The DNA of Relationships (19 page)

1. 1. Self-care is essential to all relationships.
   If you don’t take care of yourself, you will have nothing to give to a relationship.
   
2. 2. We must love God above all and love others as we love ourselves.
   This great commandment indicates that we can love others only as we love ourselves. When we take care of our whole selves—spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, and physically—we set ourselves up for healthy relationships.
   
3. 3. Your emotions are your information system.
   Your emotions inform you about what you are feeling.
   
4. 4. Listen to your emotions. Identify your emotions, and evaluate whether or not they are true.
   
5. 5. Self-care is not selfish.
   Taking good care of yourself is one of the best things you can do for your family, friends, and coworkers.
   
6. 6. Good self-care involves receiving, attending, and giving.
   You need to receive from others, attend to your legitimate needs, and give to others out of your fullness.
   
7. 7. You can release your stress and find peace:
   

• Reduce expectations.
• Receive everything that happens as filtered by God.
• Use every stressful experience as an opportunity to worship God.
• Rest in God, listen quietly, and ask him what he’s telling you to do.

During a rocky period in Bob Paul’s marriage, his wife, Jenni, let him know that she did not feel loved. Her revelation practically killed Bob because he loved Jenni very much. The situation frustrated him beyond words. He just couldn’t figure out what she meant.

Bob considered himself pretty skilled at opening his heart to receive God’s love and to feel lots of love for Jenni and others. The fact that she could still feel unloved baffled him. No matter what he did, his love didn’t seem to get through. Bob wondered why he seemed almost completely inept at getting love from his heart to hers.

One day Jenni walked by and, in a playful gesture, Bob pinched her bottom. She stopped abruptly and glared at him, as if steam poured from her reddening ears. And Bob thought,
Come on. Lighten up! I’m just trying to flirt with you.

Another day while on his way home from work, Bob thought he’d surprise his wife and sweep her off her feet. He had it all planned. He’d walk in the door, put down all his stuff, and find her in the kitchen, where she’d be preparing dinner. He would quietly sidle up to her, pick her up, swing her around, and give her a big, passionate kiss. He figured it would make her day.

So that’s what he did.

What was Jenni’s response? She glowered at him, making no effort to hide her red-hot anger. Once again Bob was baffled. He thought,
What is your problem? Here I am, acting out every woman’s dream. I’m being Joe Romance—and you are angry at me! What’s the deal?

The two encounters caused Bob to reevaluate how he interacted and communicated with his wife. He realized that although his goal had been to show Jenni his love, he wasn’t getting the job done. Obviously Jenni still did not feel loved. So whatever he was doing, it was not working.

“As a guy,” Bob told me, “it got to the point where I thought,
This is dumb. I’m tired of being a total failure. No matter what I do, it never works
. So finally I said to myself, ‘Maybe I should find out why this isn’t working for her and see if there’s something else I could do. I’m sick of being a relational goat. I want to be a hero.’ ”

None of us wants to be a relational goat. We all want to be relational heroes. Right? If so, I advise you to pay close attention to this chapter. What I’m about to tell you has the potential to radically improve all your most precious relationships. In fact, the research of Howard J. Markman, Scott M. Stanley, and Susan L. Blumberg indicates that learning and practicing the method of communication shared here will eliminate the four main causes of divorce.
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You enter into the two deepest levels of communication, where the most relational satisfaction is found in all relationships. I call it the greatest communication method on earth. I have watched it revolutionize my own marriage and family, and I’ve witnessed thousands of couples and singles using it to enrich their relationships. It’s not necessarily easy to learn, but it’s very powerful when you do.

Beyond Words to Feelings
Do you want to know one particularly nasty myth that keeps many people—including my friend Bob—from experiencing the tremendous benefits of effective communication? Somewhere along the way, they have come to believe that real communication occurs when they understand the other person’s
words.
They equate effective communication with accurately noting the words and phrases they hear.

But in fact, good communication is more than that. True communication usually does not occur until each person understands the
feelings
that underlie the spoken words. People generally feel more understood, cared for, and connected when the communication focuses on their emotions and feelings rather than merely on their words or thoughts.

Consider this the magic of effective communication. Our goal must go beyond understanding the spoken words to grasping the emotional nugget underlying the words. It’s far more important to discover and address the emotions beneath the situation than to parrot the words we hear. Ask yourself, “What is the emotional impact of these words?” not merely, “What exact words did I just hear?”

Suppose a wife says, “I really don’t think our kids should go to public schools. I think we should homeschool them.”

What did she mean? Consider carefully her two sentences. The woman used no “feeling” words but all “thinking” words. So if her husband replies, “So what you’re saying is that you don’t think our kids should go to public schools,” he’s completely missed the point. He has accurately reflected to her the words she just spoke, but he remains completely in the dark about her real concern.

But what if he listens for the emotions beneath the words? What if he listens with his heart? What if he said, “Are you saying that you feel really concerned about our kids”? Presto! This time, he’s “got it.” He listened beyond his wife’s words to her heart, to her real concern. He’s tapped into her emotional message—her fear for their kids.

A lot of people get stuck in the Fear Dance at precisely this point. They use “thought” words about their actions instead of talking about their feelings or deepest concerns. They remain stuck until they finally learn to look for the emotional nugget. They free themselves only when they discover how to go beyond the expressed thoughts and opinions and to get to the underlying feelings—the place of real concern and deep emotional experience.

I Care about You
When we work to uncover the emotional nugget, we say to our family member, friend, or partner, “I care how you feel. Your feelings matter to me.” And when our loved ones get
this
message, they feel deeply cared for. That’s when they feel loved.

But if we don’t relay this message—even if we understand the words the person has spoken—he or she still will not feel loved, and real communication will grind to a halt.

A lot of us (especially men) struggle with this skill. Men tend to think in a linear way: cut to the chase, get to the bottom line. We want to solve a problem and complete a task, not deal with emotions. We want only to figure out how to “fix it.”

Without listening for and responding to the emotions, however, all of the problem solving in the world won’t get us to the real problem. We have found that only when we understand the feelings involved can we effectively start the task of problem solving. Once my friend Bob understood this and then started acting on it, his rocky marriage got not only a lot smoother but also more enjoyable.

“I chose to become a ‘student’ of Jenni, to learn about what she thinks and feels,” Bob said. “Later that night after dinner was done, I asked her, ‘Hey, how come you got so upset when I came in and swung you around and kissed you?’ ”

Jenni’s quick reply struck a chord of fear in Bob, all the way down to the tips of his toes. She looked at him and said, “Do you
really
want to know?”

Bob thought,
Oh, man—do I really want to know?
He wasn’t sure, but by that point he felt committed to hanging up the goat’s hat in favor of the one that said Hero. So he said, “Yes, I really want to know.”

“When you did that,” Jenni explained, “at that moment, I had about ten things on my mind. I was rushing around, just trying to get dinner together—and it felt as if you wanted me to drop everything I was doing and just focus on you, as if nothing else in my life mattered to you. You didn’t care about me or about anything going on in my life.”

Bob swallowed hard, then replied, “Okay, that’s really not what I wanted to do. That’s not what I was trying to accomplish. I was trying to bless you, to do something that would make you feel loved. What could I have done instead?”

“Hmmm,” Jenni replied. “You really want to know?”

Bob gulped again and said, “Yes, I really want to know.”

“Well, if you had paused for a moment when you got to the doorway of the kitchen and just noticed what was going on with me, and then either rolled up your sleeves and started doing the dishes, or even asked how you could help, I would have felt so loved.”

Immediately Bob thought,
You know, this is not that complicated.

Next he asked her, “When I flirted with you and pinched you a few days ago, you also got very upset. What was the deal with that?”

“You really want to know?”

“Yes, I really want to know.”

Jenni explained that some types of affection felt very private to her—including that playful pinch. “The kids were doing their homework in the next room. I’m not comfortable when you do something like that when they are nearby. That’s a private gesture to me, not something to be done in the kitchen.”

Bob told me later, “That’s not the way I feel about it. I’m doing my Tarzan routine, wanting to show the whole world how much I love my woman—but it just angers her.”

When Bob asked Jenni what she would have liked him to do differently, she had no ideas. But at that moment, he remembered a situation with their eldest daughter. When Jessica was young, she would occasionally come up to Bob and plant the most inappropriate kisses on his mouth, and it would bother him. He would ask Jenni, “Can you help me here? I don’t know what to do about Jessica’s kisses.”

Jenni came up with a great idea. “The next time Jessica comes to give you a kiss,” she suggested, “turn your head and let her kiss you on the cheek. Then you give her a kiss.” He did that, and it worked great. And that gave Bob an idea.

“How would you like it,” he asked Jenni, “if, instead of pinching you, I gave you a really affectionate kiss on the cheek? I really just want to get the affection from my heart to yours.”

Jenni just melted. “I would
love
that!” she exclaimed.

And Bob thought again,
This is just not that hard
.

* THE REAL MESSAGE IS OFTEN THE EMOTION BENEATH THE WORDS. *

Effective communication comes down to listening and speaking with your heart. When people feel understood emotionally, they feel cared for. This is very different from listening to someone from the head—that is, looking merely for the content of the person’s words, without paying attention to the emotion. The goal of effective communication is to understand the
emotional
message of the speaker. You have to ask yourself,
What is this person feeling?

Allow Others’ Emotions to Touch You
It is one thing to hear these emotions and say, “Boy, I can really tell you are upset.” But it is another thing to allow these emotions to penetrate your heart, to allow yourself to feel the pain or the sadness. The key is not merely to understand these feelings but also to allow the feelings to touch you. This is one of the primary ways that people feel cared for and loved.

When I take the time to find out what is going on inside of my loved ones—when they know that I care how they feel and that their feelings deeply affect me—they feel loved and cared for. If Norma is hurting and I really care about her, I allow her hurt to touch me. I hurt because she is hurting. Why? Because I love her.

Just a few nights ago, I was lying in bed and thought of a conversation I had with my son Greg. He said that he didn’t feel as if I understand the pain he went through recently in a very hurtful situation at work. “Do you really care?” he asked me. At the time I didn’t know the depth of his feelings. So before I went to sleep, I chose to walk in his shoes during the past year and experience it with my heart. So many feelings came to me; it was quite overwhelming. I felt his pain and suddenly understood how he could have felt. I almost started crying. I met with him two days later and shared what I had done and explained how I started to understand his pain. He looked at me and said, “That’s all I needed from you. Just knowing you understand settles it for me.” What I did was so helpful for me to feel the pain of others, I did the same thing the next night for my wife, my other children, and grandkids. Now I do it often, and it allows me to feel with people after I have met with them and need to really understand them.

In his new book
Scandalous Freedom
, author and radio host Steve Brown talks about the necessity of allowing the hurt of others to affect us:

I have a dear friend who, in the last two or three years, has come close to tears whenever we talked about certain important matters. I’m a fixer, and fixers, when they see tears, see a problem in need of fixing. I offered all kinds of suggestions to my friend to stop the tears and to make her feel better. Finally, after a number of failed attempts, she said to me, “Stop it! Just stop it. My tears are good.”
    When I asked my friend to please explain herself, she told me that for many years she felt separate from her own pain and the pain of others. “I was, I suppose,” she said, “compassionate in a way. I cared about what people were going through—but there was this thing about not being able to really feel the things that hurt them. There was even a way I separated myself from my own pain.” Then my friend said something profound. “Steve,” she said, “my tears are good in that they, for the first time in my life, let me know that I’m real.”
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