Feeling Good Together: The secret to making troubled relationships work

by David D. Burns

Some experts claim that the most important deficit that leads to relationship problems is a lack of self-esteem.

The idea is that if we help children develop greater self-esteem when they’re growing up, they’ll be able to develop warm, trusting relationships with others and won’t be so attracted to violence, crime, and gang membership as they get older.

Other experts believe that relationship distress results from a different kind of deficit called relationship burnout. You may have noticed that when you aren’t getting along with someone, the negativity nearly always escalates over time. You and your spouse may criticize each other more and more and stop doing all the fun things you did when you first met and began to date. Pretty soon, your marriage becomes a source of constant stress, frustration, and loneliness, and all the joy and caring you once experienced has disappeared. At this point, separation and divorce begin to seem like highly desirable alternatives.

Many therapists believe that relationship problems ultimately result from a lack of trust and the fear of vulnerability.

Let’s say that you’re ticked off because of something that a colleague or family member said to you. On the surface, you’re angry, but underneath the anger, you feel hurt and put down. You’re reluctant to let the other person know that you feel hurt because you’re afraid of looking weak or foolish. Instead, you lash out, get defensive, and try to put the other person down. Although the tension escalates, your anger protects you because you don’t have to make yourself vulnerable or risk rejection.

In other words, the basic deficit is a lack of trust—we fight because of ...

Psychoanalytic and psychodynamic therapists believe that all of these interpersonal deficits and problems with loving each other ultimately stem from painful experiences and wounds we endured when we were growing up. The idea is that if you grew up in a dysfunctional family, you may subconsciously re-create the same painful patterns over and over as an adult.

Most of the people who complained about their relationships with other people didn’t actually seem motivated to use any of these techniques. In fact, many of them didn’t seem interested in doing anything whatsoever to develop more loving, satisfying relationships with the people they were at odds with.

good communication requires three things. First, you have to be able to express your feelings openly and directly. Second, you have to be able to listen nondefensively when your partner talks. Third, you have to treat your partner with respect, even if you feel angry or frustrated.

Bad communication is just the opposite. Instead of opening up, you hide your feelings or act them out aggressively. Instead of listening to your partner, you argue defensively and insist that he or she is wrong. And instead of conveying caring and respect, you go to war and try to put your partner down. Allison and Burt agreed that these ideas

you can provide people in troubled relationships with all the interpersonal skills in the world, but it won’t do them a bit of good if they aren’t strongly motivated to develop greater intimacy or get close to the person they’re at odds with. In most cases, hostility and conflict probably do not result so much from skill deficits, but rather from overpowering motivational factors.

We all have far more power than we think to transform troubled relationships—if we’re willing to stop blaming the other person and focus instead on changing ourselves. The healing can happen far more quickly than you might think. In fact, you can often reverse years of bitterness and mistrust almost instantly—but you’ll have to be willing to work hard and experience some pain along the way if you want to experience this kind of miracle.

If you want to develop a more loving or satisfying relationship with anyone, we’re going to have to approach the problem from a radically different angle. You’re going to have to focus entirely on changing yourself.

If you want a better relationship, you’ll have to focus on your own role in the problem and work entirely on changing yourself. Waiting for the other person to do his or her share will simply keep you stuck.

Other-blame was by far the most important mind-set. People who blamed their partners (or people in general) for the problems in their relationships were angry, frustrated, unhappy, and intensely dissatisfied with their relationships.

In contrast, people who were willing to assume complete personal responsibility for solving the problems in their relationships, and who felt a strong commitment to making their partners happy, not only reported the most satisfying and loving relationships at the time of initial testing, but their positive feelings seemed to increase over time.

The only thing that really seems to matter is this: Do you blame your partner for the problems in your relationship? If so, you may be in for a tough time. However, if you’re willing to examine your own role in the problem and you feel that it’s your job to make your partner happy, the prognosis for a rewarding, successful relationship is extremely positive—now and in the future.

self-blame triggers guilt, anxiety, depression, and giving up. It won’t lead to love or to meaningful solutions to the problems in your relationships with other people.

Personal responsibility, without any blame at all, is the mind-set that leads to intimacy.

Self-blame and other-blame aren’t very productive. Self-blame paralyzes you, demoralizes you, and defeats you, and other-blame leads to a never-ending battle with the person you’re at odds with.

We cause the exact relationship problems we complain about, but we don’t realize we’re doing it, so we feel like victims and tell ourselves it’s all the other person’s fault.

when you’re having trouble getting along with someone, the entire conflict will nearly always be embedded in any one brief exchange between the two of you. When you understand why the two of you were butting heads at that moment, you’ll understand the cause of all the problems in your relationship with that person. In fact, you’ll probably discover the cause of all the problems in all of your other relationships as well. In addition, when you learn how to resolve the problem you were having at that moment, you’ll know how to resolve most, if not all, of the problems in your relationship with that person—or with anybody, for that matter.

Good communication involves three components: skillful listening (Empathy), effective self-expression (Assertiveness), and caring (Respect).

If you want to get close to someone you’ve been at odds with, you’re going to have to examine your own role in the conflict, and that may be uncomfortable for you, too. If you’re willing to endure the uncomfortable process of self-examination, you’ll be on the path to interpersonal enlightenment and personal empowerment.

If you have the courage to identify and acknowledge your own communication errors, you’ve taken a painful but vitally important step toward more rewarding relationships with other people.

We change other people every time we interact with them—but we’re just not aware of it.

Nearly all of the correlations were close to zero.

your thoughts about how other people feel and how they feel about you are probably far less accurate than you think and may not be accurate at all.

It’s not easy to be purely receptive and compassionate. You have to surrender your own agenda and forget about your self so you can focus entirely on the other person’s thoughts, feelings, and values. And you have to do this with the spirit of acceptance and respect, rather than judgment or blame.

Direct communication with “I Feel” Statements may seem less romantic than the scenes from a Hollywood movie, but it’s more effective than waiting for people to read your mind!

In an “I—Thou” relationship you choose to treat the other person with dignity and respect. You convey the desire to develop a closer, better relationship, even if you and the other person are feeling frustrated and mad at each other.

Here’s a useful exercise that will help you develop greater skill and appreciation for this technique. Over the next week, make it a point to give out at least twenty-five compliments. Make sure that you include friends, family members, shop assistants, and even strangers.

Stroking is actually a form of empowerment because people will be far more receptive and likely to listen to you.

Complainers seem to be making demands on you, so you may feel resentful, frustrated, guilty, and panicky. Then you try to help them, cheer them up or give them some advice, hoping they’ll shut up and stop complaining. But this never works. In fact, you’re making demands on them as well. You want them to listen to your good advice and stop being so relentlessly negative. This is what keeps the battle alive.

Sometimes when you think you’re at odds with someone, the conflict is an illusion. You get so upset that you don’t notice that you’re both feeling the same way and asking for the same thing. You may even express yourself so forcefully that you create a battle instead of a dialogue. It’s easy to get trapped by the labels we use.

Instead of blaming, fighting, making demands, or assertively sticking up for yourself, you can listen skillfully, share your feelings in a kind way, and convey genuine caring and respect. This will nearly always lead to trust, teamwork, and collaboration.

Sometimes people put up a wall and act prickly to protect themselves from being hurt and disappointed.

If you tell yourself that the other person is your enemy, you’ll immediately be at war. But if you think about the conflict as an opportunity to develop greater understanding and love, your “adversary” will begin to see you as an ally. This is one of the fundamental principles of CIT—we create our own interpersonal reality at every moment of every day, but don’t realize that we have so much power.

Sometimes the thing you fear the most is the path to your own enlightenment, but you can’t experience enlightenment unless you’re willing to confront that fear.

aware of how conflict-phobic he was

defensiveness and conflict avoidance are hardwired into our brains.

And when you acknowledge David’s frustration and anger, it will be much harder for him to keep belittling you. That’s because you’ve brought the negative feelings out into the open in a gentle way.

Although it may require some discipline, you can always express your feelings in a tactful way, without using inflammatory, threatening language, but it can be difficult.

However, we can choose whether or not to give in to the urge to inflict pain. If you project hostility, you’ll have a battle on your hands. In contrast, if you resist this urge and share your angry feelings in a respectful way, and communicate your desire to develop a better relationship with the person you’re at odds with, he or she will be far more likely to listen and treat you with respect.

Ultimately, you may have to ask yourself the same question I raised at the beginning of this book: “What do I want more? The rewards of the battle or the rewards of a loving, friendly relationship with the person I’m at odds with?”

I learned the most important thing of all—that you can ONLY change yourself, you’re only in control of yourself. You can’t make someone else want to change or do anything you want them to do. The only thing you can do is change yourself.

But a miraculous thing happens when you initiate changes in your own behavior—you become a catalyst for change in the other person, and suddenly things get better. It leaves you with an empowered feeling and you can deal with all the anger and hurt feelings. You can start to look at the problem from the other person’s perspective and hear what he has to say. And when you do, he suddenly develops an interest in your feelings, and your perspective.

There’s one other thing that helps me—it makes no difference whose feelings are right or wrong. But if you want to turn things to your advantage, and you want to feel close to the man you love, you have to ignore your own truth for a moment an...

Changing the Focus is useful when there’s tension or hostility in the air and you and the other person are in an adversarial relationship. Positive Reframing can help you transform almost any type of hostile relationship failure into one of warmth, trust, and intimacy. You can use Multiple-Choice Empathy when you’re trying to talk to a friend or family member who refuses to talk to you, or someone who doesn’t know quite how to express what he or she is feeling.

Although she’d been intensely anxious, she was afraid to give up her anxiety for fear that she’d get so complacent that she wouldn’t study at all. Then she might flunk the exam. However, she admitted that she’d been so paralyzed by fear that she hadn’t studied for one minute in the previous five weeks.