In this chapter, I will help personalize your relationship playbook. As a coach, whether it was hockey or football, I was privy to many different playbooks, but I always personalized them for our team. Any adaptions we made might be either to take advantage of the talent I had available at different positions or to protect against the strengths or to take advantage of the weaknesses of the team we were playing the next week. The same will go for you. You will want to make the ideas in this book yours own.
The suggestions that follow are the product of working directly with thousands of couples over the last three decades and that I have personally seen make a difference. Hopefully, they will be of help to you as well.
Exploring the Space-Between for your Relationship Playbook
l now think the fastest way forward for any couple is to protect the Space-Between. It is a real energy field and you cannot keep putting negativity into that space. Negativity causes disconnect and what you want is connection. If it becomes too negative people start to avoid it. Why would they go into a toxic space? Negativity is to your relationship like cancer is to your body. They both kill.
The problem: How do you let your partner know that something they did was negative (whether intentional or accidental) without getting their back up even more? The solution: The two of you must agree on a safe word or phrase or signal that, when used, simply signals that something didn’t work. It is not an attack! And then you want to fix whatever was experienced as negative as soon as possible using the Safe Conversation Process.
The Zone of Safety
The Zone of Safety builds confidence that whenever you are in your partner’s presence you can trust, without a doubt, that your partner will be emotionally available, listen accurately and deeply, and withhold judgment.
A good rule of thumb is: when you feel defensive, it is a good time to mirror. Mirroring will assure your partner that you have heard their perception and experience of the situation. Another important rule: Anything negative or potentially negative is discussed by appointment only.
Skills – The Safe Conversation Process
The best way to begin practicing the Safe Conversation Process is to start with appreciations. You can use the sentence stem, “One thing I appreciate about you is …” Your partner will then mirror that back. Another way to practice is to have a regularly scheduled practice session each week to mirror something mundane. When we first learned this skill, it was over lunch (at Harville’s workshop in Chicago, 35 years ago). “Please pass the salt. What I heard you say was, please pass the salt. Did I hear you correctly?” (My wife was ready to kill me by the end of the lunch but we started to get the idea.)
Imago Relationship Therapy and Your Relationship Playbook
In building your relationship playbook, know in the Imago model, you have really married your healer. Although, at the start, your partner will probably challenge you to grow in areas that might be weak for you. Before training with Harville, I earned my Master’s in Counselling Psychology at the Alfred Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago. One of Adler’s great sayings is: “It is not what you possess, but how you use it.”
I always use the example of Terry Fox. It is over forty years ago now, but as a young man, he lost a leg to cancer and then decided to run across Canada to raise money for cancer research. Another young man could have the same disability but claim that life is not fair. They both possess the same physical loss but use it quite differently. Fox couldn’t do anything about the loss of his leg or the cancer but what he did was pretty impressive. The same goes for us. We can’t change anything that has happened to date, but what we do from here forward, we have more choice over.
As I say on my business card: The tools are available in today’s world to have the relationship of your dreams. All the best as you personalize your own playbook!!!
