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Love
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Enriched is the woman; man; child, who…
02 Feb 2006 by Rod Smith / 2 Comments
Woman
1. Enriched is the woman who knows she never has to participate in sexual activity that she, herself, does not want; who knows that her body is her own and private temple which she shares, even in marriage, only when it is by her own sacred and deliberate choice.
2. Enriched is the woman who does not lose herself in her marriage, or to motherhood, and in taking care of her family, but is able to develop a strong sense of self even while being a loving wife, mother and friend.
3. Enriched is the woman who does not put up with poor manners (being taken for granted, being sworn at, being victimized both verbally and physically) from anyone: not husband, children, in-laws, siblings, or her parents, but who appropriately, and sufficiently values herself and therefore does not tolerate those who do not treat her very well.
4. Enriched is the woman who lives above manipulation, domination and intimidation; whose relationships are pure and open, and within which she maintains a strong and valued voice.
Man
1. Enriched is the man who treats others with kindness beyond their deserving. He is generous with family and strangers and he seeks the highest good for all, knowing that the wisdom he exercises in his daily life positively impacts people around him. He regards faithfulness with high regard. The very thought of betraying his family by committing some moral indiscretion deeply unsettles his peace.
2. Enriched is the man who does not play “one-up” games. He applauds the success of others. He takes no delight in the hardships, losses, or pain others endure. He is more committed to being patient, kind and hardworking, than he is committed to being rich or to displaying symbols of success.
3. Enriched is the man who would rather lose at a sporting event than he would cheat in order to appear to have won. While he can be fiercely competitive and loves to win, he watches his behavior, treasuring his valued reputation.
4. Enriched is the man who can drink without becoming drunk; enjoy good humor without resorting to the ridicule of others.
5. Enriched is the man who pauses momentarily, quite regularly, in order to acknowledge his joy at being a man. He treasures his role as one who carries love, truth and kindness to all within his circle of influence.
6. Enriched is the man who can delay gratification in all areas of his life. He does not crave gratification when is is at the cost of damaging his relationships, his finances or his integrity.
Child
1. Enriched is the child who has never seen a parent drunk, or a parent vent their anger, use profanity, drive aggressively, behave violently, or use racial slurs.
2. Enriched is the child who does not have to worry about a gambling father wasting necessary family resources, or worry that a mother might not return home after a night on the town.
3. Enriched is the child who hears parents laughing with each other both day and night, and who hears the sounds of joy and celebration expressed by his parents.
4. Enriched is the child whose family puts off the TV for weeks on end, who takes walks with his family, who cooks meals from scratch with his family.
5. Enriched is the child whose family reads novels and who sit around a table discussing what each person is reading.
6. Enriched is the child who has a peaceful home where the only bickering is about who is funniest.
7. Enriched is child who hears “I love you” from a caring, non-possessive parents whom the child knows, expect nothing in return.
8. Enriched in the child who rests peacefully each night in a warm safe bed.
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Living with “packed bags”…
02 Feb 2006 by Rod Smith / No Comments
Some troubled couples seeking therapy are highly motivated. They are willing to do whatever it takes to rediscover each other. They are each ready to address their conflicts, hurts, disappointment or whatever it is that drives them to professional help. Other couples, by the time they call a therapist, have already reached a point of such distraction that divorce seems to be their only viable option.
Both of these couples can be helped. People can overcome seemingly impossible obstacles, and discover each other afresh, if they were willing to learn and willing to act upon very basic, tried principles of healthy relationships.
Then, and very sadly, some couples seek therapy when one person is already living with packed bags. The spouse has already “checked out” of the marriage, is already resigned to the failure of the relationship, yet agrees therapy in order to say that he or she tried to get help but help didn’t work. This is of course, is a waste of everyone’s time.
The motivated couple, and the desperate couple, are each, closer to resolution and to negotiating a working, loving marriage, than is a couple where one of the partners is already living with packed bags.
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Our sex life is boring
01 Feb 2006 by Rod Smith / 1 Comment
“My husband and I were happy until the birth of our son when our relationship changed. After our son was born he started cheating, lying, and drinking everyday. We spent less time together than we used to. I thought we were friends, but now it feels like we are distant cousins. Our sex life is boring.”
Your future must seem dull and painfully endless! While I am sorry that you are victim to your husband’s cruel behavior, I am more sorry for your child who is witnessing a marriage he could hardly want to emulate.
Take up your life
Please read David Schnarch’s book entitled Passionate Marriage. I will warn you that it is the very best book on sex and relationships I have ever read. While it is graphically sexual, it is never pornographic. It is to be read as a whole, cover to cover, before judgments are issued on its worth.
The book outlines the journey of couples who have lives as miserable as you describe yours to be, and offers valuable keys for all marriages and relationships.
I have gotten into trouble for recommending this book to couples, not only because it promotes very strong and healthy sex lives, but because it challenges people to live full, complete and adventurous lives.
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The Open Hand – a metaphor for love, community and healing
31 Jan 2006 by Rod Smith / 6 Comments
Open your hand using all your strength. Stretch your fingers. Allow the lines on your palm to feel as though they might tear apart. Study the contours, colors, ridges and valleys, joints, dents and spaces. Push, pull, and rub. Move your fingers through their paces: together, apart, back, forward, curved, strained and relaxed, cooperative yet unique. Feel the texture and every curve. Touch the crevices. Spread your hand further, turn it at the wrist, examine and compare patterns from every angle. Here are pieces of yourself you might never have studied.
I will listen to you, and make time for you if you'd like to talk.
Your hands are your constant companions. They have met the needs of others, pioneered romantic moments and worn rings of commitment. They are the way your heart leaves fingerprints, the eyes at the end of your arms. Hands reflect a person’s being and are the front line agents of your life. If eyes are said to be the windows of a soul, hands express the soul.
Hold other people with your hand thoroughly open. Allow them to know the warmth and welcome of your hand, investigate its curves and benefit from its scars. Invite others to follow the lines into the fabric of your life and see the risks you have taken and the adventures that are yours. Allow them to wrestle and rest, search, see and speak. Let them stay; let them go, but let them find your hand always open.
The Open Hand of friendship, at its widest span, is most rewarding, most challenging and most painful for it enduringly acknowledges the freedom of other people while choosing not to close upon, turn on, coerce or manipulate others. In such friendships, expectations and disappointments become minimal and the reward is freedom. As others determine a unique pace within your open hand, they will see freedom and possibly embrace their own with excitement and pleasure.
Openhanded people do not attempt to “fix” others, change or control them even for their own “good.” Rather each person is given freedom to learn about life in his own way. Openhanded people, instead, express kindly and truthfully what they think and feel, when asked, knowing even in the asking, others might not be interested or willing to learn from their mistakes, successes or life stories.
The Open Hand is not naive. It is willing to trust, while understanding and accepting that no person is all good or all bad, and that all behavior has meaning. The Open Hand is convinced it cannot change others; it cannot see or think or feel or believe or love or see for others, but trusts people to know what is good themselves. It will not strong-arm, pursue or even attempt to convince another because it has little investment in being right, winning or competing. Here is offered a core-freedom of the deepest and most profound nature: allowing others to live without guilt, shame and expectation.
Further, the Open Hand offers oneself freedom that extends to one’s memories, ambitions, failures and successes. This allows for growth of enduring intimacy, greater personal responsibility, authentic autonomy and the possibility of meaningful relationships with others.
In the discovery of a closed hand, even at the end of your own arm, do not try to pry it open. Be gentle. Allow it to test the risky waters of freedom. As it is accustomed to being closed and fist-like, it will not be easily or forcefully opened. So let the closed-handed do their own releasing and trusting, little by little, and in their own time and manner. When openhanded people meet, lives connect in trust, freedom and communion. Community is set in motion. Creativity is encouraged. Mutual support is freely given. Risks are shared. Lives are wrapped in the safety of shared adventure and individual endeavor all at the same time.
© Copyright 1998, Rod. E. Smith, MSMFT
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Is this the person you should marry?
29 Jan 2006 by Rod Smith / No Comments
If you are in love and feel you have met the person you want to marry, it would be wise to ask a few questions:
Does your relationship have the necessary ingredients required for permanence?
Are you courageous enough to ask if you will become a divorce statistic?
It takes courage to look at these kinds of issues when you are planning marriage. It seems disloyal or negative and most engaged couples avoid asking such questions. If your relationship cannot withstand the pressure of asking several penetrating questions it is unlikely it will survive the rigors of marriage, of childrearing, the long-term management of assets and finances and all else that is entailed in establishing and enduring stable family.
When you have gone to the expense of wedding preparations, it is very difficult to face family, friends and the future, and also express any doubts about your decision to marry. It is easier to get carried away by the love and the excitement that escalates around weddings, to believe that love will be enough to carry the day and be sufficient to make possible, a lifetime of shared happiness. Keep in mind that love really is blind.
Please consider some of the following:
1. Unless there is a very unusual agenda, like immigration possibilities, every couple thinks and feels “in love” when planning a wedding. Couples that have endured bitter divorces, at one time, said they were “in love.” Love, alone, will not sustain a marriage.
2. If, within this relationship, you have had ever to engage in sex, or a sexual activity you did not want, then this is not a good sign at all. No person should ever be expected, at any time, to engage in any sexual activities that they, themselves, do not welcome and want. If you ever have sex you do not want for the sake of the other person it is a signal that all is not well within the relationship.
3. Family history (for both families) over the last three or four generations will wield a more a powerful influence over your marriage than you might be willing to admit. Family history seldom remains silent. If your prospective spouse has gaps in his or her history with a “keep out” sign warning you from trying to better know his or her history better, these are matters for deep concern. Like it or not, sharing a future will involve sharing the past.
4. What you do know about each other is helpful and useful. What you do not know is probably more powerful, likely to have a greater impact upon your marriage. It is not what we do tell each other but rather what we do not tell each other that can powerfully to modify people’s futures. What we keep secret fashions our lives more than what we make known. This said, it is also important to understand that not everything has to be told.
5. While love, and feelings of love are very important, the skills of negotiation, the ability to be kind and honest, the capacity to stand on one’s own two feet, are probably more useful in maintaining a successful marriage.
6. Planning for marriage and designing a wedding is enough to make people “not themselves.”
7. It takes many years to fall (I love that word – giving the suggestion that meeting someone and finding love is something that happens to a person and is totally beyond their power to control) in love, and the love you feel for your spouse-to-be will be very different from what you will feel in the future.
8. Count the number of marriages and remarriages on both sides of each family (include aunts, uncles, step, half and every combination). Total the number of divorces within the same group of people. If the number of divorces total one third of the marriages, this is a red flag worthy of note.
9. If it is difficult to engage your prospective wife or husband in an adult manner about any one of the following: finances, sex, children, time apart, time with friends, extended family, alcohol, faith, further education, issues of race and politics, then you might find marriage to each other difficult.
10. If it feels as if one person is doing all the work (in any area of your relationship) you have cause for concern.
11. If you have felt pushed (against you will) by your prospective spouse into saying things you do not believe, doing things you’d rather not do and siding with him or her when you’d rather not, then it is likely that you have agreed to a degree of control that will not always sit well with you. Such control will only increase after the wedding. Many prospective brides and grooms think a partner is controlling before the wedding because they do not yet have the “security” of the marriage. If she is controlling before the wedding it will only increase over time. A marriage certificate will not remove anyone’s feelings of insecurity.
12. If the wedding preparations had not gone as far as they have you’d call the wedding off. If getting married (the wedding day) has gotten more attention than being married (the next 50 years), this is cause for concern.
13. One or both of you has had a previous marriage and one or both of you cannot be civil to the former spouse.
14. If your future spouse is not paying child support or behaving in an honorable manner toward his or her children this is cause for deep concern. If a person doesn’t care for the children he or she already has he or she is as unlikely to be honorable to children yet born.
15. People whom you know well, and who have loved you well for many years, have tried to talk you out of getting married to this person.
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Verbal log-jam
When I was a boy I’d endlessly practice the fluent delivery of my name but it seldom flowed easily from my lips. As if it was new news to me, adults pointed out my stutter. Perhaps they thought I was beginning, at that precise moment, for the first time in my life to spit from the mouth, twist at the neck, jig my head back and forth trying to expel some inane statement log-jammed between my gut and my throat.
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Life in our beloved 122
If the inside of a house (outside, too, I suppose) is a metaphor of the lives of the people who live in it – which is something I once read somewhere – gosh, are we in trouble. Our house is a mess.
I consistently clean it room by room, thinking often of the legend that the Golden Gate Bridge that says there’s some guy constantly painting it. I feel for him. While I am sure the view is wonderful I must believe that the poor guy whose doing it daily from one end to the other must find the wind and the weather quite a challenge.
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Being a white South African can come with complications
Being a white South African reared under Apartheid is no simple matter. It permeated everything for me. While I do not pretend to have been a political activist, I was always cognizant that my privileges, simply a result of being born white, were unmerited, and most unfair especially when enjoyed at the expense of others who were not. I think this unsettling truth (for I took advantage of my station in life) was somewhat of a companion to me from the age of about six or seven.
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Location, location – remembering winter in August
We live very close to our school and church, so close we can hear the school bell from our kitchen and the church bells in my bedroom.
Sometimes we walk to both and we don’t see the car for days.
I like it. I like not having to get in and out of the car. I like not having to negotiate traffic, something as synonymous with life in the USA as Disney, Fast Food, and the Fourth of July.
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Ready to adopt?
If you wait until you are ready to adopt a child you never will because you will never be ready. The baby, and only the baby, will make you ready. Reading the right books will be helpful, but “ready” magically comes upon you when a real baby is sleeping in your arms or crying in the middle of the night. If you are not ready to change diapers – and I always am amused at the big deal about this non-issue – being unprepared will last only as long as a clean diaper.
Life inside the Smith household
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