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The Art of Keeping Marriage Healthy: Five Ways of Strengthening our Partnerships and Families

by Glennon May 09, 2010

1. Always work on Self
- Pay attention to and pursue your own life goals.
- Know your own sensitivities and take accountability for how your functioning effects the system.

Questions:
How much time do you spend thinking about yourself and your own life goals versus thinking about those of the people around you?

How does your functioning contribute to the current situation?

What does operating as your “best self” look like in this or any situation?

What are the distractions in your life that keep you from looking at you?

2. Create flexibility in the relationship that allows for different rates of growth and periods of non-growth.
Questions:
What does it look like to be supportive of change versus reactive to it?

What patterns in your relationship have become rigidly fixed?

3. Manage yourself around the inevitable differences rather than react, fix, or try to change them in your partner.
Questions:
What are the major differences of opinions between you?

What would it look like to manage yourselves around those differences rather than waiting for one to agree with the other?

How would the difference change or shift if there was no solution?

4. Be aware of how the triangles work. Where do the issues really belong?
Questions:
What triangles are you involved in right now?

Where in your life are you taking on things that don’t belong to you?

What is the fear associated with moving toward the issue/person directly?

5. View all challenges as learning opportunities. Forgive past hurts by broadening your perspective of your partner.
Questions:
Are there areas of tension that repeatedly come up in your relationship? What are they?

By looking at each other’s family histories, what might, from the past, contribute to your partners current functioning?

 

Filed under Bowen family systems theory, Family

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