The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com and Amazon.com.

Right now, I want to turn to a call from a woman who's getting married this June, but her woman's intuition is telling her that her fiancé has cheated on her, and she's got many difficulties of her own. She's very hard on herself; she feels paranoid. She's got an eating disorder. She just feels out of control of her life, and she had a mastectomy and feels ugly and unsexy. So, see what you think about this.

Hi, Dr. Kenner, I'm 34 years old. I've been with the man for four years. We were supposed to get married in June, but I feel like he's been cheating on me, and it makes me feel very, very ugly. I feel very unattractive. I don't think, oh, we do need to take Viagra. So that makes me feel left with a woman... Bipolar... I have Body Dysmorphic Disorder, paranoia, sleeping disorder. There's something else I can't think of right now. And most of them come from surgery. When I was 23, a doctor gave me a mastectomy when he should have given me one pack of a woman. I don’t feel sexy anymore, and we’re supposed to get married in June. I just can’t be happy. I don’t... I hate myself. I hate the way I look. I just don’t care if I’m around anymore, and everything I try to do to be happy just goes away, too. It’s just one year in the season. Give me some help or some kindness and how to make myself happy. I want to be somebody different. I want to stop being myself and be someone else so I can start fresh. I wish my fiancé would love me for me and not go with other women. He’s never admitted it to me, but I just have that feeling of a woman’s intuition. Things just don’t... if he did cheat on me, I could get past that and just start my whole life over again. I’m a good person. I really am. I’m kind, and I’ll do anything for you, but I just want to be happy.

Okay, that’s a very, very sad situation that you’re in, and it sounds like it’s been going on for many, many years. You’re 34 years old now, but you had your mastectomy at the age of 23. How traumatizing. I mean, if you have a mastectomy when you’re 90 years old, big deal. I mean, you’re not trying to look glamorous at that age. You’ve got enough wrinkles, and you’ve dealt with life, but if you have it at a very young age, it can be excruciatingly painful. I wish you had had wonderful, wonderful therapy. Maybe you did have some good therapy at the time to help you see that you are not your missing breast and not to beat up on yourself, not to see yourself as less of a woman. Yes, you’re going to have some of those thoughts, but you want to have a really healthy way to cope with those. So one of the things I’m going to recommend is—

Hey, I gotta interrupt this, because we’ve got to pay some bills. Thirty seconds, that’s it. A very quick ad, and then Alan will be back.

Romance. Oh, I wish guys knew more about what we want from a relationship. Boy, I wish I knew more about what I want. Where’s that ad I saw? Ah, here it is, The Selfish Path to Romance, a serious romance guidebook. Download chapter one for free at SelfishRomance.com and buy it at Amazon.com. Hmm, The Selfish Path to Romance—that is interesting.

So, one of the things I’m going to recommend is the book Choosing to Live, and that’s on my website, DrKenner.com. It’s by Tom Ellis and Corey Newman, and that will give you a way to turn around your thinking, to try to look at your life differently. I know you’ve been given a lot of different labels in your life, whether it’s Bipolar, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, meaning you’re not comfortable with the body you’re in, paranoia, eating disorder. But my guess is that they all integrate. They’re all connected with you not knowing how to move forward in your life, and you’re working too hard to please other people. You’re pleasing—you’re a good person—you please everyone else, probably including your fiancé, as if you need to buy people’s affection to be likable. You don’t need to do that. You want to recognize that you are a good person and value yourself first, meaning, have good hobbies, have good interests in your life, things that you personally like, that you personally choose. And then, whether or not this man is cheating on you, you do need to uncover that. You want to see that the core is, I want to marry myself. I want to love myself first. So I would get into individual therapy as soon as possible. If you can get a cognitive therapist, that would be great. You can go to a website, Academy of CognitiveTherapy.org, and I hope that will help. I hope that he’s not cheating on you. You can also try couples therapy and see if that will come out in the open.

And here’s a little more from Dr. Kenner.

And right before the break, I was answering a woman who was talking about, how does she deal with the situation where her husband—who I’m assuming this is the second marriage—her husband doesn’t want her ever to see her kids or her grandkids. He wants her to cut off all ties. And I said, on the face of it, it’s horrendous. You really, you need to just tell him that this is an untenable situation. It’s absolutely not going to work. And it could be the beginning of the break of the marriage or the end of it, but there could be other factors. And if I were to observe, or if we had the advantage of seeing videotapes of what you’re like when you’re around the kids—if you’re the type of grandma who totally would wrap her life around the children, 24/7 and forget that you have a husband—then I have some empathy for him. Not that the solution is the reverse, to get rid of them, but it’s your... to get rid of the kids and your grandkids. But it’s, how do you manage your time? How do you juggle these two values, your husband and the kids, so you can sit down with him and say to him, I’m assuming his name is Henry—I’m just giving him a name, Henry—Help me understand you better. What bothers you most when I’m in contact with the kids? I don’t know whether you’ve asked him that. What do you need from me that I may not be paying attention to? Now, if his demands are unreasonable—I want sex 24/7—then you can’t, that’s not fair. But if he says that, you know, I want dinners out alone. We always have to go with the kids, and I’ve begun to resent them so much. If it’s true that most of your life revolves around the kids and you totally ignore your hubby, then own your piece of it and decide, do you want to be married or not? Is it fair to him? You also want to ask why you’re doing this, and if you’ve discovered that you’re doing it because you felt guilty about the divorce and so you feel guilty about remarrying so that the kids always come first, then you need to reprioritize. You need to ask yourself, Do I really need to continue doing this? What does the marriage mean to me? Could I make our marriage better? Now, assuming that Henry is not an abusive person but a good guy who is feeling trapped and doesn’t know how to integrate his life with your children, work with him. If your kids have bad-mouthed him and always try to pit you against him, trying to break up the relationship, you want to work with him instead. And that takes time. That takes seeing the good in one another rather than creating a war. You want more. You don’t want to have kid wars with your hubby. You want to be able to figure out how to treat each other better with respect, not as enemies. Even if you decide to part ways because you’re incompatible, that’s okay too, but you still want to do it respectfully.

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Here’s an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance, the serious romance guidebook by clinical psychologist Dr. Ellen Kenner and co-author Dr. Edwin Locke, who is world-famous for his theories in goal setting.

Partners, whether married or dating, need to communicate constantly, but many lack communication skills. For example, they may not be able to articulate well and thus struggle to express what they think or feel, but communication skills can be learned. Listening is an important part of communicating. Many people find it very difficult not to interrupt before their partner has finished expressing a complete thought. Listening well, giving your partner your full attention, and summarizing what you heard when necessary sends the message You are important.

You can download chapter one for free by going to DrKenner.com, and you can buy The Selfish Path to Romance at Amazon.com.