Podcasts - Mel Schwartz, LCSW

It’s time for Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz 009, in which host Mel Schwartz explains why “talking it out” usually makes things worse and what you can do to get on the same page. You’ll learn how to break the cycle of repeating arguments, the exact words to use the next time a conversation starts to spiral, and a new way to listen so your partner finally feels understood — and so do you.

Do you ever feel like the more you try to explain yourself, the less your partner understands? Listen to this episode.

Rather watch? Try the YouTube channel!

Don’t miss a single Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts, or to the YouTube channel. You can also simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

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What if I told you that talking to each other could ultimately become the worst thing in your relationship?

I know that sounds crazy, but I know. You’ve been told your whole life to talk things out. That communication is essential, particularly in romantic relationships. And of course, that’s true.

But here’s what happens in most relationships. We think that what we’re intending to convey is received by the other person in the way we intended with the same subtleties and nuances. And very often, our words are not landing in the way we intended.

But what’s the greater problem? We don’t know it.

After 30,000 hours of couples counseling, I see this problem time and time again.

I’m Mel Schwartz, and this is Uncommon Sense. In this episode, I’m going to show you how you can communicate with great effectiveness, how your words can land and be taken in just the way you intended, so we can create a coherent communication between you and your partner.

This is invaluable, so let’s get started.

I was walking down the street recently with two friends of mine who were engaged in the conversation, and I was just quietly listening in. And after a few minutes, I realized that although they thought they were talking about the same thing, they weren’t. I was listening intently to their words and expressions and what they meant to each other, and I saw, I saw the departure from having a shared meaning and understanding what they were saying.

They had no idea, and I see this and witness this all the time.

Going to share with you a personal story which really illuminated this for me quite a few years ago. I used to live down near the beach in the town I lived in, and I’d get up in the morning and walk to a local coffee shop to pick up my morning coffee. Great way of getting up in the morning and feeling wonderful.

I’d pass a restaurant along the way, and there was a parking attendant who would park cars there. His name was Jacques. And I’d walk by one particular morning and say, “Good morning, Jacques, how are you?” And he smiled at me and he said, “I can’t complain.”

I continued on for my coffee, but I thought about his words. “I can’t complain.”

And I thought, that could mean two different things. It could mean I have nothing to complain about or it could mean, literally, I won’t allow myself to complain.

Well, being who I am, I was thinking, I want to know. I’m curious, what did this man mean?

So on my way back, I stopped and I explained that to him. I said, “Jacques, which did it mean? You have nothing to complain about, everything’s great, or you can’t complain.”

And he said to me that in the culture he grew up in, he was from Africa, that it was bad. It was bad form to complain. So he meant, literally, I won’t let myself complain.

So I said to him, “Jacques, is it okay with you that when I ask you, how are you? It’s not a rhetorical question. I’d like you to really share with me how you’re doing. And I’ll do the same with you.”

So we had a new understanding.

That is what I mean by effective communication. We’re not just passing each other by, throwing words at each other, to fly by, that’s incoherent. And when we operate that way, there’s no verbal or emotional intimacy. We’re not opening ourselves up. We’re stuck in this transactional ping-pong match of words.

The word “respect,” taken from the Latin, I think it’s respicera, means to look again. A respectful communication slows down. It’s curious, it isn’t punctuated.

You know, when I hear people say, “love you,” is “love you” the same as “I love you?”

Another way that we punctuate things is almost like we’re operating from text. Pass somebody by on the street and they say, “how are you?” You smile and say, “good, you?” “Great.”

Is anyone telling each other the truth? When I’m in a restaurant and the wait person says to me, “how are you, I can be a bit of a wise guy and say, ‘pull up a chair and I’ll tell you.'”

So we need to use words in a way that have meaning. Where we want answers to these questions, we have to use the words and choose the most correct words. Otherwise, we’re defaulting to what I think they meant or they think I meant.

Do you ever feel like you’re stuck in the same old patterns? You’ve got the same old thoughts and beliefs. It feels like you’re just stuck inside and you can’t break out, no matter how much you want things to change.

Maybe your relationships feel predictable and boring; your relationship with yourself and with others and you’ve tried to break free from low self-esteem or maybe anxiety.

Maybe the wounds of your past have limited you but it feels like something just keeps pulling you back and makes you feel inert.

Here’s what I’ve discovered. We’ve been taught to believe that we’re stuck and that change is hard and our past defines our future but it’s not correct. Quantum physics tells us an entirely different story.

You see, reality is not fixed and inert but it’s in this perpetual state of flowing possibilities full of potential.

I’ve developed a method for you to experience your life through that experience of possibility. That’s why I wrote The Possibility Principle, How Quantum Physics can Improve the Way You Think, Live and Love.

In this book, I’ll show you how to apply the core insights of quantum physics, not the science, but just practical everyday messages for life. You’ll learn how to break free from your old thoughts and beliefs and hurts and wounds of the past that constrain you.

You can live the life you long for.

So if you’re ready to stop being imprisoned by your past and start actively creating the life you wish for, grab a copy of The Possibility Principle on Amazon. The link is in the description.

Okay, back to the show.

I was working with a couple some years ago. I’ll call them Dave and Karen. And in a very upset moment, Karen said to her husband, Dave, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Dave’s face went white. His body got rigid.

I said, “What are you feeling, Dave?”

He said, “It sounds like Karen’s breaking up with me. She wants a divorce.”

I turned to Karen and said, “When you said ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ what did you mean, Karen?”

She said, “I can’t have these stupid silly arguments that go nowhere.”

I understood what Karen was saying. And her husband of 15 years didn’t. How enlightening, how illuminating, how tragic is that?

So a conversation becomes really two separate monologues being knocked back and forth to each other. Not a dialogue. A dialogue is an open-ended, present communication where we’re sharing. There’s a correspondence.

Let’s talk about the word correspondence. What I mean by correspondence is kind of like if you strike a tuning fork, the tuning fork vibrates. It resonates. Both parts are resonating. They’re in sync with each other. A communication has correspondence as like the tuning fork. When I’m intending, when I’m in thinking I want you to know, you’re picking up just the way I intended.

Now to do that, we have to be curious. We can’t punctuate. We can’t be short-sighted. We can’t abbreviate. This leads to emotional landslides and feeling misunderstood. Only nobody understands why.

One of my great revelations about this is around the notion of shared meaning. Shared meaning about what does the word mean to you? What does it mean to me?

So Jerry and Diane were in the therapy session with me and Diane said to Jerry, “You have no idea of how to be intimate.”

Jerry was just appalled. He got rigid and angry. “I have no idea of intimacy. Are you kidding? It’s you that doesn’t.”

I said, “Pause. Can you each share with each other what you mean by this word intimate?”

What I suspected is exactly what was happening. Jerry, by the word intimate, was referring to sexual intimacy. This guy wanted to have sex all the time. He knew what he meant by intimate. Diane was talking about emotional and verbal intimacy, sharing feelings and understanding them. They’d go on and argue without a shared meaning about what they were even talking about.

Here’s another way to look at it.

So imagine you’re speaking with somebody and their native language is not English. They’ve just recently learned to speak English. If you used an idiomatic expression that they weren’t familiar with, hopefully you’d have awareness that it may not be making sense to them. You’d have to explain what that expression meant. So you’re both on the same page, having a coherent communication.

The same thing happens when we all speak the same language. The words have different meanings to each of us. We may have heard the same word in our childhood, but one was heard from a loving and kind parent. The other one was heard from a very critical parent. Words have meaning that go beyond the objective meaning of the world. They’re very deeply subjective as well.

Here’s what you have to do. Share your meaning around the word, the phrase and your intention, and slow down and confirm that the other person is hearing it and receiving it as you intended. But you cannot abbreviate this. You can’t punctuate it and make it short.

This is so much of a problem in our communication today. Everything has to be so fast and abbreviated. It’s making this tendency far more worse. It’s exacerbated. Words only represent our thoughts and our feelings. We have to do more than just express them in punctuated words.

Again, “I love you” is far different than ending a phone conversation with, “love you.” “Love you” became a substitute for “goodbye.” Does it mean I love you? And if it does, say “I love you.”

That lands very differently in therapy. What the therapist is doing is just what I’m presenting. Slowing down, having curiosity, inquiring, “What did you mean by that? Tell me how that felt for you.” We need to slow down and check in and make sure that our words are landing the way we intended. Tune in the way a therapist would. You don’t need to be trained in therapy to do this. You just need to slow down and care like your relationship depended on it because your relationship does depend upon it.

A solution, a pathway to achieving this, is curiosity. Let’s not assume that I know how they feel, how my words are impacting them. Do they understand my words the way I intended? Without curiosity and slowing down, we’re in a ping-pong match of words flying back and forth. And they don’t mean anything, to anyone.

Curiosity is respectful and engaged. We need to do a deeper dive into this true engagement for coherent communication, coherent communicating is alive, engaged and stimulating. It is not transactional, it’s not stagnant. We’re here, we’re present. We need shared meaning. Shared meaning is emotionally alive and engaged. It’s respectful, tuning in. “This is what I heard. This is what I’m thinking. Does that make sense to you?”

That is the core basis of emotional and verbal intimacy and that is the bedrock of thriving relationships.

So here is your uncommon sense. Saying something or hearing something is not communicating, making sure you heard what was intended and that your words are taken in as you intended is a giant step forward toward a healthy, resilient relationship. Just as we work out physically and go to the gym for health and vanity, we need to put our focused energy into emotional and verbal intimacy.

Try this: The next time you’re in a conversation with your partner, especially in a hard conversation, pause before you respond and instead of reacting to what you think they said, ask them, “What did you mean by what you just said? This is what I think I heard. Is this correct?”

You might be surprised by the answer, and that answer, that’s the beginning of a real conversation. That’s a shared inquiry.

Go for it. It’ll change your life.

The post Why “Talking Things Out” Doesn’t Work (and What to Do Instead) first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

In Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz 008, host Mel Schwartz walks through how to recognize the coping mechanisms quietly impacting your relationship, how you can begin to shed them, and what becomes possible in your relationships when you do.

Think back to a moment in childhood when something hurt, embarrassed, or scared you. In this episode, you’ll learn how these moments shaped you in ways you never realized — and why the coping mechanisms that once helped you are now hurting you.

Rather watch? Try the YouTube channel!

Don’t miss a single Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts, or to the YouTube channel. You can also simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

Want e-mail updates every time an episode is posted, plus related and supplementary content? Subscribe to the newsletter for free!

Something you learned in your childhood, something positive, may be quietly making your adult relationships harder, and you have no idea what it is or why it’s happening. It’s not traumatic, it’s not a scar, it’s actually something that helped you, a habit that you built as a kid to protect yourself. It was one that worked so well, you just never stopped doing it. But what once helped you is the very thing standing between you and the relationship you want, with your partner and with yourself.

I’m Mel Schwartz, and this is Uncommon Sense. After 30 years as a marriage counselor, I’ve seen this show up in nearly every couple struggling to get through their impasses. In this episode, I’m going to show you how these old habits quietly shape your disagreements, your arguments, your blocks, the moments of disconnection, and how you can begin to see them and recognize them and release them.

Let’s begin.

What is individual to yourself has to leak into your relationship? What do I mean by that?

Well, my individual personality, coping mechanisms, the history of who I am and the history of who you are, filters into our relationship with each other. It becomes our relationship.

It’s kind of like saying it’s his issue, not my issue. That makes no sense. It becomes our issue. We’re not separate any longer. But let me describe what I mean now by the notion of a coping mechanism.

Early in life, things happen to us which are imperfect or hurtful. They may wound us. And we start to shift our personality to adjust for that wound, that embarrassment, something that really humiliated us.

For example, I was working with an individual some years ago who told me that they were very tentative about speaking up in public or volunteering their thoughts. And I asked them, where did that come from?

They recalled that in third grade, they raised their hand to answer the teacher’s question. And they answered it in a way that made the whole class laugh at them. They felt humiliated. Wow, there was a coping mechanism that was formed by that third grader. She decided, I’m never going to raise my hand or volunteer my thoughts. I can’t risk asking a stupid question or making a stupid comment.

Now, how is that going to impact her throughout her life? That coping mechanism for early in life became like a wall that encased her and she couldn’t break out of it.

Another illustration that stands out in my mind that I’ll never forget is when parents say to a child, think before you speak. The coping mechanism for being told to think before you speak is that I’m not going to risk making myself uncomfortable or someone else uncomfortable. And so you stay stuck.

That’s why change is hard. This blocks our authenticity, both individually and as a couple, because two people in a relationship have these personality masks where we’re stuck in the original coping mechanism.

Now, coping mechanism early in life is functional and it helps us. But decades later, we need to ask ourselves, do I still need that coping mechanism? It becomes a barrier to my growth, to evolving, to becoming who I can become. It kind of is like a state of inertia and we start overcompensating. We struggle with it. We feel frustrated.

A coping mechanism is an overcompensation, typically early in life, for something that embarrassed us, humiliated us, or we felt insecure about. But over time, it becomes rigid and hardened.

Half a lifetime ago, I missed a step coming out of my house. I broke my foot. Sometime later, the pain from the broken foot wasn’t a problem. I compensated for the broken foot. It was broken on the outside of my foot. So I put all my weight on the inside of my foot. I overcompensated and in doing that, I caused more damage to the inside of the foot than where the bone was broken. That’s what I mean by overcompensation.

Think to yourself, where is your personality stuck in that overcompensation or protecting of a vulnerability?

I’ll share a coping mechanism with you that I overcame with a greater awareness. I was very shy as a child. Why? Well, I think my mother overprotected me. You know, we’d walk into a store, in those years we called it the candy store, and she would want me to go up to the counter and ask for that pack of bubble gum, but I insisted that she did it. And she would placate me and go along with that.

So I didn’t learn to overcome my shyness and my introversion until it came time for senior prom in high school. I was a great Frank Sinatra fan, and I got up on stage and sang Strangers in the Night to the embarrassment and humiliation of all my friends, but it helped me getting on stage. In college, I was an anti-war activist. I could stand up in front of hundreds or thousands of people and give a talk. It helped me overcome my shyness. I had to use the stage as a platform.

If you had an alcoholic parent, you may have developed a coping mechanism where you decided you had to be a peacemaker or so well-behaved that you wouldn’t get that alcoholic parent to get angry with you. Maybe you became a peacemaker, or you simply went through life deciding to avoid confrontation. Now, how does that impact your relationship?

I was working with a couple where somebody had been raised in just that environment. They had a volatile alcoholic parent, and they were a peacemaker, and they were afraid to confront anything that might create some disruption or unrest. So what happened in his marriage is instead of addressing the real things that were troubling him and needed to be discussed in his marriage, what he did instead is he would nitpick. He’d argue about little inconsequential things.

His wife couldn’t tolerate it. She said, you’re always carping and nitpicking on this or that.

Why? Because he was still stuck in that childhood coping mechanism of not confronting. So given childhood coping mechanisms like that, you become hypervigilant, so as not to upset someone. Hypervigilance leads then to a personality mask. We’re not our authentic, genuine self, and arguably, who is?

But in our lives, the goal is to evolve and grow. It makes life interesting and stimulating, and we don’t go there where we get stuck in the inertia of childhood coping mechanisms, which become like a suit of armor. We go around life clanking around with that armor. It doesn’t do anything for us. So a coping mechanism is at first adaptive, but decades later, it becomes maladaptive. It’s a burden we carry with us, and it impacts our relationships enormously.

And think about how this also impacts us as parenting. The messages that we give to our kids, they’re not genuine and authentic in terms of being open and vulnerable. Very often, they’re the end product of our coping mechanisms.

So let me provide some tips for you. Think to yourself, where do I feel out of balance? Where do I feel not genuine and authentic? Where’s the place that you go to an automatic default when you’re not feeling secure?

It can be a thought like, I’m not smart enough, which leaves me to not share my opinion. And what happens? Does that cause you then to become a private person? So often, people will say, I’m a private person. What do they really mean? It means I’m sensitive to what you might think of me, so I’m not going to share much, and that’s why I’m saying I’m a private person.

First thing to do, identify your coping mechanism or mechanisms, we have more than one. Then ask yourself, do I still need this? Does this really serve me? Is it time to shed it?

There’s a concept called positive disintegration, which means flaying off old parts of ourselves that we don’t need anymore. That’s positive, that’s growth. We want to shed the old, worn out parts of ourselves that don’t serve us any longer. And do the same in your relationships. Two people committed to doing that can have a growing, emerging relationship.

What gets in the way of doing what I’m saying? Certainty, we get locked into certainty and what’s familiar, even if it’s dysfunctional and maladaptive. Paradoxically, we need to welcome discomfort. Discomfort breaks us free from the known, from the certain.

Think of it like this, would you rather be a human being or would you rather be a human becoming? Now that sounds odd, but think about it. A being is stuck and fixed. I’d rather shift from being to becoming. A human being, a human becoming.

To do that and to free yourself of old coping mechanisms, which are rigid, you have to welcome uncertainty. You have to embrace possibilities. Instead of saying, who am I, who are we? Ask yourself, how would I like to experience my life? Do I choose to be predictable, certain, fixed, inert or flowing, open to change, to being present?

Coping mechanisms grow old and they imprison us.

So, here’s your uncommon sense. What was once positive and adaptive can become stuck. You no longer need it. You wore braces as a kid. Do you continue to wear them forever? When you learned how to ride a bicycle and had training wheels, isn’t it time to shed the training wheels? Well, it’s time to release the old coping mechanism and welcome in the birth of a new emerging quality. And by emerging or emergent, I mean, bubbling up. It’s full of vitality and growth and excitement.

Embrace uncertainty. Let go of the old coping mechanism and see what rises in this place, which is brand new and can become passionate.

Thanks.

The post Your Childhood Is Sabotaging Your Relationship (And You Don’t Even Know It) first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

In Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz 007, Mel explains what drives common argumentative behaviors, why they hurt you just as much as the other person, and how to break the pattern the next time you feel like firing back.

Do you ever give your partner the silent treatment when you’re mad? Use sarcasm instead of saying what’s actually bothering you? Raise your voice until they back down?

These are just some of the common behaviors most people think are part of “normal” fights, but are actually emotional violence hiding in your relationship. 

Rather watch? Try the YouTube channel!

Don’t miss a single Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts, or to the YouTube channel. You can also simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

Want e-mail updates every time an episode is posted, plus related and supplementary content? Subscribe to the newsletter for free!

There’s a kind of violence that happens in our relationships that we don’t even recognize as violence. You know, if there was a physical assault, we would call it violent or physical abuse. It’s black or white. There could be signs, physical signs of violence. But when there’s emotional and verbal violence, that flies beneath the radar. We acclimate to it. We treat it as normal. And it’s horribly destructive. It’s insidious.

You probably experience some form of emotional and verbal violence, either by perpetrating it yourself or receiving it, or it goes in both directions. But it’s mutually destructive.

Today, I am going to illuminate what these dysfunctions look like. Why emotional and verbal violence are corrosive and how to overcome them.

I’m Mel Schwartz, and this is Uncommon Sense.

Let’s begin.

Let’s take a look at the expression, do no harm. This is known as the Hippocratic Oath. Doctors should do no harm. That makes perfect sense.

Why should this apply to relationship?

Well, what should the purpose of relationship be? To enhance, to benefit us, to uplift us, to do no harm.

I was listening to a podcast recently about Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, their policies of non-violent civil disobedience. But I had an insight. And my insight was that non-violence needs to go beyond the physical. We’ve created laws against physical violence, but why do we still accept verbal and emotional violence?

I’m using the word violence as opposed to the word abuse. Commonly we would speak of emotional abuse or verbal abuse. But abuse is a word that gets overused. Like how we use the word he’s a narcissist today.

I assure you, 90% of the times he’s not a narcissist, but the word’s being used. Or gaslighting, another one of my favorites. Gaslighting came from a movie I believe from the 1940s in which a husband is trying to gaslight his wife into thinking that she is crazy. Today we say gaslighting when really what we should be saying is lying. He lied to me, she lied to me. That’s not gaslighting, it’s lying.

The same thing has happened with the word abuse. It’s become so overused. It’s lost its teeth. So instead of using the word abuse, I choose to use the word violence. Violence is less gray, it’s black and white. It speaks to a disruption of emotional harmony and safety.

When someone is emotionally violent in a relationship, who actually gets harmed?

Well, both people do.

Think about this. How often have you told someone that you love them, but then turned around and acted unlovingly? Yelled at them, denigrated them, frozen them out. The word love becomes incongruous. If there is emotional and verbal violence, that is not loving.

We need to make a distinction. We need to become true to our words. Again, authentic, a word I’m fond of using. Authenticity is that if I love you and I care about you, but I act emotionally or verbally violent toward you, that doesn’t play. It’s not correlating. We need to put our money where our mouth is.

Emotional and verbal violence have no place in a loving relationship or a friendship. This may have been learned behavior from your childhood. Probably was, regrettably. One or both parents said I loved you, but they were emotionally or verbally violent, perhaps even physically.

You need to choose to unlearn it. You need to choose to get clear.

Now, let’s walk through the different forms of emotional violence that may be hiding in your relationship.

Number one, angry verbal attacks. What does that look like in a relationship? What does it sound like? Well, it’s denigrating. It’s putting the other person down. It’s angry. It’s vindictive. It’s damaging. That’s the intention. It’s inconsistent with a loving relationship.

You might ask yourself, if it’s you or your partner, what is the anger actually masking? What’s really underneath the anger? If you’re feeling angry or hurt, try to express the hurt, the vulnerability, not the anger.

You might say to your partner, I’m feeling so unimportant to you or neglected. I don’t feel valued or I don’t feel loved.

Express that vulnerable feeling instead of saying you’re a piece of shit. You don’t pay any attention to me. Which one is going to get you heard?

What is the difference between responding and reacting? Responding takes two seconds. Tune into your feeling, think about what you’re feeling, and express it. That’s nonviolent.

If you can notice an angry or hurt feeling, pause, acknowledge what you’re feeling, and then choose how to communicate it. It’s okay to say, I’m feeling so angry. I’m feeling unloved. I’m feeling devalued. Let me tell you why.

That’s not acting angry. There is no verbal violence when you speak that way.

Number two, sarcasm in tone. How is sarcasm a form of violence? How does the venom in your tone harm both of you? Sarcasm and venom are a put down. They are intended to denigrate the other person. That is violent. When you communicate that way, you are harming yourself along with the other person.

Now, why do I say that? Because you’ve moved into that negative, disruptive energy. When you speak that way, not only do you guarantee that you’re not gonna be hurt, you are now engaged in fight or flight. You’re both in a ring, having at each other. Your cortisol levels rise. It’s unhealthy for you. Your blood pressure goes up. You’re damaging yourselves physically, emotionally, psychologically. It is not a love language.

Pause and imagine looking in the mirror and thinking to yourself, breathe. Exhale. Slow down. Ask yourself, do you want to be heard? Or do you want your words to fall on deaf ears and ignite even more anger coming back at you?

We’ll get back to the show in just a second, but real quick. If you’re finding value in these conversations, if you’re starting to see your relationships, your thinking, or your life in a new way, I’d love to stay connected with you beyond the podcast. I send out thoughts, insights, reflections, and practical tools straight to your inbox, things that can help you apply what we talk about here so your own life and relationships can prosper. So if you want to keep the conversation going, head to the link in the show notes and sign up for my email list. It’s free and I think you’ll find it genuinely useful. Okay, back to the show.

Aggressive gestures. What do aggressive gestures look like in a relationship? We know. Pointing fingers at each other. Rigid, inflexible body language. When we default into aggressive gestures, angry, hostile feelings, body language, again, this may be a replication of what you experience as a child, with a parent or both parents, or with your parent’s relationship with each other. It’s learned behavior.

Let’s be mindful. Let’s slow down and let’s reflect and think that kind of violence is inconsistent with love. What do I choose? Do I choose love? Do I choose validation? Do I want to be heard and appreciated? Or am I going to spiral into an unconscious, automatic reflex of anger? Where’s that going to get me?

If the person I love is being put down and treated angrily and without respect by me, that’s going to come back and haunt me and mirror me. I don’t want to be pointing fingers, getting in each other’s face, but this is challenging. What we need to do is call time out, either to one another, be able to say to each other, hey, this is not going well. Let’s take a couple of minutes and let’s regroup. We have to learn a new way of approaching how we engage each other when we’re feeling challenged, when we’re feeling put down. One of us can choose differently.

It’s not healthy, we have to be mindful. This just takes five seconds and you can actually foam the runway, which we talked about in the previous episode, by saying, I’m not going to head in this direction.

Number four for emotional violence is what I call the silent treatment. Now, how is silent treatment actually a form of violence when it feels like the opposite? Well, silence can be used as punishment. It can be used in a punitive way. When one person is feeling angry or not getting their needs met, they may choose to be silent. This may go on for hours or days. That is punitive. That is emotionally violent.

The purpose of relationship is to relate. Silence puts a wall around relating and communicating. It renders the other person impenetrable. That is punishing. That’s the opposite of relating.

Now, what’s the difference between a silent treatment and taking a healthy break? Obvious. If things get heated and you say, I need five minutes, or I’m going to take a walk so I can calm down, let’s do this when I get back in 10 minutes, that’s healthy. That’s fine. Take a break. Do not use silence as punishment.

Number five, verbal abuse. It’s denigrating. What is the point of denigrating your partner? You’re supposed to be in a relationship that enhances both of you. If you’re going to put them down and denigrate them, that’s denigrating you as well. It brings both of you into a mutual humiliation.

If my partner is being emotionally violent toward me, what should I do? Do your best Gandhi or Martin Luther King. Choose passive resistance. Don’t be reactive. Say to them, I’m not going to go there with you. This energy is not going to get us anywhere. Let’s take 10 seconds and regroup. And if they want to express how they feel in an appropriate way, say, I’m all ears. But don’t be reactive. Breathe.

How does being emotionally violent towards someone also damage you? Again, if you’re speaking angrily, your cortisol levels are through the roof. You’re causing yourself a denigration of your own wellbeing. It’s a malevolent energy and is toxic to both of you.

The premise in all relationships should be do no harm. Do no harm could mean you choose not to be in the relationship, but it can also be that you will do no harm to yourself or to the other person by belittling, by denigrating, or by cursing as an expression of anger. Do no harm to yourself and do no harm to others.

Now, this is a spiritual message. It’s a mindfulness message. It is a sensitive human attitude for all relationships.

So here is your uncommon sense. The next time you feel angry with your partner, pause and ask yourself, what’s underneath the anger? It’s usually hurt or vulnerability. You can choose. You have the power and the ability to do no harm, to do no harm to them and to yourself. Now, it isn’t complex, but it is challenging. You simply need to say to yourself, I am not going to be reactive. It makes no sense for me to harm myself or harm a person that I say loves me.

Choose differently and uncommon sense will free you from this harmful reaction of doing more and more harm to each other. Choose to be mindful and express yourself and your feelings and words that can actually be taken in.

The post “Normal” Relationship Habits That Are Actually Emotional Violence first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

Presenting Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz 006, in which the marriage counselor, psychotherapist, and author breaks down why the “strongest” people have the weakest relationships, what happens when you finally drop the armor, and the first step to building real self-worth instead of the fake version most of us are chasing.

You’ve been told your whole life to be strong, act tough, never show weakness. But that could be the exact reason your relationship is struggling. Let’s get into the reasons why in this episode of Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz!

Rather watch? Try the YouTube channel!

Don’t miss a single Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts, or to the YouTube channel. You can also simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

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We’ve all struggled in our committed relationships in one form or another, but when we do, we typically look at the fault line as being our partner’s fault.

That may not be sufficiently self-reflective. In fact, it isn’t.

We look at our relationship issues, the external relationship, our relationship with one another, but we typically pay little attention or no attention to our own inner relationship with our own self. That’s the nucleus of the relationship.

In the 30 years of couples counseling that I have experienced, I can tell you with confidence that your relationship can only thrive if both of you have an inner relationship with your own selves that is healthy.

Let me repeat that.

You have to have two people who have a healthy relationship with each other to have a relationship that’s going to succeed between the two of you. And what often gets in the way of that relationship success is low self-esteem.

We never talk about low self-esteem. In fact, in the DSM, the Bible of Diagnosis, there is no diagnosis for low self-esteem. This is the proverbial elephant in a room. Low self-worth is corrosive, but this can be improved upon and you can overcome low self-worth.

What we call our relationship is a complex tapestry of each person’s own personal history and their own inner relationship. I’m going to show you how low self-esteem has a destructive ripple effect on both people in a relationship and how you can successfully overcome it, improving your individual self-worth and your relationship success.

I’m Mel Schwartz and this is Uncommon Sense.

What’s the most important relationship that you have or will ever have? That most important relationship is with your own self. That’s a relationship with your own thoughts, your own beliefs and feelings that will impact everything you experience in your life. Everything you see and engage with other people comes through the filter of your relationship with yourself. This is the ultimate source of what becomes your external relationship.

So why do I make this point?

It’s because we are not objective analytical robots. We are subjective, feeling human beings and our personal history and experience informs how we perceive, how we think and relate to each other.

For example, let’s look at what happens when you take a drop of ink and drop the ink into a beaker of water. For a while you can follow the stream of ink, but after a while you can no longer discern where the ink started, where it’s going to. It migrates throughout.

The same thing happens in our relationships with each other. We are the drop of ink in the water and the water becomes the relationship. My experience is that the greatest influence on our relationships is our own self-worth. This is the filter through which we see each other and ourselves. This constructs the relationship.

I’m going to explain that more in detail but first let’s define the terribly misunderstood term self-esteem.

This term self-esteem, I believe, is an absolute misnomer. Most people, in trying to derive self-esteem, are looking outside of themselves. Like if you’re a star athlete in school, you create a lot of self-worth for yourself, but it’s coming from your excellence on the ball field. If you’re getting straight A’s and you’re a valedictorian, that’s a wonderful thing. But what happens if you’re not successful academically? What happens if you’re not a star athlete? What happens if you have average looks and average intelligence and there’s nothing exceptional about you? Shouldn’t you still have good self-worth?

Self-worth is about my relationship with me, but as a culture we are trained to develop what I call other esteem. For instance, if your parents ever said to you when you were a kid, think before you speak. Let’s take a look at what that means.

What does that suggest? It means you need to be really thoughtful and concerned about what other people will think of what you said as opposed to developing your own authentic self-empowerment about what you want to express. Think before you speak means you are subjugated to the impressions that other people will have of you.

When I’m working with people and they’ll sometimes share with me, I didn’t say this or I didn’t say that because I was concerned about what someone would think about me. So think about this juxtaposition. I have my relationship with me, but I’m going to set other people up as my judge. How is that going to work out?

You know, I’m fond of saying no one can judge me unless I happen to be a defendant in a trial and in the courtroom the judge or the jury get to be my judge. Other people are just people who have opinions. If I elevate someone’s opinion to become my judgment, what I’m doing is I’m judging me. And when I judge me, then I’m subordinating me and setting you up.

And by the way, as an aside, when people say they’re worried about what other people think of them, that’s not accurate. What they should be saying is I’m worried about what I think they think of me.

You see the irony? And they’re probably doing the same thing.

So low self-worth is absolutely rampant in our culture. It’s part of the problem we have, and this absolutely decimates authentic relationship with my own self and then my relationship with you.

I’m going to tell you a story to underscore this point I’m making. Whenever I do tell you narratives about my clients, understand I’m always changing their name to protect confidentiality.

Many years ago, I was working with a couple who came to me around this issue. He said he loved his wife very much. She insisted that he didn’t. As I explored further, I came to understand that she didn’t believe she was lovable. By the way, when I’m working with couples, I usually see them individually as well. Why? Because understanding an individual’s issues or challenges or self-esteem issues will inform me as to what’s going on in their relationship.

So with Jill, I started to ask some questions. Like, have you always felt unlovable? She said yes. How come? Do you know why? What happened in your life to give you this belief that you aren’t worthy of love?

The question really triggered her absolute core wound. She told me that when she was about seven years old, her mother shared with her that her pregnancy with Jill was an accident. She hadn’t planned to get pregnant. So Jill came to her own self-damaging conclusion that if I were an accident, I wasn’t wanted, I’m not loved, and I’m not lovable. She carried this core belief with her her whole life. Now, her low self-esteem, I’m not lovable, how did that impact her marriage?

Profoundly.

Our self-esteem, our values, our perceptions, our relationship with ourself, our childhood experiences are part and parcel of our external relationship. We need to slow down and look at, in this case, where the low self-worth came from and create an accountability as to her feeling I’m not lovable versus the objective statement, you don’t love me.

Now, how does our culture make this worse? Well, that’s easy.

Social media, likes, follows, chasing approval, looking for popularity, this is all derived for other esteem. We need to ask ourselves questions around our self-esteem about how did I come to this belief, this feeling about myself? Did it come from my childhood? Again, if my parents told me, think before you speak, we understand that. What did that actually teach me?Again, what if I’m an average student and not a gifted athlete, or I’m not particularly good looking? You see, our pursuit of other esteem is a fool’s mission because we can never attain it or succeed. It’s temporary. It has to be replaced moment by the moment.

How did all of this cause me to start masking my own personality? When I say masking, I mean we all wear these personality masks, parts of ourselves that we aren’t quite authentic, but we feel some insecurity, we feel a lack of something, and we create a personality mask. Like if somebody says to me, I’m a private person, here’s my takeaway. They’re a private person because they don’t feel safe in being seen. If you’re seen, then they’re fear of other people’s judgment of them. So it’s not that they’re a private person, it’s that they don’t want to be seen.

How’s that going to affect a relationship with others?

Our authentic self, our genuine self, acknowledges our vulnerability, our insecurity, and doesn’t try to hide it. We’re not presenting our pretend self. What we’re trying to do is reach the place where nobody is going to be my judge. Again, this retreat to feeling judged sets up an impediment in our relationships for hearing each other and valuing each other. Low self-esteem on one person’s part or both people’s part decimates the authenticity of a relationship.

How can I be authentic if I’m pursuing other’s esteem? I can’t.

Authentic self has to be grounded in a healthy self-esteem. So in many cases, in the majority of cases, we’re all struggling with an authentic self. Now, if two people are not grounded in their authentic self, what do you think their relationship with each other is going to look like? A constant battle over dominance and right and wrong and insecurity and insecurity.

It’s like being on a seesaw. Out of this lack of authenticity, people believe they need to act strong and show no weakness. Now, this is a theme that you hear me bringing up in many episodes. How does that actually make me weaker?

Acting strong is like wearing a suit of armor, preparing for battle. Do you want to clank around through life wearing a suit of armor, acting strong?

By the way, acting strong is acting. Acting is weak.

What happens to whatever I’m feeling insecure about if I keep hiding it? It hardens. It becomes rigid, that insecurity. I can’t reveal it. I can’t move past it. It becomes fixed and you cannot release it. And so you stagnate. And when an individual stagnates, the relationship stagnates.

Healthy relationships require two evolving, authentic people to thrive. But if one or two people are stagnating because they don’t want to reveal vulnerability, everything freezes. It gets stuck.

What happens, though, if I do the opposite and actually share what I’m feeling vulnerable about? What changes? Everything. Vulnerability is lovable. Our culture teaches us to show no weakness and act strong, which is paradoxically profoundly insecure. I’m hiding myself from my partner. How is my relationship going to work out if I am being inauthentic and hiding something I’m afraid of my partner seeing? Or what if my partner is doing the same thing and it’s a double hit?

Vulnerability is lovable. Falling in love is vulnerable. If we defend against our vulnerability, protect our insecurities, our insecurities only become more profound and more extreme.

Open up. Share what you feel vulnerable about. The other person is likely listening. Bring your fears into the light. Bring your shame into the light. And those fears and shame retreat when you bring them into the light. Bringing it into the light kind of anesthetizes the problem. It eradicates the problem. You’re not hiding from it anymore.

This also dovetails with another issue in relationships. When I’m working with a couple, on occasion he or she may say, Well, he has a problem. This is his problem. It’s his problem, not my problem.

Nope, doesn’t work that way. You see, her problem or my problem are no longer separate because they impact me. So her problem, my problem actually become our problem. Remember, relationship is a complex tapestry. It’s a tapestry where we’re two individuals coming from different families with different values, different beliefs, different experiences of vast, beautiful, complex tapestry. When we reduce that tapestry to, It’s his issue. It’s my issue. The way we should put it is, I have an issue with this and this. It affects me. And of course, it affects my relationship. How could it not?

How can my relationship thrive if both of us are wearing masks, blacking our authenticity and our vulnerability? Other esteem has us avoid vulnerability because our fear of what they may think of me. Vulnerability is a love language and it’s a feeling language. Hiding from vulnerability imprisons you. It cuts you off from the possibilities of growth and well-being.

This prevailing life philosophy trains us to avoid vulnerability at all costs. And it denies us this core quality of what it means to be human.

It’s rooted in fear. If your feelings and insecurities are hidden from other people, you’re selling yourself out. This game plan cannot possibly work. And it destroys and incapacitates love.

The paradox is that by embracing vulnerability, you become strong and fearless. It’s an investment in your relationship with yourself and your partner. That is authenticity.

Acting strong is impervious and it doesn’t allow other people to see you, to love you, and to value you for who you really are. It’s your being stuck in other’s esteem. If you want to be loved, reveal your vulnerability.

Now let’s look at this word vulnerability. What does the dictionary actually say about vulnerable? There are two definitions. I find them really interesting. Two definitions for vulnerability go like this.

The first says that by being vulnerable, you’re open to attack or criticism. Unless you’re living in a cave, you know there are going to be times when you’re going to be verbally or emotionally criticized as part of life. Not allowing yourself to be faulted or criticized means you’re wearing that suit of armor, protecting yourself. You become inaccessible to your partner. That is the essence of fear and it’s ruinous to relationships. It’s the opposite of love.

The second definition is that vulnerability is about allowing your weakness and emotions to be seen by others. Wow, that’s just what I’m getting at. Our societal and cultural common sense message is show no vulnerability. Where do you go with that? Act strong, armor up. So the message really is that you should cover up and protect yourself from criticism. And if you are criticized, show no feelings and be impervious. So you argue instead of surrendering.

We need to do just the opposite. So if you want to be loved and you want to be valued, you need to reveal your vulnerability. What’s my choice here? Cover up, act strong, defend myself, or be open and vulnerable.

If I open to my vulnerability, my self-esteem, my authentic self-esteem will grow. You might say to yourself, but I’ve been this way my whole life. Can I actually change?

The answer is yes. I’ll take this moment to pitch my book, The Possibility Principle, which explains how you can entirely reshape and reformat your identity through the process of growth. Think about what your thoughts are telling you. Notice how they’re sending other people up as your judge. Pause and rethink this.

This belief that I need to act strong, perhaps lifelong belief, ask yourself, how is that serving you? Are you growing in confidence? Do you have reduced anxiety and stress? Is it working out for you?

Think about acting as opposed to just being.

So, here’s your uncommon sense. You can continue to follow the destructive societal dictates that destroy your self-worth, have you hide behind other’s esteem and armor up and protect your vulnerability, or you can move toward authentic self-worth by embracing vulnerability, which makes you actually stronger and more lovable.

If this feels counterintuitive to you, lean into that. Counterintuitive is where new thinking and insights come from. If it’s feeling normal, you’re stuck in the rigidity of who you’ve always been, and so is your relationship.

So embrace that counterintuitive feeling and realize that is where uncommon sense is bringing you to.

The post Why the Strongest People Have the Weakest Relationships first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

In Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz 005, the marriage counselor, psychotherapist, and author shares a sixty-second technique employed before the beginning of any difficult conversation to dramatically improve the chance your partner will listen instead of shutting down.

Every important conversation doesn’t have to turn into a fight, or stop before it even starts! Learn all about “foaming the runway,” the simple communication skill that helps you have real, productive conversations, in this episode of Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz!

Rather watch? Try the YouTube channel!

Don’t miss a single Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts, or to the YouTube channel. You can also simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

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I’m sure you’ve experienced, just like the rest of us, having been in that awkward, frustrating position, when you’re thinking about sharing something with your partner, something that’s been troubling you, and you need for them to really hear. But you hesitate, because you know from past experience it’s probably not going to go well.

But you begin to open up and talk, and before you’ve even finished your first sentence, you see it happening. Their face tightens up, their body tenses, and they are already preparing their rebuttal. They’re not curious about what you have to say or how you’re feeling. They’re actually not listening. They’re defending. Maybe they’re even counterattacking.

But you may think to yourself, “so what’s the point?” And you either stop talking or you don’t bring it up. You even begin arguing with each other.

I can tell you, this pattern, this cycle of attempting to share, being shut down, or just retreating into silence to begin with, or anger or frustration, this is destructive to harmony and feeling cared for. It ruins relationships.

That’s why I developed a technique. It’s probably just a 60-second technique, and I created this out of my years of couples counseling and noticing what’s happening. This technique, which I call foaming the runway, changes everything, and it really increases the chances that your words won’t fall on deaf ears, that your partner will hear you instead of going on the defense.

I’m Mel Schwartz, and this is Uncommon Sense. I’m going to give you examples of what you can say to your partner, which will greatly improve the chances that they’re open to actually hearing you. This is your best way in, so you might actually be able to be heard and validated.

Let me tell you what brought me to this insight. It was a picture of what happens when an airplane is coming in hot, meaning they can’t get their landing gear down. They notify air traffic control that they’re having a problem, and air traffic control orders the people on the runway to foam the runway.

Why are they applying foam? Obviously, so the friction won’t cause sparks and set the plane on fire. We can learn to do the same thing with our communication in troubling or challenging times in our relationship.

So let’s go back to the impasse, that moment when you feel that they’re not really listening, and you say to yourself, |”What’s the point? They’re just going to blow up on me. Why go there?”

We’ve all had this experience with our words falling on deaf ears, and so we choose not to talk. We don’t want to repeat this agonizing experience of feeling invalidated or worse. But before we jump to the solution, let’s look at the unintended consequences of bottling up your feelings. How can going silent, how can the consequence of going silent be just as impactful as the reaction that you’re trying to avoid?

You see, we focus on the potential consequences of our actions and words. But we need to look at the consequences of our inactions, or the words that never leave our mouths. These are often far more impactful because we suppress them. What does this lead to?

First, resentment. We resent the other person for shutting us down and having to stuff what’s so important. As a result, we may turn away from them. We start to develop an attitude. They don’t know what’s going on with us, so they look at our attitude and they stiffen up and we have a negative spiral down into anger. It can also feel depressing if you feel that you can’t share what you need to share and there’s a futility. You start to turn off to the energy of the relationship, what brought you together. Walls may go up. You become indifferent and uncaring to them. The relationship has a loss of vital energy and it feels like there’s no solution.

So why are they, why are we, acting uncaringly or in anger?

Well, maybe it has something to do with how we’re actually being spoken to. If I say to my partner, “you never,” or “you always” in a negative way, it’s going to assure their defensive reaction. We have set up being rejected. We’ve set up failure. This may be due to remnants of our childhood experiences of being scolded and it has little to do with you in the moment. It’s learned behavior. It’s instinctive and reflexive.

In situations like this, the other person may instinctively be defending their territory and preparing their rebuttal while you’re still in mid-sentence. And so you feel silenced and invalidated or worse. So what can you do?

Introduce what I call the preface. Just as air traffic control foams the runway, you can foam the verbal and relationship runway by prefacing. You can’t simply dive into the conversation.

What is the preface? How does it work? How does devoting a few sentences as a preface really calm the turbulence? How does this improve the chance of being heard and reduce the knee-jerk reaction?

Well, we need to set the stage so our words don’t fall on deaf ears and cause a reaction. This just takes a minute or two. Let’s talk about some examples of what the preface sounds like.

You may say to the other person, “I’m struggling with something I want to share with you, but I’m afraid you’re going to be reactive.”

That’s an excellent preface. It slows down the reactivity. They may say, “Sure, what’s the problem?” You can then say, “I have something to share with you. I’m feeling tentative about it. But I’m anticipating you’re going to shut me down or tell me I’m wrong, so I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to say this.”

You’ve now enrolled them with this preface. There’s a far better chance that they’ll be less reactive and more present. Not to mention being sympathetic to how you’re feeling. You are literally foaming the runway. You’re providing a new way in so you can quiet the defensive reaction.

What does it mean to enroll the other person? How are you slowing down the process by lessening their reaction, by avoiding right versus wrong issues?

You might say, “I need your help with something,” instead of just launching into the attack. Of course, you don’t intend it as an attack, but they’re going to feel it’s an attack. So slow down.

“I need your help with something. There’s something I’m struggling with.” You create a different energy. Why is the struggle to communicate actually more critical than the actual thing we’re trying to talk about? This derails our ability to converse with emotional intelligence.

How does paying homage to the communication challenge first and initiating a peaceful form of communication set the table? Well, think about it. If I’m saying, “|’m having a problem. There’s something I’m struggling with saying. I want you to hear this. I’m afraid you’re not going to take it in,” we have reduced the temperature in the room. Pulses aren’t quickening. There’s no reactivity.

Also, this technique boosts your own confidence and your own self-esteem because you’re actually authentically sharing what you’re feeling, what’s concerning you. This technique, this prefacing, helps you find your authentic voice. It’s informed by vulnerable feelings, not by anger, not by accusation.

Now, let’s talk about getting beneath the anger. If you’re feeling hurt or misunderstood and you become angry, everything is lost. It’s very rare for anyone to be present and remain open to you if there’s a verbal assault. You both go down the drain. You might say, “you are,” “you always,” “you never.” If your words sound angry, if your words sound like an attack, they’re going to fall on deaf ears and they’re going to get you the same in return, a counterattack.

Anger is a mask for fear. Anger is a mask for sadness or pain. Anger comes to the forefront because it’s far more accessible emotion than vulnerable feelings.

Vulnerable feelings are hiding beneath the anger and the fury. What happens when you preface and share your hurt, share your insecurity in a thoughtful way instead of starting with anger? How does it increase the chance of being heard?

Tremendously. If you’re vulnerable, you’re being listened to. We are actually modeling the behavior we want for them to mirror. If we speak vulnerably, openly, without attack, we’re likely going to be heard. It’s a different energy. Our proclamations are typically nullified because of the wrong energy.

You see, acting strong is pointless. Embracing your vulnerability opens the communication. Remember, what you have to say may be compelling and really important to you and the future of your relationship. But if your words are lost to the other person’s defensiveness, what happened to the communication? It stalled out. It went nowhere. You’ve actually assured that they are going to invalidate you.

So slow down your process. Think to yourself, how can prefacing open the door to my actually being heard, to a new dialogue or shared inquiry between us? Two people who are both looking to be understood and appreciate each other’s feelings avoid the right versus wrong impasse, which is ruinous.

So here are the rules.

Don’t begin your sentence with the word you. Begin in the first person, I. The other person might still be listening. Make it subjective. Make it about how you feel. “I feel.” “I think.” Share how you feel, as opposed to making an objective indictment of what they did or didn’t do.

Here’s an example.

“When I brought up that sensitive topic the other day to you, you kind of dismissed it or marginalized it, and I felt really uncared for. Can we go back to that conversation?”

That’s an effective way to communicate. Remember, feelings aren’t right or wrong. If I express my feeling, I can’t be told I’m wrong. Stay away from making statements of fact that lead to argument, and they go nowhere. We all want to be heard and validated. We have to learn to get out of our own way to accomplish this. Our tendency to react rather than respond. When we foam the runway, it quiets and dampens reactivity. It provides an opportunity for a win-win rather than a lose-lose.

So here is your uncommon sense: To be heard and to be validated, you need to foam the runway by preparing a soft landing so your words can actually be heard. They can be contemplated and taken in. This is an easily learned communication skill, but we were never taught it, so it feels counterintuitive. But always, always, growth lies in where we feel counterintuitive. It feels awkward.

Wisdom should make us feel uncomfortable and illogical because you see, common sense, where we’re comfortable, is just plain dumb. So if we open up to something new, something that’s not in our familiar zone, that is where wisdom lies. Invite in the discomfort and open to wisdom.

The post Do This Right Before Having a Hard Conversation first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

In Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz 004, the marriage counselor, psychotherapist, and author shares the 5% rule to break free from circular arguments that go nowhere.

The 5% Rule is a proven technique to get your partner to stop, slow down, and actually hear you.

Learn what most therapists get wrong about fixing arguments, the common mistake that guarantees your partner won’t listen, and the simple shift in language that will change everything — all in this episode of Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz!

Don’t miss a single Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts, or to the YouTube channel. You can also simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

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You’re in a disagreement, perhaps with your partner, perhaps with a child, perhaps with a parent or your spouse. You say something. They say something back at you. You defend yourself. They defend themselves.

It’s like watching a ping pong ball back and forth and back and forth, but nobody’s winning a point. There’s no break in the action, just back and forth. It’s monotonous.

You’re both fighting to be heard and to be right. And what nobody ever taught you, the moment you need to win, your partner has to lose.

Now how in the hell is that going to work out? Particularly in a relationship. Who wants to lose?

I’m going to be sharing with you a technique, an intervention, which is so effective in stopping arguments before they explode and get in the way and escalate. And this is going to go against everything that instinctively prompts you to want to win an argument.

My name is Mel Schwartz. I have been a marriage counselor and a therapist for over 30 years. I’ve developed this technique many years ago in my practice when I was working with a couple who were tirelessly stuck and mired in this pattern I just described. Nothing was working. So I tried something new, instinctive, it was counterintuitive, and it changed everything.

Today I’m going to teach you what I’ve come to call the 5% rule.

It’s the technique I’ve used with couples for decades to break the cycle of frustrating, moronic arguments that go nowhere and that will do something that most people think is impossible. It will finally get your partner to actually slow down and hear you.

Let’s begin.

Early in my career as a therapist, I found myself feeling so frustrated, so ineffective in my ability to assist the couple with whom I was working. They were going back and forth in an argument and I kept saying the same thing to them. I kept saying, “Listen this is not about right or wrong, you’re not in a courtroom, this is a therapy session.”

This kind of flailing about represents a low point in so many relationships. We’ve all been there. I was searching for a way to help them slow down and actually listen to each other to get past their gridlock.

In the midst of one session, I reflected for a moment my thought with myself was, “I have to approach this impasse differently. I have to get them to pay attention.” I learned that when I pause and get out of my own way and just set my intention for something new and insight, it kind of appears, kind of like magic. This was a moment like that.

It came in the form of my asking the husband, let’s call him John. Of course I changed their names to protect confidentiality. I said, “John, can you try to find just a small percentage of what Barbara is saying that you could agree with? Let’s look for just arguably 5% that you can validate and temporarily suspend that 95% that you want to go after her about.”

I was asking John to go against the grain and act counterintuitively. By not defending himself or trying to score a point, I explained to John that he wasn’t pleading guilty or surrendering. The goal was simply to establish a temporary truce, a sort of a repartee, so that they could actually hear each other.

He finally managed to affirm one of Barbara’s complaints, and he took ownership of having hurt her through his words.

I noticed that Barbara barely paused as she was about to go right back at him. I raised my hand gently. I said to her, “Barbara, you need to reflect for a moment. John just validated that he regrets what he said to you and he feels badly about it. Now you need to validate him.”

Somewhat begrudgingly, she said, “I appreciate your caring about my feelings and saying that you did hurt me.”

I then asked Barbara, could she validate some part of John’s issues with her? And she began to do so.

Now they both began to turn the corner. Their energy began to shift. They moved from the individual competitive spirit of winning an argument into a conciliatory energy.

A new technique was created for me, one that I now call the 5% rule. The 5% rule is reflecting back something you just heard that you can acknowledge. Again, even if you disagree with the vast majority of what you’re hearing from the other person, you can ordinarily find some small part to agree with.

I know that’s counterintuitive. That’s not how we operate. We typically marginalize, if not ignore the part that we can agree with because it gets in the way of our argument. This default is grounded in a right versus wrong battle. Our thoughts are just looking to refute rather than confirm. We get trapped.

Even though we say we care about each other or we love each other, we don’t act lovingly. Right versus wrong battles sink relationships. If we can break free from the insane goal of winning an argument and try to find something to validate in what the other person is saying, we begin to turn the corner.

The results of this approach can be astonishing. After all, if you need to win, once again, the other person has to lose. It’s not going to work. It never does. Allowing your partner to feel heard and affirmed is the goal. Once your partner feels heard and affirmed, he or she may be in a far better position to take in what you have to say.

But timing is essential here. When they find five percent to agree with, you can’t just immediately say, yes, but, and go back into your argument. That’s part of the process of invalidating them.

Instead, pause. Affirm what you just heard. Let some conciliatory spirit fill the space so you’re validating them so the energy can shift away from that noisy back and forth argument.

Timing again is essential. The shift now becomes fertile ground for a meaningful transition and maybe some constructive exchange. If you rush to reframe or assert your own position, your affirmation is disingenuous. Affirming five percent, of course I’m just making up the number five, ten percent, fifteen percent, we don’t have to quantify it, but affirming some small part of what you just heard in no way means that you’ve abandoned your position or the feelings you need for them to hear, but you want to set the stage so they can take in your words and your feelings so you’re not talking to a wall.

This process permits us to halt our addiction to being reactive and moving toward being responsive, slowing down the process. When we react in an adversarial way without pausing to reflect, we are ensuring the failure of a conversation. We become the ball in a ping pong match. Our reactions, by definition, are not well considered.

Just think of the word reactive. Reactive is not well considered or purposeful.

Here’s your uncommon sense.

If you want to be heard, understood, and validated, you need to surrender the need to be right. That doesn’t mean default to being wrong. What it means is find some small percentage of what you’re hearing that makes sense that you can affirm and validate and do so.

That will work. It will turn the tide and the energy of the relationship. Try it.

Now, what do I mean by this word validate? Validating does not mean I agree with you or have to agree with you. Therapists get this wrong when they have you mirror back the words, which is automatic. Validating means I care about you, I care how you feel, and I want to become curious about your feelings, not refute facts and do battle with each other.

So to validate, I’m going to dive into what your feeling is. What is it like to be you? What is your perception and experience of me? That means I have to let down my guard, stop fighting a battle, and put my money where my mouth is and really care about what you’re feeling.

Feelings aren’t right or wrong. Feelings are subjective. It requires curiosity and you have to move past their words into what they’re trying to express to you.

Validating prompts empathy, caring for each other, trying to experience what they are experiencing. Are they experiencing me, my actions, and my words, seeing myself through their eyes, so to speak? This shifts us from an adversarial, antagonistic energy into a compassionate, empathic energy.

Find five percent that you can validate, that you can appreciate. Then you can feel free to share your feelings with them.

First validate, then educate. Now what do I mean by this?

You can’t validate and then say, “but.” Validate let the validation sink in, let some time go by, let them feel heard and affirmed. Then gently, you can shift their perception of you by adding new information. Again, timing is absolutely essential here.

And by the way, please let me know if you’ve tried this five percent rule and how it’s working for you. Share it with me in the comments.

Here’s another story I’ll share with you from my own life. I remember having an argument with my former wife at bedtime. I would often say to her, “It’s hot in here.” She’d say, “No it’s not, it’s cold.”

This went on, time and time again, until I had an insight. I was making an objective statement, it’s hot in here. Thunderbolt of insight came to me and I said, “I feel hot.” If I say, “I feel hot,” she can’t tell me I’m wrong, I’m expressing a feeling.

Express feelings, not facts. When you get into arguments and impasses, share how you feel. Ask each other, do you care how I feel? And if you’re in a loving relationship, you can’t say I love you and not care how I feel.

Remember, subjective feelings can’t be wrong. So to facilitate this, try to start your sentences with the word I. It might sound like I feel, I think, or even better, may I tell you something I feel or I have felt or how I experience you. You’re then taking a subjective ownership of your own feelings. There’s no debate, they don’t have anything to close down.

Again, if you love me, you should care how I feel. But if I make an objective statement and say you are, you always, you never, we’ve set up the argument. Nobody is listening to anyone. Break free from the argument and share your feelings.

And by the way, I speak to this in great detail in my book, The Possibility Principle. The five percent rule is just the first of many steps on the road toward attaining excellent interpersonal skills based on effective communication. Developing these techniques and tools allow our relationships to prosper. Just as relationship skills and emotional intelligence ought to be core educational requirements, communication mastery has to be the bedrock of any life that aspires to happiness, emotional success, and fulfillment. It’s vital that we learn the necessary nuances and skills of communication so that our words can actually be heard. Communication is the heartbeat of relationship.

Uncommon sense is this. If I need to be right, how’s that going to work out? The need to be right means we’re each going to be invalidating one another. Regrettably, this is all counterintuitive in the culture and society in which we live, which teaches us, be right, never be wrong. That’s antithetical to relationship success.

We have to break that messaging.

First validate, have empathy, find the five percent you can agree with, then you have an opportunity to share your feelings. We then come together in a vital, generative, prosperous relationship where it’s not just putting our words out there of I love you, we’re acting lovingly.

You can do this, but you have to break the rules of engagement. They do not work.

Go for it.

This has been Uncommon Sense. If you want to thrive in your relationships with others and with yourself, be sure to follow the podcast in your favorite podcasting app. And if the podcast has helped you in any way, please leave a five star rating and a review.

I’m Mel Schwartz, and I’ll see you in the next one.

The post Stop Any Argument with the Five Percent Rule first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

In the third episode of Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz, the marriage counselor, psychotherapist, and author warns that most relationships don’t show signs of failing at the end. They show them at the beginning — when no one is asking the hard questions.

What are those six questions you should ask before committing to any relationship? These aren’t surface-level compatibility questions; they are designed to take you and your partner into a level of emotional intimacy most couples never reach.

What does it mean if your partner won’t answer them? What can you tell by the way your partner does answer them?

Listen to this episode of Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz and find out!

Don’t miss a single Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts, or to the YouTube channel. You can also simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

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You should never commit to any relationship until you ask these six questions.

Here’s what happens. You meet someone. You feel exactly what you were hoping to feel. You get excited. You feel this great connection. The endorphins are raging. Your interest is piqued. Your heart’s engaged. You think to yourself, hmm, maybe they’re the one. This could work. You’re really enjoying each other’s company.

Time goes on. Maybe the weeks turn into months. And after a number of months, you may be thinking to yourself, you want to commit to this relationship. And you make a commitment. Some more months go by, and you think, maybe we’ll get married, or maybe we’ll move in together. The process of commitment has begun.

But what are we committing to once again? We’re committing to the outcome. You’re saying I’m in a relationship, but you still don’t sufficiently know each other yet. You haven’t really asked each other the right questions.

My name is Mel Schwartz, and after 30,000 hours of counseling couples, I can tell it to you for sure, this is the pattern: Two people sharing a pillow at night, but not opening up to really sharing with each other what’s in their thoughts, what’s in their feelings, really getting to know each other sufficiently. We don’t talk to each other about really important things. Death, life, politics, love, children, parenting, identity. We don’t share it.

Today, I’m going to provide you with six questions that you can ask each other, which is going to take you so much deeper into knowing each other on emotionally intimate levels that most couples actually go in a lifetime. Ask these questions before you think about committing to a relationship, and you’ll either discover that you have a foundation for a relationship that might actually prosper and benefit you, or you realize there’s nowhere to go with this relationship and save yourself years of disappointment and confusion and wondering who you were to think that they were the right person for you.

Let’s uncover some uncommon sense, and please feel free to leave me a note and let me know what other questions you’d like to have asked of each other in addition to the ones I’m going to share with you.

I’m going to delve today into some really important essential questions that we tend not to ask each other out of fear of upsetting that apple cart. By the way, I’m making up the number six. It could be 12 or 14 or an infinite number of questions. But for today, I’ve created six questions just to illustrate the importance of asking different kinds of questions for different streams and directions of a relationship so we can really know each other from a different perspective.

We commit to relationships in my professional and personal experience very prematurely. In other words, we might meet, date, feel what we hope to feel, have a great attraction to each other. We may even feel in love or we’re sexually compatible and we enjoy each other’s company. That’s all a great start. This should be the point where we say to ourselves instead of committing to the outcome, again we commit to the process. This is the point where we think, I need to get to know this person more deeply. And it’s not just about enjoying each other. It’s about truly getting to know each other and sharing yourself with each other, opening your vulnerability to each other, not pretending to be someone but sharing who we really are. And we don’t tend to do that. We prematurely commit to the relationship by saying things like, I’m in a relationship.

So my thesis is we commit to relationship prematurely before we truly know each other on the level that we really need to. And it’s fundamentally because we don’t ask deep important questions of each other. It’s astounding to me. I’ve worked with couples where after many, many years or decades of being in a relationship and being coupled, married or committed to each other, and they don’t know deep fundamental things about each other because they’ve never asked.

Okay, here’s question number one. Ask your future or potential partner, hey, what is the most humiliating or embarrassing experience you ever had? Would you be comfortable sharing it with me?

It’s a red flag or certainly a deep yellow flag if they’re reluctant to share it with you. Why am I saying that? If your future partner is going to withhold parts of themselves out of a fear of what you may think of them, then how’s that going to work out? How are you truly going to get to know them?

I find that hiding insecure parts of yourself can be catastrophic to your relationship. It becomes inauthentic. This is a roadblock to emotional intimacy.

If they begin to open up and share that embarrassing moment with you, great. You might then ask them questions about exploring, like how did you handle it? Did you share it with anyone else? Am I the first person to ask you this? Is this something you would have shared with me if I hadn’t asked you about it?

And then the person asking the question needs to actually do the same. Share your insecurities, your embarrassments. This should not feel like an interrogation. It should feel like a natural flowing, opening up and conversing with each other where you let your boundaries down. You’re being free to be yourself.

You might ask, have you learned anything from this experience? Have you learned how to deal with embarrassment and shame? Is this something you would hide from other people? Is this something you would hide from me? And if so, that impacts self-esteem and it impacts self-worth. And as I always say, and I’ve always related, self-esteem is a core ingredient on what happens in a relationship, what impacts the relationship. If you have one or both people who have marginal self-worth, how do you think that’s going to impact your relationship with each other?

So question one, would you share with me your most humiliating or embarrassing experience?

Question two, this is more of a vision statement for a relationship. You might ask, do you believe in sharing everything in the relationship? Do you think that there are any parts of your thoughts and feelings that you should keep separate, tucked away, and private? Of course, you shouldn’t have to share everything. That would be virtually impossible. But in a relationship, do you think there are things that you should choose to keep private?

I’m talking about those core themes of emotional and verbal intimacy here. What would you keep for me or for someone else? And why? Is it because you feel embarrassed or ashamed or judged? Would you be concerned about what I might think of you or how I might react to you? And to deepen that

Now again, I’m not suggesting you don’t have a right to certain privacy. It would be monotonous to share everything. But to not share something because you’re afraid of what the other person thinks is an issue. Why bother being in a committed relationship?

Can you appreciate the depths of these questions? If I could see and hear your private thoughts that go unexpressed, what would that tell me? What would I learn about you that I don’t currently know? What would I learn about how you’d see me and experience me?

By the way, the answer could be a very positive answer, right? It doesn’t have to be negative. But it’s a deeper reveal. Committing to a relationship should require a deeper, fuller sharing of ourselves prior to making that commitment. Otherwise, what are we really committing to?

Here’s question number three. Is there anything you long for in your life which has gone unexpressed? What are your goals, your life visions? What’s your heart’s longing? Do you think you can achieve it? Can you accomplish it? Are you afraid to go for it? What could get in the way? Tell me your secret unexpressed visions for your life and your relationships.

Now, the answers to this question will really illuminate whether both of you are on a compatible path, whether there’s a shared vision. Remember, if you have divergent visions, you’re not likely going to succeed. You’re going to derail. You don’t have to operate from the same script, but your visions have to be compatible.

Question number four. It’s about anger. What is your relationship with anger, your own anger, or other people’s anger? What was your experience of anger as a child? What do you do when you’re feeling angry? How do you process that anger? Do you express it or do you push it down and subordinate it?

If you push it down, a yellow flag turning to red, folks, it’s going to come out sideways,maybe with resentment or hostility, some other direction.

Do you act with a hair trigger and get very reactive the moment you feel angry or do you try to slow down the process and respond and share what you’re feeling? Responding here means, hey, when you said that, I noticed I was starting to feel angry. Let me tell you what was coming up for me. That would be a healthy way of communicating, wouldn’t it? So I don’t push the anger down, but I try to notice it and share it. That’s a healthy thing. I want to know that.

This exploration around anger is going to reveal your potential success at resolving issues in your relationship and past wounds, which happened before you met each other. Can you appreciate how vitally important this is?

Here’s question number five. In regard to your own identity, what you think of yourself, your own personality, what was most influential in shaping what you think of yourself, how you identify yourself, how you’ve come to know yourself? Typically, this comes from your childhood. What messages, good, bad, or in between did you receive from your parents? Were there moments that left you feeling humiliated and ashamed, scarred? Were there moments that were joyful and made you feel proud of being yourself?

Our identity needs to be known to ourself and cultivated and shared with each other, the good, the bad, and the indifferent. We’re going to be getting into a committed relationship. We’re going to become the closest partners we can be. We cannot accomplish this by protecting ourselves and not sharing ourselves fully with each other and getting into really deep dialogues without right or wrong, without fear or apprehension, but just this sense of great discovery about each other.

Ask each other, what were your disappointments in your life? What were your great accomplishments? Again, that question of what do you long for? What makes you feel disappointed? What are you doing with that disappointment? Share the core influences of your identity, what you long for, and what you’re disappointed in.

My last question for this episode is question for this episode is question number six. Can you tell me about your fears, specific and general, your fears about relationships, our relationship, fears about yourself? You could have fears of the financial. You may have fears about health. You may have fears about death. These are important things to share with each other, absolutely essential. Again, are you sensitive about what other people think of you?

Open up and share your fears with each other. What’s your relationship with these fears and insecurities? Do they impact you? Do they subordinate you? Do they overwhelm you? Do you avoid them? Do you push them away?

The issue isn’t fear. The issue is your relationship with fear. Do you have a fear about whether I’ll love you or love you forever? Do you have a fear about whether I’ll leave you? Do you have a fear about my fidelity and monogamy and whether I’ll cheat on you? What informs those fears? If you’ve had your heart broken, something I spoke about earlier, did you ever have a lover or a close person to you betray you? Do you not trust people out of that instinct to protect yourself? Do you not trust yourself?

You see what I’m getting at here? These six questions have to open up into an infinite number of questions. We have to take down the guardedness and really open up and share in a deep emotional dialogue with each other to know what is it we’re committing to in this relationship? Is this relationship we should be in with each other?

Let me share a personal story with you in which this all became a revelation for me. In my first marriage, I was married for 13 years. At that point in time, 13 years into my marriage, I had a moment’s revelation. I thought to myself, my former wife and I could not have been more different. Our tastes, our inclination, our curiosity were in opposition in every way. And I thought she hadn’t changed in those 13 years. She was actually the same person I thought I was in love with and wanted to marry and spend my life with.

So number one, I had no reason to be angry with her. She didn’t change. That opened me up to a greater revelation. Who was I 13 years earlier to think that she was right for me and would enhance my life?

I had changed. 13 years before, I was a very different man and I had a lot of insecurities. And maybe being alone is what prompted me to want to secure a relationship with her, to calm my stress and anxiety about being a certain age and being on my own. So I tricked myself. Clearly, if I had followed the advice I’m giving you today about a deeper involvement in opening up and sharing myself and yourself, we wouldn’t have headed toward marriage.

So my self-revelation here is no different than what I’m asking you to do. Cast aside your fear and your apprehension about how this will work out. You don’t want to secure a relationship that’s not going to enhance both of your lives. Throw caution to the wind, open up to it and go for it.

Forget about my six questions. Create your own questions. But go deep. Don’t play it safe. You deserve it. And you both need to have the awareness of whether this is really going to have a chance of succeeding. You owe it to yourselves.

This has been Uncommon Sense. If you want to thrive in your relationships with others and with yourself, be sure to follow the podcast and your favorite podcasting app. And if the podcast has helped you in any way, please leave a five star rating and a review.

I’m Mel Schwartz, and I’ll see you in the next one.

The post Don’t Commit to Any Relationship Until You Ask These 6 Questions first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

In the second episode of Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz, the marriage counselor, psychotherapist, and author shares a difficult truth: Date nights won’t save your sex life. Neither will lingerie, vacations, or simply “trying harder.”

The reason passion dies in long-term relationships isn’t a lack of effort.

Listen as host Mel Schwartz names the real culprit and shares two exercises that have helped couples reignite their passion and their sex lives.

Don’t miss a single Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts, or to the YouTube channel. You can also simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

Want e-mail updates every time an episode is posted, plus related and supplementary content? Subscribe to the newsletter for free!

You remember what it felt like early on in your relationship when you just started? The anticipation? Maybe it was electric? Hopefully you couldn’t keep your hands off of each other.

And now, years later, what happened? Does sex seem to happen on the same night of the week, or worse still, the same night of the month, in the same room, in the same way? Is it all predictable, if it happens at all?

It’s like watching the same old movie over and over again. You already know how it’s going to play out, so you really stop paying attention. You’re not passionate. You’re not even present anymore.

Here’s what nobody taught you: Passion doesn’t die from lack of love. Passion dies from too much certainty.

Let me repeat that. Passion dies from predictability.

Predictability and certainty are the killer of passion. And most couples have no idea that they’re suffocating to death. The very thing they’re trying to protect, their passion, they’re destroying.

Today, I’m going to show you exactly why passion fades in long-term, committed relationships, and how to bring it back and keep it back by breaking the rules that are boring you to death. Please let me know what you think about the tips I’m providing you to restore and recreate passion. Let me know what works for you and what doesn’t.

You ever sit by the fire, fireplace, start a great fire, watch the logs start to spark up. It’s a great feeling, the warmth of those logs on fire. What happens after a time, though? If you don’t stoke the logs, the fire goes out. Exactly the same thing happens with passion. If we don’t stoke the passion, it goes out.

I’m going to be introducing to you the benefits of embracing uncertainty and the perils of too much certainty and predictability. My book, The Possibility Principle, is all about how to embrace uncertainty and possibility. We live life from false reality. We think things are fixed and inert and not moving. Not true.

And that’s what causes so much of the grief in our lives. Passion being one. Quantum physics reveals that everything is in a perpetual state of flow and uncertainty is the rule of the universe. Uncertainty is the rule of the universe.

Now, uncertainty is full of awe and excitement. It’s what gets us to pay attention. We don’t know what’s coming next. But in a committed relationship, we forego uncertainty and default to predictability. That is the death knell of passion.

Uncertainty is exciting. Falling in love was uncertain, wasn’t it? Why do we fall out of love? Because we make it predictable.

We need to keep the uncertainty alive through exploration and curiosity. Marriage, like all institutions, operates by rules and expectations. And these rules and expectations format our engagement. They are predictable. They are the antithesis of passion.

Now, understanding that we have some rules and expectations to a point is necessary, but when they become the formatting and the predictability of a relationship, passion is going to die.

When we become indoctrinated to predictability, guess what happens? We go to sleep. Your sex life disintegrates. Everything becomes rote and predictable. And even if you are having sex now and then, it’s not all that exciting. Once again, we’re not really present.

The great writer Oscar Wilde wrote, “uncertainty is the essence of romance.”

Let’s think about that. Makes sense. Falling in love is uncertain. But now what happens over time? We make our relationship predictable.

I wrote in my book, The Possibility Principle, if uncertainty is the essence of romance, then predictability is the death knell of romance. It is the death knell of sex and passion.

Uncertainty makes us present. We don’t want to know how a sports event is going to end. We don’t want to know how the movie is going to end. We are engaged and passionate and excited because we don’t know what’s coming next. Certainty and predictability suffocate passion. Boredom sets in.

Once our relationships, once our words, and once our actions become predictable and rote, nobody is present, nobody is paying attention. And guess what? That ain’t passionate. Passionate.

We’ll get back to the show in just a second. But real quick, if you’re finding value in these conversations, if you’re starting to see your relationships, your thinking, or your life in a new way, I’d love to stay connected with you beyond the podcast.

I send out thoughts, insights, reflections, and practical tools straight to your inbox, things that can help you apply what we talk about here so your own life and relationships can prosper.

So if you want to keep the conversation going, head to the link in the show notes and sign up for my email list. It’s free, and I think you’ll find it genuinely useful.

Okay, back to the show.

Now, how to have and maintain a passionate sex life requires stepping back from predictability.

You know, so many people end up having sex by appointment. Either they literally make an appointment or they fall into routine. It’s the same night, in the same room, in the same way. Nothing varies. There’s no curiosity. There’s no playfulness. It becomes regimented.

Or sex becomes used in a relationship as a control mechanism or a reward for good behavior or punishment for bad behavior. And our sex lives also become hurried and perfunctory.

What should they really be? They should be emotionally alive and awake and intimate and spontaneous. Again, not focusing on the outcome, but focusing on wonder and play and curiosity, not regimentation, not sex by appointment.

When you’re having sex, do you talk to each other? Do you share your fantasies? Do you open up to play and curiosity? Or do you close your eyes and succumb to predictability?

I have found this predictability through my many, many hours of marriage counseling to be the core element of the default into passionless relationships.

Stoking the fire. Let’s take a look at what that looks like.

I created an exercise some years ago with a couple struggling around the vitality in their sexual relationship. I proposed that they leave their house in separate cars, go to a local bar or a restaurant with a bar, not that you have to be drinking alcohol, but whatever, and sit down at the bar and play a game whereby they don’t know each other. They’re strangers. Have a conversation and try to pick each other up.

But when you’re doing this, you can’t be talking about your children. You can’t be talking about anything familiar. You don’t know each other. When you don’t know each other, which is where you were when you first met, it’s passionate. It’s full of wonder.

Another technique I employed with this couple was, and it was in a session alone with him, and I don’t mean to be sexist in this approach that the man has to initiate the sex, but it’s just the way I did it.

I had him book a table for dinner in an inn. There were rooms and there was a restaurant. And I told him to secure and reserve a room in advance, not tell his wife what was going on. And when he went out to use the men’s room to actually acquire the key to the room.

Now, when dinner was over and he paid the check, he took her by the arm and instead of heading to the parking lot, headed to her room. Instead of going home to the same house and dismissing the babysitter, there was this excitement. There was this vitality. It was new. It was spontaneous. It was passionate.

Bring passion back into your lives by breaking out of the bondage of predictability and certainty. That’s how you do it.

Instead of experimenting and being playful with wonder, with curiosity, we get stuck inside the constriction of these boundaries. We have to melt those boundaries away. We have to come into the sense of oneness and playfulness.

Passion is about oneness. Two separate people for a period of time become more like one.

Let’s also talk about the difference between sex as opposed to making love. Lovemaking transcends the physical. When you’re making love, you’re fully engaged. You’re immersed in each other’s physical being and spiritual being. Sex tends to be focused just on the result, on the climax, on the orgasm, which is very exciting. But the experience needs to be scintillating all along the way.

You know, the distinction between making love and having sex can blur. Ordinary sex is grounded just in the result, just in the climax. Making love requires vulnerability, no fear about your performance, no concerns about how you’re seen.

Here’s your uncommon sense. To keep your sex life exciting and awake and alive or to recreate your sex life and your passion, remember predictability and conformity is the death knell of passion.

This has been Uncommon Sense. If you want to thrive in your relationship with others and with yourself, be sure to subscribe to the channel. I’m Mel Schwartz and I’ll see you in the next one.

The post Why Passion Dies in Long-Term Relationships, and How to Save It first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

Presenting the debut episode of Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz – a podcast and YouTube series bringing you the relationship wisdom you were never taught.

In this first episode: given time, why do our marriages disappoint, if not outright fail us? What elemental ingredient is missing from our education that, if we might learn it today, could not just save, but invigorate, our marriages and other committed relationships?

Mel Schwartz is ready to share the answers… with a healthy dose of uncommon sense.

Don’t miss a single Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free anywhere you get your podcasts or to the YouTube channel, or simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

So why do the majority of marriages disappoint us, if not fail us? The answer is simpler than you think. We were just never taught how to succeed.

We assume that we’ll fall in love, we’ll commit, and everything just works out. But it doesn’t work that way, as you know. Half of marriages end in divorce. How about the ones that don’t? Well, they are far from happy. They’re not really thriving.

If marriage were a business, it would be bankrupt. And we’d never tolerate that failure elsewhere. But we keep launching into relationships, committed relationships, with zero preparation.

I’m Mel Schwartz. After more than 30,000 hours of couples counseling, I can tell you this: Most couples and most relationships struggle not because they’re broken. They struggle because they’re relationship illiterate. We’ve received literally no education in this most important, challenging part of our lives.

In this episode, I’m going to walk you through three ways couples unknowingly sabotage their relationships, often from the very beginning. Here are the patterns I see over and over again. And once you see them, you can finally stop repeating them.

The first way we derail our relationships is what I call externalizing.

The second way we sabotage our relationships is focusing on outcomes rather than the process of achieving that outcome.

And the third way is that we mutually destruct our relationships by not having a shared vision of our future.

After you’ve listened to this episode, let me know which of these apply most to you and resonate for you.

Most relationships tend to move toward a commitment of marriage or a committed relationship to people who may not really have sufficiently grown in their own self-awareness, let alone their awareness of each other, become swept away by this vision of joyful and harmonious relationship. They’ve just begun to truly know each other.

And rather than begin this journey into a deeper dive of knowing each other, emotional intimacy, the heart and soul of the relationship, they turn away from each other. They externalize. And so the dance of intimacy begins. The focus and the conversations move to the wedding plans, the seating arrangement, the honeymoon. We spend more time on these matters than diving into the deeper complexity of who we each are, what we hope for, what we’re afraid of. We can refer to this as an emotionally intimate sharing.

But rather than doing that sharing, what do we do? We don’t share our fears and concerns. Instead, each person is putting their best foot forward.

In hindsight, when I’m working with individuals or couples, as they contemplate divorce, I may ask them if they were aware of their issues earlier on. Sometimes they say, “I knew there was a problem, but I didn’t want to upset the apple cart or the invitations were in the mail and I didn’t want to disappoint my parents and friends.”

These plans, the externalizing of the relationship distract us from tending to the heart, the inner working, the soul of the relationship. Relationships require the commitment to exploring one another, sharing with each other and building the skills to navigate the storms that lie ahead so you can build a steady foundation. Just as you wouldn’t build a house without pouring the concrete for a solid foundation, the same applies to relationships. The building can weather a hurricane with a strong foundation, but our relationships will wither without the foundation as life gets in the way and distracts us.

This externalizing continues as the couple builds their life together, but what are they building? The external, the jobs, the house, the vacation, the social life. The focus is externalized. We put our energy into working out our financial success and careers, our children’s education, but not to the inner working and being of our relationship.

I’ll share the parable of the frog here to give you some idea of what I’m talking about. If you take a frog and put a frog in a pot of lukewarm water, over time, the frog becomes acclimated to the increase in temperature as you slowly heat it. Eventually, the frog boils to death because it doesn’t know that the temperature is going to cause them to boil to death. They leap out. That’s what happens to us in a relationship. We become acclimated to mediocrity, to not being conscious and fully awake, to not developing the skills we need. We become like the frog in the boiling water. We have no idea how we got here or what happened to us.

Just last week, I was sitting listening to the marriage vows of a beautiful young couple in their early thirties as they were heading off to this wonderful excitement and the great adventure of their marriage together and perhaps a future family. And as I listened to these vows, here were my thoughts.

As they said, “I’m going to love you forever. I’ll cherish you and value you and respect you forever.” (Of course, this also means I’ll never lie to you and I’ll never cheat on you.) I looked around at the people seated around with big smiles on their faces, parents and relatives and friends, this beautiful young couple. And I thought to myself, oh boy, good luck.

Maybe there’s a five or 10% chance of this couple actually achieving and sustaining for any length of time what they’re vowing to. Meaning passion, love, honoring each other, cherishing each other. This connection, all the things that brought them together or they thought brought them together are not likely going to survive for the length of this marriage. That’s tragically sad.

But what a myth is going on here? And we all conspire in perpetuating this myth. Why do we fall out of love? Why does passion die? Why are we pretending that these things are not likely going to happen?

As we send this young couple launching off into their future thinking that they will succeed. And worse still, when we run into troubling times and conflict, we default into blaming one another or perhaps our own self. We think it’s our fault, adding insult to injury. But that’s the conspiracy of ignorance, which has us ignore the hard data about relationship success.

We’re all conspiring. It’s a conspiracy of silence and ignorance. We cannot succeed in relationships or committed relationships or marriage and ignore the sobering reality of this rate of failure. We have to come out of this false mythology. Relationship is an art form to be cultivated.

I call it the art of relationship. It’s not a rule book. It’s not about the six steps to this and the eight steps to that. That’s all nonsense. A relationship is alive. It’s dynamic and it has to be evolving.

So let’s come back to those marriage vows. “I’ll love you forever. I will honor you forever.” What should we be saying sounds more like I’d like to love you forever and I’d like to honor you forever and never cheat on you. If we’re not prepared to learn the things we need to learn to thrive in commitment and in relationship and succeed, you can’t get a driver’s license without passing a road test. And yet we go ahead and launch into committed relationships without any relationship education. We are illiterate. This is terribly, terribly tragic. It makes absolutely no sense.

The first problem is that we deprioritize the relationship once we secure it. There’s a turning away from each other, going back to the wedding, the wedding plans, the focus on the honeymoon, the seating arrangements. We’re not discussing with each other the things we truly need to know about each other of greater value. Absolutely essential things that we have to be aware of. We can’t put our best foot forward. We need to put our actual true self forward. We need to become comfortable with vulnerability and not defend against it. Nobody ever taught us any emotional skills around intimacy, verbal intimacy, communication skills that we need to learn to transcend this failure into the right versus wrong argument that we fall into.

Understanding that validating each other’s feelings doesn’t mean I’m wrong and I agree with you. It means I care how you feel. If I don’t care how you feel, how are we ever going to succeed in a relationship? And how can I say I love you if I don’t care how you feel? This is complex, but it is learnable. It is teachable.

A relationship that’s going to thrive doesn’t mean a relationship that never has struggles or problems or challenges. The measure of a relationship is not how good is it when it’s good. It’s how do we handle ourselves when things are rough and challenging. That’s what I call resilience.

On occasions, rarely, but on occasion, I have couples come to me for premarital counseling or even if they’re not getting married and just into a committed relationship, they’ve decided to move in together and declare that commitment. They want to learn. They want to learn all the skills and insights they’re going to need to develop and sustain that level of relationship success with each other. They’ve just increased their odds of success by, let’s say, well over 50%.

Please, before you enter into a committed relationship or a marriage, before you have children, ask yourselves, am I engaged in the process of learning to the best of my ability, how to communicate with understanding and compassion and empathy, how to get out of my own way, how not to be reactive and default to right versus wrong arguments. Can I put my money where my mouth is and make my very best effort for this relationship to thrive so you can thrive and I can thrive and those all around us can thrive?

You can make those marriage vows come true. At least you can make those marriage vows stand a chance of coming true and succeeding. It just requires much more than simply lip service. It requires new learning.

Do you ever feel like you’re stuck in the same old patterns? You’ve got the same old thoughts and beliefs. It feels like you’re just stuck inside and you can’t break out no matter how much you want things to change. Maybe your relationships feel predictable and boring, your relationship with yourself and with others, and you’ve tried to break free from low self-esteem or maybe anxiety. Maybe the wounds of your past have limited you, but it feels like something just keeps pulling you back and makes you feel inert.

Here’s what I’ve discovered. We’ve been taught to believe that we’re stuck and that change is hard and our past defines our future, but it’s not correct. Quantum physics tells us an entirely different story. You see, reality is not fixed and inert, but it’s in this perpetual state of flowing possibilities, full of potential.

I’ve developed a method for you to experience your life through that experience of possibility. That’s why I wrote The Possibility Principle — How Quantum Physics can Improve the Way You Think, Live and Love. In this book, I’ll show you how to apply the core insights of quantum physics, not to science, but just practical everyday messages for life. You’ll learn how to break free from your old thoughts and beliefs and hurts and wounds of the past that constrain you. You can live the life you long for. So if you’re ready to stop being imprisoned by your past and start actively creating the life you wish for, grab a copy of The Possibility Principle on Amazon. The link is in the description.

Okay, back to the show. So think about it. Have you ever learned anything about emotional or verbal intimacy, effective communication? Did your parents model this for you and teach you how to accomplish this? And was there anything in your education that spoke to this?

So there’s a great myth again about love and romance being enough. They are not enough. Love is not all you need. Lennon and McCartney got it wrong.

Let me tell you a story about when my kids were in high school, they had a thing called seminar day. I was invited to give a talk during seminar day. My kids were so embarrassed, of course, that they didn’t show up to school that day. But at seminar day, I spoke just to this topic. This should be part of our education. It should be required courses around communication, emotional intimacy, verbal intimacy. Now let’s dig a little bit deeper. We meet, we fall in love. We either secure commitment to the relationship, or we even go further and say, let’s get married.

But what are we really committing to? What is the commitment? The commitment is generally to the outcome. Again, “I’ll love you forever” and “I’ll never cheat on you” and “I’ll never leave you.”

We know that doesn’t work. If you have a kid who’s in school and they come to you one day and they’ve been getting a C in a particular course and they have a wake up call and they say, “You know what, mom, dad, I’m really devoted to this class. I want to get in there. I’m going to get in there.” And you might feel really enthusiastic and say, “Great, how are you going to do it?” What happens if they shrug their shoulders and say, “I don’t know, I’ll just do it.” It’s not likely going to work, is it?

Same thing with marriage. So we have to commit not to the outcome. We have to commit to the process and how do we do it? We need to evaluate if we have a shared goal, a shared expectation and vision.

Think about starting a business. Two partners would ordinarily create a business plan. They say if they have a mutually agreed upon plan for success, we need to do that in our relationships. Expectations about parenting, friendships, about money, finances, what kind of lifestyle do we want? Where do we want to live? And today we can see the importance of having conversations about ethics, politics and values, a whole host of topics that we just never really talk about early on.

It makes no sense. You’re going to be my closest ally and my closest friend for the rest of my life, but I’m not going to reveal my true self to you. When my head hits the pillow at night, I’m not going to share certain thoughts and feelings with you. That’s crazy. It doesn’t make any sense. We need to open up the process of emotional and verbal intimacy and sharing with each other.

Let’s look at what happens when we begin a relationship. We put our best foot forward. We don’t want to upset each other. We want to be liked. We want to be loved. We filter and are selective about what we’re going to share. We don’t want the other person to judge us. We pretend to be the best version of ourselves that is not getting to know each other in an emotionally honest way.

So many years down the road, we may say, “I didn’t know who she truly was.” “I didn’t know who he was.”

Do we ask deep questions of each other? Like, how did that feel for you? What was the greatest heartbreak you ever had in your life? Imagine asking if you ever had your heart broken. How did you handle that? What were your greatest disappointments in life? And how did you deal with them? Do they still impact you? Do we share our insecurities and our vulnerabilities, which is our genuine self, or do we hide and tuck it away as we race toward the finish line of commitment?

How is that possibly going to work out? Months, years down the road, these insecurities, these vulnerabilities, the things that we hide, the pieces of ourselves that we don’t feel good about are going to come out. And when they do, we’re going to look at each other and say, you’re not who I thought you were.

The next thing we need in a relationship is what I call shared vision.

What happens when we don’t have a shared vision? Think of it this way. Think about a Venn diagram. You know those three circles? The outer circle is you and me. The inner circle, which is shaded, is us. In a Venn diagram, there needs to be a sufficient amount of us, which is participatory. So we’re sharing our lives with each other and we’re benefiting each other. This commitment in a relationship requires the shared vision. Otherwise, what are we committing to? Our roles as dad and mom, a traditional wife, non-traditional wife, parenting, values, politics, work, and pleasure.

I worked with a couple very early in their marriage who were having a conflict. They didn’t have enough shared interests or they had a competing interest. They weren’t aware of this to start with. David loved mountain climbing and skydiving. His wife, Ann, loved to read books. She was kind of sedentary, a homebody. She enjoyed cooking. In no time at all, they had so much friction. She would claim, you never want to be home with me. You’re always leaving. And he was saying, you don’t like life’s adventures. They never really shared their visions for life.

Now, visions can change over time. Politics and consciousness can change over time. We avoid talking about potential challenges so we don’t upset that apple cart once more.

Sometimes we see what I call yellow flags. A yellow flag is something that we should inquire about and ask each other about, but we don’t. And when we don’t address yellow flags, they become red flags. We then end up skating on thin ice. Again, instead of saying the house needs work, we should be saying we need work.

Do we talk about whether we want to have children? How we will raise them? What our parenting philosophies are? If we don’t talk about it, we’re going to fight about it.

I can tell you time and again, when couples I work with are having parenting issues, they never talked about how to raise children. Each person thinks the way I was raised was the right way, or sometimes it was a horrible way and I’ll do the opposite.

And here’s another thing that destroys relationships, long standing, committed relationships. They end up stagnating. We end up getting bored to death with each other. Why? We get zoned into this place of predictability. Every day, every meal, every conversation becomes predictable. We’re lacking in curiosity. We don’t ask each other, well, what did you think about that? Instead of how is your day, we should say, tell me about your day. How did that make you feel? Tell me what that word means to you. Here’s what it means to me. It may not mean the same thing to both of us.

A relationship in order to thrive has to become vital and have energy. It has to open up for new learning. It has to be full of curiosity or it’s going to stagnate and become boring. It’s like watching the same old TV run or a movie run every single night. How passionate, how focused are you going to be watching the same show night after night? You’re going to blur it out after a while and stop paying attention to it. And that’s what we do to each other in our relationships.

The rules of relationship by the way we play them do not work. They cause unimaginable and inestimable failure. What could be more important in our lives than thriving in our relationships? We need to re-envision relationship. We need to commit not to the outcome, but to the process. We need to treat relationships as an evolving art form that we want to cultivate like a piece of sculpture or clay in our hands that we are crafting. We cannot go to sleep once we’ve secured the relationship. If you do that, your relationship is going to disintegrate.

If you’re my boyfriend, I’m your girlfriend. If I’m in a committed relationship, if you’re my partner, we’re married. Those are statements of possession. They are not statements about the evolving art form of relationship. The ownership of a relationship closes down the process in the evolution. A relationship should be and needs to be exciting, stimulating, challenging. We need to work on it and cultivate it. We need to ask new questions and each person needs to devote themselves to cultivating their own emotional growth, their own emotional intelligence and curiosity.

Do you want to be the same person at 60 or 80 that you were at 30? Do you want your relationship to be the same at 60 that it was at 30? Or do you want it to grow?

Stop watching the same old rerun. Stop being the same old rerun, having the same old conversations. Don’t participate in a relationship that becomes bankrupt. It’s up to you.

Relationships need a new game plan to thrive. It’s a lot of work, but so is going to the gym or having financial success. But the most valuable focus and energy that you can have anywhere in your lives is in committed relationships. That’s where greatest source of gratification and fulfillment will come from. Say to yourself, and I know this sounds awkward, “I’m committed to being in a growing, prospering, evolving relationship.” And ask yourself, what does that look like? And by the way, that relationship can’t evolve and grow unless both of us evolve and grow. We cannot stagnate.

To really succeed in your relationships, you must awaken to this new set of priorities. Sustaining love demands a new way of relating. You can do this. You can succeed. You just have to set your intention and focus to be awake and to commit to the process to truly sustain loving each other and thriving in your lives.

You can do that.

This has been Uncommon Sense. If you want to thrive in your relationship with others and with yourself, be sure to subscribe to the channel. I’m Mel Schwartz, and I’ll see you in the next one.

The post Why Marriages Fail, and How to Save Yours first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

Introducing Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz – a podcast and YouTube series bringing you the relationship wisdom you were never taught.

Every week, Mel shares in-depth knowledge and guidance that goes far beyond self-help “quick tips” to help you bring about real growth in your relationships with others… and yourself. Keep reading to learn how to subscribe so you never miss your weekly dose of Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz.

Don’t miss a single Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free anywhere you get your podcasts or to the YouTube channel, or simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

Have you ever felt stuck in your most important relationships? Who doesn’t?

Does it feel like no matter how hard you try, you just don’t make any real progress?

You’re not alone.

Despite the words of Lennon and McCartney, love is not all you need. Most of us start our relationships feeling in love, hopefully. But over time, that love fades. We fall into the same old troubling patterns and arguments. The same sense of disconnect.

Well, it’s not our fault. It’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault.

Half of marriages end in divorce. But you know what? That’s not the bigger issue.

The fact is that only a small percentage of long-term relationships actually thrive. The fact is, if marriage were a corporation, it would be bankrupt. We’d never tolerate that rate of failure in business. Why do we tolerate it in our relationships?

So what’s the real issue?

It’s simple, in my opinion. No one ever taught us how to succeed in relationships. And so we just wing it.

How’s that going to work out?

We’ve never received any education in relationship. And so we struggle.

Think of this. If communication is the heartbeat of relationship, the majority of relationships are on life support.

That’s why I created Uncommon Sense to share the insights, the tools and the breakthroughs that you were never taught.

I’m Mel Schwartz. I’m a psychotherapist and a marriage counselor and an author. And I’ve had over 30,000 hours of experience helping people build stronger, healthier relationships.

Each week on Uncommon Sense, I’ll share the breakthroughs that my clients have experienced which allowed them to thrive in their relationships.

Here’s a small sampling of what’s to come:

You’re going to learn how to break free from mind numbing arguments, how to avoid eight common words that we use in every sentence that block empathy and destroy our emotional intimacy, how to use the five percent rule to turn conflict into connection, how to foam the runway so your words are actually heard by your partner and how you can recreate passion and intimacy and even recover from infidelity, how you can develop emotional and verbal intimacy.

And this is not about quick tips. It’s about building a new foundation for your relationship success, starting with yourself. After all, your relationship with yourself impacts your relationship with others.

So if you’re ready to thrive in life and in love, subscribe to Uncommon Sense wherever you get your podcasts.

Let’s transform your relationships, starting now.

The post Introducing Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.