Turn Your Relationships into Energy Generators Rather than Energy Drainers

"There is no hope or joy except in human relationships."
-- Antonine de Saint-Exupery

Women are relationship oriented. Relationships mean a lot to women. A good relationship can give you increased energy and support a positive outlook. A troubled relationship can wear you out.

Your limbic brain controls your physiology and is also your emotional brain. The health and wellbeing of your relationships entrains your emotional brain, which in turn governs your physiological health.

Nothing affects the emotional brain like the quality of your relationships. Research shows that when we feel emotionally disconnected from those with whom we are in relationship, our emotional brain becomes aroused and we move into flight or fight mode. This means we respond only in terms of defense and attack. The results are not good for our relationships and it throws our physiology into chaos.

When you are engaged in disconnected, turbulent, or emotionally unfulfilling relationships, your moods and energy can become drained, negative, and unsustaining.

By contrast, relationship peace and connection can lead to better health and well being, more vital energy and more positive moods. By almost every measure those who have close and rewarding relationships do better than those who have turbulent relationships.

Here are some tips to turn your relationships into energy generators instead of energy drainers.

Spend More Time with Your Partner

Marriage researcher John Gottman has found that marriages that work and improve over the years have certain characteristic interactions. Happy couples spend more time on their relationships– an extra 5 hours a week. They engage in:

Look to Each Other Strengths

One of the more amazing results of research on romance is that the more you hold onto your illusions about your partner’s strengths and virtues, the more lasting and stable the relationship and the happier you are. The crucial measure is the discrepancy between what your friends believe are your strengths and what your partner believes are your strengths. The bigger the discrepancy in what your partner believes about your strengths -- in the positive direction -- the greater the romantic illusion your partner has about you.

Happier couples look on the bright side of the relationship, focusing on strengths rather than weaknesses -- believing that bad events that might threaten other couples do not affect them. These couples thrive even when they are actually threatened with such events, and they do so in proportion to the size of their illusions about each other.

Positive illusions are self–fulfilling because the idealized partners actually try to live up to them. They are daily buffers against hassles, since partners forgive each other more easily for the transgressions of daily life and use the alchemy of illusion to downplay faults and elevate shortcomings into strengths.

Be Optimistic

The optimistic and pessimistic explanatory styles of each person in the marriage impacts how healthy, stable and viable the relationship is and how workable and happy it is. Any combination of optimism and pessimism can work except when two pessimists get together.

When two pessimists are in a relationship, it is easy for a negative downward spiral to occur – the odds are against them. In such a situation, it is important for one or both of the members of the relationship to change their pessimistic explanatory style into a learned, more optimistic style.

Be A More Responsive and Attentive Listener

Responsive and attentive listening can help make a good relationship better and a poor relationship a good relationship. Validation is a crucial aspect of responsive listening. You should go out of your way to validate what your partner is saying. The more they care about the issue the clearer your validation needs to be.

Validation by the listener ("I see," "Yes, I understand", "OK, I get it.") satisfies the speaker’s need to know that she has been understood. It is also important to let the speaker know that you either agree or at least are understanding or sympathetic with what they are saying (nodding, "I agree", " Right" "I can see how you would think that")

Non-responsive listening can be the result of inattention due to external factors such as noise or a distracting situation or internal factors such as fatigue and listening to your own thoughts instead of the speaker, and boredom. To increase your partner’s feeling of validation it is important to move past such factors. Your partner will feel invalidated if you are non-responsive.

One internal factor that often gets in the way of responsive listening is the practice of preparing your rebuttal while listening to the speaker. A good way to overcome this habit is to begin your response with a paraphrase of what you heard the speaker say.

Your ongoing emotional state is also a barrier to responsive listening. When you are experiencing negative emotions you are more likely to hear what is wrong with the speaker’s point rather than what is right. In this case, the best practice is to admit the negative emotion and ask to put off the conversation or apologize for the non-responsive reply.

By being more responsive as a listener, you show your partner that you are paying more attention to them in a higher quality way and that you care about maintaining the connection with them.

Capitalize On Your Communication

The quality of your response to good or positive news from the other person can turn any good relationship – marriage, parenting, friendship – into a great one. If you react positively and enthusiastically, your relationship is likely to be more committed, more caring, and more satisfying – at the time and later on.

Shelly Gable divides the possible responses to good news into the following four categories:

The first category, active-constructive, capitalizes on the situation, amplifying the pleasure of the good situation contributing to an upward spiral of positive emotion. Capitalizing turns out to be a key to strong relationships.

When your partner in a relationship tells you some good news or something they are excited about, take the time and energy to convey your enthusiastic positive support. Save any downsides that you see until another time.

With just a few targeted changes, you can reap the benefits of stable, connected and satisfying relationships.

"What do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other?"
-- George Elliot

 

References

The Relationship Cure. By John Gottman and Joan DeClaire

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman and Nan Silver

Murray, S., Holmes, J., Dolderman, D., & Griffin, D. (2000). What the motivated mind sees: Comparing friends’ perspectives to married partners" views of each other. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 600-620

Authentic Happiness. By Martin Seligman

Fighting For Your Marriage. By Markman, Stanley and Blumberg

"Will you be there for me when things go right?" Supportive responses to positive event disclosures by Shelly Gable in Love and Positive Emotions by Martin Seligman Authentic Happiness Newsletter http://www.authentichappiness.org/newsletter