I want to let you know exactly how I was able to feel more connected to my husband. For a very long time, I wasn’t feeling that we were a “team,” that he didn’t understand me and that I wasn’t his #1 priority. I was feeling alone, misunderstood, and not appreciated.
What exactly did I do to change things and allow myself to feel connected with him again? Well, I can tell you that spending more time together trying to talk about all of this did NOT help. Meeting with a marriage counselor helped us talk things through without one of us getting totally frustrated or shutting down, but after these sessions I felt exactly the same as before we started.
Spending more together, even when we were not addressing my feelings, did NOT help. As a matter of fact, our ‘alone’ time and date nights just made me long even more for my husband and I to be “on the same page,” to feel like we had a partnership, and to feel cherished by him.
It was not until I started changing my THOUGHTS rather than trying to change my HUSBAND that our marriage had a radical, profound change for the better. I dropped the thoughts I was having such as, “if we were a team, he’d put my wants and desires above his mother’s wants and desires.” Now I probably need to explain that his mother simply had some opinions about the amount of time she wanted to spend with my kids (her only grandkids) that happened to differ from my own opinions.
Once I realized that my thoughts were the problem here, I decided to look at things differently. I chose thoughts such as:
>”My husband is caught in the middle and wants to please both his mother and me–what a caring husband and son.”
>”There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ here–only different opinions held by different people”
>”My mother-in-law has opinions and they are about her–not about ME.”
>”As long as we plan vacations with just me, my husband and our kids first, I’m totally open to plan vacations with my in-laws.”
So some very interesting things happened when I adopted these new thoughts. My husband was thrilled to plan some family vacations with just the 5 of us and then planned a vacation and some visits with his parents. We went on these vacations and it was fascinating that when we were with his parents, my husband noticed he used to defend or try to hide his parent’s opinions and actions from me but now he felt like whatever his parents said or did no longer divided us–as a matter of fact, he felt like we were such a strong, close partnership now.
The result of me changing my perspective and no longer expecting my husband to change, was what actually allowed my husband to change. Once I changed my thoughts it was so much easier to see that me believing that I was alone, misunderstood and not appreciated created my reality. When I made the shift and believed new thoughts about my husband, I was able to feel partnership, cherished and most importantly CONNECTED to him!