Episode 27. War and Peace: Marriage Style
Conflict in marriage is often misunderstood and feared, but it's actually a natural part of any healthy relationship. In this episode, we explore the crucial difference between conflict and contention, and why understanding this distinction can revolutionize your marriage.
We delve into the research of relationship experts John Gottman and the Arbinger Institute, revealing surprising insights about the nature of marital disagreements. Did you know that 69% of conflicts in marriages are perpetual? We'll explain what this means for your relationship and how to navigate these ongoing differences constructively./tt
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One. Hello, lovers, and welcome to another exciting episode of Marriage iq. We're hearing a lot of people are becoming more intelligent spouses, and that makes us really excited. Tell me, Dr. Hastings, my love, Nobody wants to listen to what we're going to talk about today.00:00:23
Oh, really? Well, that's a wrap, folks. I hope you enjoyed the 30 seconds of this podcast and have a great week. Oh, my gosh. Wait a second.00:00:33
What are you talking about? People are going to like what we're talking about today. Well, everybody knows that talking about conflict is taboo, right? And emerge trying to pick apart the difference between conflict and contention. I mean, who wants to listen to that?00:00:52
I mean, they're basically the same thing. As the old saying goes, if you don't talk about your problems, then they don't exist. Voila. Right? All problems solved simply by just not talking about them.00:01:09
It's a miracle.00:01:12
Sweep it under the rug and everything will be fine. I never knew relationships could be so easy. I just keep telling myself, just never talk about what bothers me about you, and our marriage will be perfect. We'll just live happily ever after.00:01:32
Well, I can tell you that is definitely not how a good marriage goes. And on this podcast, our purpose is to actually help people learn to be a little bit uncomfortable. That is necessary for having a good marriage, being able to sit in discomfort. So really, that is the beauty of marriage iq, that we can talk about hard stuff and let people explore things from different perspectives while they're just taking a bath, while listening to Marriage IQ or driving down the road or sitting on their couch or making dinner. But, my love, if we let anyone peek into our own married life, they.00:02:14
They might see that we don't always get along. Yikes. I mean, are we supposed to be the experts here? Us not get along all the time? What are you talking about?00:02:26
Aren't we the ones that are supposed to have all the answers? Why on earth would anyone want to listen to us if we tell them that conflict is not only acceptable in a relationship, but also necessary? Yeah, it really is necessary. To help us grow, let's maybe share one of our experiences recently. Let's.00:02:49
Last week, weekend, we were in the. Grand Canyon, which anybody who's listened to some previous episodes knows this was a big goal of mine for the year. And we conquered. We did. We were hiking the Grand Canyon, and it was a long hike.00:03:07
It was a long hike. I wanted to talk about something that I thought was really insightful, really unique perspective on life, and I was really excited to share it with You. And I felt like I probably didn't. Respond how you wanted me to because I wasn't understanding what you were saying. I was tired, I was exhausted.00:03:30
It was on our way back up. But. But is that true to say that I. I didn't respond like how you were expecting me to? I.00:03:39
Yes, I felt hurt. However, I remembered the program and I decided that night to keep an open mind about your perspective on how my words may have landed on you. And we got some sleep. I remember you laughing. Well, we laughed together at me trying to amble across the hotel room after hiking for many hours and feeling like I was 90 years old.00:04:08
Yeah, sleep did wonderful things for me. I felt better. And you switched into somebody twice your age three times. Yeah, I got over it. Look, it was.00:04:20
Grand Canyon is not easy peasy. But I remember we. We did drive the next morning for a few hours. It was a beautiful day in Flagstaff, Arizona. Crisp fall day, just beautiful.00:04:36
And we started talking about it again, just a different angle. And I brought up that idea. And this time I used some more context. I used some examples that I hadn't used the day before. And during this car ride in the middle of nowhere, Arizona, we both were able to kind of come together and see each other's perspectives.00:05:03
You're able to see what I was talking about. And we. In a way that we both felt heard and understood. And that was really impactful to me. It really does allow us to have more insight into our own lives.00:05:21
And so we're going to share some ways, maybe through just a little bit different lens today of why we have conflict, why we move from there into contention, sometimes how we can pull back out of that. So some of our listeners may be saying, my husband hurt my feelings, just like you said I did to you. And shouldn't I expect for him to apologize for that? I am continuing to feel hurt because he hasn't apologized. I told him it hurt my feelings what he said.00:05:57
Yeah. What would you say to that? Well, he may have. I guess I would try to look at it from both people's perspective and have them just talk about it. But if you only get one person's perspective, can they turn that around without him apologizing?00:06:21
You can if you start looking at different ways of maybe what he might be thinking, why he may have responded that way, if there are other things happening in his life that day that may have caused him to respond in that way, if he had something bad happen or if he had other things that happened in his life that Caused him to really have a lot of stress and just to think on that and go back to, what if I'm wrong? Where am I wrong? Is there the potential that my interpretation. And you know, I think even if there isn't that possibility, which there always is, but if there wasn't, you could also just change some of your thoughts surrounding that. So today let's.00:07:16
You could also just change your thoughts around your own thought. Yeah, right. Reframe your thought in a way that just decreases your stress and distress. So let's talk just as a reminder, what is conflict? Oh, go ahead.00:07:33
As a reminder, what is conflict? So according to Chelom Leavitt, who we interviewed recently on our podcast, conflict occurs when we bring our own different opinions and perspectives to a situation. Contention is the need to be right and insisting that our perspective is the right way and must be wholly adopted by the other partner in a way that harbors isolation and. Feeling. Further deterioration.00:08:11
Yeah. Of the relationship. Okay, so on the one hand, conflict. We have differing opinions. On the other hand, contention.00:08:20
My feelings or my opinions are right and yours is wrong. And because yours are wrong, I feel negatively towards you. So I think that's why it's important to define a language here. Right. We talked in previous podcast about learning a new language.00:08:41
This is a new language. Conflict is okay in a marriage, in a relationship, Contention is not. And the two are. They're similar, but very different in some aspects. And that's it.00:08:56
And an outcome within conflict. We're allowing for ourselves to be wrong, possibly. Hey, I could be wrong. Let me see what the other person thinks. Why do they think that way?00:09:09
And allowing the other person to have their own opinion. So conflict, that does allow for growth. Contention shuts down the conversation. So that's really good to understand the difference. I've heard somewhere saying, would you rather be right or would you rather be married?00:09:28
Take your pick. So that's an easy way to kind of think of the difference between conflict and contention. How does conflict. Can we pause for one second?00:09:45
So how does conflict turn into contention? It can if we harbor these perspectives without allowing those other ones into our marriage, into our thought process. We are all just very different people. And sometimes it's really hard to wrap around that idea that we are just. We think differently, even though we've been married for 28 years.00:10:17
There's a couple of books out there, institutes that we are using for this podcast that we really like. This podcast won't have a bunch of clinical research, but there's the Arbinger Institute They've written several books that have fundamentally transformed the way that we look at our relationship. The Anatomy of Peace, the bonds that make us free, and outward mindset are three that we really love. Right. And leadership and self deception.00:10:51
That's right. Fourth one, there's others. These are, you know, fundamentally have changed how we see our relationship. And then the Gottman Institute and John Gottman, he has a book, the Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. And so those two institutes are going to be kind of the baseline, the foundation of what today's podcast is kind of based on.00:11:22
John Gottman says, believe this or not, he says that 69% of marital conflicts are perpetual. So there's perpetual problems and there's solvable problems. He calls them solvable problems are, hey, we fix it. Perpetual is no, I'm going to see differently than you do perpetually. And that's a lot.00:11:45
Let me give some examples that he does. If one partner wants to have a baby and another one doesn't, that could be a perpetual problem. If somebody wants sex a lot more frequently than their partner for many years, that can be a perpetual problem. If one person really wants a clean house and the other doesn't know how to clean, they're not as hardworking. That could be perpetual.00:12:13
Somebody wants to raise one partner wants to raise the children in one religion, and one wants to raise them in another religion. That's ongoing, that's perpetual. And also, differences in parenting can be. So not all conflicts are going to be resolved. In fact, most of them aren't.00:12:34
And just knowing that, I think is helpful for people to know. Maybe my marriage isn't broken. Yeah, we're not broken. I'm not broken. You're not broken.00:12:43
We've got different opinions. Yeah, we're two different people. And these conflicts, they may arise at times, and a lot of times they do. But there are also solvable conflicts, too, that I guess make up the other 31%. Right, right.00:13:00
And they can still hurt when they happen sometimes if we perceive them as an attack. Like, I, you know, this is where I want to go to dinner. You want to go to dinner somewhere else. And you're like, well, we can go where you want. Well, yes, that's a good example.00:13:16
But they can be more serious than that also, but still able to come up with a solution. So let's take a look at another look at how conflict can occur by using this example of an elephant. So there's a story of an elephant in the room. The lights are off. There are six blind men they're in the room.00:13:40
They each describe what they put their hand on the elephant and describe what this elephant is. The first man touched the leg. He said, hey, this elephant is a pillar. The second man, no, it's a rope when he touched the tail. The third man, no, it's a thick branch of a tree as he touched the trunk.00:14:02
The fourth man, he said, no, it's like a big hand fan as he touched the ear. And the fifth man, no, it's a big wall as he touched the belly. And the sixth man said, no, it's a solid pipe as he touched the tusk of the elephant. So which one of these men were right? All of them.00:14:26
They were all right. They just didn't see the full picture. Technically. Technically, in what their worldview was, their perspective, their experience, what they experienced. And so, yeah, they can be all right, just like two people in a marriage can be.00:14:47
Both rights. Just taking a. Looking at it from a different perspective. Right. As our worldview expands to encompass curiosity in seeing our partner's point of view, that's going to give us a more full picture.00:15:04
And don't beat yourselves up if it doesn't come naturally first. A lot of times we mess up first, but then we remember, oh, yeah, we know better. And with just a little bit of time to maybe heal those little bruises to our ego or whatever, then it's helpful to look back and talk about it. So it would be nice as a couple, we could learn together how to turn on the light, flip on that switch. Just a flipping of the switch so we can see.00:15:41
Oh, yeah. Okay. I can see where you're right. I can see where I'm right. I can see where we're both right and we're both wrong, too.00:15:48
And we both have a part in it, a bigger picture, right? So can I get other people to change through nagging, shaming, pleading, or ignoring? We've probably all tried, whether our spouse or our children or our neighbors or. So the problem is we're waiting for that other person to change. Right?00:16:15
Waiting on the world to change. Right. So there's a guy who blogs at the Gottman Institute named Kyle Benson. He says he talks about partners who do get into conflict and they can both be right, and how to shift from viewing the problem as the other person's problem, the other person's fault, to viewing the problem as inhabiting a space between each other. So when people are fighting, it's like a metaphor that partners are like separate islands with murky water separating them.00:16:56
Instead of trying to fix each other, partners should focus on cleaning the murky water that exists between them. I like that. I like that too, because it makes you not the enemy. It makes you, you're not the enemy. My lover, my spouse, my friend.00:17:13
It's just a co worker fixing a problem. Right. We're going to work together to clean up a mess that we've got here and we're going to come at it from two different perspectives. And typically discipline, correction, they don't get people to change either, believe it or not, especially in adults. It might work in children, but it really doesn't.00:17:35
Shaming, making people feel bad, it just doesn't work. And you know, there's a diagram, it's called the collusion diagram in chapter five of this book, the Anatomy of Peace. And this is a really, really interesting, this is a really interesting diagram. Just kind of walk you through it here. One partner asks the other partner, let's say the wife asks the husband to do something for her and she reminds him, nags him, whatever.00:18:17
And he finally does that service for her. He's like, okay, I finally got her off my back. Well, she interprets it that, as that he doesn't really love me. He doesn't. And the husband's saying, no, I did what you asked.00:18:37
I did exactly what you asked. Or he's selfish, or he's immature, or he, he's self centered. Yeah. He does it in ways that the motivation, it's not centered on her. And it ends up being for her.00:18:52
I do everything she asks me to do. And yet he villainizes her in a way. But now the woman then takes that as fodder for ammo for the next time. Like, oh, he doesn't really love me because you know, he, yes, he did this, but he did this in a way that was very demeaning and I didn't like it. So there's this.00:19:17
She's getting into this cycle where a collusion cycle with herself, she perpetuates. Or they both are. Because it seems to me like a war is brewing. Like if this keeps happening. Well, they both are.00:19:33
We're doing it from the perspective of the woman in this scenario, but it builds on each other. Even though he ends up doing what she wants. You see how this can turn into a massive problem. Yeah. When he's always thinking he's doing what she asks and she just sees the negativity from him, it turns into an all at war at times.00:19:59
Yeah. Anyway, so we, what we do at that point is we try to validate Our feelings. Right. And when you want validation, you seek for allies, right. Other friends, family, parents, maybe co workers to validate.00:20:21
Sometimes people will use a child, one of their children for validation. That's really, really bad. It's hard on the child. So when I say validate, it's like you're bringing other people in to talk about how bad your spouse is. And then they, they, they find ways to support you and then you feed off each other until it gets into like a, you know, this echo chamber where you can't think outside of that chamber.00:20:50
And it's very, very dangerous. It is dangerous because that kind of a situation not only is hard on the marriage, but it's where affairs are more likely to happen. If it's co workers or others outside the marriage that they're talking to for. Validation, I will say that if I ever sense that with a patient or a colleague or an employee. Sense what?00:21:22
Sense an opening up of a problem in their relationship to me. So if they're confiding in you about relationship problems. Right. I sense that, you know, they're becoming vulnerable with me. There is a line that I've drawn inside my head that when that happens, I choose not to cross over that line and be an ally with that person.00:21:52
Because as I become an ally, if that continues, that's not going to go anywhere. Good. Yeah. And I think that's important for people in marriages to understand. Like, it sounds innocent, you know, that we don't think about it, but that's an opening and we need to be prepared when those openings happen.00:22:14
You know, I appreciate they're trying to be vulnerable and certainly in the beginning, they probably don't have in mind to have an affair. Right. But when you have an ally, especially of the opposite sex, that creates connection. Right. You know, for someone, well, in a deep.00:22:31
I can't believe that they're doing that to you. Oh my gosh. This is, you know, it, it brings you closer together. So we want to try to avoid being an ally for someone over marital problems. So it's a problem when I start betraying myself with this collusion to justify how terrible you are.00:23:04
And it's a cycle. It gets worse and worse. How terrible? I horribleize you. I didn't know that was a word.00:23:11
I don't think it is, but it sounds good. I horribleize my spouse. And your faults become worse than they really are. And we like that gives you justification for whatever. Right.00:23:27
For whatever behaviors. Okay. And it's kind of like we compare the rose colored glasses poop colored glasses. And your spouse could be doing the exact same thing. And it's how.00:23:41
Which lens are you looking at what they're doing as a, as a friend, as a spouse, as an equal, or as a horrible human being? The exact same thing. And yourself, you're deceiving yourself. We have to catch ourselves in, in villainizing our spouses even a little bit. I mean, I think we're all have done that from time to time.00:24:10
But if we can look at what am I assigning to you that may not be true, that I'm just kind of amplifying a little bit to justify myself. That's a really big important part of insight and self awareness. Yes, I appreciate that. So let's change then. We've got this heart of war that we just talked about where we feel negatively toward each other.00:24:37
Sometimes that ends in a lot of fighting. Sometimes it ends in not speaking to each other, but we feel negatively, whether it's for a short time or a long time. And how do I change that? Well, like we talked about is griping, complaining, begging, nagging, shaming, pleading. Are those things going to work?00:25:00
No. The only thing that I can do to help with this conflict is, well, one person, at least one person has to be open to the possibility that they're wrong or partially wrong. Is that me, myself and I. That is going back to our four cornerstones rather than making the other person the enemy. I look at myself and I have to be open to what can I do to magnify what's going right?00:25:38
What can I do to correct things in myself that might de amplify or decrease the perceptions that I'm having with you? So the woman who you gave the example of, she had something she wanted her husband to do and she keeps asking him and asking and asking him, and then he gripes and complains and then he does it begrudgingly. So how do you stop that? Do it yourself, Hire somebody else to do it. Ask yourself, does this really need to be done?00:26:18
I mean, there are a lot of other options besides keeping the cycle going, right? Yeah, no, that's a good thought, a good idea to do it yourself or have someone else do it right. If you've asked him several times, just say, okay, I'm not going to fight about this anymore. We'll just put money in the budget that this is going to be taken care of by someone else if it's not done by a certain time. So really focusing on changing ourselves is.00:26:51
Let me try that again. Helping things go right takes Cultivating peace within our own hearts. A really good example of this is found in the story of the early. Like around 1100-1200 AD in the middle east, there were a lot of contention, a lot of wars between the Crusaders and the. The Muslim Turks.00:27:26
The Turks, that's it, yes. And these wars kept going on this cycle, cycle, cycle for hundreds of years. And one would come in and destroy the other and take the land, and then another one would come in and do the same. Well, the greatest leader during that era of time is Saladin. And Saladin, he was a Turkish leader, right?00:27:53
He was. And he did something very different. He approached war with a heart of peace. He approached conflict and contention with a heart of peace. Wait, you can approach war with a heart of peace?00:28:09
He did, and he had great success. But during his time, when he went to war, he was very compassionate with the people that he was warring against. So they took over Jerusalem in, I can't remember the 1100s sometime. And he let them come in to. He let the Jews come in to go to their temple.00:28:35
He didn't take all of their money and all of their possessions. He let them take that out with them. So he was a human? Yes, well, he saw them as human. And so there was a story of one woman who.00:28:48
Her. Her young daughter had been kidnapped by the Turks. And she begged and pleaded with the soldiers to let her please talk to Saladin the next day. And for some reason they gave her audience with him. And she told the story of her young daughter being kidnapped.00:29:09
And he wept with her. He was. So this is a woman that he just. She was the enemy. She was the enemy.00:29:16
And he wept with her. And then he told his soldiers to go to the slave where they took children to become slaves and find her. And within an hour, she had her daughter back. They protected the art, they protected the things that were important to people by just seeing them as more than an enemy. Yeah, they looked at them as humans and not its.00:29:43
That's right. So not objects. Philosophically speaking, Rene Descartes is a philosop, is a philosopher who created the idea of I think therefore I am, which is called individualism. It emphasizes the importance of knowing myself. We subscribe to that internal self awareness.00:30:09
Internal self awareness and identity. Knowing who I am because I can think, I know who I am. But his research was built upon by Martin Heidegger, who later came along and said, but wait a second. We live in a world with others, and we're impacted by our relationships here with others. So the way we think comes down to how we've been influenced by others and our interactions with them.00:30:34
We also subscribe to that because that is external self awareness and intimacy. He also coined the concept of being authentic. Being yourself, but being yourself within relationships. And then later, Martin Buber came along, another philosopher, and he said, okay, I got all of that, but it really has a lot to do with how do we see the other person. Not just taking it to the next level.00:31:03
Right? Yeah, very next level is do I see you as an it or do I see you as a thou? A thou or an it? So when I take. When I took Spanish and German and French in high school, they have.00:31:18
When you conjugate verbs.00:31:22
Okay. Martin Buber was a philosopher that came up with the concept of we're more in our relationships and in ourselves than just being ourself, more than being who we are because of other people around us. But our relationships depend upon seeing the other person as a thou rather than an it. If I see you as an it, you mean nothing to me. I can walk by you and not think twice about you.00:31:52
So it's not hard for me to hurt you if I see you as a thou. Someone who is of great value, someone of great worth, someone royal, almost even then the way I treat you is going to be very, very different.00:32:11
So it's really. It's not just being nice. No, it's humanizing each other. It's saying you as a real person with real needs and real desires and real wants and real value, dreams. Right.00:32:29
And seeing you equal to me, that's being, looking at you as a thou. So we can be internal self aware, we can be externally self aware, but really it's bringing that together to make. To say you are of incredible value as a human being. Right. To illustrate this.00:32:53
And this was within our family, not just within our marriage, but in 2018, maybe we took our whole family to Jerusalem. We took our four children with us. And helping them understand this idea also was. Was very helpful. My whole life, I'd very much considered in Jerusalem Judaism to be more what I aligned with.00:33:22
Christianity and Judaism aligned more closely and saw Palestinians maybe more like the enemy. But I really wanted to explore this idea. What if we went and sat down and ate dinner in a Palestinian home? Would I feel the same way? So we went to Jerusalem.00:33:39
I found an online, an Airbnb that you could stay for the night. I said, I don't want to stay for the night. We just want to come and have dinner with you. And we had a Lovely evening. Well, they were very excited to have us.00:33:54
They were in Bethlehem. In Bethlehem? Yeah, the Palestinian side there in Bethlehem. And they told us their experiences, they told us their history. And they consider themselves refugees.00:34:08
And it was a lovely evening. They were lovely people growing up as. As Muslim, Palestinian Muslims. And they had superb value. This cute little family with little kids.00:34:25
Yeah. And the next night then we went to a Jewish rabbi's home for Jewish Shabbat dinner. And that was very different. Very different experience. Very, very different.00:34:37
It was a little bit less personal because it was filled with rituals and. Things, but no less meaningful though. No less. It gave us great perspective into their lives and their history and what makes them tick and that the same thing is important with spouses. We came away from that just loving both of these people so much and wanting just only the best for both of these groups of people, Israelis, Palestinians.00:35:10
So seeing the humanity in each other and in different people changes our hearts from hearts of war to hearts of peace. Another way that we can do that is to look at our own internal wars. What do I have within myself that's poisoning my thoughts, my feelings and my attitudes towards someone else, especially my spouse? What is causing this? If I can't put an end to the war within myself, how can I ever put a war.00:35:45
Put an end to those feelings of war towards you or to other people? How and why have I turned to this warlike thought process? Why do I perceive you as an enemy? Is there something in my background that influences these lenses?00:36:06
That's insight. Yeah. That is sitting with yourself and contemplating. Right. Instead of.00:36:15
My spouse is just bad all the time. He's mean and it just self perpetuates a bad cycle. But sitting and thinking like you did, hey, what's going on with myself? So we had an experience not long ago where we were working on a project together that I kept responding in ways and I'm not a raunch. I don't think I'm a raunch.00:36:46
I don't yell at you, but maybe not sensitively like you're hoping sometime. And I noticed that over this issue I kept having you would speak authoritatively about something and I would counteract it constantly. That's what it was. But maybe you're not right. What about this?00:37:08
Well, I think because there are times when I was wrong and that kind of burst your trust in me where I was wrong, when. So we talked through it and I. You're right. I realized that it even went deeper than that. There were times where I thought something was true.00:37:30
And it ended up being not true. Because I told you it was true. Not not with you. Even prior to our marriage, that there was some, there were some things that made me really question can I trust not looking at other sides. When you speak authoritatively and say this is reality, this is what's true and I just believe then I can be gut punched.00:37:56
And so that kind of is bleeding into me. If you say something and it's not true, I don't know if I can trust that. So I have to find out for myself. I have to look at other perspectives. But me vocalizing that can be received by you as me not being supportive or having faith in you.00:38:16
Well, and I think we've talked about it and I've said okay, I really, when I start saying things, I'm going to put a little caveat on it. Like I'm not sure for sure, but it looks like it's heading this way. Or it looks like whether it's a college football game or the stock market or the elections or anything. So that's something that we've come up with ourselves to help me not be triggered. Just because he understands my perspective more and my worldview more a little bit.00:38:49
He's willing to or you are willing to make that little change to help me. And then I'm trying to work on not getting triggered but using curiosity instead. Instead of saying, well, how do you know that they're going to win? Or how do you know? You know, just to say what research have you seen lately?00:39:08
I would be interested to see what, you know what you're seeing or what about these football plays are leading you. To believe that we don't want watch that much football, my love, but we do watch some. So another way to keep our hearts at peace instead of at war or to learn how to self soothe. If we can use mindfulness, if we can use just taking a break, that 20 minute break like Gottman talks about. We talked about that too.00:39:36
That the coping episode, right? Yeah. And learning to sit in discomfort.00:39:43
Some other suggestions Gottman has is to start with a soft startup. If we attack in the beginning instead of just being soft about it, that really always helps. Being curious helps. Having effective repair attempts like we talked about in episode 12 on marriage autopsy, having a flood watch. What's my body doing?00:40:05
Is my heart rate getting elevated? Am I getting a headache? Is chest tightening compromising or making a consensus? Working together to talk things through. And sometimes there won't be a solution.00:40:20
But we can learn to view our partner's perspective at least. And then be tolerant of each other's imperfections and know that we're all imperfect. Remember, 69% of conflicts don't get resolved, according to Gottman. That's a lot. You can still live a really, really healthy, scintillating life together.00:40:42
So let's talk about some solutions this week, shall we? Yes. Remember those important three words that we talked about in the beginning, episode four, toward the beginning of our podcast, Am I wrong? Those are really important words. Ask yourself, am I afraid of conflict in marriage?00:41:07
Do I just sweep it under the rug? All it means is that we're both learning to be strong, flexible individuals together. There's nothing to be afraid of. Conflict is a code word for growth. Don't look for conflict, of course, but don't ignore it when it arises.00:41:30
And ask yourself, how am I sabotaging myself in this relationship with self collusion? And now let's talk about some things this week for your marriage. Some action items. Find a recent scenario that you and your spouse disagreed on this past week or two and revisit it. Are you trying to describe an elephant separate from your spouse with the lights off?00:42:02
How do you turn those lights on together so you can come together and see that elephant for what it is? And that brings us back to our four cornerstones. Identity, Intentionality, Insight, intimacy. I think today's episode we delve a lot into insight, really a lot of that self reflection, using the words and the ideas of the Gottman Institute and the Arbinger Institute, two great institutes that help us just teach and learn similar concepts, but with a through a different lens that we might be able to understand better. And so with that.00:42:54
We hope that you all have a really great week and we'll see you next week on Marriage iq. Thanks everybody for being with us this week. We would love to hear any comments that you have on this episode. Just leave them in the comments on whatever platform you're looking at or look us up on Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn under marriage IQ and leave some comments there. We'd love to hear your thoughts and have a great week and we'll see you next week.
