emotional growth

If you need vacation from spouse, maybe you married wrong person

By David McElroy · June 11, 2019

I’ve heard variations of this story three times over the last month.

About three weeks ago, a friend told me he was taking a vacation to relax. I asked where he and his wife were going.

“Are you kidding?” he asked. “That would defeat the whole purpose. I can’t be myself around her. Me and some guy friends are going to Colorado.”

Another situation was a wife who admitted she can’t wait for her husband to leave town every time he goes on a business trip. The third was a guy going on a family vacation — with his parents and siblings — and leaving his wife behind, by mutual choice, because they don’t enjoy each other’s company anymore.

I sometimes hear people say it can be healthy to spend time away from a spouse. I’m not sure I agree that it’s ever positive, but I’m certain it’s negative if you’re doing it because you simply can’t stand to spend time with the person you married.

If you need a vacation from your spouse, that’s a sign of something disturbing. Maybe you’re married to the wrong person.

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False belief of boyhood haunts me: I can’t be loved unless I’m perfect

By David McElroy · March 8, 2019

You and I are held captive by unconscious beliefs we learned as children.

We all learned different things — depending on our families and how we were treated — but we all internalized ideas that became our core beliefs about ourselves. These beliefs help us to survive as children and become our defense mechanisms. They’re like silent background instructions telling us how to survive and get our needs met.

But then we grow up and keep living as though our simplistic childhood beliefs are actually true. In this way, our childhood defenses turn into adult blind spots that can make us miserable — and we don’t even know we’re doing it.

I’ve recently learned something interesting. If I know enough about your personality, I can go a long way toward determining which false beliefs you learned about yourself. Our secrets aren’t as hidden as we think they are.

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I just went from joy to bitter disappointment in the space of seconds. I had an exciting idea, but it was something I needed feedback and discussion about. I wanted to turn to a trusted partner and say, “What do you think about this?” But I felt deflated because there was no one there. I recently shared with you how much I miss having someone to take care of, but I also strongly miss having a partner who’s there to listen and to help me plot how we can move forward in life together. The best marriages are sort of a “mutual aid society,” an arrangement by which each person is fully committed to helping the other become the best he or she can be. It was actually so late tonight when I had this thought that a partner might very well have been asleep already. But it would have been enough to say to myself, “We can talk about that tomorrow” — if I knew someone cared and wanted to be part of that conversation with me. I miss that kind of relationship. Doesn’t everyone need this?

Here’s more evidence that the modern U.S. school system is badly broken. It was once a reasonable assumption that a high school graduate who was accepted to a major college could read and write competently. For years, colleges have known their incoming freshmen’s writing was mostly dreadful, so they’ve been forced to teach students to write. (They’ve done it very poorly.) Now it has become obvious that basic reading skills among freshmen are so terrible that some colleges must now teach kids how to read. At the University of California at Santa Cruz, all incoming freshmen will now take a mandatory three-course sequence which will teach them how to read and understand what they’re reading, in addition to trying to teach them how to write. If a student has made it this far in life without learning how to read and write, this probably won’t work, but the system will eventually be dumbed down to ignore the failure. Parents who trust the modern school system to educate their children are gambling with their kids’ lives. The system is broken.

Catholic priest Richard Rohr is a well-known writer and teacher on several subjects, one of which is the Enneagram. Most of his work with which I’ve been familiar is related to spiritual and psychological development. I recently discovered that someone has posted a good bit of one of his Enneagram workshops on YouTube and I’d like to recommend that if you have any interest in the Enneagram personality typing system. It was only about six months ago that I discovered I’m actually a Type 1 (instead of a Type 4), so I’ve been watching various teachers talk about that type lately. Rohr happens to be a Type 1 as well, and his description of the type — and especially his self-criticism — struck home with me. Here are links to his teaching about most of the types: Type 1, Type 2, Type 3, Type 4, Type 5, Type 6, Type 9. (Types 7 and 8 are missing.) You might also enjoy an interview that Krista Tippett did with Rohr for the On Being podcast two years ago. It was listening to that interview again this week which prompted me to go find his Enneagram teaching. I don’t always agree with Rohr about everything, but he’s always thought-provoking.

It’s still not a common pattern, but more families are deciding today that it makes sense for a dad to stay home with the kids while a mom is gone to a job. The specifics of such arrangements vary. In some cases, the wife works outside the home all the time and the husband runs the household. In others, the man works from home and the woman works outside the home part of the time. In such an arrangement, the parents switch who’s supervising children depending on who’s home and who’s busy. Society still seems to collectively have a problem with non-traditional parenting arrangements, but they can make a lot of sense for many people. Of course, the far-more-common pattern is a father who works full-time elsewhere and a mother who works full-time as well, but who still has to take care of kids and home when she’s finished with her paying job. Different arrangements are going to work for different families, but it’s clear that the worst of all worlds in the expectation that the woman work a full-time job and then come home and work another full-time job raising children on her own.

Stories about young people running away from home often don’t end well, but I just heard a story of a good outcome. The young woman who shared her story with me isn’t a child, though. She’s in her early 20s, but she ran away from home last year. She lived in Michigan with her dysfunctional family. Her mom was addicted to meth and various prescription drugs. She was the only one in the family who worked — and her family took almost all of the money she earned. The only bright spot in her life was a guy she met online playing a video game. The two grew close and fell in love. About 18 months ago, she secretly packed everything she owned — and he drove from Birmingham to Michigan to pick her up without her family’s knowledge. Today, they’re married and have a new baby. She says leaving her family was the second best thing that ever happened to her — and her husband and baby are the best. “He doesn’t seem to understand what a big deal it was,” she said, “but he saved my life. I took a big risk and he did, too, but I’m happy and loved for the first time in my life.” It might not be common, but some runaway stories do end well.

emotional growth

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