Is your daily life being affected by being in a problem relationship?
- Are you at the end of another draining fight with your partner?
- Perhaps your children are driving you to the wall with their incessant problem behaviour.
- You may be struggling to get results at work and feeling disempowered.
Whatever the relationship, if it's bad, it's affecting your mental health.
One lady I worked with was trying so hard to please her partner that she was filling up with resentment. She felt that she had invested more emotionally into the marriage and that her wife was not taking things seriously enough. She had been to see several people who she thought may help. The help she needed wasn't available so she decided to come to me as a final attempt to mend things.
At the start of our initial meeting, she cried so hard that her face was blotchy and swollen. After a while the tears slowed, which they aways will!
She told me how she had tried to make everything perfect for her wife and that in doing so, she had sold her soul. She ended by saying "What's wrong with me?"
A gentleman had come to see me because he was showing verbal anger to his partner and her children. He sat on my sofa and howled with despair. He said he was drinking too much, smoking and eating takeaways, all of which made him feel worse. He went to to say that he is a National Sales Director for a successful company, but had no control over his moods at home. To make things worse, he wasn't sleeping and believed he was about to have a serious health episode.
Working with another lady, she told me that she had taken on so much extra work. She was working late into the evening when she believed her colleagues would be enjoying their much deserved down time. Her resentment for the organisation was palpable, although she knew that she wasn't being fair in assuming that everyone else there was having a ball.
Going through the blame game is usually the first part of trying to make things better.
"If I hadn't married him, I'd be X!"
"If I had done better in my interview, I'd be more successful!"
"If she wouldn't argue back, everything would be great!"
"If the kids would do as they were told, the household would be peaceful!"
The misery and loneliness you will feel can, weirdly be the start of your recovery. By asking yourself "What's wrong with me?" you are acknowledging that you play a part in the problem!
This thought can trigger the start of your shift towards change.
Your shift, your change, your life!
In every single relationship there is communication. Whether you like it or not, you will be communicating even when you think you aren't. People around you will be picking up your signals and building their understanding of what is going on. You will be picking up other peoples signals and building your own understanding of what's going on.
John Grinder (co-creator of NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming) writes in his NLP Communication Model "You create your perception of reality inside your own neurology."
Very simply, you will take in masses of information through your senses of sight, feeling, sound and to a lesser degree taste and smell. This is your unique filter system! From this you will form an understanding of the situation. For example, you hear a siren, see flashing lights and smell smoke. This will then produce a thought which leads to a belief which leads to an action.
Your understanding of the situation is yours and mine is mine. We will have both accessed the information we believe is relevant to the situation. How we communicate this across depends on trusting our subconscious to throw up the best option.
The subconscious mind is a wonderful resource and should be deeply appreciated. it is responsible for storing and ‘barcoding’ every single experience we have ever had. Each and every experienced is filed according to the data we have personally attached to it. It is our unique reference guide and one to which we attach all manner of meaning.
Back to the siren, flashing lights and smoke. Close your eyes for a moment and think about those words. Your subconscious mind will be working super fast to access all stored data and attach meaning from previous filters. What are you feeling right now? How do you know this representation is accurate?
Learning to access and interpret your stored memory data is a super skill which can be learned and developed to bring fantastic results for improving all communication.
As an NLP coach, I help you to build your 'picture' from any situation and then change the barcode to give you a completely different perception.
Going back to the gentleman who was angry with his stepchildren. We did a very simple exercise to start looseniing up the problem.
- What's wrong? I'm always angry with them
- What is the cause of this? They are spoilt by their real father, get away with murder and live in my house!
- How have you failed to resolve this? By drinking too much and staying up late and laying low
- How can you overcome the solution to your problem? By looking at why their presence angers me and working through it
- What would you like to change? To stop shutting myself off from my partner and her kids. To be present and enjoy time to them
- When will you stop this from being a problem? As soon as I open up about my upbringing and start communicating openly
So, we go back to you creating your perception of the situation inside your own reality.
Your perception is being built on every microscopic detail of your past experiences.
The unhappy National Sales director went on to dig out his past experiences and to understand how they had shaped his beliefs around family life, children and parenting.
His old way of communicating his own wishes was to shut down and wait for adults to find him. He found the stepkids behaviour overly indulgent and realised that this was what jarred him.
So we accessed his perception of reality and simply changed the barcode!
So from now on, instead of saying “What’s wrong with me?” Ask yourself “What’s behind this and how can I change the outcome?”
If you want to know more, I’m here.
Jules x
*The content of the video is credited to John Grinder