Interview for Nicole Perry
What is a common place of outside stress? Is it work, life, etc?
There will always be outside stress on any relationship whether it be marriage, work, or even friendship. It is how we deal with the outside stress in the relationship that makes the difference.
Communication breakdown is the biggest source of stress in a marriage. Not articulating an issue in a way the other person can understand leads to further frustration and breakdown of the relationship. I also believe, that not taking the other person’s issues to heart and trying to find middle ground is very taxing on a relationship.
In your example of The Break Up, not getting the right amount of lemons and not understanding that a centre piece for the table was really important to the woman, shows stress from within the marriage. These are not outside issues. The issue was not the number of lemons but the feeling of disregard it produced, the feeling of not being understood and becoming more and more hurt, which ultimately lead to the separation.
You are a life coach. How do you work with people on changing their lives to eliminate this outside stress?
I work with people to understand themselves and the way they make choices, communicate and spend their time. We work on belief systems, that is the beliefs they have about themselves that make them do what they do. We work on value systems that sustain through the tricky times. With self confidence and self respect comes the ability to acknowledge other peoples pain.
Understanding yourself leads to not being defensive and being able to take feed back from other people as helpful rather than critical.
What are some things people can do so that they are more relaxed and won’t fight over small ‘stupid’ things with a husband or wife?
I work with many people who are going through separation and others who are thinking about it.
While in the process of separation, we deal with issues such as communication skills, as it is a really terrifying time and people can play the ‘blame game’ which tends to breakdown all communication to the point of not being able to resolve issues without outside help.
When children are involved it is really important to be able to have a polite relationship which does not impact on the children’s emotional wellbeing.
When I see people who are thinking about separating we tend to focus on what it is they want from their life. Often times, these people feel they have lost themselves somewhere in the relationship and feel they are living for others instead of themselves.
In separation no one is usually relaxed. Being polite is a really great place to start to change the relationship. Never use phrases that have ‘you’ in them. For instance, ‘you always’ or ‘you have to’ these are fighting words and will get fighting responses. ‘I feel’ or ‘could we please’ are non combative.
Consider your spouse, whether still married or separated, as a person you admire.
Do not sweat the small things.
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