Psychology 409B March 24, 2006

It’s A Personality Thing

By Lisa Tabon

Coleman, Joshua, The Lazy Husband, St. Martin’s Press New York, 2005 (pages 112-149)

Instructions for this activity are found at:

www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy24/g24-oral1.htm

Instructor: Dr. Leon James

I. A Key part of creating change in a marriage comes from understanding how your and your partner’s personalities affect your marriages

a. Need to know how your past:

i. Makes you reactive to certain types of behavior or communication from him

ii. Contributes to your misperceiving him

iii. Makes you behave in ways that are confusing or troubling to him

b. Know and understand how his past:

i. Makes him react to certain types of behavior or communication from you

ii. Contributes to his misperceiving you

iii. Makes him behave in ways that are confusing or troubling to you

c. Understanding his personality and how he got to be that way is empowering

i. It can help you correct his misperceptions about you

ii. Help you communicate in way that don’t trigger his anxiety, negativity, or defensiveness

II. The Boy-Husband

a. Just one more child to take care of

i. A common complaint from women living with their husbands is that its like having another child

ii. This is sometimes an unfair accusation because many men assume responsibility in ways that benefit women and children, even if they’re not responsibilities that women would prefer

b. Work to feel less responsible for him

i. Become aware of the origins of your feelings of overresponsibility and work toward being more detached from those feelings

ii. Women are socialized to feel responsible for others

iii. Many women have a harder time feeling happy if their husband or children are distressed in any way

iv. **allow natural consequences to occur in your partner’s life**

c. Gain an understanding of why you are overly responsible

i. A dependent husband can only continue his dependence if he’s being supported by his wife

ii. Her acceptance of this behavior often exists because of an unregulated feeling of responsibility on her part

iii. How many of the following statements true for you:

1. I have a harder time receiving than giving

2. I feel burdened by how much time I spend worrying about my spouse

3. my husband often complains that I’m too intrusive in his life, but I’m not, all hell would break loose

4. I feel exhausted all the time because I’m constantly over-committing myself

5. I feel guilty if the people closer to me are struggling

6. If I can help someone I’m close to, I will, even if it’s at my own expense

7. I don’t know hoe to relax and have fun

d. Use non-judgmental language to let your partner know of your change

i. Give your partner notice without humiliating him

ii. A graduated instituting of activities where you slowly phase out of the tasks you want him to take over is recommended

iii. He may truly feel terrified, confused, or overwhelmed by these new behaviors he has to adapt

iv. It may not just be a manipulation when he says he doesn’t know

e. Make an honest assessment of whether some part of you likes or benefits from your partner’s dependency

i. For example:

1. if you were devalued as a child, you may be reassured by your husband’s neediness

ii. strive to recognize that part of yourself and begin to shift your attention to the positive aspects of your partner’s behavior or contributions

iii. the dependent person often believes that his partner likes his dependency

1. it’s important to use loving confrontation

2. it isn’t healthy for to accept his excuses and run his life for him

3. your taking over tells him that he can’t learn how to be independent and run his own life

f. Don’t Expect Overnight Change

i. It’s more likely to take some time for them to successfully turn it around

ii. What can change overnight is how much you do for your partner that he can rightly do for himself

III. The Worried Wife

a. Worry is often at the core of overly responsible behavior

i. Being a worrier can cause your husband to tune you out

ii. A part of getting him to do more may mean becoming less worried so that he actually wants to hear what you have to say

b. What to do if this describes you

i. Strive to understand the nature of your worry; ask yourself these questions:

1. does it appear rational?

2. did something happen in my childhood or past that has left me feeling unsafe?

3. do others tell me that I worry too much or tease me about my excessive worry?

4. Do the things that I worry over rarely come to pass?

ii. if you answer yes to several of these, your worry is probably interfering with your enjoyment of life and maybe your marriage

c. Begin to push back against your worries

i. Make a conscious decision to push against one or tow of the worries that are interfering with your life

ii. Make a commitment to do small steps in the direction of learning to tolerate that worry

iii. Experiment with new behavior and integrate knowledge that comes from that behavior

IV. The Worried Husband

a. A husband’s worried orientation interfered with his ability to relax and enjoy his life

i. It also made him reluctant to take on responsibilities because of a fear that he would get it wrong

b. What to do if your partner is this way:

i. Don’t criticize him for his worry

ii. Tease him if he’ll let you

iii. Don’t allow his worries to rule the roost

iv. Have him talk to his doctor about a medication evaluation

V. The Perfectionist Wife

a. Are you a perfectionist?

i. I can’t relax if something is incomplete

ii. Nothing I do is never quite good enough

iii. I can never stop and take pride in what I’ve done

iv. I can never please anyone

v. I can’t get anything right

vi. People always look for the chink in my armor

vii. If people get to know me, they’ll see how inadequate I really am

viii. I have to work extremely hard to maintain a good impression

ix. I take pride and pleasure in my hard standards but I drive everyone nuts

b. Examples of a perfectionistic orientation toward your spouse:

i. He can never do things all the way

ii. If he only tried a little harder

iii. I should have married someone more like me and with my standards

iv. I’m always mad at my husband for one thing or another because he never gets stuff right

c. Strive to understand the origins of your feelings

d. Examine your irrational beliefs

i. Everyone is imperfect

ii. You deserve to be loved and respected for who you are, etc.

e. Examine your criticisms about your husband

VI. The Perfectionist Husband

a. Living with a husband with perfectionistic expectations of you may cause you to feel controlled, dominated, or blamed

b. It’s important to gain some immunity to how his standards make you feel

c. If your partner’s perfectionism causes you to behave in ways that aren’t good for you, it may mean that you haven’t fully understood how your past affects the present

VII. The Angry Husband

a. Living with a hostile/abusive spouse can make you feel depressed, inadequate, anxious, or afraid

b. One of the first steps to dealing with your partner’s hostility is to understand how it’s affecting your mood and behavior:

i. Frequently don’t go to places or see people that I want to see

ii. Do much more for him, the house, kids than is fair

iii. Constantly worry that my behavior is going to get me yelled at

c. It makes me feel terrible about myself when he gets mad at me

i. One of the challenges of marriage is to gain control over how much of the other’s behavior affects how we feel about ourselves

ii. Children who grow up in abusive or neglectful homes develop beliefs that they’re not entitled to protect themselves from mistreatment

d. State your requests with an assumption of cooperation

e. Don’t let your intimidation rule you

f. I don’t want the children to witness conflict

i. A common reason for women to submit to their husband’s dominance is a fear of a harmful and escalating fight

ii. Children are generally not harmed by parental fights provided that:

1. the fights typically resolve

2. children aren’t blamed for the conflict

3. the marriage isn’t characterized by chaos, out-of-control verbal/physical abuse or ongoing shame/humiliation

g. It’s not worth it to me to see him so upset, so I just give in

i. Statement is often made from a place of low self-esteem and low sense of entitlement

ii. Strive to understand where your lack of entitlement came from

VIII. The Angry Wife

a. Some women respond to childhood abuse by becoming combative and argumentative

i. This is done to never again feel vulnerable

ii. More likely to make their husband’s feel belittled, resentful, and resistant to change

b. Dealing with Guilt

i. Guilt about past behavior increases the likelihood that the behavior will occur again

ii. Guilt contributes to feelings of self-hatred

iii. Self-hatred reduces your resilience because your internal resources are used to prove others wrong

c. Exercise on Guilt

i. List behaviors that you feel chronically guilty about

d. Pledge

i. Commit to a program of forgiving yourself for whatever you accuse yourself of doing or not doing

ii. The shortest path to decreasing behavior that you don’t like in yourself is moving toward self-forgiveness, self-compassion, and a commitment to change