Feeling Good Together: The Secret to Making Troubled Relationships Work

Feeling Words when you’re practicing the Intimacy Exercise on this page. If you photocopy this page two-sided, you’ll be able to take the Relationship Satisfaction Test four times on each piece of paper. To download a printable PDF of this toolkit, please visit http://rhlink.com/9780767930901a001

example, if you photocopy the Relationship Satisfaction Test on this page two-sided, you’ll be able to take the test four times on each piece of paper. And if you photocopy the EAR Checklist and list of Common Communication Errors on this page on the back of the Relationship Journal on this page, it will be much easier to do Step 3 of the Relations

When you use Multiple-Choice Empathy, you come in from the opposite angle. You disarm the other person and agree that she has a perfectly good reason not to talk to you.

There’s a natural tendency to get into a power struggle with someone who refuses to speak to us. Most of us get frustrated, so we pressure the other person to tell us what’s wrong. When she refuses, we subtly blame her and imply that she should be more open. This makes her clam up even more.

Multiple-Choice Empathy can be very helpful when the person you’re trying to communicate with has trouble expressing his or her feelings. When you use Multiple-Choice Empathy, you suggest several possibilities and ask if any of them make sense. For example, you might say, “It seems like you might be feeling hurt, angry, or discouraged right now. Do

This was an excellent example of Positive Reframing—Babette thought about a potentially difficult or adversarial situation from a more positive perspective and communicated that vision to her boss. Instead of telling herself that she was a helpless victim who was under attack from a powerful and hostile adversary, she thought about the conflict as

If you can set your ego aside, it will become easier to see the other person’s nasty or adversarial behavior in a more positive and flattering light.

Positive Reframing has to be genuine or it won’t be effective.

When you use Positive Reframing, try to think about the other person’s motives and behavior in a positive way.