Part of healing a marriage in distress is self-work. By shifting your focus inward rather than at your spouse a couple will instantly notice some descalation. A focus on your spouse is actually a focus on your pain, only this tactic of dealing with the pain typically causes more pain. Here’s why, you don’t know why it hurts, you just know it hurts. Your brain is telling you that if you want to survive the person doing the hurting needs to be stopped. To make it even worse the person doing the hurting is your spouse and is coded in your brain as someone who is supposed to be safe. It’s a recipe for panic.

Marriage work is self-work, it has to be, there is no way out of it. All relationships require self-work but none so much as marriage. You should be paying attention to what is happening between you and your spouse, but you should also be looking within. Looking within, just like looking “between,” begins with noticing. The best time to do this noticing may be during or after a conflict, usually during a conflict a softer more vulnerable part of self has been poked at and out of protection of this part of you, a “bear” can arise. Noticing involves slowing down the chain of events within us, similar to the way you slow things down in the cycle between you. What are you looking for when you slow things down?? Three very important things, let’s look at them.