Here’s a glimpse into a conversation I recently had with a client. I wanted to share it because these kinds of things happen so often in marriages or long-term relationships.
By using the very thing that is upsetting us, we can dramatically change disturbing relationship dynamics!
Challenge Participant: My husband keeps doing things unintentionally. My one-liner is: I need him to remember to pay attention to my needs for me to feel safe and connected. It feels like a future of fear of getting hurt again. Every time, he says he’s sorry and he doesn’t mean to, but keeps doing it.
My response: It really helps to work the thinking that is triggering you in an actual, specific situation. You can even include in the one-liner that you want to feel safe and connected, so then you can boil the one liner down to something really short like “I need him to remember to pay attention to my needs.”
Questions 1 & 2 of The Work
Re-state your one-liner, then question one of The Work of Byron Katie, “I need him to remember to pay attention to my needs”, is it True?
Then question 2. Can I absolutely know that it is true—That “I need him to remember to pay attention to my needs?
Sometimes you can get a shift just by asking yourself if it’s true, but in marriage, we are often overcome with an emotional charge that requires observing responses in a deeper way…
Questions 3 & 4 of The Work
And then really go into Question Three, looking at how you react when you believe that thought, how you treat him, how you feel toward him, how you don’t notice all the times he does attend to your needs and instead you only focus on when he doesn’t. Whose business are you in when you believe you know how what he is supposed to attend to or remember?
At Question Four, ask who you would be in that moment if you did not have that belief at all (if you were just showing up as pure curiosity and receiving). Look at his face in your stressful situation and see how you feel about it without the thought. (It doesn’t mean you get rid of the thought; it just means you imagine yourself in that situation as someone who never had that belief.)
Turnarounds for Freedom
Then when you turn it around you can find examples for:
1) the self: How do you not remember to pay attention to your own needs?
2) the other: How do you not remember to pay attention to his needs? (It’s all very biblical—we take the log out of our own eye before we worry about the speck in the other person’s eye.) Then your peace does not involve him needing to change; you’ve got your work cut out for you there with turnarounds one and two.
3) to the opposite: I don’t need him to remember to pay attention to my needs…. Find three reasons why you don’t need that, including you don’t need that because that’s not what’s happening in that moment.
…Then You Feel Super Blessed, or Can Negotiate
This is a radical shift for so many marriages. When even one person starts to get this, they notice how often the person really is paying attention to their needs and they feel super blessed and supported. The mind tends to want to focus on its story that you are not having needs met, but those times can serve as a wake-up call… a reflection of how YOU are doing to yourself or others what you thought was being done to you.
It’s also important not just to be a doormat, i.e., to negotiate to get your needs met. But so often we are barking up the wrong tree and it wasn’t really about the other person anyway. Coming home to ourselves, and seeing how we are the ones who left (so we are the ones who need to come home… and in this case remember to meet our own needs) starts to clear up the rest. We are then able to ask for what we want without strings attached
It is SO MUCH FUN when you can use your triggers to turn around your relationship to yourself, which turns around all your other troubling relationships too.
IF YOU ARE SERIOUS ABOUT GETTING SOME RADICAL RELATIONSHIP RELIEF—then I hope you will seriously consider a complete shift in the way you see your relationship needs–14-days or less to your own Stressful Relationship Solution: a course being offered for more than 1/2 off during February! (One video + short lesson per day, or work through them all in an afternoon for a whole new perspective on whatever stressful relationship you focus on as you work through this hands-on self-paced course!) ***And for a limited time, since the course is new, those who work through a certain percentage of the lessons get a Happiness Breakthrough Session with me!
Much love,
🙂 Shawn
PS. We’ve GOT THIS! I mean it—We totally do have the solution to being triggered and feeling victimized by loved ones or other things–even the weather!
- Be seen and heard in all of your relationships! Come take the new STRESSFUL RELATIONSHIP SOLUTION digital course, which I am discounting during February.
- You’ll work through ONE need in ONE relationship (and you can do it on many more via this simple course), and that can change everything!
- Once you’ve finished this “shortcourse,” you have not only learned or gone deeper into The Work, but will have a whole new perspective on HOW TO BE HAPPY WHETHER OR NOT OTHERS CHANGE!
Just CLICK to Learn MORE:
