Inspiring Stories » Choosing to Change Your Life

Building A Better Relationship

To Bears Kaufman and the Option Family:

I feel compelled to share my life-changing experience with you so here it is!

My husband Peter and I have been together for almost 20 years and we have two little children, Gabriel and Daniel. Although I thought I felt satisfied with our relationship Peter has constantly been searching for more to move our relationship to a higher level. I frankly resisted those efforts due to threat of change or loss of control, etc. Peter decided to go to the Happiness Option Weekend program in early February and requested that I go to the weekend program at the end of March.

He returned from the Happiness Option Weekend drained but moved by what he experienced. Impressed by his experience, I, using my usual lawyerly approach to a situation, read all that I could to prepare myself for my weekend. I read Happiness Is A Choice and To Love Is To Be Happy With and realized that this approach to problems could add to my life. So, I tried it. I guess it worked so well (and your happiness weekend worked so well) that Peter now felt comfortable to reveal to me that he had been sleeping with another woman and he explained to me his reasons. I was devastated and hysterical. I spent the entire night asking him how he could ruin my life, I thought I could not go on and I decided to leave him as I could not live in a relationship where such a deception had occurred.

Over the weekend I visited my sister in Annapolis and cried for 48 hours and became angrier and continued to feel an almost unbearable hurt. I talked to Peter extensively during this time as he explained that he had the affair for us as he was searching for ways to continue in our relationship while desperately trying to find what he was looking for. I reaffirmed my decision to leave him and talked with my sister about the mechanics of how to divide the possessions and how to deal with the kids.

I drove home that afternoon to see my children. As I was approaching the Pennsylvania border, I played the Wayne Dyer tape that I had just checked out of the library and was reminded of the dialogues and the Option Process®. I started a dialogue with myself and realized I understood why Peter did what he did, realized he did the best he could under the circumstances and trusted that he was doing it for us. I realized this was an unbelievable opportunity to move to the level Peter had been searching for. I made the decision to return home and use this experience as a positive one in our relationship, yet I remained angry at him. Then I asked myself the question that I did not initially understand when I read To Love Is To Be Happy With - What are you afraid will happen if you do not get angry? What a powerful tool! Was I afraid he will do it again? No. Was I afraid he was not sorry ? No. There, I realized I had no reason for my anger and was able to just let it go. What a power.

The next day Peter and I talked for hours and resolved so many things. However, I still felt an intense hurt. I began another dialogue process to deal with that and returned to the same question - Was I afraid he was not aware of how hurt I was? No. Again I was able to let go of that hurt.

It is now a week after Peter's initial revelation and Peter and I are at a place in our relationship emotionally, sexually, and spiritually that I never dreamt I could be all brought about simply from reading your books! I truly believe that Peter and I would not be together and I would be filing for divorce without the publication of Happiness Is A Choice... Thank you and I wish to leave you with a poem from Rumi that describes the beautiful state Peter and I are in because of Option:

To Peter:

When it's cold and raining,
You are more beautiful

And the snow brings me
even closer to your lips.

The Inner Secret, that which was never born,
You are that freshness, and I am with you now.

I can't explain the goings,
and the comings. You enter suddenly,

and I am nowhere again.
Inside the Majesty.

Thank you for bringing us there. We will see you at the CoupleCourse program in May.

Kathleen