Are Your Mental Models Getting In The Way of Improving Your Marriage?

As the saying goes, I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. The same reasoning applies when you're approaching your marriage problems.

We all have mental models that help us make sense of the world we see. A "mental model" is a way of looking at the world, our beliefs, ideas, images, and verbal descriptions formed from our experiences. These interpretations of perceived reality lead us to expect certain results, give meaning to events, and predispose us to behave in certain ways. Although mental models offer internal stability in a world of continuous change, they also blind us to facts and ideas that challenge our deeply held beliefs. They are, by their very character, fuzzy and incomplete.

Take, for example, your model of marriage. Where did your understanding of relationships and marriage come from? Mostly likely, it has a great deal to do with what you saw growing up. Many of us grew up with the “hang tough and stick it out” or “screw it, I’m out of here” models of marriage.

Because mental models often exist below the level of awareness, their power on our behavior and on our thinking is usually hidden and unexamined. Part of our personal work in learning how to have a great marriage is to reveal our mental models to ourselves and examine how those models influence the ways we act during difficult situations. Becoming mindful of our mental models crafts for us behavioral choices we may not have been aware of before.

With mental models, if you only have a limiting framework for thinking about your marriage, then you’ll try to fit every problem you face into that structure. When your set of mental models is limited, so is your potential for finding a solution.

In order to improve your marriage, you need to think differently. Wait, don’t say that you’ve heard that, or done that before. I’m going to challenge you to actually think differently, and I’ll show you a few ways of doing just that.

You see, if you develop a bigger toolbox of mental models, you’ll improve your ability to solve marital problems, or other life problems for that matter, because you’ll have more options for getting to the right answer.

Let me ask you: Are you ready to make a shift in your marriage mental model? In my practice, I offer clients ways to build new mental models. Here are a few to get you started:

1. Find a photo of yourself as a child. Try to put yourself mentally back there… What did you understand about marriage then? What had you learned about marriage and relationships from your family, friends, school, or faith?

2. Face up to gaps between what you say and what we do: such as when you say you want to have a great marriage but allow barriers to real connection to exist, for example, in the way you communicate with your spouse, keep your commitments and/or honor your word.

3. Read books and take classes outside the norm. If you read the same material and go to marriage counseling as everyone else, then you’ll think in the same way as everyone else. You can’t expect to see problems in a new way if you’re doing all the same things as the masses (and with our 50% divorce rate you can see how that is working). So, either read books or take classes that are outside the norm. In other words, look for answers in unexpected places.

4. Talk to family, friends and colleagues about mental models. Discussing mental models with others can help increase awareness of our own models and expand our thinking about the different assumptions, beliefs and paradigms people have about relationships and marriage.