How To Have A Relationship Without Fights or Arguments

are tuned in now, give me a shout out in the comments about where you're from. We're going to be talking about how to have a relationship without fights, and I'm going to be revealing to you some ideas that will help you stop all fighting and arguing in any relationship that you have, whether it's with your children, your parents, your siblings, your intimate partner, or your business colleagues. We'll be focusing on intimate relationships, but it's applicable to everybody. So type in, right now, where you are from in the comments. Ah, Theresa! Good to see you. And we'll give people a couple more minutes to show up and Then I'll get started. These events are a continuing series that I'm doing every Thursday at 11 AM Pacific time to try to introduce as many people as possible to the idea of how to listen others into existence. In fact, that's going to be the topic of my video next week is What is listening other people into existence, and why do we want to think about it? And of course, how do we do it? So calendar these events because there's lots of really powerful information that you can use immediately in your life. Okay, my clock just said that it rolled to 11 o'clock, so let's get this started. This Facebook Live and YouTube Live— I'm simulcasting to both YouTube and Facebook— is all about How to Have a Relationship Without Fights. And without further ado, I'm going to drop myself down into the screen like this. The magic of modern technology. By the way, I'm using BeLive, which if you want to do Facebook Live events, I found that this to be a really amazing platform. Be.Live is the name of the app. Really useful. Okay. So how to have a relationship without fights. There are many, many relationship therapists, counselors, psychologists who think that fighting in relationships is inevitable. As a peacemaker, I disagree with all of them. I don't think fighting is inevitable. I think that fighting is about, um, just not understanding The nature of emotions, and I'm going to be talking about that in the next 30 minutes and give you some examples of how you can use a skill called affect labeling to really stop forever fights and arguments in any relationship that you have. And I know that's a grandiose claim, but I think that if you pay attention to what I'm talking about and practice the skills that I teach, you will find that the claims are absolutely true. So the number one thing that couples fight about is nothing. And that's because most arguments are not about substance. Couples don't fight about money. They don't fight about sex. They don't fight about anything. What they fight about is the fact that one or both of them do not feel validated and do not feel heard. And that is the vast, vast bulk of, um, things that couples fight about. So Gottman is absolutely right. Couples fight about nothing. So in a moment, I'm gonna show you how to stop these relationship fights and arguments forever. And I know I can make that claim because in my relationship with my wife, Malia, we never fight or argue. We have zero fights or arguments, nothing, zippo. And the people that we— couples that we've trained in these skills over the years report that they never have fights or arguments either. So we know this to be true. Um, but first, let's get into this stuff. What matters is how partners respond to negative emotions. It's not about the substance of the fight. It's not about the money, for example, or anything else. It's about when one partner in a relationship has a negative emotion, uh, how does the other partner respond, especially if that negative emotion is accusatory. Or invalidating or diminishing or judgmental or critical. And that response to negative emotions is what dictates whether or not couples fight or not. According to research, both partners in a relationship are emotionally available for only about 9% of the time. So that means that 91% of the time, one or both of the partners in an intimate relationship are not available for each other emotionally. And this pertains to heterosexual couples as well as to gay or lesbian couples. In Intimate relationships, the research shows that there is no distinction in relationship behaviors depending upon what kind of relationship it is. That is, the sexual orientation of the relationship makes no difference. So if you are gay or lesbian or bi and you have a relationship, everything I'm talking about today applies to you as well as to people who are in heterosexual relationships. So what creates emotional unavailability? And in a simple word or phrase, it's emotional invalidation. And you might be asking yourself, well, what is emotional invalidation? Emotional invalidation is the kind of statements that were made to us as children that diminished us, that criticized us, that judged us, that told us not to feel the way we feel, that told us that emotions are bad, and to be anything emotional is to be bad, weak, irrational, soft, vulnerable, exploitable. This is cultural conditioning. It starts at around 18 months to 2 years of age, and it happens in every single family. That's why John Bradshaw claimed before his death that 96% of all families are emotionally dysfunctional, because emotional invalidation is insidious and pervasive. And I think it's one of the, the deepest, uh, types of emotional abuse that exists on the planet. And it has been going on for generation after generation after generation. So let's look at this a little bit more carefully, because once you understand emotional invalidation, You'll begin to understand why partners in a relationship are not emotionally available for each other 91% of the time. So I'm gonna put on the screen a typical emotion— emotionally invalidating statement. And what I'd like you to do is if you're at a place where you can take out a piece of paper, uh, and a, and a pen or a pencil and just make a tick mark. What I want to know is whether or not this type of statement has ever been made to you and whether or not you have ever made this kind of statement or this statement to somebody else. So think about, has somebody ever said something like this to me? Have I ever said something like this to somebody else? Number 1: You've got it all wrong. But of course I respect you. But I do listen to you. That's ridiculous. I was only kidding. That's not the way things are. Deal with it. 'Give it a rest. You must be kidding. You can't be serious. It can't be that bad. Your life can't be that bad. You're just being difficult or dramatic. You're in a bad mood. You're tired. It's nothing to get upset over. It's not worth getting that upset over.' There's no reason to get upset. You're not being rational. But it doesn't make any sense to feel that way. You got a real problem. You are way too sensitive. You're overreacting. You are way too emotional. You're an insensitive jerk. You need to get your head examined. You are impossible to talk to. You're making a big deal out of nothing. You're blowing this way out of proportions. You're making a mountain out of a molehill. What is your problem? What is wrong with you? What's the matter with you? Why can't you just get over it? Don't you think of anyone but yourself? What about my feelings? Have you ever stopped to consider my feelings? This is getting really old. I'm sick and tired of hearing about it. Are you still upset over that? It happened a long time ago. All right, so how many of those were statements that have been made to you in one form or another? Throughout your life? And if you want to, put your, put your answer in the comment box. And then the next thing to think about is, what does it feel like when somebody emotionally invalidates you using statements like those that we just looked at? And put in the comment box what your experience is when you are being emotionally invalidated. Most people will say that being emotionally invalidated feels awful. It makes them angry. They feel diminished. They feel disrespected. They don't feel listened to or heard, and it's hurtful. So the question is, if we've experienced emotional invalidation all our lives, and we know it's hurtful, and we know it's painful, and we know it makes us angry, why then do we emotionally invalidate other people? And the answer is this, very simple. We emotionally invalidate to soothe our own anxiety. What does that mean? It means that when somebody else is in our presence, and that person, especially if it's our partner, intimate partner, becomes emotional. We become anxious because, because we have not been trained how to deal with our own anxiety in the presence of somebody who's upset. And as a consequence, our partner's emotionality triggers an anxiety in us. That causes us to react unconsciously to try to stop the emotions of our partner. And so we emotionally invalidate. There's a perverse kind of hidden logic, unconscious logic in our brain that says, if I can stop you from feeling emotional, then I won't feel anxious because you won't be emotional. So emotional invalidation is an extremely selfish form of self-soothing, and yet we do it all the time to everybody, and everybody does it to us. The ACEs study out of San Diego, the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, shows that emotional abuse of this type is the cause of morbidity later in life, such as cancer, diabetes, all kinds of addictive disorders, antisocial behavior, depression, suicide, alcoholism, um, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. There's a host of medical diseases that occur as a result of this kind of emotional abuse. And if you haven't read the ACEs study, Google it, Adverse Childhood Experiences study, because it is a wake-up call about how we treat each other in our relationships around emotional abuse. So fundamentally, we emotionally invalidate to soothe our own anxiety because we've never been taught anything different. Our parents did it to us because they've never been taught anything different, and their parents did it to them And their parents did it to them, and this emotional invalidation goes all the way back to generation after generation after generation, and it's incredibly abusive. So the reason this becomes important is because the frequency and intensity of daily emotions experienced in relationships is a good barometer of how flows individuals feel to their partners. So if there's nothing but negative emotions that people experience, they're gonna feel very distant. They're gonna feel alone. They're gonna feel angry and resentful. On the other hand, if they are feeling validated, if they are feeling positive emotions, then of course they're going to feel close and intimate with each other. So monitoring the emotions in your relationship becomes probably the most important skill that you can have in order to avoid fights and arguments. Earlier, I'd say we would cover the secret sauce on how to stop fights and arguments in relationships, and that's what I want to do now. You understand that fights and arguments aren't always— they're always about nothing, and that emotions are the key to relationships. And the problem that we have is our default in relationships is to emotionally invalidate our partner in order to soothe our own anxiety around our partner's emotions. And that is incredibly destructive. So what is the antidote? Well, the science shows us that relationship satisfaction is directly related to emotional competency. And emotional competency consists of three things: emotional self-awareness, emotional, uh, regulation, self-regulation, emotional self-regulation, and empathy, the ability to understand and reflect back the emotions that another person is experiencing. In the moment. We're going to be talking about the third, empathy, through a process known as affect labeling. And the beauty of this skill is that once you start practicing it, you start building up your own increased emotional self-awareness and your own self-regulation. So affect labeling by itself as a practice is the surest, fastest, most efficient way to develop your emotional competency. And the more that you develop your emotional competency, the more likely it is that your relationship is going to be satisfactory. Now you might ask the question, well gee, what if I do all this work and my partner doesn't do the work? Well, that's what that then presents us with, what, uh, David Schnarch, very well-known Uh, clinical therapist, uh, author of the book The Passionate Marriage, talks about the two-choice dilemma. If you choose to grow and mature in your relationship and your partner chooses not to, then you are faced with either remaining in a relationship where you will grow and perhaps become more and more frustrated at the immaturity of your partner, or you will challenge your partner to mature and grow emotionally along with you, in which case the relationship will probably grow and mature as well. And you may be faced with the choice of having to leave a relationship because your partner is too frightened, scared, uh, to move on. That's called the two-choice dilemma. So here's the secret. Listen your partner into existence. And that link, you've seen it sort of hidden and flashed around there, that is a link to my online course— courses, both courses, my advanced basic and advanced courses on how to do this. I'm going to show you how to do it in the next couple of minutes, but if you really want it, the full-on training, then take a look at that link and go to the page and you can get the course. And For those of you that are in relationship and both partners are tired of fighting and arguing, then you should both take the course together and study the material and practice the exercises together so that you can master the skills. And I'll tell you a story in a little bit about one couple that just did this very recently, and it completely salvaged what was going to be a bad marriage and a separation and divorce and to get they, they're together. It's amazing. This stuff is really powerful. So let's get into the details. So let's start with a simple example. Imagine yourself planning to go out to dinner with your partner, and maybe it's a special occasion, and you want to go to your favorite restaurant, and you know exactly what you want to order. Have you ever had a conversation with your partner go a little sideways like this. Hey, let's go out to Zula's tonight. I don't like Zula's. Why do you always get to pick? I don't always get to pick. Why are you being so emotional about this? You're making a mountain out of a molehill. See, you never listen to me. It's always about what you want. And of course, then it devolves into an argument. And notice all the emotional invalidation that went on in those statements. Every single statement and counterstatement was an emotionally invalidating statement. So let's rewind this and see how to do it a little bit differently. The first thing we wanna do is we're gonna calm things down and we're gonna do that in a 3-step process. Step number 1 is that we're gonna ignore the words. Doesn't matter what your partner says. You're not going to listen to them. You're going to absolutely ignore them. The moment you're sensing any kind of emotionality in your partner, especially negative emotionality, from that point on for the next 90 seconds, couple of minutes, You're going to ignore everything your partner says because it's just not going to be important. Step number 2, you're going to listen to your partner's emotions. Now there's a technique for doing this and you have to build up a vocabulary. That's why I have the course so you can learn all this stuff. You see it in the yellow link there. Listen, uh, listen others into existence and But let me just give you the, the, the 50,000-foot view. Our brains, our brains are hardwired to understand the emotions of other people. In fact, reading the emotions of others is effortless, fast, and easy. And you're saying to yourself, well, gee, I hardly even know what my own emotions are. How can I read the emotions of other people? It's because our culture and our society and your childhood upbringing taught you that emotions are bad, they're weak, they're evil, they're irrational, and you will never allow yourself to develop this part of your brain that can read emotions automatically. From an evolutionary perspective, humans have only had language for about 230,000 years. Our language ability developed at about the same time that we mastered our predecessors mastered the use of fire, because with the use of fire, we could take complex proteins and meats and we could render fat. And all of a sudden we had sources of, of high, high calorie food. And, and that all coupled with some other environmental pressures allowed for a rapid expansion of our brains and more importantly, a rapid growth in the hypoglossal muscle and hypoglossal nerve from the brain into the larynx. To allow us to control our mouth and tongue and actually begin to form languages. All of that was directly related to the discovery of fire, to the control of fire. Before that time, for millions and millions of years, hominids did not have vocabulary. They weren't able to speak to each other. It was all emotions communicated through nonverbal communication. You may have run across the study by Albert Mehrabian back in the 1960s, a psychologist at UCLA who did a study that demonstrated that only 7% of the information communicated by— that only 7% of the information communicated from one person to another was through words. 93% of all communication is communicated nonverbal. Through things like tone, through things like tone of voice, or what's known as tonality, speed, volume, facial expressions, particularly eye expressions, and body language. All of that conveys far more information than the words themselves. So what we have to learn to to do is first unlearn the habit of listening to the words. That's why we ignore the words. And two, allow ourselves to listen to the emotions. And the really simple way to do this is to simply sit in silence and allow the emotions of the other person to flow into you, and your brain will figure it out and pop it into your consciousness. And that's when you do the third step, which is reflect back the emotions with a simple you statement. Oh, you're angry, you're frustrated, you feel disrespected, you don't feel heard, you feel sad, you feel shame, you feel lonely, abandoned, you don't feel loved. Whatever it is, it's a simple you statement. Now what you don't want to do is you don't want to go back to that old active listening stuff that was taught by Thomas Gordon back in the 1960s called active listening. He was wrong. And all the people that have followed him since that time have never— they've just copycatted what he did, and nobody's really looked at the science. And of course, if those I statements really worked, we'd be using them today, and I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you because this is old knowledge. But the fact of the matter is, I statements don't work for reflecting back the emotions of another person. I statements are perfect for reflecting your own emotions. I'm angry. I'm frustrated. I don't feel heard. Perfect use of I statements. But if I'm speaking to you, I'm going to use a you statement because I'm speaking to you, not to me. So I wouldn't say something like, oh gee, what I think you're feeling is angry. First of all, it's passive voice. It's voice of disconnection, not of connection. Puts the focus back on me. And as we all know, when somebody uses that kind of passive patronizing voice on us, We just get angry. It's emotionally invalidating to use an I statement. So use a you statement. All right, so let's take a look at that little fight that erupted over going to dinner and see how it might go differently. Hey, let's go out to Zula's tonight. I don't like Zula's. Why do you always get the pick? Now, what is this fight really all about right now? It's not about going to Zulu. It's about a feeling of the second person not being heard, maybe not feeling respected, maybe not feeling appreciated. We don't know, but there's something going on. And so the first person is now going to affect label. We're going to use these three skills just like this. Oh wow. You really feel disrespected and ignored. Yeah, I do. You don't feel appreciated that your opinion matters in our relationship? Well, yeah, you're right. Thanks for listening. Okay, you're welcome. Where would you like to go out to dinner? Hey, let's go to Zulu's. And that's exactly how it goes every single time. It's that simple. But notice the shift in the It's shifting how we respond to that first negative emotion. We respond to it by reflecting back what we think our partner is feeling in the moment with a simple you statement, and we start getting affirmations. You're looking for a nod of the head. You're looking for a dropping of the shoulder. You're looking for some kind of affirmative verbal response, like yeah or exactly. And you keep doing it until Your partner's calmed down and relaxed. It takes about 30 to 45 seconds. The brains, our brains respond to this very quickly and automatically and unconsciously. So your partner, if you're doing this correctly and your partner hasn't listened to this presentation or read my book or taken in my course, so your partner has no idea what's going on. And it just, it's, it's like magic because it's the way our brains are hardwired. All right, let's take a look at another way of doing this. Well, all right. Hey, let's go out to Zula's tonight. I don't like Zula's. Why do you always get to pick? Now we're going to start getting into the argument a little bit. I don't always get to pick. Why are you being so emotional about this? You're always making a mountain out of a molehill. Now it's It's the second person's turn. Oh, we're in a negative loop. Let me do some de-escalation. Oh, you're upset and frustrated. You feel blamed. You're sad because we're fighting. Yeah, thanks. Hey, we can go wherever you want. Nah, Zulus is fine. And that's the way these conversations, this listening goes. As opposed to the very first example where they were into a fight where they were both emotionally invalidating each other, got into blaming and shaming and criticism and judgment. Nobody felt heard, nobody felt listened to, nobody felt appreciated, and most importantly, nobody felt loved. And that's where relationship fights come from, every single one of them. So the secret The stopping all relationship fights and arguments forever is to ignore the words, listen to the emotions, and reflect back the emotions with a simple "you" statement. Here's another one: "See, you never listen to me. It's always about what you want." You're angry and frustrated. You feel disrespected and unappreciated. You don't feel heard. And of course the answer will be yes. Ignore the words, listen to the emotions, reflect back the emotions with a use statement. So let me know whether or not this idea works for you. You can put a comment here wherever you're watching, whether it's Facebook or YouTube. You can email me at Doug@dougnull.com. You can go to my website, DougNoll.com, and you pop a comment, uh, there. I'm gonna actually put this up in a blog post in the next day or so. I want to talk to you about what to do if you want to get further training in this, and this is something that people ask me a lot, how do I learn more? Well, you can learn a lot just from watching these videos, and you can learn a lot from going to my website and reading all of my blog articles on all these topics around the idea of affect labeling. You can also buy my book, De-Escalate. Let me show it to you. De-Escalate: How to Calm an Angry Person in 90 Seconds or Less. And if you want to get the book, you can go to a place called dougnoll.com/d-escalate-the-book. And that's the sales page for the book. And if you go there, you can also get access to a lot of other resources that will support you in your journey in learning how to do this. The other place you can go is to this website, um, which is shown on the screen there. See if I can bring it right up. Here it is: dougnoll.com/LP/listen-others-into-existence. Listen— listen— listen-others-into-existence. This will take you to the most advanced courses I have and also the most current The book was published in 2017. I'm continually learning, and all the new information I have is now in my courses. Uh, and so this is where you go to sign up for the course. Now, I'm not going to kid you, these are not exactly cheap. It's $699 for both courses. You can buy one or the other, but I suggest that you do both. And my suggestion is also that if you really want to have a rich fulfilling relationship with your partner, that both of you do the course together, both courses, the basic and the advanced course, and you practice the exercises and you work on this. It'll take you about a month not to do the courses, but it'll take you a month of consistent practice to habituate this kind of listening others into existence in into your daily habits, which just becomes automatic. So like anything good, it takes a little bit of effort, but it's not impossible. It's a lot easier than learning how to play golf or fly an airplane or do any other number of things that take some really serious effort. This takes some dedication and persistence, but not a lot. And the beauty of it is that you will immediately start to see how you are growing emotionally and how your partner is growing emotionally. And you'll begin to see how this is flowing into all other aspects of your life so that you'll have the ability, for example, to be in any situation, social or business, and know exactly what to say, how to say it, and when to say it without any question whatsoever. You'll say everything that you need to say with utter confidence. And more importantly, people will thank you for what you had to say because you would have listened them into existence. So I had the screen up a second ago. We're at the end of our 30 minutes. I try to hold these right around 30 minutes for people. So next week I'm gonna be talking more about the same topic. I'm gonna be covering the idea of what is listening others into existence and why is this idea of listening other people into existence so important? Here we are in the first part of the 21st century. Why is this the foundational skill of the 21st century? So join me again next week, same time, same place, 11:00 AM on YouTube or on Facebook, and we'll be talking about listening others into existence. And feel free to write me with any questions at Doug@dougnull.com or put questions in the comments, and I will be sure to reply to them as I see them. Thanks a lot. Have a great day. We'll see you next week.