Episode 140 – How to Have a Better Marriage with a Relationship Coach
The Marriage MBA graduate Helen Zuman is joining me in conversation today, and I know it’s one you’re not going to want to miss.
A Harvard graduate, former cult member (yes, we talk about that) and certified coach through The Life Coach School, Helen helps authors and coaches build their businesses and claim their authority by helping them write compelling self-help books.
Helen demonstrated great emotional leadership in her cohort of The Marriage MBA. She always led with vulnerability, openness, and willingness to be visible getting coached so others could learn and benefit, too. I’m so grateful to her for that.
We did a deep dive into her experience of the program, including how to have a better marriage, how a relationship coach can be the catalyst for needed change, and how to create a stronger relationship on your own terms.
Deciding in your own way how to have a better marriage
Helen started by saying, “Where I started out [in The Marriage MBA], I was kind of wanting an escape hatch…feeling miserable and wanting relief. In particular, wanting relief from what I experienced as my husband’s blame of me for the various things he didn’t have in his life, like to-do list sex, which was probably the most painful part of my marriage.”
She opened up about not having the cashflow to sign up for The Marriage MBA and applying for her first-ever credit card so she could register – only, the card wasn’t going to arrive in time for program registration. Helen approached her husband, crying, and that’s when he offered: “Why don’t you just use the money from the joint account?”
It was such an awakening moment for her that the solution could be that simple, but also that her husband was more than okay with her using their money how she wanted to.
She also noted, “I paid the joint account back because I didn’t want to feel like I had to use this program to heal my marriage. I wanted to use it to get clear on whether or not to stay, basically. And so it needed to be MY money.”
One of the central questions that we ask in the program is, “What is the best relationship I can have with this person?” And then: “Do I want that?” Sometimes couples get along amazingly better. They can finally talk about the real stuff, and when they do, it turns out they want something different.
As a relationship coach, I can confirm that sometimes the highest and best outcome really is for the relationship to end – but to end from a grounded, centered place as opposed to acting on an angry impulse or unresolved resentment.
The role of grief in contemplating the end of your marriage
When it came to entertaining the idea of divorce, Helen said, “I asked myself, ‘What are all the reasons why you don’t want to get divorced and think it’s off the table?’ And I came up with a number of things.
I thought that divorce was a failure for me. A friend had just gotten divorce and I was like ‘yay, shackles off for her’ but for me, no, that’s a failure. Also, in my cult, monogamy was forbidden. My husband and I getting married was sort of a ‘screw you’ to the cult and if I got divorced, it would be like [I lost].
Then we had a coaching call about all these reasons why I wasn’t even allowed to think about divorce, and you told me that I didn’t need your permission to decide that I had done enough and that if I was ready to leave, I was ready to leave. But if I did want that permission, you were there to give it to me. To say ‘you have done enough, you have tried enough, you can go with a clean conscience if that’s what you want.’
For months, I was on edge wondering if we would get divorced, what my exit plan should be, would I have to leave the house I loved, where would I go, etc.
The thought of leaving the marriage felt like getting kicked out of the cult: the end of the world.
I just had to keep revisiting that, yes, that could happen, and to keep painting a picture of how my life was going to be amazing if I did leave, in order to get my nervous system used to that possibility.
I accepted the possibility that I was going to need to feel the total grief of divorce ahead of time, and once I accepted that, then I didn’t need to try to control my husband or what he did.”
This is so important. In our society, we don’t really talk about how any loss is grief. We think about it in the context of someone’s death. But it applies to divorce, too. There is a grief process when we are losing the marriage we thought we were going to have, and asking ourselves “What can this be instead?”
One thing that can help manage this grief is knowing that if you, for whatever reason, want to leave your marriage, you do have that choice now or in the future. It can be so empowering. When it comes to figuring out how to have a better marriage, just knowing you have that choice might allow you to relax into today’s choice.
How to have a better marriage on your own terms – even for sex
So many people feel frustrated with this and don’t know why, and don’t know where to start when they look for help from a relationship coach. I think Helen’s insights are so powerful here.
“The number one source of pain in my relationship when I signed up for The Marriage MBA was that I was having sex regularly with my husband in order to keep the peace, in order to control him by preventing him from becoming angry. And that is a terrible way to enter into sex.
During my coaching with Maggie, I gave myself permission to tell him I’m no longer going to have sex that I’m not wildly enthusiastic about.
It brought up all kinds of tension and conflict between us. His favorite thing to do with me was to have sex, and my favorite thing to do with him was drink mate on the porch together and talk about our lives.
It was a moment of giving myself permission to really center my body as far as what forms of physical touch and physical contact felt good to me. I started to articulate what sex was for me. And we started building something new together.”
This is so liberating for just all of us to hear. We may not be troubleshooting a sexual situation, but for anything where we want a different result, we have to take different actions.
Get the tools to create a stronger marriage
If you want to stop being frustrated with others’ behavior and how you respond to disagreements or fights and start showing up as the person you want to be, I want to invite you to enroll in The Marriage MBA.
The Marriage MBA — the Mindset Breakthrough Activator — is the 6-month group coaching and mentoring program that teaches you the relationship skills you weren’t taught in school.
What you’ll learn inside draws upon cognitive behavioral psychology — how your thoughts and feelings impact your actions and outcomes — to equip you with the kind of mindset that activates breakthroughs in ANY area of your marriage that feels less than 5-star.
You have so much more power and influence in your marriage than you realize. In The Marriage MBA, you’ll build the skills and tools to and deepen the level of connection in your marriage, then use them over and over for the years to come.
If you’re ready to figure out how to have a better marriage for yourself and your honey, this program will help you.
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