Here is another thought on simple interventions people can use to enhance, reinforce and make more permanent the relationship in which they engage. This is a variant on a method we call “act as if.” I once heard a lecturer on relationships and mental health say, “if you don’t know where you are going, don’t be surprised if you don’t get there.” Seemed confusing at the time but I’ve since realized that it was quite profound and applicable to much of the work I do with my clientele. If you want a positive relationship, you must do more than take steps to move away from a negative one. For example, if you want sobriety, you must do more than not use the drug of choice (abstinence). If you don’t want aspects of the unwholesome relationship you are currently in, you can’t simply stop doing those things that are unwholesome or destructive and hope that what replaces them will magically be better. You can’t wish/hope that the new way you act/think/feel will be better than the undesirable way you have been acting/thinking/feeling. A good, all to common example of this is the fight against addiction. Individuals who suffer from addiction commonly find themselves wishing to stop the addiction. They frequently report trying to stop using the drug only to find themselves back in the same old pattern of use. Folks who manage to overcome their addictions do so not from simply saying I’ll stop now. Rather they find successful sobriety by replacing the old habituated behaviors with more healthful ones. They do these new healthy behaviors, think the new healthy thoughts and nurture new healthy feelings often and for a sufficiently long period of time so that the new way of acting/thinking/feeling becomes automatic and unconscious. “If you don’t know where you are going to don’t be surprised if you don’t get there.” A necessary strategy for engaging in a healthy happy relationship is to have some idea of what such a thing looks like. If you are lucky enough to have come from a background filled with friends and family who have extensive healthy relationship skills then you probably already have a good notion of what a happy and productive relationship looks like. When I ask folks in my practice what a happy/healthy relationship looks like. They most often say “I don’t know” or they will cite a list of traits, qualities or characteristics of a relationship they don’t want to be in, or the traits, qualities or characteristics they don’t want in a partner in a relationship (often the one they brought into the office to have fixed). When they have this problem of describing what they want in a relationship, I go at it another way and ask if they know someone who has a good relationship. If they say they do, I ask them to tell me what makes that relationship seem to work? What do they admire about the way they act towards each other? In this way they are sometimes able to identify more positive and proactive ways of being with each other that would be good to have in their own relationship.
Once they have identified some of these thoughts/actions/feelings, I suggest there are a couple of ways to start engendering them in their own relationship. The first comes as no surprise given that I am a therapist, it is coaching. That is a process where I help them identify in specific operational detail the changes they want and describe what it will look like when they are successful in upgrading the relationship. “How will you know you are getting it?” The second way is not and either/ or option. It can be, and should be, engaged in even if the folks are engaged in coaching. It is Modeling. This is not a complicated skill or technique. In fact, it is one of the easiest. We’ll detail it further in the next post
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