Create the relationship you want without leaving the one you're in
how to have a conscious marriage…Because the cost of not modeling healthy relationship skills
is even greater than the cost of divorce…
Can You Imagine What’s Possible?
Why healthy relationships require inner work
“But isn’t staying in an unhealthy marriage bad for my children?”
This is the question I asked when I began the journey that saved my marriage and kept my family together. I was afraid that it was bad for my kids to see my husband treat me “that way.” No matter how much I didn’t want to repeat my parents’ patterns and divorce, I thought I had no choice.
The problem with that question is that it presumes our half of the relationship equation isn’t part of the sum of the relationship. In other words, it presumes that our spouse’s behavior will be the same regardless of their environment and the people around them… and that ours will as well. It presumes that we are unchangeable, a rigid constant no matter what life throws at us.
So let me ask you if you became happier when you grew up and left your parents’ home? Did you feel freer, more independent, more loved? Did you change as a result of no longer being criticized, shamed, abused, or made to feel like you weren’t good enough just as you were?
Chances are you did. The person you became in the presence of the negative energy of your parents is not the real you. You adapted to feel safe. And while you may think you’re finding safety by leaving your husband, I invite you to consider the possibility that the person they are in your presence is not the real them… nor is the person you’re being in their presence the real you.
Your marriage is failing because you are two hurting humans looking to be accepted just as you are, for who you really are. The relationship created on the crumbling foundation of your childhood traumas IS ready to end, but the possibility of rebuilding a relationship on the rock of your authentic selves is available to you right now.
This journey to inner freedom, happiness, and relationship mastery is called The Quantum Love Journey. Keep reading to discover how it works to create a conscious marriage using the relationship you already have as a feedback loop to grow in self-awareness.
Step 1
Exploring Triggers
Step 2
Healing
Step 3
Energetic Coherence
Step 4
Intention Setting
Step 5
Connection & Empathy
Step 6
Communication
Step 1: Exploring Triggers
when you get upset, stop and get curious
The first step in The Quantum Love Journey is to explore your triggers, or the times you have an emotional reaction to something that is beyond the actual stimulus. So the fights with your husband, feeling sad after a conversation, being afraid your marriage is ready to end after your spouse’s bad behavior… These are all points in time where we are triggered to react.
That reaction is our cue that something deeper is at play. There is some part of us that wants to be witnessed or healed.
Recommended Reading: The Authentic Wife, Quantum Love, The Untethered Soul, The Conscious Parent, The Awakened Family, What Happened To You, The Four Agreements, Eastern Body Western Mind, How Toddlers Thrive, Unconditional Parenting, The Gift of Fear, Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters
Exploring Triggers: Using conflict and negative energy shifts as feedback, you’ll investigate the root cause of behavioral patterns you want to stop repeating in your life.
Step 2: Healing
Understand mentally, repair physically
Identifying the patterns, understanding the unconscious behavior that caused the pain, reparenting your inner child — all of these MENTAL healing steps are needed but healing must also happen at an ENERGETIC level as well.
When all of the old emotions and traumas are gone, you are guided by your free-flowing emotions in the present moment and can stay in home frequency (an energizing emotional space) around others.
Recommended Reading: The Authentic Wife, Quantum Love, Eastern Body Western Mind, The Seat of The Soul, A New Earth, The Language of Emotions, Mind to Matter, A Course in Weight Loss, Dying To Be Me
Healing: Fully feeling any repressed emotions, reparenting your inner child, forgiving yourself and others, and adopting new beliefs all serve to reprogram your body & brain, aided by regular meditation to help you take control of your thoughts.
Step 3: Energetic Coherence
Harnessing the powerful influence of your body’s energy
When you’re stressed, your brain is in high beta brainwaves. You can change these to more soothing alpha or delta brainwaves through meditation, which helps you get out of the primal part of your brain that reacts so you can choose a response instead.
Likewise, your heart moves into erratic heart rhythms under stress which depletes your energy AND causes your loved ones to match the erratic energy of your body.
Energetic coherence is a smooth, steady rhythm needed for optimal function. The best part, though, is that your loved ones will entrain to you or match your energy, so if you can regulate yourself, you’ll change how they feel as well!
Recommended Reading: The Science of HeartMath, Science of the Heart, The Authentic Wife, Quantum Love, The Language of Emotions, Mind to Matter, The Emotional Intelligence and Power of Our Hearts, The Gift of Fear, The Motherhood Evolution
Energetic Coherence: Using self-care to shift into an open-hearted state of love or a higher energetic state where life is happening by you. Ensuring your own needs are met.
Step 4: Intention Setting
Take Control Of What You’re Creating
Everything that happens in your life is created by an intention, even if you don’t choose it. It’s often our subconscious intentions running the show and we don’t even realize it. You see, intentions shape your actions, words, thoughts, energy, and behavior. If you have an intention to enjoy your dinner no matter what, you will!
If you have a subconscious intention that your marriage end, it will as well. 🙁
Choosing intentions moment by moment helps you take back your power as the creator of your life rather than being lived by it. You don’t have to know what the future holds, but you can have the intention right now to speak your truth, for example.
Recommended Reading: The Authentic Wife, Quantum Love, The Four Agreements, The Seat of The Soul, The Language of Emotions, Mind to Matter, The Spiritual Power of Empathy
Intention Setting: By identifying your intention, you’ll change your thoughts and behaviors to match the experience you want to have.
Step 5: Connection & Empathy
Connection before correction
Connection may seem to be the last thing you want right now, but its absence is preventing you from being heard the way you deserve.
When I realized that my fear of being open to connection was really the fear of being even further depleted emotionally, I was able to dive deeper into my self-care practices to have enough energy to even bring to the table. Then I realized that connection could actually be energizing in itself if I wasn’t in a state of resistance while attempting it.
It may surprise you, but the FBI actually uses connection and empathy in hostage negotiations to resolve them without anyone getting hurt. If nothing else, pretend you’re a hostage negotiator! 🙂
Recommended Reading: Quantum Love, The Language of Emotions, The Art of Empathy, Never Split The Difference, Boundaries* The Spiritual Power of Empathy, The Gift of Fear
Connection & Empathy: Actively listening without judgment while seeking to understand, with genuine care for the other and with solid energetic boundaries. Receiving care. Expressing care verbally or physically by giving from an overflow.
*This book condones spanking. I don’t! There are great lessons in it outside of the parenting sections.
What Kind of Partnership Do We Have and How Will it Affect Our Kids?
We can usually understand where we fall on the narcissist-empath spectrum by the dynamic in our relationship. Find your Partnership Style and how it affects your kids.
Step 6: Communication
Your power is your voice
While communication is often the first thing we want to tackle, just saying the right words is far less important than being fully present in the conversation, which we can’t do until we’ve visited the first five steps.
The most important thing I had to change was a shift from masculine energy-based demanding, criticizing, requesting, shaming, and passive-aggressive jabs to feminine energy-based observations and vulnerable shares about my true thoughts and feelings. I had to go from masculine analyzing and logic to feminine empathizing and being receptive to love.
Recommended Reading: The Art of Empathy, Never Split The Difference, Boundaries*, Nonviolent Communication, How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen, How To Win Friends & Influence People, Methods of Persuasion
Communication: Expressing your inner world without defensiveness or attack, but with the intention to be understood and to problem-solve. Verbalizing expectations for mutual agreement and informing others of boundary violations as needed.
*This book condones spanking. I don’t! There are great lessons in it outside of the parenting sections.
Here’s What I Know To Be True
About Love and Marriage
Every woman has the power to create the relationships she wants with the people already in her life
You have the power to change your relationship or your life by changing the role you play in it
You can't change a relationship by looking outward for someone to blame
All relationships are here to propel us forward in life--either through contrast (what we don't want) or collaboration
There's a fierce energy in all of us that's unleashed when we're closest to our SOUL truth. Likewise, we feel resistance when we're moving away from it
There's no outside influence more dangerous in a child's life than having a parent too busy to be PRESENT with them
Whatever you think you're protecting your child from is only an old wound you haven't faced yet
If you want to lose your way, you should ignore your feelings
Love is an energy, like a fire inside our chests. You alone can douse it and you alone can build it. It isn't transactional, dependent, or needy. It's a state of being.
We're no good to anyone else unless we take care of ourselves first.
We create each other. If you don't like your marriage, examine your role in it
We allow others to grow when we ask them for help
Is Divorce Really That Bad?
If you have children together, yes.
I always knew that I didn’t want to divorce simply because of the way it turned my life completely upside down when my own parents divorced, but when my husband and I were struggling I secretly hoped my case was an anomaly.
It wasn’t.
Research shows us that emotional costs include feeling sad and angry, embarrassment, fear of abandonment, grief over loss, irrational hope of reconciliation, worry about their parent’s well-being, anxiety about divided loyalties, and uncertainty about romantic relationships. Children can experience psychosomatic symptoms as well including headaches, vomiting, dizziness, sleep problems, stomachaches, and inability to concentrate.
In 2001 Paul Amato updated his meta-analysis of ninety-two studies previously published in 1991 with results from sixty-seven new studies and he found that, on average, “children with divorced parents did significantly worse than children with continuously married parents in terms of academic achievement, self-esteem, popularity and peer relations, misbehavior, depression, and anxiety.”
There is no age group that is not negatively affected by divorce. Studies show even infants are not immune. Babies with regular overnight visits with their father are more insecure and disorganized in their attachment to their mothers and more disorganized with their father according to a study by Solomon and George published in 1996. A second study by Clarke-Stewart et al., published in 2007 showed very young children are less positive, affectionate, and engaged in play with their mothers than children from married families.
The effects of divorce don’t end in childhood.
In 2000 the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology published a study of college students whose parents had divorced that found 75% felt they would have been a different person if their parents hadn’t divorced. 50% said they missed having their father around, they had a harder childhood than most people, or they wished they had grown up in a never-divorced family. 25% wondered if their father really loved them, and 20% believed they were doomed to repeat their parents’ problems – all significantly different responses than those from students who grew up in always married families.
In 2001 a study by Furstenberg and Kiernan published in the Journal of Marriage and Family indicated that individuals whose parents divorced are more likely to break up with their live-in partner, suffer economically, live in subsidized housing, be on welfare, and men are more likely to be unemployed.
References:
I suggest two books to learn more about why it matters to our world and to the future of humanity to end divorce culture:
– Divorce: Causes and Consequences
Please also see my video, Ending Divorce Culture and read my essay, Marriage Is The Sport That Helps You Win At Life
Be sure to visit my YouTube Channel for more!
- Clarke-Stewart A, Brentano C. Divorce Causes and Consequences. Yale University Press; 2006. Accessed February 4, 2021. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat07141a&AN=ebc.EBC3419862&authtype=sso&custid=ns017578&site=eds-live&scope=site
- Amato, P. R. ( 2003 ). Children of divorce in the 1990 s: An update of the Amato and Keith ( 1991) meta-analysis. Journal of Family Psychology, 15 , 355 – 370 .
- Emery, R. E., Laumann-Billings, L., Waldron, M. C., Sbarra, D. A., and Dillon, P. ( 2001 ). Child custody mediation and litigation: Custody, contact, and coparenting 12 years after initial dispute resolution. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 69, 323-332.
- Judith, A. (2004). Eastern Body, Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System As a Path to the Self (Revised ed.). Celestial Arts.
- Furstenberg, F. F., and Kiernan, K. E. (2001). Delayed parental divorce: How much do children benefit? Journal of Marriage and Family, 63, 446-457.
- Solomon, J., and George, C. (1999). The development of attachment in separated and divorced families: Effects of overnight visitation, parent and couple variables. Attachment and Human Development, 1, 2-33.
- Clarke-Stewart, K. A., Vandell, D.L., McCartney, K., Owen, M.T., and Booth, C. (2000). Effects of parental separation and divorce on very young children. Journal of Family Psychology, 14, 304-326.
- Amato, P. R., and DeBoer, D. D. (2001) The transmission of marital instability across generations: Relationship skills or commitment to marriage? Journal of Marriage and Family, 63, 1038-1051.
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30 Texts or Convo Templates
COMMUNICATE WITHOUT CHANGING YOURSELF
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The Princess & The Peeve
EMOTION ASSESSMENT
Your emotions tell you what to do next if you know how to listen to them. Use this easy checklist to figure out what you’re feeling right now and what to do about it!
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5 STEPS TO SAVE AN ADHD MARRIAGE
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