Bringing Up a Charged Topic

Set your intention. Remind yourself. I love myself and I love my partner. It is from that love that I will speak. Remind yourself that your intention in having this conversation is to make things better for both of you and to be closer. Hi. Welcome to Sex Love Power. I'm your host, Michelle Lisenberry Christensen. This podcast is where I convene the conversations about love and sex that help powerful women and those who love them to create the intimacy and intensity they really want in bed and in life. Together, we navigate the tensions between our desire and our devotions, between our wildness and our security with our eyes wide open. This podcast is designed to help you create more closeness, ease, pleasure, and justice in your relationship. And we do it by blending wisdom from the fields of sexuality and spirituality, trauma and self regulation, and intersectional feminism. I'm so glad you're here. Hi. We've talked before on the podcast about how to deal with your partner's defensiveness. We've talked about how to pick the right time for a communication. You can go find episodes on both of those topics and we'll put links to them in the show notes. But today I want to get into the specifics of how you can deliver feedback, how you can share how you felt about something your partner did, what you'd like them to do differently in a way that actually gets results. We're talking about feedback and direct conversations, even about big feelings, in a way that works well because every single couple has to have these conversations or there's a lot of negative fallout. People wind up in my office or in my virtual office talking about long standing hurts because so many of these conversations have gone wrong. So we're going to cover today how to create conversations that actually help you feel closer, how to remember that that's the point of these conversations when you're in the middle of it, and how to reduce the amount of residual pain that comes from not only the initial bump that the two of you hit together, but then the messy conversation that happens afterward. This is a system that I learned from my mentor, Terry Real, founder of relational life, and he talks about it in several of his books. And we'll put links to those in the show notes. But I want you to have this simple process. I teach it in seven steps, but the actual feedback wheel only has four. So it's a simple thing to remember once you've learned it. And it has made huge impact on my relationship and many of my clients relationships, because it turns these painful situations where something our partner did upset us into situations where we can actually draw closer. They can know us better, we can get more of what we want, they can get more help from us in how to respond to us in ways that work well. And they can get more of what they desire, which often is to be successful with us. So regardless of where you've been inside these kinds of conversations, which partner you are, if you're more often the one who's bringing up an issue or you're the one who's on the receiving end of it, I hope that today's podcast can help you have conversations in a more productive way and feel like your pains are actually doorways to more closeness, deeper intimacy, and more joy together. So let's jump in. I actually want to go first to what not to do because I've made so many of these mistakes. You've probably been making these mistakes and it's a great place to start because you'll be able to see yourself and you can know in advance because I'm telling you right now, we are going to address each of these mistakes. You're going to have a better way and that's why you've been repeating them, right? It's because you didn't have a better way. This felt in the moment like the best approach. But if you've got something emotionally charged to discuss, we want to make sure that we make matters better, not worse. So the first thing not to do is to set up this as the time to air the grievances. If you bottled up your anger and your fear and your sadness for a while without having said anything, you've built up a good head of steam and you've gotten ready to explode. That's a time when you might set your intention to unload all of these pent up upsets and resentments right now, lunching in, if the other person doesn't want to hear about it now, no matter what they were doing before, make a note of the obvious character flaw that their reticence reveals. Add that to your laundry list of complaints. How many times have you done that? I will out my husband a little bit with his permission. He used to say to me, this is why I can't bring anything up with you. Because he would have done exactly this, like built up a big head of steam and then ambushed me. And then when I said, whoa, this feels like a lot coming at me, he would say, see, you don't want to listen. So I've done the same, you know, done what John and Julie Gottman call harsh startup. Come to my partner with a list of accusations and then expected him to receive that well, so nobody receives the airing of the grievances very well. The second idea of what not to do. If you want to bring something up that's important and you want it to have you draw closer, not further apart. Second thing you could do is allow your intentions to morph freely. Why are you talking? Can't remember. It's to vent. No, now it's time to apologize for your unrestrained verbal barfing a minute ago. No, now it's time to make them feel all of your pain. You know, we can sometimes jump all over the place when we're feeling really reactive. We're trying to have good intentions, we feel scared, we feel apologetic. So obviously the opposite of this is to stay intentional. But so often we do have our intentions more freely. And there's another corollary to this, which is to say you allow your scope to roam freely, where you start to include other topics besides the first one you brought up. You know, there's the in another thing. Or you always and try to address every single thing that's ever gone sideways between the two of you in this one conversation. The third way not to bring things up is to tell your partner off. So to do this you would identify disturbing patterns and your in depth analysis of each one. Compare them to other people. Mash past, present and future behavior together. Tell them you always do this and you know why you always do this. It's because blah blah blah and so and so never treated me like this. Or so and so's partner never does that. Or to tell them you've continually done this for the past three years because you're eventually going to leave me. So there are ways that when we are flooded, when our lid is flipped, we make it into what Terry Real calls unbridled self expression. And this is really not a productive way to bring something up, even though you probably already know that. It's often a way that people do. The fourth way not to bring something up. Try to read your partner's mind. Never acknowledge that you're subjectively assigning meaning. You know, if they say what that's not what I meant, say don't deny it, you know it's true. Or try to tell them their motivations, their thoughts and what they're going to do in the future. You know, maybe you tell them you never even wanted to visit my great aunt Nellie in the first place. Like you know what's going on inside their head. And if they try to tell you that your mind Reading is inaccurate. Presume that they're lying. The fifth way not to bring something up is to fully express how you feel. Get as worked up as you can so they really know you mean it. I have never felt as wrenching a betrayal such as this in all my days. And you can hear the tongue in cheek there. But boy, do I have the capacity to be dramatic, to really go deep with how pained I am. But it never really helps. You can use dramatic language, metaphors, literary illusions, imagination, maybe even animal sounds. If I hadn't just gotten this back from the cleaners, I would rend it to show you. And of course, if you're using this not very effective tool, you will naturally back it up. When your partner feels kind of overwhelmed by the intensity of how you're communicating, you can just chalk that up as another character flaw of theirs. Add it to the list. The sixth way not to bring something up. If you really want to draw closer, refuse to be satisfied. Don't come up with a specific request that would help you. Say something like, I don't even know where you could begin to make this up to me. It's just so awful. Or if you do make a request and then they agree, find a way that what they just agreed to isn't enough. I mean, your apology does help a little, but what else are you gonna do? And bottom line, make them pay. After what you put me through, you are gonna be in the doghouse for a long time. And finally, the seventh way I do not recommend bringing something up is clinging to disappointment. This is where you would not let yourself be comforted in any way by the attentive listening or the amends or changes that your partner has given. Nurse that resentment. Never express appreciation for what they've done, how hard they've worked at listening and staying present and expect absolute acquiescence. And if you don't get it, sulk, pout, and refuse to enjoy their company. I hope that those tongue in cheek guidelines for what not to do both hold up a mirror and help you see some of the ways that. Yeah, I guess it's not reasonable to expect to get good results. When I communicate with my partner that way and help you know that I've been there and lots of other people are making the same mistakes as well. And it's okay. We just need to find a way to give feedback that our partners can actually receive. So here are the seven steps to speaking to settle down together. It is not cheating to use a checklist every time you have this conversation. You could Save it on your phone. You could print it out and keep it handy. We actually for a time had a laminated set of these guidelines in a couple different places in our house because we would go so sideways if we didn't. Practice has made us progress, so we know these now and it goes better without guidance, but it took years. So take your time, use your tools, and you can download a printable copy, a laminatable copy of these guidelines in the show. Notes of the episode here. So step one. Set your intention. Remind yourself. I love myself and I love my partner. It is from that love that I will speak. Remind yourself that your intention in having this conversation is to make things better for both of you and to be closer. Once you've set your intention, the second step is to ask for a good time to talk. It's as simple as that. You can say, is this a good time to talk? And if it's not, you can say, can you let me know a good time for you? So that you're not ambushing your partner, they're consenting to having a conscious conversation, and they may ask, what do you want to talk about? And you can say, there's something I'd like to share with you. That does include feelings I had about something that happened between us, and my intent is for us to feel closer. So sharing the intent often helps set at ease a partner who might be worried that you're going to ambush them with something. Another thing that helps is a time limit. Because without a time limit, a lot of partners presume you're saying, can we talk all night until the sun comes up about this thing? And that sounds awful. So if you say, I'd love about 10 to 20 minutes of your time, that can help reassure them that it's not going to go on forever. And if it's really been a problem in the past, I recommend using a timer and saying, we're only going to talk about this for up to X number of minutes, whatever you both feel comfortable with. And then we can give it a rest and come back to it if there's more to say. But our real intent is to just get through it, to let it be a little lighter and easier than it might have been in the past. So now, once we get into the conversation, this is where Terry's process only has four steps. I call them steps three through six, and you'll see why. So state what happened. These are observable actions, not your interpretations. So this is where you succinctly state just focusing on one Situation. What happened last night you left your dishes in the living room would be an example. Don't identify patterns or trends. Don't say you always, or as usual, just state what happened one time. Keep it in the present, not in the past or the future. So it should only take you a sentence to say this. The next sentence will be step four. State what you made up about what happened. Own that you're subjectively assigning meaning to it. I made that mean that you feel entitled to be irresponsible. I told myself that you expect me to pick up after you like your mother did. So that's my meaning. I made it up. I told it to myself. It's not true in a capital T sense. And I get that you have a different meaning for it, but that's the meaning I gave it. So what you're doing here is trying to see where someone else might have a different interpretation and grant that to your partner and notice whether you have any flexibility to assign a different meaning. So often the more painful the meaning that we assign to something, the the more vehement we are in hanging onto it and not being willing to let it go. Isn't that funny? So this is a great exercise in saying, like one interpretation of what you did is this. And you'll welcome their interpretation as well once you feel really heard in yours. And the next step, which is how you felt when you made that interpretation. So in this step, you're going to own your feelings as the product of the action, plus your interpretation. You know, they did leave their dishes in the living room, and then you made meaning out of that, and that's why you're feeling this way. The dishes didn't necessarily make you feel that way. It was what you made it mean. So I like to use the words I make myself feel to really demonstrate that ownership to both my partner and myself. I make myself feel hurt and angry. Hurt that you don't listen to me and angry that you don't pull your weight. Don't say the other person makes you feel because they don't notice whether this feeling is a familiar feeling in other situations. Notice whether this feeling is something that you remember feeling a lot as a younger person. It may be something you're trying to work out inside you within the relationship, which is a great thing. That's a big part of what relationships can do for us. They give us a safe place to work out old feelings. But it's neither safe nor does it work things out if we don't recognize that they're like, oh yeah, this is mine. It predates you. And it just gets stirred up in your presence. So step number six is make a request. Ask for specific behaviors that would help you feel better right now. So for instance, you might say, what would help me feel better is for you to apologize and reassure me that you take this seriously and tell me what you're going to do about it. Go for satisfaction here. Don't nurse the resentment. Don't punish the person. Really look for what would actually give you that kind of melting feeling of relief, what would resolve things. And a lot of people are in the habit of not even expecting that and of taking their misery as kind of a cheap booby prize in the place of actual satisfaction. So that might be a habit you need to unlearn in order to really get satisfaction. Is the habit of going for resentment as a little charge in place of the satisfaction that you may have despaired you would ever find. So that's something I often help clients do, is really reach for what would satisfy you here. And it sometimes can be mysterious. So take some time to really look for what request would actually satisfy you. And if you can't find one, why is that? And then finally really receive your partner's response. Let in the understanding and mirroring that they give you back. And sometimes what they'll give you will be really imperfect. So this is a place to not just be like glass half full optimistic about what they share, but glass 10% full. Take what you get and celebrate it, because it will grow if you build on it. Appreciate any acknowledgment or any action commitment that you receive, and really do your best. And I know this is hard to let go of anything you asked for, but you didn't get. Let yourself grieve the essential pain that we don't always get all of what we want. But I find over time, in every marriage where people are reaching for what they want and doing their best to accept what's here right now and to take things one day at a time, things get progressively better and better and better and more and more of what we want does materialize. But people who nurture instead their despair, their resentment, their frustration tend to get more of that. So really let in what you do get from your partner, receive it, appreciate it, and then grieve. Get whatever care you need around your disappointment or your residual frustration so that you can come to the next conversation with that same fresh intention that we started with. My intention is to have things be better for us both and to be closer to you. So that's what speaking to settle down looks like. It's a a seven step process and I'll just recap briefly. Set your intention. Remind yourself that you love you and you love them and that you want to be closer. Ask for a good time to talk. State what happened. Tell them what you made up about what happened. State how you feel given the meaning you assigned to what happened and then make a request. Ask for something that would help you feel better and closer to them. Then receive the response. That's it. It's a simple process that takes a lot of skill and depending on where you're starting from, may take a lot of shifting of your approach. But at each step along the way, I hope I've given you a couple of tips and insights and some real empathy because all of this is relatable. Wherever you are, it makes sense and you're not alone and you can do this. You can make these little shifts and the reason to do so is is back to the intention for the conversation. You can be closer, you can be more satisfied, you can get more of what you're hungry for in your relationship and you can turn down the cost of all of the conflict and the painful ways of relating that you may have had in the past by practicing these tools. You don't have to be perfect at them right now. Just practice. You will improve over time. You'll get stronger and someday soon I will do an episode on how to be the listener so that you have great tips for yourself and your partner on how to really receive this kind of feedback and what mindsets are helpful and not so helpful in relation to receiving your partner's feedback. But for today, I'll leave it there and wish you deep satisfaction. The love, the sex, the connection that you really deserve. I want that for you today and every day and I look forward to hearing from you how these tools work. Be well and remember, if you love, love, love loves you too. I'd love to hear what you're taking away from this episode and what questions you have. Where do you feel this conversation in your body? My free Conscious Couples circle is the place to continue our conversation. You can share your experiences, ask questions, and get more actionable ideas for creating the love and sex you deeply desire in ways that involve you both. It's all happening@society.lizenderry.com that link is in the show notes for you. You know new listeners need to hear what you're taking away too. Podcast reviews are what really help others recognize how this podcast is different from other relationship and sex podcasts. So thank you in advance for leaving a review right now in your podcasting app while you're thinking of it. Before you forget, for the just a few words about about what this show gives you. And hey, have you subscribed to the podcast? You're gonna want to, so you never miss an episode. Please go to the app where you listen, hit that subscribe button, and then you'll always get notifications of new episodes when they drop. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Michelle Lisenberry Christensen, and this has been Sex Love Power. I will see you on the next episode, and until then, may the light within you illuminate the world around you.