Communication - Couples Therapy Better Treasures

February 5, 2021February 5, 2021

Investments in little, tiny, Commitment Behaviors Pay Big Relational Dividends

Commitment behaviors:

In line with the Gottman Method principle of “Small Things Often” commitment behaviors offer ways in which partners make deposits into the emotional bank account. They are also formalized rituals (shared meaning) created by partners during negotiation and reinforced in performing them time and time again with compounding valuation by partners.

A commitment behavior can be anything, from hanging up a towel, to making “eyes” at your partner from across the socially crowded room. They can be a bouquet of flowers on Friday or Monday. A phone-call to one’s partner after interacting with that particularly attractive co-worker. An agreement to disclose attractions to others along with the manner of so doing. A back-rub on Tuesday. Special dinners one counts on to celebrate a specific occasion.

The point is that they are formulated mutually, agreed upon mutually, and can be replicated regularly. They are the How we get from A to Z with regard to this or that or the other.

Pain, anger, disappointment, even joy may be the catalyzing agent to develop a commitment behavior, perhaps even a whole slew of them.

Walking you through, there is impetus for the creation of an agreed upon behavior. It comes along from the recognition or realization that life does not need to have this particular re-occurring suffering in it. What if we transformed our actions around this particular event/irritating transgression? What if we “cut a deal?”

Could we negotiate for something that would work for both of us and in so doing will engender appreciation for our partner/spouse? Careful self-aware mindfulness will prevent and work around any restrictiveness of such a deal and in fact, a good deal is good for everyone, not a 0 sum game! How can it work for everyone? This is where creativity, trust, and reliability count. Can we count on our partner’s positive attitude for the iterative nature of creating such a positively meaningful behavior?

Yes, if both partners arrive to the negotiation table fully resourced, and resolved, of sabotaging resentments. If so, then partners will want one another’s happiness; they will be motivated to remove obstacles or add a proverbial vault to our partner’s quality of life satisfaction.

No, if there are an accumulation of unforgiven injuries rolling around in the sub-flooring of our consciousness.

One can begin to find areas for commitment behaviors by moving through one’s day from waking up to going to bed. Look for parts of your day that you might dread and identify what it is about it that irritates. The same steps apply for annual, monthly, or weekly tasks, events, or celebrations. Imagine how you might ideally like something to go. That is where you begin. Create, create, create, and simplify to boil it down to what is essential here for you that might be influenced by your partner’s committed behavior.

Now you may be ready to recruit your partner’s participation in said ideal.

Now you will be ready for negotiation. You can learn more about negotiation here.

As consent-based negotiations require skill sets, working with a Couple’s therapist who specializes in NVL or Gottman Method Couples Therapy may be a valuable asset to hold until you’ve both honed the practices. After negotiations, accountability measures may be put in place. These are also consent-based negotiations.

Consent-based negotiations in short—allow us to cleanly ask our partner for their participation in what would bring us joy/relief/predictability/reassurance/surprise/etc. (i.e., any number of experiences we have self-identified). They are asks, without cajoling, manipulation, pressure, coercion, or intimidation.

What you walk away with may be iterative, but each effort along the way says, “I love you and am here for you in this life.” It says we are committed to one another’s positive experience of this life, that we participate and share in their joy and lived experience. Over and over again, it demonstrates: WE are Partners!

January 21, 2021January 21, 2021

4 Best Ways to Be Present for Others: Intentional Presence

Do you see me?

Do you care that I’m here?

Am I enough for you, or do you need me to be better in some way?

Can I tell that I’m special to you by the way that you look at me?

Photo by: Toa Heftiba

Post inspired by Maya Angelou

In every interaction with others of us, each of us arrive at the moment with the same unconscious questions. We answer each of these questions during the engagement.

Question 1: Do you see me?

We provide this answer in how we engage with the other:
Do we look at them when speaking to them, have we foreclosed on how we will respond to anything they have to say before they even say it?

In other words, have we predestined how they will respond to us and are therefore engaging with an object versus an emergent, iterative, changeable, subject?

Question 2: Do you care that I’m here?

We answer this with our greeting of the person before us. How do we begin our verbal and non-verbal hello? Or do we skip this step as we are interacting with a home appliance or app? Further, do we personalize our greeting in some way, calling up a moment shared in our last interaction which fosters a sense of continuity, an indicator that there is an actual ongoing relationship with this person even in the interim of our engagements. It says to them, “I know who you are, what you and I are about, that we have a history and that I care enough to remember it.”

Question 3: Am I enough for you, or do you need me to be better in some way?

This is an interesting question that we answer with our PRESENCE…
For instance, if the interaction’s purpose (read more about that here), calls for us to be giving someone feedback, requesting something of our partner (friend/child/co-worker/etc.), are we focused on the behavior we want to see in action or are we focusing on the behavior we don’t want to see (i.e., are we criticizing–coming through the back door of communication by not explaining what we want and instead forcing our partner to figure that out,…or even worse are we contemptuously relaying some message that if they were a decent person, they would somehow already know what to do without our explicit, illumination of our request)?

Succinctly, relaying warmth, direction, compassion and confidence about the other person (even when asking them to do something differently) is answering the third question with affirmation: I do not need YOU to be better, even when I am requesting something different of you.

Question 4: Can I tell that I’m special to you by the way that you look at me?

How is our body language, what does our affect (facial expression) say to them in the moments that we are engaging with them? Are we inviting? Dismissive? Enthusiastic? Compassionate? Rejecting? Kind? Eager? Engaging? Shut-down?

When we engage others, intentionally answering each of these questions (even 2 would be AMAZING!), we bring the full weight of our powerful presence to another. Our presence expressed in this way sets up the interaction for the best possible outcome and we free the communication from expectations. In that moment we relate to an aliveness in ourselves and in the other with whom we communicate/relate. All possibility, potentiality is tapped.

For more questions about Presence, or how to move into the presence by breaking the circuits of automatic behaviors, reach out to us; we are here to help!

Warmly,

Amanda Mason Psy.D. CAPSY26711

July 22, 2020July 22, 2020

Feedback Faux Pas vs. Productive Feedback

How NOT to provide feedback. —-LOL, the irony!

Follow 3 simple rules to give feedback, so it doesn’t blow up in your face.

We all want to give feedback that produces positive results, minimizes ill feelings between parties, and maximizes buy-in from our partners. Organizational psychology focuses on how to accomplish just this. We (partners, parents, friends, family & community members) can benefit from adopting successful communication practices of high-achieving, loved and inspiring leadership or partnership. Here is what we know so far:

Effective feedback is future-focused, collaborative, solution-oriented, and more clearly specifies desired outcome. It reflects recognized buy-in and assumed intact motivation; it fosters growth mindset.

It is so easy to get feedback wrong, and so easy to go off-track. We are narrowing in on how to get it right, however, and this post provides an important update to what we know about how to and how not to provide feedback.

In studies, even when the feedback was given under the premise of helping develop better behavior, feedback that highlighted the poor behavior choice and/or sought to gain agreement on establishing blame, cause, or explanation, backfired demonstrating reduced motivation for change and increased ill-will between all parties involved in the feedback.

So, it is better to avoid focusing on the past and trying to gain agreement on who and what was at fault for the failure/poor outcome as this decreases motivation and intention for change.

Here is what you want to focus on in giving feedback to your partner or your child (or your friend, or your co-worker, etc.):

State specifically —get as specific as possible about your hopes, and invite their collaborative, solution-oriented discussion of worthwhile alternative efforts/actions. Brainstorm potential solutions and identify opportunities for success.
Stay positive about the past, be reflective of your positive experience of your partner’s competence and acknowledge your assumption of their sincere motivation for success.
Stay future oriented! Avoid going back to focus on what happened in the past.

Studies showed that even when the feedback was very negative, if the feedback that was given was future-focused, it tended to be received better and led to higher reported motivation for change.

So saying,

“I am feeling horrible about missing the garbage pickup, I am so mad, so frustrated, that we will have the stink piling up in the hot summer sun, stinking up the whole entire neighborhood, throwing off the air pollution monitoring systems, sending up plumes into the cosmos and scaring away aliens that would have landed here to provided a cure for cancer, and the Corona virus! I know we both want to make the trash pick up and I do know you care. We are usually pretty good with setting up ongoing calendar reminders. It would help me if we got the trash out right after dinner clean-up, that would certainly free me up from worrying about in the evening. Maybe it might help to set a reminder for just after the time when we normally finish up dinner? What else might help or could you or we try?”

…is way better than saying,…

“You got up late again and hadn’t put it out the night before like we talked about last week, honey. We’ve just got to work on procrastination, and I do understand that your friend had called in a favor.”

The first super negative script is way more motivating for changing behavior than the last because it does not focus directly on the past behavior.

The first script stays away from labeling behavior that needs to change; instead it focuses on collaboratively identifying future behaviors that might produce a specifically different, hoped-for outcome.

In sum, do remember, that in studies, those who rated feedback discussions as most future-focused, more readily accepted feedback and indicated high intention to change even when the feedback was most negative. And keep in mind, it is a positive to initiate the conversation with expressing the goal of improving things in the future, but don’t sabotage it by focusing on the past mistake, or what explains or caused the failure. Instead, reflect and assume growth-mindset and encourage input about what to try next to reach a more specifically outlined, achievable goal.

Content inspired by: Jackie Gnepp, Joshua Klayman, Ian O. Williamson, Sema Barlas, 2020. The future of feedback: Motivating performance improvement through future-focused feedback.

Where the science comes from: the field of organizational psychology (Jackie Gnepp, Ph.D.—of Humanly Possible).

January 29, 2020March 4, 2020

How to Disclose an Affair: What To Do & What Not to Do…(Part One)

You realize the significance of holding the secret from your partner. The ache of the deceit surprises you. You want forgiveness and honesty. But is it worth hurting your partner?

There is a wide-range of advice from relationship professionals available to you. Indeed, should you desire to conceal an affair for the life of your relationship, you will find support for this. Other professionals advise you to come clean. As you have discovered, there’s an inescapable niggling asterisk darkening each tender moment or intimate exchange. It’s time to fess up, but how to do it?

You want to reduce the stress and pain your partner will feel when you admit to infidelity. Staying true to this lofty goal will help you through the tougher parts of disclosing.

In advance of disclosing, get some support. Part Two in this series identifies the many resources you may need to tap to ready yourself. You may already anticipate that the fallout from an affair whether disclosed, suspected, or detected, may take awhile. Part Three of this series offers tips you may use to avoid prolonging recovery.

Unfortunately, many partners who have been involved in an affair attempt to reduce the suffering of the betrayed partner by avoiding discussing it. This is not the way to do it. It will only increase the detrimental effects your partner will inevitably experience.

In fact, the more open and honest you can be the easier will be the healing process. Attempting to minimize or obfuscate will increase their distrust for you and work against reconciliation. No matter how bad it all is/was, they will want and need the full truth to move past the injury.

Accepting that transparency to all aspects of the affair and the timeline surrounding the affair will assist you in completely answering the numerous questions to come. Acknowledge that your partner will often want to know many details which may seem trivial or unimportant to you. A therapist who specializes in Affair Recovery will often build a timeline as this tool has been reported to be very helpful to the betrayed partner as it helps to keep their questions and answers straight when their world is understandably spinning.

Oftentimes, when a betrayed partner is able to match a suspicion to a date and activity they begin to relax into the belief that they can begin to trust themselves again. This is a very important step in Affair Recovery. More on this later.

Also it is extremely important to keep in mind that any attempts to hold back or reveal only a bit at a time also increase the injury. Let the therapist be the one who encourages the betrayed partner to back away from wanting to know details that would concretize a visual of the intimate details of sex acts. Your job is to reveal and not conceal–anything.

Ideally, you have broken off the affair completely before you disclose. If not, seeking out a Gottman Method or Emotionally-Focused Couples therapist is where you want to start. These therapists are especially trained to understand the complex reasons, and the cascade of behavior choices that lead to engaging in an affair (whether emotional or physical). Your therapist can help you to better understand the process leading to affairs. Your better understanding will assist you during the confrontation phase of Affair recovery.

Importantly, make sure that you specify that the services you are looking for are specifically for you. Gottman Method Couples therapists (GMCT) are not encouraged to do Couples work when one partner is still involved with their affair partner. So, if this is you, please specify at the beginning of treatment that you are looking to resolve your indecision, or decision for that matter. Many GMCT will gladly see clients on an individual basis when they have not already been engaged to treat the couple.

If you are not into therapy, Shirley Glass, a well-respected author on the subject of affairs, offers an enlightening perspective on the step-wise path to initiating an affair. Again, clarifying how affairs happen will provide you with the most helpful descriptions and explanations to reorient to during the post-disclosure discussions.

Importantly, your understanding of what led you to progress through each step toward the affair should not be used to distance yourself from taking responsibility. However, it will provide some insulation to any attacks on your character that are likely following disclosure. Understanding will aid forgiveness, recovery, and the process of re-building. And, it will certainly protect your relationship from unnecessary further injury and additional infidelities.

Now that you have taken time to acquire some additional understanding and support, read on to learn how to best prepare for disclosure.

January 16, 2020March 4, 2020

Blind-sided by a negative reaction? Hit reset before it is too far gone to salvage.

You are going about your normal day. Perhaps all is good in your head and heart. You seek out your partner (or kid, co-worker, friend, neighbor, boss) to communicate. You notice a twinge of irritation in their response; they are not taking it the right way. “What’s this?” you think. You attempt a rebid. Fail!

Uh-oh! Before you yourself slide into Defensiveness, recall that Defensive responses are one of the 4 Horsemen (Gottman). And in growing defensive, or expressing defensiveness, you are liable to trigger the cascade or decent of your innocent communication into a death spiral, perhaps ending in contempt or stonewalling. Don’t do it! Pull out! Pull up! Mayday, Mayday!

What do you do then?

Hit reset! Studies show that the outcome of the communication corresponds to the trajectory of the first 3 minutes of dialogue. Course corrections in these pivotal moments are key.

Reset is a simple (not so simple if you are prone to compulsive reactivity–but all the more warranted) and extremely effective technique. It involves interrupting the communique to put your partner at ease before renewing any effort toward delivery of your message.

Here’s an example:

P1: “oh, hey. I think I’m coming off in the wrong way. Mind if we hit the reset button?”

P2: “huh? okay i guess.”

P1 should now state the desired outcome of their bid for connection.

P1 (several examples):

Example 1: “I’m hoping you might join my enthusiasm about …”
Example 2: “I am wishing you might be okay exploring my thoughts about this with me; I need to work it through, mind listening and helping me reach a better understanding here?”
Example 3: “I’m so upset about this right now and it’s not you, and I need to hear you understand and accept my pain in my experience here. Is this a good time?”
Example 4: “I need a laugh or encouragement here, are you in the mood?”
Example 5: “you seem preoccupied/are you ok, do you have a moment?”
Example 6: “can you take a moment for me or should i come back later?”

By clearly stating your end goal, you may have better luck in reaching it. Some tips to keep in mind include:

Accept that everyone arrives at an interaction from the context of their own recent experience. You or your communication may or may not be a part of that. Everyone is entitled to be where they are. Reminding yourself of this essential truth may help when your hope for the communication is disappointed.
Maybe it wasn’t your turn to go first. Maybe you came in too hot. Maybe your partner needed some interest before launching into your own. Maybe they were wrapped up in something else at the moment. Great partners try to prioritize availability, but 100% is a ridiculous expectation. Even the happiest honeymooners turn toward their partner’s bids an average of 85% of the time. Satisfied couples will want to keep in mind the 5:1 positive interaction ratio. Practice makes progress.
Start with Assumption of Similarity to reinvigorate your energy in bidding with your partner. Self-reflect that you have also been on the poor response end of a communication attempt (for whatever reason, you didn’t meet your partner’s hoped-for-response (bid)–it’s okay, we can access forgiveness and understanding, right?). Forgive, and move-on, by acknowledging that we can’t always be receptive and gracious all the time.
Recall HALTS {hungry, angry, lonely, tired, stressed. If either of you is in one of these states, it is much harder for effective communication. Resolving these states first puts you both in a better place to engage.

Hitting the reset button and communicating your intention and request in a direct and non-threatening language while also considering and making room for your partner’s context is the equivalent of a mega-repair. You are giving your bid the best chance to be received and responded to as requested. Well done!

While you can’t guarantee the results, accepting with compassion and understanding is the goal. This applies to your disappointed feelings in addition to your compassion and forgiveness when a partner turns away or against your bid for communication. Of course, forgiveness is aided by repair. And clearing the deck of miscommunication and failed bids is another post in its own right. To be continued…

October 7, 2019October 15, 2019

Clear & Considerate Communication

Conscious Communication require openness, flexibility, and empathy as well as mindfulness. Exploring our own experiences, we can review contacts with others that were richly imbued with meaningfulness–someone took time to consider and accept us (warts and all). Setting an expectation for an interaction with little effort into planning is akin to gambling. And, failing to remain open, or receptive and empathic during an interaction often results in disappointment for all parties. I often encourage my clients to work backwards from their idealized ending. What’s your desired outcome? Then considering everything you know about your audience, customize your approach.

Conscious Communication require openness, flexibility, and empathy. Exploring our own experiences, we can review contacts with others that have been richly meaningful—a treasured interaction in which someone took time to consider and accept us. Setting an expectation for an interaction with little effort into planning is akin to gambling. And, failing to remain open, or receptive and empathic during an interaction often results in disappointment for all parties. I often encourage my clients to work backwards from their idealized ending. What’s your desired outcome? Then considering everything you know about your audience, customize your approach.

Once you have tailored your message, it’s time to work on delivery:

In Step 1 we consider our audience and the place and timing of our communication. Set up the contact for success.

Tracking and coaching our brain to pace & go slow is Step 2. Try fully cycling a breath before switching from Speaker to Listener. Eliminate broadcasting by keep messaging tight (again, it helps to have the end-goal in sight).

Step 3 involves stating the intention for our communication. Of course positive versus critical communication is the best approach. Using the Gottman approach and non-violent communication (NVC) requires framing your intention in terms of stating your own positive need. For instance, do you desire consideration of your shared idea, collaboration, resolution, or reconciliation. Making intentions clear at the beginning helps your listener to categorize your communication/contact expectations (particularly helpful when communicating with those with an insecure attachment style–helps to decrease listener anxiety).

Step 4 demands our ability to prioritize the experience of our listener/s. Reminding ourselves to maintain an accepting and receptive attitude to our audience’s response allows us to maintain our access to both creativity in our communication and our original intention. Rehearse a mantra-like receptivity strategy for success. Use compassion as a compass for how to proceed next and be open (flexible) to pivoting.

Do you need to come back to the topic?
Unwittingly stepped into a solvable or (argh!) Perpetual Problem?
Misjudged the timing or your approach to the contact? It happens (John Gottman says it happens at least 60% of the time).

Prioritize your audience by maintaining your compassion and connection. It often helps to use assumption of similarity: imagine yourself in a situation where the roles were reversed. We’ve all been there, right? Make sure your conversation goes slowly enough to allow you to reflect on your own not-so-eloquent moments and give credit or allowance to any reaction on the part of your partner/s. If doing so, gives you pain, easily adopt this master relational skill via my post on Assumption of Similarity.

Step 5: Summarize. Almost all effective forms of therapy require review of the process resulting in optimized personal outcome. In creating positive interactions or contacts with others, this is the conscious and intentional way to transition out of the contact. With my clients, it is paramount to practice this skill until it becomes automatic. There is a really cool secret trick though. Just ask the golden question: “Do I have it right: (followed by a compassionate retelling of the exchange)? What am I missing?” Then wait for your audience to confirm or add content. And then, after reaffirming any last minute updates, Voila!: An effective, conscious, considerate contact!

Congratulations.