How To Fix A Broken Marriage Starting Now | Paul Friedman

Hi, I'm Paul Friedman, founder of the Marriage Foundation. The topic is how to easily fix a broken marriage starting now. Welcome back, I'm Paul Friedman, and this topic, how to fix a broken marriage starting now easily, is our topic. I'm Paul Friedman. Now, the emphasis from my perspective, and I want it to become your perspective, is the word easily, because it's not hard. Starting now, this is another important part, I'm going to give you some tools right now in this video so you could start the process of fixing your broken marriage now. There's a caveat, okay, and that is that it's easy. You could start now, but it isn't going to be done tonight or to this morning. I don't know when you're watching this video, but we're going to get you started, and a solid start, okay. I'm going to give you a technique, maybe two, for communication, but first let me give you some information about marriage itself. I'm going to tell you why you got married. Now, I used to do this. I started saving marriages in 2001. At that time, I was a divorce mediator, never had the thought that I could save a marriage, never wanted to save a marriage. I believed in divorce. I was divorced at that time, and I made plenty of money helping people with their divorce. Bad karma, I know, but I wasn't doing it for bad reasons. I'm not trying to justify, but when I went through the divorce, I couldn't believe the pain imposed on myself, my ex-wife, and my kids, basically because of the court system and everyone in it. I mean, let's face it, when you get a divorce and you try to do it by yourself, you're crazy. You got to have an attorney, and the attorneys, one of the first things they know about you, how much you're worth. So guess what? They're figuring out, how long can I stretch this out? Should I bring in psychologists? Should I bring in this and that? How many times do we go to court because it costs more money to go to court? It's a racket. It is a racket, and I have a lot of friends after that who were divorce attorneys. We'd hang out together. I was invited to play golf with family law judges, and I was part of the system, but I wanted to help people go through the system without utilizing lawyers, and that's what I was doing. I was creating a good system as a divorce mediator that I wanted to replicate and spread all over the United States, have offices everywhere. And then in 2001, this couple came to me who's therapists, good people. I worked very well with the therapists. They sent me business. I took them to lunch, took them to dinner. We got along very well, and this couple, their marriage was dead. That's what they thought, but they didn't want it dead. They asked me as a communications expert, because I was really good on the whiteboard and everything, could you help us save the marriage? In 2001, everyone believed it was the trend that marriage was all about communication. If you learn how to communicate, you'd be okay, and it was bad communication that killed the marriage, which is not entirely false. It's one of the things. I broke it down to four killers of marriage, and poor communication, marital communication is one of the killers. So they were right, and so they asked me to help them save their marriage. So I started getting into, well, why do we get married in the first place? And I asked myself that question, and I thought, oh my God, I never asked myself, why was I getting married? And so what I did, it was a little experiment. I'm going to give you the answer, but when I started working with couples after my first couple who are probably still married to this day, I had a big whiteboard, and I would go, okay. Now my sessions were $300. They weren't cheap. I said, you tell me why you got married. Now these aren't people who want to get a divorce. I'm already working with people who have asked me to save their marriage, and I go, you list the reasons why you got married, and I'll put it on the whiteboard, and then I'm going to put my reason why you got married on the whiteboard, and if you don't believe that my reason is correct compared to your reason, you don't have to pay for this session. I was totally sincere. I was good with that because I realized none of us realize why we get married in the first place. So the first response is always, I fell in love. Good, and I tell them that's good, and it's a good reason, kind of. Okay, what else? Well, we want to have kids. I want to have kids. Okay, another really good reason. Another good reason, I want to spend the time with this human being who I love all the time. I can't get enough of them. Okay, great. Partnership, companionship, however you want to call it. Also, I don't want to die alone. Well, that's multifaceted. You know, you want to be with the person you love or the kids, and don't count on that, but you want a family. You want to be part of a family, all good reasons, and I say, okay, now I'm going to give you mine, and we would spend a few minutes on it, and I would put on the whiteboard I wanted to be happy, and I wanted to be happier, and they would go, huh, of course. I said, right, and what's the one thing, one thing that is impossible for you to be unhappy when you're feeling is love. I want to experience love. Now, this is a very deep topic, this love business, because in our world, it has become distorted because of Western psychology. Now, I'm not blaming them. I'm merely explaining why, because it goes back to the father of Western psychology, old Siggy Freud, who decided that love doesn't really exist separate from the mind's perception of love, and so he called love an abstract thought, and if you look up love, if you Google love, you're going to find answers like, well, it's increased like, and they'll give you examples. Well, I really like this, but I really like that. I love that, but that's not the truth. Now, I know that that's not the truth, because as a spiritual person, I've experienced real love, and I realized that it's not of the mind at all. The mind, actually, if you really break it down, and I do break it down both in my books and in my online courses, one for men and one for women, I break it down, and what I do is I explain, and I'm going to explain it now to some degree. Ask yourself, what am I? And the answer will be something like, well, I'm a human being. I'm a man. I'm a woman. I'm a happy person. I'm a sad person, like that. We define ourselves with adjectives, but that doesn't really get at the truth of what we are, and yet the truth of what we are, unless you're afraid to acknowledge that God created all this, the truth of what we are is we are created in his image as souls. We are souls. The soul as a man, soul as a woman, makes no difference. You're essentially spiritual. You're a soul, and the main attribute of a soul is the same as God, because we're created in God's image, and what is that? Love, joy, wisdom, and we're so separated from those thoughts, from those ideas, that when we get married, we get married in this material entity instead of the spiritual entity, even though we got married in order to experience happiness, which is a spiritual thing, and love, which is the ultimate spiritual thing, you see? So what happens is we have no idea what we're doing when we're married. I saved so many marriages, and I'm going to tell you that all of the people who I helped get a divorce, I don't even know how many, none of them should have had a divorce, because I learned everything about marriage, and I was able to communicate with people, a master of communication, what marriage is, how to live it, how to pull yourself out of the hole that you dug yourself into, and most importantly, well, one of the most important, is how you can do it without your spouse even participating. You don't need their participation. In fact, I could tell you right now, if you have gone to couples counseling, and many of you have, then you know it's filled with pitfalls. First thing that happens is you go in, and you waste your time, because the counselor says, okay, what's going on? What's going on? And it's like being in court. You're not saying, well, what's going on is I want to regain the love and joy that we had in our marriage. Nobody says that. So first thing you're going to do now, starting now, is you're going to recall why you got married. I got married to be with my soulmate, to give love to my soulmate, not to be loved by my soulmate, and we're not going to get into that in this video, but to give love to my soulmate so I can feel constant, ever-increasing joy. And I'm not BSing you. Constant, ever-increasing joy from day one, once you realize this is what you're really doing here, until the end of your days. Ever-increasing love and joy. Techniques. Here's the technique. It's a communication technique. I'm not going to go deeper into it. What I teach in the books and what I teach in the course is how to recreate your own thinking so that it becomes automatic, what I'm going to share with you now. But what I'm going to share with you now is a communication technique. Now, I'm going to tell you, you can't rely on techniques like this long term, because you have to be who you are, which means you have to modify your mind, and yes, you have the power to do that. So here's technique number one. You're about to say something to your wife or your husband. Stop. Just stop. Ask yourself, is this going to have a beneficial or a detrimental impact? What's it going to do? Beneficial or detrimental? This is the technique that I used with my very first couple. Now, they were easy. It wasn't difficult for me to help them with their marriage, although there was far more education that I got that I transferred over to them. But this was the beginning. Stop. Beneficial or detrimental? Do not allow yourself to bypass this. And within days, the temperature is going to go way down in your marriage. You're not going to have this tension that you had before. Why? Think of your marriage in one way, as a container. This container, there's only two people in. Many people make the mistake of talking to their friends or even a therapist about their marriage or a parent or whomever. And what they're doing is they're breaking the law of the marriage. The marriage is only two of you. That means only two of you belong in this container. Now, in this container, you now are cellmates instead of soulmates. But the last thing you want to do is bring in somebody else. So you never want to talk to anybody about what's going on in your marriage. And you yourself don't ask your spouse to do this. Just you yourself only put in sweetness. You see, you have a container. You put in only sweetness. The container will contain sweetness. Now, love and a powerful, proactive attitude of only putting in love will push out any of the negativity that was there already. Any of the negativity that they might put into the container, they being your spouse, make it your mission. I'm only going to infuse love into this container. Now, psychologists will go, you're going to explode. You can't do that. You have to vent. You have to let it out. You have to set boundaries. No, you don't. You didn't get married for that. You got married to experience, what did I say earlier? Happiness and love. That's it. You don't have to set boundaries. You don't have to learn how to be this negotiator. You don't want to negotiate anyway. You want to create love and happiness. Now, it's extensive. The teachings for marriage are virtually gone, except I'm only aware of my having them. I didn't create them. I discovered them. Why do I say that? Because God creates everything. And we just have to look in the right places. We have to have the right attitude. So could you discover this on your own? Yeah, you could. But I'm telling you right now, it took me eight years to really get it all discovered, all put together. You could save a lot of time and effort if you just use one of my books or use the online course for men, if you're a man, the online course for women, if you're a woman. The main point here is you're going to start fixing your marriage easily, starting now by following that technique. It's so great. I am very excited about what I discovered because literally thousands of marriages have been saved with this stuff. And I think, you know, a good friend of mine was a fellow divorce mediator. And we used to speak at Second Saturday, which was a support group for women going through a divorce. And I handed him my book after I wrote it. And Robert goes, okay, Paul, I'm writing out a check right now. You're going to create it. He was a very strong guy. He was an ex-Navy SEAL. And he said, we're starting a nonprofit and here's the money for a lawyer. And he was a lawyer, but there's obviously specialized lawyers. And we started as a nonprofit. And to this day, we're still operating as a nonprofit. So it's a very powerful system that we have. It's going to help you. And I urge you to look deeper into this. Go to our website. If you have a question for me, put it in the comment section. I'm happy to answer it. If you want to just have a free question answered, there's an ask a counselor link below. Go ahead and do that. So I'm so glad you stopped by. If you follow what I'm saying, it'll change your marriage. It'll change your life. God bless you. Thank you for stopping by. Again, I'm Paul Friedman. I founded The Marriage Foundation. Take care.