Mid-Life Is Prime Time For Your Deepest Pain Ever!
Mark Smith shares from his 33 years of marriage counseling experience the extraordinarily painful options that face most middle aged couples - Resurrection Or Resignation.
Mark E. Smith, MSW is the Founder and Director of Family Tree Life Coaching. He previously worked as a highly respected therapist and author in the Indianapolis area for 32+ years. He now practices as a Life and Relationship Coach. He offers coaching for individuals, couples, families, family businesses, executive leaders, pastors, and therapists. He has world class coaching expertise in Affair Recovery, Relationship Issues, Narcissistic Abuse Syndrome, Sexual Addiction, Abuse, Trauma, Complex PTSD, Anxiety, Mid-Life Issues, Shame and Abandonment Issues. If you need a safe, courageous, cutting, marriage-jolting healer, he is your guy. You can contact Mark Smith at [email protected] and 317-507-8866.
The Wall
Their wedding picture mocked them from the table
These two whose lives no longer touched each other.
They loved with such a heavy barricade between them
That neither battering rams of words
Nor artilleries of touch could break it down.
Somewhere between the oldest child’s first tooth
And youngest daughter’s graduation
They lost each other.
Throughout the years each slowly unraveled
That tangled ball of string called self
And as they tugged at stubborn knots
Each hid their searching from the other.
Sometimes she cried at night and begged
The whispering darkness to tell her who she was
While he lay beside her snoring like a
Hibernating bear unaware of her winter.
Once after that had made love he wanted to tell her
How afraid he was of dying
But fearing to show his naked soul he spoke instead
About the beauty of her breasts.
She took a course in modern art trying to find herself.
In colors splashed upon a canvas
And complaining to other women about men
Who were insensitive.
He climbed into a tomb called the office
Wrapped his mind in a shroud of paper figures
And buried himself in customers.
Slowly the wall between them rose cemented
By the mortar of indifference.
One day reaching out to touch each other
They found a barrier they could not penetrate
And recoiling from the coldness of the stone
Each retreated from the stranger on the other side.
For when love dies it is not in a moment of angry battle
Nor when fiery bodies lose their heat.
It lies panting exhausted expiring
At the bottom of a wall it could not scale.
• Why mid-life is time to get to work
• Men’s Group – 45 years old
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• Invisible Wall – Read ‘The Wall’
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• “Mid-life marriage mired in bone chilling stagnation.”
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• Resurrection Or Resignation
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• Depends on the workability of the partners 1-5
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• The goal is to heal yourself
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• Whoever the first one to feel the pain is, they need to share that pain with their slumbering spouses.
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• For a marriage to be resurrected two people need to simultaneously and enthusiastically embrace the radical reassessment and reconstruction of their personalities from the ground up.
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• Do you know how you are fucked up?
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• 10,000 piece jig saw puzzle – Genogram, Feedback Session
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• Separation
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• Don’t say that you can’t afford it. You can’t afford to do without it!