This week I’ve been reading Complaint Free Relationships: How to Positively Transform Your Personal, Work, and Love Relationships
After a few years of marriage I have been wanting to make some improvements in communication and I have been finding it hard going without a good role model. The usual advice from other married couples and of course from counselors is to ‘get marital counseling’, but after trying that it seems to me that the counseling route is fraught with danger. If people feel safe to talk (complain) about their spouse to the counselor while said spouse is listening and feeling upset, then I am not sure whether it is really communicating or whether it is just going to cause more damage in the long-run. Going to the counselor abdicates responsibility for the marital communication to the counselor, and then when issues arise there is a sense of “well we already saw the counselor and it didn’t work, so that proves we’re never going to get along!”
To be honest there have been a few times recently when I thought that my marriage is never going to get better, but I’ve been trying anyway. I simply don’t believe that you can get better at anything without practice, and being good at marriage requires practice too. After a couple of recent disasters in communication I figured it was probably time to practice some better skills, and given that I was already looking into A Complaint Free World, I decided to add Complaint Free Relationships to the same Amazon order. I’m happy I did, it is a good book!
In the second chapter, ‘Relating in Relationships’, Bowen describes a relationship he had with a coworker when he was working for a radio show. Bowen had been promoted to a managerial role, but was still relatively fresh to the industry, whereas his coworker Phil had been working at the radio station for his entire career. The two were always fighting about how things should be done and they could only see the worst in each other. Bowen just assumed that Phil was an argumentative and unfriendly person and that their relationship would never get better.
It was when Bowen saw Phil meet a friend for lunch and the friend clearly actually liked Phil that Bowen realised that there was more to relationships than meets the eye. In fact, for any person who you might have a bad relationship with, there is most likely people who have an excellent relationship with that same person. The difference between their relationship with that person and your relationship is you.
Bowen expliained, “Phil’s relationship with his friend was different from his relationship with me because Phil related (recounted or told) different things to himself about his friend than he did about me. Phil’s internal dialogue was about things he appreciated about his friend. Phil’s pal also told himself positive things about Phil. I, on the other hand, experienced a constant, negative, judgemental voice shouting in my mind whenever I thought of Phil. “Phil is an obnoxious, opinionated, condescending jerk,” I related to myself about him, and the result was that I had a relationship with a person who was all those things. Phil’s friend had a very different relationship with Phil because he related different things to himself about Phil.”
Here’s a quick and easy exercise that Bowen suggests so that you can see how you are affecting your own relationships, for better or worse:
- Think about a person you really like. What characteristics of the other person makes you like them so much? What do you tell yourself about this person that makes you like them?
- Next, think about a person that you do not like. What do you tell yourself about this person? Do you tell yourself that they are rude, mean, fat, selfish, lazy, conceited, all of the above? Feel free to list as many things as you think about the person.
- Now consider this: the person you really like is probably really disliked by someone else. And the person you detest is most likely someone else’s favourite friend or relative! If so, what might those other people think or say about them?
- If you believed what they believed, would you have a different relationship with these two selected people?
Using this realisation, Bowen realised that Phil acted differently depending on who he was with. Bowen was able to turn his relationship with Phil around by choosing to relate to Phil as a friend instead of as an enemy. He learned that you absolutely can change people using the power of your mind. “Having Complaint Free relationships is not about learning what to do; it is about learning how to be. When you become the kind of person for whom such relationships are common, others shift in your presence.”
Bowen offers some very good advice in the next few chapters as to how to change yourself to make your relationships better. I have taken his suggestions as a personal challenge, and I am pleased to say that so far his advice is very effective. I don’t think I have had even one fight with my spouse since I started last week! I will share some of his suggestions over the next few days.
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