Show Notes

If you asked what the key to a good relationship was, most people would say communication. If prompted further, most would tell you that they are good or effective communicators, but is that true? In this two-part episode on communication our strategies deviate. In Part 1, Isaiah, being a marital attorney, illustrated how you can make a divorce less painful when communication is beyond repair. In Part 2, Meredith, being a licensed psychotherapist, will explore the alternative of not leaving the relationship, but instead finding new ways to connect with your partner, improve communication, and manage conflict.

In this episode we cover:

• How do we fight? When communication turns into conflict

• How to make arguments more productive

• Bids for connection

• The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse 

• Taking breaks and creating boundaries

• Getting on the same team with your partner

• Self-awareness and emotional attunement 

Transcript

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (00:00):

We don't have to get into all these fights and all these things. And if I'm to leave something for tomorrow, but then tomorrow's going, okay, well, why would I want to revisit? What's what happened yesterday? We're beyond yesterday. We're good.

Meredith Shirey (00:11):

But that's the thing. Are you really good? Or did we just sweep it under the rug?

Theme Music (00:22):

[inaudible].

Meredith Shirey (00:24):

Hey everyone, I'm Meredith Shirey. I'm a licensed psychotherapist, specializing in relationship issues,

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (00:30):

and I'm Isaiah-Juste a divorce attorney.

Meredith Shirey (00:32):

This is a podcast about filling in the gaps of our relationships, the deeply personal choices we make for our families and ourselves,

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (00:39):

And the impact that our actions have on the rest of our lives. This is Love Me or Leave Me.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (00:48):

Hey guys, welcome back. You know, in the last episode we spoke about a tough topic, communication, divorce, and that's a very specific type of communication, right? It's a very individualistic, very kind of protective self protective. You don't necessarily want to over-communicate with your partner. Well, now we're going to flip that on its head. We're going to talk about the other side of things, communication and relationships. How do we communicate when we're actually together? So we could avoid a breakup or a divorce, and we have the perfect person here obviously to talk to, and kind of real into her head about all these things. And I'm really excited to get this going. So, you know, they say how you fight is more important than what you actually fight about. I, and this is a concept that I don't get at all right. And people always tell me, it's Isaiah. It's not, it's not what you say. It's how you say it. And that's always so confusing to me because if I say, Hey, I'd like some eggs. That's what I mean. I'd like some eggs. Um, but it's tough in that way. Right? And understanding what the other person is saying.

Meredith Shirey (01:56):

That's, that's actually a very important point and I can see where there's a lot of confusion in that. And hopefully I can distill some of this. So it is true that how you fight is far more important than what you fight about or how often you fight. A lot of times, people have this misconception, that fighting means your relationship is unhealthy and not finding means your relationship is healthy. And that's actually not true. You can have a very unhealthy relationship where you don't actually quote unquote fight. But if you're both avoiding conflict, that's not good either at the same time. You know, if it's just saying, Hey, I want some eggs. Hopefully that doesn't land people in either of our offices, but you never know if it's followed up by, right. I'm sure that's the thing, right? It's usually the what's followed by, Hey, I want some eggs what was before that, that probably, that probably paints more of a picture. So context is super, super important here.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (02:54):

So then how do I communicate it as a team with my partner? What are some of the tricks to communicating with my partner that I can utilize or that the listeners can use to communicate better with the other person?

Meredith Shirey (03:06):

Right? So there are a lot of things that go into laying the foundation for healthy communication and building connection. But the name of the game here is how do you build connection with your partner? There are many, many different ways to do this. I'm going to try to give you at least the broad strokes on a couple of these. So one of them is being really self-aware about your wants and needs. What triggers you, what sets you off and then turning that in having some emotional attunement towards your partner. So that basically means are you able to tune in to what your partner wants, what your partner needs, how they think, how they feel, and that is a constant moving target. And that is a little hard for some people to come to grips with, to think, wait, this isn't just a one and done conversation. And the truth is no, our relationships are very fluid. We're constantly growing and evolving and changing our approaches to how we address our relationship need to also be growing and evolving and changing. And so one of the best things you can do to maintain connection to your partner is to stay curious. The words, tell me more, can sometimes have more weight than the phrase I love you. It shows an interest and an engagement.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (04:17):

So that's a great piece of advice. Tell me more, right? Cause you're engaging with, you're engaging with your partner. That's really important, um, to do that. And I find that important. That's important in my relationship as well. You know, what I find difficult is when I say something one way, but it's interpreted a different way. Do you ever see that?

Meredith Shirey (04:35):

Oh, all the time. I would say that most of the time couples in my office use me almost as this emotional interpreter to fill in those gaps because one person saying one thing, the other person's hearing something completely different and they probably had this conversation a hundred times and they're just so frustrated because they desperately want to hear one another, but there's some kind of block getting in the way. And so in that way, I'm almost like an emotional plumber too. I'm working through the clogs in your communication. Um, but the thing is we all have a very, very different approach, right? And the message I'm trying to send to you will probably be not exactly the message that you hear because we don't share the same brain and that's okay. I think that a lot of people get wrapped up in the idea that, well, if we're different, that must be bad.

Meredith Shirey (05:24):

Different must be bad, incompatible. And that's actually not true. All of us are incredibly different. So if you think back to your family of origin and how you grew up, that probably set the tone and the blueprint for how you learned to communicate what you learned to be normal. And for most of us, that's not challenged that much until we're in a relationship specifically romantic relationship with somebody else. And then suddenly we realize, wait a sec, you don't do this the same way as me. And so now we have to talk through the times when we miss each other. So there are a few ways that we can help you to improve your odds of either not missing those things or when you come to that misinterpretation, being able to have a healthy conversation about it, rather than sitting in our assumptions.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (06:10):

Tell me more. What's the, what's the secret, right? What are the secrets to do that?

Meredith Shirey (06:14):

What's the secret sauce? Okay. So John Gottman coined this term bids for connection and a bid for connection is any reach out that your partner does to solicit your attention. So it can be as simple as this we're on zoom, right? If I say, if I'm looking at you and I smile, if you smile back at me, that's you turning towards my bid for connection. So if I'm your partner that says to me, you're engaged with me and you care about me. And that's like a little tiny credit in our relational bank account. Now, if you're to look away and ignore me, that's considered turning away from now. If you look at me and you say with some hostility, Meredith, what do you want? That's actually turning against you and you really want to avoid turning against. So the secret to all of this is to try to really pay attention to those small moments in those bids.

Meredith Shirey (07:08):

And to try to, when you're noticing them turn towards. So again, give some kind of engagement that is connecting and it says, I care about you too. This isn't about perfection. You know, you're not gonna see this every single time it happens. It is normal for you to miss it. You know, this, this is not about batting a thousand. Really. You can probably miss about 30% of these and it's not a big deal. Think about each one of these, almost like a tiny grain of sand on its own. Not that big of a deal, but when you put them together, it creates a beach. So is your beach full of good positive interactions? If it is that actually allows your partner to have a better sentiment towards the relationship. So when you do have those miscommunications, your partner's going to be more likely to say, Hey, what's going on.

Meredith Shirey (08:01):

They're going to give you the benefit of the doubt and want to understand. Now if your beach is full of really bad grains of sand, because you've been doing that turn against or turn away, what's probably going to happen is your partner's going to misinterpret it. And they're going to turn that assumption into something very negative. Our brains make assumptions all the time. It's automatic, it's involuntary. But if we're not finding ways to challenge those into a positive way, if we're not finding ways to dispel the myth in our assumptions, then they become fossilized into the truth of the narrative, right? So you're, you're not paying attention to me because you don't care.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (08:40):

Well, I mean, that's a lot of pressure, 70% of all the smiles. That's a little, it's a little scary. I mean, how do we, how do you catch these bins of connections and then right. Like do I have to be staring at my wife? Like 24 seven? You know, what does that look like on the ground, you know, cause for me, right? You know, sometimes you see it and sometimes you don't and you, and I certainly don't mean to like turn away necessarily, right? You want to be a good supporting spouse, but you know, the kids are running around, while you're working and just screaming and yelling going on and you know, you, you don't always catch them. So do you have any advice as to like, how do you catch that before connection? And what do you do with the bids for connection is missed

Meredith Shirey (09:20):

70 sounds like a high pass. It's really not. And if you're really struggling for this, this is actually a great way to start fostering also that emotional attunement with your partner by just asking, Hey, how do you like to connect with me? Are you ever making these bids? And I'm missing them? When does this happen? What does this look like? Now? You have to be open to the answer because they're probably going to say, well, you missed it here. You missed it here. If you respond to them by saying, no, I didn't or you respond with defensiveness, that's not going to actually further the connection. That's going to furthermore disconnection. So be open to the possibility of saying, I might need to try something different. So the name of the game here is flexibility.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (10:01):

You're catching kind of where the fights start, because like you said, it's not the, I want a plate of eggs. This is what happened before that. And I'm willing to bet that, you know, sometimes before that there was some type of connection that was missed and that angered the other person that caused some type of assumptions. And then now we're in the negative spiral of having an argument or a fight.

Meredith Shirey (10:22):

A lot of times, many missed bids for connection can lead to conflict. So again, this is why, if you think about them like grains of sand in the beach, you want them to be good sand, right? You want these to be positive credits in, in the relationship. So let's actually take a slightly different analogy from the beach. Let's think about like credits in your bank account, right? If every one of these interactions represents a 1 cent credit, that's not a lot. Right? But over time that accumulates, now let's say that you do have a conflict. If you've got a lot of credit in that bank account, the debit of a conflict, isn't going to make that much of a difference. It'll hurt, but it's not detrimental. Now, if you don't have much credit in that bank account, that conflict is really, really threatening to the stability of your relationship.

Meredith Shirey (11:12):

So when people get into conflict, one of the best things you can do is to slow down. So often we get so reactive and we stop hearing our partner very, very early on. We all have a bit of a listening deficit disorder and we need to slow the conversations down. Now, there are times too, when you get into conflict that the conversation is not going to be productive anymore. And it's okay to take a break. In fact, I think that when you get to that point, taking a break can be some of the healthiest steps you can possibly take,

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (11:44):

But I'm upset. Right? And you know, my partner did something I didn't appreciate or didn't like, or something of my, my view is wrong. Right? How do I then just take a break? I mean, isn't that saying that, you know, I'm somehow like devaluing my own feelings by doing that.

Meredith Shirey (11:59):

I can see where you're coming from there. And you only take the break when the conversation is not productive. If you can have a healthy, productive conversation, you might not necessarily need to take the break. It's about when we get to a place of, I'm not hearing you, you're not hearing me. And now we're really getting into that area. Maybe we're even using some contentious language. That's when we need to take the break, because we're going to do things that are going to create lasting damage and scar our relationship. That's when you need to take the break. But if you can both stay in the conversation, then by all means, try to do it. This is, I don't want to say necessarily a last resort, but you have to be careful about the break. They cannot be used maliciously or manipulatively. So if someone is using the break to just try to avoid the conversation, that's not good. What I say to people is if you're the one saying, we need to take a break, you need to tell your partner how long this break is for and why you need it. So this is when we're going to come back to the conversation.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (13:03):

You know, I think of my mother, right? My mom was married for, uh, for 36 years or so. And, and she would say that it's like she had a volcano on her. And she just had to say what she was going to say when she was going to say it, if not the volcano would kind of just like explode. I imagine that a lot of people kind of feel like that. So it's really difficult to, to stop and take a break. But then on the, on the other hand, you're right. Once you take a break, it's kind of like your, your body comes down and then maybe you can come back to the situation and have a more productive conversation.

Meredith Shirey (13:39):

Yeah. I think that that's a really good analogy. I love that, that metaphor of using the volcano, because people have different approaches to communication, to conflict. And again, this goes back to your blueprint of how you grow up. Probably has a lot of an influence. So, so if you grew up with a mother who used a lot of volume, right? And like you said, when she got upset about something, she let you know right. Then that's going to give you a different lens and how you interpret like loud voices, let's say, so you might not necessarily need the brakes. And you might actually do a little better with shorter, more frequent arguments versus one big, huge long one. Right? And your partner might feel very differently. So it's really about having some awareness of what works for you and also what works for your partner.

Meredith Shirey (14:27):

And just talking about that. Some people don't like the idea of going to bed angry, and some people say, I need to sleep on this. So one thing that you can do too, is to tell your partner like, Hey, I want to talk to you about this is now a good time. I would advise against maybe having the volcano erupts. If it's three in the morning, and one of you is fast asleep. Like, do you not? It's okay to go to bed angry. You say, I love you. And we will talk about this in the morning. So that's the thing. If you're going to be one of those people needs a little more time to work into conflict. Let me know when we're going to have the conversation. You cannot just leave it in the air for never having it. If you're going to take the break or if you need a little more time, that's okay. But you need to say, when we're coming back to this and it needs to be within 24 hours,

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (15:13):

I hear that. Right. But then what comes to my head is I'm a person that likes peace, right? I just want, I just want to have a peaceful life. We won't have to, you know, let's peace, peace, and love. We don't have to get into all these fights and all these things. And if I'm going to leave something for tomorrow, but then tomorrow tomorrow's going, okay. Why, why would I want to revisit? What's what happened yesterday? We're beyond yesterday. We're good now,

Meredith Shirey (15:34):

But that's the thing. Are you really good? Or did we just sweep it under the rug? Here's, here's an analogy I use with people a lot. Right. And especially with us living in the New York area, this'll make a lot of sense. Right? Most of us don't have a ton of closet space. So imagine that each one of those unresolved conflicts where it's like, all right, we're going to go to bed. Uh, I'm not very happy, but you know, all right, now it's next day and we're good. It's like taking a box and put it in that closet. And maybe at first you can put way way back in that closet goes back, back, back, back, but it never really goes away. And then you put more boxes in and more boxes in. And then the doors of that closet start creaking open. But you try to put more boxes in just shoved the doors closed really hard. And eventually the doors just kind of open on their own. That's kind of how those unresolved conflicts at up, right. To go back to your volcano analogy. That's like that pressure and the volcano building and building, building so that when you have the eruption, the eruption knocks your socks off and takes out a village.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (16:29):

Okay. So then how does one resolve a conflict? Because you're saying these things are more broader discussions that could last over days or whatever, you know, it's, it's not, it's a fluid thing. It's not something you say, okay, this discussion is over. Now. Now we've moved on. How do we ever get finality in any of this now?

Meredith Shirey (16:47):

Well, it can be. So I would say if it's a discussion about who's taken out the garbage, do not let that be something that rolls on for days and days, that's going to make everyone bananas crazy. Don't do that. Your bigger conversation, so if it is something that is really, really tough and contentious, or it's kind of one of those revolving conflicts where the same theme keeps coming up over and over those it's okay to say, you know what? Let's put a pin in it. Let's come back to it. We need to sleep on it. I need to clear my head and get my thoughts around it and come back. But yeah, if it's about, who's taking out the garbage or who's picking up groceries, try to have those things be as tightly knit and resolvable and put them away as possible. Now here's the thing.

Meredith Shirey (17:24):

When you fight about everything at once, you get nothing accomplished. So you try to make those conversations very specific and succinct and get them over with. And once it's gone, leave it in the past. So to your point about, okay, if it's the next day and we're good, now, if you're really good and we have this resolved right then yeah, there's no need to bring it back up. One of the things that will do the most damaging is that thing that was resolved six months ago, if you're bringing it up in the fight now, or the thing that you were mad about for a day, six months ago, but you never brought up to me now, you're bringing up to me now, when I'm angry at you about something totally different. So to your point, you know, when you need to come back to it, make sure that you're giving yourself some guard rails so that it doesn't feel like it goes on forever.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (18:13):

What I find sometimes is that you'll tell your spouse or your partner, Hey, you know, I feel a certain way about how you did this or whatever it is, whatever the issue is. And then the response is, well, you do the same thing, right? And it kind of feels like the valuing to what, what you just said. Like now you're having a conversation about things that happened forever ago or about like a much greater issue, but there's no way to resolve that in that manner. Right? Like if I say, Hey, I didn't like the way you spoke about X and your spouse says, well, you do the same thing. There's no resolution there.

Meredith Shirey (18:44):

And that's a very, very good point. That is. So when someone's one being defensive and saying, you do the same thing, that's actually one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse that John Gottman coined to talk about what is really, really detrimental and can actually lead to relational demise.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (19:02):

We've just gone to a very dark place. Are we getting biblical here?

Meredith Shirey (19:06):

I know we did that in the last episode too. I don't know why we keep coming up with these biblical references

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (19:12):

Last time. We're an Old Testament with Solomon. Now we're in New Testimony we're in, we're in Revelations here.

Meredith Shirey (19:17):

Yeah. Either way you get, yeah. We keep going as weird dark places like the world was ending. Well, I mean, 2020 anyway, moving on. Right. So John Gottman is actually one of the leading researchers in couples therapy. Um, he is basically like the Michael Jordan, if you will, of of couple therapy research. And so he out of his research came up with these four principles that when these are really, really prevalent in conflict over and over and over, they actually are more predictive of the demise or the end of a relationship. So with about 90 to 94% accuracy.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (19:51):

What are those four things?

Meredith Shirey (19:52):

So defensiveness that you were just referencing, that's one of them, right? The I'm going to defend my actions or I'm going to deflect and toss the ball back to you really as a means of not hearing you. So even what you said that I didn't feel heard after that.

Meredith Shirey (20:08):

And now it's about you. That is exactly why defensiveness is really corrosive and why it's one of the four horsemen. It's one of the lighter four horsemen, not one of the more insidious ones. Contempt is the worst one. And human nature is when you feel attacked, your natural instinct is going to be to defend yourself. So one of the best things you can do is to take a deep breath in and out and to say, tell me more, one of the three word magic phrases, because that indicates that you're listening. Because when you go immediately into defense of your intentions, it communicates to your partner, that one you're not listening. And two that you're not actually caring, interested in their perspective, right. That you're kind of making it about you and you don't have room for them. And that makes them feel worse. It actually makes you feel bad too. Do you want the other horsemen or should we just move on? Okay. I wasn't sure if I'd scared you away,

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (20:58):

I'm still here.

Meredith Shirey (20:59):

Okay. All right. No, one's running away screaming. Good.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (21:01):

A little nervous though.

Meredith Shirey (21:02):

I mean, you should be, they're pretty scary that, you know, the apocalypse again, cough 2020. Uh, but so the other ones are criticism, which is pretty, self-explanatory the big thing there is. It's okay to complain, but make your complaints specific and behavioral. Not about who your partner is as a person,

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (21:21):

No name calling.

Meredith Shirey (21:22):

That's actually a good point. Name calling falls into the worst one. So if you avoid any of the horsemen, avoid this one contempt name falling cause falls under contempt. So when you are doing things to belittle your partner, when you're communicating superiority, so name calling is a really obvious one. Please don't do that ever, ever, ever. It is literally like a cancer to your relationship. Now, contempt can actually be communicated in other ways, too that are a little more subtle. So I rolling is actually a really powerful way to communicate contempt. Also smirking misuse of sarcasm again, when it starts communicating superiority. That's when it's really, really problematic.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (22:04):

If we talked about three of the horsemen, right? Criticism, contempt and I think defensiveness, you said, I think there's one missing. What's the fourth horseman?

Meredith Shirey (22:12):

Right? So the fourth one is also one of the really nasty horsemen when you want to avoid. And that's called stonewalling. So stonewalling is what happens when someone completely withdraws or shuts down from the conversation. Now here's the really insidious thing about it. Someone can do that and still be sitting right next to you. What can look like them ignoring you is actually they're so emotionally flooded and triggered that they can no longer actually respond because they're in that state of fight or flight and they shut down, but it looks like ignoring. So what happens most of the time is that one person stonewalls, right? Because they can't engage anymore. And the other person says, see, you've checked out, you withdrawn from me and I'm going to make all these assumptions about why, because you don't care cause it doesn't matter to you because you're just that apathetic.

Meredith Shirey (22:59):

Right? And because I don't matter when really it might not be bad at all, but this person has had to retreat inside of themselves. So that's why you want to try to take the break before you need to Stonewall. So you see how these things can feed into each other and escalate a conversation quickly. And the thing about conflict, again, it's normal. If you were a human and you were in contact with other humans, you're going to have conflict and that's okay. It's really about sometimes slowing it down, taking a break. If you get to the point of, again, you want to say something contemptuous or you're feeling the need to Stonewall. That's okay to say, I need to come back. And the real thing is, again, you don't want to say things that can't be taken back.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (23:40):

Yeah. That's an amazing point. I think that's something that we all have to remember, right? As two humans, right in conversation is always going to be a difference of opinion. And sometimes feels like, you know, when you watch television or are you hear, you know, from our cultural norms about what a relationship is going to look like, conflict is never within that type of thing. Unless it's in a very extreme version where, you know, our relationship is going to end, but every relationship has conflict. I think that's a great way to put that. And the question is, how do you have that conflict? What are my boundaries here? Right? Like I need, I need some space in which I can act and I can express myself and listen as well without violating, you know or invoking one of these horsemen.

Meredith Shirey (24:23):

And you can be in conflict and you can be expressive and you can talk about your feelings and you can do that without using criticism or contempt. It is possible. You know, and it's really about being honest and vulnerable and authentic with your feelings. Now what a lot of people do when they haven't done a lot of the self-awareness work is they tend to blame your partner, right? To assign all of these faults and, and your feelings, you know, it's because of you that this happened, right. That's not a good thing. You want to avoid the blame game, but you can talk about your feelings without blaming your partner and still get that point across.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (25:02):

I think maybe that's a good place to take that break you were talking about. Right? So when you get to the point where you're about to blame, maybe that's where you saying, know what we should take a break from the conversation.

Meredith Shirey (25:13):

Exactly. And I think that blame is a really slippery slope right now. If you're looking for someone to take accountability and responsibility, that's a little bit different because there should always be an assumption that two people have something to contribute to this, right? A conflict takes two people. We each have our sides. So we each need to take ownership for what we're bringing to it.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (25:35):

I think a lot of it goes back to how we communicate. We like to put ourselves in boxes as human being and you communicate this way. And I communicate that way, you know, and I know we all, uh, are experts at Dr. Google. And one of the things you Google is like the five love languages. How does that come into play here? I hear that it's like the be all and end all and like can completely predict how your relationship is going to be.

Meredith Shirey (25:58):

Yeah. The 5 Love Languages, the Enneagram, I mean, people love to use whatever pop-psychology is out there. And listen, I'm not going to disparage the five love languages, but I want to be really, really clear on this. It's a great starting point to start a conversation so that you can begin understanding yourself and your partner to get that emotional attunement. So again, you can be responsive to the bids, but remember, again, it's the starting point. It is not the end point because they're not static. And when you actually go through the love languages, you probably fit into more than one of those categories and it's going to change throughout the relationship. So if you go into it and you want to learn about it and you present it to your partner as a tool like, Oh, I thought this was interesting. You know, where do you think you fall? How has it changed for us? And he used that as part of an ever evolving conversation. It can be a helpful tool, but just think about it as one tool in a tool belt that requires many tools.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (26:57):

The way, I think about it sometimes is that when you're in a relationship, you know, people assume that the person they marry is that, that's the person that, that person's always going to be. But as human beings, we evolve and we change and we change in our ideas and we can grow. And I think the idea is to kind of grow together. Right? And I think maybe this way, when we're talking about communicating and the bids for connection and all of that stuff is a manner in which our tool set. Like you said two to go together. Now sometimes, you know, like, like I said before, with The 5 Love Languages, you communicate differently. Right. And that causes a friction. And I think sometimes we'd come from different cultures in the United States of America. You know what American culture is there, right? American culture is made up of a plethora of other cultures, maybe two people who married each other are in a relationship from different cultures and have different styles of communication and different upbringings. And then how do they get together? And like figuring out all this,

Meredith Shirey (27:54):

That is a very, very important point. And so as the world is becoming more accessible, you do see a lot more by cultural and multicultural relationships and families. And what's really important is to, again, to kind of know what your blueprint was going into this and what your partner's is, so that we can find a way together to talk about that where I don't need to be. Right. And you don't need to be wrong. So one thing that's really, really important when you're having any kind of conversation to preserve the weakness is to shift your goal from being right or from winning to understanding one another.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (28:30):

Well, what if I'm actually right?

Meredith Shirey (28:33):

I mean, that's what your partner is also saying, right. They're equally right too,

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (28:39):

But she's not right.

Meredith Shirey (28:40):

How do you know?

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (28:42):

I wouldn't be having the conversation then otherwise. Right.

Meredith Shirey (28:45):

Okay. But I'm going to, I'm going to pick on you a little bit. How do you know that your perspective is the absolute truth and that there's no truth in hers?

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (28:53):

That's a good point, I guess. Right. Um, and maybe you got to give yourself space for that space to be wrong, but somebody like me, like I'm an imperfect being, right. So somebody like me, like, I, I wouldn't waste my energy in having a conversation if I didn't think I was right to begin with. Right. Or having a disagreement, if I didn't think I was right to begin with, it reminds me of now I'm going to invoke my grandmother who used to always say "cada cerebro es un mundo" right in, which was just Spanish, which in English means every mind is the only universe. Right. And then to channel my mother again, she would say, and the universe that matters is mine. Right? So it's kind of like, how do you get these two people who are in their own universes to kind of come together?

Meredith Shirey (29:34):

So it's allowing space and holding space for each person's perspective and knowing that there's validity and that there is rationale in it. Right? So when I listen to you with the intensity that I want you to listen to me, and I don't do that with the expectation that you're going to perfectly adopt my perspective or I, you, if I don't come into this thinking, if I listened to you, I'm going to give up and lose something in me that allows room for both perspectives. So I love your analogy of the universe. We want to have galaxies that are in orbit that are not colliding necessarily. You can hold both of these perspectives as though they're parallel lines. They can both exist and they never need to intersect. You can understand someone and give them empathy and validation and never once agree with them.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (30:22):

I think maybe the thing to remember is like, I tell people, you know, you got in the relationship, you chose your partner, you chose your spouse, you chose that person. You didn't choose that person because you thought they were an idiot, right. You wouldn't have, you wouldn't have done that. So maybe you come in with that baseline level of respect. This is not like it's talking about some Joe Schmoe, you know, outside that you don't know, some stranger is the person who you chose to have relationship with. So you have to give them that baseline level of alright, what you're saying has to make sense on some level.

Meredith Shirey (30:51):

Exactly. That's, that is a perfect way of saying that. And that is why, again, you really want to make sure to build up that relationship credit with all of your bids, for connection and challenging those negative assumptions so that you can have that positive sentiment and give them the benefit of the doubt. You're right. When we're in the beginning of our relationship, we are so much nicer to our partners. We respect them more. We think their opinions are cool and their music's awesome. And that cute haircut they had in the eighties was great. You know, we think everything about them is magical. Wonderful. And then we wake up 20 years later and we hate the way that they breathe. So what happened, there was a lot of room over the years for those missed bids, for things that didn't go well for those scars on our view of the other person in the relationship, right?

Meredith Shirey (31:38):

So the more that you can keep that fluid and allow yourself to have some adaptability and flexibility of that. And the more that you and your partner are making an effort to stay connected, right? By resolving those conflicts, going back and doing the repair, communicating, talking about your needs. And when it changes, you're going to build it, the relationship credit. And so you're much more likely to love your partner in a more evolved way where you can hold both. I love you the way that you were back then, I love you the way you are now. And there are things about you that still annoy me.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (32:10):

Now I'm going to chime my father. May he rest in peace? I asked him once I said, what is the key here? Like, what is the secret to the long marriage? Because he was married to my mother for 36 years. He said, you just got to get through it.

Meredith Shirey (32:23):

What did that mean for him though?

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (32:26):

I think it meant exactly what you said. You've got to realize that this other person is different than you. There's going to be fights. There's going to be happy times. There's going to be sad times, but through it all, you just got to stay together and be together. All right. So this is what I'm getting from our conversation. And let me know what you think. Meredith, we should pay attention to that of bins for connection, which I think is an awesome thing we should avoid at all costs. The four horsemen. We should understand that the way you may say something isn't necessarily interpreted in the way, the way you meant it. Well, we should also remember that the person that we chose to be in relationship with deserves a certain baseline level of respect, because if they didn't deserve that, we wouldn't be in a relationship with them.

Meredith Shirey (33:17):

The only thing I'll add to that is exactly what you just did, which is checking for meaning, checking and making sure and clarifying the point. Did I hear you correctly? Was that the message you intended to send? Right. Making sure we're on the same page that builds that solidarity that we've been talking about, right? That sense of weakness and what a great way to wrap this up. So congratulations, Isaiah. You'd like you did all of this. And do you remember at the beginning when you said, Oh, I don't want to do this bid. This sounds too hard. And now you're excited about it.

Isaiah Vallejo-Juste (33:49):

I don't know about excited. Well, wish me luck.

Meredith Shirey (33:51):

I don't think you need luck. You've got this.

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Rich Hackman [Producer] (34:02):

Love me or leave me is a podcast production of the blurred brand. This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical or legal advice and is not a substitute for professional consultation, diagnoses or treatment. Always follow up with a licensed attorney or healthcare professional who can address your specific needs. Thanks for listening.