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

Hidden Dimensions of Relationships

What can we learn about relationships from physics?
The super string theory has proposed that inside of the tiny quarks that are inside protons and neutrons are vibrating strings, minuscule filaments vibrating at different frequencies. This theory supports the idea that there are more dimensions of space than the three of which we are aware. A fascinating theory that may help explain why the universe operates the way it does.

I started wondering if this idea of unseen dimensions might also be applied to relationships. In any relationship there is the outward behavior of each partner and the words they speak. This dimension is visible to both partners. Then there is the dimension of each person’s thoughts, which though not visible, but both partner know exists. The next dimension is the beliefs held by each partner. These beliefs may not always be within the awareness of either partner, but they can be uncovered with a little effort. And inside is the vibrating energy of the subconscious.

Subconscious, just like the vibrating filaments in super string theory, is not something that we can see, but non-the-less it helps explain why people operate the way that they do.

Your beliefs whether you are aware of them or not, to a great extent determine your thoughts, words and behavior. Everything that you see, hear and know about your relationship is filtered through your belief dimension.

When your partner’s behavior does not make any sense to you, it is because you are trying to understand their behavior while looking through your belief dimension. In order to begin to understand their behavior you need to step out of your self, in a sense, and attempt to see through their belief dimension. What some have termed, walk a mile in their shoes, or see things from their perspective.

This is not something that we can ever totally do, but we can get much better at making an effort to see things from our partner’s perspective.

You could try reversing roles in your head. Become your partner in your head, not to prove that you could handle things better than they do or that you would make different or better choices, but to pause and think what would it be like to be on the receiving end of your behavior. How would it feel to be treated the way you treat your partner, if you were your partner? If your answer is an automatic “great” then it may be possible that you are still seeing things from your own perspective rather than theirs.

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

Marriage: Now Is the Time

In today’s fast paced world we quite often forget to take care of ourselves, not only physically but emotionally and spiritually as well. All three of these areas have a huge impact on our relationships with our spouse. The tried and true answer to resolving these issues is time.

Time can be our friend or our enemy. If we ignore the passage of time thinking that we’ll get to those issues later we will find that later, like tomorrow, never comes. Our health, physical, emotional, and spiritual health needs to be a priority. If we think about the time we spend preparing for a career and in performing in that career we can be astounded by how much effort we put into it.

Now just think about your physical health. How much time and effort do you put into that? For some of us health issues have made us more conscious of what is needed to stay fit but just look at the national averages for overweight and obese people. The figures are shocking. And even more shocking are the rates of divorce in our society today. These are proof of the fact that we let our spiritual and emotional health issues run unchecked and unattended.

Time is the answer. This is a fact, it takes time to become emotionally ill in your relationship and it will take time and effort to heal those relationships. Again it is a matter of setting priorities. Ask yourself why it is you work so hard at your job, for a great many it is to support their family. Yet if they are not working just as hard at making their families strong and healthy then all the monetary wealth will have no impact at all except to create bigger problems in the divorce.

The time needed does not have to come in big bunches, in fact in the big picture the little bits of time spent on a consistent basis are more effective than the big chunks all at once. Little things like saying good-bye before you go and giving an approximate time when you will be back. And if you can’t make that then the little time spent in making a call to say you’ll be late. A brief moment spent daily in hugging and saying I love you reaps rewards for a long time after.

Time scheduled for each other as “our time” is wonderful relationship medicine. This is a time when each of your know that you have the others undivided attention to discuss daily problems, situations and schedules. To talk about plans for future dates and holidays. To tell each other about your day, week, month, year and life. Discuss the things that are bothering you, things that make you happy, things that are going wonderfully and things that are not. Let each other know about your hopes and fears, about your dreams for the future and each other.

Time means caring when shopping for a gift or making a surprise date for each other. Time spend in taking care of your share and more of the household chores can say so much more about how much you love and care for each other than your words. All of these require little amounts of your time but large amounts of your heart and thoughts and this tells the other that you do care.

The time for doing these things is all the time, right now, in fact, you should have started during courtship. If there have been lapses in these types of behaviors and some emotional spam has intruded into your relationship then the time to rectify it is now, immediately. But know this that it will take almost as much, if not even more, time to fix the issue as it did to create it.

A hero is not one who does the major thing once in a long time; a hero goes about daily doing the little things that make everything run smoothly.

It’s your time so use it wisely.

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

Marriage: Wake Up from the Trance

Have you ever felt that you were just going through the motions in your relationship? The days pass, you get up, you do the same things, you have the same conversations, you have the same arguments. Maybe you have begun to feel that you are two ships passing in the night. There is so much to get done and so much going on that you have lost track of the “us.” You may be in kind of a “marriage trance” where you are going through the motions of being married, but you have lost the concern and closeness that you once felt for each other.

A Princeton Theological Seminary did a study on compassion. A group of Divinity Students, were given an assignment to prepare a sermon. Half of the students were assigned to prepare a sermon on the topic of the Good Samaritan, the man who stopped to help another man in need at the side of the road, and half were assigned other sermon topics. Then the students were told they had to go to another building to present their sermon. Some of the students were told that they had to rush to be on time to present their sermon and others were told that they had plenty of time. As they went to the building to present their sermon they each passed a man who was bent over and moaning.

Interestingly they found that whether the student stopped to help the man had little to do with their sermon topic. Their decision to stop and help was more related to how much of a hurry they were in—how much they were focused on what they were doing rather than on what was going on around them.

Each of us is hard wired to be able to empathize with other people. We are able to feel their pain. So why is it that partners fail to empathize with each other? Perhaps it is because they are so absorbed in their own thoughts, their own feelings and their own busyness that they do not actually “see” their partner.

They may make assumptions about what their partner is or should be feeling. When their partner tries to talk to them, they are so busy defending their position that they do not really hear what their partner is saying. They are so focused on their own hurt or their own “rightness” that they are unable to “get” what their partner is saying.

It is important to wake up and allow yourselves space and time to notice each other and to notice what life is like from the other’s perspective. Take time to really focus on your partner and be open to hearing and accepting their thoughts and feelings.

We have found in our counseling practice that once partners can really listen to and understand each other, they begin to empathize and problems become much more solvable. There is an “aha” moment when you suddenly see your own behavior as if through the eyes of your partner. In other words you can begin to understand how what you are doing feels to them. Waking from your marriage trance can transform your relationship.

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