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Everyone Deserves a Happy Relationship
Jenny & Nigel Heath.
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It’s amazing how quickly the year has passed, since we shared our new venture with the group last December. We learnt a lot from that session and have continued to learn as we have refined, retuned and developed The Happy Relationship Company and our concept of Coaching for Couples.
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We get so much personally from this practice group, learning something new or remembering something we have forgotten as we practice our NLP, laugh with good friends and make new friends. It’s good to be able to share the growth of our business and receive feedback from these same people.
We began by explaining our background, talking about the difficulties and pain of separation and divorce, the financial cost and the cost to our children. We know now that much of this is avoidable. Not only this but also how perfectly good relationships can become really special.
We have based a lot of what we do on the immense work done by John Gottman in his US ‘Love laboratory’ facility. John has painstakingly studied couples going about their everyday life and conversations, and has codified his work to share his findings. He has identified the ‘little’ things that happen in ‘normal’ relationships that can pull them apart or make them stronger.
We have added to these patterns our own ‘strategies’ and exercises to help couples get the most from their relationship. Where necessary we can help couples who are finding themselves stuck in an unresourceful place. Much of this is based on our own learning of NLP & many other personal development technologies. Much of it developed in our own relationship to keep it growing and developing.
During the evening we ‘shared’ some of these exercises with the group, to give them a taste of our model of Happy Relationships.
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I often tell potential ‘speakers’ about the safety of NLP-South, as a place to experiment and practice. Taking my own advice Jenny and I decided to use ‘state chaining’ and ‘spatial anchoring’ to set the scene for our passion for our new venture. We took the audience to an uncomfortable place - the pain, misery and desperation of a relationship breakdown. Using our own experiences we re-lived the slide into the abyss of despair and anguish. Wary of staying there too long, we moved to a new place to share the re-growth we experienced as we embarked on NLP and other personal development technologies together.
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We then talked about the ‘standard’ model of marital counselling or relationship coaching and the difficulty of one counsellor with two clients. It’s difficult not to take sides, and even if you don’t, your clients may well feel you have! I have heard about counsellors being physically damaged by both partners in a session as they decided to pick on the counsellor.
As relationship coaches we aim to see couples two on two, to bring both male and female perspectives to bear and to avoid anyone being picked on or feeling picked on.
We are codifying our model to train other relationship coaches.
We are also publishing E-Books to help people work through things at home.
Here is a picture of our model:
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We have based this on flowers and gardening! Those of you who have been to the Summer BBQ’s at our home will know of our love of gardening, and may not be surprised we have used this metaphor for our model.
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The flowers each represent a key aspect in a relationship. We need to keep taking action to keep the flowers in our garden healthy. Sometimes this may be a ‘surface structure’ activity, like dealing with greenfly on roses. Sometimes it will be a ‘deep structure’ approach, closer to or at the roots, like treating the soil condition. You will notice that the main connection on the model is at root level. This leads us into the first exercise - increasing flexibility
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M
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In our everday language we talk about things being at opposite ends of a spectrum or mutually exclusive. Black & White; Night & Day; Male & Female. Between black & white are many shades of grey; between night & day are the magical times of dawn & dusk; between male & female we share more than we may at first think. We all have male & female attributes.
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In December 2006 when we ‘launched’ our ideas in this group we laid out a line (continuum / meta-program) on the floor, with M for male at one end and F for female at the other and asked people to physically move along the line. This year we’re did the same exercise in a new way, to gather feedback on the difference this makes. We could have used a guided visualisation process.
We had some immediate feedback of preference for the spatial anchoring of walking the physical line. As everyone is different it’s good to know there is always more than one way of taking people through an experience.
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A demo before exercise 2 - Staying Connected. Based on John Gottman’s work, ‘bids for connection’ are being constantly made in all relationships; in response they can be ‘turned towards’, ‘turned away from’, or ‘turned against’. We did a demonstration. See if you can work out which is which.
1) Jenny. “Nigel, I’m going shopping this afternoon, do you fancy coming with me?” Nigel. “No, I’d rather stay at home and watch the rugby.”
2) Jenny. “Nigel, I’m going shopping this afternoon, do you fancy coming with me?” Nigel. “Oh for goodness sake, not shopping again! Don’t spend all the money. (Embedded command) you know how tight things are.”
3) Jenny. “Nigel, I’m going shopping this afternoon, do you fancy coming with me?” Nigel. “Ooh yes! We could pop into that new tea-shoppe, and I’ve got some dry cleaning to collect.”
Have you worked out yet which is which?
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The point here is not that ‘bids for connection’ are always going to be ‘turned towards’. For a healthy relationship however ‘turning towards’ should happen more often than ‘turning away’ and ‘turning against’ needs to be very rare! We use these positive patterns to put ‘credit’ in our relationship bank. Early in a relationship we give each other many positive strokes. We build up a good reserve of ‘credit’ to maintain those good feelings for quite a while.
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‘Turning away’ and ‘turning against’ take credit out of the bank, ‘turning towards’ puts credit back in. None of these transactions are enormous, its the little things that make or break a relationship over time.
Constant withdrawals end up with your relationship account becoming overdrawn.
Then when the world throws something at you to test the strength of your love, maybe pressure of work, lack of work, issues with children, etc; there is nothing to fall back on. The relationship becomes bankrupt and may dissolve.
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Time for exercise two, Soft and Harsh start ups. Or - “How to make a bid that gets the response you want!”
Let’s set the scene. How you begin a conversation will often influence the outcome. Shall we demonstrate? Well we did anyway!
Jenny. “Nigel!! Those shelves in the kitchen need sorting! We have MY family coming over this weekend and you need to put those shelves up!”
This start up makes it Nigel’s job to sort the shelves. It contains implied criticism that they are not up yet, and possibly a hint of dire consequences should this state of ‘not upness’ continue to the weekend! Harsh start ups typically contain an element of contempt, frustration, put downs, dissatisfaction, judgment and often rudeness, any of which may be thinly disguised in sarcasm or humour. They seek to ‘blame’ the other and contain ‘you’ statements to highlight shortcomings. They can be greeted with defensiveness, hostility or plain dumb insolence!When the response is not all that Jenny was hoping for there is a danger that other prior failures to do as requested also get brought up and thrown my way. (Often known as gunnysacking).
Soft start ups need a softer tone of voice. Its OK to complain about something that needs to happen provided we stick to the facts and don’t personalise the issue. Own your part in this. Appreciate any barriers that may have been causing the delay. Ask for what you want and be clear.
Time for the group to play. In two’s we gave them a sheet with ‘Harsh start up’ statements and asked them to turn them into ‘Soft start up’ statements. (And while they were at it to spin straw into gold). They also had the instruction sheet you’ll find in your home practice pack. The group enjoyed this game! Some found the harsh start up very easy (& didn’t know what was wrong with them anyway!) but struggled turning them into Soft start ups!
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Phew! Time for a break.
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Exercise three - Goals of the Heart.
In relationship terms before we can share goals for both of us we need to be clearer about our own goals. Not sharing goals can lead to resentment. “Surely as a woman Jenny just ‘knows’ what’s important to me and what my goals are, doesn’t she?”
We borrowed our model from Curly Martin of Achievement Specialists ) and asked the group to think about some goals and write them on the back of the sheet. These could be simple goals or deep meaningful goals, depending on how each person was feeling at that moment. Maybe in the areas shown in the picture on the right the goals would be different sizes and have different priorities. We asked the group to think of things they could work on tonight. We ran out of time to do this exercise justice - which just goes to show how much there is to explore, even when you start with little goals.
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