Continuing with Truth #6: Negativity is Invisible Abuse. Last week Helen suggested that there are three key ways we can unknowingly slip into negativity.
They are:
- Critical thinking,
- Competition,
- Constructive criticism.
So how do you stop being negative if it is habitual? Harville and Helen’s solution for themselves was pretty straightforward.
How to Stop Being Negative
“One day, we hung a calendar on our bathroom mirror. At the end of each day, we drew either a smiley face or a frowny face in the space for that day.
A frowny face meant one or both of us had been negative that day. A smiley face meant we both got through the entire day without being negative. Yes, Harville and I – who have four degrees and ten books to our names – had to resort to smiley and frowny faces on a calendar to help break our addiction to negativity. And guess what? It worked!” (p.79)
A New Problem
Eventually, the frowny faces slowly disappeared from their calendar, but then a new problem surfaced. “It was SO quiet. It was embarrassing to admit. But we didn’t know how to speak to each other without being negative.” (p. 80)
“So we designed another exercise – one that would help us focus on what we actually liked about each other. Energy follows attention. We knew that when we were negative, all we were doing was creating more negativity. What would happen if we started flooding each other with positive comments?” (p.80)
And that process worked too!! It was hard at first but over time the appreciations became easier.
Cultivating Emotional Safety
“Our Ritual of Appreciations created a degree of emotional safety that we’d never experienced before. We fell in love all over again, on a deeper, more wonderful level. We then made another discovery. The simplest way to turn off negativity is to replace judgment with curiosity. This one attitude shift has the power to bring wonder back into your relationship.” (p. 81)
She goes on to say: “This one shift (removing all negativity) will profoundly impact not only your partnership, but all of your other relationships as well. Eliminate the invisible abuse of negativity with your partner, and it will disappear from your relationships with your children, your friends, and the broader world.” (pp.83-84)
A Challenge
A couple of years ago my partner and I took on the challenge of three appreciations a day for 30 days, with no repetitions. Crystal is a great cook, so if I said: “that was a great dinner tonight”. I couldn’t use that one again. What we both realized over the 30 days was that to come up with three different appreciations each day, we had to really pay attention to all that we did for each other.
It is easy to take what your partner does for you for granted but having to find three new things each day to appreciate made us way more observant and also more verbal. We actually said out loud what we appreciated the other had done, and that has continued to this day. It was a great exercise for both of us.
An Exercise
The exercise at the end of the chapter encourages readers to appreciate three things about each other before going to bed. The point of this exercise is to shift your focus from what you don’t like, to what you do. And remember: the more you focus on the good, the more good there will be to focus on!!!
