Part 5 (Prior post: Men, Intimacy and Patterns)
Judgment generates trouble in a marital relationship.
You may have a strong need to view yourself as right and your spouse as wrong.
You judge his behavior and thoughts as being either acceptable or unacceptable. There may be a little grey area.
Of course you do the same thing to yourself: you are either right or wrong, and you most likely detest the part that is wrong, but may not admit it. Tension builds and soon this spills into your relationship.
Of all the people I’ve worked with intensively over the past decades, this is the most difficult pattern to break. There is a rigidity that is tightly held.
Is this you? We all have a part of this pattern, since we are taught from an early age to do the “right thing.”
Unfortunately we weren’t always told the reason, or over arching pattern of life, why that particular behavior was “right” or acceptable and preferred.
Discovering the coping pattern of your husband, choosing that pattern out of many, helps diminish the need to judge, be right or declare him wrong – and thereby lessens the tension.
One reader stated:
It had “bullet” behavior patterns that are at some level difficult to see in yourself or others in a clinical manner. It kind of neutralizes and takes the judgmental aspect of the behavior down to a workable level.
1 thought on “Men, Intimacy and Judgment”
That is totally me. I was so frustrated because my feelings were not being validated. I felt so helpless and hopeless like I was a victim of circumstance. I wondered why he was so unreasonable and I couldn’t fathom why he just couldn’t do the ‘right’ thing. Since reading this I feel a sense of relief and see his perspective as one of many albeit different to mine. I choose not to judge his actions so much but see the patterns of behaviour and a way he relates to the world. I totally get why I don’t need to fix him and that my work is limited to my locus of control – myself.