Many couples believe their marriage is strong because they seldom argue. But the real silent killer of marriage is when we distance from our spouse in order to keep the peace. We have become experts at justifying how busy we are; most couples have come to believe they simply do not have time for each other. The sad reality is that suddenly, years later, we wake up next to our mate and realize that somewhere along the way, the flame died.

In my book, I explain how we damage our marriages with two patterns–Blaming Our Spouse, and Distancing from Our Spouse. This information is crucial to your family, because blaming your spouse and avoiding him may lead you to focus on your child in unhealthy ways.

We will discover the origins of these patterns in our marriages. We can now learn to reduce both our fight-response of arguing and our flight-response of avoiding our spouse. Modern neuroscience has confirmed that our fight-or-flight response governs much more of our daily behavior than we realize. It’s triggered by an ancient survival instinct we call anxiety.

In our caveman era, anxiety saved our lives by helping us anticipate a threat, but today it causes us to overreact in relationships. By taming the caveman within, we can train our brains to lower that anxiety and become less extreme: less overreactive in our relationships.

How do you view your marriage?

• Do you feel unfulfilled in your marriage?
• Do you worry that perhaps you married the wrong person?
• Do you feel as though you have matured beyond your spouse, whereas he (or she) seems stuck?

Many spouses today secretly wonder if they feel unfulfilled because they married the wrong person. The thing is, there is no evidence that you’d do better by starting over with someone else. The divorce rate for second marriages is 60 percent, and 73 percent for third marriages.

It doesn’t have to be that way. You can check out my book by clicking here.

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