by Donna Eden
“Yes, it’s that or the streets for both of us. We’re both really lucky I have this job in these tough economic times.”
“Do you mean that you’re not just thinking about yourself?”
“Yes, that’s what I mean.”
“Do you mean that you try to be on time, but sometimes you just can’t be?”
“Yes, I try really hard.”
“You do, don’t you? Sometimes I forget that.”
Hearing and fully understanding your tonal partner’s meaning makes it more likely that he or she will be able to take in your side of the story. Then encouraging the use of “Do you means” to check out whether your words and actions are being heard and interpreted accurately allows a realignment and new attunement. As your tonal partner comes back to center, you will again receive the gift of being known at your subtle depths and ushered into life’s aesthetic dimensions.
Other Tools to Keep You in Harmony
We wish we could say that if you follow the above instructions, you will never again reach an impasse or have a misunderstanding with your partner. But neither life nor love works that way. Of the hundreds of self-help techniques that have emerged for couples, the following have worked for us personally and for our clients. As a group, these techniques address a range of issues that are important for maintaining positive energy in any relationship.
Notice Breath, Soften Belly, Open Heart
The following is one of David’s favorite ways for quickly centering himself. When you reach an impasse, returning to your own center for a moment is an excellent strategy. The rediscovery of the healing power of meditation as used in ancient spiritual and healing disciplines is considered a breakthrough in contemporary health and mental health care3—for good reasons, including a more relaxed physiology, enhanced ability to meet stress, increased power of concentration, reduced vulnerability to a range of problems from anxiety to heart disease, and greater spontaneity, creativity, peace of mind, and happiness. While this book does not teach a deep, committed, daily meditation, you can still use basic meditative methods to shift your energies in highly beneficial ways.
When you evoke emotions like love, appreciation, caring, and compassion, your heart produces coherent rhythms that get your brain to resonate with them. According to scientists who have investigated the workings of the heart, the heart is able to learn and make decisions independent of the brain. In fact, laboratory experiments have shown that “the signals the heart continuously sends to the brain influence the function of higher brain centers involved in perception, cognition, and emotional processing.”4 Your heart has its own “brain” and “nervous system,” and the brain in your head dutifully obeys messages that are sent from the brain in your heart.5 As you bring your awareness into a “heart space,” your perceptions shift toward compassion and caring, the opposite of the focus that is invoked during flooding. As simply put in Rumi’s mystical poetry, “The way to heaven is in your heart.” A simple technique that brings your focus into your heart can be particularly valuable during relationship stress.
The three-step instructions for the practice contain six simple words: Notice breath. Soften belly. Open heart.6 Set an intention of opening your heart to your partner’s feelings. Then let everything drop away except the six words: Notice breath. Soften belly. Open heart. Say each pair of words with a deep in-breath and a deep out-breath.
With “Notice breath,” your mind concentrates on your breath.
With “Soften belly,” your whole body relaxes.
With “Open heart,” an expansiveness emanates from your chest area.
Repeat this three-breath sequence at least three times. Return to the business at hand. It may seem to have become a different situation altogether. The energies surrounding the situation may have already been transformed.
Gentle Start-Up
One of John Gottman’s most practical single findings is that the way a delicate topic is introduced has a strong influence on whether it will lead a couple on a path toward resolution or toward emotional flooding. The amount of accusation, blame, criticism, and negative voice tone and facial expressions in the early phase of a conversation allowed him to predict the outcome of the conversation with 96 percent accuracy!7
• THE ENERGY DIMENSION •
Notice Breath
Because energy follows attention, there is an immediate shift, with energy moving from your brain to your lungs. The energy becomes more rhythmic and coherent as your awareness focuses on the movement of your breath.
Soften Belly
As your focus shifts down to your belly, the energy literally softens. It becomes less dense and more fluid, moving out beyond the confines of your belly. The energies of your abdomen also align with the energies of your breath.
Open Heart
Even with people who seem to have “closed hearts” or armoring across their chests, Donna sees the energy literally open and become more receptive during this part of the meditation. It looks like a large French door in the front of the chest opening outward. It expands and extends out much farther from the body as the heart, belly, and breath come into a resonance.
A habitual communication style that distinguished happy and lasting marriages from failed relationships was what he calls the “soft start-up.” If you are going to make a request or bring up a disagreement, you are at a choice point. Whether you introduce the issue in a soft or harsh manner is up to you.
It is easier, however, to lead with a soft start-up if you’ve not been stockpiling negative feelings until they finally burst out of you. Research confirms this. While women are more likely to be the ones who bring up difficulties for discussion, the most successful couples tend to deal with conflict as it comes up rather than let it build.8 That means that they are not already overloaded by the time they raise an issue and can take the time to formulate a gentle start-up. Gottman’s guidelines for a gentle start-up and for introducing complaints in a constructive manner follow,9 along with some typical harsh start-ups and how the situations might have been approached more constructively:
Begin with a positive rather than negative reflection of your relationship. Harsh start-up: “When was the last time you left space for us to have some fun and connection time on our work trips? It’s work, work, work, and more work! If we leave it to you, we’ll never have any fun together.” Gentle start-up: “I remember the first concert we went to—Crosby, Stills, and Nash. We sang in the car all the way home. Let’s find a concert we’d both enjoy when we’re in San Francisco next week. Wouldn’t that be fun!”
Express appreciation and gratitude. Harsh start-up: “You never help me with the housework.” Gentle start-up: “I appreciate your having brought in all the gardening tools now that autumn is almost over. Would you help me move the furniture in the living room this weekend so we can make room for my new desk?”
Start with “I” instead of “You.” Harsh start-up: “You always find something more important than being with the kids. You hardly know them!” Gentle start-up: “I was sad this morning when Janie asked you to help her with her math and you had to go off to work. Was that hard for you?”
Don’t stockpile complaints. Harsh start-up: “You never reach out to me anymore. We haven’t had sex in months, and you probably haven’t even noticed.” Gentle start-up: “I’ve been missing our intimate time. I know we’re so busy that we’re exhausted by the time we could even cuddle, but let’s make our time together more important.”
State your feelings and needs without attacking or blaming the other person. Harsh start-up: “I can’t believe that you forgot Jimmy’s birthday. You are the most self-centered person I know!” Gentle start-up: “I’m angry and disappointed that you forgot Jimmy’s birthday. Will you tell me how that happened?”
Describe your side of the story as your perception rather than as the absolute truth. Harsh start
-up: “I’m no fool. Let’s face it, you’re bored with me.” Gentle start-up: “I’ve been feeling lonely lately, and I’m afraid you’re bored with me. You’ve looked at your watch three times just since we started talking.”
Focus on specific behavior, not global judgments. Harsh start-up: “You are the sloppiest person I’ve ever had the misfortune to know.” Gentle start-up: “I know it’s a bummer to have to tidy up the bathroom after you shower, but hanging up the towel and putting your stuff in the hamper would make a real difference to me.”
• THE ENERGY DIMENSION •
A harsh start-up causes the receiver’s energies to pull back into the body, disconnect, and become ready to move back out aggressively. The sender’s energies look exactly the way this start-up is named: harsh. They are fast and forceful.
A gentle start-up invites the energy of curiosity, responsibility, and receptiveness. These energies appear to Donna to have a rolling and engaging quality as they move toward the partner. The sender’s energies move out slowly and softly, with colors that remind Donna of faith and hope.
Making a conscious choice to use a gentle start-up when bringing up a request or expressing a difficult feeling sets the direction of the interaction. The way a start-up is received, even a gentle one, also of course evokes an energy that will influence all that follows. The counterpart of the gentle start-up is nonjudgmental listening.
Nonjudgmental Listening
The “Do you mean” technique is a set of training wheels for nonjudgmental listening. It keeps you attuned so you take in your partner’s feelings, experiences, and meaning before you take action. It gives a structured way for successful conflict resolution, and it puts first things first. Before you try to get your partner to come to your point of view, be able to state your partner’s position to his or her satisfaction. There is tremendous power to listening with an open heart, signaling with your eyes and facial expression that you are completely present and attentive, and offering periodic nonintrusive verbal encouragement with utterances such as “Yes,” “I hear you,” “Uh-huh,” “Go ahead,” “I see why you would feel that way,” and “That must be hard.”
When your partner has the floor during a disagreement, make nonjudgmental listening your priority. Receiving your partner nonjudgmentally is powerfully affirming, though it may be difficult if your partner is exuding anger, judgment, or blame. Before you yourself begin to flood, remind yourself that your partner’s anger is (in most instances) a measure of investment in the relationship, a reflection of caring. A complaint is a bid for connection and, even if this is a hard moment, it is only a moment in a relationship that contains many strengths and that has seen and will almost certainly see many brighter moments. Your job right then is to (1) accurately take in your partner’s feelings and (2) offer verbal and nonverbal evidence that you understand. Particularly important (and challenging) is to remind yourself that your job is not to change your partner’s feelings, fix the situation, or further your own agenda.
Like the gentle start-up, active, attuned listening is a choice that is available to you that can have a transformative effect on the direction of the interchange. It is also a simple and direct way of “turning toward” rather than “away from” or “against” your partner’s bids for connection. Gottman found that the newlywed couples who would still be together on six-year follow-up turned toward each other’s bids for connection an average of 88 percent of the time, while those who would be divorced six years later turned toward each other’s bids an average of only 33 percent of the time.10
Cultivating Gratitude
Expressing appreciation is not just for the soft start-up. However much tension may (or may not) pervade your relationship, your partner has chosen you for building a shared life. This puts you in an exclusive position as a primary source of affirmation and “mirroring.” Your partner’s sense of self is influenced by what you reflect back. Genuine appreciation is incredibly reinforcing, and what is reinforced tends to be repeated. In a very real sense, “what you see is what you get.” The more you appreciate your partner’s favorable qualities and convey that appreciation, the more those qualities are likely to be expressed. Most people, however, begin to take for granted what is always there. The tendency to scan for what needs to be fixed rather than for what is right can also overshadow an appreciative outlook. Regularly delivering appreciations is powerfully affirming for your partner, and it also keeps you on the alert for what you truly appreciate in the everyday flow of your lives together.
AN APPRECIATION VOLLEY
While expressing gratitude and appreciation is valuable any time, if you do it in a structured manner, attending to this vital need to say and to hear what is positive won’t get lost in the busyness of your lives. You can do it as a “volley,” giving your partner three “I appreciate . . .” statements, or you can alternate, one of you making the statement, then the other. Receive the appreciation with a “thank you” or other positive acknowledgment. We will set our writing aside right now and do this, recording what we say:
DAVID: “Donna, even though it was hard to take it the other day when you told me that you were mad at me because I wanted to fire Lina, I am realizing right now that I got over it so quickly because I thought of the thousands of times you have been there backing me in my choices. I really appreciate that.”
DONNA: “Thank you, David. I appreciate how you come around after something difficult with me and how kind you are when you do.”
DAVID: “Thank you, Donna. Donna, I appreciate the way that even when you are having difficulty with something, you will switch into moments of absolute joy. Yesterday you were so stressed trying to get ready to leave for our conference, and then you suddenly said, ‘Look at these blue shoes, they make me so happy!!!’ Things like that just dissolve the tension and make my life so much more fun.”
DONNA: “Thank you! David, even though you’re a pretty in-your-head kind of guy, I really appreciate how you are so often able to put my feelings into words when I can’t.”
DAVID: “I couldn’t have said that better myself, Donna! Thank you. Donna, I appreciate the way you invite me to help you word things when you are writing a hard letter or trying to express a difficult concept. That is so affirming, and it brings out a part of me that I really like.”
DONNA: “Thank you. David, I appreciate how well you do that for me. You have a big heart, and you’re able to be right there for me.”
DAVID: “Thank you . . .”
We invite you to experiment with creating regular, dedicated time together for “volleys” like this. Making structured appreciations a regular practice trains you to keep yourself attuned for what you truly appreciate about one another in a way that helps the love between you to blossom. A note on protocol: While there is no rule against using the same statement more than once, and some qualities or acts deserve to be acknowledged many times, you will find it embarrassing if the best you can come up with week after week is “I appreciate the tennis racket you gave me for Christmas three years ago.” Attuning yourself during the week so you notice what is worthy of your appreciation can quickly upgrade the quality of the energy that flows between you.
AN APPRECIATION SANDWICH
Another valuable use of the power of appreciation is coming to be known in couples therapy circles as the “Appreciation Sandwich.” It is actually a structured approach for the soft start-up. It gently brings your focus to a problem that needs to be solved, sandwiching your concern between two appreciations. When you wish to raise an issue that may be touchy, announce to your partner that you would like to offer an Appreciation Sandwich. This becomes a way of signaling to your partner that you are planning to gently enter difficult territory and hope he or she will be receptive.
From this invitation, move right into the Appreciation Sandwich or agree on a time for you to deliver it.
Begin by expressing a sincere s
tatement reflecting something you genuinely value about your partner, in the form of “I appreciate . . .”
Your partner listens attentively and responds with a “Thank you.”
You then express your area of concern or a request with a carefully worded statement that begins “I have difficulty with . . .” or “I would like you to . . .”
Again, your partner listens attentively and ends with a “Thank you.”
You complete the “sandwich” with another statement that begins “I appreciate . . .”
This is received with another “Thank you.”
Your partner’s first response is to clarify the “I have difficulty with . . .” statement using the “Do you mean” format, continuing until receiving “yes” responses to three questions.
Once your difficulty or request has been fully received and understood, tell your partner that you appreciate that your meaning was taken in. At that point, any subsequent discussion about the issue will proceed on a more solid foundation.
• THE ENERGY DIMENSION •
Expressing Gratitude
The more you state genuine appreciation, the more you activate your body’s radiant circuits—the energies of joy, gladness, awe, wonder, and generosity. Because of the stresses in our lives, this energy system has gone dormant for many people, but by exercising it you rebuild it. So expressing gratitude not only serves you as a couple, it builds stronger muscles for joy within you.
Tell Me What You Want to Hear!
Sometimes appreciations that come out of a structured exercise fall flat. You just can’t quite find the words or the focus or the passion to ring your partner’s bells with your appreciation statements. You can instead ask your partner to role-play being you and to state the appreciations he or she would like to hear you say. It is often astounding not only how well he or she can do it, but how your partner’s sincerely saying what he or she longs to hear may boost your empathy and become highly instructive for you. In fact, this is a powerful technique in many situations. If your partner is not giving you the response you long for, simply pretending you are your partner and saying your own name and then what you would wish to hear can sometimes clue your partner right into giving you what you are wanting. Usually it is not that your partner doesn’t want to tell you what you want to hear but that he or she doesn’t have any idea about what that is. This often traces to your sensory modes and other differences far more than any insensitivity or lack of caring. If you have established the technique as part of your repertoire with one another, it can be a powerful tool.