Maintaining a Positive Perspective in Your Relationship

Welcome to the fourth floor of the sound relationship house! This flood is all about maintaining the positive perspective.

I see you long term couples back there looking at me skeptically like “yeah, just wait until you deal with LIFE. It’s not all rainbows and butterflies!” and you’re right, it’s not. Life does happen. Hard things happen. Being able to weather those things while maintaining a positive perspective of your partner and your relationship can be revolutionary.

How can you maintain this positive perspective? Well, you need to do the work to keep your relationship in what’s referred to as positive sentiment override or PSO. PSO allows you to give your partner benefit of the doubt and assume positive intent of them when they inevitable do something that is not totally aligned with what you want, need, or how you would have done it. (Alternatively, negative sentiment override is when you are unable to give benefit of the doubt and assume malicious intent from your partner. Ex: They didn’t get stuck late at work, they just didn’t want to come home and see me because they don’t love me anymore.)

What puts your relationship into PSO? If you remember way back, we talked about the emotional bank account. The emotional bank account is the ratio of positive interactions to negative interactions that a relationship wants to have in order to stay healthy. When times are good, that ratio needs to be 5 positives for every 1 negative. In times of stress or tension, that skyrockets to 20:1. The phrase that is often used regarding making these deposits or having these positive interactions is “doing small things often”. As I tell many of my clients, the deposits are not made up of the boombox-over-the-head moments. They’re the smaller things. Bringing you a glass of water. A comforting hand on your back. Reaching for your hand while you walk. Telling you they’re proud of you. Spending an evening together.

If you find you’re struggling here, or if your relationship has already been thrown into negative sentiment override, try to increase the deposits. If those are being met with resistance or mistrust, or if you just feel stuck- go back down a level. Maybe go all the way back to love maps! Spend some time there and learn about one another again. Maybe revisit your love languages and make some pointed, concerted efforts, into filling their specific love tank.

If you’ve tried those things and continue to struggle or are having trouble even getting back to being able to try those things- give me a call. Let’s unpack this together and give you a solid foundation.