Handling conflict in a relationship is challenging for many couples. It can be difficult to find ways to talk about disagreements or complaints that don’t devolve into arguments that don’t resolve anything, leave you both feeling worse, and potentially lead to more fights down the road.

Marriage expert John Gottman describes five steps to deal with conflicts without letting them turn into fights.

Step 1. Soften Your Startup: We looked at some tips to soften your startup in an earlier post. “Startup” refers to how you initiate a discussion with your partner about a complaint you have or an issues of conflict in your relationship. Regarding startups, Gottman says:

If you start an argument harshly—meaning you attack your spouse verbally—you’ll end up with at least as much tension as you began. But if you use a softened startup—meaning you complain but don’t criticize or otherwise attack your spouse—the discussion is likely to be productive. And if most of your arguments start softly, your marriage is likely to be stable and happy. If you are the one most responsible for harsh startups in your relationship, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to the fate of your marriage to soften up.

Step 2. Learn to Make and Receive Repair Attempts: Once a discussion starts off on the wrong foot and you get caught up in attacking or blaming each other, you can still turn things around if you’re able to stop this pattern long enough to get things back on track. Repair attempts refer to the ways in which you try to rescue a discussion that has stated to turn into a fight.

A repair attempt is any attempt to put the brakes on once a discussion is starting to become an argument, to prevent things from escalating further, and get things back to a nicer tone. Repair attempts Includes things such as:

• Telling your partner how you are feeling: “I’m feeling a little upset right now.”

• Telling your partner what you need: “I just need you to listen to me for a minute without saying anything.”
• Apologizing: “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
• Asking to take a break: “I need to take a little break right now before I can continue to talk about this.”
• Showing appreciation: “Thanks for telling me what you’ve been going through.”

Once you learn to make repair attempts, and just as importantly, learn to pick up on when your partner is making a repair attempt, you become able to reign things back in once a discussion starts turning into a fight, and then continue to discuss things in a more productive fashion.

Step 3. Soothe Yourself and Each Other: During conflicts with your partner, it’s easy to become flooded with negative emotions. Once this happens, you’re no longer in a position to have a productive discussion because your emotions have become too overwhelming: your ability to process what your partner is saying goes out the window and it becomes almost impossible to think clearly and rationally.

When this happens, if you try to continue your discussion you’re likely to either blow up at your partner, or shut down and stop communicating altogether, either of which are only going to make things worse. When your emotions start to get too heated, it’s essential to take a time out, temporarily stop the discussion, and give yourself a chance to calm your emotions.

After you’ve calmed yourself, anything you can do to help soothe your partner will go a long way towards reducing any tension even further. This also helps makes your partner feel safer expressing themselves in the future, because they know that if things get heated or they get upset, you’re able to help calm and soothe, rather than triggering even more distress. In turn, this makes flooding less likely to happen in the future.

Step 4. Compromise: As nice as it is to get your own way, in a marriage or relationship, the key to resolving conflict is to compromise, even if you’re convinced that you’re right. In order to be able to negotiate a compromise, the above three steps need to be in place. A comprise that you’re both satisfied with is difficult to achiever unless the discussion starts gently, repairs are made when things start to escalate, and you both manage to keep relatively calm and not become overwhelmed by emotions.

Compromise involves finding some common ground you can both agree on. Gottman presents an exercise to help find that common ground:

Decide together which problem you want to tackle. Then sit separately and think about the problem. On a piece of paper, draw two circles—a smaller one inside a larger one. In the inner circle make a list of the aspects of the problem you can’t give in on. In the outer circle list all of the aspects of the problem you can compromise about.

 

Try hard to make your outer circle as large as possible and your inner circle as small as possible. Once you’ve filled in your circles come back and share them with each other. Look for common basis of agreement.

In order to achieve compromise, Gottman suggests asking yourselves the following questions:

• What do we agree about?
• What are our common feelings or the most important feelings here?
• What common goals can we have here?
• How can we understand this situation, this issue?
• How do we think these goals should be accomplished?

Being able to reach compromises is an essential part of having a long-lasting, successful relationship.

Step 5. Be Tolerant of Each Other’s Faults: The final step in reducing conflict in your relationship is to realize that neither of you are perfect. It’s easy to wish your partner were different: richer, smarter, more attractive, more organized, more spontaneous, etc. However, the reality is that your partner is the way they are and they’re not going to change that much. So if you blame the problems in your relationship on the character of your partner, there’s not going to be much room for those problems to change.

Compromise is hard to reach if your focus is on changing your partner or wishing they were different. Until you’re able to accept your partner the way they are, flaws and all, you’re going to have trouble compromising. Unless you’re able to tolerate and accept each other’s faults, finding common ground is going to difficult to accomplish.

Every relationship has conflicts. There will always be times when you and your partner disagree about things or have complaints about each other’s behaviour. The key to a successful relationship isn’t to remove or avoid conflict, but to learn to navigate and negotiate these conflicts in ways that leave both of you feeling respected, listened too and safe. Using the five principles described above helps ensure that you and your partner handle conflict in ways that allow your relationship remains strong and secure.

I’m a couples counsellor and marriage therapist in Toronto who can help you work through issues in your marriage or relationship. To learn more, please see my couples counselling and relationship issues pages. For further information, or to make an appointment for marriage therapy or couples counselling, please call me at 416-516-6024 or email greg@gregdorter.com.

In a recent post we looked at how mindfulness can help us let go of our thoughts when we get caught up in ruminating or worrying or just thinking in circles. Letting go of thoughts is never easy, however, and in this post we’ll look at how simply watching our thoughts can help us let them go.

Thoughts pop into our heads all the time, and usually we don’t pay any special attention to them: they enter and leave our minds all on their own, just like a car that drives into our line of sight, remains in our field of vision for a few moments, and then drives along and passes out of our line of sight again.

But certain thoughts tend to attract our attention. They grab us, suck us in, and we get stuck on them. Often it is thoughts that have a particularly strong emotional pull to them that we having trouble letting go of and allowing to just pass by on their own. It’s like our emotions are an adhesive that make thoughts related to a particularly strong emotion stick in our mind, where they stay stuck and don’t go away no matter how hard we try.

For instance, if we’re feeling anxious, we’ll tend to get stuck on worrying thoughts; if we’re feeling sad, we’ll get stuck on thoughts of regret and disappointment; if we’re angry, we’ll get stuck on thoughts of having been treated unfairly or wronged. But if we can learn to just watch these thoughts despite their emotional pull, they don’t get stuck, and we can let them go as freely as any other thought that we don’t give a lot of attention to.

The opposite of watching thoughts is to engage with them. We engage with thoughts by trying to understand them, respond to them, change them, judge them or react to them in any way. However, when we watch our thoughts, we simply notice that they are present in our mind, and just watch them as they come and go. We allow then to enter our minds and stay there for a while, and then let then go on their way.

As soon as we engage our thoughts, they tend to stick around, and lead to more thoughts, and before we know it we’re back to ruminating or dwelling or worrying. But if we can just let the thoughts come and go as they please, they tend to go away on their own, without us having to do anything special.

There are a number of metaphors that describe this process of watching our thoughts, including the ones below:

The next time you find yourself caught up in your thoughts, unable to stop ruminating or worrying or going over the same thoughts over and over again, see if you can’t try to step back a bit and watch your thoughts. Instead of engaging them, just let them go, allowing them to pass out of your mind just like a cloud passing through the sky or a leaf floating down a stream.

Letting go of thoughts is often something we can’t do easily. The more stuck a thought or line of thinking gets in our head, the more difficult it becomes to let it go. In the next post, on cognitive defusion and letting go of thoughts, we look at some more ways to take a step back from your thoughts and get unstuck from them, and some additional strategies to help you watch your thoughts rather than engaging and getting caught up in them.

I’m a Toronto therapist and counsellor who uses mindfulness to help people deal with issues such as depression, anxiety, stress and anger.

For more information about how you could benefit from mindfulness-based therapy, visit my mindfulness therapy webpage. To make an appointment for counselling or therapy in Toronto, please call me at 416-516-6024 or email greg@gregdorter.com.

It’s easy to get swept away by our thoughts, especially in the face of strong emotions. We get stuck ruminating and dwelling about the past, filled with guilt or regret. Or our minds start racing and we can’t stop worrying about the future and imagining all the things that could go wrong. Or we replay conversations over and over again in our heads, trying to make sense of them or figure out what we could have said differently.

When our minds get going like this, not only is it exhausting; these patterns of thinking tend to make us feel bad, intensifying the emotions we’re already feeling and generating additional negative emotions as well. Because this experience is so unpleasant, it’s natural to want to these thoughts to stop, and to be able to prevent yourself from even having them in the first place. We often wind up trying to make these thoughts go away, and shut them out completely and make sure they don’t come back. But just like we can’t control our emotions or suppress our emotions, neither can we control or suppress our thoughts.

So what can we do when our thoughts start racing, we get stuck ruminating, or we just can’t quiet down our minds? One way of approaching negative and disruptive thinking is to examine our thoughts and see if there aren’t some alternative ways of thinking about the situation. We looked at how we might deal with distressing and negative thoughts in this manner using cognitive therapy (CBT) in a post on cognitive therapy and challenging negative thoughts.

An alternative approach is to bring mindfulness to our thoughts, and learn how to just let go of them. “We do not need to fight with thoughts or struggle against them or judge them. Rather, we can simply choose not to follow the thoughts once we are aware that they have arisen,” write Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, John D. Teasdale and Jon Kabatt-Zinn in their book The Mindful Way Through Depression, about the Mindfulness-Based Congitive Therapy (MBCT) approach to depression.

Mindfully letting go of thoughts is something we learn to do when we meditate. Many people think mediation involves having a blank mind completely void of any thoughts. However, in mindfulness meditation, the idea is not to shut out thoughts altogether, but simply to not allow yourself to get carried away by your thoughts.

In mindfulness meditation of the breath, for example, we bring our attention to our breath, and try, as best we can, to keep our attention focused on our breath. Despite our intentions, our mind inevitably does wander from the breath, and we start thinking.

When this happens, we simply acknowledge that our attention has wandered to our thoughts, and then let go of those thoughts and return our attention to our breath. And when our mind wanders again and we start thinking about something else, once again we acknowledge our thoughts, let go of them, and return our attention to our breath.

Just as we learn to repeatedly let go of our thoughts and return our attention to our breath when we meditate, we can do the same thing as we go about our every day life. When we practice letting go of thoughts in everyday life, we don’t always need to return our attention to the breath (though taking a breathing time out or returning to the breath for a few moments is always a great way to relieve stress). Instead, we can let go of a thought and return our attention to the work we were doing, or the book we were reading, or the person we were talking to, or whatever else we were doing when our thoughts began to steal our attention.

Another way to we can let go of a thought is to refocus our attention from our thoughts to our senses: the taste of the food we’re eating, the sound of the music we’re listening to; the sights around us; or the sensations of our feet striking the ground as we walk. Letting go of thoughts is as simple as acknowledging that our mind is off thinking about something other than the present moment, and then allowing that thought to pass out of our mind as we return our attention to whatever it is we are doing and whatever is going on in the present.

In theory, letting go of thoughts is simple. In practice, though, it’sis not as easy as it sounds. It can seem like as soon as we let go of a thought, there it is again, back in our head. In the next post, we look at how watching your thoughts can help you through the process of letting go of thoughts.

I’m a Toronto therapist and counsellor who uses mindfulness to help people deal with issues such as depression, anxiety, stress and anger.

For more information about how you could benefit from mindfulness-based therapy, visit my mindfulness therapy webpage. To make an appointment for counselling or therapy in Toronto, please call me at 416-516-6024 or email greg@gregdorter.com.

In a previous post we looked at some signs that suggest your relationship or marriage is in trouble according to relationship expert John Gottman. Gottman also describes seven principles that can help you get your relationship or marriage back on track.

1. Enhancing Your Love Maps: Love Maps are the part of your brain where you keep information about your partner’s life. The more familiar you and your partner are with each other’s world, the more detailed your love maps. You know each other’s histories, day-to-day life, friends, values, interests, dreams, etc. You know how things are going in in their life, at work, whether they’re having a bad day or week, what’s been on their mind, anything that’s troubling or worrying them, and important things that are coming up in their life. You also know the little details like their favourite foods, books, movies and tv shows. You keep track of what’s important in each other’s lives, and in so doing become closer and more intimate with each other.

2. Increasing Fondness and Admiration: When things are going rough in a relationship, you can sometimes lose track why you fell in love in the first place and forget the things about your partner or spouse that you value, admire and love. Instead of focusing on your partner’s flaws and the ways in which they annoy you, when you remind yourself of their good qualities, you keep the positive feelings alive in your relationship. According to Gottman:

Fondness and admiration can be fragile unless you remain aware of how crucial they are to the friendship that is at the core of any good marriage. The simple reason is that fondness and admiration are antidotes for contempt. If you maintain a sense of respect for your spouse, you are less likely to act disgusted with him or her when you disagree.

By nurturing your fondness and admiration for each other, you make it more likely that when you do disagree or argue, you’ll do so in ways that lead towards resolution rather than escalation.

3. Turning Towards Your Partner: Turning towards your partner involves connecting with your partner in little ways on a continual and ongoing basis. This forms the basis of a strong friendship, which is the basis for a strong relationship.

Turning towards your partner is as simple as doing things together like cooking or cleaning, asking about each other’s days, going for walks together, or taking a few minutes out a busy day to offer support to each other. When your partner looks for attention, affection, humour or support, you are there for them.

Turning towards your partner is how you forge an emotional connection, and is the basis for romance, passion, and even a good sex life. When couples turn towards each other they stay emotionally engaged and remain together; when they don’t, they end up drifting apart.

Gottman finds that in turning towards your partner you build up an “emotional bank account,” storing up affection and goodwill that helps get you through conflicts hard times. More importantly:

Turning toward your spouse in the little ways is the key to long-lasting romance. Many people think that the secret to reconnecting with their partner is a candlelit dinner or a by-the-sea vacation. But the real secret is to turn toward each other in little ways every day. A romantic night out really turns up the heat only when a couple has kept the pilot light burning by staying in touch in the little ways.

4. Letting Your Partner Influence You: Instead of needing to get their own way or be right all the time, people in strong relationships show an interest in their partner’s opinions. They learn to listen respectfully to each other, even when there’s disagreement, and are willing to find compromises.

This doesn’t mean always giving in to your partner. Rather, you are able to come up with solutions that both of you can agree on and that consider both of your opinions, wants and needs, which is key to maintaining a healthy relationship. Sometimes you may benefit from “yielding in order to win,” and let your partner have their way even if it’s not your ideal solution, because it’s preferable to continually fighting or arguing about an issue.

Gottman finds that if you’re a man in a heterosexual relationship, letting your partner influence you is particularly important, as “The wives of men who accept their influence are less likely to be harsh with their husbands when bringing up difficult marital topics, which in turn increases the odds their marriage will thrive.”

5. Solve Your Solvable Problems: Gottman recommends five ways to resolve conflict in a relationship, which we’ll look at in more detail in a post about how to handle a conflict. These five ways are:

• Softening your startup when bringing up difficult issues
• Learning to phrase issues as complaints rather than criticism or blame
• Being able to make and accept repair attempts when disagreements are escalating
• Finding ways to soothe yourself and each other
• Learning to compromise and being tolerant of each other’s faults

6. Overcoming Gridlock: Not all problems are solvable. Some conflicts don’t have a resolution. Unsolvable problems can include things such as how clean the house needs to be, how often you go out together, how often you have sex, your religious beliefs, how to raise your children, or whether or not you want children in the first place. Every couple has a set of unresolvable problems, and relationships are successful to the extent that you learn to cope with these issues.

Gridlock occurs when you start having the same argument over and over, you become more extreme and entrenched in your opinion, and every time the issue comes up you wind up feeling hurt, frustrated, and rejected by your partner. Gottman says that “gridlock is a sign you have dreams for your life that aren’t being addressed or respected by each other.”

In order to navigate around gridlock, you need to find out what these dreams entail. Then you’ll become able to to move away from gridlock and towards dialogue, and talk about the issue without hurting each other. Even though the issue isn’t resolved, it doesn’t need to create dissatisfaction with the relationship. Ending gridlock involves:

• Discovering and respecting the dreams behind the conflict
• Determining what is non-negotiable for each of you
• Finding areas within the issue where there is some flexibility
• Coming up with temporary compromise
• Continuing to engage in respectful discussions about the ongoing conflict

Following these steps won’t end the conflict, but the issue will no longer hold such a powerful negative grip on your relationship, and your relationship will still be able to thrive despite these differences.

7. Creating Shared Meaning: Gottman says that if you manage to adhere to the first 6 pinciples above, it’s likely you have a good, stable relationship. However, relationships can also have a deeper dimension in which you and your partner create an inner life together. It’s possible to create a culture within your relationship full of rituals and customs that link you and your partner together.

In essence, each couple and each family create its own micro culture [with] their customs (like Sunday dinner out), rituals (like a champagne toast after the birth of each baby), and myths–the stories the couple tell themselves (whether true, false, or embellished) that explain their sense of what their marriage is like, what it means to be part of their group.

 

Developing a culture doesn’t mean a couple sees eye to eye on every aspect of their life’s philosophy. Instead there is a meshing. They find a way of honoring each other’s dreams even if they don’t always share them. The culture that they develop together incorporates both of their dreams…. When a relationship has this shared sense of meaning, conflict is much less intense and perpetual problems are unlikely to lead to gridlock.

If things are already going well in your relationship, you may be doing a lot of these things already. By making sure you continue to keep doing what you’re doing and working on some areas that could use improvement, you can help inoculate your relationship from problems down the road. And if you’re going through some problems, learning to impliment these principles in your relationship can help you turn things around.
 

I’m a Toronto marriage therapist and couples counsellor. To learn more about how I can help you prosper in your marriage or relationship please see my couples counselling and relationship issues pages. For more information, or to make an appointment for marriage therapy or couples counselling in Toronto, please call me at 416-516-6024 or email greg@gregdorter.com.