A “Family Mental Health training workshop” was held by the Basij Medical Community Centre of the University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences, together with the university’s Student Counselling and Mental Health Centre, for a group of staff in the university’s Farabi Hall.
According to MEFDA (University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences), Dr Bahman Bahmani, who led the workshop, spoke about the importance of the family, its foundations and principles, and healthy communication in marriage. In his words: the family is an abstraction, a product of mental and emotional capacity; the family is the setting of birth, life and death.
Referring to the books “Eight Lessons for a Happier Marriage” and “Marriage Without Failure” (Persian title), he described the marital relationship, which begins with a contract, as the family’s main pillar, from which the family’s other relationships take shape. If we make this relationship more capable, the family’s other functions grow too. In today’s families, after a while the children become the main concern — and this is not the best state of affairs, because the main concern should be the marital relationship.
Dr Bahmani added: we don’t know how to take responsibility for our relationships, because we never learned — so what should we do now? We live in the present; when we live in the past, it means we are still the person we were. We grow in intelligence, cognition, understanding, knowledge and skill, but emotionally we have stayed in the past. In our past emotional relationships and the emotional ties we had — such as frustration, dependence and so on — that part of our being has stayed as it was. Nothing exists but what exists, yet we look for what is not; then what is also becomes what is not, and we go looking for a past that no longer exists.
“The book ‘Marriage Without Failure’ explains seven ways husbands and wives try to gain communication skills that are very wrong, and explains present-focused, problem-solving ways for husbands and wives to talk with each other.”
He stressed that one of the family’s missions is to help its members solve problems. Every member of the family should be trained, so that the family’s capacity to solve problems grows; the family is a problem-solving unit that helps its members solve their problems.
“What is a problem? Any situation that can answer our need. Needs are innate and instinctive, and they are met through learning.”
“Our wants and our needs are not the same. If our wants serve our needs, we grow healthily; but in many cases our wants do not help our needs, and even block them from being met. That is where problems and illness begin.”
He went on: status and standing are an innate need. Respect is an innate need, whereas status is a false innate need; respect is a need, and so is the sense of being valued.
“Everyone has the right to feel valued. Each spouse has the right to be accepted unconditionally by the other — but with the responsibility to answer the other’s rights. Their right is to have the other’s responsibility, and this is a rule.”
“In human relationships we don’t look at ourselves; we don’t accept our responsibility for changing things; we accept complaints and criticism. This is a flaw, and it is the same in family relationships — a pervasive flaw that burns. In family relationships it is poison to want to fix the other person, to behave so that we don’t lose, and to imagine that if I leave this game I will lose many advantages.”
Dr Bahmani also said: in religious teaching, you are charged with your own behaviour and answerable to God, and must not owe others their rights. But in being a couple there are two things, rights and responsibility. This responsibility really means: “I answer their rights so that I have rights, and can ask responsibility of them.” We should turn our minds towards discovering the other person’s needs and answering their needs and wishes.
He added: we must gradually move towards turning the marital relationship into needs-based responses and wishes, because this is the right framework for a marriage.
The workshop leader continued: motivation arises when a gap is perceived; motivation is whatever gives a relationship energy and direction.
At the end of his talk he named “How to meet our own needs responsibly” and “Seeking our rightful needs without the slightest disrespect” as topics for the next workshop.
