Feeling Good Together : The Secret of Making Troubled Relationships Work

by BURNS, DAVID D. MD

• ISBN13: 9780767920704
• ISBN10: 0767920708
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-12-30
• Publisher: Crown Archetype

Summary

We all know people who are hard to get along with. It might be your spouse, mother, neighbor, friend, or colleague. In his new book,Feeling Good Together, Dr. David Burns describes Cognitive Interpersonal Therapy (CIT), a radically different method for developing more loving and satisfying relationships with the people you care about. Based on twenty-five years of clinical experience and new, groundbreaking research involving more than one thousand individuals,Feeling Good Togetheris filled with helpful examples and tools such as the Relationship Satisfaction Test, the Blame Cost-Benefit Analysis, the Relationship Journal, Five Secrets of Effective Communication, the Intimacy Exercise, and more. Using these techniques, Dr. Burns shows you how to resolve virtually any kind of relationship conflict almost instantly.

Author Biography

DAVID D. BURNS, M.D., is an adjunct clinical professor of psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and has served as visiting scholar at Harvard Medical School. He's the author of the bestselling Feeling Good and When Panic Attacks. Thousands of mental-health professionals attend his training programs throughout the United States and Canada each year, and he's been featured widely in the media.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. ix
Why Can't We All Just Get Along?
What the Experts Say	p. 3
The Dark Side of Human Nature	p. 16
Why We Secretly Love to Hate	p. 23
Three Ideas That Can Change Your Life	p. 31
Diagnosing Your Relationship
How Good Is Your Relationship? The Relationship Satisfaction Test	p. 41
What Do You Really Want?	p. 47
The Price of Intimacy	p. 51
The Relationship Journal	p. 65
Good Communication vs. Bad Communication	p. 70
How We Control Other People	p. 80
Three Troubled Couples	p. 86
How to Develop Loving Relationships with the People You Care About
The Five Secrets of Effective Communication	p. 95
The Disarming Technique	p. 100
Thought and Feeling Empathy	p. 115
Inquiry: "Did I Get That Right?"	p. 128
"I Feel" Statements	p. 134
Stroking: "I-It" vs. "I-Thou" Relationships	p. 140
Putting It All Together: Solutions to Common Relationship Problems	p. 150
Making the Five Secrets Work for You
Mastering the Five Secrets	p. 177
Using the Five Secrets in Real Time: The Intimacy Exercise	p. 180
Intimacy Training for Couples: The One-Minute Drill	p. 186
Common Traps-and How to Avoid Them
"Help! The Five Secrets Didn't Work!"	p. 193
Helping and Problem Solving	p. 203
Hiding Your Head in the Sand: Conflict Phobia and Anger Phobia	p. 209
Apologizing: "Can't I Just Say, 'I'm Sorry'?"	p. 217
Submissiveness: "I Must Please You"	p. 221
Resistance Revisited: "Why Should I Have to Do All the Work?"	p. 232
Advanced Techniques
Changing the Focus: Is There an Elephant in the Room?	p. 237
Positive Reframing: Opening the Door to Intimacy-and Success	p. 243
Multiple-Choice Empathy: How to Talk to Someone Who Refuses to Talk to You	p. 251
Your Intimacy Toolkit	p. 257
Index	p. 267
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter 1

What the Experts Say

We all want friendly, rewarding relationships with other people, but we often end up with the exact opposite—hostility, bitterness, and distrust. Why is this? Why can’t we all just get along?

There are two competing theories. Most experts endorse the deficit theory. According to this theory, we can’t get along because we don’t know how. In other words, we fight because we lack the skills we need to solve the problems in our relationships. When we were growing up, we learned reading, writing, and arithmetic, but there weren’t any classes on how to communicate or solve relationship problems.

Other experts believe that we can’t get along because we don’t really want to. This is called the motivational theory. In other words, we fight because we lack the motivation to get close to the people we’re at odds with. We end up embroiled in hostility and conflict because the battle is rewarding.

The Deficit Theory

Most mental health professionals, including clinicians and researchers, endorse the deficit theory. They’re convinced that we wage war simply because we don’t know how to make love. We desperately want loving, satisfying relationships but lack the skills we need to develop them.

Of course, different experts have different ideas about what the most important interpersonal skill deficits are. Behavior therapists, for example, believe that our problems with getting along result from a lack of communication and problem--solving skills. So when someone criticizes us, we may get defensive when we should be listening. We may pout and put the other person down instead of sharing our feelings openly, or we may resort to nagging and coercion in order to get our way. We don’t use systematic negotiation or problem--solving skills, so the tensions escalate.

A related theory attributes relationship conflict to the idea that men and women are inherently different. This theory was popularized by Deborah Tannen in her best--selling book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation and by John Gray in his best--selling book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. These authors argue that men and women can’t get along because they use language so differently. The idea is that women use language to express feelings, whereas men use language to solve problems. So when a woman tells her husband that she’s upset, he may automatically try to help her with the problem that’s bugging her because that’s how his brain is wired. But she simply wants him to listen and acknowledge how she feels, so she gets more upset when he tries to “help” her. They both end up feeling frustrated and misunderstood. You may have observed this pattern in yourself and someone you’re not getting along with, such as your spouse.

Cognitive therapists have a different idea about the deficits that lead to relationship problems. They emphasize that all of our feelings result from our thoughts and attitudes, or cognitions. In other words, the things other people do—like being critical or rudely cutting in front of us in traffic—don’t actually upset us. Instead, we get upset because of the way we think about these events.

This theory may resonate with your personal experience. When you’re mad at someone, you may have noticed that your mind is flooded with negative thoughts. You tell yourself, “He’s such a jerk! He only cares about himself. He -shouldn’t be like that. What a loser!” When you feel upset, these negative thoughts seem overwhelmingly valid, but they actually contain a variety of thinking errors, or cognitive distortions, listed on pages 6–7.

One of the most interesting things about the cognitive theory is the idea that anger and interpersonal conflict ultimately result from a mental con.

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Excerpted from Feeling Good Together: The Secret of Making Troubled Relationships Work by David D. Burns
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.