Reading Corner

Links related to the weekly posts.

 

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This week, we wrote about how to let conflicts go until you can talk without charge. Here are some articles from us on how to handle conflicts in your relationships.

How To Avoid Relationship Conflicts With One Little Word “This technique was designed to be used in situations where you are feeling responses like irritation, impatience, or anger in your relationships. The simple, yet very effective technique, is to ask yourself in such a situation, “What is important here?” This helps you to calm down and to think about where you want to put your emphasis in responding to a situation you are finding challenging. When I recounted this story, I unconsciously added a word to it. I said. “Stop, and ask yourself what is important here.” One of the women shared that hearing me say stop gave her something she could understand working with when things were getting heated in a relationship.”

How to Create Peace Instead of Conflict in Your Relationships “Current culture and leading relationship experts hold that conflict within relationships is inevitable, and that lack of conflict is a danger sign for a relationship. They say if you don’t have conflicts, it means that you are suppressing your emotions and heading for trouble. The conflict arises inevitably from innate differences between each person (see last week’s blog on this issue). There is a prevailing opinion that suggests that you can balance criticisms and injuries within a relationship by having at least five compliments for every criticism. We have a very different view about this.”

What Makes Up a Conflict-free Relationship? “Critical to having a peaceful conflict-free relationship is an attitude we refer to as total acceptance. Understanding that the other person is a full and separate individual, with different ways of expressing themselves and unique preferences, is a necessary foundation for peaceful relating. Total acceptance is the practical application of this understanding. It is an act of trust in the other, a belief in their positive intentions. Unfortunately, this is something that many people are not familiar with. This is an experience rather than a concept, and so it is something you must learn about through doing. How can you approach this?”

 

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This week, we suggested paying attention; it’s how to best support each other. Here are some other blogs we’ve written about paying attention in your relationships.

Make Sure You Pay Attention to Your Relationships “Strangely, there is a tendency to stop seeing and appreciating that which becomes familiar. With time, you might even stop feeling and valuing the connection within your relationships. To keep those connections in the present, you have to create shared experiences and take time to just be and to relate to one another. There are many ways to do this. To bring a relationship into your current experience, you must bring it into your present life.”

Why is Attention Important in Your Relationship? “your relationships with other people, whether acquaintances or your lover. If you’re not paying attention, you won’t see them. If you’re continually switching attention, you will only see them a little. When you give them your full attention, they become, for that time, your entire world. You see them for who they are, though of course filtered by your beliefs and prejudices. And this other person, whether a checkout clerk or your lover, can feel your gaze, will respond to your attention, because our reactions are very much social in nature.”

How to Remove Tension and Find Peace in Your Relationships “From this kind of mutual willingness to meet and embrace each other’s wants and needs, and not see them as oppositional or challenging to your own, an uncharged atmosphere is created that encourages openness. A gentle path emerges where talking, making decisions, and finding solutions is not fraught or loaded with resistance. The potential for a minefield is removed, and in its place is ever-increasing intimacy and connection. You can communicate your desires much better if you know what they are. It helps to listen inside yourself and really find out what you want in a particular situation. Once you’ve done that, you can more readily find a way to put it into words to share with another.”

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This week, we wrote about talking to each other, and how important that is. Here are some earlier writings of ours on talking and listening to one another.

Don’t interrupt! I’m talking! How to Keep the Peace in Relationships “We went out to breakfast to come up with a blog topic, the first time we’ve done that in a long time. We noticed that we were interrupting each other, something that has happened many times before: “Wait, I haven’t finished saying what I want to say,” and so we examined it further. What is peculiar is that we have a method for making decisions and resolving differences that involves listening to the other person without judgement, without preparing a response, and instead listening intently to what is being conveyed. This is something we use often and it has worked well for us.”

You Need to Balance Talking and Listening ” We pay less attention to our partner when we are the speaker. Active listening must have both sides – speaker and listener – aware of each other at all times. Sense if your partner has something to say that fits in, and interrupt your speaking or cut short the length to allow their thoughts to enter. Both parties have to find a balance between expression and reception. Both parties have equal roles in maintaining this balance.”

Why It’s Important To See The Other’s Viewpoint In Your Relationship “People get into quarrels over all sorts of things, big and small. They get upset because they feel they’re not going to get what they want; anything from a clean kitchen to another child. They might feel hurt, attacked, insulted, ignored – whatever, some negative feelings are there, yet more often than not, they are unacknowledged and disguised by finding reasons that match. And of course, this is how your partner is seeing you. You can break this impasse by changing the focus from how this affects you to the reasons for why they are taking their position. Ask not just why they think that way, but what they are feeling about it. Bear in mind that they probably don’t know what the feelings behind their position are. In other words, show empathy.”

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This week, we wrote about the importance of sharing your truth in relationships. This is a key topic, and we’ve written about different aspects of it a number of times before.

Why it is Important to be Honest and Share Your Truth in Relationships “As to how you speak when it involves another person, you must be gentle as well as honest. Some people take the intimacy of a relationship as a safe place to dump all their feelings, act out, or blame the other person. Don’t do this. They are your feelings; find out where they come from. Even when they appear to be caused by someone else, that person probably has their own set of causes. Every lie takes an effort. Every unspoken feeling takes its toll on the body. When you are honest and authentic in your relationships, life is freer and lighter.”

Why You Need to Trust and Speak Your Truth in Relationships “Being honest is not just a matter of not telling a lie. It is more often about not sharing your truth. When you withhold some part of yourself, it can be sensed. Your partner may not know what it is, but they can sense that it is. This causes feelings of mistrust and doubt to enter your relationship. It will create unnecessary distance and even estrangement. To overcome and avoid this unnecessary and all too common behavior requires self-reflection and an open self review. As with so many issues that can complicate a relationship, this takes a desire to know yourself and to examine your actions.”

Why it is Important to Speak Your Truth in Relationships “Phil and I were sharing over dinner the other night and found ourselves discussing what it means to speak your truth, and how you find your way to that truth. I was telling him about some challenges I was trying to resolve with one of my close friends. I told him what had occurred and how once I had reflected on what was troubling me, I was able to share that with my friend. The feeling of finding that truth and then being able to speak it without charge or blame, but rather with a clear statement of what I felt, created a tremendous peace and calm within me and toward my friend. When something happens in one of my relationships that upsets me or makes me feel hurt or not treated well and I don’t really understand my reaction, often I can’t say anything right away. Perhaps this is a good thing as it gives me time to reflect on what is going on in me that makes me feel this way; what is my truth? Uncomfortable feelings of someone I know behaving and making choices that are foreign to me are often at the root of my discomfort.”

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This week, we invited you to create peace in the world, one relationship at a time. Here are some of our posts on various aspects of peaceful relationships.

The Five Fundamentals of Peaceful Relationships “For the last few weeks, we have been writing about subtle aspects of peaceful relationships. It is now time to describe the five principles for creating peaceful relationships, of which these subtle aspects are a part. These are: Knowing and Sharing Your Core Values; Recognizing the Uniqueness of Every Individual; How to View and Interact with Differences; Finding Total Acceptance; A Process for Dealing with Decisions and Disagreements.”

Promoting Peace: What Can You Do to Make a Difference? “This feeling of peace is precisely that: a feeling, and until it is recognized and described and labeled, you won’t be aware of it, you won’t be able to cultivate it and nurture it, you won’t notice its presence or absence. Look at those moments in your life when you can rest without agitation; look at the different feelings that different people bring out in you. There are words for feelings and emotions that don’t exist in English, like hygge or zeitgeist. Some have made their way into English; some haven’t. By naming a feeling, it is that much more tangible, and the same applies to the feeling of peace.”

How to Create Peace in Relationships and Life by Knowing Your Core Values “Your core values are those upon which you base your life, your actions and decisions, even when you are not clearly aware of what they are. This can occur because values are often felt rather than thought, and as a result you may not have actually put them into words for yourself. And yet they are so critical to your life, inner peace, and all your relationships. A knowledge and understanding of what yours are can be a great tool for creating mutual solutions to disagreements and misunderstandings in your relationships, as well as finding a more fulfilling way of applying them to what you do and how you do it in your life.”