adjust your focus
SUMMARY: Making regular deposits in your savings account for emergencies is a smart way to handle finances. When a conflict arises, positive interactions and sincere appreciation between you is like “money in the bank” for your marriage. It can have an important impact on the way the conversation goes and whether the conflict is resolved. Want to find out why adjusting your focus is such an important conflict resolution skill to develop? Read on to find out…
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As a young teenager, I (Wende) was charged with the care of my two younger sisters while my parents went out for dinner one evening. Wanting to do a good job of my task, I advised my sisters that, if they ate all their dinner we could make some popcorn and watch a movie together before they went to bed. I had already checked the TV listings and found that there was a movie airing at 8 pm that evening. These were in the pre-DVD and OnDemand days of television, so what was being broadcast was what we got.
After supper, my sisters dutifully helped clean up and then got themselves into their pjs, ready to enjoy the movie with me. I made the popcorn, poured us each a glass of KoolAid (we never had pop in our house) and we settled in to watch the black and white movie “Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte” starring Bette Davis.
We watched the movie to its bitter end…and it was terrifying! The story revolves around Charlotte, an elderly spinster whose sanity is slowly disappearing. As a young woman, her would-be husband was brutally murdered, his one hand severed and his body decapitated in the family’s summer house. Charlotte never recovered from the shock of his brutal murder and became a recluse. She is preyed upon by an evil cousin and a local doctor whom she ultimately murders in the final scene of the movie.
Needless to say, this was not the family-friendly movie that my sisters and I had thought we would watch that evening, but we were all riveted to the TV. That night none of us could sleep. The girls refused to go to bed in their own room, so we all huddled, sleepless and terrified in my single bed, staring into the darkness expecting Bette Davis to appear with a hatchet at any moment!
So why would I tell you that story? To illustrate this simple principle: what you focus on expands. The principle was true that night we unwittingly watched a horror movie and couldn’t stop picturing it in our minds when we went to bed and it’s true in various aspects of our lives, including our relationships.
What you focus on expands. Are you angry about something? Focus on the incident that made you angry and your spouse’s behaviour or actions suddenly take on nuances and intentions that may never have been there at all. You’re angry because of what he did or because of what she said.
But wait a minute…are you angry? Or is there a different emotion at work here? Maybe you’re not really angry at all. Maybe you’re hurt more than angry. Or maybe you feel taken for granted. Perhaps the emotion isn’t anger. Perhaps it’s something else.
By focussing on the true underlying emotion of the conflict, you can stop the problem from becoming a barrier to connection and communication. In other words, don’t focus on the action or behaviour; instead focus on the feelings that resulted and then deal with those feelings.
Hurt feelings can be like a snowball. Remember making snowballs as a kid? You start with a small handful of snow, pack it into a round ball and then start rolling that ball in the snow on the ground, packing it down as you go. The more you roll and pack, roll and pack, the larger that snowball becomes. Pretty soon you’ve got a snowball so large you can no longer roll it on your own; you have to call in the neighbourhood kids to help you roll it further. Same principle applies to hurt feelings. Ignore them and they keep expanding until you’ve got an unmanageable ball of emotions that are not only hard to deal with but may be downright dangerous to your marriage.
Next time you find yourself in a conflict with your spouse, don’t focus on the behaviour or actions of your spouse. Focus on your feelings about the behaviour or actions. And then sit down together for a “meeting” to discuss how you feel. In fact, when you’re struggling in your marriage, if you plan these meetings regularly, say once a week for an hour each time, you’ll soon discover that, by giving space to your relationship in this way, you are thinking of each other more as being on the same team and less as adversaries in a pitched battle for “who’s right” supremacy.
The purpose of the meeting is for both of you to express yourselves, clear the air, give and receive forgiveness and move on. It is not for one of you to beat the other one over the head with incriminations, accusations and ultimatums. The purpose is repair and improvement, not blame and shame. Focus on your own feelings, not the behaviour or actions of your spouse. Explain how you feel and why you feel that way.
Using these kinds of meetings on a regular basis can help a couple repair the minor issues as well as big ones because you are learning to understand how each other feels. Armed with this understanding, you can then begin to work together to solve problems and move forward together. You’ll find yourselves more mindful of your relationship, more in tune with each and more open to expressing gratitude to each other, even for the minor things. Something as simple as “thanks for making the coffee this morning” or “I appreciate you cooking dinner tonight. It was really good” can go a long way toward improving your marriage.
It’s like making regular deposits in your savings account for emergencies. When a conflict arises, having good will, positive interactions and sincere appreciation between you can have an important impact on the way the conversation goes and whether the conflict is resolved.
Like the old song says,
“You’ve got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative,
Latch on to the affirmative, don’t mess with Mr. In Between.”
For more information about pre-marital preparation and marriage coaching, click HERE.