Want to leave ‘Dysfunction Junction’?
Apr 29th, 2008 by spaceagesage
On our honeymoon trip in 1993, my husband and I visited one stop along the way called Dysfunction Junction. It is not on any map and you won’t see it on your car GPS, but there are a lot of them around.
On that trip, we traveled across several states staying with family and friends on the way to and back from our honeymoon hotel. One family we stayed with taught us some amazing things about how to have a great marriage. Unfortunately for them, they did it by showing us a negative example. They taught us the dark side of Dysfunction Junction, and they showed the result of using venomous relationship skills. We decided they could have written, The Idiot’s Guide to Hurting Your Mate. In that one weekend, my husband and I watched a powerfully distilled version of everything couples should not do in a marriage.
It changed us forever.
The biggest lesson we learned was that the animosity starts small, and how important it is to stop placement of the first brick in the wall of emotional distancing and resentment. This couple’s own brick wall was so well-built that it seemed to take on a life of its own. The wall – sustained by habitual, defensive arguments and never giving an inch – seemed to have more value to them than their relationship.
A second eye-opener for us newlyweds was how vital it is to uphold and respect your spouse, especially in front of others. These people waited until the other one was gone, and then proceeded to tell us how horribly the other one treated him or her or how incompetent the other spouse was. Not a kind or generous word passed their lips about the other. We were made to feel like we had to pick sides in a mud-slinging contest.
The bottom line lesson? Time spent drawing lines in the sand, playing hurtful games, and refusing to work on personal responsibility takes too much energy away from the healing, nurturing, and fun part of a relationship.
Has it been easy applying these lessons? No way. Was it worth sacrificing the ego and the need to be right all the time? Unbelievably so.
POCKET-THOUGHT:
We all get emotional or defensive now and again, or we have a need to feel our anger working its way out of us. But think about this quote from author Doc Childre:
Managing our emotions increases intuition and clarity. It helps us self-regulate our brain chemicals and internal hormones. It gives us natural highs, the real fountain of youth we’ve been searching for. It enables us to drink from elixirs locked within our cells, just waiting for us to discover them
Rampaging emotions can hurt us and those around us. Getting a handle on them in a positive way improves our lives.
Have you ever visited or had to escape from Dysfunction Junction?