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How to Avoid Annoyed in Your Relationship


We both wrote separately this week.

Maude: Impatience? Irritation? What is going on here?

That’s what I was asking myself the other day, as we sat down to get our newsletter finished and ready to send out. Phil seemed to be annoyed and in a hurry, and was responding in a short clipped manner, without his usual loving responsiveness. 

I wasn’t having any of it! This is not how we relate to each other. I mentioned my confusion and dislike for the energy, and said it didn’t feel good or right. 

A general call for exploring what was happening was put out and we retired to the living room to find out. This blog is not so much about what was happening in that particular incident, but more to the point, how we handled it and what we experienced as a result.

Click here to read more (and Phil's version too.)

Click here for the audio version.
 













Successful Relationship Reading Corner

Bookshelf

In this week's blog, we wrote about how to avoid annoyed in your relationship. These articles cover the issues of touch, dealing with anger and talking about feelings.

The Power of Touch "Hertenstein had volunteers attempt to communicate a list of emotions to a blindfolded stranger solely through touch. Many participants were apprehensive about the experiment. "This is a touch-phobic society," he says. "We're not used to touching strangers, or even our friends, necessarily." But touch they did—it was, after all, for science. The results suggest that for all our caution about touching, we come equipped with an ability to send and receive emotional signals solely by doing so. Participants communicated eight distinct emotions—anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, sympathy, happiness, and sadness—with accuracy rates as high as 78 percent. "I was surprised," Hertenstein admits. "I thought the accuracy would be at chance level," about 25 percent."

12 Creative Ways to Deal With Angry People Without Strangling Them to Death "Ancient wisdom traditions, especially Buddhism, invites us to take matters into our hands and look deeply into the nature of our mind in order to find the true source of our suffering. Buddha’s advice on how to deal with angry people is simple, profound and involves three steps
1. Examine your own mind,
2. Examine the mind of other person,
3. Use skillful means to make peace."

How to Talk About Feelings With Your Romantic Partner "...recent research has shown that even just naming a feeling, without doing anything else, can lessen the intensity of the emotion and help us manage it better. On the other hand, when you ask your partner to tell you how he or she feels, you often have an agenda. That agenda most likely puts pressure on your partner. And that pressure makes it hard for him or her to label the feelings honestly, which then means that your partner doesn’t get the benefit of naming the feelings, and you end up feeling hurt, angry, and/or betrayed."








Spreading peace one relationship at a time
Phil and Maude
 
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