Foreword
For many years, I have wanted to more openly share the knowledge from the many lessons about human nature that my former clients have taught me. More than any graduate school or formal training program, my clients have both taught and inspired me with their heroic struggles to face down inner demons and to open themselves more completely to life. It is with much gratitude that I now hope to pass along some of this experiential knowledge so that others may benefit.
Writing "The Marriage First Aid Kit" posed a significant challenge for me. My primary concern was to reduce the emotional distance between the reader and myself. I knew that much of my writing would be a subtle confrontation of the reader’s already closely held beliefs about love, relationships, and self-concept. Because I had many counter-intuitive things to say, I wanted to connote the sense that we all struggle with the same dynamics of human nature albeit configured in many different ways. I especially did not want to “talk down” to anyone as if I were not vulnerable to fear, shame, regression, and defensiveness like everyone else. I hoped that my approach would help the reader to be more receptive to my novel perspective and somewhat strange ideas.
My concern with the reader’s receptivity helped me to decide on a conversational style of prose. Many of the seeming grammatical errors in this book were not errors at all but were instead quite intentional. For example, I often placed conjunctions at the beginning of new sentences. By using this idiomatic device, I strove to induce the reader to stop and more fully digest the beginning of a powerful idea without breaking momentum of its further development. I also used the collective first person quite often. Although this probably strained certain sections, I wanted it to give the reader emotional protection when reading about their own emotional dynamics. I hope it works as I intended.
All of the case examples throughout the book have been altered. Names have been changed and other facts have been altered in order to protect identities. In many of the vignettes, each character and situation is a collage of distilled truths taken from many couples over many years. Any close similarities to any reader are certainly intentional.
Finally, let me encourage you, the reader, to change or adapt any of my suggestions that don’t exactly fit your situation. Relationships, like people, are all unique. While generalizations can be made, they shouldn’t be taken as rigid rules. No one has written the final word about love and relationships, myself included. They're too complex. It's especially important that you don’t underestimate the power of your own inventiveness as a positive force within your marriage. More than any rule, it’s your own creativity along with faith that together sustain the spirit of a truly vital relationship.
Good luck in your endeavors, or I should better say "Good Work"!