Divorce & Remarriage

This week we talked a lot about divorce and remarriage particularly when it comes to blended families. A blended family is when a person already has children when they get married or married again. It gets increasingly harder when both people have kids and so more blending is taking place. I want to talk about divorce first though.

When you talk about divorce, it's known that there was a peak in the 70's because that's when the no fault divorce was allowed. I talked about this in a previous post so that's why I say you should know. :) Anyway, what isn't as well known is that there was also a peak of divorce around the late 40's meaning that the people who got divorced then, it was their kids generation that was getting divorced in the 70's. Brother Williams was talking to a judge here in Rexburg and he gets a lot of young couples coming in to get divorces. The main reason being it just wasn't fun anymore. How sad is that? When if they tried to stick it out they would probably stay together. When people are court-mandated to go to counseling for a certain time before they are allowed to divorce, they usually end up staying married. Plus, after two years 70% of Americans regret divorce after they've already gone through the process. I think it's sad because you can spend so much money and time on  divorce and then you end up regretting it. Not to mention, a lot of the time people get a divorce because they think it'll be better in the next one. That they've learned what they need to and they just didn't have the 'right' person. Well people who divorce will have similar challenges in the second marriage that they had in the first. Challenges are inevitable when you are married because you are two different people who have been raised in different ways, and so of course there will come times when you clash. That doesn't mean you shouldn't work through it though and put in the effort to keep it going. Of course this doesn't apply to abuse and the like. There are many reasons as to why people should get a divorce, I'm just talking in respect to people not imagining it like they thought so they want to try again with someone who will be better, so to speak.

President Kimball said something I thought was very profound. He said, "Approach marriage as a never failing formula." If you don't think of it as it could fail, then you won't let it. Michael and I have talked and we would never get a divorce. It's not something that's ever even crossed our minds as a possibility. We got married because we love each other and we promised that we would always be together. I don't think that's something you should take lightly. In this world today it seems that vows or promises you make don't really hold any value and that's so sad.

It makes it so much more difficult when children are involved. Dealing with the legality of it all. Depending on where you live depends on who gets custody although it's up to the individual judge. For example on the coast there is more joint custody. As you get more inland usually it's the mom who gets more time and the legal custody of the children. It also can be really hard on your wallet. Brother Williams gave an example of a friend he knew. He makes about $2200 a month, but pays $1875 in alimony to the wife, even though the kids are grown, he has remarried, and his ex-wife has remarried. He's still legally having to pay. Sounds pretty messed up to me, but that's the way it works sometimes.

We talked about blended families and how it can be a really difficult transition. However, blended cohabitation is ten times worse than a blended marriage. Cohabitation is proved to not be beneficial at all, but compared to doing that with kids involved makes it a lot worse. There are more cases of abuse of every kind. Blended families can also thrive though. It takes a lot of work, but it can be done. Brother Williams is a blended family with his wife and they have been married for many years and are still happy. You get what you put in, and you have to put in the work. It can be harder than normal marriage, but everything takes work because whether you are a blended family, or a family starting out, you will come across differences and it's how you handle them that will determine your happiness.

Meeting Needs vs. Changing Behavior

We discussed the importance of active parenting. How it's important as a parent to address the NEEDS of a child, rather than the BEHAVIOR. Behavior is a result of needs. Brother Williams gave a very interesting perspective on parenting I hadn't really thought of before. He said can you imagine having your vulnerable child that you love so much handed to someone else to take of? He was relating it to Heavenly Father and how He entrusts us to watch and take care of His children. So we need to do the best we can because we're just taking care of them for the time being.

When we parent it's important to realize that we don't know enough. Even if you "believe" a certain way, in the end you should really always be striving to do what's best by the Lord. We need to follow His guidance. It's important when we parent that even if we feel a certain thing needs to be carried out, we should first ask the Lord in prayer if this is right because He knows best. Not to mention, He's the perfect parent.

Have you ever met a child that is so annoying you have no idea how to handle them? Have you ever considered that the reason they are so annoying is because they have needs that aren't getting met so they're acting a certain way to try to meet those needs themselves? Many times when kids are really obnoxious, it is due to undue attention seeking. They're being that way because they don't know how else to get the attention they crave. In this scenario it's important to not just focus on the behavior. It's important to realize that maybe they need something and that's the reason for the behavior. Brother Williams gave an example of a boy who would chew on his shirts. No matter what his mom did for punishment for this, he would always chew on the collar of his shirt. Finally she took him to a doctor to see what the problem could be and he couldn't find anything wrong, but he suggested giving the boy bananas every day. In a couple days the boy stopped chewing on his shirt. The reason for this is because he was lacking potassium. He didn't know why he chewed on his shirt, just that he couldn't help but do it. Laundry detergent has trace amounts of potassium in it and so he was getting as much as he could. Once he started eating bananas however, he stopped chewing. His need was met and he was fine. The mom was focusing on the behavior that she didn't want him doing, rather than trying to meet a need.

Elder Groberg said, "You can never get enough of what you don't need, because what you don't need cannot satisfy you."

This makes me think of poor food choices.Sometimes I'll just sit and eat a whole bunch of hot cheetos and it seems I never get full of them because they're not satisfying a need of mine. They're not nutritious or in anyway helpful to my growing, but I keep eating them because I want them to fill me up or satisfy me, but they won't. I'll end up eating a whole bunch and then find myself needing to eat something more.

Brother Williams knew this hyperactive kid who would always touch people and get in your face and was just really obnoxious to most people so that people would try to avoid him. After some thinking, Brother Williams decided to give him what he needed. Instead of waiting for the "attack" he would approach the young kid and be super friendly. He'd basically do what the kid was doing. He'd be right there, and touch his arm and interact with him like the kid was interacting with everyone else. The kid eventually calmed down enough and didn't annoy people anymore. It was because his need was met. He just wanted attention and contact with people but didn't know how to get it without being annoying. Once he was getting attention and contact, he calmed down and was fine. It makes me think of little kids who will repeat the bad behavior, because any attention is good attention.

Teenage sex a lot of the time is because of a need for contact and belonging from someone. However, it's not satisfying enough because they're still not getting what they really need. A very interesting study has shown that dad's who hug their daughters makes them less permiscuous. They're not out looking for bad attention for contact and belonging from someone else because they are getting the feeling of belonging and love at home.

It's important to teach your kids to contribute. Typically you don't feel connected or belonging with someone if you aren't contributing. For example, if you were at a friends house and they wouldn't let you help with anything and just wanted you to sit there and watch a movie while everyone else cleans. Do you feel a part? Or do you feel more like a guest and uncomfortable? It's the same with a sports team or young women's for example. If you show up to games, but are just standing there and aren't helping to score or work a little, do you feel you've bonded with the team and a part? Probably not.

When you're dealing with kids it's important to treat them with just as much respect as you would anyone else. Brother Williams gave an example where he was in charge of an all boys group home. It was just him and 35 other boys that he had to be in charge of. These were kids where they were so bad they weren't allowed to live at home anymore. Well he made it a point that when he'd come to work he would bond with them. He would talk to them and treat them politely. Then when it came to working with them, it was simple because they were shown the respect they deserved. On the other hand, he had colleagues who were working with other groups of boys and they had severe problems. The boys were always getting out of hand and they'd have to wrestle them down or something. Brother Williams was meeting the needs of his boys.

An interesting thing was pointed out. When you have a child with a mental illness, you're not supposed to treat them differently than your other kids. Of course sometimes adjustments have to be made, but overall they should be treated as normal as possible because that's how they learn what normal is. A girl in class pointed out how she knew someone who had an autistic kid. They had other kids as well, but the autistic kid was treated much differently than the others. Since the other kids weren't getting the same type of attention, a lot of them started to exhibit autistic behavior so they would get more attention. It doesn't have to be necessarily a mental illness either. Kids will act however they feel will get them what they need. Needs are SO important when parenting and it's not about a change in behavior, it's about addressing a need.. which WILL change a behavior.

Staying Home

This week was a little cut short because of Thanksgiving, but we had to read an article about homemaking and if it makes you dumber or is mind-numbing to stay at home instead of "experiencing" the world. It kind of bothered me that women's rights are saying how it's mind-numbing for women to stay home when they should be out having careers in the world. The most important thing you can do in your life is to bear children and raise them. I think you can learn so much from staying at home with your children. They are so curious about the world and ask so many questions you would have never thought of. Their perspective is so different I think you can learn new things every day. I learn so much from my little girl. I know some families need both parents to go to work to make ends meet and that's fine. You can keep up with the world and learn new things and still stay at home. Plus just because you're in a career doesn't mean your job allows it so you can be learning new things all day, you're probably just doing the same mind-numbing things at work.

However, it is important to pursue your education I feel because you can help teach your children.

Communication

This week we discussed the topic of communication. How it is so important to be able to communicate effectively. In the beginning of class our teacher had an object lesson. He had us take a "pop" quiz but all of the questions were written in Danish. He wanted us to answer the questions, even though none of us knew how to speak it. Some of us were able to kind of guess what was being meant just by the words themselves. He then went on to explain how in communication sometimes we can infer what we are hearing, but that doesn't necessarily mean we know what is being said. When you are communicating there are three things; Tone, words, non-verbal. They don't even all of the time relate. For example, you can be saying something that's pleasant, but your tone in how you say it can come off unpleasant. That's how sarcasm is. What you're saying doesn't always mean the same thing if you inflect a certain tone or body language with it.

President Harold B. Lee said that we need to communicate so we can't be misunderstood, not just so we can be understood. This was really profound to me because sometimes you feel like what you're saying makes perfect sense, but someone else could be decoding it differently. Decoding is the biggest problem in relationships. Brother Williams gave a little diagram to help us see this visually. We have our thoughts/feelings and based off of how we feel we encode some type of message. Then the other person then has to decode what we've just said and gets thoughts/feelings based on what they think was said. In other words the person you are talking to could be decoding what you're saying MUCH differently than you were intending.

He gave an example of a husband and wife he knew. They were having marital problems because she felt like he was cheating on her or wasn't completely honest with her. She thought this because she would hear from her friends (who happened to be attractive) how funny her husband was because they ran into each other in the grocery store. She thought he was flirting with other women because he had never told her the stories of seeing these women in the stores so she felt he was trying to hide it from her. In actuality, he didn't tell her he'd see the women because he knew his wife felt insecure and he was trying the whole time to get away from talking with them anyway so that his wife wouldn't get upset. He loved his wife so much that he didn't want her to feel insecure so he wouldn't say anything, and when she would find out she felt betrayed because she felt he was trying to hide things from her. She was decoding what he was doing as being sneaky, when that wasn't what he was doing.They were both trying to solve a problem, but unless they have good communication and a shared meaning then it can just create conflict.

It's important to not only have good communication, but to understand a shared meaning. Teaching better communication skills to couples in the short run worked, but in the long run was actually detrimental because they can still misunderstand each other. Unless you both are on the same wave length and really understand each other, relationships won't improve by just better communication.

Family Stressors/Crisis

This week was about stresses and crises in the family, and how you respond to them. There's a model called the ABCX and it breaks down a stress in a way. This is how Brother Williams presented it to us. A=the actual (stressor) event. B= both resources and reactions. C= cognitions and X= the total experience. We talked about how what you think about your situation has in large to due with what you get from the experience. Usually people will say that events trigger your emotions, but in actuality, events trigger your thoughts which trigger your emotions.  There is a saying which I'm going to totally butcher, but in essence it says how nobody (or event) can make you feel a certain way. We choose how we respond. We tend to be aware of things consistent with our emotional state. He gave the example of watching a scary movie. After a scary movie you come home and all of the sudden you hear little noises in your house and freak yourself out even more. When actually your house probably makes those noises all of the time, you are just more aware of those noises now.

Families that are strong typically do better in high stress situations. They do well because typically there is more communication, there is cohesion, flexibility, and resilience. Families that aren't that strong will typically fall apart after a huge crisis instead of come together. Families need to be flexible at times. We had the example of spatulas. There are the ones you use for flipping eggs lets say, and then the rubber spatulas you use. The one you use for eggs is pretty useless in scraping out a bowl for example because it's not flexible. I feel like there needs to be more of an effort in every family to be flexible with each other. More fights are prevented when a family can be flexible. The excuse of you need to act a certain way with someone because "that's just how they are" is a poor excuse because in order for a family to really be strong then EVERYONE needs to be willing to bend at some point. Not saying at all that you should just go with the flow of everything and not have an opinion, but it's important for there to be leeway between people instead of one person always catering to the other.

Physical Intimacy

This week we talked about physical intimacy in class. I'm not going to go into details all about this, but I did want to touch on a few things. Men and women are wired differently when it comes to arousal and so it was said how before marriage you are taught that you need to have self control. Well this is a really important thing to learn for after marriage to. That sounds wrong, but it's true because since men and women get aroused differently you have to be willing to have self control of your desires so you can both feel pleasure. Marriage takes a lot of selfish behavior away, if you are happy. I don't think you can be genuinely happy in a marriage without being selfless and always wanting what's best for your spouse. If you're still really selfish in your marriage I guarantee your spouse isn't as happy. 

There's a circle. It's interesting because women tend to need safety and security before they can be physically intimate while men need sex in order to feel secure and safe. My teacher pointed out that a lot of times girls think guys only think about sex and that's all they want, but it can be true that guys want sex in order to feel close to their spouse and since it's different for girls it can get complicated at times. The most important sex organ is your brain. If you don't feel good in your brain you can't have a satisfying experience.

Marriage & Babies

This week we went over marriages and introducing kids into your life. Right around where Michael and I are in our life right now so of course it really intrigued me. We were talking about the advantages and disadvantages to marrying young especially because it happens frequently in the Latter-Day Saint culture. Some advantages we came up with is when you marry young you have more of a mate selection and you're also able to have more children more often. The younger you get married the more opportunity you have to have children. Disadvantages is that some people get confused maybe with the misattribution of love or something and commit too early without thinking it through. You also don't get to know as many people because you're not out dating for years, you already have found your partner. I think overall though, it's more of an advantage to marry young. People who marry closer to age 30 have a harder time when they do find a mate because they have been set in their ways for so long. Plus, when you have kids early on, you rely on each other more. You are both growing up together and setting a routine together and so you can grow closer together because you're both experiencing life changes. When you marry older you have to work a little harder to get a routine together and you've already potentially gone through life changes by yourself rather than a bonding moment with someone else.

LDS people usually think about marriage at the first date. That's not true for everyone, but it is typically true because you marry who you date and marriage and family are really important in our religion. My teacher pointed out that in Denmark you just hang out and you don't start dating until around your 30's because that's when they consider marriage. Well someone pointed out that a downside to LDS people thinking about marriage on the first date is that you could decide to not even try to go on a date with someone because they're not "your type". Think about all of the people you could meet that maybe would be good for you, but if you are thinking right from the beginning "Well I would never marry someone who looked like that" then maybe you could miss out on something great. In a way it's judging a book by it's cover.

Another thing we talked about was how marital satisfaction statistically decreases DRAMATICALLY once a baby is born. There are ways to help keep from this. It is SO important to go on dates all of the time. A lot of couples stop going on dates during pregnancy even because the wife feels lousy, and then after the baby is born is even more. It's so important though because dates are your time alone to be with your spouse and that is SO important. It's also really important to involve your husband in everything even if he doesn't seem to care. It will help him feel bonded with the baby during and after. I had Michael going to almost all of my appointments when I was pregnant with Adalynne and although sometimes he felt it was pointless, I think it really helped him to feel a part. He was saying how important it is to have a bonding experience as a new family and sometimes other family members can inhibit that. I remember when I had my daughter I felt like I really lost out on an opportunity with her and didn't get to bond with her like I should have. Mainly because almost right after I had her everyone came in the room to see her. That's not necessarily bad because I know everyone was excited but after all it was my new family and I didn't just get to sit and hold my new baby and stare and smile at her. Right away it felt she was handed off and I just had to watch everyone else hold her. It will be different with my next. I want to make sure I bond with her like I didn't get to with my first. I'm not doing it to be mean either, I'm doing it so I can feel secure in my relationship with my baby and grow with my family. I don't think Michael and I have had a decrease in marital satisfaction because mainly when we had Adalynne we made it a point to still do things together and date often. Mainly because we lived with family for the first 8 months and so we could go out whenever, and also because he has always been the most helpful husband ever.