Be Generous in Your Relationships

Begin each day with a question, “What can I do today to make my relationships better?” and then do something. Some small thing done each day, will cumulatively make a huge difference in your relationships.

Like the Rolling Stones song, Can’t Get No Satisfaction, the more we run around trying to satisfy ourselves the more elusive satisfaction becomes. Stopping the focus on “self” is the place to begin.

Compassion means feeling the feelings of others. Compassion means trying to understand how others are feeling—putting our self in their shoes. This can be difficult, if we are all wrapped up in “woe is me’s.” If we are focused in on our own hurt feelings or our own dissatisfaction, it can be hard to see past that to the fact that others may have hurt feelings and dissatisfactions of their own.

Why do we need to be more generous in our relationships? Because being generous is just plain more fun. Life is so much more fun and satisfaction much more attainable when we are generous, when we celebrate and enjoy, rather than whine and complain.

Use your generosity to create a hopeful vision for your relationships.

Susan Derry, B.Ed., M.S.Psy., R.P.C.
Professional Counselor & Life Coach

Co-author of Marriage Prep: Beginnings a downloadable marriage preparation course

Co-author of Intimate Sex: Manual for Lovemaking, a sex manual for couples

Offers a free Nurturing Marriage Ezine

Tame the Emotional Monsters

Have you ever felt overwhelmed with anger, frustration, or guilt? Has the flood of emotion been so great that it has distorted your judgment and hampered your ability to behave appropriately? If you have ever been overtaken by emotional monsters, then you may appreciate knowing how to tame the beast.

The first important thing to remember is not to resist and not to act (just yet). It is important to welcome and accept your emotions, good and bad. See them as a way to learn about yourself. What are your emotions telling you? What can you discover about yourself? What are the needs behind your emotions?

Like small children, your emotions will keep pestering you until you pay attention to them. When you disregard or resist your emotions, telling yourself, I don’t want to or I shouldn’t feel this way, those feelings tend to intensify rather than fade. If you do manage to stuff them down for a while, they are going to pop up again, most likely at the worst time.

Jealousy, hostility, and pettiness are going to taint your relationships and make your life miserable. To avoid this you must tame these emotional monsters. Albert Einstein said, “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?” Make friends with your emotions, be kind and accepting to them, but do not allow them to take you over.

Just as we should not let our friends control us; we do not allow our emotions to control us. Instead we listen to and learn from our emotions. As we do that, we will find the monster has turned into a choice friend.

Allow yourself to pause and fully accept and feel your emotions and then allow them to dissolve. You can then use what you learn about yourself to assertively meet your own needs. You can ACT rather than react.

Susan Derry, B.Ed., M.S.Psy., R.P.C.

Professional Counselor & Life Coach

Co-creator of a Healthy Weight Loss System.

Offers a free report: Weight Loss Myths Exposed

Relationship Course Corrections

Are your choices giving the results that you want? Take a look at your relationship. Are you on course? Is your relationship meeting your needs, it is meeting your partner’s needs? Does it feel good to you or are you struggling along?

In 1979, a sightseeing flight from New Zealand to Antarctica, with 257 passengers onboard ended in tragedy. Unknown to the pilots, there was a two-degree error in the flight coordinates. This small error put the plane 28 miles off course by the time they approached Antarctica. When they descended to a lower altitude to give the passengers a better view of the landscape they found themselves directly in the path of Mount Erebus.

Unfortunately many couples ignore small warning signs in their relationship, hoping that somehow the relationship will self-correct. This generally leads to disaster.

Couples that stay the course, that are satisfied in their relationship, have just as many obstacles and disagreements, but they make adjustments as they go, they learn from their experience together, they check in with one another, they express their thoughts and feelings, they forgive one another, and they don’t hang onto the garbage that would eventually weigh them down and cause them to crash.

The 1979 disaster could have been prevented had the navigational planners realized and corrected their error. Unfortunately is seems they made no attempts to check the flight plan co-ordinates against the geographical reality (the mountain in the flight path).

Unfortunately many people approach life with the attitude, I am right and don’t confuse me with the facts. They make little or no attempt to do a reality check in their relationship.

You need to get real in your relationship. It is important to understand that neither your nor your partner’s perceptions actually represent reality. They simply represent your interpretations of reality. When you make a serious attempt to also see things from your partner perspective, to really hear and understand how they are feeling and thinking, not to judge them or to prove that they are wrong, but to make a serious attempt to see things from their perspective, you will come closer to getting real. When you get real in your relationship you are in a better position to see and make needed corrections.

Don’t wait to make a course correction, until you crash into a mountain, don’t wait until your relationship is dead. Start making choices that will give you the results you want.

Susan Derry, B.Ed., M.S.Psy., R.P.C.
Professional Counselor & Life Coach

Co-author of Marriage Prep: Beginnings a downloadable marriage preparation course

Co-author of Intimate Sex: Manual for Lovemaking, a sex manual for couples

Offers a free Nurturing Marriage Ezine

Relationships: Don't Do That

"If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain." Maya Angelou

Frequently when receiving marriage counsel you are asked to do something. Maybe you are told to talk more about your feelings or to listen more empathetically to your spouse, or perhaps to set goals and create a vision. These are good and important activities in your relationship but there is something different that will be asked of you today. That is to refrain from doing something—to not do something that may be aggravating your relationship.

To begin you will need to do something, make a list of things in your relationship that would cause Dr. Phil to ask, “And how is that working for you?” This list can include little day-to-day irritants to your spouse or major trust and love issues. If you have been married for any length of time you will have a list already because these are the things your spouse brings up every time you get into a fight or have a disagreement. You know the “you always do that,” or “this happens every time,” and the ever present “you’ll never change.” Just fill in the blank.

Next, seriously consider which of these issues you can’t or won’t change. Saying that you are not willing to change something about yourself is okay. In fact it is essential to stand up for yourself, there are values and beliefs that you hold dear that make you, well, you. Becoming someone you are not for your spouse is a sure road to resentment, dislike, frustration and pain. It will in no way ever leads to happiness, not for you, not for your relationship and not for your spouse. So you must look at your list and decide which of the items are not open for discussion or change. You really have to be brutally honest with yourself here, make sure when you say you can’t change something it is not just because you don’t want to, or you are too lazy to. Be fair to yourself, your spouse and your relationship.

Now you should have a shortened list of things that you are willing to work on, to change or drop completely. The next step requires some hard thought, prioritize your list, use whatever parameters you choose. It could be from the most irritating to your spouse to the least, or maybe from the shortest time to change to the longest, perhaps from the easiest to the hardest. However you make the choice make sure it is your decision because it is best and easiest for you when you “buy into it.”

Now comes the different part, stop doing that particular thing. Make a decision to not do whatever it is that you have chosen not to do. Make a positive affirmation statement that you can repeat about the issue. An example of this could be: “I am happy, content and grateful for the changes dropping this (fill in the blank) has brought into my life, into the life of my spouse, and into our relationship.” Repeat this to yourself several times a day, with conviction and with positive emotion.

It is equally important to realize that you will have slip-ups and that it is not the end of the world, cut yourself some slack, don’t beat yourself up over it. Just pick yourself up, dust yourself off and begin again. It helps to determine some time frames so that you can celebrate the times when you succeed. Finally work your way through the list. Don’t get impatient, be happy with your attempts and keep trying.

“Many aspire to change the world but few realize that everyone accomplishes that goal. Each day you live you are changing something. Rather than simply changing the world, one should aspire to make a positive change with each action they commit.” unknown

Dallas Munkholm, B.A., B.Com., R.P.C.
Professional Counselor & Life Coach

Co-author of Marriage Prep: Beginnings a downloadable marriage preparation course

Co-author of Intimate Sex: Manual for Lovemaking, a sex manual for couples

Offers a free Nurturing Marriage Ezine