The Simple Relationships Blog

We get better one step at a time. Choose a blog and take a step.

Lessons Learned from the Birth of our Twins

 

The birth of our twins was far from ideal. Born 5 weeks early, Natalie was rushed to an emergency c-section after 17 hours of labor. When our kids were born, I was out of the room and Natalie was unconscious. Despite the stress and the high potential for emotional trauma, we walked out of that experience more or less unscathed. How? By applying the tools we teach on this platform.

1. Set realistic expectations.

2. Release the things you can't control.

3. Focus on what is going right, not on what is going wrong.

And there's lot's more where that came from! We hope our story helps to demonstrate how these tools can truly impact your life and help you maintain peace even in the most dire of circumstances.

- Danny & Natalie

Continue Reading...

Expectations are Planned Resentments.

There’s an expression that says “Expectations are just planned resentments” and there is a lot of truth to that statement. An expectation is just our idea of the way that we think things are going to happen. When our expectation isn’t met, we feel like what we got less than we deserved, which leads to disappointment. Then hot on the heels of disappointment comes resentment, which is defined as “bitter indignation [anger or annoyance] at having been treated unfairly.” As you can see, consistent disappointment is a recipe for some serious resentment in your relationships.

High expectations, when clearly communicated, can inspire people to work towards a noble goal but they often don’t bode well for your relationships. If you expect to be invited to all your work friends’ weddings, if you expect your grandkids to call you regularly when you have made no efforts to call them, if you expect your spouse to have sex with you 3 times a day,...

Continue Reading...

Weaknesses Are Just Overused Strengths.

People come in all shapes and sizes. Introvert, extrovert, agreeable, disagreeable, present and aloof, focused and reserved, optimistic, skeptical, the list goes on forever! If you’ve taken a personality test, DISC, Enneagram, Strengthsfinder, whatever, they all demonstrate that while personalities come in all shapes and sizes, there is never one that is objectively good or objectively bad (at least outside of a specific context.).

 

Let’s think about this. If someone is “Hard-Headed” or “Stubborn,” where does that weakness come from? It’s probably rooted in confidence or loyalty, which are good things to have! Maybe someone is being stubborn because they want to protect and preserve the culture of their family. Then again maybe they just can’t take critical feedback, who knows. The point is, the qualities that can bother the people around us are usually good things that get taken a little too far.

 

For example, If someone...

Continue Reading...

Unforgiveness Keeps Them in Control.

While most of us don’t think of Justin Bieber as one of the great emotional philosophers of our time, he is absolutely correct about this. To have a “chip on your shoulder” usually refers to holding some kind of grudge.
 
Oddly enough, it’s our sense of justice or fairness that leads to us holding grudges. We feel a need to punish or judge or distance ourselves from our offenders until they pay for their crime. The problem is that, most of the time, the offender goes on living their life without a second thought while you are stuck there, fuming about this perceived injustice. You remain bitter, angry, and disconnected and your peace will only come at someone else’s expense.
 
This is what Bieber means when his sexy voice sings “unforgiveness keeps them in control.” The offender did the crime, they should do the time, but who in this scenario is suffering? Not the offender, because it turns out you have no power over...
Continue Reading...

The Source of Emotional Pain: Part 3 | PAST RELATIONSHIPS

Whether it is loss of loved ones, divorce, abuse, heartbreak, or someone leaving your life, this pain is deep and persistent. The hardest part is often feeling like you never got answers or the closure that you needed, or if closure was even possible.

 

Many times, the pain can be scary to confront because to truly be free of the pain from past relationships, you are going to have to let the relationship go. No matter how good or bad the relationship was, we will hold on because we can't stand the thought of them actually being gone, even if it's just their memory.

 

Holding onto past relationships creates two major problems.

1) We may not be able to fully heal from any trauma that was experienced in that relationship.

2) Holding onto that person may be taking up the place of a new relationship that will help to fill the emotional hole that the person before left.

 

Another word for "letting go" is "grieving." This word is often understood but what it means is...

Continue Reading...

The Source of Emotional Pain: Part 1 | OFFENSE

Why does it seems like emotional pain in our relationships is unavoidable? Is there a way to get to the bottom of it?


When your heart is hurting, there are 3 primary causes for the pain: Offense, Memories, and Past Relationships. Today, lets talk about offense.


When someone hurts you, purposely or accidentally, that is what is considered an "offense". Offense by definition is “A breach of a law or rule, an illegal act. Annoyance or resentment brought about by a perceived insult” (note: perceived)

Offense happens to all of us daily (whether we like to admit it or not) and in correlation with the dictionary definition, we like to define it as when people break “our law”. Did you know that we each have an internal expectation of the way things "should happen" in our lives and relationships? When those expectations are not met, offense happens. This can be us OR other people not meeting our internal expectations and varies easily person to person. Some offenses...

Continue Reading...

The Danger of Being Certain.

How is that we find ourselves being “certain” of something? We were “certain” that the earth was flat until we learned that it wasn’t. We were “certain” that X-Rays were perfectly healthy for pregnant women until Alice M. Stuart learned that it was consistently causing birth defects. I personally recall being passionately “certain” that Santa Claus was real until I learned that (spoiler alert!) he wasn’t. I heard a quote of a science professor who would lie awake at night, haunted by all of the students that failed his courses because they disagreed with a theory that was later proven false.
 
 There are several relationship and emotional myths that are still practiced today. For instance:

"You should just know what's bothering me."

  • While it would be great if they did, mind-reading is a myth and good communication is a skill of maturity. If you're only willing to do relationship with mind-readers, I...
Continue Reading...

How I see it is not the way it is, it is just how I see it.

Reality is a funny thing. While reality itself only has one truth, we all perceive reality differently. This gets difficult when someone walks up to you telling you off about something you have done when, in reality (the REAL reality), you did nothing wrong! In his book "How to Stop the Pain," Dr. James Richards explains that the people who are most prone to this kind of misperception are people with low self-worth. Let me explain.

In his book, Dr. Richards tells a story about how his stepfather was a violent and insecure man. He would begin most of his explosive arguments with the phrase "Do you think I'm stupid or something?!" He would lash out at strangers for looking at him funny and even attack his loved ones because HE thought that THEY thought that he was stupid. As Dr. Richards writes, "What he never realized was that HE was the one who thought he was stupid."

When we think we're not good enough, that we're flawed and unworthy of love, we often believe that others think...

Continue Reading...

Withholding leads to Withholding. Generosity leads to Generosity.

Withholding our time, energy, resources, emotional availability, or communication within relationships is very easy to do and happens more often than we may think.
For whatever reason, there seems to be an ingrained mindset in most of us that to get what we want, we need to withhold something from the other person until we get it.
 
Think about it as simply as a little kid, if they don’t get what they want, they will withhold a good attitude until they get it (nicely put;). But what we were never taught is that withholding from the other is the WORST way to get what we want!
 
So let’s learn a new way, the best way to get what we need in relationships is to give and give generously. I want someone to communicate more with me? I should start communicating. When you give, it creates a vacuum that naturally causes the other person to feed into.
 
Most of the time, we withhold because we believe the other person doesn’t deserve us being generous,...
Continue Reading...

How to Grow Together

One hard truth of relationships is that you can not fix your spouse. Once you now that, this makes a lot of sense. You can’t change your spouse, you can only change yourself. So if you two as a couple want to change or grow, the only thing to do is change or grow yourself.
 
This can be tough because it is SO MUCH EASIER to see the flaws in other people but it's much harder to see our own or to humbly accept critical feedback from others. But the fact remains, if you want your relationship to improve, you must grow. If you want to change someone else, all you can do is offer feedback as kindly as you can and hope that they are also willing to work on themselves. The rest is out of your control.
 
I mean let's think how this plays out. If I want my wife to be more affectionate toward me, I should ask her and hopefully she does her best to meet that request. But if she refuses, what do I do? Do I cold-shoulder her? Do I try and manipulate her? Do I blow up and...
Continue Reading...
1 2
Close

50% Complete

Two Step

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.