March 27, 2017
Interview with Elliott Connie, author of the book The Solution Focused Marriage
Mike Carruthers:
When a relationship is in trouble the natural tendency is to first figure out what went wrong in order to fix it.
Elliott Connie:
But that’s just as silly to me as before I can lose weight I have to have a full understanding on how I gained it. It makes no sense whatsoever.
Elliott Connie, author of the book The Solution Focused Marriage, believes that rather than focus on what went wrong do things that make the relationship better. For instance…
…having a goal for your relationship. What a goal does is it makes sure that we’re all oriented towards the same thing. If I know what our conjoint goals are I’m going to observe your behavior as differently than if I don’t know what your goals are.
It’s also important to take credit for the honeymoon phase of your relationship.
When a relationship gets started there are all these euphoric feelings of pleasure and bliss. And those things happen because you took steps to fall in love and ensure your partner would fall in love and you have to be willing to take credit for those things. When we’re aware of our talent we’re more likely to use them so you have to understand what your relationship talent is so you can use that talent on your partner.
And make note of your successes as your relationship improves.
So we had this goal what’s going on in our lives that is evidence that we’ve taken a step (even if it’s ever so slight) towards the accomplishment of that goal. We have a habit sometimes in relationships to delete the positive information and only talk about the negative information.
