If you are looking for a quick fix or an easy “wallpaper” solution to a problem, there is plenty of free advice on the internet. But it may not be as helpful as you think. Remember the adage, you get what you pay for. If you have made your way here, you may already know to view any pithy or quick advice with skepticism no matter if you find it on Reddit or in a therapy office. While a situational problem may resolve quickly with a tip or skill in the right direction, long standing psychological and relationship issues tend to have more layers under the surface so it takes a more complex approach to address.
Simple and easy tips are not bad if applied at the right time and to the right problem. At the same time, some habits are hard to change, and some skills need a lot of practice to really become second nature to you. So in this blog, I want to take you on a journey that begins with the simple and ends with the more complex. Let’s look together at the whole gamut – things you can do in a day, week, month, and a year to change your situation or your skills and abilities to deal with a situation in your life.
One Day: Shift Your Perspective
Behaviors and circumstances may take much longer than one day to shift, especially when it comes to relationships, because they involve the willing participation of another person beyond your control. But do you know what is under your willpower, at least to some degree? Your perspective.
In other words, you may not be able to stop your spouse from throwing their socks on the floor, but in just a single day, you can choose to shift how you choose to interpret those socks or your partner’s intentions in throwing them on the floor. Keep in mind we cannot actually know what made them throw their socks on the floor. That is called Mindreading and is one of the most common dysfunctional thought patterns we tend to engage in. Their cluttering may not be deliberate or intentional as a way of frustrating you. In fact, most of the time our partner’s actions have little to do with us except when we decide to take it personally. Their choices are not your problem unless you make it so. So change your perspective – find another way to view your partner’s intentions in leaving their socks on the floor. Call it mindless, call it rushed, call it entropy, and let it go.
Of course, when you try this, you may notice right away that perspective-shifting is a process in itself. Listen to the protesting that arises when you attempt to change from being annoyed at your partner to a more benevolent stance: “But they should carry their weight around the house.”
How do you respond to this thought? First, validate your emotion of frustration at the seeming inequity. Then, question this way of framing the situation – because it’s clearly bringing you more frustration and annoyance than peace. Why take on suffering because you cannot make your partner care about clutter like you do?
Are there other ways in which they contribute to domestic chores that you’re overlooking? “Well, they are good about putting out the garbage bins on Wednesdays. I tend to forget that.” Or they always help with the laundry (even if the laundry is strewn around the room, LOL).
Do they bring other strengths to the relationship that complement yours? Often, couples are attracted to each other for behaviors that eventually become a source of frustration. That is relational murphy’s law. What looks sweet or cute right now will become a sore spot later.
Upon further reflection, you may remember that you are better about chores, but your partner is better about scheduling social events with your friends – without them, you would maintain a tidy home and forget to put time into your relationships for months at a time. From this vantage point, you could adopt one way of reframing your annoyance. “My partner is bad about picking up socks, but they’re good about picking up the phone.”
Looking at complementary strengths and weaknesses is just one way to reframe your view. By questioning your perspective in a gentle and curious – yet self-validating – way, you will likely discover a natural reframe. And you may even feel motivated to voice the appreciation for your partner that arises – something that, in troubled situations, may have been missing for a while! This can be a small but powerful step to break a negative cycle. And here is a secret tip: If you compliment your partner often for what they do right, they are more likely to pick up their socks!
One Week: Journal and/or Interview the Other Person
Now, let’s advance one week into your journey to bring about positive change in your relationship. In working on your individual perspective, you probably already noticed that there’s much under the surface to process. Over the next week, can you expand your curiosity?
For many folks, that can look like personal journaling and, if your partner/other person in the relationship is willing, interviewing them from a place of curiosity about their experience might yield surprising results. After all, in the heat of the moment, you may launch into criticisms and complaints at each other, but have you gotten an inside view of the situation from your partner’s eyes? What is truly “off”? What’s working and not working? A famous couples therapist, Dan Wile, once said, “If you find your partner’s behavior or words infuriating, try building empathy for their perspective.” Try to look for the “hidden reasonableness” in their logic. You might find they make a lot of sense even if they see things very differently than you do.
Consider asking questions like a journalist; ones you have never thought to ask your partner in the middle of power struggles and nit-picking. “How did you feel when I snapped at you about your socks being on the floor again?” “Tell me what was going on for you that day?” “How do you view clutter around the house and how would you ideally like to participate in keeping a clean home?”
When we step back and admit that we don’t truly know what the other person is experiencing in a complex and nuanced way, it can have a cooling effect on conflict and criticism within a tense relationship.
One Month: Build a Collaborative Connection
After you have collected all this information about your inner experiences and the experiences of the other person, what can you do with it? Over the next few weeks, take in everything that you’ve learned and sort according to the question: “How can we help support each other?” How can we capitalize on our strengths?
Let’s say that you interviewed your partner about throwing their socks on the floor. Through that process you get to the question, “What is it like for you when you get home from work?” Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to you, the sock police, that your partner is more exhausted by their in-person work than you are by your remote work. And your partner learns that you view your shared adobe as your office as much as your home – which is why mess and clutter perturb you so much.
Now you both have the opportunity not only to shift your perspective, but to brainstorm ways that you could make life a little easier – even sweeter – for each other. Note that this brainstorming is its own stage. You may be tempted to leap into new chore systems or modalities of healing, but it’s best to move slowly and gradually toward change that you can sustain. Begin by focusing on building understanding and empathy. When we truly get our partners’ inner reality or struggle, a creative compromise can be easier to find. Too much change too fast can either be short lived and cause a feeling of let down when either of your relapse or worse yet, rupture the system with more frustration at failure, slowness to adopt new ways, and the emotional resistance that arises from your own internal hangups about change.
Remember: BOTH of you own this problem. Your partner may not care about seeing socks on the floor till laundry day while you cannot tolerate it for more than a few hours. So in coming up with compromises, make sure both of you are honoring what is really important to the other person to make the compromise stick. Perhaps your partner needs flexibility and you need consistency. Find a way to honor both sides.
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy
Part of the foundation of the above wisdom is a specific model of therapy called Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT). While many types of therapy focus on the past, and use that to understand and analyze its effects on the present, SFBT grounds itself in the present and helps the client create a plan for the future.
To put it in the words of Insoo Kim Berg, the founder of SFBT:
“Instead of problem solving, we focus on solution-building. Which sounds like a play on words, but it’s a profoundly different paradigm. We’re not worrying about the problems. We discovered, in fact, I don’t say that just for an audience today, but we discovered that there’s no connection between a problem and its solution. No connection whatsoever. Because when you ask a client about their problem, they will tell you a certain kind of description; but when you ask them about their solutions, they give you entirely different descriptions of what the solution would look like for them… a horrible, alcoholic family will say, ‘We will have dinner together and talk to each other. We will go for a walk together.’”
It is a person-affirming, action-oriented, and client-empowering approach, which can be nice to incorporate when you are trying to co-construct solutions to relationship problems.
SFBT works its magic through creative, exploratory questions. This helps keep the conversation in a dialogue space geared toward open, compassionate curiosity rather than blame or shame – fittingly, focused on solutions rather than problems. Some examples of these questions include:
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“What would you like to have happen?”
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“What has helped so far?”
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“What will make things better today?”
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“How could we find our way into a different conversation?”
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“What do you want to stay the same?”
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And the famous miracle question which is described further below.
Can you see how you could use some of these questions when approaching conflict or issues in your own relationship?
Investigating Exceptions
One powerful approach in SFBT is noting the moments in which a problem seems to spontaneously resolve on its own. If you can seize on these and trace back what happened, sometimes you can reverse-engineer a proactive solution.
In our example scenario, you and your partner might think back to the last time that the floor was free of socks – what was different in that moment? Can you create those circumstances on a more regular basis? How can you each contribute to creating that supportive situation?
Miracle Questions
Another SFBT conversation method to encourage creative solutions is the Miracle Question. This premise proposes that, overnight, the problem you’ve been facing is magically resolved.
The question is often phrased this way: If you woke up tomorrow and this problem no longer existed, what will you notice first, who will you credit for the change, and how will life feel different after that?
When you wake up, what small clues start to cue you in to the existence of a new reality in which you no longer deal with this problem? And how can those clues lead you to the details of the miracle that took place? Talking through those details can help you discover a grounded solution that is, in fact, quite within reach.
Scaling
One other important component of collaborative problem-solving is accurately measuring your distance from your goals and how long it will realistically take you to make progress. In SFBT, this is framed in scaling questions, which help you define the degrees of steps you can take toward your preferred solution. You and your partner may want to talk through the gradation of change that’s possible and on what timeline.
One Year: Change Your Behavior
If you are able to reach collaborative conversations with your partner, then one year is enough time to enact some actual change in behavior.
This is where the value of daily and weekly practice comes in. Human beings are creatures of habit and familiarity. So while we fully intend to make changes that we know is going to be good for us and we know we will feel better or have a better relationship if we do it, we can put in a tremendous effort for a short time and then we relapse back to our usual way of doing things. Making long term changes is like changing the direction of a huge ocean liner. It cannot be done quickly or sharply (the way a speedboat can change directions). It takes repeated small steps until the ocean liner is moving correctly in the right direction.
Some couples find this easier to do with simple agreements rather than complex organizational systems or detailed GANT charts for the relationship. Perhaps over time you can manage multiple agreements, but it’s okay to work in stages.
For instance: “I agree to put my socks in the laundry hamper when I get home from work. To support me in this, you agree to feed the kids a snack around the time when I come home, so they’re distracted and don’t immediately take all my attention (which encourages me to strip off my socks and just leave them wherever so I can run around with our kids).”
Think about habit change in small doable steps. Cue one habit with another habit you already have. If you walk in the door and kick off your shoes in a particular place, maybe put a laundry hamper right there so shoes go to one side and socks go in the hamper. Or perhaps you have the habit of turning off all the lights in the house before you go to bed and you can pick up any clutter as you go from one room to the next so it becomes a rhythm of lights off, clutter off, and a peaceful rest, aaah!
And keep in mind that honey attracts more bees than vinegar. In other words, being generous with compliments, kudos, high fives, and thank yous will create an atmosphere where your partner feels more motivated to be generous towards you, accept your influence (and pick up the socks even if they don’t care), and begin to share in your wish to keep a clean environment.
Which is, after all, the ultimate goal. You are not trying to make your shared life, home, or workplace robotically spotless – you’re simply trying to create a functional harmony in which, socks on the floor or not, you can each feel wholly yourselves, alive, and witnessed by the other people in your life.
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