Relationship Radio: Marriage, Sex, Limerence & Avoiding Divorce
Relationship Radio: Marriage, Sex, Limerence & Avoiding Divorce
How This Communication Tactic Revolutionized Our Marriage
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If you’ve ever felt your relationship is struggling due to miscommunication, this episode is for you. Join us as we explore the compelling concept of SMART Contact™—a vital communication strategy designed to bring couples closer, even during turbulent times. We delve into the intricate balance of pushes and pulls in conversations, revealing how understanding these dynamics can transform your communication and foster deeper connections.
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Hello, I'm Marcos.
Speaker 2:Hi, I'm Elisa.
Speaker 1:We are part of the team here at Merch Helper.
Speaker 2:And today we're going to talk about smart contact.
Speaker 1:If I had to explain it in one sentence, it will be something that allow the lines of being available when you need it and give a space when they request a space Somewhere in the middle, don't you think?
Speaker 2:Yes, something that we learn pretty well in our time in crisis.
Speaker 1:Like be able. I mean you have to become some sort of a detective and see your spouse reactions to when you approach. Um, if they're being rejecting your approach, if they're engaged they move a little forward. All those signs you got. You're gonna become pretty good at doing that with time. It's not gonna come natural to you but it can be developed quite a bit if you put the effort in it.
Speaker 1:Well, yes, at first for us it was, I mean, for me it was, um, I have no pools. You know, smart. Smart contact is a way to diminish your pushes and increase your pulls somehow through communication. It was no pulls that could actually come out wet, because my wife was out of the marriage. She wanted out, so it was only about diminishing pushes. If I try to force my way into her with chatting about whatever more than items, it will be a push. So that was not a smart contact. Doesn't matter what I was coming and trying to. Hey, let me tell you about your day. And she gave me just it was fine, very short, cold answer. I have to take that as an indication. Okay, if I say something else at this point, it's going to a push. I see a lot of that with my clients that in order to force smart contact, they try to open channels of communication when those channels are not there, and you become doing more harm than good.
Speaker 2:You became really good at this. Making me feel safe, not controlling anymore, was one of the things that we suffer a whole lot before our crisis and during our crisis at the beginning. So stopping all the pushes, like he was saying that he actually, you know, start working on those it made me feel safe, like I said, and then, you know, willing to communicate with him because we were able to communicate.
Speaker 1:And it's not only when you say it, I mean how you say it, but when you say it.
Speaker 1:My analogy, bad analogy is like fishing. You threw a hook in the water, like you ask a question and if they go with it, if the fish takes the hook and start talking, you let them go. You always follow the waves, you always follow that pattern. They want to talk about something, go there, don't cut them off with another question and, you know, chop their train of thought, allow them to express themselves if they are, but if they give you some sure, concise answer, I mean, let's say the only thing you do is at some point you go to the same church and you sit side by side because the family goes there and you have to sit by side by side, enjoy that win. You know, if you try to forge your way back to her or his car and make a conversation and the other person is not into it, it's better for you to part ways right there at the bench. Go home, I mean, fight another day yeah, very much so the pushes and pull.
Speaker 1:what we've been talking talking about is it is pushes and pulls. Push and pull is like the foundation of every single concept that we have at Marriage Helper. Anything you do that evokes negative emotions within your spouse is a push. Doesn't matter if you intend it to be a negative emotion or not, or positive, and the contrary goes as well. Sometimes you're not engaging in what you think is a smart contact. It's a pull, and this is a thing I have with a lot of my clients that I tell everybody from the get-go when I send them to a smart contact toolkit.
Speaker 1:That we have is basically every other toolkit is very straightforward. I mean you go, you listen to it and then you come back to me. And they come back to me and they tell me okay, I'm doing this, I'm doing that, but for some reason with smart contact it's always. They come back to me and they say I'm doing A, b and C and I'm like, okay, c, yeah, but A B. It's just a hybrid of whatever is the way you do things With what we say you should do things. Go back, take your preconceptions of how you're supposed to talk, send emails, do things for the other person. You know, smart content is not only about conversations. It's about what you do, as well, you know, and it's about not taking more than you give in to. That's the critical part about it. So go back to smart contact. Take all your ideas, how you do communication and just listen. If you do that, it's pretty self-explanatory.
Speaker 2:And we know it's hard to do smart contact when you're in crisis. It's tough to do smart contact when you know your spouse may be hating you at the moment, and that's one of the things that we were going through. I mean, I was in an affair, I want him out. I want, I wanted to be out of the marriage. I wanted to push Marcos away. So I will do anything, you know, imagine to push him away. And so I know, and we know, it's hard to do smart contact when your spouse may be hating you. We get that and it's possible.
Speaker 1:Fear is the worst enemy of smart contact, because you see your spouse drifting away and you think I have to do something. And that's when most people make mistakes. They try to impose themselves, they try to drop themselves somehow in circumstances, in situations you cannot force your way in. You cannot force your way in.
Speaker 2:Give you a force of your way in, you will push the other person away more and more and more yeah, smart contact for us was really, besides behavior, communication um, like I said before, the fact that you know I, no matter what I did, he, you know, was able to treat me with respect, treat me with respect and accept where I was, and there's so many other aspects that we can spend all day talking here about. You know, at least in our crisis time, how we've worked throughout this.
Speaker 1:When there's very little to no communication. Number one yes, you do have to wait for those opportunities. You got to be prepared. You're working on your pies so you make sure that the very slim opportunity you have you are in tip-top shape. But smart contact is not only about direct contact between those two people. When you guys were married, you have circle of friends, you have families, you have all sort of ropes what we call ropes in marriage helper that connect dots with dots.
Speaker 1:And if you work on your pies, if you start changing your behaviors not yourself your behaviors in order to be a better self, somehow that will trick her down. Okay, it's not about you intentionally trying to tell a friend hey, tell my wife that I'm doing much better here or I stopped drinking. But by you going To those circles of friends and maybe if you had a drinking problem before, you're not drinking anymore they're seeing that you don't have to showcase yourself. They will see your changes. They will see you are treating people differently. That happened in our story a little bit, you know, and most of our circle of friends were her friends, so they were on her side. But still some of that like, hey, marco is not the same guy anymore, and even if she didn't want to see that she was hearing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, we spent a good amount of time together too, so I could totally see the change. Now, one of the things that we teach here at Marriage Helper is not to do the changes for the other person, and that's what we normally try to do. We want to change our behavior so she or he could see it, and that's really not the case. We want to do it for us. If we start doing it for the other person, we may give up. You know when circumstances get negative or you know when things got bad. So it happened to Marcos while we were in the crisis that he started to change at first behaviors and just to try to, I guess, manipulate, we could say, or control the situation a little bit. And then he realized that you know I was still treating him bad, so he did a turn into. You know, I'm gonna do this for me. I'm gonna do it for me to become the best version of myself that I that could be for you know me, for the kids, for the marriage, or you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the problem with doing it for the other person is you end up not doing things. That, because, as Pulse is evoking positive emotions within the other person, pies is doing things that evoke positive emotions within yourself. So if you try, like I, have a client in Spain. She is Chinese descendant. They met in taiwan and he brought her back to spain and then left her. So this lady, as pies as part of her pies, is watching soccer games all day because he's a soccer fan. And I asked her her okay, do you even like soccer? No, but if we have a conversation, I know what to say, because her favorite team is Barcelona. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm all like stop.
Speaker 1:That just brings anxiety to you. You're going to go through hours of soccer. You may not even that subject, may not even ever come, and you're just distressing yourself. Your anxiety is going up. That's another thing that happens when you do pies for that person. If they don't see the results, your anxiety level goes up. Then, when you have interactions, your chances of you making a mistake, because you are up here on anxiety, they're much higher. So you just focus on yourself. Do the things that evoke positive emotions to you. I the way I did pies. In my case, the way I describe this is like throwing pancakes to the ceiling to see which one sticks you do different things.
Speaker 1:I I did a bunch of stuff during developing my Pies culture what I call developing a Pies culture that I keep every morning. I do my Pies for about an hour when I wake up. That's what I do, and it was a process of trying things, throwing them away, adding things, taking things out. It changes with times too, depending on where you are and I did many things that I read. I was like this should be great, like watching the sunrise at the beach. I'm not a kind of guy. It was me, not because she likes to watch sunrises on the beach, I would like the same. So I stopped. It's not for her, it's for me, and that will improve your peace level in order to do a smart contact better.
Speaker 2:We used to do conflict really bad, really bad. Or I will say Marcos would have done conflict really bad.
Speaker 1:And I would just stay there and be quiet and not say a thing.
Speaker 1:I'm a big guy, yeah. So it's not about what I will have wanted to learn sooner, because when we first came to the workshop we learned these principles, but it was so hard to implement them at first. So, for me, I knew, I knew what I needed to do, well and right, but the level of frustration that I was going through, the level of hurt, the level of pain, um, kept me making mistakes, you know. So I wish I would have had, maybe, a stronger will, which I do have a strong will, but you know, still, every now and then, when I, when she will come and I was treating her what I thought was treating her greatly for a while, and she will come and try to pick on me, and pick on me because she wanted to force her way out by making me maybe tell her, you know what, get the hell out of here, or something like that Then I will go back to what I call the old Marcos and start throwing some poison pills down the well, and that's the one thing that usually set me back a little bit.
Speaker 1:It happens to so many of us. We do well for a while, then we can't take it no more. We make a mistake or two mistakes, and then our spouses come and say, see, this is what I don't want to do in life with you and we're like, come on, please give me a break. It is hard, it's not easy. Another thing that we say is we don't teach this stuff in order for you to do when they're easy to do. We teach them so it becomes natural by practice, so you can do them when they are hard to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you will say that it was fear. You use the word fear, but you also talk about will not having enough will to do what you were supposed to do. Could it be like consistency A word that we could add there as well Like to stay consistent to what you're doing, no matter what, which is hard.
Speaker 1:Kind of believe in the end result. Believe in the end result, you know, believe in the goal. Make sure that your focus is on. This is what I want to accomplish, whatever it is. For me was not even get you back. To get my wife back for me was get my family back.
Speaker 1:so when I really start focusing on like, okay, is this that is going to come out of my mouth will get me closer or farther away to my goal and I was always thinking about my goal getting my family back. It doesn't matter how much pain I'm in, it doesn't matter what she deserves to hear from me. It was more about will this get me closer or farther away, and that's basically how I did smart contact after that.
Speaker 2:That's really good. I love that. Yeah, yeah, we do, we do. I mean, like I always say, you know, our marriage is not perfect. Our marriage is really really good. I will not change it for anything. It's not perfect, so we have to be really good. I will not change it for anything. It's not perfect. So we have to be careful with what we do and what we say. You know, sometimes we go, we may go back to old habits, but you know we click out of it pretty quick, so we still do. I don't know if you have any examples that you can think of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, when we talk about getting your marriage to a deeper level, better than it ever was, what it looks like to me is you will not compromise what you have obtained, what you have sacrificed to get to, for anything. At a point that feeling gets into you. Look, I'm not getting anything to come in between what we have built. That's how we're feeling now we are there.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, somebody comes in the gym and says something to me and it's a female. I don't even talk anymore, I'll bark. You know I don't want talk anymore, I'll bark. You know I don't want nothing to get in between what we have built.
Speaker 2:We protect. We protect our relationship a whole lot, we protect our relationship and that's part of smart contact too.
Speaker 1:We make sure that whatever's going to come out of my mouth comes in a way that it doesn't harm the other person. And yeah, like Elisa said, every now and then something happens. Yeah, but like horsemen, you know those horses that they used to run wild all the time. Now, when one comes out, like it happened to us, like a few weeks ago, you know, she came out and used sarcasm and I look at her and I start laughing. I was like, okay, you just used a horseman.
Speaker 2:We laughed for like five minutes after that.
Speaker 1:I haven't heard nothing like that in like years. But we made sure that okay, yeah, this happened, but let's take care of it. You know, we don't want it to happen again. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So coming into the workshop, maybe you may get to know a little bit of our story in another video, but I got married pretty young. We're both pretty ignorant on what we're doing and I'm not saying that you know. You may marry a little older and you will know what to do, but still we were very ignorant. A lot of the moments in the workshop were very eye-opening and so coming to the workshop and learning what we learned has helped us a whole lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my way of doing a smart contact or what I thought a smart contact was was let me bring the food to the table. You give me what I want. Women, Pass me a beer, get it out of of the way and let me watch the game. That was a smart contact for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we were leaving, maybe like in the early 1900s something along those lines.
Speaker 1:That's what it sounded like we walk into that place from at least me, my experience. I walk into that place at least me, my experience. I walk into that place Friday morning thinking I'm right, we were having this crisis. She was walking out of the marriage. Hey, I'm doing kind of. I mean, I'm a little rough on the edges, yeah, I'm a little tough, but I'm the one who's right here.
Speaker 1:And the process with that worship is they open you up, they dissect you is no way you can hide from who you are and what you have done. You know, pile after pile of information, they will hit you like a ton of bricks unless you're a perfect human being, which I don't think you are. I wasn't. She's awesome, but she wasn't. So I found myself on Friday afternoon on the hallway of that place that we were having that conference that day, on my butt, sitting with my hands between my head, and I'm like man, I'm a humongous jerk. I'm doing all this wrong and a lot of that is how I treated my wife with the things I said. I was hurting her without knowing. Honestly, I was naive enough to not know how much pain I was inflicting. The workshop is eye-opening, all throughout. Everything you know spells out smart contact, even if we're talking about different segments with different things. It's all about communication All through the worship.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it I mean it changed our lives, it changed our marriage. But let's just, you know, yes, we want to save marriages, that's our goal. Want to save marriages, that's our goal. But it's so individual too that it helped us both learn about us. You know, now, a day now I question everything I do. Why do I do this? Like, where is this coming from? So there's so many things that have taught us that I can totally say that this changed our lives, not only our marriages, but our life, you know, for the better. Yes, it will. You will learn more about yourself. Yes, sometimes that will hurt, and that's you know. If you're already in pain, you may not want to hurt anymore, but it's a benefit.
Speaker 1:Under that there's a lot of benefit under that. Yeah, you have to be able to go there with an open mind, thinking not like, even if I walk out with a closed mind, they open up for me. But if you can get there with an open mind instead of thinking, okay, how they can fix my spouse, what can I do myself to become better, I encourage you to go to magehelpercom. Slash call c-a-l-l.
Speaker 2:Check us out okay well, thanks so much for watching and we will see you in the next video. You.
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