Happy Marriage Tips:
Ask how you create bad feelings about your partner

The least used of the happy marriage tips is the second of the Four Questions in the coping formula: "How Am I Creating This Bad Feeling?"

The answers for this question are understood by advanced students of the Coping program, and also the experts working with people who are having trouble coping.

The happy marriage tips recommend that everyone continue to use the question as one of the four questions in the coping process, because it reminds you that any bad feelings you have result from your own thoughts. Your thoughts produce your feelings.

So, after you've identified the bad feeling you're having (even if you are just learning the coping questions), remind yourself that you are causing that feeling by the thoughts you are having.

What good is the question if I don't know the answer?

We include it in the happy marriage tips on coping because it may make you curious enough to want to find out how you produce the thoughts you have.

To answer the question, you really need one more tool, the Sage Model, commonly called, "The Map."

The Sage Model is fully explained in book II of the Metamating Series, which is a series of six books you get when you Join the Team of other couples learning How To Make A Marriage Last.

The Sage Model Is A Map Of The Mind

One of our happy marriage tips is to learn how you create any of the bad feelings you have toward your partner. The Sage Model is mostly used by advanced students and experts to coach people who struggle with accepting and forgiving their partner.

Click here to get the PDF copy of a graphic depicting the model. It can be intimidating when you first see it, but it turns out to be very easy to learn and use, with a little coaching. Print it out so that you can look at it from time to time. Get the Map

For our purposes here, we'll simply show how it can be used to help people cope with marital issues. When you finish reading through the story about Doris, you can see the places on the map that Doris examined for how she might cope with her bad feelings.

Situation: Doris Couldn't Accept Her Husband Leaving Wet Towels On The Floor

After you've read the happy marriage tips that follow, you'll see that eventually, Doris has to choose between accepting that her husband is going to leave wet towels on the floor or build up a pool of resentment and frustration toward the man she loves.

As Doris proceeded through the steps in the Coping process, she concluded that her wisest choice was to accept her husband and his bad habit with the towels. But, she couldn't do it.

Doris wrote, "I know I have to accept it, but I just can't do it. I can't accept living with a slob."

Using the Sage Model (map), her coach found at least four different ways that she could modify her thoughts. Doris could:

1. give wet towels less importance than she had been giving them (reduce her “importancizer”).
2. modify the scope and see that wet towels was just one of hundreds of things her husband did, and it was enormously outweighed by the other hundred more positive things he did.
3. expand the time component of the thought until she saw that over the next 50 years of living together, the couple would face much more challenging and rewarding issues than wet towels.
4. examine her assessment of her husband as a slob, and see that he isn't really a slob; he just has this one sloppy habit.

Doris found one of these very easy for her to do. She changed her thought about the towels, and was easily able to accept this annoying habit in her husband.

This example illustrates the power of the map and a coach, to help a committed person like Doris become able to cope, even though the issue, at first, seemed beyond her ability to cope.

Happy Marriage Tips: Don't get hung up on the Sage Model

Some people think the Sage Model is the greatest creation they have ever seen. Others think it is "inane," "stupid," or "useless," and they don't use it at all.

You don't have to know the Sage Model — or how to use it — to learn the powerful skills of coping. It's useful for experts who coach people who get stuck. It's also a wonderful discovery for curious people who are fascinated to learn how they think.

We say that it's no big deal. Use it or not. The important thing is the four questions of Coping; the Sage model is really only valuable to help answer the second question.

The real coping work is done by questions Three and Four.

To continue with more happy marriage tips in the series "Coping,"
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