Pointing the Finger

posted on 08-17-10 at 7:34 am in Relationships

You can’t create a flourishing relationship by only fixing what’s wrong, but it’s a start.  The best place to begin is to focus on changing yourself rather than your partner. Couples therapy works best if you have more goals for yourself than for your partner.

Problems occur when reality departs sharply from our expectations, hopes, desires and concerns.  It’s human nature to try and change one’s partner instead of adjusting our expectations. This aspect of human nature is what keeps therapists in business!

The hardest part of coupes therapy is accepting you will need to improve your response to a problem (how you think about it, feel about it, or what to do about it). Very few people want to focus on improving their response. It’s more common to build a strong case for why the other should do the improving.

You can’t change your partner and your partner can’t change you. You can influence each other, but that doesn’t mean you can change each other. Becoming a more effective partner is the most efficient way to change a relationship.

It’s easy to be considerate and loving to your partner when the vistas are magnificent, the sun is shining and breezes are gentle. But when it gets bone chilling cold, you’re hungry and tired, and your partner is whining and sniveling about how you got them into this mess – that’s when you get tested. Your compassion and character get put to the test. It’s a choice point.  You can join the finger pointing or become how you aspire to become.

The more you believe your partner should be different, the less initiative you will take to change the patterns between you. See times of dischord as an opportunity to learn about yourself by inviting nonjudgmental awareness.  You can learn a lot about yourself by understanding what annoys you and how you handle it.  You picked your partner for a reason.

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The Importance of Communication

posted on 03-16-10 at 7:07 am in Relationships

Good communication is much more difficult than most people want to believe and is the number one presenting problem in couple’s counseling.The three most important qualities for effective communication are respect, openness and persistence. It requires both people to speak from the heart about what really matters to each. Effective communication means you need to pay attention to:

  • Managing unruly emotions, such as anger that is too intense
  • How you are communicating – whining, blaming, being vague, etc
  • What you want from your partner during the discussion
  • What the problem symbolizes to you
  • The outcome you want from the discussion
  • Your partner’s major concerns
  • How you can help your partner become more responsive to you
  • The beliefs and attitudes you have about the problem

No wonder good communication is difficult!  Thankfully, it is far from impossible. The key is in practicing and being mindful of your part in the dance.  Ultimately, we are each responsible for how we express ourselves.

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Bruised Bananas

posted on 01-12-10 at 7:11 am in Relationships

Sometimes A Banana Is Just A Banana by Rita Maynard

One day in the kitchen my husband remarked, looking at the bruised bananas I just brought home, “Slim pickin’s, eh?” Right he was. There was a very sorry selection of bananas at the store and after scouring the shelves these were the best I could come up with. Then he said, “You know if I brought those bananas home you would have reacted differently.”

I gave this a bit of thought and, oh my, he was right.

In our relationship, I am the one who is more organized, disciplined, detailed, and tidy. When he said, “Slim pickin’s, eh?” it felt like validation. He knows me and how hard I try to do a good job for our family.

However, if he brought home the same blackened produce the message that would hang in the air was how incompetent a fruit picker he really was. Easily, I could jump to believing he just grabbed the first bananas he saw and rushed out of the store. Then it would have been a short hop to have gone down the slippery slope of attacking all the other ways he does not pay attention or attend to other things I think are important. The counters are not cleaned well enough, the newspapers are left on the table. Then there are those unfinished projects around the house, and, and, and.

If it was a particularly stressful day for me, my mind may have gone into some character assassination, thinking he was the kind of person who never picks up or always misses what is really important to me. A perfect storm of a stressful day and a recent cascade of feeling disappointed could lead me to experience my own vulnerability and fears about the relationship and regress to feeling I will never have the relationship I always wanted.

Yikes! I realized how quickly I can fuel a fire that was not even burning.

Now, I am a trained professional. I know how damaging both to me and the relationship this slippery slope can be. Once started, it reinforces a pattern of negative thinking in my brain and conjures up all that could be frightening and hurtful in my relationship.

It leads me down the path of distancing myself from my partner as I would see him in this negative light. Maybe this type of thinking was adaptive as some point in our human history as a defense. But now I was not even under attack and there was nothing constructive to this thought process – especially if I strive to be a good partner.

So, my goal for myself is to try to recognize this type of thinking at its inception and cut it off as soon as possible. I want to work on being more generous of spirit and to view my husband in the best light possible while putting a check on my quick process of negative attributions.

I hope the next time I see bruised bananas in the kitchen I can think my husband did his best at the store, remembering all the ways he does things for us, smile lovingly and say, “Slim pickin’s, eh?”.

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