I’ve had three superbly gifted coaches in the last five years.  You are one of them.  You brought me through a professional crisis (with reverberating personal consequences) that I wasn’t able to get through on my own.  We agreed to work together again in different circumstances.  You would be our coach, rather than mine.  Our coach meant coach to my husband and me.  You had the credentials I was looking for.  You had studied the master (the person and process I thought equalled mastery) and you were looking for clients.  So we three embarked together.

Your work, and the work you were studying, recommended one basic way to a good marriage.  The marriage could have money troubles, lots of arguments, and struggles over children or health.  However, it had to have many more positive interactions than negative ones.  This prescription (initially stated as long ago as 20 years) is born out in the work of much of positive psychology today.

Almost from the beginning there was trouble.  I cried through every session.  I felt more discouraged about my relationship than hopeful.  I felt that I took our assignments more seriously than my husband did, and I felt you let him get away with behavior you’d call me on. If I didn’t mention my husband’s shortcomings for a whole month, we got along better, but I felt hamstrung and invisible.  If he did the same thing, he reported feeling the same loss of identity.   This was tough for at least two of us.  I believe that you wanted to enable a more peaceful path for us.  I believe that I wanted this too.  In some way, I also believe that my husband wanted it.  But our spiral was definitely downward.

After perhaps six months, I ended our coaching together.  I also told my husband that I didn’t know if we should stay together.  He agreed.  This was our nadir–no help, no hope, no connection.

Interestingly, during the same period of time that we had been coaching with you, I had been working with another coach on my weight.  I’d lost perhaps 20 pounds during this period.  I’d also been actively seeking spiritual practices and a spiritual community that would support who I wanted to become.  As a result of pursuing these other two goals, I began to feel more confident about myself.  As I noticed this, I wondered if I could go back to the possibility of keeping my mouth shut when I thought my husband was doing or saying something negative, critical, or hurtful, and feel differently about it.  To be clear, I wondered if I could let his slights roll off of my back because I felt stronger and more powerful in myself.  I wondered if I could do this without loss of my sense of self, and my sense of well-being.  I found that I could.

It has only been two months that I’ve been experimenting with this.  Here’s what I’ve found that I want to tell you about: when I ignore, or let go of, his slights (or what I think in the moment are his criticism, blame or denial), I have more of an attitude of curiosity than martyrdom.  I wonder what will happen if I don’t say anything?  The most amazing thing is that I sometimes find that he didn’t mean what I thought he meant.  The second most amazing thing is that he apologizes if he did mean it (sometimes), without my asking or having to ask.  The last thing is that we are happier together; we are laughing more, and we owe that, at least in part, to you.