Have you ever had a fight with your spouse that feels like a wrestling match? Only there is no referee to stop you from repeating the same argument over and over again.

You can’t believe you are still fighting about the same thing for the hundredth time. If only you could get your knuckle-head spouse to understand your point. Maybe if you say it in a different way or with a new example. Nope, it’s still the same darn argument.

It becomes a race to see who can shift the blame off themselves and onto the other one. Soon you have forgotten what you’re fighting about.

All you can think about is how to get out of this argument. Aren’t we supposed to compromise or something? But all you hear is the way your spouse is talking to you. Where’s that referee when we need one?

Here I am. While I’m not in your living room with you, I can loan you my perspective on dealing with relationship conflict. You don’t have to compromise on love when you disagree!

3 Steps to Turning Conflict into Compromise:

Compromise is a possible solution to calling a truce in couple’s arguments. It doesn’t work well when you feel like you are pressured or arm wrestled to give in. You both have to be okay with the final solution.

Step 1 = Identify what you don’t agree on. (This is the easy part!)

Step 2 = Identify what you do agree on. (This may be harder to see at first glance, but you can find a common goal.)

Step 3 = Identify what you can both live with. (What are you each willing to give up to reach a common goal?)

Does this help you end the argument without stuffing it under the rug for another day? If not, you’ve found an argument where you both have very different positions.

2 Ways to Agree to Disagree with Love and Respect:

You can still respect your spouse even if you have differences. And you don’t have to sacrifice your sanity or love when you agree to disagree.

Are you done having this argument again and again? If you are ready to stop the arm wrestling tournament, then you need to know that you can be your own referee. I’m putting these strategies for agreeing to disagree (with love) in your hands:

1. Mark Your Territory: This works great for household maintenance. Decide what tasks you want to be in charge of, and stay out of other’s territories. When you question, critique, or remind your loved one to take care of their territory, you are stepping on your loved ones toes. Ouch!

2. Be Responsible for Your Choices: When you make a choice that your spouse doesn’t agree with, be willing to take responsibility for any consequences that come because of the choice. Love and respect your spouse through his (or her) choices.

Respect upholds love, while stepping on your loved one’s territory or choices, just hurts and repels love. If you can find a solution you can both live with, then do it. But if compromise doesn’t work, then learn to respect each other even if you disagree.

Turn your differences into an opportunity to not just stand your ground, but also respect the one you decided to spend the rest of your life with!

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Photo Credit: “Referee” by Avinash Kunnath

Do you want to have better quality friendships like you did in the good ol’ days?

Remember when your biggest decision was who to play with after school. Eventually these friendships grow or change into who you are going to share your secrets with or cry on when you are broken hearted. Friendships become as important to you as your family.

“Many people will walk in and out of you life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.” ~ Unknown

Our friendships peak and adulthood hits. People go away for school, get married, move for their job, and have kids. Friendships come and go and it becomes hard to keep up with your old friends. Yet you long for the friendships that last a lifetime.

While busyness and location may get in the way of growing great friendships as an adult, there is another culprit – having a negative focused mental filter. Often we have our mental filter set high to keep hurt out, yet we miss out on the opportunities for new and growing friendships. You can change your filter, letting the good in instead of keeping it all out.

Recognize Negative Filter

Recently I watch my daughter try to navigate through new friendship territory with a filter that needs an adjustment. She assumes that others don’t like her, leaves herself out of the activity, and then complains about being left out. As I coach her through the tears, I realize these friendship problems don’t end with adulthood.

Many adults walk around their world surrounded by people yet feeling lonely. Their negative thoughts leave them out. If you have your mental filter set so high that all you see are negatives, you are probably missing out on friendships and resources.

Take a moment to listen to the messages you are focusing on. Do you focus more on the negatives than the positives? If yes, you may recognize some of these negative assumptions:

• What if they don’t like me or I don’t fit in
• They want too much from me and I can’t say no
• I feel left out when I know I’m not their best friend
• We have too many differences that I can’t relate
• I can’t handle feeling hurt or rejected again

I imagine these negative thoughts didn’t evaporate after middle school, and that some of you still battle with these negative assumptions now. We all want to be known and connected, but what does it take to make it happen?

Change Your Mental Filter

Imagine that your body is surrounded by a screen. The holes on the screen can be enlarged or shrunk. You can change the size of holes depending on how much you want to let in.

Focus less on the negatives, and you will increase the holes in your screen. Instead of filtering it all out, you will be able to let more in. You will also begin seeing things in a new way instead of assuming the worst.

My daughter is able to see that the girls she wants to play with have a different idea on what to play – it isn’t that they don’t want to play with her. When she focuses less on her negative thoughts, she is able to move toward the girls even if her way is different. The result is making memories instead of tears.

When you look through your screen with new eyes, you can see positives looking back at you. People that are interested in you, what you have to say and spending time with you. If you don’t see these people trying to look through your screen, it’s time to change your screen and stop filtering so much out.

Friendships as Exchange of Resources

I think of friendships as an exchange of resources, one in which both people have a say in what they exchange. The resources may be tangible such as swapping babysitting or tools. Or the exchange may be intangible such as sharing stories and reassurances. Having someone to confide in, to reassure you, and to celebrate life’s milestones is an amazing resource.

While friendships may change as we grow, they are still important. Discover what you do or say to yourself that keeps people out. Then decide to not let your screen be set to negative. Instead be determined to view the exchange in a new way. In this way, you are letting more into your life than you are turning away.

“The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart. ” ~ Elisabeth Foley

How have your friendships changed over time?

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Photo Credit: Happy Girls Under Rainbow by Sharon Pruitt

Do you ever feel sorry for yourself?

It’s a dark place where all you can see is negatives. One negative feeling leads to another just like blowing dandelion seeds to spread more weeds. It’s hard to find anything to lead you out of this dark and rooted place.

When you are cultivating worry and anger, it is hard to view life differently. While you may not feel happy and joy all the time, it is possible to change how you feel by changing your thoughts. You can go from negativity to contentment by cultivating different seeds of thought.

3 Steps to Cultivate Seeds of Contentment

It’s time to pull the weeds of negativity out by their roots.

Step 1: Recognize a Negative Mindset: A negative mindset is narrow, future predicting, or history repeating. It is not being fully present to what is, because you are so worried about what did happen or what could happen.

What is your personal marker for recognizing you are caught in over-focusing on the negative? It may sound something like this: no one cares about me, everyone leaves me, everything I do fails. This is a miserable place to stay and the roots may be deep.

Step 2: Challenge Your Negative Assumptions: There is another way to think about almost anything. If you challenge your thinking, your feelings will follow.

For instance, if your marker for negativity is feeling left out, isolated, and lonely. Then look at how your thinking leaves you out. The more you think negatively, the more you keep to yourself or act based on the assumption that others don’t want to be around you.

If you challenge this thinking, you can find a more objective way to think about others actions or inactions. Then you will be more open to making personal contact with others without presenting only negatives.

Step 3: Practice Gratitude: Focus on what you have more than what you don’t have. Embrace what is instead of what if.

Once you have poked holes in the negative thinking, you are ready to plant new seeds. Grab your journal and fill in the following until you run out of ideas: “I am grateful for ___________________________”

A few seeds that I am cultivating:

• I am grateful for friends that don’t judge, criticize, or advise.
• I am grateful for my children’s unconditional love and affection.
• I am grateful for being debt free.
• I am grateful for living in a house that we can afford.
• I am grateful for doing work that I find challenging and interesting.
• I am grateful for a spouse that works hard and accepts me.

When you get stuck in the negative, it’s so hard to see life any other way. But once you start digging up the negativity, it starts to crumble. Trickles of light are let into the darkness. And problems turn into opportunities, so that life can grow instead of weeds of negativity.

Please share the seeds of gratitude and contentment you are cultivating.

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Related Posts: Riding the Waves of Change; Grant Three Wishes for Joy

Photo Credit: “Child Tending Broken Baby Seedling” by Sharon Pruitt

I am doing it again, rushing and cramming too much into my day. I’ve been pelted with stressors lately, and my cells are screaming for a break.

Instead of slowing down, I push myself and take more on. Proudly recognizing my productivity while my body and mind suffer. Sadly, I am sometimes even hurrying so I can relax, which makes it really hard to relax. Instead I crash.

Even my kids get to here me chant hurry up, speed up, and go quicker. Kids are so much better at slowing down and cherishing the moment. In fact it almost seems impossible for kids to hurry themselves.

I wouldn’t need to hurry myself if I took on less instead of more. While there are times where we need to take on more and rise to the challenge, there are also times when we need to slow down in face of the many responsibilities we have.

Are you caught in a web of hurrying up so you can get caught up, only to find you are too tired to enjoy life or loved ones? If you are a hurry addict like me, join me in a week dedicated to slowing down. And maybe we will remind ourselves how good it feels to slow down that we keep it up.

10 Ways to Slow Down Instead of Hurrying:

1. Schedule more breaks instead of more tasks in your day.

2. Take a nap.

3. Sit, watch, and listen to nature.

4. Read a book for fun.

5. Journal without turning it into a creative or productive work.

6. Unplug from computer, phone, or electronics for a day.

7. Go for a walk with no destination or time in mind.

8. Get a babysitter and do something gentle for yourself.

9. Limit the amount of time you check email and social media.

10. Connect with people face to face.

If we don’t slow down during our day, we will have a hard time slowing down at the end of the day. There is no such thing as hurrying to relax. Hurrying leads to more hurrying as your mind-body stay in hyper-drive.

Learn to cherish slowing down as much as hard work. Rise to the challenges in your life but settle in. Not everything needs to be a sprint or a race. Be productive but enjoy yourself and your loved ones along the way.

How does your body or mind signal you to slow down? Do you wait until the signals are really loud?

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Photo Credit: “Orchestration of Sleep” by Casey David

When someone complains do you take it personally? Instead of really hearing them, you feel like they are talking about how they feel about you.

For example, when my daughter complains about not wanting to do her chores, my mind makes assumptions. My heart rate quickens as I ready for battle. And I tell myself, “She makes everything hard on me. I wish she would treat me as good as she treats her teacher.”

If I stay in battle mode, I get hooked into a power struggle, debate, or argument. Then I eventually get so fed up that I withdraw. When I notice the fight of flight response take off in me, I can change my thinking and emotional response already in progress.

When we perceive others’ negativity less personally, we free ourselves and our loved ones. We are free from being held responsible for others negativity. As a bonus, we are free to connect with others, instead of protecting ourselves.

6 Steps to Listening Without Personalizing

If you walk around feeling like there are threats to your emotional well-being in each personal encounter, you will live a guarded life. In the long run, you will miss out on opportunities for personal connection.

While our emotions tell us that negativity infects us, how do we let other’s complaints get under our skin less? Here are 6 steps to letting negative emotions stay where they belong (in owners’ skin):

• Interrupt your own emotional reaction in order to think more clearly
• Evaluate whether negativity from other is threat to your well-being
• Choose not to let it get under your skin and cause an “infection”
• Find another way to think about negativity that is separate from you
• Let other own their feelings by letting them stew in it
• Reflect what you observe not what you feel

In my example, I can take deep breaths to help me slow down before I yell at my daughter. This gives me time to see that her complaint is not a threat to my happiness. Thus I don’t have to let it get under my skin as much as it usually does.

When I don’t feel threatened by her complaint, I am able to hear that she doesn’t feel like cleaning right now. Her negativity is less about me or our relationship and more about her. 

I no longer feel like defending myself or making her feel bad. Instead I can reflect my observation and remind her of the choices that are in front of her. (“I know you are tired. You are welcome to watch TV when your room is clean or go to bed early.”)

I would not be able to listen to her in this way if I took her complaint personally. I am able to move on, and she will either take responsibility or stew in her complaints. Either way, our relationship isn’t impacted negatively by her complaining.

Emotional Separateness Key to Relational Connection

This is not a typical way to feel more connected with others. It seems counter-intuitive. When we are anxious, tense, or unhappy, we usually push for sameness, agreement, and togetherness.

However, I am convinced that the way to feeling more connected with others is to allow each person to have their own bucket of emotions. That is to separate our emotions as being a reflection of the person that carries them.

By not taking others emotional reactions personally, we are truly able to hear what they are saying. To listen to what they are saying about themselves. To know a person is to connect with them.

How can you use these 5 steps in your dating or marital relationships? Please share other ideas you have for not taking others negativity personally.

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Photo Credit: “Dream Walking” by Digital Pimp

Life can be a hail storm. At times you feel like you are pelted by hail of many sizes. Your kids are sick for the second time this month, your car breaks down, and you have a new work assignment to learn.

If we are pelted with one piece of hail at a time, it’s much easier to absorb it. But it can be hard to dodge the hail if we are caught in the storm. How do we ride out the storm when we are hit with many stressors at once?

Do you stay hyper-alert, waiting for the next bad thing to happen? Feeling like you are on edge, gripping your seat, and tensing your muscles. Having trouble relaxing and sleeping because you are waiting for the next storm to drop on your head.

Stress Vs. Stress Response

Revving your body and mind up during stress is useful to take on the task at hand. And when the stressor is over, most of us naturally return to our pre-stressed self. Yet others live in an almost constant state of feeling stressed out.

You don’t have to stay in fight or flight mode, you can learn to notice the difference between a perceived and real threat. Instead of responding to every stressor as an invasion, infection, or rejection, you can squash your misperception before it eats away at you.

In doing so, you are separating your response to the stressor from the stressor.  There is power in realizing that you have some control over how you think about the hail storm that is hitting you.

The more stressors that hit me, the harder I work and the more I take on. I start seeing everything as negative and a threat to my well-being. It’s not until I slow down that I can find a new way to think about what’s stressing me out.

Self-Reflection for Comfort During Life’s Storms:

Not convinced? Grab your journal and take some time for some self-reflection. Explore the idea of how you can settle down during life’s storms. Respond to the following words, ideas, and images in your journal.

Quote:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” ~ Charles Darwin

Photo: “A Bend in the River”

Question: Is your stressor a real or perceived threat? If it’s a perceived threat, how do you change how you think about it so you can settle into it?

I love comments so please share what ideas you discover. Here’s to learning how to slow down and lean into the stormy times of our lives. Let the self-soothing begin!

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Enjoy reading this post? Subscribe via email and receive a Free E-Book (Take Charge of Your Worry: 10 Ways to Manage Anxiety Naturally).

Photo Credits:

Take Cover by Ben McIver

A Bend in the River by Steve H.

Have you ever beat yourself up for having a bad day?

Having a bad day (or week) doesn’t have to define us. How we rise above the bad day and climb out of shame defines us. It may take several days to get out of a funk, but you can do it.

“It’s not the load that breaks you down, but the way you carry it.” ~Unknown

The Toxic Downward Spiral of Shame

Shame is toxic. When you feel shame, you think you are the mistakes you’ve made. You internalize the mistake, letting it eat away at you, instead of letting the mistake be something to learn from.

If you are embarrassed or ashamed about how you handle yourself in a situation, you may stew in shame and self-criticism. If you do, you will go deeper into a dark cave and have a hard time crawling out.

For instance, let’s say you have a fight with your significant other, and to comfort yourself you turn to food. You overeat until you feel numb, but then you end up feeling worse about yourself. This shame keeps you more isolated because you feel unworthy. So the next time tension erupts in your relationship, the cycle continues.

Climb Up Instead of Down

The downward spiral doesn’t have to stop at the bottom. When you hit the deep pit of shame, there comes a time when you realize you have a choice. You can stay in shame and self-criticism or you can crawl your way out.

“To fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another.” ~Katherine Paterson

Where can you interrupt the cycle? How else can you think about yourself?

You talk yourself out of the deep cavern of shame and guilt by gripping one stone at a time:

• Believing that you can handle hard stuff
• Knowing self-confidence grows the more you rise above hard stuff
• Remembering that everyone makes mistakes and they don’t define us
• Climbing is uncomfortable but good for us
• Learning doesn’t involve negative self-criticism

You put anyone in a situation with enough stress, pressure, and tension and they will crack. Everyone has a breaking point. This doesn’t mean you are weak or chemically imbalanced. It means you are human. Under enough stress, we all fight or flee.

Knock the dust off, bandage the sores, and rise to the challenge of climbing out.

How do you rise above shame and interrupt self-criticism?

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Photo Credit: “Climb” by Leonardo Palloto

Remember the bliss of a budding relationship. It’s like a breath of fresh air. The feelings of attraction and excitement bring a smile to your face and butterflies to your stomach. So where do all these blissful feelings go?

The longer you invest in a relationship, the more you don’t want to lose them. You would do almost anything to avoid feelings of loss and rejection, even if that means avoiding conflict to keep the peace.

Two Most Common Relationship Mistakes:

As each of you puts more energy into maintaining the good feelings and sustaining the relationship, troublesome ways of interacting typically creep in. No matter how long you have been together, it is highly likely that you have made at least one of the following mistakes:

1. Trying to fix your partner

2. Letting your partner fix you

Which one sounds like something you are doing? I claim #1 as my biggest mistake. While my attempts to fix my spouse may be well-intentioned, they typically get stirred up by my own worry and tension. Luckily for my husband, he doesn’t like it when I try to shape him up and he lets me know.

“Some conflictual marriages can be characterized as each person wanting to lean on the other more than the other will permit. Other conflictual marriages are better characterized as each feeling the other wants to control the situation.” ~Michael Kerr, M.D.

While no one is perfect, you can learn to turn all this energy onto yourself instead of deferring or turning it on your partner. In doing so, you make more room in your relationship for growth, togetherness, and comfort – maybe even occasional bliss.

A Different Way to Think About Relationship Growth

This is a very different way to think about relationships. It’s not about working directly on the relationship, it’s about working on your part in the problem, so you are part of the solution. Instead it is about becoming more self-directed without losing relationship connections.

How do we become more self-directed without becoming self-centered and selfish? The goal isn’t to be more isolated and disconnected, it is to do our part in creating more intimate, positive, and cooperative connections. Once you recognize your part in the problem, whether it’s distance or conflict (avoidance or pressure), you open up new choices:

1. The choice between being regulated by your partner or being self-regulated

2. The choice between acting on your emotions or your thinking

I can continue to try to shape up my hard working husband, or I can find another way to manage my worry. I can look for the choices that I have in front of me instead of trying to answer the choices he has in front of him. I imagine I’m more fun to be around when I calm myself down and put less pressure on him to do it for me.

We all react emotionally to differences in our relationship. Learning how to have a choice in how we react to these differences helps us be more approachable and less negative in our relationships. We become someone that others want to be around instead of avoiding conflict to keep the peace.

What helps you see your part in relationship problems?

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Photo Credit: “Love is…” by Nattu