Marriage counseling is one of those places where people can get healing from their broken dreams by restructuring the story behind the dreams. The Magic Formula Technique is one of the twenty-five transformation methods I have discussed in this website to restructure your story.

The Magic Formula says that when there is a conflict between two people, the aware person will be able to say to himself that what my partner and I have in common right now is (1) our anxiety, and (2) that we are both lovers, that we both care. The aware person is able to look into the mirror of his own mind and realize that people get anxious when their differing stories seem to separate them,but she also realizes that people more basically care because love is the unifying truth of who they are. The antagonisms between people begin to melt away when one of the partners is aware of their common ground of both anxiety and caring.

The aware person can say "My partner and I are anxious and defensive in our appearance and behavior, but my partner and I are peaceful and loving in our reality and truth." The unaware person says "I am hurt; and she is mean. I am upset and he is distant. I jealous and she doesn’t care. I try and he ignores me. He is abusive and I am a victim." These kinds of thoughts arise from our story of who we are, creating barriers and alienation, which are symptomatic signs of our unawareness and self-deceit. The truth is that when there are arguments, both people are being overwhelmed and controlled by their stories. True commuication cannot occur between people as long as inner communication in the individual is not occurring. Unawareness keeps people from seeing their common ground. On the surface people appear to be polarized and alienated, which is called the personna, the personality, the appearance, but if you go deep enough, beyond the superficial, you will find connection, similarities, common ground, oneness, and you will understand that stories appear to "separated" people. Stories generate anxiety. Stories take us away from who we are.

When the story of separation is being experienced, when the story of lack is being experienced, when the story of entrapment is being experienced, then we will have anxiety, and we will suffer from the effects of stress and loneliness.

• A person loves as much as their story will permit.
• A person is as free as their story will permit.
• A person is as powerful as their story will permit.
• A person is as creative as their story will permit.

The main cause of divorce is marriage to our story, the identification with our story, and the failure to recognize our true identity.

The Magic Formula is a technique by which we can become more aware. Identification with our story is a state of unawareness. The truth is that neither person is right insofar as each person is unaware of his story and that each person is right insofar as he is aware of his story. Each person is guilty insofar as he believes the lie about himself, and innocent insofar as he didn’t realize this lie. Guilt has a hold upon us because we blame others for our own self-deceit, but guilt is an illusion insofar as we "know not what we do."

The state of conflict, the state of war, exists in each person’s mind, between his story about himself and the truth about himself. Every thought and every word I utter is about myself, about myself only. I have no objectivity about anyone else. My story prevents that objectivity. When I judge another, I think I am judging another, but actually all judgments are about myself. Every judgment I ever made about anything was about myself. And every idol I ever worshipped, every good quality I ever saw in the world, are my good qualities, just like all the bad qualities. These qualities are subjectified and twisted.

And so when you apply the Magic Formula to your own self, which is all that you can possibly do, you will be able to re-own and assimilate the projections you have made upon the other. If you are saying "My partner is mean" look at your own mean thinking. If you are saying "My partner is selfish" look at your own thinking about selfishness. If you think your partner is overweight or beautiful, look at your own heavy or beautiful thinking. If you think someone is brilliant or stupid, look at your own thinking about brilliance and stupidity. If you think your partner is right or wrong, look at your own thinking about rightness or wrongness, or else you will mis-communicate and harm your relationship. If you do not own your projections, your story will continue to control you, and you will feel like a victim of someone or something, and when you feel like a victim, you will try to control that which you think is in control of you.

How often do we find ourselves saying:

He drinks, and I am self-disciplined

She spends and I scrimp

I work and he plays

I’m clean and she is sloppy

I’m sociable and he’s a loner

I face problems, and she avoids them

I’m sexy and she is cold

I have feelings and he doesn’t

I have rules for the kids and he indulges them

And so, look in the Magic Mirror, and take note of what you see. Your partner is your Magic Mirror, here to bring you the greatest gift of all, the knowledge of yourself. The good, the bad and the ugly all belong to you, and only when you own them all, are you free.

Your partner will play the role of the good guy or the bad guy, so that you can look into the mirror and see your story. And so the Magic Formula is actually a Magic Mirror. When you look into this mirror and you see a frown upon the face of your partner there, you will sooner or later realize that it is your own frown that you are looking at. This projection, this mirror experience, comes from the power of imagination, as it is projected through the lens of our beliefs. Thus without knowing it, we create what we don’t want, and in that respect we are our own worst enemy, our only enemy. To "love your enemy" is thus our greatest opportunity, because as Pogo said "The enemy is us." The story gives form and shape to the imagination. Through the all-powerful imagination, we are projecting forth into the mirror of the world all of the good and bad, all of the hate and love, all of the self and other, that is possible to experience. Our story creates our symptoms and our symptoms are our story, both of which point to the Infinite.

Carol explained her story in these words: life is a problem, human beings need a crutch and God is the biggest and best crutch that we know of, so why am I doubtful about God? I commented that Karl Marx had explained the same view when he said that God is an opiate for the people. I asked her why she didn’t believe that God is the biggest and best crutch, and she said because God is too good to be true. It is too easy, too simple. Since she was 18, she couldn’t trust God any more since her boyfriend was killed in an accident. Even before that she had felt abandoned when her mother had a mental breakdown and was hospitalized. In college, Carol had an affair with her married music professor, and later married his son. This relationship lasted only a year.

She had a couple of other relationships with married men, but these relationships were also quite a mixture of tasting what she wanted and losing what she had tasted. The experience of abandonment and loss were a very recurrent and persistent theme in her story. Her story goes like this: I search, I find, I depend, I lose. In her current situation, she met a man who had been in a terrible accident and was disfigured, but he had a good heart, and so she married him, although she was not in love with him. I suspect that she felt she wouldn’t lose him since she would be his caretaker, that he needed her. But he had been a very proud, macho, physical speciman until his accident when he lost his "strong man" self image and his good looks. He had many plastic surgeries, and became depressed, losing his "heart" . She became detached and felt nothing.

In some of her relationships, including this one, she had been abandoned, and now she is abandoning her husband. The most recent form of her dream is that she will get a divorce and adopt a child. She explained this by saying that at least she won’t lose the child. I won’t be abandoned by the child. Yet she suspects that she could even lose the child as well. I asked her if she had mistrusted herself, abandoned herself. She had sought love, was disillusioned by love, abandoned love, and now dislikes herself even more as the abandoner. She doubts that she has ever liked, trusted and depended on herself to any extent. People tell her to do what she wants, to take care of herself, but she says that is all she has ever done, and the way she did it was by seeking to please others.

I commented that she has a story of an infinite appetite and search for love. I asked her how she could have a desire for something infinite if she is not infinite. She agreed that she has infinite desires, and that she has searched infinitely for love, but she cannot make the leap to the awareness that she is infinite. She said that she just doesn’t know about that. I said that Jesus agreed that we "know not". We have a story of abandonment because we are unaware of the Infinite. And you can’t trust the biggest and best crutch of them all because it too is a part of the story. She just cannot believe that God is a trustable finite answer to an infinite hunger, and that is what we try to do in our story about God as a crutch. The infinite looking for the infinite seems ridiculous, but it is true. God became man that man might become aware of his infinity.

Our story, in other words, includes the beliefs that we are separate, lacking and trapped and that various outer idols are an answer, a crutch for our dilemma. We search for a lifetime, in acceptable and unacceptable ways, to fill our infinite hunger. We experience frustration, disappointment, abandonment, grief, depression, anger, and disillusionment. We distrust others, god, and ourselves. We experience feeling like the abandoned victim and we experience being the abandoning victimizer. We experience the temporary excitement of being in love and tasting infinite fulfillment. Life changes, we fall back into the pit, and distrust sets in again. And God has permitted all of this to happen, and so God is a crutch that fails too. All of this constitutes our story.

The essence of this recurrent human story is that we are merely finite human beings addictively searching for and often failing to find an infinite solution to our hunger.

Investigate this story. Is it true that we are merely human, that God is a crutch, and that we have failed to find the Infinite? What would I be without this story? This book is the leap that I have taken when I ask this question. Each person must find his own answer.

Breakthrough into spiritual self-discovery is the objective of Infinity Theory. Breakthrough occurs when an individual does self-inquiry about his or her story. Our story is devised as a way of trying to get what we want in a self-protective manner. Therefore our story is dualistic because it assumes that self and other are antagonists or adversaries. "Self" in this case refers to our story about ourself and "other" refers to our story about the other. This dualism is cast in Black and White characterizations, stereotypes and scenarios. Both stories contain a grain of truth, but a handfull of illusions. The handfull of truth in each story is our anxiety and caring. Each story contains "dreams" and "broken dreams." Dreams point to our caring; broken dreams to our anxiety. When we are able and willing to be honest with ourselves, we look for our common bond with the other in both anxiety and caring, in both dreams and broken dreams. Common ground means community, community means communing, communing means connecting, connecting means one spiritual source, and the result is communication.

Marriage is a place of dreams and broken dreams which becomes a laboratory or school for spiritual self-discovery. Self-discovery is a breakthrough experience. Spiritual self-discovery is what we realize when we use the Magic Formula and play win/win in all of our relationships. Every experience we ever had, pleasurable and painful, up until now, is preparing us for Breakthrough.

Christine and her 18 year old daughter were fighting every morning about their dogs. Christine offered to "compromise" so that both of them could have what they wanted, and it went smoothly, without a wrinkle. She had finally listened to her daughter and understood. No one lost anything, both won. The next day the daughter came home and did the dishes and cleaned the bathroom without being asked. The mother felt so good.

One couple is beginning to detect that when they differ, each experiences anxiety. Everyone is anxious due to their story. Look into self and see if you are anxious. While the husband had moved out, another of the children brought home a dog and a cat. And a second child, who had been wanting a cat, also was allowed to get one. The mother made an agreement with both girls about the care of the animals. The mother said she was not anxious about her decision until she talked with the husband about it. She expected him to be negative about her decision. I guessed that she was anxious before she told her husband and she said she had not been aware of it. After we worked this through we realized that the husband was probably 70% against the children having animals in the house and 30% in favor of it, and the wife had been vice-versa, but the husband had taken the Black position of 100% against it and the wife the White position of 100% for it. Truthfully, each loved and feared the idea. When they found this common ground, solving the problem was easy.