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Couples On The Brink Of Divorce -- Can This Marriage Be Saved?
After more than a decade of providing marital and family counseling, Shaw now declares her primary professional goal as: "lowering the staggering divorce rate in America — one couple at a time." Her method, which she refers to as "Power to Thrive (tm) Marital Reconciliation Therapy," allows couples to safely delve into the painful and often toxic patterns from the past, and explore what is necessary to move beyond it. She walks clients through the process of letting go of fears and resentments, and coaches them to learn and practice authentic and lasting forgiveness. Once this has occured, new possibilities begin to emerge in the marriage that were never previously available. Love that the couple once thought was forever lost, emerges more powerfully than ever. Commenting on this process, Liza says, "When people are no longer being run by fear and resentment, blame and guilt, relationships can finally become what they have never been before."
This uplifting and informative interview provides people in even the most seemingly hopeless marriages, an opportunity to consider new possibilities for the future. It makes a strong case to couples who have taken that most sacred of vows, not to give up on their marriage without learning how not to fight, and how to actually have the marriage they have always wanted.
Download | Duration: 00:29:04
Learning Assertiveness -- Stay Happily Married Interview with Lee Rosen
Download | Duration: 00:32:56
What Prepares You for the "Possibilities" of Parenthood?
If you are waiting to be “ready” to have children, you’ll never end up having them. It turns out, NOBODY is ever actually ready for children. Even when we think we are… we have read all the "What to Expect" books, and completed the prenatal classes like good parents-to-be… nothing could possibly prepare us for this strange and demanding new frontier. When the long-awaited baby finally arrives, we find ourselves confounded... confronting questions we are most likely too ashamed to admit, such as "what have I gotten myself into?" and “Is it too late to change my mind?” In some of the very darkest moments, we are clutching at the strands of sanity in an endless walking-coma of sleep-deprivation, searching for the "rewind" button on our lives.
Every good parent accuses themselves on more than one occasion, of various “horrible-parent” indictments as they entertain secret, unimaginable thoughts like "my life was infinitely better before this little ball of needs, demands and bodily fluids showed up in my world," and "will I ever be free from this life-sucking destroyer of clear and uninterrupted thought again?!" Every good parent spends at least a little time wondering where to find the "Returns" counter in this miserable department store – eager to trade in the diaper bag, burp cloths, and especially the screaming, blow-out pooping, vomiting, drooling, shrieking, wriggling little monster, for getting our pre-baby body back and one 8-hour chunk of uninterrupted sleep. Come on, parents, it's finally safe to admit it. Do the next generation of parents the favor we never got and let's all finally come clean.
Parenthood is the only thing that makes parents ready for parenthood. It's the only thing that ever could.
It is the "doing" of parenthood — the practice, that teaches us how to do it. We could even have years of preparatory training with real, living, breathing and pooping babies, but it would never, ever prepare us for even one day of caring for our own. Our own baby looks like us and our partner, who we generally love most of the time (unless it's 4 a.m. and they are snoring through a difficult feeding and changing session. Love is just plain hard to conjure then.
Our own baby has a smell that releases animal instincts in us, causing the "fight or flight" response at that difficult feeding (Ostensibly instilled in us many thousands of years ago, in case a Sabertooth Tiger might try to devour it, but today, more likely triggered by baby’s unsoothable gas-pains), keeping our desperately-exhausted selves from falling back to sleep even after the baby has finally nuzzled back down. These same instincts cause waves of endorphin-highs the likes of which we could never get with any drug on the planet, as we nourish him with milk and warm him with some skin-to-skin contact in the inevitable quieter, more tender moments.
Our own baby triggers a primal experience of Unconditional Love so complete — until we have this experience, we just cannot comprehend it. There is simply no prior experience to have a context with which to understand it. After our newborn is lying so perfectly in our arms, we laugh at ourselves that we ever referred to our pets as our “children.” And we laugh at ourselves that we ever thought we could prepare for anything in life — especially this.
Once we finally become parents, we begin to realize that no other Love has ever actually been complete. The closest thing we could have come to previously was the Love we had felt for our parents... But after having a child, we discover how self-centered the Love for our parents had actually always been. We realize, in fact, how self-motivated everything in our life had always ever been in our pre-baby lives. And we realize that there was never anything wrong with this. It was by design, really; we just hadn’t had anything in our life up to that point requiring such utter selflessness. And perhaps for the first time, we even get the gift of seeing that our parents generally did the best they could with what they had as we attempt to take on the same grueling and difficult tasks.
Until we experience the crucible of caring for our own tiny, vulnerable and perfect little bundle of protoplasm, we just don't know the fullness of our own Compassion. We don't know our own heart's capacity to so completely pour itself into another, while gaining absolutely *nothing* back in that moment except the satisfaction of fulfilling an immediate need and “being there.” Before we became a parent, we thought that all of this would be a really "bad" thing – just too hard, too miserable, too exhausting. And it really IS all of those things. But after we had children, we understood that these very experiences were the absolute necessity required in the process of burning away the chaff — of growing our heart and cracking it wide open, and allowing more God into it than we have ever known possible. And then, once our heart expanded in this way, it had the ability to overflow into everyone, everywhere. We became capable of Loving as we had never been able, before we practiced – and learned – to unconditionally Love, through our child.
Before we enter the realm of Pure-Possibility that exists inside the gaze of our newborn baby's eyes, we don't know what we don't know about Possibility itself. We have never understood our total completeness before that moment – until we fully comprehend that on the very day WE were born, WE, TOO, HAD IT ALL... And we didn't know we had it. We never did. But we didn't need to know. Newborn babies have no need to know anything. They simply exist in a perfect "Being" state. And we were once just as perfectly "newborn" as the baby we hold in our arms.
Staring into the infinity of our newborn babies' eyes, we finally recognize that we haven't ever lost our capacity to exist purely in this "Being" state – our adult brains have merely forgotten how. We enter into it, and understand in one perfect instant that all along, it has been our "needing to know" that has made us forget our inborn capacity to simply "BE." It stirs in us, the instinct that enables our vulnerability, our need and desire to be cared for and loved by another. It is this instinct that allows us to give ourselves over to others completely – to allow them to hold us, to love us and to utterly pour themselves into US, with no requirement for anything to be given back in return. We enter the realm of Possibility in that moment with our babies, and we remember again at the very deepest level. Our precious and dependent little beings can bring us back to ourselves, if we only allow ourselves to remember.
Once we have this, we really "get it" on an experiential level, something very different from knowing – like the difference between tasting a fresh-from-the-vine strawberry and just hearing someone describe the taste – that certain difficulties become the very gateway to our salvation. And that the light and tender moments weigh far heavier than the heaviest-burdened moments in our lives. We "get" how completely surrounded by Love we have been, all along, and that we still are. We get this, if we allow ourselves to.
We can't help but get God all over us as we are channeling love through us, by tending to the needs of our child. In this world, there is no more efficient way to become this channel than selflesssly and unconditionally caring for a child. It is the closest we ever get to actually Being God.
And if someone doesn't choose to experience parenthood in this life, that's perfect too. I think God was infinitely merciful when he instilled in us the "blind spot" mechanism in our brain — the phenomenon of not knowing what we don't know. This way, humans can't know what they are missing when they haven't had the experience. And I can only speak from my own experience, of the difference being a parent has made in my life. For me, the difference that has made all the difference in my life, has been the opportunity to dwell in this realm of Possibility, experiencing the "Now" with my beautiful children –something I previously "didn't know I didn't know," and this has forever expanded my experience of being human.
Nothing thrusts us more directly into the realm of Pure Possibility than caring for a child.
A New Paradigm for Relationships
Download | Duration: 00:41:48
Predicting the Future: Why It Should Be Left Up To The Psychics
The interactions between these two people were brittle with acrimony. Even in ten years of private practice, I had never experienced such brutal and toxic hostility. The wife resented her husband's very existence, huffing, puffing and scoffing at every word he had the insolence to articulate. The husband described his despair over yet another failed marriage and his dread over the prospect of having to survive a second divorce. They each spent most of our first hour together casting blame, defending their own positions, and refusing to consider the other's perspective as even potentially valid. As I said, a pretty bleak situation.
But as I always do with the couples who find themselves slumped down on my couch (or in this case, my two separate couches), I began our work together with this question: "Are you willing to put aside the discussion regarding divorce for a distinct period of time, during which you would each wholly commit yourselves to exploring whatever might need to be explored, to resolve the anger and resentment that has obviously poisoned any opportunity for the two of you to even be in the same room with each other?"
They hemmed and hawwed. They presented me with all of their reasons for their mistrust of the other and their total lack of ability to believe in the possibility of a future worth living out together. And after I had spent enough time building a rapport with each one, I challenged them to consider an important reality: they would be in each others' lives forever, thanks to the four dependent little beings they brought into the world together, who were anxiously waiting to be picked up at the babysitter's house. I asked them to imagine what the future would look like together — married OR divorced — if they continued to do more of the same with each other. I suggested that if they decided to work with me, they would need to have willingness to let go absolutely, of the need to try and "predict the future" about their relationship, since the only thing they would have to base their predictions on would be the past — and we knew where THAT led them — right onto a Marriage Therapist's couches! They surprised me, and agreed to take the chance. I remember the moment vividly when the wife looked up at me and said, "Liza, I want to know I tried everything for my kids' sake. If I don't try this, I will always wonder if I could have done something to prevent the pain I know they will go through if we get divorced." At this, the husband was able to suddenly lighten up, and responded, "Well shoot, we know how to do 'this' already. There really is very little risk. I mean, if it doesn't work out, we can always just go back to this." They left my office with a commitment. It was a start.
Fast forward to now. We have waded through months of intense and usually-grueling weekly therapy sessions, and I must now admit that this couple has completely dumbfounded me beyond all of my wildest imaginings. They have courageously unravelled a colossal amount of pain, disappointments, miscommunications, broken agreements, resentments and unfulfilled expectations. Through their generous willingness to risk, I have had the profound privelege of coaching them through learning to interrupt and eventually halt the lethal communication patterns that had them so paralyzed on that first day. It has been mind-numbingly hard work for them at times, and I am consistently awestruck by their persistence. In the last few weeks, this couple who only six months earlier faced a highly predictable future of vindictive court battles, custody fights, visitation schedules and consequentially nasty step-family fallout, has accomplished the Miraculous. They saved their marriage.
Recently, the wife staggered me with a report they are having the best sex she has ever had in her life! With a devlish smile, she described the emotional and physical intimacy, and subsequent eroticism that has sprung up out of nowhere. She described that her husband, who has never been a verbally expressive person, now regularly communicates his gratitude for her, his admiration of her beauty, and his ongoing devotion to her. They appear to be falling in love, ostensibly for the very first time. And the Love that is now possible, on the other side of the abyss they have managed to claw their way out of, is a Love that could never have been possible before. She explained that she never believed this kind of Love was possible with any man — but especially not with the man she had been so angry with on the day they first met me. She also acknowledged that this new way of being together is obviously very tenuous, as it is so new and because they have a lot more years of practice, as she put it, "doing it the crazy way." So it will take constant vigilance and continued hard work to continue building this new life together. And she recognized that. As she described the way her children are responding to the love and fulfillment that is finally present in her once-chaotic home, I did not even try to hide my tears. The hard work this couple courageously took on in therapy made it possible for them to learn new ways of communicating and "being with" each other. Prior to this, those children had been doomed to a future of "more of the same" communication breakdowns, hurt feelings, and dysfunctional relationship patterns — whether or not their parents reconciled their marriage. Now, they had a chance. Today was a day that defined my career... My purpose, fulfilled.
But if the future for this couple had been left up to the ordinary, predictable world, what is occuring in this family's life today would never have been possible. Today, I truly know the impact that a therapist's own position on what's possible for a marriage can have on the future of a family. Thank God I am not a betting woman. And cheers to Possibility...
Preventing Unnecessary Divorce
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