Splitting up and reforming families

Separation. Divorce. Remarriages.

Topics I was not at all thrilled to read/learn about.

However, this became a topic that brought more joy to me than I thought it could. Yes, it is really sad to think about families splitting up, and I still don't like thinking about it. But, learning about remarriages and blended families and how you can diminish the typical difficulties in them made me really excited for some reason.

 Some interesting statistics we learned this week:

• After being divorced for 2 years, 70% of those people regret the divorce and could've saved it.
• 95% of people say they're satisfied with their marriage. (it isn't true that everyone is so unhappy in their marriages)
• It usually takes 2 years for blended families to reach normalcy. 

My professor married his wife when she already had two kids. His wife came in and they told us about their experiences. As we were closing up the class, he told us a video/song that his adopted son (one of the ones from his wife's previous marriage) showed him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjO1F6oCab8

I was tearing up and realized how great of a professor I have. We have the choice of how we treat our families and the example we set for them. He said that sometimes we glorify having the same genes as our children, but really we can be great parents whether they have our genes or not.

I've learned so much from this class and I have so much more confidence in my ability to have a successful, happy family!

Raising those kiddlets

Parenting! My favorite subject! I just absolutely love learning about how we can become better parents and the effects of certain parenting styles. The biggest thing that stuck out to me this week was about what happens when children don't have their needs met--which needs don't just stop with food and shelter. People need things like contact and a sense of belonging, along with a feeling of some type of power. When these types of needs aren't being met, kids often act out and we attribute negative motives to them, when in reality they are just seeking to satisfy needs and may not know where to find them.

My professor told us a story about this little boy who used to be in his ward that drove people crazy. He was that boy that is all over the place, going crazy, stands way too close to you, and seeks attention in obnoxious ways. My professor said that one day this boy jumped unto his head. Brother Williams freaked out and threw him on the ground. He was stunned and couldn't believe what he had done. He preceded to apologize incessantly. The kid looked up and said "It's okay, my mom told me something like this would happen eventually." My professor decided to try something. During every transition period he would seek this boy out and talk to him, he would put his arm around him and show genuine interest. Very soon after he started doing this, the boy calmed down. His contact and belonging needs were being met so he didn't need to try to seek them out in outrageous ways.
Too often we see people like this--whose needs are not being met and they're doing whatever they can to try to fill those needs--and we push them away, making their needs even less met. Instead we should help them to meet their needs and this unbalance will likely diminish.

Dads and worrrrrk

I don't have too much to say this week since it was thanksgiving and we only had one class! But this week we studied about the importance of fathers and how working mothers affect the family. I could not believe how much families benefit from having a father involved in the family--I mean I guess it makes sense, but I didn't expect the value to be so tremendous. I really want my husband to be extremely involved in our family so that our children will have that strong influence.
I learned something about myself this week...I am conflicted. The more I become invested in my schooling, the more passionately I feel about it. This makes me want to share my knowledge with people and to bless other families. But I've always wanted to be home with my kids and learning about the benefits of that, makes me want to be there. It's just a conflict within myself. Maybe I can find a way to help families from home.

Talkin' it up!

Well this week we talked about everyone's favorite topic------COMMUNICATION! Three things go into communicating with others: nonverbal cues, tone of voice, and the actual words. I think I get really caught up in the words I'm saying, heck, I love words! But in reality, the actual words we say have little to do with the message we send. Communication is a case where it doesn't matter so much what we think we're sending, but what matters is the message that is received.
Try to imagine this as a circular diagram (it was kinda hard to make) but this is how communication works:

thoughts and feelings=>encode=>send through a media=>decoded
^                                                                              v
^                                                                              v
Decoded<=send through a media<=encode<=thoughts and feelings<=

You can see that there is a lot of room for misinterpretation as we try to figure out our own feelings and the feelings of others. This day brought me back to the symbolic interaction theory and how often people aren't meaning to send the message we receive.
It's important to create shared meanings so that you both know what you are talking about when you say certain things. I think this helps us to feel connected and better understand each other.
We also got this cool tip:

Describe the situation
Express feelings/opinions
Assert your wishes
Reinforce, reward people who respond positively
Mindful--stay on topic
Appear confident
Negotiate--willingness to give to get

I am a little apprehensive about parts of this model, but I think overall it's pretty good.

We're goin' crazy!

This week it was all about crises and how families deal with them. Crisis is defined as something that makes it so a family can no longer function as it did before the event. We learned a cool little formula:

Actual event--observable part, the stressor
Both resources and responses--attitudes, $, insurance skills, flexibility, cohesion, lean vs. blame, church
Cognitions--how they perceive the event
------------
total eXperience--the crisis

It was cool to learn about how it isn't the event that determines whether the family will survive or not, but rather how the family deals with it. Certain things make it easier for a family to deal with crisis like the things under the resources and responses. The way we think about a crisis really affects how we experience it and how the family will be able to function after the crisis. Our thoughts sure do have a lot of power!

Some tips we got were:

• "It's the structure, not the stressor"  We often focus on the actual event and not how we deal with it, but really it's the structure of our family and what we choose to do that affects how we'll be afterward.
• "Making decisive acts, being mindful of other's situations, and not following natural tendencies tends to lead to improvement through crisis." Families can either go through crisis and be worse off, the same, or better off afterward. I think most of us want to be better off, so if we think about how we're acting and choose to be agents who act rather than objects that are acted upon, our families will be better off following a crisis. 
• "If it doesn't get resolved, it won't change." Too often we think if we just kind of ignore things and let them "blow over" they'll go away, but this often leads to extended periods of hard feelings that are unresolved.
• "Observe and describe reality" ex: I'm really sad and it's hard to deal with VS. I'm really sad , it isn't fair that someone did this to me. 

We're all bound to face a crisis at some point in our family lives, but we can choose to make the best of it and come out better than we were before!

"We often think the event creates the feeling but in reality our thoughts of the event create our feelings which lead to our actions...we decide how we respond to events."

No! No! No! Go!

This week the topic was sexual intimacy. I was really surprised with how interesting this topic was and how much I learned. I really love when sexual relations are talked about in light of God's plan and how it should be, instead of just that it's bad--which isn't the case at all! I loved how my professor addressed some flaws LDS culture (I guess that's a little ironic). In the LDS culture, what we're too often taught comes off as sexuality being bad (instead of sacred and not appropriate at the time), and then we get married and are expected to just GO (hence the title of this blog)! Brother Williams talked about how we don't need to rush things even after we get married and we discussed what this bond really is about.
We also talked about how people too often think that a good sex life is what majorly contributes to a happy marriage. Sure, it's a factor, but it isn't as big as many think. And it's more of a thermometer (according to our book)...generally if the marriage is going well, the physical intimacy will be going well, if the marriage isn't going well, neither will the physical intimacy. I think that's because it is SO much more than just being physical, it's really uniting two people and an expression of love, so if you aren't showing your love in other ways, then the physical intimacy won't be as satisfying.
We also talked about affairs! It never occurred to me how much really is cheating. We discussed the emotional detached and attached involvement and the physical detached and attached involvement. We also read about a newly married woman who didn't realized she was emotionally attached to another man and that this was infidelity. She was so upset and never wanted to compromise anything with her husband. She realized she had to change the way she thought and her actions. We have to be really careful about what we're doing and how we interact with people of the opposite sex. We do not want to be unfaithful and cause problems in our marriages.

Taking the plunge

From the weddings to marriages--what makes them good? People can go absolutely crazy over an extravagant wedding and do a lot less to prepare for the actual marriage. Transitioning into marriage can be difficult, here two separate people, two separate lives, suddenly become one--or hopefully they do. When two people get married, they've got to figure out lots of things--what traditions they'll follow, who will do what work, how decisions are made and many, many more things.

This week I learned about what can affect marital satisfaction. It was interesting to see the different trends for the level of marital satisfaction. We talked about how children affect marital satisfaction. Apparently the marital satisfaction tends to be rising and rising in the first little while of marriage (no surprise there). And then when the first child comes it tends to decrease slightly. This kind of surprised me--I thought babies were supposed to bring joy and happiness! But we talked about how it is only slightly lower and we discussed things to prevent the satisfaction from declining too significantly! I loved talking about how we should involve the husband (/father) a lot in the pregnancy--let him talk to the belly/baby, bring him to the doctor's visits, pick out baby things together, have him be really involved in the labor, and discuss things that will change once the baby comes. We learned about how too often women use this as a time to bond with other women,  which only ostracizes the husband. In reality, these special times should be shared between husband and wife to bring them closer together and to bond them to each other and to the baby. It's a really important bond we don't want to miss out on! 

Moral of the story, build connections with your spouse and make sure you are creating your own family and talking about how things will change and they'll go much smoother! 

It's all about the loooove

L-O-V-E...The thing we all want to find. As a female, love is something that is often on my mind, though I have never before experienced learning about love in a school setting. Boy, was this an interesting experience. In this section we focused on what love is, how people select their partners, and differences between cohabitation and marriage. I'll admit that though I clearly will wait until I'm married to live with someone, I thought the research might show that a different start would produce a more satisfying marriage. I found it really intriguing that those who live in cohabitation have a harder time adjusting to marriage because they lead parallel lives when cohabitating and cannot become "one" as easily after marriage--God really does know what he's talking about. I also found it interesting the different things that go into selecting a life partner. Our textbook focused on what attracts us to people and why people get married. Surprisingly they said that love isn't the biggest reason (though people mistake it to be the only reason). Things such as money, similarity to our families, and close proximity were all reasons for selecting someone--though they may be subconscious. We like what we're comfortable with and thus we seek to find someone who fits into our mold. We also have a very limited pool of people to choose from--though the internet has opened this up quite a bit. 

After this section, I realized that love isn't what we typically may think of and that it can be very hard to define. But, falling in love isn't all we need in order to have a successful and fulfilling marriage. I think love comes with time and grows deeper as we get to know someone more and more. What a beautiful thing!