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others.
Peter Pearson, the cofounder of the Couples Institute in Menlo Park, California, says that he
sees four relationship killers in his couples counseling practice.
It's frightening stuff, since these "assassins of marriage," as Pearson calls them, have a way
of sneaking up on you.
They are:
So if you're going to start changing in sequence, both people need to emerge from their
bubbles. Because as sociology has discovered, vulnerability supplies the bandwidth to a
relationship in the same way that a modem gives bandwidth to the internet.
"We can't want different things, because if we want different things, the relationship won't
last."
"If I speak up, I'll be criticized. The consequences will be too negative."
If these assumptions take hold, the relationship can get stuck in toxic dynamics,
like hostile-dependent, where one person dominates the other, or conflict averse, where no
one brings anything up.
While it takes a lot of time and effort to re-calibrate these assumptions, Pearson says that
learning the basics of compassionate or at least non-triggering communication is a
start.
To reverse that trend, Pearson offers the following guideline to his clients:
When you want to bring something up that you think is going to be a problem for your
partner to hear, I want you to say it in a way that doesn't make your partner look bad or feel
bad.
Pearson says that his clients often struggle with figuring out how to express their feelings
without making the other person look bad. But even if it doesn't go smoothly every time, it
can be beneficial to the relationship since it allows either person to bring up issues that
would have otherwise been avoided or triggered a fight.
"If you're giving an account of your experience without making the other person look bad,
then you've got a bullseye," he says. But "if in recounting my experience, I do a fair amount
of finger pointing, then we don't get too far."