Marriages are more likely to survive when partners are in accord – either they’re both arguers or else they’re both passive. Marriages are in danger, though, if one partner is an arguer and the other is passive. That said, couples – even when they’re both arguers – frequently lack the skills to fight. My first rule is that there’s no excuse for aggression. You can express your feelings and needs without yelling, berating or degrading your partner. Above all, no violence! I always try to impress on couples that reality is in the receiver. What seems like communication to one partner actually comes across as aggression to the other. That means that if he says you’re being offensive to him you are. You can insist that you didn’t mean to hurt him, but that’s irrelevant. For him the hurt was real. If I say ouch it hurts. It works both ways. I have a second rule: if the confrontation threatens to spiral out of control take a break. Tell your partner that you’re going for a walk. If you come back and your partner is still in a rage take a longer break. You want to do whatever is necessary to stop the situation from escalating
Non-Confrontation: Some couples try to avoid confrontation altogether so they won’t get hurt, but seething in anger and saying nothing aren’t any solution, either. Your partner does something that annoys you, yet you don’t say a word. But when the same thing happens again and again eventually the frustration will build up and you explode. You bring up all the accumulated grievances and spill them out at once. She’s shocked. She had no idea she’d done anything wrong and now she’s being handed a bill of indictment. This is a prescription for disaster.
The Support Sandwich: Confrontation will sometimes become necessary in any relationship but there are ways of going about it so that you don’t end up devastating your partner or making things worse for yourself. I teach a technique to my clients which I call a Support Sandwich. First support your partner, then confront him and then support him:
I can see how frustrated you are.
But I need for you to talk to me in a softer way.
But I also know how when I get all wound up it’s hard for me to be soft, too.
No one changes because he’s told that he’s wrong. If you’re using a harsh tone of voice with me and I respond the same way neither of us gains. But if I confront you with love and respect – “I love you and you hurt me and I need you to speak to me in a softer way” – then it’s far more likely that both of you will emerge from the experience with greater understanding and fewer scars.
Vulnerability: When we’re fighting it’s almost impossible to step back and ask your partner: What do you see me doing that’s making you so hurt and angry? Opening up to your partner — showing vulnerability — is one of the most difficult skills for my clients to learn. That’s perfectly understandable. The cues we get from our culture tell us just the opposite. Our media show couples trying to resolve their disputes by shouting and lashing out at each other. As we grow up we learn two basic strategies to confront: attack and defend. We’re taught to look upon the person we disagree with as an adversary. Most people don’t realize that softness can be strength.
LACE: Here’s one of the biggest paradoxes of all: When you give love you heal your heart, not when you receive love. Even when you hurt me, if I give you love and compassion and appreciation it helps me. That concept of giving love is expressed in an acronym I’ve coined called LACE which stands for Love, Affection, Compassion and Empathy. Saying that love is a healing force isn’t just a pretty metaphor or a romantic sentiment suitable for syrupy pop songs. It’s literally true. Scientists have shown the therapeutic effects of love on health. Even if you send your love out and pour it back into your head – in other words, even if your love isn’t being reciprocated — that energy heals your heart all the same. When the two of you are focusing on ‘I love you, I want to give this to you’ – you can only benefit. But if your thinking runs more along the lines of ‘I need her to soothe me and tell me it wasn’t my fault’ it’s not going to work.
Focus on Yourself: I always urge my clients: Take care of yourself first. You can’t look at the other person and say it’s his fault. That’s not going to help you. Taking care of yourself means many things: you need to learn how to eat better, how to exercise, how to become more relaxed. Above all, it means learning how to speak to yourself in a softer way. (In other words, you can’t keep blaming yourself – I deserved it, I had it coming to me, it’s my fault…) I can’t change my partner’s behavior without first focusing on my own behavior. I’ve been able to help couples by treating only one partner without ever laying eyes on the other simply by getting that person to focus on herself. When one partner changes her behavior she will influence the behavior of the other. And what if it doesn’t work? Well, then the person who has learned how to help herself will have the satisfaction of knowing that she gave it her best shot.
The Critical Incident: There’s something called the critical incident – it’s that incident that happened that you wished hadn’t. You’d do anything to go back in time and undo it. When you think about something that’s happened it generates bitter feelings. Feelings drive behaviors. When people fight they want to go back in time and bring up the critical event. So when I’m working with a couple and they start fighting about something that happened I ask them what they’re thinking and how it made them feel. The event can’t be undone. But we do get to decide what kind of feelings we want to create right now. That’s how we can gain control over our lives. I can choose what I think and feel. I can choose to move forward from anger or sadness or guilt.
Restoring Trust: One of the first casualties of a deteriorating marriage is trust. How do you learn – or more precisely relearn — trust? There’s a risk involved, of course, especially when it comes to affairs. There’s nothing more devastating than finding out that someone you love and trust is having an affair. But if there’s any hope of regaining trust you have to make a distinction between the affair and what happened to precipitate the affair. How does he heal from it and how do you heal from it? Before we really start working on the relationship we have to get clear how to respond to the affair. But the same principles apply wherever something happens that stretches trust to the breaking point or beyond. What the other person needs is empathy and compassion and above all, no stories. By that I mean that if you’re the one who’s had the affair you shouldn’t try to explain or justify what you did, however valid your reasons, even if your partner drove you to it.
If I tell my brain I can’t trust again because I don’t want to be hurt (again) the brain will respond accordingly. If, on the other hand, you want to trust your partner – even though it represents a leap of faith – and you keep reinforcing your intention the brain will begin to shift gears and little by little you’ll learn to trust again. But you have to tell your brain what to do. You don’t want your brain to tell you what to.
Intention: If both partners have good intentions – they really want the marriage to work – then the prospects for success are greatly improved. However, a problem arises when people can’t express their true intentions, they get hung up on the words and as a result their partner misconstrues their meaning.
John: Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to reach out and I don’t have any bad intentions it’s still perceived in a negative way. That makes me hurt in two ways – it hurts because all of a sudden I’m being accused of something I didn’t intend but also because there’s obviously something I’m doing wrong in her eyes. I want to find out what that is.
You’re really trying to say something to be supportive but you’re not realizing that the way you’re saying it comes out as accusatory. The bottom line is intention. I’ve seen couples where the husband will be struggling to explain what he’s feeling. But I can tell that his words are coming across in a hurtful way to his wife. I have to interrupt to point out that his intention is at odds with the way he’s stringing his words together. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. I turn to the wife and I tell her, “What I’d like you to do when he’s talking, when it’s heartfelt, instead of personalizing it and letting it worry you, tell him what’s bothering you. Tell him that what he said hurt you and ask him to try it again – even if it takes two or three or four times.”
Letting Your Partner Alone: When couples let each other find out who they really are that’s when relationships tend to last. If you don’t feel free you won’t connect with your partner. If I’m desperate and I insist on you acting in a certain way so that I can live with you that’s when things will spin out of control. If I don’t feel free I’ll look for satisfaction elsewhere. Maybe there’s someone else I can feel free with – that’s what affairs are always about. The paradox is that if in my desperation to hold onto you by imposing all these expectations I’ll be driving you further away.
Change: The brain doesn’t like to change patterns. We get stuck with certain behaviors and lead our lives as if we have no choice. When we get trapped in a cycle your brain has been very busy reinforcing the same pattern: criticize-defend/criticize-defend…. . What research shows, though, is that when we change the pattern the relationship will begin to heal. I encourage couples to take a lesson from Zen. Zen is about non-attachment. By adopting an attitude of non-attachment – in effect stepping away from the pain – the pain is alleviated. It doesn’t mean that you stop hurting altogether. What it does mean is that you are beginning to break free of the vicious cycle, you are escaping the trap, and instead of being stuck in the past – he did that, she did that – you’re moving forward.
Homework: During my sessions I very often give my clients homework assignments – skills that they can practice when they’re together in their normal day-to-day lives. Many of these assignments will be appended to each chapter for readers’ benefit.
How talking and listening to each other for ten minutes every morning can work wonders
How giving and receiving five appreciations a day can improve your marriage
How it’s possible to reconnect after a fight
How it’s possible to stop aggressive fighting
How to risk being vulnerable
How to find out the rules – your rules and your partner’s
We’ll also cover
The ADD Relationship: What couples can do to compensate when the marriage is disrupted because one partner has Attention Deficit Disorder.
Dependence: In any relationship there’s always the danger that one partner in a marriage will become dependent on the other, not only emotionally but for his or her very identity so if the marriage ends they have no idea who they are anymore.
Family Past: It’s not unusual to confide in your partner about your family past and the hurt you’ve suffered and how your upbringing may relate to your behavior in the present. The trouble starts when your partner uses what you’ve said about your family as ammunition to hurt you.
How to Soothe Yourself: Soothing yourself sounds easy but it’s not. As children we often use objects – toys, teddy bears, pillows – to soothe ourselves. As adults we resort to stronger medicine — drugs, overeating, shopping or an affair. We need to learn healthier ways of soothing ourselves because after all if you don’t know how to soothe yourself how can you soothe your partner – and how can your partner soothe you?
Getting from head to heart and why it’s so hard for so many people…. Why it’s so important to stop ruminating over the relationship
Why the dominance of left brain thinking threatens marriage, adversely affects the educational system and the culture at large
How too many people resort to action to the exclusion of anything else before they have understood the situation they’re in.
How the problems that confront straight couples are no different from those that confront gay couples
How over the course of two decades or more the problems that cause couples to drift apart are largely the same but two trends have emerged in recent years. More clients are complaining that they’re sexually turned off by their partners because they’re overweight or obese. The second problem is that more relationships are troubled because people have been spoiled as children and are full of unrealistic expectations that they bring to their marriages.
