I have been giving this 10-Minute Marriage exercise to couples for more than 30 years. This exercise has been in many of the marriage books I have written. So I really believe strongly in this exercise. To have a great marriage you absolutely must have the ability to be able to identify and share your feelings. If you or your spouse cannot identify or share your feelings with each other you will have so many more arguments and much more anger throughout your marriage.
What happens to the person who has no emotional training is they get what I call emotionally constipated. What this constipation means is that they can’t identify feeling after feeling, and so they build up and then they either go silent for hours or days or they blow up. Either choice is not a pretty sight for the marriage.
In the resource section of this app you will find a feelings list. What you will do is randomly pick a feeling, and then you will place that feeling in the following two sentences. “I recently have felt ______________ when ___specific event___.”
“As a child or adolescent I felt ______________ when ___specific event___.”
Let me give you an example. I find that examples work better to explain this exercise.
“I recently have felt excited when appearing on a national television show.”
“As a child or adolescent I felt excited when riding a motorcycle. I was about 15 years old.”
What you are doing is taking the same feeling word and placing it in the present tense and in the past tense. You want to do both a present and past example for at least three months to get your emotional skill level up. After about three months you can drop off the earlier childhood memory example.
I must warn you before starting this exercise with your spouse, you absolutely should follow the three boundaries for sharing your feelings together. When doing this exercise the following boundaries apply the rest of the day when you are relating to each other.
Boundary #1
When doing this exercise never, ever use an example that involves your spouse or your marriage. Even the positive feelings keep outside of each other’s exercise when doing the feelings exercise. If you don’t keep this boundary, this exercise will mutate into a way for each of you to expose mostly negative feelings towards each other and this will be counter productive and you won’t want to do the exercise and you will both stay at your current emotional skill level.
Boundary #2
When doing the feelings exercises maintain eye contact. Do not look up, down or past your spouse but rather into your spouse. This boundary is critical to have this exercise be effective. You want this exercise to help you connect heart to heart, so look at each other when you do the feelings exercise.
Boundary #3
The third boundary of this exercise has to do with the time after one of you shares a feeling. There is to be no feedback toward the person sharing their feeling. You simply quietly listen and when they are done sharing a feeling then you share your feeling. You both do two feelings a day to add to your 10-Minute Marriage.
If you are not daily sharing your feelings with your spouse, make a plan with your spouse to do so.
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