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How To Make A Difficult Decision

As an online therapist, I have a lot of clients coming to me for advice on how to make a difficult decision in their life. So I thought I’d make a quick blog on what I’ve found to be helpful.

Here you go…

While yes pros and cons lists are often great in decision making, they probably aren’t going to help too much when it comes to a really difficult decision.

The decision wouldn’t be a difficult one if there were more pros than cons.

So, what can you do?

One thing that I have tried to focus on, when I have had to make difficult decisions in my own life, is my values. What is it that you value in your life that is effected by this decision?

Let’s say you are deciding between staying where you are and moving to another country. This is a complex big decision with a seriously long list of pros and cons.

Start by looking at what you value in staying and what you really value in leaving.

For example, staying might serve your values of security and familiarity and certainty. Whereas leaving might be in line with your values of being with family and of being adventurous and embracing change.

While all of these things might be values to you, it’s often easier to prioritise our values at a given point in  our life.

For example, while I really love security and familiarity and I’m such a creature of habit; I know that in this point in my own life, I’d rather prioritise adventure and embracing change.

I hope you found that helpful and that you start to live more and more of your life in line with what you truly value.

If you are interested in working therapeutically with me, I am currently offering a FREE consultation session to people. This is to give you a chance to get to know me and to see if online therapy feels comfortable for you.

If you’re still reading this, then perhaps you and I would be a good fit and you can

go ahead and book a free consultation today.

Book A FREE Consultation

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Let’s talk online dating…

Did you know that personal ads account for the meeting that leads to a sixth of the marriages in the US. And seventy percent of same-sex relationships start online. Yet, there is still a bit of a stigma towards online dating… What, why?

Here’s a great piece of info that you can refer to the next time someone makes you feel bad about online dating:

In a 2013 study by Harvard and the University of Chicago, it was revealed that relationships that started online we less likely to end in a break-up and were associated with higher levels of satisfaction than the couples who met offline.

It wasn’t a huge difference, but large enough to be statistically significant. The couples who met online were found to be more satisfied with their marriage and reported a slightly higher quality relationship.

This makes a lot of sense though right,  because online dating breaks the boundaries of location, class and social grouping etc. It can allow you to find someone who shares many of the aspects that you may find more important such as education level, religion and diet such as being vegan.

Of course this doesn’t mean that online dating works for everyone. Many people end up feeling even more lonely while using online dating. It’s just not for everyone.

You might think that if online dating doesn’t work for you, you’d just stop, right? But we actually continue to do a lot of things that don’t work for us.

Whether or not online dating is for you, it clearly works for a lot of people around the world and therefore shouldn’t be looked down upon.

🖤

 

 

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Positive Sentiment Over-ride

Positive sentiment over-ride occurs when your overall positive sentiment towards your partner outweighs the negative.

According to Gottman, when a couple has positive sentiment over-ride, they are more likely to give one another the benefit of the doubt.

For example if your partner is comes home grumpy one day, instead of automatically thinking that they are angry with you or that they are a bad partner; you may think that maybe they just had a bad day or slept badly or something.

Basically positive sentiment over-ride acts as a sort of buffer against irritability in a relationship. You are understanding of your partner and that helps you to be more forgiving and tolerant of your partner.

If your partner comes home grumpy and you have a negative sentiment over-ride, on the other hand, you may interpret your partner’s grumpiness as a reflection of something that you have done. You will probably be hyper-vigilant towards criticism and put downs and therefore end up misinterpreting some of the actions from your partner to be more malicious or careless than they were.

Perhaps developing a stronger positive sentiment over-ride in your relationship could be beneficial to you and your partner. 🖤🖤

 

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Is there a fundamental shift in dynamics that precipitates affairs?

Shirley Glass noticed a fundamental shift in dynamics that tended to precipitate affairs. Usually couples have a shared intimate space in which they can exchange confidences, daily updates, and occasional relationship complaints (which actually help to maintain a strong relationship). It is as if the couple builds a wall around this shared space that keeps others out of their intimate relationship space. 

However, affair-prone partners tend to reach a point in which they stop confiding in each other, stop sharing daily stories and stop raising their relationship complaints. In effect they close off this shared space and replace it with a wall.

They may then meet a friendly person and, over time, they may find that they are able to confide, share daily stories as well as their relationship complains that they are withholding from their partner.

In effect they are opening up a new shared space between them and this new person, which becomes more and more intimate. Eventually the initial walls may become reversed and they end up building a wall around them and this new person which keeps their partner out.

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Can the way that you raise a complaint predict the outcome of your relationship?

Gottman found that by observing the first three minutes of a conflict conversation, he could predict not only how the rest of the conversation would go, but also how the relationship would go 6 years down the road…with high accuracy!

He found that couples who approach conflict gently by explaining how they are feeling about a situation, rather than by bringing up a flaw in the other person’s character had a much better chance of success.

For example, saying something like ” I’m frustrated because the bills aren’t paid” works out better for the couple than saying something like “You’re so lazy, why haven’t you paid the bills yet?”

Being specific about the problem that you want changed is also key in conflict. The more specific you are, the easier it is for your partner to know what to do differently in the future.

For example saying “You need to be more responsible” is vague and unsurprisingly ineffective because it doesn’t give your partner much direction. However saying something like “It would be so helpful for me if you could pay the bills by the end of the week”. This is a much easier for your partner to change as it is clear and direct.

You may not be able to completely avoid conflict in your relationship (as even the strongest relationships have conflict) but you can control how you approach the conflict. This is important because you don’t want to keep repeating the same negative approach as  Gottman has shown that this can have a devastating impact on the relationship.

So remember to gently talk about the situation as opposed to a flaw in your partner and to be specific.