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Marriage is a “vulnerability hangover”

Marriage is like one, big “vulnerability hangover”, especially for guys. 
“I do” is saying in part, “I do want you to be the one to reveal my true self to. The one I’ll share my dreams and desires and needs with.”


And the revealing and unraveling doesn’t happen all at once. 
The love and safety doesn’t come in the act of being vulnerable – that’s just being brave – it comes in the response.


Pretty scary but worth it. 


It helps to learn how to listen, how to hold space, to accept without the knee jerk reaction to fix or change your spouse.

Be Yourself

You don’t have to be an extrovert to be successful.
You don’t have to have a degree to minister to others.
You don’t have to be a preacher to be a pastor.
You don’t have to be smarter, or younger, or prettier.

You do have to be hopeful.
You do have to be passionate.
You do have to work hard.
You do have to be brave.

You do absolutely have to be yourself.

Advice for young dads

Facebook reminded me, I wrote this four years ago today.
Little did I know I’d need to follow my own advice.

When you write for others, you write for yourself.
When I write for dads, I write for my kids and myself.

One bit of advice for young dads: learn how to dance!

Maybe you’re like me and some times daydream of times you’ll have to step up and come through for your daughters in some way
One thing I almost guarantee she’ll do when she’s older is ask you to dance.
Not the spastic punch dancing to Raffi or kids songs that you might do at playtime or in the kitchen but the kind of dancing where you hold out your arms and she reaches up and put hers on yours. You put one on her waist and you have to look into her eyes while not stepping on her toes.
This is far more likely than needing to arm yourself to track down bad guys and rescue her from them or even answering a call to come fix a flat tire.
But those seem doable, not dancing.
If your gut reaction to this suggestion is “Anything but that! I’d rather get dipped in acid and crawl through broken glass!”, then you are exactly the dude who needs this because the more you feel uncomfortable with that, the more likely it is doing this will be meaningful to your girl.


My baby recently wanted to dance with somebody, I sent her brother out to do the job (because he’s a pretty good dancer). For whatever reason, he wasn’t feeling it.
Those brief moments watching her alone, just waiting, seemed like forever.
I’m glad he didn’t dance with her because I eventually did. It was my job and my privilege. My joy.
I felt self-conscious and awkward until I focused on her.
It was great. Really great.
It was also too short because the song ended too soon, before I could really figure out what we were doing with our feet.
I just wish I had been ready sooner, I wish she hadn’t had a moment of doubt or waiting.
So, I hope when you say “I’d do anything for her”‘ as uncomfortable as it might make you, that you’ll include dancing.
It’ll be worth it.

A few ideas for the day after Valentine’s Day

Hi guys!

Long time no blog here.

I hope you had a great Valentine’s Day!
I had a full day in the counseling office then enjoyed some dessert with my family and the start of a movie.

Valentine’s Day can be a lot of fun but after the chocolate and flowers and the reminder to focus on romance and your significant other, what’s next?

Here’s a few blogs I’ve done on marriage that I wrote for my church. I think they can be helpful even if you’re single too, they’re on being loved and the twists and turns of life.

I hope they’ll encourage you to continue to grow closer, improve your communication and problem-solving in your relationships.

Below I’ve also including a month of short videos on marriage that I did for my friends on Facebook.

https://clearcreekpdx.com/2018/how-god-can-strengthen-and-save-your-marriage/
https://clearcreekpdx.com/2018/how-god-can-strengthen-and-save-your-marriage-part-2/
https://clearcreekpdx.com/2019/a-blog-in-three-rich-mullins-songs/

Short Videos on Marriage and Communication

On Muscle Memory and Retraining Habits.

One of the challenges with fighting is it’s both the most natural and unnatural thing to do in the world. It’s natural to want to hit somebody when you’re angry. It’s not natural to throw an effective punch. It’s natural to want to want to defend yourself when someone is trying to punch you. But it’s not natural to defend yourself the way a mixed martial artist or a boxer defense against punches.

At a high-level, martial artists don’t try to defend punches by blocking. They defend by getting closer and keeping their eyes open. It’s natural to turn away. It’s natural to stay out of harm’s way. It’s normal to withdraw. So whether it’s defense or doing a proper armbar, martial arts is about training responses, training habits that are unnatural until they become natural. You do this be repetition, hundreds even thousands of them over hours and hours, years and years of training to develop muscle memory. You develop movement without thought. It makes you faster, more effective. You train reflexes, that don’t involve your higher conscious part of your brain.

One problem that can arise is sometimes you have to unlearn muscle memory. You have to unlearn habits that aren’t effective, that don’t work or aren’t as effective. In family and in relationships you can develop mental, emotional and behavioral habits in response to certain situations. And a vital task in healthy relationships, marriage and parenting is identifying negative communication, behaviors and relational habits that you learned from your family of origin or other experiences and relationships. And then develop new habits and patterns and form new emotional muscle memory.

It takes hard work, lots of it. It takes repetition and consistency. It takes humility and lots of problem-solving and experimenting, It also takes determination and support to stick with it because under stress we revert to our old habits.

Happy Valentine’s Day 2018

Romantic. Sweet. Innocent. Fun. Silly. Sexy. Sentimental.
 
Painful. Annoying. Poignant. Bittersweet. Sad. Lonely.
 
Today can be all those things.
 
What I like about today is that it makes us think about our relationships – who do we love and who loves us.
And it opens our hearts to consider what love really is.
 
What makes us happy?
What brings us real joy?
 
And these questions ultimately make us think about
our story so far,
what brings us meaning and life,
where we place our hope and faith.

For fearful anxious parents

It’s hard to give up fear because in many ways fear can keep your kids safe.

Fear can keep you safe.

The problem with fear is that trust can’t exist in an environment of fear. And there can not be true connection and intimacy without trust.

There is a different way to keep yourself safe. And that’s wisdom, strength, and connection.

Yes, I want my kids to be safe and I want to protect them when they’re little. But as are growing up, and when they’re all grown up, I actually want them to shed safety.
I want them to be brave.
I want them to live like warriors.

Parenting and Identity

Parenting is more about your best behavior than your kids’.
And realizing it’s not about behavior ultimately.
 
It’s about identity.
 
You can’t create a great story for your family, your marriage – you can’t be heroic in the face of your challenges – without facing and knowing your backstory.
 
You can’t get to “this is us”, without discovering “this is me”.

I went to a marriage counseling training last week, one of the interventions we learned was how to work through the aftermath of a fight.

One of the keys, besides self-awareness of feelings and listening well, was talking about a memory, a story from your past that brought up those same feelings.

It helps us identify our triggers, it helps us become more aware of how we react.
“None of us get out of childhood without a few crazy buttons.” – John Gottman.
When we understand this, we gain more self-control, we are able to stay calmer and objective (we prevent getting flooded).
This helps us problem-solve, brainstorm, compromise, collaborate and come to agreements more easily because we aren’t overwhelmed (and overwhelming our kids) with our frustration, grumpiness, anger or even rage.
We are able to give our best selves to our family.

Fighting for Your Marriage: Lessons From The Zombie Apocalypse

My clinical supervisor and mentor once told me this about marriage:
Make sure you don’t bury them [hurt/resentments] alive.
It inspired these lessons from zombie hunting, for reanimating your marriage when it isn’t quite dead but isn’t quite alive.

One way to fight for your marriage is learning how to kill zombies.

The zombies of betrayal, disappointment, bitterness, old patterns, unforgiveness.

Here are few ways surviving the zombie apocalypse can help you fight for your marriage.

1) The zombies are the zombies, not your spouse so don’t take the hatchet to each other’s knees.
2) Sharpen each other’s machetes and fill each other’s chainsaws with gas every day.
3) Find ways to the kill the zombies dead, once and for all.  If you bury them alive they spawn and come back worse than ever.
4) Guttural language, listless shuffle, glassy eyes, aimless wandering…your husband may look like a zombie at times but don’t kill him, he may just be tired after work.
5) The zombies are relentless so remember to have fun while blowing gaping holes in them.  There’s always comic relief needed at some point.
6) If you escape the clutches of the zombie horde but leave your spouse behind to be overrun, in the end, you still lose.
7) Bringing up the past is the toxic fluorescent green sludge that reanimates the zombies, get rid of that ASAP!
8) Nurse each other’s wounds.   You can’t always be in fight-or-flight mode.  At some point, you have to pull back from the zombie horde.  Besides humor, the zombies can steal away empathy. When you’re constantly under stress, you lose your ability to think of anything but survival.  You may lose your ability to find solace in each other. So, find that pause in the you-against-the-world and care for each other’s wounds. Who knows with that intimacy and vulnerability you might even get naked and reconnect with a love scene in the middle of the war.
9) Last one: A zombie’s Never Say Die attitude is worth imitating in pursuing an awesome marriage.

What would you add?

A quick tip for stress and marriage

A quick tip for dealing with the impact of stress on marriage.

When life gets hard,

From employment and financial stress

From parenting struggles and sleep deprivation

From busy schedules or illness

From struggling with anxiety or depression

It makes marriage harder in a few ways:

We have different triggers. Different things upset us or cause us stress.

We express being stressed differently. We react differently.

You might ramp up.  Your spouse may shut down.

We manage and cope with stress differently.

You may want to binge on Netflix.  Your spouse may cope with shopping.

The differences all serve to make us feel more alone, misunderstood, overwhelmed.

They amplify the stress because it increases the negative self-talk, paranoia even and messages that

We aren’t enough.

This isn’t working.

We are broken.

We are failing.

We start to believe we’ll end up rejected or even abandoned.

Here’s one thing that can help: remembering

So much of marriage counseling is remembering.

Remember when your spouse looked up to you?

Remember when your spouse made you laugh?

Remember when your spouse was patient and gracious?

When they wanted to get to know you, talk for hours

When they took the time understand you?

Remember when it was hard not to be obnoxious about public displays of affection?

Remember when you did those things for them?

“That was in the past” you might say, how does that help?

Especially in the middle of the stress, or on the other side of the hurt and distance.

Well, remembering the past can give you hope for the future.

And a marriage without hope feels dead.

Remembering the past helps you remember what’s possible.

Not only what’s possible but what was real for you.

It helps you remember what could be real again.

If you can just find away to reconnect and work through it together, instead of on your own.

Find a way to remember together.