapted from FOUNDATIONS Newsletter

After the Fight – Making Up

When you’ve had a falling out or feel distance between you, how do you come back together and reconcile? The following might help:

  • Ask yourself if there are unfinished issues with your parents that you have super-imposed on this issue with your partner?
  • Talk it out using the Speaker-Listener technique. (One person speaks, the other listens and then paraphrases what they heard. The speaker confirms whether the listener heard correctly. Only after the listener gets it right does the speaker go on, or the listener asks for “the floor” and shares his/her own thoughts.) Remember the rules. Don’t jump prematurely into identifying a specific solution until you’ve respectfully heard and been heard.
  • Put out the Unity Candle you used at your wedding or reception (or use another symbolic item) to signify that you’re calm enough to talk.
  • Apologize for your part. This doesn’t mean that your beloved is blameless, just that you are expressing sorrow for any way that your actions or words may have hurt your relationship, even unintentionally.
  • The Sacrament of Reconciliation can help you to forgive yourself and heal.
  • Seek professional counseling when the two of you aren’t making any headway in resolving the issue and it is infecting other parts of your marriage; you are feeling hopeless; you tend to distance rather than tackle the issue and the distance is growing; physical or verbal violence is being used (in this case, go to counseling separately).
  • In marriage, using lovemaking as a substitute for talking things out can bury the issue instead of resolving it. However, lovemaking after you have reconciled is a wonderful way to celebrate.

About the author
Susan Stith is the Family Life Director for the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown, PA.

Changing Your Spouse – and Yourself

They say that when a man marries a woman, he thinks, “She’s the one I’ve been waiting for. She’ll never change.” – and she always does. And a woman looks at her man, and thinks, “He just needs a little work; after we’re married, I’ll help him change” – and he never does.

The truth is that both men and women will change as time goes on. Biologists tell us that every seven years we have totally replaced all the cells in our bodies with new ones. Our ideas, politics, interests have evolved over the years. While research shows that personality tendencies (like introversion/extroversion) remain fairly constant throughout our adult lives, we still do change. Personal change and growth can become issues in marriage because we develop at different rates. We hope our spouses will change for the better: become more patient; stop unhealthy habits; spend more time with the family; work less – or more; go to church more – or less, talk more – or less. We are all works in progress.

Change sometimes doesn’t happen fast enough to suit us. Your beloved may be oblivious to your dissatisfaction. If he or she doesn’t realize the need to change something, a loving spouse can gently ask for change. Nagging, cajoling, and arguing, however, get us nowhere and can make us even more miserable. Successful couples recognize that the only person you can change is yourself.

Enlist your spouse as your partner in self-change. When you are willing to change some behavior, tell your spouses about your plan to change and enlist their support. Energy for marital growth can be ignited in your marriages. Our spouses, no matter what personal faults or issues they may have, will appreciate our efforts (they’ve been hoping we would!).

What if your self-change strategy doesn’t light a fire under your spouse? Despite your hopes and personal improvement efforts, he or she is resistant or unable to change. This is where the most powerful – and paradoxical – tool of marital change is at your service: Acceptance. When spouses show each other love and acceptance they respond more quickly to each other’s changes.

Be ready to support any effort your spouse makes towards change, no matter how tentative or incomplete that effort is. If he or she discloses a desire to change, be ready to help and not hinder the process. It may be that professional help is in order, but your role as helpmate is indispensable. You are the one who loves your spouse the most.

About the author
Lauri Przybysz is the Coordinator of Marriage & Family Enrichment for the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

Four Elements of Conflict Resolution

Having a successful marriage means learning some skills that differ from the skills you need for most other pieces of life. You are in the business of building, maintaining, and protecting a relationship. In many instances in our lives, we are protecting our own interests. In marriage, we sometimes have to put aside what might be our first choice in order to keep the relationship in good health.

1. Know the distinction between difference and disagreements.

You can differ with your spouse without having a disagreement. You can vote for different presidential candidates, prefer different restaurants, or have different favorite movies. These differences do not necessarily impact your relationship, because you can act on your own to satisfy your preference. But if you differ about whether to live on the East or West coast; or if you differ over whether or not to buy a house, then it is hard to go forward without resolving that difference.

2. Differences become disagreements when space is limited.

Since in marriage you join your lives and commit to staying together, then your choices of some basic issues become matters for joint decision-making. Not only is your physical space limited, but your psychic space is limited, too. How do you feel about having company on Saturday evening? How do you feel about cleaning up the house Saturday afternoon in order to have it ready for company Saturday evening? It’s “our” decision, it’s “our” company, and it’s “our” space to make ready. We may have different needs for socializing, different desires for time use and different standards for tidiness, all of which have to be negotiated for this one event.

3. When disagreements heat up, they become conflicts.

There is a bodily reaction that happens when you are in a conflict. Your pulse rises, your breathing speeds up, and you often get sweaty palms. Your body is sending adrenalin into your system, because it believes you are in danger. It is preparing you to fight.

This reaction happens faster in some people than others, but whenever it happens, it drives the ability to come to a reasonable solution right out of the picture. The fight instinct drives away the learned response to compromise every time. When you’re ready to fight you cannot feel your love for your partner; therefore, the conflict takes place in a dangerous zone, without the caring that normally characterizes your interactions with one another.

At this point you must make a choice. Either you can resolve the conflict and come back together feeling good about each other and your relationship, or you can come away feeling embattled and resentful, and it will make your relationship more difficult, at least for a while.

4. Conflicts are resolved more easily when you can cool off first.

Making the choice to back away from a fight until you can talk calmly – while taking a huge amount of discipline – can reap big benefits for your relationship. The only way to win an argument in a marriage is for both partners to come away feeling that they were heard and respected.

Helpful books:

  • The Five Love Languages, Gary Chapman
  • The Other Side of Love: Handling Anger in a Godly Way, Gary Chapman
  • You Don’t Have to Take It Anymore: Turn Your Resentful, Angry, or Emotionally Abusive Relationship Into a Compassionate, Loving One, Steven Stosny
  • Love and Anger in Marriage, David Mace

With a Little Help From Our Friends

Wally and I realize that probably the most important learning we’ve had in our marriage of 48 years is that WE are the sacrament…and that a sacrament is a public commitment, to be nurtured by and shared with others.

We recall an incident years ago when we had a huge argument as we were driving to a meeting of our Marriage Encounter circle of friends. One of us (we can no longer remember which one!) yelled at the other, “Why are we going to this meeting when we’re in such bad shape?” The wise reply from the other was “Where else can we go when we’re like this?”

We sensed then – and know now – that we could never last – much less grow and thrive – as a sacrament without inviting others to help us stay married. In the worst of times, that meant agreeing to go to counseling, but it also meant pleading with others to pray for us and to give us faith and hope in our vocation when we could find none.

In these later years of appreciative companionship our primary ministry as a couple is to just “be there” for other couples… most especially those struggling to hold their marriages together through the “for worse” times. We are convinced that no couple can live their vows of lifelong love and fidelity all by themselves – nor should they even try.

Our experience is that the marriage covenant is a sacrament for the wider community – and also a “co-creation” of that community.

They Said It Wouldn’t Last

There have been many ups and downs throughout my marriage of 19 years. Some folks said my husband and I wouldn’t last six months; we were so different! I like things in order and I take commitments seriously. Spouse, on the other hand, is laid back, even catch-as-catch-can on occasion.

At times I wanted to disappear and not look back. I am sure my husband felt the same way.

Then it hit me one day: Our marriage is not about how we make each other feel. Our marriage is about keeping our vow to love and honor each other even in the midst of problems, and in doing so, imitating the faithfulness of God to his unfaithful people.

Such an imitation of God’s faithfulness gives God glory, a minister friend assured us. It is why every single human being on earth exists — to give our Creator glory, and to trust God’s promises of eternal life with him in paradise for those who do not grow weary in doing good.

At first I could not see how washing dishes I did not dirty or paying more than my share of bills gave God glory.

I sought counseling, talked to long-married couples and read everything I could get my hands on that encouraged me as a wife. Then I asked myself: What was more important — prevailing when in conflict or my husband’s well-being physically and spiritually?

The answer became apparent to me one night when I found him fast asleep in front of the TV, the TV remote practically welded to his hand, his slumped shoulders free of the weight of the world.

Thinking that my being in his life could impact his eternal destiny was very sobering. Far be it from me, I thought, to be the reason he hated or did not forgive. We loved each other and needed to work harder at not allowing issues to blind us to this fact.

So I washed those dishes I didn’t dirty, for a clean home was important to me. And I paid bills we both had entered into without waiting for him to sometimes, for that too was a matter of honor and I had been blessed with the means to do so.

I draw comfort too from two Scripture verses: “All have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God. They are justified freely by his grace through the redemption in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:23-24). They remind me that while I am married to someone who, like me, is at war with a human nature bent away from God, we are not alone; God is with us — and in us! — to help us make the right choices in life.

What an awesome duty it is, then, to be entrusted with the fuller knowledge of another’s struggle, to be the voice that cries out to God on that person’s behalf.

What a privilege to imitate Christ who both demands and freely offers unending faithfulness!

Little Miracles

Andrew and Anna, married for nearly 10 years, face one of the biggest challenges that any marriage can confront. In June 2006 their daughter Rose was born with DiGeorge’s syndrome, a serious genetic disorder caused by the deletion of a small part of a chromosome. Because the condition is rare – 1 in 4,000 – Rose’s prognosis is uncertain. Right now doctors are debating how to treat her heart and gastrointestinal abnormalities.

In the meantime, the couple’s life has turned upside down. They try to maintain some normalcy for their other children, ages 5 and 3 ½, even as they struggle to meet Rose’s medical needs. Constant medical procedures and midnight wake-up calls to give Rose her medication put a lot of strain on the family. Tempers get short and “the small stuff creeps up.” Much-needed breaks, such as leaving the children with a teenaged babysitter so that the couple can enjoy an evening out, have become impossible. Andrew and Anna know that marriages break up over these kinds of difficulties, and they are determined not to let that happen.

Friends, family and the Secular Franciscan Order offer understanding and practical support. Andrew finds that Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, The Christian Meaning of Human Suffering is helpful for people going through a situation like theirs. Andrew and Anna have a special devotion to Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.

In the face of such uncertainty, the graces of marriage keep Andrew and Anna going. They have learned to celebrate the “little miracles.” “Rose came home,” said Andrew. He and Anna believe that God entrusted Rose to them, and they know that God will be with them in whatever lies ahead.

Lost Dreams

After almost 10 years of marriage, my husband decided to quit his secure government job and start his own business. I was scared. We had two children, ages 2 and 6, and could not maintain our simple lifestyle solely on my salary. Tom had no clear idea of what kind of business he wanted to start. He just wanted to be his own boss.

He pulled out his retirement savings, which we soon exhausted. He began to pay the mortgage late, then couldn’t pay it at all until my parents helped out. Several credit cards maxed out. Bill collectors started to call. The IRS hauled us in for an audit.

Tom reluctantly abandoned his dream of owning a business and looked for employment. Over the next six years he held a succession of jobs, some temporary, others unsuited to his talents. My anger and resentment grew. I felt that he had ignored the needs of his family in order to pursue a selfish and unrealistic quest. I considered divorce, and most of my family and friends agreed that I was justified.

Still, I held back, mostly out of concern for the children. Tom was a good father and I knew that they would be devastated if we split up. Somehow, I hoped that things would get better.

Miraculously, they did. Tom found a job with the county government that provided stability and a steady, if modest, income. We cancelled the credit cards and paid off the balances. We were even able to set a little aside for the college fund.

The emotional wounds took longer to heal. I had to learn to trust Tom again. Tom had to recover his self-esteem. All of this took a toll on our relationship. Twenty years later, our marriage still struggles, but things are better. I’m glad that we stuck it out. I’m glad that we have tried to honor the commitment that we made to each other more than 30 years ago.

Missing in Action

We all miss our husbands for various reasons. Admittedly, I forget Devin is even gone thanks to the all-consuming demands of my three children. Averaging, daily, 18 diapers and 8 outfits, 2 loads of laundry, 9 meals/snacks, one load of dishes as well as the inherent demands of nursing, I hardly have time for personal hygiene!

But last Sunday, when sitting contemplatively at Church and relishing every nanosecond of alone time, I was momentarily taken aback by an awakening breeze saturated with cologne from a man briskly walking past my aisle. Because I don’t get out much nor associate with anyone outside my estrogen circle of friends, I abruptly remembered what those masculine, knuckle-scraping, virile creatures were like (and wow did I miss them…I mean him)!

Before children, I remember feeling starved from never being ‘touched’ throughout a deployment. I longed for a simple hug or physical connection that reminded me I was more than a job-commuting and gym-frequenting being. It got to the point that I wouldn’t mind if my ‘personal space’ was comfortably invaded in crowds because I felt that if no one shook my hand or accidentally bumped into me I could seriously pass the entire deployment without ever having physical contact. (Considering the physical beings that guys are, no wonder our husbands grope each other ‘comically’ and wrestle around to “burn energy”).

Beyond the physical absence, I miss my husband’s daily encouragement and support most. After the kids go to sleep we would eat dinner together and rehash the day. Between recounting the number of temper tantrums abated by distraction and furniture claimed as their own personal Mt. Everest, he would always smile and shake his head in relief that his job was the less stressful one of flying and being shot at!

I have always viewed marriage as having someone bear witness to my life. It is not a means to validate me or give me meaning- but someone to share in the joys and take over where I leave off when times are tough. Though I have three young children, I’m still relatively new to this role as mom. I have embraced the fulfillment children bring as well as the challenges. However, I still struggle with this new identity as my kids’ mom rather than Christi Crovato the once informed and engaging (or so I’d like to think) girl on all things political. These days I need more encouragement regarding my parenting skills than I need help with the lawn (though that would be nice too). I think we can all agree that email and the phone just don’t cut it. The authenticity of encouragement seems to be lacking when words have to be generic enough to blanket and appease all the nuances your hormonal and realistic emotions entail. I want him to tell me I’m doing a great job as a mom and believe him. Because honestly, when heard from a distance, it feels like a film critic giving two thumbs up for a movie he has not seen.

Whatever your current challenge is, we look to our husbands to weigh in and respond with insight. I don’t hold my breath for any earth shattering epiphanies from Devin-but his physical presence often is enough to provide me with the comfort and support I seek. As much as I may feel that I need him, I realize that he is the one missing out the most: Declan’s mischievous grins and bear hugs, Emeline’s mountaineering skills and pick-me-up arms and Mary Kate’s big fat dimples.

Now that most of us have established new networks of support, let’s remember to be that source of counsel and comfort for others. Let’s be the one who rallies and heartens those around her whether you think they need it or not-because in all honesty we always need encouragement, especially when our husbands are missing in action.

About the author 
Christi Crovato lives in Oceanside, CA with her three small children. Her husband is a Marine Corps helicopter pilot currently on his 5th deployment.