by Ray White
Relatedness also helped the evolutionary process by providing a reason to pass knowledge down from one generation to the next. Feeling connected to and caring about their tribe members would have motivated them to pass down any information that would help them survive and flourish.
One of the most reasonable arguments about social or group preservation vs. self-preservation is a parent’s reaction in the face of a threat to his or her family; the automatic, unflinching reaction would be to sacrifice his or her life to save the family. Even the smallest social ties lead people that are nearly strangers to risk their own lives to save others. As stories come in about a recent tornado, we hear about teachers who thought nothing of using their bodies to protect their students from falling debris. The stories are inspirational; but everyone wants to believe that is, of course, what they would do and how they would react. My wife was telling me about the daydreams of one of my sons, which included common thoughts that we have all had about what we would do in a life-and-death situation. We almost always imagine ourselves rising to the occasion and risking our own lives to save others. Positive daydreams never include us slinking away and leaving other people to face certain death. We want to be heroes; we want to do what feels right for the group.
As I am writing this book, we have had a series of weather-related tragedies, acts of terrorism, and horrific accidents. Everyone I speak with has an itch to help. They have some unknown force that makes them want to help other people in need. It brings people together and reinforces the community. It also brings tremendous relief and satisfaction when people can find a way to help, even if it is something as small as donating a few dollars or bringing in a few canned goods. It is in our nature to help other people survive, and if there are even the smallest ties to family or community, we will put their survival ahead of our own.
Chapter 12
Nurturing Positive Relationships
Nurture close relationships. Spend time with people who want to “celebrate when you were born, care about you as you live, and miss you when you are not around.”
Life and relationships are made up of small moments and fleeting opportunities. John Gottman, considered one of the foremost researchers on relationships, tells a story about a time when he was walking by his wife and he saw her looking into the mirror sadly. He knew he had two choices: he could keep going and go read a book that he was very interested in, or he could stop and listen to a story he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear. Understanding that relationships are based on the trust that is built during these tiny moments, he stopped and listened and connected with his wife.
To nurture positive relationships, we can take advantage of those small moments and fleeting opportunities. We should build trust when we can. Brene Brown, in her book Daring Greatly, used the analogy of marbles in a marble jar. Each time we take a moment to connect, we are putting marbles in a marble jar. The marbles represent the good will we may need later when our actions are less than positive and we need forgiveness and understanding from our partner or friends. It is like our positive relationship savings account. We are saving for later when the relationship will need the trust and forgiveness that we have built up over time.
Find and Build
Many people are focused on finding the right romantic partner, rather than nurturing the right relationship. The assumption is that if you find the right person, then you can just be yourself and you will live happily ever after. Finding the right partner is a very important beginning, but it is only a beginning. It must be followed up with a commitment to doing a lot of little things on a regular basis to maintain and improve the relationship. Finding opportunities to feel and show appreciation and gratitude, sharing successes and failures, having a sense of humor, working as a team, bringing positive energy to conversations, and regularly saying the small things like “I love you” and “I respect you” all help maintain those positive relationships over time. Positive relationships require effort and commitment. Much of that comes naturally because of our love for the other person; but at some point as the bloom on the rose fades, a conscious effort is required to build and sustain what can become one of your most important sources of happiness.
Activity: Make a list of the relationships you would like to nurture
Gratitude
People who practice gratitude are more empathetic and are able to see things from another person’s point of view. Others see people who practice gratitude as more helpful and generous. Gratitude for what you have reduces your need to accumulate “stuff” and therefore results in less judgment and jealousy about other people and what they have, which means less friction in relationships.
Feeling gratitude toward a person improves your relationship with them. Gratitude is a habit you can form that will help improve your relationships. To make a relationship more positive, seek out aspects and opportunities where you can show gratitude. Make a list of the things about that person that you are grateful for.
This will help bring to the surface all the small ways someone else has supported us. Spend lots of energy and effort communicating your gratitude to that person. Do it often. Every day, share and be specific about why you appreciate them. Don’t expect any reaction in response. Embrace whatever reaction they have. New behaviors create discomfort at first, but eventually they settle in. Be sincere and push through the challenge of “it feels awkward” or “it’s too much.” Once they realize you are sincere, they will relax and begin to accept, if not look forward to, your expressions of gratitude. (See the earlier chapter on gratitude for more information and exercises.)
Activity
1.Write short notes of gratitude to your partner or spouse and leave them in strategic places on a daily basis. Start with at least seven--one a day for a week’s worth of gratitude.
2.Write a heartfelt letter of gratitude to someone important in your life and read it to them in person. The significant increase in happiness comes from actually reading it to them, not just in writing it.
3.Write down three things you are grateful for. Find something to be thankful for every day.
More Positive Than Negative
We often take for granted that our partners or friends know we love them. We have said it hundreds of times and we show it through the many things we do with and for them. But they still need to hear it said out loud and often. Relationships require constant confirmation that things are going well. We tend to get into a habit of assuming the good and talking about the bad. “Of course he knows I love him. That is why I married him. We need to talk about why he doesn’t open up to me.” We think about and appreciate the unique and wonderful traits about the other person, but we don’t always give voice to those thoughts. So even though we are thinking them and they are a part of our internal conversation, our significant other doesn’t get to hear them. They only hear the part we have time (or decide to make time) to talk about, which can often be the problems or challenges rather than the things we are grateful for.
Research on several different levels has shown that relationships need more positive input than negative input. It is what is called your “Positivity Ratio.” John Gottman found that personal relationships need at least five positive comments, actions, or statements for every one negative comment. The real challenge is that our habits are usually to voice the negative and assume the positive. We love and appreciate the other person, and we assume they know it. It is not bothering us, so we don’t feel the need to make sure we express those positive feelings. On the other hand, we seem to need to express the negative feelings. We need to get them out, hash them out, or somehow expel them from our mind. So once we get comfortable in a relationship, we tend to speak the negative and assume the positive.
By consciously focusing on the positivity ratios, we realize that we have to work to get to a five to one. We can rebuild the habits of positivity that will make our relationships stronger. I have a 17-year-old son; and his job, car, messy room, homework, and interactions with his b
rother and sister give me a lot of opportunities to point out areas for improvement and future success. Since the number of conversations we have is limited by our busy schedules, our interactions can become dominated by my giving him direction on areas where he can get better, rather than my sharing how proud I am of what he has accomplished. It is hard to maintain the five to one or better positivity ratio. But reading about Gottman and Frederickson has helped me make a conscious effort to spend more time on the good things; which means I sometimes let the areas for improvement slide for a while, or at least find examples of when he did it right, rather than finding when he wasn’t quite at the top of his game.
Activity
1.Give more positive feedback than negative feedback. For one day, use an index card or your Notes App on your smartphone and add a little tick mark every time you say something positive about the other person in your relationship. Count how often you tell them you appreciate them, or they dress well, or you really value their advice. Then make a tick mark every time you discuss something negative with them. Try to add five more positives every time you add a negative. It is surprisingly difficult, yet unbelievably important. NOTE: This is something we give to someone else. Expecting our friend or partner to do the same is unfair and will lead to disappointment. (See the 100/0 Principle below for further explanation.)
Thinking our way to Positive Relationships
Positive thinking can help make relationships stronger. Approaching a relationship as if everything is positive and the other person believes in you and supports you helps you take actions that encourage positive results, rather than actions that put the other person on the defensive. Positive thinking also provides you with more perseverance and the ability to get through the rough times, rather than give up.
Diener and Biswas-Diener, in their book Happiness, discussed how thinking positively about a past event actually changes your memories of that event and makes you happier. Thinking back and focusing on the best parts of an experience enables you to enjoy that experience again today and remember it even more fondly in the future. This is especially true of relationships. Thinking positively about all the great times and experiences you have had together actually shapes your memories to be happier and more positive. You are much more likely to stay in a relationship with lots of happy memories.
We have the power to make people great just by how we think about them. All people are human beings. They all have problems and flaws. They all have good points. It is what we focus on that makes the difference. We can spend our time listing their mistakes, or we can think about the things we love and appreciate about them. Most of us are reasonably good people that sometimes make bad decisions. We all know we are not perfect, so it is unfair to expect others to be perfect and spend our time focused on those imperfections.
Another part of the problem is not loving or appreciating ourselves. We know all our flaws. We see those same flaws in other people; and because we hate them in ourselves, we judge and hate them in others.
There are a lot of bad behaviors, and I’m not saying that we have to accept those bad behaviors. We should hold people accountable. We should spend less time with people who consistently exhibit bad behaviors. But we can also feel sad for them, rather than judging them as a bad person. Most people we would categorize as bad are just sad, unhappy, or angry people who need love but don’t know how to find it in themselves or in others.
People are what we make them. No one is perfect. Why are the people we love so great when we first meet them, but seem not so great later on in the relationship? Do they change? Not necessarily. It’s just that we tend to create a “halo effect.” When we like someone, we notice all of their good points. When we don’t like them, we notice and focus on all their negative points. We create how wonderful people are in our own minds. We retain the information that supports our judgments and makes us feel “right,” and reject the information that disproves our judgments and makes us feel “wrong.” Our friends and family members also tend to respond to our expectations. If we have low, unhappy expectations, they tend to live down to them. If we have high, positive expectations, they work to meet those. The power to choose how great the people around us are is a fantastic power. A little positive thinking, and you can make people great!
Addressing Our Anger
We are often angry with other people for various things they have done. What we can realize is that the anger is more related to what is going on with us than related to the other people. Pretending the emotion does not exist is not productive. It is important to admit we feel anger and to identify it as anger. Once we feel and identify it, we can manage it. The existence of the anger doesn’t mean we have to act on it and lash out at other people. Instead, we should explore what made us feel that way and why. What was the trigger? What did the other person do that bothered us? Once we can understand the origin of our feelings, we can discuss them patiently with other people and improve our relationships through those discussions, rather than ruining them by lashing out in anger.
Show respect, honor, empathy, kindness, and love, even during a fight. It is okay to feel the anger. It is not okay to make your friend or partner feel demeaned, disrespected, or belittled because of how you feel. It is common to want the people closest to us to feel our pain and to sometimes want them to pay for making us feel that way. But in the long run, making them feel worse is not going to make us feel better. It just hurts our ability to connect and be comforted by that person. It is easy to read and logically understand these concepts, but in the “heat of the battle” you forget everything but the pain and anger. Somewhere in the back of your head you have to listen to that little voice that will tell you, “This is how I feel, but I choose how I will act. I can choose to love them or hate them, but what I need most now is their love.” You can explain to them what type of behavior you will accept and what type you will not accept, but you don’t have to make them feel like less of a person because of your pain. An Alcoholics Anonymous saying captures the message: “Anger (or hatred) is like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die.”
Close your eyes and imagine you could feel better about all of your bad relationships. Imagine you could stop being angry and upset and could get past whatever event or memory is preventing you from getting along with that person. The good news is you can. You choose to be angry and upset. You choose to let that past wrong interfere with your relationship. You decide that what they have done is so horrendous that you have to keep them out of your life for whatever amount of time. So make a different decision. As hard as it may seem, forgive them. Understand that whatever they did was an insult, inappropriate, and unforgiveable; but your relationship with them is more important.
Practice Forgiveness
A skill helpful for creating positive relationships is learning forgiveness. Being able to forgive ourselves and others frees us from the burden of maintaining negative emotions. It also releases all parties from being victims. By forgiving ourselves we can stop being victims of our own overly critical judgments, and by forgiving others we can stop being victims of the perceived wrongs they have inflicted upon us. We imprison ourselves by wallowing in and ruminating about what others have done to us, constantly reliving those negative emotions. Having those original feelings of pain or betrayal is not bad or uncommon. The challenge comes when we choose not to let them go, and we relive them over and over again. As the AA saying goes, It is like taking poison and expecting the other person to die. We are hurting ourselves and having little or no effect on them. We have given our power to be happy to them. If we forgive them and let go of the pain, then the relationship can move forward in whatever new form it takes; and we can spend our time finding more positive emotions and experiences.
So how do we shed all that negative emotion and create a space of forgiveness? One idea is to become the observer and pretend you are giving advice to a friend in the same situation. What would you tell them to think about or to conside
r? Another idea is to evaluate the relative value of the relationship against the value of getting to keep your negative emotions. What do you gain by staying angry or upset? What do you gain if you forgive and rebuild the relationship?
Be smart about it. If they are in any way a danger to you or your family, or if they are abusive, you can choose to forgive them but still not subject yourself to danger or physical or verbal abuse. Choose to manage that kind of relationship from a distance via phone, email, or Google Hangout. If you do visit them in person, when their actions become inappropriate, forgive them, but let them know that you choose not to be around them. Rather than nurturing the hate that is created by the pain they cause, nurture the forgiveness and pity you have for someone who is unable to control his actions and his life, or someone who does not understand the negative impacts his actions create.
“Forgiveness is the feeling of peace that emerges as you take your hurt less personally, take responsibility for how you feel, and become a hero instead of a victim in the story you tell.” Dr. Fred Luskin
Get Excited About Good News
Respond well to good news. It can make your relationship stronger and help it last longer. Research has shown that our happiness is magnified when we can share it with others, and magnified even further if the other person had a positive and enthusiastic response to our happiness. How your partner responds to good news is a better predictor of the longevity of the relationship than how he or she responds to bad news. Celebrating small wins is ideally something you encounter daily, or at least much more often than you encounter hard times. Sharing small wins with the people who are close to us increases our level of happiness associated with those wins. When others share with us, it is important to respond positively and enthusiastically. We can often dampen their level of happiness by responding negatively or even by responding in a neutral manner.