Marriage and Family Therapy – My Life

My early experiences with love where very minimal from my parents. My grandmother on the other hand was always very affectionate with me. My parents were divorced long before I can even remember. My mother was married several times and she always openly displayed affection towards her new husband for at least a little while. My parents never really displayed a lot of affection towards me or my little brother. My mother was around most of the time. She made it to almost every wrestling match, football game, and baseball game. My father on the other hand was never there. I have just recently started speaking to my mother again after eight years of silence. My father and I are business acquaintances more than any thing else. I think I have told him I loved him a total of two maybe three times. Once upon a time I was a very cold individual and I eventually learned to be warm and affectionate but I really don’t like it. Being warm and affectionate causes to much heartache and pain, so I have decided to return to the old me. It is just so much easier. The funny thing is that I want my spouse or mate to be a very affectionate person. It makes me feel good when they are. I also want my spouse to be understanding to the fact that I have to work very hard to be affectionate. As far as kids go I have never wanted them, but the older I get I think I might want them. I believe if I ever have kids I want them to be reared to the fact that they should so affection but to realize that they could get hurt and that is just a part of life.

I acquired my sex education from watching television and from my mother at the age of thirteen. She handed me a box of condoms and gave me the birds and the bee’s talk. She said the most important thing was to make sure both parties are completely satisfied. I lost my virginity at the age of thirteen so my attitude toward sex approaching my marriage is that it was very important. I expected my mate to have the same attitude.

How do I categorize my parent’s marriages? My parent’s marriages were all of conflict. My home life was never that great. That explains why I was emancipated at the age sixteen and had my own apartment. Life was much better on my own. I was able to finish High School and put myself through flight school and I am almost through with college.

My parents when they were married tended to settle their differences by arguing and yelling. There marriage was one of authority and not of democracy. My mother is was and probably always will be a person that will always boss. How I deal with conflict depends on what type of conflict it is. If I am at home and the cause of the conflict really matters I try to be democratic. If I really don’t care about the root cause of the conflict I’m pretty passive. When it comes to being at work, if the conflict is between my captain and I it is important that it be a democratic discussion but with the final authority resting solely on the captain. If the conflict is between me and ramp personnel I am a very authoritarian. I am currently legally married, but I am going through a divorce at this time. What ever way I tried to settle conflicts it didn’t work out for me. I have come to the conclusion that if one person does not want to settle the conflict it will not be settled no matter the technique used to solve them.

I only have one sibling. I have a younger brother. He is four years younger than me and has a different father. I guess that technically makes use half brothers. My relationship with Ryan (my younger brother) as a child was one of contempt and anger. Ryan’s father was still around up until I turned thirteen. I had real jealousy issues with him for that and for the fact that he has and still is treated differently than I am. Even though we are brother we have two totally different personalities. His is one of laziness and freeloading and mine is harder working and determination. The older Ryan and I got the worse our relationship got. It took my mothers four husband Ron to bring us together again. Ryan was very close to Ron and they had an amazing relationship. If an onlooker wouldn’t have known any different they would say that they were father and son. Ron was killed in a car crash when Ryan was sixteen and he handled it very badly. He was a wreck and needed not only emotional support but also a stable home to live in. My wife and I took my little brother into our home and let him live there until he decided to move back to our mothers. Finally my brother and I have a good relationship. Being the oldest sibling and the most financially stable has its strains and benefits; the biggest strain is that not only my brother but my mother look to me for advice. They also look to me to take care of problems and help them out financially as well.

My self and my family are of Christian faith. We celebrate Christmas, Easter, Lint, and all other Christian and national holidays. We never really had a true tradition for any of them. We do however have a tradition for the opening day of hunting season. Ever since I can remember my brother and I and all of my cousins would take the opening day of hunting season off school or work to all go hunting as a family. Opening day and my grandmothers birthday are about the only times that our entire family gets together to do anything as a group.

My approach to life has changed over the years. I used to be a pretty positive person and always gave people the benefit of the doubt. I trusted people and never looked over their shoulder to make sure they were doing the right thing. My attitude changed recently actually. Now I am a negative person and don’t really trust many people. The cause of the change is the ongoing divorce with my wife and a recent date. I trusted my wife with everything including my deepest darkest secrets and now all of that is being used against me. She is using it to basically blackmail me into giving more to her in the divorce settlement. I tried to be more than fair with her but that is not good enough.

As far as the recent date goes it is partially my fault for trusting people. I keep a large amount of money in my truck to use as spending cash for my trash company when it needs it. I had to run into the office for a minute or two and I left her in my truck while I was gone. When I got back everything appeared normal and we went out and had a great time. After I took her home the next morning I had to go buy tires for the trash truck and I was three hundred dollars short, which in the grand scheme of things is not a ton but it is still theft. So now I can not and will not trust everyone again. I personally consider myself a rebel. The reason I do is that I am one of the few family members that do not work for the family shop or farm. I went out made my own choices and mistakes and got to where I am because of me. I am not a rebel when it comes to following proper rules and procedures I am very much a conformist when it comes to that. I really don’t get angry when I don’t get my way, but like most things that depends on the situation. If I am informed on a good reason not to do it my way I have no problem with that. I am always open to hear other peoples ideas and thoughts because a lot of the time there thoughts and ideas are ones that I have not thought of. Or if I had then I can explain to them why I didn’t like that idea and we can discuss it further. I feel that I am a very practical person. I think practical describes me better than humaninistic and religious. The reasons behind that are I do believe in religion buts I do not live my life by it. I am more of a down to earth person. My dreams are obtainable and my lifestyle is well within my means.

There is supposed to be a paragraph in here about what my ideal mate is. To be quite honest I have no idea and I’m not really in the mood or position to talk about that right now.

I used to believe that I had a great understanding of my self, but with all the recent changes in my life I am forced to question that. At this point in time I don’t want a good self-understanding. My goals in life are as follows: I want to be better than my parents in regards to love, wealth, and parenting, I want to retire by the time I’m fifty, I want to have kids prior to the age of thirty-five, I want to live life like I was dying everyday, and most of all I want to be remembered as a good man. My top five values in life are happiness, wealth, love, to live life, and health. I want to be happy; I want to look forward to coming home and also going to work. Wealth incorporates a lot. To most people it means money and to others it means love and happiness in their family. To me it means both. I want it all. I just want to love someone that loves me back and not with me for monetary reasons. I want to live like I am dying everyday because I want to look back and say I have no regrets in life. My health is the last and final thing. I put the values in order for me and the importance of them to me. I don’t want to live forever like most do. I just want to be healthy and live as long as I am meant to. I am afraid of very little. I am afraid of being alone. My grandmother is ninety years old and she has been alone for the last fifteen years and she has been miserable and I don’t want that for myself. I am afraid of not making the right decisions in my business because I have people that work for me that count on that pay check and count on their job. I am also afraid of failure. The only thing in life that I have failed at is my marriage. I really have never failed at anything else and I don’t know how to handle that.

All in all I am a nice person who will go out of his way to help another. I also am a very jaded person who does not have a lot of faith or trust for the opposite sex. I want to become a great family man, a person who people look up to, and most of all someone who is well respected. The only part of that were a spouse is imperative is for the great family man. The rest of it I can and will do on my own. My advice to my best friend and to anyone that leads this paper is to always be honest, never give up, and to treat people how you want to be treated.