Why Am I So Critical Of My Husband? | Paul Friedman

Are you being so critical of your husband? Probably, there's something wrong. Watch Paul give some advice on what you can do and for you to understand what's happening on your heart and mind.

I'm going to try to not give you just some blow you off kind of answer or make you responsible
and just leave you with nothing. I'm going to try and give you something that is going to be useful. Now that doesn't mean you can't go further that you can't take what I offer you as a first step towards really improving your marriage. Because let's face it, when you got married. You got married in order to be happy. In fact you got married in order to be happier every single day of your life and I'm not just saying this. To me, this is a very practical thing and for all of our clients who take our courses whether it's the men's course for marriage or the women's course for marriage or who read one of my books.

This is what the expectation should be when you get married. It should be to be happy, isn't that why you got married? So you're not happy and you're recognizing that you're overly critical of your husband and I would suggest that being critical of your husband at all is being over critical
of your husband because where is that coming from. It's not coming from a place of love. It's not coming from a place of support even if you don't express it outwardly. It's coming from a place and this is what we should have been learning as children. It's coming from a place of the mind being controlled by our biology because our biology as you know very well.

We all learned this is that one of the conditions of life is the innate drive to survive and criticalness is a reaction which means that something is threatening in our mind. We're afraid that we're not going to survive, and because we don't learn this, because we don't learn this
and how it all works and the ramifications we go through life being overly sensitive. It's not a criticism to say you're overly sensitive because almost everyone is. I remember many years ago, I was sort of screening the therapists that I would train and I had someone call a hundred therapists in San Diego and I met with 20 of them and I ended up only training 13.

Why?

We have conditions at The Marriage Foundation for who represents our principles, and it all can be learned. You should be learning these principles too because they're all about making your marriage amazing. But I wanted to start with therapists who were open and one of the big things
that is important to be open to is who you are as a human being. And therapists in my opinion
almost all of them are trained in a way that suggests that we are merely psychological beings
and that isn't so.

The first question that my representative asked these therapists was, "Do you believe that you are a soul or do you believe that you have a soul?" Now the truth of the matter and you're going to go, "Well, that's your opinion." If you're inclined to do so is that we are all souls. We are souls and we have a body and we have a mind. Now we are residing in this body and this body is biological, and the biological body is driven to survive. So the mind, we have a choice. We have free will, right? You'll acknowledge we have free will. We have a choice. Do we listen to ourselves
which is the soul or do we listen to the body?

It's a choice when I present it to you that way but if no one has ever educated you about this proposition and you don't have to call yourself a soul. You could just call yourself consciousness
but you have a self-awareness. You have the ability. Yes, you do, to choose constantly. You could choose going this way, going that way, feeling positively, feeling negatively but we're not trained
early on in our life to know that. And so we're sucked into this trap of feelings, "Well, I feel this way about that." Well, he never should have said that to me. Who does he think he is?" So what's
happening there is when you're critical and as a result overtly defensive in many cases, your drive to survive is being triggered. It's instinctive at that level. It comes up to the mind and the mind takes over.

Now it's fairly -- I'm not going to say it's complicated because for me it's simple. I understand it so well and I explain it I think pretty well in the courses especially but also in the books so that you can understand that when "I" react it's not I who is reacting but it's the mind that is influenced by my biological body. And you can see so many variations in different people as to what they consider threatening and what they don't. Because what happens is this instinct
comes up into the mind and operates at a different level but it's not a good level because it's not the level of you as a soul so here's what it is.

Watch the video for more.

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