i feel like giving up – Save The Marriage: Even if only YOU want to!

The Choice…

https://savethemarriage.com/stmblog/wp-content/themes/corpus/images/empty/thumbnail.jpg 150 150 Lee H. Baucom, Ph.D. Lee H. Baucom, Ph.D. https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/669b7e375d93f77521ddaba08adb8063?s=96&d=blank&r=pg September 8, 2020 September 8, 2020

By: Lee H. Baucom, Ph.D.

September 8, 2020

“It’s your choice,” I reassured her. It was a call I picked up between sessions. The person told me she had been following my System, but wasn’t sure if she could keep it up. She wasn’t sure if it mattered, so she was thinking about quitting. She wanted to know what I thought….

I didn’t need to convince her either way. It really was her choice. Should she walk away or should she keep working on it? Only she could answer.

My concern was what seemed to be fueling her decision. She was discouraged. (Which is an interesting word, denoting she had lost courage… and she was coming to me to be encouraged — to gain courage — to act one way or the other.)

To be fair, the process of saving your marriage is emotional, heart-wrenching, painful, frustrating, and exhausting… before it turns the corner. Is it worth it?

That was her choice. The Choice. To work on it or to walk away.

Maybe it is all just getting to people this week… summer is over, school is starting back (whether virtual or in-person), the pandemic is wearing on, politics is unavoidable… and then there is that marriage crisis!

Navigating all of that, staying afloat, and continuing to push forward is just tough.

Which leads to the choice. Work on it or walk away?

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Why Protecting Yourself Won’t

By: Lee H. Baucom, Ph.D.

March 22, 2017

Whenever I get the same questions over and over, I decide it is time to do a podcast. And this came up just a couple of days ago. The person on the other end of the phone call said, “Why should I even try? If I don’t save my marriage, it will just hurt more when I fail.”

The question that repeats is, “Why work on this when there is a chance it just can’t be saved?”

For this very reason, many people never even try to save a hurting marriage. Ironically, by not taking any action, they are almost guaranteed to lose the marriage. . . and feel hurt — what they said they were somehow avoiding.

Human nature is to avoid immediate pain — even at the expense of greater pain down the road. We tend to do some “anticipatory hurting,” imagining the pain we might feel later. And so, we avoid a course that takes us to that feared hurting.

The only problem is, this often causes suffering almost immediately.

I asked my caller a quick question, “Okay, if you don’t work to save your marriage, what will happen to your marriage.” She paused. Then she admitted, “It will definitely fail.”

“In other words,” I commented, “if you do nothing, you will lose the marriage and be in pain. If you work on it, you MAY be hurting if it doesn’t work. But you MIGHT recover your marriage.”

My caller is now a client of mine, hard at work, saving her marriage.

Don’t protect yourself in a way that guarantees the hurt. Why not give it a shot?

(Listen below for more understanding of why we do this. And if you are ready to work on your marriage, grab my Save The Marriage System HERE.)

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