Relationship Conflict That Works

Aside from the make-up sex, arguing with your mate really sucks. The sad part is that the fighting doesn’t usually get anywhere. Most people don’t know how to argue effectively. Conflict can work for you. You just need to know how to do it. Resolving conflict can empower a relationship. Just think about your favorite movie—the hero and heroine face a huge problem and, after a major battle, they win.

Conflict can make you feel strong, if you work your way through it. Try this…

Don’t Name-Call

You might think you have to call him names to get his friggin’ attention, but this is a really bad idea. It makes for a vicious fighting experience that wears away your affection for one another over time. Don’t call names. There are better ways to get your loved one to see that you’re seriously upset.

Listen to Your Mate

Listening is really hard—particularly when you don’t feel listened to yourself. Most people will say they’re listening, but the person they’re arguing with doesn’t feel heard. Important—Listening doesn’t mean you agree with everything she’s saying.

You still need to hear her.

Individuals tend to hear what they think the other person is saying and then they try to explain why they did (or didn’t do) whatever. Explaining doesn’t work if the other person doesn’t feel you’ve listened to him.

You need to listen—sit quietly and concentrate on what the other person is saying to you—even if you disagree. Don’t interrupt. Don’t explain. Take mental notes like you’re going to be tested on this information. You’re listening to her perspective, her view on the situation.

Tell Him How You Feel

When your significant other has said all he wants to say, it’s your turn. Not your turn to say what you think(not yet). Instead, you need to repeat back to him what you heard him say. “So, you felt ignored when I didn’t call you. It seemed like you weren’t all that important”—or whatever.

This may not have been at all what you meant.

Still, repeat it back to him so he knows you’ve heard him and what he’s feeling. Repeat back what you’ve heard him say. If you heard wrong, he’ll tell you. That’s okayGive it another go. Listen even harder, then tell him what you’ve heard.

After all this—after you’ve heard how she thinks things are and listened to her feelings—then you tell her how you see the situation. Don’t use blaming language. Start your sentences with “I feel….” Don’t tell her what you think she ought to do or how she ought to see it differently or why she’s so messed up.

Tell her how you feel.

By this point, the two of you are talking and caring about each other and communicating. Resolving problems gets a lot easier when you can hear each other. If you’ve not gotten to a point of being able to communicate about the issue, you’ve probably not been successful with the first few steps.

Try again. Arguing sucks, but working things out feels great.

Failure's Message

It could be that you’re just a screw-up, but that would mean that everyone who ever failed at anything is also a screw-up. History is littered with huge successes that failed miserably for a while before hitting it big. Everyone messes up. Don’t kid yourself, it’s not just you. The real challenge is in finding what the failure means. What it means about your function, your endeavor, your risk.

Don’t miss the message. Failure is telling you something important. There’s a vital message in your failure. It’s saying to you “…next time, try a little to the left….”

You may be headed down the wrong road, but even the right road has bumps, sometimes big bumps. It’s really important to look at your situation as objectively as possible. This can be difficult. The struggle to attain a personal goal can be very challenging. If you’ve been The Golden Child in your family, you might feel the pressured to always do well. This is a big strain since no one is perfect. As hard as it may be, give up any attempt to reach perfection.

You will fail. Everyone fails. Just make sure you see what the failure is telling you. You need to think of failure as a corrective tool. Something to learn from. There’s valuable information in the experience, even if the feeling is awful. If your working toward your goal leads to you falling short, you need to figure out why. Even if you give up the goal, you need to see the learning. Most individuals think that screwing up means you need to give up.

Wrong. You just need to do things differently.

The goal may be mistaken. Maybe it’s someone else’s goal for you to be a great pianist or earn a graduate degree. Perhaps you’re pursuing this goal because you think the attainment of it will make you feel better about yourself. You might be going after this goal because you’re trying to follow a successful parent (or trying not to follow a successful parent) or because, for whatever reason, you think you ought to seek this.

The path is probably long and difficult. You need to pursue goals for the right reasons—for you. Because you like the process (not the failure part) or because achieving the goal feels like part of who you are.

You might need to mull over why you’re going after this goal, but risking failure should never keep you from seeking.

The only way not to fail is to never try anything. That leads to a sad, sad life (which is really the ultimate failure). Failure results from trying and not reaching. No matter what ball you're trying to hit, you're going to miss it first. Failure is a fundamental part of success and it needs to be viewed as giving corrective information, not as a reflection of self-worth.

Go ahead. Chase a dream. Just make sure you use failure as a tool, not a judgment of you.

Breaking Up

Never say “if it’s this hard, it probably wasn’t meant to be” about your relationship. Don’t kid yourself. Relationships are hard. In fact, they’re probably one of the hardest things you’ll do in your life. Of course, relationships can be rewarding, fulfilling and a lot of fun, too. But they’re not always easy. If it seems like yours is easy, just wait.

Okay, so the arguing sucks.

You fight and it’s ugly. Maybe you’ve been fighting more and more. It may seem like you just get over one fight and your partner picks another fight. Maybe you’re breaking up, and even if you really don’t want to—you don’t want to do this anymore.

There are some things (that most people do) that you shouldn’t do. Don’t threaten to leave. Threatening is pointless. Maybe you’re just trying to show her how mad you really are. Maybe you’re seriously pissed, at the moment. Maybe you’re just tired. Saying you’re going to leave may seem like pulling out the big guns—just another war strategy.

Don’t do it. Don’t threaten to leave until you’re really ready to leave. Leaving should be reserved for when you’re done with the relationship. Finito. Through. Outta here.

Be done or don’t say it.

Don’t leave until you’re really through with the relationship, either. Don’t do that back-and-forth, on-again, off-again thing. It’s draining and exhausting and it doesn’t make anything better.

But even if you don’t, your partner may leave. If you’re faced with a separation you don’t want, be careful. How you handle this can either make or break any hopes you have for getting back together. There are specific things to do, though. First, go to therapy and listen. This may be hard. Talking to a stranger about your personal life is weird. Do it anyway.

Go by yourself, if your significant other isn’t interested. This is important. Go by yourself. When you’ve got a relationship break-up, it’s clichéd to offer to go to therapy. Kind of seems phony and desperate. She may think you just want to do this because she’s really, really mad. She thinks you’re just saying you’ll go with her to therapy because she’s talking about ending it. She doesn’t think you’re serious about changing things. If you want to really show that you’re open to see what you can do differently, go by yourself.

Don’t stalk and pester your partner. Believe me, this isn’t sexy and it doesn’t put things back together. This only makes your mate think you’ve lost your mind and maybe she should take out a restraining order. You may be thinking about her all the time. You want her to know, but don’t call her a million times a day. It’ll only make things worse.

Don’t dismiss her concerns and complaints. Don’t argue that you haven’t done whatever she's saying you did or you haven't done it that much. If she didn’t have an issue with whatever she’s concerned about, it wouldn’t be under discussion.

Above all, listen. Really listen. If you have a hard time with this, get your therapist to explain what your partner’s saying.

Don’t kid yourself. Relationships are hard work…and they can be worth all the effort. This can really be good for you. You can learn to make your life better.

Don't Forgive Too Fast

Everyone gets hurt—damaged by someone else’s actions or offended by comments that shouldn’t have been made. Some individuals are the victims of a major breach in their relationships.

This can leave you gasping in pain, particularly when the injury comes from your mate, your mother or your best friend. These are individuals to whom you’ve given your deepest trust. People you thought loved you. When one of these individuals commit an offense against you, it goes right to the quick.

Forgiveness is a big buzzword. Experts say you have to forgive for your own well being and to be in alignment with positive karma. But nothing is said about understanding why this offense happened. You have to forgive.

But don’t be too quick to rush to say it’s okay. Don’t forgive too quickly. It isn’t healthy.

When an offense occurs in a relationship that matters—one you want to maintain, you may jump into forgiveness just so you can get beyond this painful place. You may say you forgive this horrible action. You want this behind you. You may want to keep the offender in your life. You may even feel—just a very little bit—noble in your forgiveness.

Painful, difficult things don’t go away just because you say you forgive.

And while forgiveness if supposed to heal all, false forgiveness doesn’t make anything better. Particularly if the offender never really asked for forgiveness or if the situation that caused your pain has never been effectively addressed. For forgiveness to make sense, something has to change. Relationships—between mother and child, those between friends and relatives—intimate relationships, these are difficult and complex. Sometimes offenses are not intended or foreseen

Still, when you get cheated on or lied to or deceived, offering forgiveness without change doesn’t help the situation. You may have contributed to this situation, you may have been less than honest yourself. Your need to own up to your own behavior, the things you’ve messed up.

But this doesn’t mean you need to overlook the other person’s actions.

Forgiveness doesn’t need to be given easily. If you’re too quick to offer it—if you don’t deal with the problems in the relationship—you’re offering an empty nothing. You’re trying to make everything okay, just by saying it’s okay.

True forgiveness just doesn’t work this way.

Love Bi-Polar

No one just leaves a relationship, anymore. They torture each other for a while first.

Most people don’t have a clue about how to break up or to do the reverse—fight productively. They don’t actually get anywhere, really. You’d probably like to be in a relationship where the two of you always get along and never fight. Relationships always have conflicts, though, so the arguing and fighting typically results in some unhealthy yelling, name-calling and hurt feelings.

In the middle of all this, someone breaks-up with someone, saying that they’re outta here. There are usually tears and maybe something gets thrown as someone heads out the door.

Then, they both start to miss one another, get amnesia about the bad times, dwelling on the good times and how sweet their significant other can be (sometimes). Then, inevitably, someone ends up texting or calling someone. What follows is almost as inevitable--because something drew you together in the first place--you make up and live happily until the downward spiral that starts it all over.

You might end up doing this over and over. Of course, it’s all much more complicated if you’ve been together a while, have children together or are legally married. You’ve got an investment. It may seem crazy to just throw all that away and you might start thinking about what you’ve contributed to the mess. Maybe you weren’t totally and completely right. Maybe you said something you shouldn’t have or did something you shouldn’t have. Suddenly, you’ve changed from blowing cold to being very hot, again.

It can wear you out.

The relationship may have massive, deep flaws that leave you wondering why you keep coming back. This is actually an excellent question. You really need to know why you feel pulled back into this relationship. You need to know what you’re getting out of this interaction, whether you stay or you go. This is info that’s very valuable.

You need to know the good stuff. If you get to the point of leaving again, you need to remember what kept you in it as long as you’ve been there. This may not be enough to keep you from walking out the door. The bad stuff may still out-weigh the good stuff, but stay until you’ve really had enough. Even if you get totally mad. Even if you want to scream and throw things.

Don't leave and then turn around and come back. Stay until you're done.

If you’re still hooked in this thing, stay. Don’t do this if there’s risk to your person, of course. Then, you need to get the heck outta Dodge and figure out how the relationship has worked for you(don't tell me it didn't work for you in some twisted way) from a safe distance. You do need to figure out what’s been working. What worked in the beginning… And you need to be very clear about what's not working.

If you keep waffling about this relationship, ask yourself: What is this power he or she has over you?!? The answer is important—not that it means you should get back in—but for you to understand what’s going on with you.

It’s always safest to know what’s going on with you.

Does Everyone Cheat?

We’re almost getting used to hearing about politicians who cheat on their wives. It seems crazy for them to do this when they have so much to lose. Yet, they continue to cheat.

It’s not just politicians, either. Cheating is rampant. You probably know friends who’ve cheated…or been cheated on. Maybe both. You may have cheated. Whether physical or emotional, cheating is on the rise.

For whatever reason, the largest percentage of the population still has expectations of exclusivity in intimate relationships. We still want fidelity. We’re just not good at it. Some estimates put 80% of relationships as having one or both mates cheating. This may be arguably a high figure and, understandably, hard numbers aren’t easily yielded. Still, the big question is why?

The wronged individual almost always wants to know this. Why did the infidelity happen? Why did this person cheat? Some people wonder if they’ve caused their spouses to step out on them. Are they, in some way, responsible? Did they not do something they should have done? Or do something they shouldn’t have done? Both the need to understand this kind of breach and the difficulty doing so is haunting.

Infidelity leaves a stain that’s hard to remove.

There are a bunch of answers to these questions. Most of them are intricately individual, but some things are universal. Cheating is a sign of prior trouble in the committed relationship. To some, this feels like blaming the victim. Others think this is offering an excuse to the cheater. Neither implication is true. However, if there weren’t trouble, of some sort, in the relationship, the cheater wouldn’t have cheated. Most people don’t want to believe this. They are so hurt by the betrayal that they struggle to look objectively at the condition the relationship was in before the cheating happened. Please don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying that the cheating is in any way excused by the relationship having issues. Relationships always have issues of some sort. It’s the character-building part of relationships. Many folks deal with these without getting into an emotional or physical interaction with someone else. Relationship conflict is not an excuse.

But cheating doesn’t occur in happy relationships.

It sometimes occurs in relationships that the cheated-on mate thought was happy, but they’re usually misinformed or uninformed. Their significant other wasn’t happy. People who cheat use phrases like “it just happened” and “we weren’t looking to get involved” when they’re talking about the affair. They’re just as delusional as the cheated-on mate. Somewhere, someone made a choice.

Cheating is a sign of prior trouble in the committed relationship. Individuals in emotionally-connected relationships, where conflicts are resolved, don’t cheat.

Again, this is not an excuse. But relationship conflicts can be resolved, although no one is saying the process is easy. You can even survive an affair with the relationship intact, if everyone is invested in making this happen. You can. Only, not if you don’t deal with the issues that weakened the relationship initially. If you just try to forgive and hope it won't happen again, you're fooling yourself and just limping forward, with nothing learned.

Learn from the trauma. The hard part about this process for the betrayed mate is talking about how he or she contributed to the relationship estrangement. When you’re wronged, it’s hard to look at how you contributed to the problems before the infidelity. After all, you weren't the one getting naked and talking dirty to someone other than your mate. But you have to look at what wasn't resolved before this. You need to see your part in whatever was happening in the relationship. This is your power in this mess. It's what you can change, if you decide to stay. This is the only hope of getting the relationship on a healthy track.

Cheating is never, ever, a good answer, no matter what the relationship problems. But, one way or the other, you can survive.

College Smart

So, you’re supposed to get a college degree in order to make a decent living. Right? If you don’t want to work at McDonalds—nothing against those folks(they’re saints to put up with what they have to put up with)—you’ll need a profession. General opinion is that you need to go to college to get, at least, a two-year degree.

A college degree in any field was once considered a ticket to working for big bucks. This is no longer the case.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go to college. Higher education provides you with more choices and, statistically, more income. Go to college, but be smart about it. There are individuals who are artists, performers or really great plumbers. College isn’t probably as vital for them as, say—someone who wants to do research in neuroscience. Most people need some kind of training in order to achieve their professional goals. College is the logical choice.

It’s important to ask college recruiters questions, but the most important person for you to interview is yourself. There are current college myths you need to recognize. You need to think about what your college education will prepare you for.

What career will fit you best? This isn’t always obvious. You probably have relatives, friends and teachers weighing in on this one. It’s easy to be blinded by the perceived prestige and power of a profession. What you really need to ask is will you enjoy the work that this career will entail everyday. Will you go happily off to work as a lawyer, arguing for a living? You may make serious money as a litigator, but lawyers handle tons of paperwork and phone calls, too. Will you enjoy that? Will you be happy doing this job?

Will you make enough money? Is this kind of job going to enable you to live the kind of life you want (and afford to put your kids through school, as well as, save for retirement)? It’s hard to know what’s enough money for each individual. This is a question you must ask yourself. Then, you need to be honest about what you’re willing to do to earn that income. And, again, will you be happy? You might make a mint in business, but this will be meaningless, if you don’t like your job.

Will attending a prestigious college help you? Once you decide what you want to be, you have to ask yourself if spending the money for a degree from a big name school is worth it. Will going to this school really help you get to know the “right people” and thus, end up making your professional life easier? You need to weigh whether these advantages are worth the college loans you may have to take out. There is a lot a debate on this subject.

Then, when you graduate, will you be able to live comfortably and pay off your loans? This is a really important question. You might be drawn to the prestige of a degree from a name university, but you need to ask yourself if your eventual job—teacher, social worker, theater stage director—will earn you enough money to pay off your college loans and still manage to live. A social work degree from Boston College gets you the same job as a social work degree from a state school. You may argue that the education is better, but that’s generally not the case.

Never think this college thing is simple…and that’s not even including tough professors and 8 a.m. classes. College is a pretty big endeavor. You’ll spend your days reading dense textbooks, writing papers and learning math. This is great if you love math, and not so much if you don't. You’ll have to earn this degree(diploma mills aside). You want the degree to be in an area you enjoy.

The last big question you need to ask yourself--Are there jobs available for your degree in the field? This is a really important thing to explore. You may love psychology and find the classes fascinating, but a four-year degree in psychology prepares you for little besides graduate school. Some degrees are just the first rung on the ladder. Others, such as history and sociology, may offer tremendous insights, but have to be used in a creative way. There’s no obvious jobs for some degrees.

Then, again, you could teach. The world needs enthusiastic, engaging teachers. Make sure that’s the kind you’d be.