Level 1 Course | Strength-Based Marriage

Part 1

The Bad Feeling Cycle

How the cycle shows up in my own marriage

I feel bad.
I try to make my wife change so I won’t feel so bad.
That makes her feel bad.
She tries to get me to change so she won’t feel so bad.
That makes me feel bad.
Rinse and repeat.

How to end the cycle

I feel bad.
I comfort myself.
If it still feels important, I ask my wife to change.
If she doesn’t change, I’ll be okay because I know how to take care of myself.

Notes

It’s okay to want your partner to change. Everybody wants their partner to change.
Everything you do either makes it easier for your partner to change or makes it harder for your partner to change.
When you’re stuck in the bad feeling cycle, you’re actively making it harder for your partner to change. (You’ll also hear it called the distress cycle.)
Either partner can lead the exit from the cycle. If you’re waiting for your partner to lead the change, you might end up waiting a long time.

Part 2

How to Comfort Yourself

When you were young, you might have had a parent or grandparent who knew how to comfort you when you were sad or afraid. There’s a certain energy of warmth and acceptance that helps young children feel better. Even if you didn’t have much of that in your life when you were young, you may still know how to offer it to yourself.
Most of us have the ability to offer this energy to ourselves, but we don’t do it very often.
If you grew up in an environment with a lot of criticism and control, it might be harder for you to offer warmth and acceptance to yourself.
Even if that is true, you can still learn.

Option 1: Picture yourself as a child

Close your eyes and picture yourself when you were a child and you were in some sort of difficult situation. Ideally, you want to picture yourself in the kind of situation that would cause you to feel the way you feel when your partner doesn’t treat you well.
When you picture yourself at a young age, you might instinctively feel compassion for that child. Most of us feel warmth towards children more easily than we feel warmth towards adults.
If you feel warmth towards the child that was you, you are already learning to offer warmth and acceptance to yourself as an adult.
You can also imagine you, as an adult, showing up in a difficult scenario you experienced when you were young and rescuing your younger self from that difficulty.

Option 2: Imagine yourself comforting a small child or pet

Think of a child or animal that you love. Imagine the warmth and acceptance you offer them when they want physical connection and comfort. That is the same energy you want to learn to offer yourself.

Option 3: Give your discomfort physical characteristics

You feel emotional distress or discomfort. Try to figure out where it’s focused in your body.
Most people feel this discomfort in their face, throat, chest, or stomach.
Imagine wrapping that discomfort up in a soft, warm towel or a fluffy blanket.
You might want to try imagining what shape or color your discomfort has.

Option 4: How long can you last?

Locate your discomfort in your body and think about how long you have been feeling it.
Your discomfort and distress ebb and flow like a tide.
Ask yourself this question: If you had to feel this discomfort for the next 20 minutes without any relief, could you do that?
Could you do it for 20 hours?
Could you do it for 20 days?

Option 5: Give your discomfort permission to stay

When you were young, you needed caring adults to be invested in your well-being for you to stay alive. You were programmed to feel intense emotional distress when your parents or caretakers weren’t invested enough.
As an adult, you don’t need anyone else to be invested in your well-being for you to survive, but you still have the same instincts that you developed when you were a child.
The discomfort you feel is related to those instincts.
When you feel relationship distress, try saying this out loud: “I give myself permission to feel the way I feel, from time to time, for the rest of my life.”
When you say that, you’re helping your brain learn that you don’t depend on your partner for survival the way you depended on your parents for survival when you were young.

Option 6: How harmful is this feeling?

When you feel bad, try to figure out where your feeling is centered in your body. You usually feel distress in the face, throat, chest, or stomach.
Relationship distress is designed to make you feel like you’re not going to be okay.
As an adult, you probably are going to be okay, even though you don’t feel like you’re going to be okay.
Give your distress a harmfulness rating on a scale from 1 to 10.
Think about how much harm would come to you if you had to feel this feeling for the next 30 minutes, then give it a number.
It’s okay to wrestle with yourself over this question. Everything inside you wants to hold on to the idea that this feeling is not okay.

Part 3

The Responsibility Trap

You’re responsible for your feelings and your behavior.
Your partner is responsible for their feelings and their behavior.
You are not responsible for theirs, and they’re not responsible for yours.
When you want your partner to change, talk to them about things that are their responsibility.
Don’t talk to your partner about things that are your responsibility unless you’re actively taking responsibility for those things (apologizing or confronting yourself).

Your brain is wired to focus on things that aren’t your responsibility. For example, you might have an instinct to:

talk to your partner about how you feel
show your partner how you feel
make your partner feel bad when you feel bad

Those instincts helped you survive when you were young and helpless. When you weren’t getting the care you needed, you made a fuss, and hopefully someone came to take care of you.

You’re not young and helpless anymore, but your brain still reacts the same way to bad feelings. Your instinct is to try to get your partner to fix it.

The very first thing you ever did on this planet was to let everyone know how upset you were. Without that skill, you probably would not have survived childhood.

As an adult, you can take care of your distress internally, but you still have an instinct to dump your distress into your relationship or into your family.

Part 4

Right-Brain Communication

Your left brain is good at talking.
Your right brain is good at understanding.
The more you talk, the less you understand.
Good communication requires a balance between your left brain and your right brain.
Your left brain has a kill switch that lets it shut down your right brain. When this happens, communication breaks down in your relationship.
When your left brain takes over, it makes it easier for your partner’s left brain to also take over.
Your left brain has only one emotion: anger, frustration, and resentment. (Yes, those are all the same emotion.)

How to balance your brain

You can keep your brain in balance by limiting how many words you say at one time.
Say 20 words, and then pause for a few seconds to let your left brain listen to your right brain.
If you don’t know how long to pause, start by pausing for 20 seconds after saying 20 words.
While you pause, ask yourself these right-brain questions (these are questions your left brain can’t answer):
- What is it like for my partner to be with me right now?
- What emotional impact did I just have on my partner?
- Did the thing I said make them feel better, or did it make them feel worse?
- Am I making it easier for them to do what I want them to do, or am I making it harder for them to do what I want them to do?
- How much appreciation do I feel for my partner right now?
- Am I going to be okay if my partner doesn’t do what I want them to do?

When your left brain runs the conversation

You use words in a manipulative way.
You will frame things in terms of good and bad, white and black, right and wrong.
Your words make it seem like you’re more innocent than you really are.
You say things that make it harder for your partner to do what you want.
You feel angry, resentful, defensive, and frustrated.
You don’t feel much appreciation for your partner.
You lose your ability to put yourself in your partner’s shoes.
You lose the capacity to think of your partner as a person who makes sense.
You say the same thing over and over using different wording.
You pay attention to the impact your partner has on you, but you don’t pay attention to the impact you have on your partner.
You say a lot of words. The more you talk, the less likely you are to get what you want.
You will focus on justifying your feelings, your words, and your behavior.
You will fall for the fantasy that there is some magical combination of words that will get your partner to change.
You will think your partner doesn’t understand when they actually do understand and they disagree.

When your right brain runs the conversation

You’ll say a few words and then pause to think about the impact you’re having on your partner.
You will speak with kindness and appreciation.
You will see your partner as a person who makes sense.
When your partner disagrees or disapproves, you’ll be able to accept that that is their position for now.
You won’t feel the need to justify, defend, convince, or manipulate.
When you speak with your right brain, your voice is more fluid and less rigid.
You will give your partner permission to disagree with you and disapprove of you.
Your right brain understands that your partner will always crave freedom and always rebel against control.
You will say exactly what you think in the kindest way possible.
Once you’ve told your partner what you think and what you want, you will allow them to do with it what they will.
You won’t repeat yourself over and over.
You won’t fall for the fantasy that there is some magical combination of words that will make your partner change.

Part 5

The Innocence Trap

Your left brain is good at cropping out parts of reality that make you feel bad.
It feels bad to acknowledge the ways you make life hard for your partner.
Your left brain wants to crop those things out.
At the extreme, you can end up living in a make-believe world where you only do good things and your partner only does bad things.
You can get addicted to seeing the world this way. Some people live their whole lives this way.

Questions that bring your right brain back

When you notice you’re stuck in the innocence trap, ask yourself questions that only your right brain can answer:

What’s it like for my partner to be married to me?
What’s it like for my partner to live with me?
What’s it like for my partner to go to bed with me at night and wake up with me in the morning?
What’s it like for my partner to listen to me when I’m talking?

Your left brain doesn’t see people as people, so it can’t give a reasonable answer to these questions. Trying to answer them honestly brings your right brain back online.

Confronting yourself

You can leave the make-believe world by confronting yourself in front of your partner.
Talk to your partner about things that are true about you that make life harder for them.
You will be tempted to put these things in the past, even when they aren’t actually in the past.
Pay attention to where you feel discomfort in your body when you reveal these things to your partner.
You might be able to track some discomfort in your body just by thinking about revealing this to your partner.

Part 6

Ripples

Picture you and your partner each in your own kayak, paddling on a beautiful lake. When you rock your boat, it creates ripples in the water, and those ripples affect your partner. When your partner rocks their boat, it creates ripples in the water, and those ripples affect you.
When you were young, the ripples in the water you lived in were quite large. Some of them were big enough to capsize your boat.
That’s why your brain still watches the ripples coming toward you. When you were small, the impact your family had on you mattered far more than the impact you had on them.
As an adult, the ripples on your lake are always something you can manage. Even when your partner is rocking their boat hard, it might be unpleasant, but it isn’t going to sink you.
So it doesn’t make sense to spend all your attention on the ripples your partner sends to you. Building a better relationship depends on shifting your attention to the ripples you send to your partner.

Questions about your outbound ripples

What’s it like for my partner to be with me right now?
What was our last conversation like for them?

Your mind will keep pulling your attention back to the ripples coming in. When it does, gently turn it back around: focus on your outbound ripples, not your inbound ripples.

Getting out of the cycle