A book review blog series to strengthen your marriage relationship!
Any relationship between two or more honest people will eventually involve some degree of conflict because no two people see everything alike. But how these conflicts are dealt with can make or break the relationship. Nowhere is this more true than in marriage. Marriage is a pressure cooker– where the tension between selfhood and partnership comes to a head.
While not marketed as a marriage self-help book, The Anatomy of Peace is an excellent conflict resolution resource for married couples. Here’s why:
- The Anatomy of Peace reveals the root cause of conflict. This paradigm shift allows us to learn how to stop destructive patterns and instead help things go right so that we have more peace.
- The conflict resolution concepts are taught gradually in narrative format. This makes it easy to see yourself and your partner clearly in a non threatening way.
- There are a number of useful visuals and tools to help you remember and apply the concepts taught (The Choice Diagram, The Collusion Diagram, The Carry-Box Diagram, the four steps for Recovering Inner Clarity and Peace, The Influence Pyramid, and the mnemonic NOPE).
- Many marriages are in need of more peace! Studies “indicate that on average, people see and treat their partners or spouses worse than any other group” (Arbinger Institute, 2020, p. 246).
Here are 10 key takeaways from The Anatomy of Peace:
- The root cause of conflict is our choice to see others as objects rather than as people (Arbinger Institute, 2020, p. 31). For example, we may see people as an obstacle, vehicle, irrelevancy, or inconvenience.
- When we choose conflict, we choose to be more concerned about ourselves than with finding solutions that will work for everyone involved. And we are actually invested in failure (Arbinger Institute, 2020, p. x, 40).
- We have to find a justification when we choose to betray our inner desire to help others (Arbinger Institute, 2020, p. 132). Four common self-justification styles are: “better-than,” “worse-than,” “need-to-be-seen-as,” and “I-deserve.”
- A collusion is a pattern of “conflict where the parties are inviting the very things they’re fighting against” (Arbinger Institute, 2020, p. 50).
- “The most successful negotiators understand the other side’s concerns and worries as much as their own… Who is more likely to be able to consider and understand the other side’s positions so fully- the person who sees others as objects or the person who sees them as people?” (Arbinger Institute, 2020, p. 37).
- Having compassion and love for others doesn’t mean we don’t have boundaries. In fact, having love and compassion helps us to have healthy boundaries (Arbinger Institute, 2020, p. 106).
- While we can’t make others change, we can influence change as we help things to go right rather than correcting things that are going wrong (Arbinger Institute, 2020, p. 18, 167).
- To replace conflict with cooperation, we need to see people as people, build relationships, listen and learn, teach and communicate, and then, if needed, correct (Arbinger Institute, 2020, p. 207, 218).
- “Our passions, beliefs, and needs do not divide but unite: it is by virtue of our own passions, beliefs, and needs that we can see and understand others’. If we have beliefs we cherish, then we know how important others’ beliefs must be to them. And if we have needs, then our own experience equips us to notice the needs of others” (Arbinger Institute, 2020, p. 228).
- We sustain change when we recover our desire to help others and act on those desires (Arbinger Institute, 2020, p. 193-194).
Are you ready to find and make more peace in your marriage? Order a copy of The Anatomy of Peace today and embark on the journey of a lifetime. While I am still very much learning to apply these principles in my own life and marriage, reading The Anatomy of Peace was truly a transformative experience for me. Check out my blog post, The Anatomy of Peace Part 2 to learn more.
Reference
Arbinger Institute. (2020). The anatomy of peace: Resolving the heart of conflict. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Hi, I’m Heather Huggard. I have always loved to learn. I especially love learning about physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. I have a bachelor’s degree from BYU in nursing (with a psychology minor), and now I am a Marriage and Family Studies major at BYU-I.
I am especially interested in studying the personal development that happens through marriage, and the topic of differentiation. The theory of differentiation comes from the work of Murray Bowen, and was later developed and applied to marriage by David Schnarch. Dr. Schnarch’s crucible approach to marriage difficulties is intriguing to me because it focuses on personal development while in a close relationship. This approach also differs from the more mainstream attachment based approaches, instead focusing on the balance between autonomy and connection. I think I am passionate about this topic because it is something I want to develop within myself.