Last week Dr. Ross shared what fear of abandonment is, where it comes from, the characteristics of the fear and how to manage it for a life of peace. 

This week, Dr. Ross will be covering how to effectively deal with a spouse that has fear of abandonment. She will give very practical ways to manage it. 
1. Reflective listening while communicating.
2. Having emotionally charged conflict.
3.  Taking time outs.
4. Weekly check-ins.
5. Compassion for your spouse's perspective. 

For a complete transcript of the interview, go to http://reviveyourmidlifemarriage.com/63

Dr. Dawn A. Ross, Ph.D. is a Metaphysical Practitioner, with a Doctor of Philosophy., specializing in Metaphysical Counseling from the University of Sedona.

 She is a Master of Spiritual Guide Connectivity, certified Holistic Life Coach, Certified Stress Management Coach, Certified EFT Practitioner, Certified NLP Practioner, certified Hypnotherapy Practioner, and a certified Life-Style Weight Management Specialist.

In this episode: 

• What fear of abandonment is and where it comes from.
• How it manifests in one's life.
• How to manage it for greater peace.

This is a two-part series. 

For the highlights of this episode, go to http://reviveyourmidlifemarriage.com/62

I’m hearing more and more couples talk about needing more time alone or just more time doing things away from their spouses. That is not a bad thing. It doesn’t mean you don’t love your spouse enough or are wrong for needing your own space outside of the relationship. Stepping away to take care of yourself is an excellent thing for the health of your relationship. Day in and day out with your spouse can get monotonous, even in the best relationships. There should be a balance in a marriage where each takes their time away to care for their own needs.

Remember when you had little kids, and you dreamed of just having some time alone?  That was hard to come by and often was accompanied by feelings of guilt. At least it was for me. That happens in marriages too. Especially if one spouse needs less time alone than the other, let me say this certainly if you need time alone, you need to convey it to your spouse and give up these feelings of I might hurt their feelings, or I shouldn’t take time away if my spouse doesn’t need the same. It is about your needs. When you deny them, you’ll feel more and more overwhelmed and discontent. If this happens, chances are you won’t be your best in the relationship. 

Not everyone is comfortable with just saying, “I need some time alone.” The worry is that it might be offensive or sound like a threat to the relationship. So, how do you ask for this without being offensive or cause your spouse to feel like something is wrong in your relationship?

In this episode, I'll be giving you 4 ways to express to your spouse that you need more time alone, especially if you have a spouse who doesn't have the same need. 

How we feel about ourselves has a tremendous effect on every area of our lives. You can find more books on self-esteem on Amazon than you have time to read. 

To have positive self-esteem, you must see yourself as worthy. Conversely, unworthiness results in low self-esteem.

In Brene Brown's book The Gifts of Imperfection, she says, "If we want to fully experience love and belonging, we must believe that we are worthy of love and belonging."

If you believe the negative stories that were told to your growing up, take on throughout life in school or work, or even failed relationships, you will most likely have poor self-esteem. Usually, those stories become our truths. I'm never enough. I'll never be enough, i.e., unworthiness. And those feelings will follow you into your marriage.

When that special someone comes along, you feel giddy that someone has come along to make everything right. You feel loveable. You feel great about yourself. All that time and attention proves it, right.  Just think back to that time and those memories and how great you felt. 

Our society sets us up to expect our spouse to be our redeemer from all the past hurts and all those feelings of unworthiness: boy, what pressure. 

There is a book I highly suggest you read, but the title is what is essential here. It is called, You Are the One You've Been Waiting For by Richard C. Schwartz. That title is the greatest truth. Putting our spouse in the place of the redeemer in our lives is not only unrealistic, but it will also set the relationship up for many disappointments. 

No one can make you feel worthy and loveable like you can. It is called self-esteem, not others esteem. 

In this episode, I'll be covering how low self-esteem or unworthiness manifests itself in a marriage and how to turn it around.

For complete show notes to this episode, go to http://reviveyourmidlifemarriage.com/60

If you aren't setting goals for your marriage, you probably aren't moving in a forward direction. No goals in life keep us stuck.  Goals give purpose and keep us motivated. There is a sense of accomplishment in each success.

Have you heard this quote? “If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.”

In the business world, companies are driven by goals. When we are raising our children, we have clear parents' goals to make sure our children get everything they will need to go out into the world as well-equipped humans. What I see happen in so many marriages is there are simply no clear goals for the relationship. Then we find ourselves in a stale relationship that feels like it is going nowhere. We become disillusioned and apathetic. We muddle along just getting by and settling for mediocrity. 

Have you and your husband ever set goals for your marriage? If you haven't, there is no better time than now. 

Here are 10 marriage goals that could get you started. 

For complete show notes to this episode, go to http://reviveyourmidlifemarriage.com/58

Marriage should be a place where you gain comfort and validation for the struggles that come with life.  As my husband and I navigate this midlife journey, the struggles we used to have are very different than the ones we have today. Our bodies have changed. We look in the mirror and see a different version of ourselves that can be hard to recognize. We feel thirty and look every bit of our age. We are experiencing children moving out into their own lives without our constant care, which dramatically changes the role we have played in their lives. While my husband has job security, his workspace is made up of younger and younger employees. Seem stressful? It is. Midlife is no joke. 

While there are so many new opportunities to do new things, grow, and design a new phase of life that is rather exciting, some of these changes can bring up fear, sadness, and feelings of irrelevancy. 

Even though I don’t care for the term midlife crisis per se, I know at times, coming to terms with these changes can certainly make you feel like you are in a crisis.  

It is times like these that we need an extra dose of comfort and to give an extra dose to our spouses. I like to think of my relationship with my husband as my comfy recliner at the end of the day. My safe space. 

I read this the other day: We all want to be known and understood by our spouses. I agree we want to be known, but I don’t think we need to be understood. We will not always understand what our spouse is going through. We don’t always have the same struggles, nor can we fully understand them. My feelings around my children leaving the nest can’t be fully understood by my spouse. I spent my life raising the children as a stay-at-home mom. They were my focus and work. His main job was supporting our family, working outside of the home. While we both miss our grown children, it isn’t the same. My husband is feeling the change of age in the workforce in his profession. I haven’t gone through that, so I can’t fully understand what that is like. So instead of being understood, I believe what is necessary is to be known, loved, and supported. We want to know that we will find love, support, and comfort for whatever we bring emotionally to the table.  

So how can we give and receive comfort during the challenges midlife brings? Here are 5 ways:

For Complete Show Notes go to http://reviveyourmidlifemarriage.com/57

I have found myself in times of feeling apathetic in my marriage. I mean after many years, we can move from being proactive to being downright lazy. After all, sustaining a healthy, connected marriage is hard work. But, without constant attention, the easier it is to fall into apathy. 

Apathy is damaging. Left unchecked it is usually the start of the total disintegration of the marriage. It’s relational cancer. 

Leo Buscaglia, also known as “Dr. Love,” was an American author, motivational speaker, and professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Southern California. This is what he had to say about apathy: “I have a strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate – it’s apathy. It’s not giving a damn.” 

Apathy is indifference-an I don’t care attitude. And if we are indifferent in our marriage and don’t care anymore, what hope is there? None.

In this episode, I'll cover the warning signs of apathy and the ways to get back to connection.

Complete show notes can be found at http://reviveyourmidlifemarriage.com/56

This is the second part of the Interview with author Ben Winter. We will be continuing to discuss his book, What to Expect When Having Expectations: Using the Anger of Unmet Expectations to  Find Peace.

This week we will be talking about what you do if you have shared your expectations, but they still aren't being met. How do you keep your peace and manage the anger you might feel?

Are there unreasonable expectations we have for others? Absolutely.  Find out what some of those are and how to manage them.

Finally, we will discuss how expectations play into regret as we age.

You'll find the complete transcript at http://reviveyourmidlifemarriage.com/55

Ben Winter is the author of What to Expect when Having Expectations: Using the anger of unmet expectations to find peace. 

The book is about understanding where your expectations come from, what drives them, why you aren't always aware of them, how to come to peace after being upset by an expectation going unmet, and increasing communication with yourself and others. 

We will be covering these topics:

1. How being precise and explicit with expectations matters.
2. Why expectations are neither good nor bad.
3. How to determine what expectation is not being met when you are feeling upset.
4. What holds us back from sharing expectations.
5. How the programming we have from childhood plays into our expectations as adults.
6. Reaching agreements in marriage around expectations. 

  Join us for an in-depth conversation on expectations. 

Wouldn't it be nice if we had all our emotional wounds healed before we got married?  Just being aware of my emotional wounds would have been nice. However, as young adults, we don't always have the awareness that comes as we age. Consequently, all those stored emotional wounds from our past are typically triggered in marriage. Our most intimate relationships bring out the good, the bad, and the ugly. In fact, it is in our marriages where those old wounds from childhood show up. We often don't even realize that how we are responding in our marriage is often the result of our old wounds from the past. 

Having emotional wounds is not a sign of weakness. We are not less than having emotional wounds or scars. We sometimes think that just putting them in a box labeled "the past, don't touch" will free us from having them affect us later on. Having emotional wounds is a universal experience. Whether we acknowledge them or not, they affect us in every relationship in our lives. Even the behavior of people we don't even know can trigger old wounds when they say things or do things to us.

Triggers of old wounds

Let me give you some examples of how old wounds can show up in a marriage.

Say you had a controlling parent or controlling parents. You were told what to do, when to do it, and be expected to do it perfectly. You felt you had little autonomy and feared not measuring up to expectations placed on you. Maybe your spouse tends to tell you what to do instead of asking. It could be in the form of You need to do something a certain way instead of in the form of a request. That triggers those old wounds. You feel like you don't measure up. You feel like you are a kid again living with your parents. Boom, you are triggered. You become defensive, angry, and dig your heels in with an F you attitude. 

It could be that your parents were emotionally unavailable. You might have felt invisible and lonely. So when your spouse is unattentive, busy, or preoccupied, it triggers that feeling of not being important or worthy.  You might beg or plead for attention. You may expect your spouse to make you feel worthy, respected, and valued. You feel less than when you think your spouse isn't paying attention to you the way you think they should. 

Maybe you come from a very volatile family where screaming and fighting were the norms. You vowed that would never be a part of your home. So, when your spouse gets angry and raises their voice, you are triggered. You may retaliate, or you may become fearful and do everything in your power to avoid upsetting your spouse, bending over backward to avoid anything that could cause a conflict even when it means you have to stuff your feelings to do so. You become a people-pleaser. 

Did you feel safe as a child?  If not, you may have developed ways of protecting yourself and avoiding getting too close to anyone. Even if your spouse is a safe landing spot, you may not entirely give yourself to intimacy for fear of being hurt. Intimacy is a risk you aren't willing to take. 

Do you see how our marriages can make old wounds surface?