Understanding Your Child as Needed

I’m about to take what at first will seem like quite a detour. I am going to share with you

a crucial process for encouraging motivation within the inner child. However, before

applying it to the inner child, I am going to place it within a much more familiar context –the marriage relationship.

When I was still in my private counselling practice, I would oftentimes have couples

come to speak to me in the midst of tremendous relational tension.

Sometimes I would encourage the husband to complete the following sentence:

“For the life of me, I can’t understand why she . . . “

While the wife completed the following sentence:

“For the life of me, I can’t understand why he. . .”

When the relationship was in severe trouble, each party could easily fill the front and

sometimes the backside of an 8 1/2 X 11 sheet of paper with the completions to those

sentences.

This approach was based upon a life-changing pyramid shared with me by Dr. Al

VerBerg in the early 1980’s.

Happiness was at the top of the pyramid because that was the goal. No one looked

around and said, “I sure am happy single, let’s see if I can get married and really

change all that.” Every person has hoped that getting married would increase his or her

happiness.

However, what is this illusive thing we call “happiness?”

To help us we need to look around at the marriages of others. Do you know someone

who is married to a perfectly wonderful person, but is unhappy in the relationship? By

“perfectly wonderful” I mean that the spouse isn’t an alcoholic, doesn’t have affairs,

holds down a reasonable job, and is relatively verbal in communicating love and

affection? However, the spouse is still unhappy.

Then again do you know any couple in which the spouse is not dependable, not good at

communicating love or affection and yet the other spouse appears happy in spite of it

all?

Within the context of a relationship, happiness has much to do with expectations as it

does with the reality within that relationship. The question “What did you expect the

relationship to deliver?” will oftentimes determine your own sense of happiness within

that relationship.

Or to express it in still another way, “happiness” in marriage is when I am satisfied and

content with my marriage partner. Anytime that contentment is eroded by my

expectations, “happiness” is gone. The pyramid shares in a visual manner how to build

towards that happiness and how to maintain it.

Notice how it first begins with Communication. While it is true that we all do

communicate, it is also true that we all don’t communicate equally well. Some of this

has to do with the level at which we communicate.

Those who study this subject more than myself explains that we can communicate on

one of several levels.

The CLICHE LEVEL is typically reserved for people we meet in passing. “How’s it

going?” “Nice day.” “Have a good one.” all are phrases that fall into this shallowest

level of all communication.

FACTS ABOUT OTHERS is the next shallowest level as we tell people around us about

the goings-on in other people’s lives. “Did you hear that. . . “ “Can you believe that

they. . . “ fall into this category.

FACTS ABOUT OURSELVES moves down one more level in which I open up to you

about self revelations like what I do, where I was born, who my parents are and other

non-vulnerable statistics about me. After I share these with you, you will know more

about me, but you still won’t know me.