Marriage and Intimacy Tips for Christian Couples: Secrets of Happily Ever After

Cultivating Positive Sentiment Override for a More Passionate Connection

• Monica Tanner • Season 3 • Episode 260

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Ever found yourself caught in a tangle of misunderstandings with your partner, where every comment feels like a dig?

I'm pulling back the curtain on the silent saboteur known as negative sentiment override. Learn how this mental habit can erode the very foundations of our relationships and some strategies to overcome it. We'll talk about the art of positive sentiment override, where the benefit of the doubt becomes a bridge to better communication and conflict resolution, using Dr. John Gottman's golden positivity ratio.

Be sure to tune in transformative anecdotes and strategies, all designed to keep the flame of romance alive, turning everyday interactions with your Sweetheart into an ongoing honeymoon.

As my gift to you for listening, download a copy of my 75 ways to show gratitude for your spouse at: www.monicatanner.com/gratitude

Speaker 1:

I want you to really be aware. Are you just default, thinking negatively about everything that this person in your life is doing, or can you take a breath and employ some of these exercises I just gave you to help you see things in a more positive light? Have you ever wondered what makes the difference between those couples who absolutely love to be together and the ones who merely tolerate each other in their old age? Hi, I'm Monica Tanner, wife to a super hunky man, mom to four kids, relationship coach and intimacy expert. My goal with this podcast is to help you and your partner swap resentment for romance, escape the roommate rut and nurture a bond built on trust, communication and unconditional love. Each week, I'm sharing the secret strategies that keep couples madly in love, dedicated and downright giddy about each other, from the honeymoon phase to the golden years. I'm on a mission to crack the code of happily ever after, and I'm sharing those juicy secrets right here, because an awesome marriage makes life so much sweeter. Let's get to it.

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the secret of happily ever after podcast. I'm your host, monica Tanner, and I'm super excited to talk about a topic that I think affects so many relationships. In fact, I think that it affects every single relationship in that when we let this thing go on autopilot, it is slowly poisoning our relationship. However, when we become aware of it and we can combat it, it is one of the easier things to really amp up and benefit our relationship. But we have to be aware of it. So in this episode, I wanna make you aware of something that's like silently and slowly deteriorating your relationship and the passion that you feel for each other. But before we get started with today's content, I wanna suggest that, as we get closer to Valentine's Day, that you consider giving your spouse the gift of a commitment to weekly date nights, and to help with this, I have what I like to call the date night journal. Now, this is a wonderful resource that will help you document your love story one date night at a time. So by giving your sweetheart the gift of this journal and your commitment to date every single week, you're making a massive statement about how much your relationship means to you. So inside of this journal are 52 areas where you can record your dates, what you learned about your partner on your date and something you never want to forget about the date. So it's super simple, but for me, I can't even remember what I ate for breakfast yesterday, much less some date night. That happened nine months ago that I never wanted to forget. So you can use this journal to document your love story. It's super, super, super fun, and to get a copy of it, all you have to do is go to Monica Tanner dot com backslash journal and you'll get it in time for Valentine's Day. So I hope that you will consider giving your spouse the gift of a commitment to going on weekly dates this year for Valentine's Day.

Speaker 1:

All right now back to our topic, which again is a super sneaky thing. That happens to all of us as humans, and it's not really our fault. It's just the way that our brains are wired. But our brains they're one of their main jobs is to look for problems, and so as we get comfortable in our relationship, once we've been married for any length of time, our brains on default just start to find problems with our spouse and with our relationship. Dr John Gottman, a famous, renowned marriage researcher, calls this negative sentiment override, and it's when we take like a neutral experience or a neutral statement and we categorize it in our brain as negative. Some people refer to this as wearing poop colored glasses, and it's just kind of when you put a negative spin on just normal everyday occurrences. On the flip side, once we start to recognize that our brains naturally do this, we can combat it with something called positive sentiment override. Now this happens when we start to intentionally give our partners the benefit of the doubt. So maybe they make a comment and we immediately trigger our brains, think, oh my goodness, they're totally insulting me right now or they're saying something super unkind. If we catch it quick enough, we can think wait a second, maybe they didn't mean it like that. Maybe I should get some clarification or give them the benefit of the doubt, because I know my partner loves me and why would they say something like that? Right?

Speaker 1:

So when we intentionally give our partners the benefit of the doubt, there are so many benefits. Some of these benefits include enhanced and better communication. Right, if you feel like your partner is being mean and critical all the time, it doesn't foster very good communication. But if you give them the benefit of the doubt and you think that's probably not what they meant or maybe I'm taking that the wrong way, it's going to foster enhanced communication instead of getting upset. You probably get curious, like I wonder what my partner really meant by that right? It's definitely going to foster better conflict resolution in that, when you're giving your partner the benefit of the doubt, perhaps not so many conflicts will arise and definitely, if nothing else, this contributes to the longevity of your relationship. In fact, according to Dr Gottman's research, the ratio of positivity to negativity and conflicts for couples who stay together is five to one five positive encounters to each negative encounter. However, the ratio of positivity to negativity is 0.8 to one for those couples who divorce. So 0.8 positive, so not even one positive interaction, but almost one to one negative. So we definitely want to stack these things in our favor.

Speaker 1:

So let me give you an example from my own life that happened just a couple of days ago, where I immediately applied negative sentiment override, where, after I had some time to think about it, positive sentiment override would have been much more appropriate and closer to reality. So one of the things I really love is sleeping in freshly laundered sheets. In fact, I probably wash my sheets more than most people, because I love the feeling of climbing into a made bed with fresh sheets on it. I just sleep so much better, and so the other day I made sure that I washed our sheets, and I didn't have enough time to make the bed in that moment, so I just took the clump of clean sheets and put them on the end of my bed, thinking that my husband and I would make the bed together right before we went to bed that night.

Speaker 1:

Well, something happened that I needed to work on in my office. So I asked my husband hey, would you mind kind of taking care of the kids doing finishing up, cleaning up after dinner, putting the kids to bed, so I can hurry up and finish this thing really quickly. And then because it might be a little bit of a late night for me, so of course he was perfectly willing to take care of all the things so that I could hold myself up in my office and finish up this project. But it got a little later than I had anticipated and by the time I came out of my office my husband was dead asleep on the bed with no sheets on it. I was just wrapped up in a blanket on top of my bed.

Speaker 1:

Now my first reaction to this is like oh my goodness, it was totally negative. What a lazy like who would go to bed without putting clean sheets on the bed, like that makes no sense. And my first reaction was I wanted to wake him up. Like, kick him off the bed, wake him up, make him, help me make the bed so that I could enjoy this, these clean laundered sheets to sleep in, right? So negative sentiment override is kind of a sneaky default when we're not thinking about it. And because it was late at night, I went to bed super, super grumpy. What I did was I took the clean sheets and I wrapped myself up in them and I just went to bed, but I was super grumpy about it.

Speaker 1:

Have you taken the intimacy level quiz yet? If not, you absolutely should. All you have to do is go to Monica Tanner dot com backslash quiz and take a three minute quiz. At the end I'll tell you what level of intimacy you and your spouse are at and I'll give you next steps to be able to increase your intimacy. Regardless of what level you're at, you can always make improvements. So do yourself a favor and go to Monica Tanner dot com backslash quiz and learn about your level of intimacy and how to improve it.

Speaker 1:

In the morning, when I had some time to be intentional and think, oh my goodness, my husband totally took care of the kids, cleaned up after dinner, did all the things, and he was probably exhausted, thought he would just lay on the bed and wait for me to get done. Maybe he didn't even see the clean sheets, maybe he thought that I had just taken them off the bed and they were dirty. There were so many scenarios that weren't necessarily completely negative. Right, they could have been neutral, like he didn't even know the sheets were there. He didn't know that they were clean, he didn't know that they were ready to be put on the bed, right or positive. He'd worked so hard that he was just exhausted and didn't even notice, right? So I had to be intentional about thinking positive thoughts. And when he woke up that morning I asked him hey, did you notice that I had just washed the sheets and they were just ready to be put on the bed? Why did you fall asleep last night? And he said I honestly don't even remember falling asleep. It was exactly as the positive sentiment override me, came up with that he was just exhausted after a long, hard day. He didn't notice that there were sheets on the end of the bed, north, think about it. And he just laid down for a second, thinking that he would wait for me, and I was so late coming out of my office that he had already fallen asleep. So this is just one scenario scenario or instance where negative sentiment override almost caused me to do something I really would have regretted. I'm so glad I didn't violently wake him up, push him off the bed because I wanted to sleep in the clean sheets, right.

Speaker 1:

But you can imagine how, after months or years of allowing this negative sentiment override to kind of take over your thoughts, the way you're thinking about your partner and the way you're thinking about your relationship, it can really poison not only your interactions but the way that you feel about each other in the marriage. So I really wanted this episode to bring out this idea that, when you're not aware, sometimes you start to think really negatively about things that aren't negative. Maybe they're neutral, maybe they're just a little bit positive, but your brain is handing you the thought that this is an attack on you, or this is really negative, or this is a problem that needs to be solved. So here are some things that you can do to kind of break that pattern if you start to notice it happening, or if negative sentiment override has kind of become pervasive in your relationship. Here's some things that can kind of break you out of that cycle and help you lean more towards the positive.

Speaker 1:

Number one you can keep a gratitude journal. Now, this is super simple, and something that I absolutely recommend to couples anyways is a daily gratitude practice where you think about the positives or the things that you're grateful for in your spouse and in your relationship, and you can either just write them down for yourself or acknowledge them to your partner, think them and show some appreciation for the blessing they are in your life. I promise if you do that daily, then positive sentiment override will take over those negative thoughts that maybe you've let go for a little too long. You can also institute a daily or a weekly meeting where you are intentionally complimenting each other on the things that you really appreciate. So I love how you came home after work and immediately started doing the dishes and talking to the kids about their day. I really appreciate how you do that so often. Right, you can talk to each other about the things that are really going well and just by virtue of looking for those things and pointing them out, you'll start to see them.

Speaker 1:

It's this incredible concept of your brain is really good at finding the things we give it to look for. So the third and final tip I have for you is to wake up every morning and give your brain really good problems to solve or look for the things that you are grateful for during the day. So if you wake up and you just start your day without priming your brain to look for positive, either solutions to problems that you're facing or things that you're grateful for, your brain, like I said, on default, will look for problems. That's its job. Your brain loves to solve problems, but did you know that you can give your brain good problems to solve? For example, you can say hey, brain, today I want you to help me find ways in which my husband is trying to show love for me or is showing up in a really good way. I would love for you to help me think of ways that I can help my children individually feel my love for them or my support for them in these areas. Right, you can give your brain problems to solve so that it's not on its own looking for problems that may not even be problems for you. Do you see how you can manipulate some of these default thoughts into positive and productive ways of thinking.

Speaker 1:

Now, the cool thing about these exercises is that they not only work for your marriage, but you can use this positive versus negative sentiment override in any relationship. You can use it as you think about your children or your in-laws or your neighbors. Whatever relationship you're thinking about. I want you to really be aware Are you just default, thinking negatively about everything that this person in your life is doing, or can you take a breath and employ some of these exercises I just gave you to help you see things in a more positive light?

Speaker 1:

All right, that's all I have for you today. Thank you so much for spending this time with me and, as always, I'll be back next week, same time, same place, and until then, happy marriageing. If you had as much fun as we did just now, I hope that you'll head over to your favorite podcast player and leave a rating and review for the show or share it on social media. That's how other people can find this awesome content and we can spread the message that happily ever after is possible. Feel free to check out my website, monnecatannercom, to find out more ways you can work with me and, as always, thank you so much for spending this time with me. I'll see you next week.