How To Set MARCH 30, 2016

Transcription

1 How To Set BOUNDARIES W MARCH 30, 2016 EBINAR WEDNESDAYS

2 Participants: Joe Beam Kimberly Beam Holmes [Audio Length: 59:28] RECORDING COMMENCES: Hello, this is Joe Beam, and so as we speak on boundaries, how did you intend for us to start this webinar? Well, you know Joe, one of the most common things that we hear people say when we re talking to them about any kind of marriage issues or what they might be experiencing in their marriage, different things like that, is the question of boundaries and how to do them, if they re important, why they re important, all those kinds of things. So, that is why it s such an important issue. All right. I will speak to that. When we talk about boundaries, we also talk about something called about criteria. Let me quickly explain the difference in the two if I may. A boundary is something that you say is unacceptable behavior. You decide it is unacceptable because of the fact that if, indeed, the person continues to do it, the behavior is destructive either to that person or to you or to other people who really matter, such as your children. Therefore, boundary says this is behavior, that because it is destructive, cannot continue. Then on the other hand we have what we call a criteria. A criteria goes like this. It s something that we need to occur. What that means is, it s not something that I m telling you that you can t do because it s destructive, it s something I m saying that has to happen because this relationship desperately needs it. Therefore, when we talk about criteria and we talk about boundaries, we re not talking about wishes. We re not talking about wants. It s not like okay, here s a criteria, I want you to treat me like a princess or a prince. That s a wish, that s not an absolute behavior that you really want to happen. Or a boundary could be something like I don t want you to ever look like you re angry, which is something that s impossible for another person to fulfill. So, when we talk about boundaries, we talk about criteria. We re not talking about wishes and wants. We re talking about absolute dos and absolute don t s. Now, if you understand that then, we can set the stage for how we understand what we re going to do when it comes to a boundary or criteria. Now understand again that you re going to set a boundary only on behavior that you believe is destructive, either to that person or to you or to people important to the relationship such as your children. And so if your spouse, for example, is drinking heavily.

3 By that, I mean drinking to the point where that he or she is not in control of himself or herself, or where things or occurring such as driving drunk or abusive behavior when the person s drinking, then you can set a boundary this way. You can say that s it. We don t want you to do that anymore because that s destructive behavior. It s destructive to you and it s destructive to me or my children and therefore, I can t tolerate that anymore. And so when you set a boundary, you say that behavior cannot occur again. Now if it does, there s going to be a negative consequence. The negative consequence is going to be hopefully something that you make tiered. Let me explain what I mean by that. If you re dealing with somebody who is struggling with something say like getting drunk or drinking heavily, drinking too much. If you set a one-and-done boundary, the first time you do this, that s it, you re done, you re out of here. If you set a one-and-done boundary, then you re going to have some difficulty because people who struggle with things like that sometimes will fall off the proverbial wagon. That means that even though they intend to do the right thing, sometimes they fail, and there should be a negative consequence. There s not a get out of jail free card here, but if your boundary was one and done, you do it one time and that s it, it s all over, then you re going to put yourself in a situation that if that person does struggle and does fall at least once, then he or she has no other chance. Therefore, when we say make a tiered response, what we mean by that is make it where there is a negative consequence but it gets more intense in future settings. So, for example, you may say to the person if he or she is struggling with alcohol, the next time you come home drinking heavily or drunk, you will be out of here for two weeks. We want to review that ahead of time. We don t want problems. Even if you don t agree with it, we ll talk about what you ll do with that later. But let s say you agree to that and we say okay, you re going to be gone for two weeks. Now, if you straighten up after that and you come back and you say you re sorry and you want to try it again, that s fine. But if you do it a second time, then you re out of the house for two months. Not just two weeks, but two months. In other words, you have intensified the negative consequence if the person does it a second time. After that if you straighten up and try to do right, you can come home again, but then we ll set another boundary, which is if you do it the third time, that s it. We will not go any more than that. That s as far as we re going and we will see the attorneys and we ll file for divorce or whatever you intend that negative response to be. Okay, let me give a brief summary of what I ve said so far. Boundaries are when you say to a person this is a negative behavior that is unacceptable and if you continue to do this destructive behavior, there s going to be negative consequences. Let s say it this way. You don t set a boundary just because of the fact that you don t like something somebody does. It s not a wish, it s not a want.

4 It has to do with an absolute don t. In other words, if you do this destructive behavior, there s going to be a negative consequence. For example, a spouse, let s say your husband or your wife has a significant drinking problem and has been driving while drinking and you view that as a destructive behavior. Now, the destructive behavior can be destructive to that person, destructive to you, destructive to other people in the relationship such as your children, or destructive to the relationship itself. In other words, it s not saying I don t like it when you frown at me therefore we re going to set a boundary that you can t frown at me. It s not that kind of thing. It has to do with behavior that is destructive. You say therefore you can t continue to do this. Now, if you re going to set a boundary, we suggest that you make the negative consequences be tiered. What I mean by that is if you say the very first time you do it, it s one and done you re out of here, you re going to put yourself in a bind if the person is really struggling with something. So, let s go back to our example of drinking. If here s a person whose struggling with drinking too much and you say the next time you come home drinking heavily or the next time I notice you have driven a car while drinking, that s destructive behavior and therefore you re gone. Well, that can be a pretty harsh consequence for a person who s trying to overcome something like that. Should there be a negative consequence? Absolutely. We re not talking about a get out of jail free card. What we re saying is if you make a tiered response, it can go something like this: The next time I catch you drinking or driving, that destructive behavior to you, to the relationship, to us, the next time I see that happening, then you re going to be out of the house for two weeks and I m going to do whatever I need to do to make sure that that actually gets enforced.

5 Now, after that two weeks if you come back and you say I m very sorry, will you take me back? I will. But if you get to drinking the second time, you do that same violation the second time, then it s going to be two months. Now, after that if you come back and say I m sorry, take me back, I will. But the next time, the third time, is going to be for life. We will not be able to stay here. I ll see the attorney; I ll do what I need to do. Now, you say why would you set such harsh consequences? Well it s based, of course, on what you think the behavior is. We suggest you set no boundary unless the behavior is actually negative, it s destructive. If it s not destructive, it s not going to be worth fighting over the boundary. Because it is destructive, you have to build that negative consequence. Now, if you build a negative consequence. If you say if you do this, then that s going to happen, you must make that happen. So, let s go back to our example of drinking. If your spouse comes home, driving home drunk or at least heavily drinking, if not absolutely drunk, and you say okay, that s a violation of the boundary and they explain to you oh no, I got some terrible news. My really good back in high school, we were so very close and I just found out a couple of hours ago that he was killed in a car wreck. My heart was breaking. I couldn t handle the pain and I just stopped to get a drink and the next thing I knew I was in the situation. If you look at him or her and say, wow, I am so sorry your friend died. I could certainly understand why you did what you did. Therefore, no negative consequence this time, then you re going to lose the ability to create negative consequences at all. You see, people who are doing destructive behavior often can be great manipulators. They can also be great liars. Therefore, if you decide a behavior is destructive enough that you ve got to set a boundary, it s not a wish or want, it s an absolute don t. If you decide to set a boundary, then you must enforce that boundary without grace or mercy. Now, the other side of this very quickly is what we call a criteria. A criteria is the opposite of a boundary. The boundary says this is a destructive behavior that must not happen and if it does, this is the negative consequence. A criteria on the other hand is a behavior that you say this has to happen for this relationship to continue. Now again, don t make it a wish or a want. You don t say something like treat me like a princess. First of all, you can t even measure that. Secondly, it sounds awfully selfish. But it can be something like well, we have severe problems here and one criteria here, and again, I m still using the illustration, is that you will go to AA at least once a week for the next six weeks. You can make a criteria like that. Again, we suggest that the negative consequences if the person does not fulfill the criteria be tiered. In other words, the first time you don t do it, here s a consequence. The second time, more difficult consequence, the third time, a really, really bad consequence. Now, if you going to build a criteria, it s also a good idea to build in a reward.

6 Not just a negative consequence if they don t do it, but a positive thing that will happen if they do, and that can be based on whatever it is that you know is important to the other person. Whatever he or she wants in life. Now, we re not talking about bathing somebody. Not even talking about making a bargain. What we re saying is if a person is doing a criteria that you asked, then there should be some positive reinforcement to that. Whatever that might be in your particular situation. That gives you the gist of what a boundary and a criteria are. But if we want to talk about this, the best way to go from here is for you to start writing in your questions or comments in that little Q&A section that you see, and as you write in your questions or comments, we ll deal specifically with the issues that you wish to talk about now that we ve given the general up front information about this. Here is a question that I got earlier today actually. Someone was saying their spouse is, I can t remember if they said their spouse was having an affair or not, but there was something that was leading to a divorce situation, and the person writing me the , they said I m still paying the electric bills, I m still doing all of these things to help out, to help her out, is that something that is me just being too kind? Is that something I should continue doing, or should I stop doing that stuff? Should I make that a boundary? Well, I think that depends on what the person is doing. You said you think there s an affair going on but we don t really know the situation here, is that correct? Yeah, I m even looking back through it and he doesn t say anything about affair, he just says that they are separated and she s talking about divorce. She s moved out and making no attempts and reconciling. They have three children together. She is working to start her own life and she hasn t asked for much help, but there are a few things she wants me to do as far as helping with car insurance, signing a separation paper in order for her to get food stamps, and I still pay her phone bill. Do I allow myself to continue to help because I care for her? Does this act of kindness really help these types of situations? Well, this day in time most everybody has heard about enabling. I mean it s a thing you hear even on the sitcoms, people understand what enabling means. Enabling means that you re actually helping somebody do a behavior that s not going to be good for them or for the relationship or anything else. So, the person moves out and says hey, I want you to keep paying my phone. Now, if she needs that phone for the fact that she needs it to know the children are safe, how to keep up with them, those kinds of things, that s one thing. Like okay, I can see that. We want to make sure that you have the phone to keep up with the kids and make sure that they re safe. On the other hand, if she doesn t need the phone, but it s relatively a luxury for her.

7 Now, let me explain further, in this day in time, most people would say I need a phone. I understand that. But I was saying if she doesn t need that phone for something having to do with your children or your relationship, why would you pay for it if she has moved out? So of course, everybody has to make his or her own decision based on the relationship, their situation, we can t know all of the details. We can t tell you what to do. We can only teach the principals. The principal here would be yeah; you can set a boundary. If a person s doing destructive behavior like I don t want to be married to you anymore, I ve moved out. I m living on my own. Now, you ve helped me make that easier for me by doing this and this and this, I think you can set a boundary and say as long as you re doing behavior that I believe is wrong, I m not going to do that. And so the boundary would be as long as you re out there doing that, I m not going to enable you. Now understand in the situation you re talking about if she goes to see an attorney and if she gets a judge involved, then a judge may very well say yes, you will do this and you will do that. Then you will have no choice. But as long as you have a choice, whatever you do, don t make it tough on the kids. You don t want to do that if you have children. But at the same time, I think it makes all the sense in the world to say I m not going to help you do something that s destructive either to you or to our relationship. Do you think that answers the question he was asking, Kimberly, or not? I do. I do, I think that answered it, yes. There s a difference in being kind and being a pushover. Right, and to use the word we ve already used, being an enabler. Enabling the other person to do things they should not do. Now Kimberly, can you see the screen questions or am I the only one seeing those? Nope, I can see them. So, we have one person who asks, If I ask my husband to leave and he won t, how can I enforce that? He says he pays rent and can come into his own home as he pleases. Well, that is true unless you decide to get some legalities involved. In other words, as long as he s paying rent or his name is on the mortgage or any of those kinds of things, then he can come and go as he wishes. But if you really want him not to be there anymore, if you re saying this behavior is destructive and it s got to stop. How do I enforce that? How do I keep you from coming back? That is when you have to go see an attorney in your state, in your county, in your city, and those things can vary by the way no matter where you live. They may be different than even one county over.

8 Your attorney can best guide you on how do you enforce that. You will have to obey the law, and sometimes you have to get the law involved. Now, if you re thinking it s not worth that to me, then that is your decision, and you can make that. On the other hand, if you think wow, what he s doing is so bad, that I need to have that consequence, then there are legal ways to make that happen. That s right. That s good. So, the next question that comes in says, In setting boundaries, how can you set the good reward and what would be a good example of that? It would be so dependent on what s important to that person. Now, we re not talking about like trying to train a dog, you know, here s a treat because you did what I wanted you to do. We re not really saying that. We re saying if the other person is actually trying to make the marriage better. In other words, I really want to make this work. I know I have a problem, to use the illustration we have been using so far. I know I have a problem with alcohol. I am going to AA. You asked me to and I m going every Tuesday night. I ve been for the last three Tuesday nights. I plan to go several more meetings. As a matter of fact, maybe I m going the rest of my life, I don t know. If a person s doing that and if one of his goals or her goals is they re trying to save the marriage, that s when you do things with that person like okay, I truly very much appreciate the fact that you re doing that. So, one way is you actually affirm them. You re doing a good thing. Another is, okay, now that I know you re trying to do that and I know you re wanting to save the marriage, let s sit and talk if that s what you want to do and I ll be glad to be open and transparent and listen and those kinds of things. I m not going to be judgmental. If you tell me what it is that makes you want to drink, or if you can even come to me and say man, I m going back to AA next Tuesday night but I m really struggling because I want a drink right now, you can come tell me that. And we ll sit there and we ll talk about those things. As a matter of fact, we won t just talk about the things that are our problems. We ll talk about the better things of life as well. And because you want to save the marriage, let s do some things together. Let s take walks together because that s good and you enjoy that and I do as well. And so you look at the person and the situation and say, what I want to do is demonstrate back to him or her that I really appreciate the efforts that he or she is making to fulfill this criteria that I ve set. I m not going to set a criteria, then you start fulfilling and I basically ignore it like good, you re doing what I said. No, you actually reciprocate. You come back and try to do things for that person and with that person to say I truly appreciate you meeting this criteria. I m going to do my part too. Let me get into your life. Let us do this thing together. Those kinds of things.

9 Very good. And I hope all the people listening, even though some of the examples have to do with affairs or have to do with drinking and that might not be the exact issue that their marriage is facing, these principals are really foundational across multiple types of situations, so even if you hear a question that s being asked and you think oh, that doesn t necessarily have to do with me. The answer is still so important anyway. Yeah, for example, let s look at the issue of control. We actually talked about that on a call-in radio program last night. If your spouse is controlling you, let s say your spouse is controlling you by physically intimidating you, then you can say the next time you physically intimidate me, that s a boundary that we will not cross and when you do that, this is going to be the negative consequence. And by the way, I really want you to go get some help because of your anger. So, let s say your spouse goes and starts getting some help because of that anger. Now, there s a criteria that you ve set. I need you to do that, they re doing it. Now, you reward that other person, not by being waiting. Just sitting there waiting thinking you ll mess up, you ll mess up, but reward the person by talking to him or her or spending time with them, doing things that they like to do to let them know, I really appreciate the fact that you re working on this. So, yeah, it can work with control, it can work with alcohol or drugs. It can work with infidelity. As you said, it applies to whatever situation is going on out there. The next question that has come in says, If my husband has had two affairs with women in his office, what is a reasonable boundary for his behavior in the office to build trust? He owns the business so cannot move to a different job and has all female employees. Now, that s a tough one. But I m going to challenge one of the statements. He owns the business so he cannot move to a different job. I understand what you mean when you say that, and I certainly get it, like look at all the time, all the money, all the years we ve put in this to build this business, it s how we make our living, it s how we pay our mortgage, and therefore we can t just go someplace else to another job. But that s not necessarily true. Sometimes people in these situations realize the only way we re going to be able to build trust is that I m going to sell this business and we re going to either go into another business where I don t have all female employees or, I m going to go to work for somebody else or, I m going to differentiate the way I do this business. I m going to structure it in a way where I m not surrounded by women, but surrounded by men. In other words, there are different options here. It s just that they re not all quite as attractive because, we re getting the money, it s coming in, so we ve got to keep doing it like we re doing it. You can, if you choose to, but you could set a boundary to say no, we re going to change the nature of the business or sell the business or whatever. Let s suppose you decide not to do that. If he has all female employees, you could actually say I m going to start working there as well. We ll ride to work together. We ll ride home from work together. I ll be there all day long. I ll actually do some work.

10 I ll have a job. I m going to attribute to what we re doing. Or you build in some other kind of safeguards around there. There are different things that you can do to say I need to know that I can trust what s happening there and we re going to do whatever it takes to make that happen, so if that means my momma s going to work for you, or I m going to work for you or we re going to change out to male employees, which I realize takes a little while to do, or etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. There can be a solution but it s not always easy to make that solution occur. I ve actually seen a situation where the guy was a third generation in a business and his wife said I cannot trust you if you continue to be there because of what you ve done before. Therefore, that has to change. You re going to have to leave that business and go to another and the guy had to make a decision. It was, do I lose my wife and stay where I am as a third generation in this? Or do I give this up because I m trying to save my marriage? You say wow, you give a guy a choice like that he s certainly going to give his wife up. Not necessarily. It s all going to be what s important to him. But here s what important to you. What s important to you is this, if you cannot set a boundary to his behavior that gives you a way to feel safe emotionally, then it s going to wind up destroying you anyway. That s why we keep saying a boundary is to stop destructive behavior. Destructive behavior can be physically destructive like drinking too much, but it can also be emotionally destructive like he s already had two affairs with women that worked for him, and he s surrounded by women and he wants to stay in that business, well that s destructive too. That can absolutely destroy you emotionally. And so the adding of a boundary is we re going to stop destructive behavior or we re going to do something to change this relationship dramatically. Yes, there s always that compromise that can be found if you put your minds together to it. So, the next question says, My husband has been involved in a long distance affair for almost nine months. He hasn t said he wants a divorce and says he doesn t know what he wants. He travels for work most of the time and then comes home on some weekends and stays in a different bedroom. What is appropriate to set a boundary? Example, maybe he can t stay here any longer? But still be a safe place for him? Since he travels so much, if I ask him to move out, we would have almost no contact and we do not have any children. Yeah, it s not always easy. I mean it really just isn t always easy. Sometimes you have to make decisions that are going to be tough. So, he travels most of the time. You don t feel safe. He s involved with this other woman and has been for some nine months. Now, I m assuming when you say set a boundary, a boundary would be like if you continue to have contact with her, then you cannot keep coming back here.

11 . Now, you ll have to have some way to measure that. If you say you can t keep having contact with her, he s going to have to agree to some things since he travels so much like that you can check his phone or you can check his , etcetera, which he may not agree to do. If he doesn t you could also set a boundary about that. Actually a criteria. A criteria would be I get to look at your phone. A criteria would be I get to look at your . Criteria, again, if it s not being met, has a negative consequence as well. You say, wow, it sounds to me like if I had set those kinds of boundaries or criteria, then he may just go away and leave me and not come back at all. The answer to that is, that is correct. That may happen. You understand that boundaries and criteria are not magic. They are what you do to try to stop destructive behavior, either physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, to stop destructive behavior. Now, if you see he s traveling all the time and still talking to her by phone or however he s doing it, if you don t see that as destructive to you at this point, then you don t necessarily set a boundary at this point. You can say to him I m being a safe place for you. I want to listen to you. I want for us to communicate and understand each other. You can do that if you can live with that behavior. What we say is, you set the boundary when finally, you say, I can t do this anymore. It s destroying me emotionally. I can t live in this kind of limbo land. I can t live with this kind of doubt. I can t live worrying about what you re trying to do out there. Now if it gets to that place and you set a boundary or a criteria, you understand that your spouse may say that s it, I m gone. That s why we always say don t set a boundary or criteria just because of something you wish or want. It s an absolute do, that s a criteria,, or an absolute don t that s a boundary, and know that there can be a negative consequence to you. In other words, the person may violate the boundary and you may have to wind up ending the relationship. So, that s why you don t set them until you say I can t live like this anymore. I m going to have to do something. Now, you say if I set a boundary am I no longer a safe place? Sure, you can still be a safe place in that you listen, you care, you communicate, all those things are still there, but it says there s certain behaviors that are so destructive, I cannot allow those any longer. Very good. The next question here it says, If my husband doesn t take care of himself as far as personal hygiene, brushing teeth, taking showers, things like that. I ve asked and he makes excuses. There s no sex, no kissing, and I don t even want him in the nice covers on our bed. He gets in the bed anyway. He works hard but this bothers me. So, this is a completely different type of question that we ve been answering thus far. Yeah, but it definitely is a criteria question. Not a boundary. It is actually a criteria question. The criteria to be said in a situation like this is this: This is behavior that I need from you. The behavior that I need from you is that you will brush your teeth regularly. You will take baths. You will wear clean cloths.

12 You will not get into our bed when you re dirty, when you smell or etcetera, etcetera. I don t want that. Now, she says he works hard. I understand. But the criteria can be if, and again just like we said earlier, you don t set a criteria like this unless you re willing to have negative consequences take place. Now, the negative consequences already apparently are happening in that there s no sex and there s no kissing. Apparently, those things aren t very important to him or at least not important enough to him to come in and take a bath and put on clean clothes and brush his teeth. So maybe you find out what else is important to him. What would be important enough to him to do that? So, if you say okay, the next time you get into that bed and you re dirty now we re setting a boundary, a behavior that can t happen, that s destructive I m not going to be in that bed. As a matter of fact, I may take the kids and go stay with Mom for a couple of days because I m not sleeping with you when you re filthy. Or you will meet the criteria of taking a bath and etcetera, etcetera, and if you do, I m going to make love to you again. Now, I m not trying to trade sex for this. That s not what I m saying. I m saying if you do those things, then I ll feel comfortable making love to you again. I ll want to make love to you and our lovemaking is going to be as good as it possibly can be, maybe better than it s been in the past. In other words, what I want you to see is there s a reason for you to do this and if you do it and the criteria, I m going to give rewards that make it worthwhile to you and negative consequences if it doesn t. Now, I will repeat one more time what I ve said before. Only do this if you find his behavior destructive or if you find that criteria is essential because you cannot go on without it. Again, we re not talking about wishes and wants. We re talking about absolute dos and absolute don ts, and just emphasizing one more time, if you set a negative consequence, you ll have to fulfill that negative consequence or else you lose all ability to have any control and if you do that, it may not turn out like you wish. These are not magic beans that you plant and the vine that leads you to the golden egg. These are things you do because you can t tolerate that behavior anymore or you need certain behavior to occur and it s so important to you that you re willing to take this kind of a risk. Very good. Yes, and that s the theme of a lot of the things we ve been saying is make sure that these things that you re wanting to instill, the boundaries and the criteria for are that important to you. Exactly. Not wishes and wants, but absolute dos and absolute don ts.

13 Mm-hmm. Moving right along, so this next person says, My husband was having affairs and I m sure he probably still is although I don t have proof. We still live together and at times we have sex. Can I set a boundary in some way as far as him and I no longer having sex? I absolutely don t want to and I m not comfortable having sex with him if he s still involved in an affair. Okay, so think about it this way. She s saying I think, or she says I m sure, I m sure he s probably still having affairs. Now, here s where you re going to have the difficulty if you re going to set the boundary. If there s no way for you to know for sure, in other words, you say I m sure but I don t have proof. If you don t have proof, then there s no way that I know of that you can actually assess the boundary. So, if your boundary is you cannot be involved with anybody else, okay good. You re going to have to have some way for that to be verified, so therefore you re probably going to have set some criteria. Criteria meaning things that must happen such as I need to have a keystroke logger on your computer so I can see where you go and who you talk to. I need to be able to look in your . I need to be able to look at your phone. Then a boundary would be there can t be any missing time or missing money. If you just disappear for a period of time and I don t know where you are, that s not going to be acceptable. If money is disappearing and I don t know why it s being spent or has been spent, that s not acceptable either. So, you actually have to set sort of a series of boundaries and criteria. Now, as I say that I also need to tell you though, if you set too many of them, they re definitely going to backfire on you. You can t set five or ten or fifteen. That s not good. You only want to set one and if you have to have a few subsets of that, if there are very few, you can do that. Could you say okay, unless you meet the criteria of helping me know that you re not involved with someone else, then I can t feel comfortable having sex with you anymore. Can that be a criteria/boundary tied together? I think yes it can. Why? Because if I m not sure that you re just true to me, then I have fears of such things as venereal diseases, I have fear that I m giving my heart to you when you re not reciprocating by giving your heart to me because you re giving yourself to other people. And to say I m not going to make love to you until I feel this kind of security, yes, that s valid. Now, even as I say that, please understand, I m against people using sex to punish other people just because they want to get their way. Like here s how I m going to control you. You get sex when you do what I want you to do. You don t get sex when you don t do what I want you to do. We re not talking about that kind of a mindset. That s going to backfire. That s not a good thing. That s control and that winds up hurting everybody.

14 Boundaries and criteria are not controlling another person. If that s your intention, don t do these things, please, because it s all going to go bad. It s not to control the other person, it s to stop destructive behavior. Not trying to control the other person, but to stop destructive behavior, or is to ensure behavior that has to occur for the relationship to continue. So to say I can t make love to you when I m worried about you making love to other women, that makes sense to me. Give me a way to know. Help me, with a criteria, to know that I m safe with you and then we can make love, that s fine. I see that. I get it. But it s not like, you will do this or you won t get that. If you do it with that attitude, you re controlling rather than trying to stop destructive behavior or trying to create behavior that needs to occur. Here s a really good question that I saw that just came in that I thought people might still be kind of hazy on exactly what this means. So, how can you set boundaries if you re living apart and you re not reconciling? It becomes extremely difficult to do. Let me explain why. Boundaries only work if the other person is going to have a negative consequence that matters to them. Criteria s only going to work if the other person either has a negative consequence that matters to them or a positive response that matters to them, so if your spouse has abandoned you, you have little to no communication, he or she doesn t want to reconcile, they don t care what you do, they don t care what you say, can you set a boundary that can hurt them, yeah you possibly could, but the boundaries are going to be awfully hard to enforce because of the fact that you re not living together. You say, well how can I set a boundary. You can set a criteria like this: You either have to come back home within the next thirty days, or maybe let s get to a different one. We re going to be seeing a counselor in the next thirty days and if you don t meet that criteria, this is what I m going to do. Now, you can set that. Either you start marriage counseling with me in the next thirty days or I m going to go ahead and file for divorce and I m going to ask my attorney to take care of me in every way I need to have myself taken care of. Can you make a criteria like that? Yes. If he or she really doesn t care, they don t care if you try to create negative consequences, they don t care what you re going to do, yeah you can set them. You can even enforce them, but it s probably not going to lead the other person to want to go to the marriage counseling or whatever else. It typically works when the other person still has some concern or care about the negative consequence or about the positive consequence. If they don t care about either, or have little concern about either, boundaries and criteria probably aren t going to accomplish very much.

15 What is the best way to find out what is important to your spouse if your spouse isn t expressing any interest in wanting to do anything either way about saving the marriage so that you can set rewards for criteria? Do you just ask? You can. If the spouse is actually being honest and talking to you and being open, asking is a great thing to do. If your spouse is not doing that, then you base it on what you already know about him or her. What s been important to him or her in the past? If you can t figure that out, and hopefully you can if you ve been together for any length of time, you ll know the kinds of things your spouse finds important, and if you just stop and think about those, you can probably figure out the positive rewards. But if you absolutely can t, then you look at the positive rewards that are general to humanity, such as affirmation. I will not affirm anything that you do that s wrong but I can affirm you as a human being. People want that. Acceptance. Even though you re doing something I m not happy about, I can still accept you as a person. I can accept what you feel, even if I don t like what you feel. So, you can do those kinds of positive rewards in the sense of doing what most humans want. It s not necessarily saying, my husband likes video games therefore I m going to say if you meet this criteria, I m going to buy you a brand new video game, that s not what we re talking about. We re not talking about doing it like children. We re talking about like adults. Okay, if my husband likes time to spend by himself playing video games, then I can say you know honey, I appreciate you meeting this criteria of going to the marriage counseling with me and I know that you like to have time by yourself to play with those video games, I m going to make sure that you have some of that where I m not bothering you. I m doing that to let you know how much I appreciate what you re doing for me and I want to do something in return for you. Mm-hmm. It s so good anytime that you re asking something of your spouse, whether your spouse is wanting to save the marriage or not, if something positive happens to always follow that up with, I believe, some kind of reward. The way that we say it might sound very psychological, but you want to reward the behaviors that are good, no matter the reason the person did them. Even if the person followed the behavior because it was a criteria or a boundary and it wasn t something they necessarily wanted to do. You still want to express thanks for that and to provide that positive feedback, because if you provide positive feedback, it s more likely to happen a second time. That s correct. That s very wise. Sometimes people want to make sure that the other person feels what they want them to feel.

16 You cannot set that as a criteria. You cannot set that as a boundary. In other words if you still feel any emotion towards that other person, here s a negative consequence. People don t have automatic control over what they feel and so making either a criteria or a boundary based on what people feel is not valid. It doesn t work. So, Kimberly, you are absolutely right. What you do is you look at behavior and reward positive behavior because then it s more likely to be repeated. I m sorry I m being redundant of what you said, but what you said is very good. Well, thank you. Well the next question that we re going to tackle here, she says, I made my husband leave eleven days ago in anger. He was being deceptive. We had a year of him in a funk of depression and burnout. I don t want our marriage to end so what do I do? Well, I m really curious here as to who was the angry person. All of a sudden that question disappeared. I m sorry. I was going to try to I m sorry, I marked it as answered. So, she just said I made my husband leave eleven days ago in anger. Okay, I m going to assume that meant that she was angry, and she also pointed out that he s been dealing with depression for about a year. He was being deceptive. We had a year of him in a funk of depression and burnout, okay. When a person is being deceptive, you can set criteria and you can set boundaries, but it sounds to me like what happened here was not a clearly understood boundary that he deceived you again. You had enough, you had it up to here and so you just popped him. Just get out. I don t want this anymore. While I understand that kind of behavior, it s not the best thing you can do. You see, here s one of the things that s so important about either a boundary or a criteria and that is either you explain it up front. You sit down with, in your case, a husband and say look, you ve been dealing for depression and burnout for a year and it s killing us and you ve been deceiving us. So, okay, here s the criteria I have. The criteria I have is that you get professional help to deal with your depression. Now, here s a negative consequence if you don t. Within the next thirty days, you don t find somebody you can see about this, a psychiatrist, a medical doctor, a counselor or therapist or whatever, then the negative consequences are going to occur. If that doesn t happen by April the 29th, just picking a day out of the air here, then there s going to be a negative consequence and it might be that you have to leave. You tell people up front what the negative consequences are going to be and if possible, you tell them up front what the positive consequences are going to be.

17 Rather than doing it in anger like that s it, I ve had it, you re out, you want the person to know in advance, here is the boundary. You can t do this. Here s the criteria. We really need you to do this. Here is the negative consequence. Here is the positive consequence. Now hopefully, the best way is if when you explain it to them, they agree and they say you know, okay, I got it. I see it. Sometimes if they do agree, by the way, it s 100 times better. If they don t agree, if they say well, I hear what you re saying but I don t agree to that, you can still say well, that s the way it s going to be because that behavior is destructive, therefore that boundary is going to be set. Or that criteria has to happen because this thing s all falling to pieces if it doesn t. So even if they don t agree, you can still enforce the criteria or the boundary. It s not a good of thing. As a matter of fact, you can see the downside of it. When you finally have it up to your eyeballs and you re saying that s it, I m done, I m out, because anything done in anger has a much more likelihood of having negative consequences to you and to the relationship. So, in a situation such as you re describing. Again, we don t know all the details so don t think I know everything about what you re saying here. I therefore can t tell you absolutely what to do because I don t know everything that had happened. But if it were I, just based on what I know here, just based on what I know, if it were I, I think I might contact him and say, you know the depression is unacceptable. The deceptiveness, that s certainly unacceptable, but the fact that I exploded was unacceptable too. I m sorry that I had a fit of anger. Let s see if we can take another step. Why don t you come back home? But before you do, we re going to sit down and work out a system of consequences, because here s some boundaries. You cannot continue to be deceptive. If you are, here are the negative consequences that are going to occur. I need you to get some help that will really, truly help you with that depression. If you re thinking well, he s already seeing a counselor but it s been a year and he s still right where he was, then the criteria might be you ve got to find somebody else. You ve got to find a medical doctor who can help, a psychiatrist who can help, not because I think he s crazy. It s just a psychiatrist are the doctors that best understand these medicines and often can do better for you there and so if I were in your shoes, I would consider saying I m sorry for the anger, please come back home. But before you do, we re going to establish some boundaries: You can t lie to me anymore. And some criteria: you re going to have to get help for your depression and these are the negative consequences if you don t. Here are the positive consequences if you do. We can work this out. I love you. I want to make this happen, so why don t you come back. That s probably how I would handle that. Again, I don t know all the story, but based on what I know, that s how I would handle that. I m seeing a lot of very, very, very specific questions that people are saying here s my situation, how do I set a boundary for that?

18 Here s my situation, how do I set a boundary for that, and since we have so many of them and we only have eleven more minutes in the webinar, here is what I would suggest if you have a very specific question that you feel like you need help thinking of a decent boundary and one that you feel comfortable with and what we ve given you this far, you still have a lot of questions, here are the options that we have for you for that, because we do want to set you up for success. If you re in our regular group on Facebook, you can if you wish, you can get some opinions from people in there, but here s the other part of that. People do that in there all the time, but a lot of the feedback that you re going to get in there are going to be people who are not experts, who probably have not done this successfully and so they might not be giving the best advice. You may or may not be able to get some of the Marriage Helper s staff to weigh in in the large Save My Marriage Facebook group just because there s so much that goes on in there, so it s very hit or miss. One of the other things that you can do is if you do join our Save My Marriage course, which is $399, it s a ten week course, you get the best access to us that you can get aside from coming to the workshop, to the Marriage Helper 911 workshop. And that Facebook group is full of a much smaller group of people, but people who really understand what teach, they ve gone through the coursework, they understand boundaries, they ve implemented them successfully themselves, and that is a very strong support group happening in there that we re able to respond a little bit more to those just because they re a little more self-maintained and so we re a little more present in there. I would definitely suggest getting in on that Save My Marriage course. We re going to start over. There s a weekly group coaching call that goes with those. We re going to be starting all of those over here in the next few weeks. We ll be starting back at week one. So, now s a great time to get in on that. If you re planning on going to the workshop, then 100% of what you pay for the Save My Marriage course, so the $399, can be applied towards the cost of the workshop as well. So, essentially it s a win-win type of situation. For the people that are really wanting more about boundaries, they are wanting more in-depth help with that, that s the best thing that we offer. If you re wanting personalized help, then we do have marriage coaching that we offer and you can us or contact us for more information about that and we ll be sure to send that out too. But, Joe, basically what I hear you saying is when you re making boundaries, you really need to there are the boundaries and the criteria, they re two different things, and remember everyone, you re going to be getting this webinar as a recording, so you ll be able to go back through it and listen to it again and take notes, so when you re setting the boundaries and the criteria, you need to have the end goal in mind before doing that. There needs to be a here s the boundary and here s the consequence. Here s the boundary and here s the reward. Here s the criteria, here s the consequence, here s the criteria, here s the reward. All of that needs to be set beforehand so that you don t fail in following through with things. Is that right?

19 Yes, I would agree whole heartedly to that and sometimes it s just difficult to know all the answers. As I m skimming through a lot of these questions here Kimberly, and as you said, we won t have time to get to all of them, I m seeing a lot of people, as you said, giving us a specific instance and saying here s the situation, how do I set the boundary. This one woman wrote I just glanced as I was going by, she said when it comes to setting boundaries my mind just kind of freezes up, I don t know what to do or how to do it. Now, if you want to work with a coach other than us, then there are people out there who will do that of course like somebody in your church or whatever. We will do that as we have availability in that group that Kimberly just talked about. Let me hit two big points though, Kimberly, I see as I scroll through here. One is this, how long do you keep the boundaries in place? Expecting transparency and phone and computer records and so forth? We ve been in reconciliation nine months now and the trust has returned 99% of the time. Do you keep going and not refer to the boundaries again and assume that they will never cross the line again? When we talk about putting a boundary in place, we don t think of it as being out there for a lifetime in the sense of reminding him every so often, remember here s the boundary, if you ever come home drinking again, here s the situation. If you do that, after a while, the other person is going to feel like you just don t trust them or have any confidence in them. Now, it can still be a criteria or a boundary, but no, when you get to the point where it s not being destructive to you anymore, then I suggest that you don t talk about it anymore. Now, if something else comes along, some other problem starts occurring, then you can go back and sit and start over again like okay, we re going to have to talk about boundaries again. We re going to have to talk about criteria again. But these are not something that you set up and remind the person of again, again and again. Hopefully you get to the point where you feel comfortable with each other and you feel comfortable and you just move on without it. By the way, Kimberly, there s another question I want to ask here, but I think I interrupted you. Did you tell people how, if they choose to do the ten week course and get in that group, did you tell them how to do that? Well, I didn t because I forgot. It wasn t your fault. If that s something that you re interested in, we d love to have you as a part of it. You go to MarriageHelper.com/savemymarriage, all one word. I ll include a link. Everyone who s attended the webinar, you ll be getting a followup so you ll get that in there as well.

20 Okay, and here s another one. Again, to help explain some of the basic principles here. A lady asks well what if the actions are not destroying emotionally, but because of the lies and the deceit, the sleeping with the prostitutes and so forth, I don t want my children to grow up with someone who is not willing to get help and continues to be a sex addict. I know that addictions don t go away without help. Therefore, I am feeling it is time to set a boundary such as asking him to leave. Is this good to do to ensure? Yes. Remember we said the destructive behavior can be destructive toward you, like destroying you emotionally. But the destructive behavior can be just the behavior of the person. For example, if you ve got a guy out there that s sleeping with prostitutes, that s destructive behavior to him. He s liable to come up with who knows what kind of disease that could even kill him, or bring it back into your home and bring it to you. And also remember, we said earlier it can have to do with what s destructive to other people in a relationship and that includes your children. It doesn t have to be necessarily that it s destroying you emotionally. It can be that the destructive behavior is destructive to the person doing it, either physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually. It can be destructive to you, of course, we talked about that. It can also be destructive to your kids. You can say that s it. I will not tolerate this any longer because of my children and how destructive it is to them that this behavior continues to go and so if you say well, based on that, is that enough for me to say I need to set a boundary. I say yeah, absolutely it s enough for you to set a boundary. It s anybody that s being hurt by that destructive behavior. Awesome. Very good. Well, we have a couple of minutes, Joe. Just a very few. Do you want to tackle maybe one more question before we close this out? Sure, pick one. Okay, I think we ve discussed this. We ve discussed so much. But basically, if your spouse is not currently showing any interest in repairing the marriage and you re trying to implement boundaries and criteria, we ve mentioned it s very hard to do in that situation. So, is there any kind of in-between point? Where your spouse might not be ready? They re not going to abide to any boundaries or criteria because they re just not wanting to do anything at all? But is there a middle point where you can still say I m standing for my marriage, here is something I can do right now until it gets to the point that I can implement more boundaries and the consequences will matter.

21 Well, you can set boundaries even if the other person doesn t care. I mean, you can say things like I m not going to accept the fact that you are living with that woman and spending all your money on her and not giving money to us. And so you can set boundaries and enforce them. That boundary is not probably going to help you put your marriage back together, but it s a boundary that will still protect you and your children, so you can set boundaries all along the line. It s when you re setting criteria that hopefully could potentially help you put the marriage back together, there will come an end to that when the person finally gets to where he or she just doesn t care at all. But it s hard to know exactly when that is, so what do you do? You continue to set criteria. And again, remember we talked about you don t put a whole lot of these out there. Just what s essential and you go to criteria out there and hope that he or she will respond to the criteria, both from the negative consequence, like if you don t this is the negative consequence. If you do, this is the positive consequence. For example, we ve seen people set a criteria about the divorce that s worked to their advantage. We ve had many, many people come to our workshop with their spouse, the workshops we do for marriages that are in crisis that the spouse didn t want to come at all but the other spouse had a criteria, and the criteria was this, I know you don t want to save the marriage, I know you don t care. But I also know that you want blank in the divorce. For example, maybe you want me to go ahead and sign the divorce papers and quit fighting. And so here, I ll make a criteria. The criteria would be go to the workshop with me and participate. You can t just sit there like a knot on a log. But if you go to that three-day workshop and participate, at the end of the workshop, yeah I ll sign that, I ll do that. So, you can actually set criteria right up to the very end of the divorce. Now, we have seen people do that and when they come out of the workshop, the person that walked into the workshop saying there s no way, I m just here so she ll sign the papers or so he ll sign the papers, we ve actually seen about three out of four of those marriages turn around and save that. Even if the other person says I don t care, if you can find the right reward that s important to him or her, you can still set criteria that hopefully can help you put the marriage together. Now, if there s nothing like that, then obviously you get to the point like I was saying earlier where the criteria doesn t matter anymore because they ve gotten to the point where there s nothing from you that they want.

22 Well, Joe, thank you so much for your time today. I think this ended up being a great webinar. Remember everyone who is on, you re going to get a copy of it. Sorry about what happened for the first couple of minutes, but we ll be having another webinar in a couple of weeks. We d love to have you on it, and even more so, we d love to have you a part of our community in the Save My Marriage community. If that s something that you re interested in, we d love to have you in there. So, Joe, have an amazing rest of your day, and to our Marriage Helper crusaders, we will talk to you in a couple of weeks. Have a great one. Thank you very much. END OF RECORDING