By Gina Watson, LMFT-S.   Most of the couples who come into my office arrive “asleep”.  They certainly don’t feel asleep and they are usually dying for a good night’s sleep but nonetheless, they are definitely not awake.  Our lifestyle in the American culture and parenting culture of today is hectic.  The standard answer for “how are you?” is no longer “fine”.  Now the answer I get most often is “busy”.  People are busy with work, busy with responsibilities to family, busy carting children to activities.  The small silver lining of Covid19 is that I’m finding that couples who have not made time for one another in the past are actually spending time together and – get this – enjoying it.  I was dead wrong in my prediction that quarantine would be bad for relationships.  I have mostly seen the opposite.  I’ve made a point to challenge all of the couples I work with to find a way to maintain the slower pace forced upon us by the pandemic.

Slowing down is the first step to waking up and becoming conscious.  At the breakneck speed we were living our lives pre-Covid there was little time for reflection or contemplation.  Most couples believed that was a luxury while buried under familial and work duties.  The cost of not living life in a conscious way is that we are often acting and reacting from unconscious forces.  We don’t really see our partner, we are simply projecting our own stuff onto them.  We look at our partner and the story that begins to play in our head tells us they are selfish or neglectful because something within us is feeling hurt in some way.  How can we really know who our partner is and what their intentions are without truly looking?  I mean looking from a place that is wide awake.

The first thing I ask couples to do in my office is to do a 180 and turn their lens from the external world to their own internal mind.  What unexamined, complicated forces are at play that we have no idea is even happening.  Most of who we are and our life experiences lies unexamined beneath the surface.  When you do this, it changes everything.  The lens through which you have been viewing your partner and the world is revealed to be distorted by your particular life story.  The same is true for your partner.  Familial, gender, cultural and societal factors all shape our unique lens so that no two persons are exactly the same.  So how can we know for certain that what we are seeing is real?  Of course, it’s real to us.  This is what we call perception.  Couples often describe the same event to me and I wonder if they are living on two different planes of existence.  How can two people experiencing the same event come away with completely different stories of what happened?  This is usually followed by our inherent arrogance and need to be right in declaring that our memory of the event is superior to our partners.  Ask yourself how many hours of your life have you wasted arguing with your partner about what you said?  About what they said or did?  That is what I call unnecessary wear and tear on the relationship that yields no positive benefits.  The ROI is zero.

A conscious marriage means that you first understand you are usually operating on auto-pilot and thus reacting rather than intentionally responding to your partners behavior.  Because of our highly sensitive fight or flight system, an unconscious or reactive response is most likely to be defensive.  We miss all the cues that tell us that we are not being attacked by our partner and stop listening at the first hint of an attack or accusation.  This quickly derails a conversation and we never seem to be able to get it back on track.  Imagine being able to sit very still, very quiet and witness what your partner is saying without it disturbing your inner peace.  Imagine telling yourself that whatever they are saying they believe and they desperately need for you to hear.  It makes sense to them in that moment.  It doesn’t have to be true for you to continue to listen until you understand their perspective – right or wrong.  Of course you see things differently.  Your lens was shaped by different forces.  As Steven Covey prescribes in his seven habits, “seek first to understand”.  A frequent homework assignment I give couples is to each spend twenty minutes listening to their partner express a feeling or concern.  Listen with 100 percent of your attention in a distraction free place.  If defensive thoughts arise, allow them to pass rather than pull your attention away from listening.  The goal is not to respond to what your partner has told you, only to make them feel like you truly heard them and accept that this is their perception.  Ask an empathetic, clarifying question if you must but otherwise remain silent.  The speaker should acknowledge the listener for allowing them to feel truly heard and understood, hugs, then go on about your day.  When the listener can observe the feelings that arise within them while listening and be curious about them rather than hijacked by them – this is conscious listening.  To have a conscious marriage, both partners must acknowledge that there are unconscious forces at work in the marriage, sabotaging their connection.  When you can be awake to these forces and be curious about them, rather than allowing them to hijack you, you are no longer asleep.

Want to go deeper into this topic?  Stay tuned for our upcoming webinar on how to co-construct a conscious marriage.  Leave your email address below and I will send you the details.