Dear Thay, I am planning to take the Fourth Mindfulness Training but have a concern about the following: I will refrain from uttering words that can cause the family to break. In my work as a psychologist, psychotherapist, I come across couples whose relationship is so toxic and sometimes abusive that the least damaging option is for them to separate. In these situations, I sometimes utter words that may contribute to the breakup of the family or the couple. Is it possible for me to have an addition, something like, "unless it is in their best interest"?

I think it's possible. From the appearance, it looks that it looks like it has not been broken, but it's already broken. We pretend that the couple is still a couple, but deeply, we don't see it as a real couple anymore. There is no harmony, no unity. So let us face the situation and see deeply, look deeply.

I think we'll be tempted to divorce or to separate before we try our best. There's a danger. We have not tried hard enough, and we want to give up. And next time when the situation presents difficulties, you will have the same kind of tendency, thinking of stopping, of divorcing or separating. So what is important here is to ask the question as whether we have tried our best.

There are many practices that can help mend the situation, repair the situation. And we have not really tried with or without the help of friends and psychotherapists and so on. So as a psychotherapist, we should also encourage the other person to try, offer him or her methods of practice, using the techniques of deep listening, compassionate listening, and loving speech in order to help change the other person and change oneself, and not to encourage that person to give up right away.

If we want to find reasons, arguments to do what we like, we can always find some arguments, some reasons very easily. It's not a matter of reasoning, argumenting. It's the matter of practice.

So the breaking up of a couple, of a family, does not take place just like that. It is a slow process. And if we are practice mindfulness, we don't allow small things to happen. After having said something or done something not skillful, although that something has no power to break the relationship yet, but it is one of the element that can contribute to the breaking up of the relationship.

So with mindfulness, we would not ignore that. We have to talk to the other person right away. "Darling, yesterday I said something not very kind to you, not very thoughtful to you. I'm sorry." Or "Yesterday you said something that does not inspire confidence in me, and that still stay with me. Could you please to explain to me why you have said such a thing for the sake of our lasting relationship? Please explain." So don't leave these small things unsolved. And if we practice mindfulness like that every day, every week, and then we don't allow the split, the crack to be to begin. And we don't wait until there is a serious crack in the relationship in order to try.

Usually, preventive medicine is much easier to practice than the other kind of medicine. It's true with psychotherapy. Preventive practice is very important.

Thank you.

[one sound of the bell.]