Intentional Living With Tanya Hale

John Gottman is a brilliant relationship expert who has done an amazing amount of research on what makes marriages successful.  He has identified four elements of dysfunctional behavior in marriages that are especially destructive, and he calls these The Four Horsemen.  These four elements are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.  In this podcast we are digging into these four behaviors and learning how to identify and clean them up in our own relationships.

Our primitive brain does some amazing things for us.  However, if we aren't paying attention, it can keep us stuck and struggling to create the kind of life we really want to have.  When we learn to manage our primitive brain and engage our pre-frontal cortex, we have the capacity to really show up for our life in the ways we want.  On today's podcast, we're learning just how to use your brain to do what you really want to do.

Today Sione and I are celebrating our second year of marriage, and we have a lot to celebrate!  In this podcast we are talking about how we have grown this past year, tools we have learned and implemented, and ideas we have come to understand better.  This is a chance for you to see how the tools I teach here on the podcast are implemented in real life.  

I think a lot of us grew up believing, at some level, that love was a reward for good behavior.  And yet, when looked at through the eyes of God, love is never a reward.  Love is actually the first and greatest commandment, it is a law. The law of love teaches us that regardless of how others act, regardless of how we're treated, regardless of what is said or done, our responsibility in every situation is to learn how to love.  That's a tall order, to be sure, and it is also the way to find our greatest happiness and best relationships ever.

Many of the people I work with who are struggling in their marriages find friendship with their partner to be elusive.  It was there when they got married, and over time, they have become more and more distant, negative, and dismissive, until they find they just don't have a good friendship with their spouse anymore.  And this is a huge problem.  Dr. John Gottman, a relationship expert has said, 'happy marriages are based on a deep friendship. . . a mutual respect for and enjoyment of each other’s company.'  It's time to rekindle the friendship in our marriages, and in this podcast we're going to talk about how.

I hear so many people who just want us all to get along.  What many of them are meaning is, why can't everyone have the same opinions and wants and needs?  Why doesn't everyone just do things the way I want and then it would be easy?  Of course that would be easy, it would also defeat a huge part of the reason we are here on earth, to learn to be more loving and accepting and respectful of other people's agency.  So, maybe we're actually not all supposed to get along, maybe we're really supposed to learn to love and accept other people for who they are and honor their agency.  

When we feel safe in our relationships, we feel we can show up with more vulnerability.  When we show up with more vulnerability, we create more emotional and physical intimacy.  But oftentimes, the behaviors we are engaging in in our relationships put the other person into protective mode rather than feeling safe, and so we struggle to create the connected relationships we really desire.  In this podcast we will talk about ten ways we can create more of a safe space for our person.

So many of us did not learn growing up what it means to be in a relationship.  If you're like me, you thought that growing up and getting married would mean that you would have someone to love you, to shore up your insecurities, to validate you, or to agree with your opinions.  If you're like me, what you wouldn't have thought was that a relationship is a place to learn how to be more loving and kind and show up in a space of US rather than a space of ME.  In this podcast we are digging a little deeper into what it means to show up in relationship to create a safe space for our partner.

When I really got serious about dating in my 50's, I used something called the 90-day Relationship.  An idea baby of Brooke Castillo from The Life Coach School, I took it and ran with it.  Basically, you're all in, fully committed, and figuring things out for 90 days.  It was a brilliant process for me to figure out relationships more and to find my person.  Through this process I discovered some of my most destructive patterns of behavior and was able to clean them up.  Check out this podcast to learn more about why this process worked so amazingly well for me.

Dating in the middle part of our lives is a different ballgame than when we were in our 20s.  Thank goodness!  We have a much better understanding of who we are and what is really important to us in a relationship.  And using the tools you learn here on the podcast you will be able to create something very different.  I'm going to be sharing with you some of the ways that I showed up dating in my 50s that I feel made a huge difference for me finding such an amazing partner.  

Divorce is a major life event, and one that can leave us feeling as though our whole world has been upended, because, often it has been.  It can be really tough to get our feet on solid ground with all of the emotional and even physical turmoil that divorce creates.  How do we start to heal from all of the pain?  And how do we move forward into the life we imagined waited for us outside of our terribly dysfunctional marriage? 

If ever there is a time in our lives when our self-worth seems like it's up for grabs, going through a divorce is it.  It's a time when we question our judgment, our wisdom, our value, our loveability, basically, we question so much of who we are and the choices we have made.  And yet, having a strong sense of self is so vital to our abililty to move forward and heal and grow.  So, how can we hold onto, or even grow our sense of self-worth?  How can we see our value even in the midst of one of the toughest decisions in our lives?

One-upping and one-downing in our relationships is so normal and expected for most of us, that we can often have a tough time recognizing when we are doing it. Here are two things to look for to help you be more aware: resentment and contempt. When we are putting ourselves in a one-down position, we will often feel resentment. When we are putting ourselves in a one-up position, we will often feel contempt. When we can learn to recognize these thoughts and behaviors, we can then start to figure out how to approach our relationships from a much healthier and happier equal place.

Validation is something that we often seek from others to shore up our sense of self.  And this never really works, because SELF-worth is something that can only be created within ourselves.  Validation in our marriages and relationships, however, is a very important tool.  It lets the other person know we see them, we acknowledge them, we accept them, and it creates connection and intimacy.  In this podcast we are discussing how we can better validate our relationships to create greater connection.

It's hard to know what to do when you're in a tough marriage.  You have tried so many things to make it better, and often it seems that despite your best efforts it's getting worse.  You're stuck in limbo trying to decide what to do and whether you should call it quits or keep trying.  What can we do to make it better?  How do we know what the right decision is?  How do we make a decision we can feel confident in?  All that and more in this podcast.

Our natural tendency as humans is to go into a one-up or a one-down approach in our relationships, especially when there is conflict.  And yet, this tactic is incredibly ineffective in helping us to communicate clearly and get on the same page.  In addition, when we engage with one-upping or one-downing the other person, we are attacking our own sense of self-worth, which then exacerbates our tendency to go up or down.  Let's clear this up, shall we?

Miscommunication is a silent killer in our relationships.  The tricky part is, we often don't even realize we are miscommunicating, and yet it causes so many fights and so much frustration for us.  When we can understand why miscommunication happens, we can behave in ways that will clear up what both of our expectations are about and we can preemptively stop most of the fights before they even start.  

When we talk about betrayal in relationships, we most often think of the really big betrayals such as infidelity.  But just as important are the small betrayals that can occur over and over in our relationships that erode trust over time.  Trust is such a vital part of our relationships, and when it's not there, we also don't have emotional intimacy or partnership.  Learning to recognize our small betrayals and clean them up is vital in order to create stronger relationships.

Many of us grew up in homes where we didn't receive any training about vulnerability in relationships.  We were fairly uneducated about emotions, and it has shown to be very detrimental in our marriage relationships.  My previous 24-year marriage struggled with a severe lack of vulnerability, and today we're talking about why that was such a problem and the difference vulnerability will make in your emotional intimacy.

Sometimes our relationships can get difficult, or if not difficult, a little stale.  In those times it can be hard not to check out and show up in a way that nourishes our relationship.  Today we're going to talk about eight ways that we can be a better partner in our marriage relationships, or in any relationship.  When we show up better, the relationship is always better.  And since the quality of our life depends mostly on the quality of our relationships, it's always helpful to give our relationships some solid TLC.