All about delivery

My husband has spent many years telling me that it’s the way I say thing that gets him so upset, not what it is that I am asking him to do. So without really knowing what I was doing, I started working on “buttering him up” before asking him to do something. Granted, it does not always work out perfectly, because there certainly are times when my frustration during a situation keeps me from thinking through how I should say something. But there has been an obvious difference when I work on my delivery.

John Gottman calls this “softening your start-up”, and gives couples four parts to include in what I named the buttering up stage. First, he says that we need to share responsibility for this, then tell how we feel, about a specific situation, and then state what we need.
In black and white print that sounds easy enough, but I have learned that the practical application is so much harder (especially when I am already frustrated)!

It is easy to forget in a family relationship that more often than not we will treat other people better than we treat the people living under the same roof. I guess we take for granted that these people will love us despite our flaws, and the worst part of ourselves. In reality we should be responding to their requests the same way we would respond to someone at church or at work. Why is it so much easier to respond and deliver messages to people at church and work? We fake it. OK not really fake, we control, and that’s the honest truth. The same urge to contradict our spouse is there when we are disagreeing with our boss. We know that we can be polite to our boss when we would rather punch them in the face. And really the same is true at church. Well, maybe just for me, but I often think about how I need to be polite because I am in God’s house. Which then circles back to my home. I want God’s spirit here in my home, which means I am going to have to work on the delivery of my messages to the people in my house.

Elder Lynn Robbins said, “[Satan] damages and often destroys families within the walls of their own homes. His strategy is to stir up anger between family members.” When we are angry with our spouse it is worth stepping back to take a deep breath, and think about the best way to deliver the real message we want heard.