Great Relationship Advice

I heard a great piece of relationship advice last week. This one really got my attention and gave me a way to see if I’m being reasonable or unreasonable when I get into that “wanting him to change” thing.

It goes like this: You can ask a partner—and maybe even your child --for a behavior change but not a personality change. You can ask for behaviors you want from your partner but we can’t ask them to be different inside or to develop the characteristics that will cause him to think like you do.

For example, you can ask him to take a turn doing the laundry or ask him to clean the bathroom on Saturdays—those are behaviors—but you can’t ask him to notice when the bathroom is dirty or when you need socks—those are aspects of personality. You can ask him to buy and mail his sisters birthday gift (But please, please do not comment on what he chooses—don’t sabotage yourself.) But you can’t ask him, “Why don’t you remember your family’s birthdays?” That is personality.

Similarly, you can say, “I’d like you to give me one compliment each day.” –that’s behavior. But it’s not OK to say, “Why don’t you appreciate me?”—That’s personality. And the start of a fightJ. That’s pretty much like saying, “Why don’t you be me?” And really, would I ever want to be married to me? I don’t think so.

Act as If--Again

It’s so frequently said, so obvious and so proven. But sometimes so hard to do.

Aristotle said, “We acquire virtues by first having put them into action.” A whole bunch of years later Timothy Wilson at the Universality of Virginia said, “One of the most enduring lessons of social psychology is that behavior change precedes changes in attitude and feelings.”

Note to me: Stop waiting to feel like it. Don’t wait to feel like writing; don’t wait to feel like doing yoga, meditating or dancing. And most of all: Don’t wait to feel loving;

Act the Way I Want to Feel

We owe much to the philosopher William James. It was his book, “The Varieties of Religious Experience” that was critically important to Bill Wilson’s sobriety. James’s book was one of the texts that early AA members read and studied before they wrote our AA literature.

Ideas from William James permeate the Big Book and 12 step thinking and language. For example, James wrote: “Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.” Or as we now say:

“Act as if”. And, “Fake it till you make it.” Or, as I am reminding myself this week, “Act the way I want to feel.”

Gratitude is a Behavior

Yesterday in a meeting the speaker said that acceptance is a process. That helps me remember that when I can’t really “get” acceptance I can still be in the process of acceptance. Similarly, I realized that gratitude is not just a state or an emotion; it’s also a behavior.

We make our selves notice things we are grateful for. We can make a gratitude list to further this noticing. We can say “Thanks” quietly or out loud and always we can recall that, “Service is gratitude in action.”