Are you tired of defensive conversations with your spouse?? These are the kinds of conversations where you can’t stop butting heads or conversations where one of you shuts down and refuses to keep talking.
These conversations can prevent us from the connection we long to have with our spouse.
Sometimes it feels like these defensive conversations have become so common in a relationship, and it’s almost like they are happening to you with little or no control over them.
Well, I’m here to tell you that there are many things you can do to avoid this defensiveness!
Below are 3 keys to avoiding defensive conversations.
🗝 The first key is to UNDERSTAND what defensiveness is and how it works.
Defensiveness is simply a survival mechanism built in to protect you from a perceived threat. If you are being chased by a lion, this mechanism is vital to survival, allowing us to quickly respond and protect ourselves!
The problem is your spouse isn’t a lion ready to eat you. Your spouse is a human, who is constantly becoming, evolving, and changing (just like you!).
This survival system is built into your subconscious. It’s reacting and responding without you even thinking!
The key is to understand what your survival system is responding to!
It’s responding to what you think you know about:
- Who your spouse is
- Who the opposite sex is
- How love works for you
- How marriage works for
- All beliefs in your belief system!
The majority of this belief system is developed between the ages of 0-2 😱! And it is this understanding that is driving your survival system to respond automatically.
The more you are able to understand this survival system as well as your own belief system, the quicker you are going to be able to avoid defensive conversation.
🗝 The second key is to learn to take RESPONSIBILITY for your own backyard.
Here at Beautiful Outcome, I talk about staying in your backyard a lot. Envision you have a backyard and next door is your spouse with their own backyard. In your backyard are things like your responses, reactions, attitudes, tones, and beliefs. And your spouse has theirs in their backyard.
It’s easiest in marriage to look at your spouse’s backyard and all the things they need to change. And while that is true, their backyard is 100% their responsibility. Just like your backyard is 100% your responsibility.
🗝 The third key to avoiding defensive conversations is CURIOSITY. Curiosity is vital in this process! It allows us to discover what we don’t know, we don’t know. So, when you apply curiosity in your conversations with your spouse, you will then begin to better understand their reactions. And your new understanding may bring you to realize you don’t need to utilize your survival system. Defensiveness is most often a symptom of misunderstanding.
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