I just needed to get into trouble

For many years I have worked with people who become their own worst enemy. These are people who work very hard to achieve in life, only to do some really stupid things that undo all of their good work, just when they are about to make it!

Just recently I worked with a man who had overcome a very challenging situation is his marriage. His wife was unhappy and was seeking companionship elsewhere. When the man discovered that another man was interested in her, his emotions went through the roof. In a rage he went to where his wife was at the time, walked into the house and assaulted this other man. He told his wife that he never wanted to see her again but she jumped into his car, refused to get out and ended up going home with him.

The man was subsequently charged with assault and although this process that dragged on it bought the man and his wife closer together. They are and now together in a relationship better than either of them could ever have previously imagined.

But that is not the end of it

2 years down the track and the man was under extreme emotional pressure. His father had been on life-support and had passed away plus financial disagreements that the man was having with an extremely unethical business partner came to a head. The situation reached boiling point when the man went to the to his business partners factory, took some equipment away and told his business partner he would he would give it back when his business partner paid back the money that he had stolen. Problem was that the man had done something illegal (theft) and the police became involved.

Once again the man was facing police charges.

What's so fascinating is that the man told me he felt an inner need to get into trouble. He explained that things have been so good that he didn't know what to expect. What confused him was that he got into trouble with the police, he felt somehow better.

I found this to be an absolutely fascinating example of a phenom are which comes up time and time again from people who have let's say difficult backgrounds.

Here's what the man worked out. It was like it was when he was a child. Way back then the people who loved him inflicted him with pain as they emotionally and verbally abused him. So being in trouble was a place where he felt safe. How about that!

This is why we as adults need to be aware our inner emotional conflicts; because one way or another emotions are expressed and without awareness it can be very destructive.

The Cost of Divorce

I was talking to a Family Lawyer earlier today and she told me that when it comes to finances, the most stupid thing a person can do is get divorced.

This is pretty obvious when you look at the enormous divorce settlements of celebrities like Tiger Woods, Greg Norman and Mel Gibson. However, although the rest of us don't have those $figures to contend with, divorce is still a very expensive and painful process to go through.

This lawyer told me that even the so-called winners end up financially struggling for at least a few years after and that selling the family home to pay for the divorce, with nothing left over at the end, is very common.

Of course there is a much better option to divorce; one that leaves the family's wealth intact. The problem is that this gets lost in the emotion of divorce and when people finally do see it, it is too late.

I always used to think that relationships were a bit of a mystery.  Not any more though.  Relationships don't make sense all the time because they are emotional experiences, and when the pressure is on, people make emotional decisions.

Don't know if you've noticed but, if your like the rest of us, when you're at your most emotional, the decisions you make tend to be pretty crappy.  They are not logical and too often, downright destructive.  If you want to be in a relationship that really works, one that makes your life better, then be emotional by all means ... but don't make decisions until your intelligence is in control

Get your emotional act together.  Emotions have their place that's for sure, but they do make lousy decision makers so you have to keep them in check.

Being in the Right

On the weekend I was talking to a friend and his wife who left me with a number of real-life realizations.  Sure they both told me the same story with the same facts but their stories were still totally different.

This is a couple who are heading towards divorce, even though neither of them wants to be divorced. They're both excellent parents and underneath they really do love each other. They just can't see this because they have become obsessively negative.

If they don't change their ways then divorce is a certainty. They have become so negative to each other that everything said was construed as an attack by the other persons.

The offending issue was extremely trivial, as these things normally are. In this particular case the husband needed new batteries for his torch, and the wife purchased new batteries but they were the wrong size. That seemingly innocent little mistake became a catalyst that turned into a major confrontation. The husband accused the wife of deliberately purchasing the wrong size batteries just to cause an upset, while the wife accused the husband of once again not appreciating her efforts to please him.

The realization is that past a certain point, divorce becomes like a runaway train; almost impossible to stop until it crashes and destroys something valuable. My friend of his wife are locked into a position whereby each is totally committed to finding faults in the other, and to protecting themselves from being found out by the other person. The result was a totally toxic confrontation, with no possibility of a positive outcome, and another certain step along the road to total marriage breakdown.

It really was a living example of that proverbial question, "Do you want to be right OR Do you want to be happy?"