Opposites Attract, But Spouses Repel
We tend to think of our marriage in terms of feelings. We marry our spouse because of the way we feel when we’re with him or her. Later, many people divorce their spouses because of the way they feel when they’re with him or her. Feelings are fickle.

Remember your sixth-grade science class, when you did experiments with those U-shaped magnets? It’s as if our mating instinct is the “magnetism” that makes two opposite magnets attract. But after the honeymoon phase, what changes the magnetism and causes those two magnets to begin to repel each other?

Act First, Think Later
We often forget the fact that we humans are also mammals–creatures of instinct, who act on impulse, rather than planning and principle. Yes we have thinking minds, but we often use them simply to justify our behavior after the fact. For example, our mating instinct drives us to marry, our reproductive instinct causes us to start a family, and (if we’re not careful) our fight-or-flight instinct may destroy our family. It’s as if your marriage is flying straight toward a mountain, but the controls are locked on “auto-pilot.” You have to learn about these instinctive behaviors before you can take over the controls and pilot your own family plane.

I’m not the poster boy for Perfect Husband And Father, but I have made tremendous progress in the past six years since I began to study Bowen Family Systems Theory. The psychiatrist Murray Bowen is like the “Jane Goodall” of the human family. His research at the Meninger Clinic, the National Institute of Mental Health, and Georgetown Medical School has yielded a theory that includes four involuntary, predictable behaviors that can be observed in all married couples.

So, the burning question is, “How do I learn to observe these instinctive, involuntary behaviors in my family of origin, so that I can prevent them from recurring in my own nuclear family?” You can get a complete set of resources at my web site, dedicated to coaching families: www.DavidArthurCode.com. Later in this article, I’ll give you an example of one resource that a client of mine, “Debbie,” took and applied to her own life, with excellent results.

Observing The Chimps In Our Own Family
Jane Goodall didn’t learn about chimpanzees by placing a chimp in the middle of a room and staring at it. She studied chimp families in their natural communities in their natural habitat. Like our primate relatives, the human is a herd animal. You and I will never understand our own behavior until we learn to observe ourselves not as individuals, but as members of our own “herd.” In our family of parents, grandparents, siblings, children and spouse, we act, react, and are acted upon by every member of that “herd.” Like other animals, we are “imprinted” by those interactions from our very first breath in this world.

This imprinting can be both positive and negative, and I believe that we spend the rest of our lives acting out those family imprints in every other relationship we have with our friends, our enemies, our boss, and our colleagues. “Projection” and “transference” are just fancy names for the same imprinting a chimp undergoes when his mother coddles him too much, and he never learns to fend for himself.

Until you go back to your family of origin, and learn how to observe yourself as you interact with members of your herd, you are doomed to repeat the same emotional and behavioral patterns for the rest of your life. Each of us may be like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day,” stuck in the same relationship ruts that were imprinted upon us growing up in our herd.

Debbie’s Story
Since her father re-married, my client “Debbie” had been perpetually caught up in the drama between her father and her stepmother. On Debbie’s wedding day, her stepmother made a scene at the reception about how the wait staff treated her son from her first marriage. When Debbie’s father and step-mother argued about money, Debbie found herself trying to “referee” the battles, and ended up taking many of the “punches” from her step-mother while her father would duck out of the house on “errands.” Debbie was miserable until she learned about relationship ruts, and I could see the light bulb go on in her head.

On the next family visit, Debbie went home “as Jane Goodall.” She observed how she was instinctively imprinted by her family to try to “make it all better” for everyone. When she stopped trying to fix conflicts that broke out in the family, at first people were shocked, and re-doubled their efforts to draw her into the emotional tar pit. Debbie continued to observe the quicksand, without dipping a toe into it. Suddenly, her father and stepmother were forced to clean up their own mess. Sometimes they fought on, and sometimes they made peace, but it was no longer Debbie’s problem. She was free from the “fix it” role that had been imprinted on her by her family of origin! She practically danced into our next appointment, with all that weight off her shoulders, and she also found it easier to set boundaries with her own children and husband—bonus!

This week I launched a web site dedicated to Family Coaching. Family coaching may seem like an unusual concept, but consider that we often go to financial advisors, fitness trainers and business coaches. Yet, when it comes to relationships and parenting, we’re flying blind, just using trial-and-error. Why would we leave the most important aspects of our happiness to chance? The teaching at my web site is an effort to distill some aspects of Bowen theory and show how they apply to your marriage and mine. I guess you could say I’m offering an Instruction Manual – a kind of “User’s Guide for Families.” I hope my site will help you learn how to deal with the CAUSE of family strife, rather than just suffering the symptoms.

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