It’s been a week and I’m still sitting with something that happened in a couples workshop. 👩❤️👨
The Gottman’s are well known couples’ therapists and have developed a unique approach to conflict resolution. It comes down to one core idea. You appreciate your partner on purpose, not just when you happen to feel like it. This wasn’t a new concept for us but they did offer their own “special sauce” for the process.
One exercise was built for a different kind of conflict. Not the blowup kind. The long-running kind, the one that’s been part of a marriage for years without ever fully resolving.
We went in assuming we had to do the hard part first. Define the conflict. Get precise about what it actually was, so we’d have something solid to work with. 😎
My husband, who’s spent his career as a psychotherapist, 👨⚕️ wanted the tidy version as much as I did.
That’s not what happened. 🫣
We circled it for a while and couldn’t pin it down … every time we got close to a clean definition, it turned into something else. I got frustrated. I wanted to point at it and say THAT’S the thing.
That frustration taught me something I still believe. If we could have named it that cleanly, we would have already solved it. The reason it’s stuck around this long is exactly that it resists being pinned down. 📌
So we stopped trying to define it. We just talked. Nothing about it happened on command, and it wasn’t neat. But once we set the diagnosis down, we could actually hear each other, including the part we still don’t agree on.
I do a version of this most evenings anyway, an abbreviated form of what I teach as Aware Appreciation™. Usually it’s aimed inward, at what I’d otherwise walk past in my own day. Appreciation isn’t only something you do for yourself though. This week, mine went toward my husband instead of focusing on me. And, guess what?! The benefits were still felt by yours truly. 🤷
If there’s a conflict in your own life that’s been sitting there for years, resisting every attempt to define it precisely, that resistance might not be the problem. Set the diagnosis down for one evening and focus on what you can appreciate instead. Trust me. It’s foolproof. 👌
