You may be a good communicator, yet when it comes to dealing with an affair, you are in a new arena. Ther personal nature, and raw emotions often turn a confrontation into a fight.
Surviving Confrontation <<– listen to the audio here
Hi, this is Jeff Murrah with Affair Recovery Radio. I’m glad you’re here with me this evening. We’re going to be talking about some very useful stuff for anyone out there who’s in a situation where you’re having to deal with an affair, and some of the stuff tonight will be good for anyone who’s got some issues going on in their marriage or their family. Because tonight we’re going to be talking about surviving confrontation.
Confrontation, it goes hand in hand with relationships. Any kind of relationship, healthy, unhealthy, you’re going to have to deal with confrontation. With affairs confrontations are a big part of what’s going on, and you’re going to need to find some ways to survive confrontation. Rather than every confrontation turning into a major fight.
It could be that you’re a very good communicator, yet when it comes to dealing with an affair this is a whole new arena. Because when you’re dealing with an affair you’re dealing with raw emotions, you’re dealing with sensitive situations that are taken very personally. And the personal nature and the raw emotions often turn what would be just a confrontation into a major fight. I want to give you some ways to handle that and reduce the likelihood of your confrontations turning into major fights.
The solution is going to be the ways of surviving confrontation. First one, think and breathe before you speak. Think and breathe before you speak. Something as simple as just taking a breath before you go ahead and confront them about something can often make a world of difference. Because when you just blurt things out without gathering together your words, and without taking a breath, many times it can lead to you feeling much more stressed, and it can also lead to the other party taking what you’re saying as more threatening.
There’s a higher risk of you raising your voice when you do it before you have had a breath. If you’re one of those people who tend to shoot their mouth off before thinking about what they say, this is especially true. You need to think and breathe before you speak.
You can do it in the other order, breathe and think, so there’s nothing sacrosanct about that. I did want to go ahead and talk about the think part because the acronym TAC is going to explain the three approaches this evening. First one is to think before you speak, think and breathe.
The second one, the A part, is to keep in mind that assumptions are your enemy. What I mean by assumptions are your enemy, you need to focus on understanding what your spouse is telling you rather than making assumptions. Because many times people get into major fights by choosing to believe a lot of their assumptions, rather than really understanding what is being said.
When they say something and you are not quite sure what they’re saying, don’t assume. Find out. Find out even down to the very basic things: who, what, when, where, and why. Why is going to be a little trickier, I’ll have to devote a whole episode on that. But drill down to the basics.
Because I know one of the problems I run into with couples, although all of you may speak and understand English, the meanings that you attach to the different words may be very very different. This is common with a lot of cheaters. Remember President Clinton got into a big argument over what the definition of “is” is. This is a type of games that they play, and this is why you want to avoid assumptions.
Because what they’re saying and what you assume they’re meaning may be totally different. And that’s what you’re going to have to bear in mind. Assumptions are your enemy.
Number three, keep thoughts, emotions, and feelings separate. Couples get themselves into trouble when they start mixing them up. That confuses your message and it leads to a lot of fights. What I mean by keeping your thoughts, emotions, and feelings separate, just because you feel it, and your feelings are a valid experience, that does not mean it is a fact.
You may feel unloved. You may feel rejected. That does not necessarily mean that they no longer love you and that they have rejected you. Even though you may feel that way.
What you think about what’s going on is often very different than what the facts. I talked a few moments ago about assumptions, this gets into that, and you’re going to have to separate out what you’re thinking from what you’re feeling. So many times the wires get crossed and all these bleed into one another.
Your emotions are your emotions. That does not mean that they’re facts, and you’re going to have to realize facts and emotions are two different things. And to treat your emotions as if they are facts and confront your spouse with what you’re feeling, that can often lead to difficulties.
As you’re talking with them keep each of these separate. It will make it to where whenever there is a confrontation it can be much more productive. Because when you do this mix and match stuff of combining what you think, what you assume, and what your emotions are, with the facts, each of you can leave feeling like what just happened. That’s because you kept changing what you were dealing with. Whether you were dealing with emotions, whether you were dealing with facts, whether you were dealing with what you were thinking.
The facts actually shouldn’t change that much. What you think and what you feel, what they think, what they feel, those will change as the two of you work on the issues.
I use the acronym TAC because, much like dealing with confrontation, you’ve got to take the confrontation head on. If you’re a sailor you know about tacking your ship into the wind whenever you are encountering a strong head wind, you’ve got to do a maneuver called tacking. Very similar here. When you’re dealing with a confrontation you’ve got to take that type of approach.
Once again, let me go ahead and review. We’re talking about think and breathe before you speak. Assumptions are your enemy. And keep thoughts, emotions, feelings, facts, judgments, all those things, separate. Because mixing them confuses your message.
We may have to deal with that topic a little more on how to make your message clearer, but these are things that if you go ahead and put them into place now it can make a big difference in terms of your confrontation, to where they’re much more productive. That doesn’t make them any more enjoyable, but you’ll be able to get more out of them, your spouse will be able to get more out of them, and the two of you will have actually communicated rather than throwing a bunch of words at each other.
And I think that will make a very big difference in the long run. Go ahead and work on trying to put these things into practice, because with most people it takes them some practice before they can master these things. I know that you may be one of those people that can do it right away, that would be wonderful. But most of us need practice so I encourage you to practice these things.
I know myself, I have to remind myself of the breathe one all the time. Because whenever I get real passionate about things, Jeff, take a breath. And it really does make a difference. I encourage you to go ahead and put these into place and it will help you as you go through your affair recovery.
Until next time, this is Jeff Murrah with Affair Recovery Radio. Thank you for listening. Bye.
