How To Deal With An Unreasonable Spouse | Paul Friedman

Do you experience your spouse being unreasonable to you and you don't know how to deal with it? Watch Paul explain in this video how to understand this unreasonable problem in your marriage.

Some of you may know that I actually began my marriage saving career as a divorce mediator. It wasn't until I was down the road a bit that I realized I can be helping marriages instead of ending them. So how to deal with an unreasonable spouse is something I had to learn early on while I was a mediator.

In fact, that's how I got into this. I thought through communication someone can really transform their marriage into a great marriage and I was a good mediator. I got people calm down, got him to be able to articulate their point of view without emotions but boy, did I have a lot of education afterwards. It's not just about communication. The key here is actually emotions -- really is, so it doesn't matter whether you're male or female whether
your husband or wife, it doesn't matter because all of us are kind of cursed with emotions.

I know the psych community talks about, "Well, you have to honor and respect your emotions." But that's just not true I have a background also in developing myself spiritually and using all kinds of methods and techniques and I applied them to marriage. One of the fundamental key understandings that people have who are spiritually minded and I don't mean just religious but spiritually-minded understand something very deep. You are
not your emotions. You have emotions. You see, you're not your mind. You have a mind.
Your mind has emotions and emotions play a vital role in our lives but for the most part, they should be controlled absolutely controlled.

Why should your emotions control you?

And so, what's going on when you have an unreasonable spouse is two things, one they are coming from a place of emotion. It's all emotion whether it's anger, fear or whatever.
Having an emotional reaction to something that you may have said or you may have done and they're not able to approach the topic purely, logically, cleanly, more importantly, they can't approach it lovingly so they get trapped and that's where the unreasonableness
comes in. Now in negotiations which is what divorce mediation was all about everything was easy. I could use a whiteboard, I could identify values, get them to identify values. Put a pros and cons, pretty simple stuff but when you're married you don't want to go there.

You don't want to go into this realm of reasonableness. Well, reasonableness takes on a different context because in marriage your context is love. It's not whether he's right or
she's right or whether this happened this way or happened another way based on how an individual sees it. Your marriage is based on love. I'm seeing your spouse from a loving point of view from -- what does that mean?

It means having compassion, it means having understanding. It means being a good listener and it's not just men who are bad listeners. Both males and females are bad
listeners because what happens is we get into our minds what is right, "Oh, that's not right. It's Joe, why not? It was just not right." No, nonsense. If someone has that perspective it's right for them and if you disagree with it, it means it's not right for you until you recognize
well, it's right for them.

Then, what happens?
When you have this perspective of what is their point of view?
Where are they coming from?
What is their perspective that what they're thinking or saying or insisting upon is reasonable?

And then you understand them better and you realize they're not unreasonable. Maybe they are ultimately misguided because maybe your point of view is based on pure logic but if you really love somebody, you don't point that out. You work with it. You work around where they're getting hung up. So you see, working within "unreasonable spouse" is not so much in finding a way to manipulate them, to get them to see it your way -- that's not what you want to do. What you want to do is you want to change your perspective from an analyzing perspective where you're weighing things to a loving perspective where you're not even
concerned that much about the outcome. You're more concerned with how are they feeling, what's going on for them?

Why are they for instance potentially upset or potentially stubborn or stern?
Or their heels are dug in, why?
How can you help them be in a calm or place?

See, it's your way but help them be in a calm or place. If you're resistant to their point of view, they're not going to go into a calm or place. They're going to become more stuck in their perspective. It's natural -- that's how we are. We are naturally defensive because our minds always resort back to one of two places either the soul or the body, and the body
is always saying survival.

Watch the video for more.

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