How To Save Your Marriage And Empower Yourself, Too!

Save my relationship?

You find that difficult. It's tiresome to look for the possibility of saving your marriage when you've been confronted with quite the opposite for years and years. How can you see potential, for example, when your wife comes down to breakfast looking like she just doesn't care about how she looks? How can you see potential in your husband who won't say "good morning"?

So here is something to think about: If you were to alter your own attitude, could you get different results? Changing how you think about your loved ones can have a powerful effect on their behavior. And that can save the marriage.

Let's do my Benefit of the Doubt exercise for the first scenario. The way the B.O.D. goes, you have to think of five reasonable reasons why the person did whatever they did. Here are possible reasons why your wife doesn't take care of herself any more:

1. I have not remembered our anniversary this year; I have not given her even a Valentine's Day card, so she stopped taking care of herself.

2. She's told me she can't do anything right according to me, so she may as well give up.

3. I tend not to look in her eyes when she is talking. In fact, when she's talking, my mind wanders off, so of course, I don't really know what she's saying. She has to conclude that I don't care, so why should she?

4. We have not hugged in a long time, let alone kissed, so she draws the conclusion that if I don't care, why should she?

5. My wife is grieving over her mother's death which she just can't get over I'm not too sympathetic because I didn't like her mother. Maybe that makes her feel unloved or unloving.

See how it works? You have to step into your spouse's shoes to see the world from her point of view. When you do that, you realize that maybe you can make positive changes which will encourage the right steps forward in your wife and that has the power to turn the relationship around.

That's powerful!

Now, consider the husband who is always criticizing you. How can you see potential in him? There is an answer in spite of how bad it looks. Here is step 1 for your list:

1. He grew up in a negative home where he never learned to think or speak positively so he feels depressed all the time and his criticism is just a symptom of that. He needs to learn how to see the world in a better light.

Now, you try to find four more.

As you can see, this wife must tap into inner strength to recognize that her critical husband needs help. Instead of feeling like a victim, she can encourage him to make some changes. Having empowered herself by doing the B.O.D., she will recognize that the problem is his, not hers. Once she stops being hurt and frustrated with him, the marriage will improve automatically. She might also encourage him to seek counseling with the right professional which will raise the odds of success even more.

Use the B.O.D exercise to help you see the potential in the people you love and you will be surprised how powerful that is in improving your relationship.

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