Something’s gotta give

About, Relationship Design

The Christmas season and the start of a new year can be filled with tons of pressure. The new year could also be the beginning of something great.
Perhaps there’s been a chronic tension in your life or your marriage for months, the Holidays and time with family can cause things to erupt.
You’ve been co-existing for a while together, now with family coming into the picture, you’re possibly having to “put on a show,” as if everything’s okay.
Only, everything’s not okay. It downright sucks.
It may not be to the level of divorce or separating, but you don’t want the relationship to continue the way it is.
Or maybe things are so bad you, or your spouse, have been having serious thoughts of ending the marriage. But it’s not that easy to simply chuck it all. You’ve built a life together. You own a lot of things. And then there’s the kids.
If you’d like to take some steps forward in 2011, you’ll have many opportunities. One of which is this:
Blow Up My Marriage will be opening its doors again for the winter session.
If you’re not sure what this class is, it’s a radically different way to view what goes on in marriage.
You can read more details here.
Here’s what a couple of prior class participants say about this course:
I have not been an active participant in the forums but I have been keeping up with the readings, doing the assignments, and talking them through with my wife who is also taking the class.  When we started, we were in a very bad place.  My wife had been having an affair for almost a year, lying quite a bit, and I was in denial.  She suggested this class, and I was skeptical, especially since our experience with live counseling ended with her taking the affair to the next level.
Many of the first few lessons seemed like they had been written about me/us, and not for a general audience.  We had made so many of the textbook mistakes over the years.
But your class made us see these things, gave me the courage/forum to be much more open and honest about my feelings, wants, and needs, and after a truly cathartic conversation with my wife in September, we are in a far better place now.
And more importantly, we both know that we won’t always be in a great place, that it’s okay, and we now have the tools (individually and as a couple) to deal with that fact.  Thank you.
________
I want to thank you for the effort you have put into developing and offering this course. Although I did not participate in the forums as much as I really should have, I want you to know that the readings were insightful and very useful.
I also wanted to tell you that in the early weeks of this course I was feeling very uncomfortable. Many of the readings were making me think about aspects of my life that I really did not want to. By the mid point of the course I had been forced to confront these aspects, which were an addiction to pornography and a series of bad financial decisions and debts, all of which I had hidden from my wife for the better part of the last five years.
I used to think I was a decent person. After this course I have come to the conclusion that I am a mostly decent person, but I have some personal shortcomings that prevent me from truly being the decent person I should be, and that my wife and our kids deserve. In late-November I had finally reached the conclusion that I simply could not continue to hide these things from my wife and I could no longer afford, on an emotional level, to continue to keep these matters to myself.
So, I came clean. The following weeks were frosty, after all I have hurt her badly, but I have sought credit counseling and we now have a plan to deal with the financial problems. I also have counseling appointments booked to start dealing with the pornography addiction.
Really the financial debts are not large, less than $4,000, and even the pornography, though a major issue, is not insurmountable. The big obstacle I now have to face is regaining my wife’s trust after so many years of half-truths, hidden agendas and betrayal.
But, we are still together, I am being more open, and we are starting to talk about serious and emotional matters again. We both know that we can work together to survive this and become stronger because of it.
Ultimately, I am trying to say that if it was not the readings of this course forcing me to confront my problems, I would probably still be ignoring my issues and hiding them from my wife.
Thank you, I think you have helped me take the first step to being a better person.
________
The winter session of Blow Up My Marriage will begin mid January.
There are limited spots available. If you want to be sure and get in this session, sign up below to be added to the advance notice email list. You’ll get first dibs before the doors open to everyone else.

(photo source)