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• ross - Feb 03 2007 | news

  This is brilliant!

  Quoted: The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you ...

  • mohit - Feb 03 2007
    

    awesome

  • Katherine - Feb 05 2007
    

    That's pretty great!

  • milolutz - Feb 09 2007
    

    Yes, that's the secret to a happy coupling, I'd have to say.
• seregine - Feb 03 2007 | news, psychology, relationship

  Great old article about the right solution for common relationship problems. It came up in conversation today.

  Quoted: I wanted — needed — to nudge my husband a little closer to perfect.

  • laurel - Feb 03 2007
    

    Hm. What do you think about that? I definitely don't like to be constantly remininded about my faults, but I'm not sure about being silently resented and "trained" either...

  • seregine - Feb 03 2007
    

    There's a big difference between "silently resenting" and being occasionally annoyed. It's good to err on the side of focusing on the positive. It's just a better communication pattern. "Training" sounds unnecessarily manipulative: both people can use it on each other, and it will still work.

    The beauty of this pattern is that it conditions both people equally by forcing the trainer to notice and affirm the trainee's positive qualities. It's like a negative feedback loop for bad vibes.

  • laurel - Feb 04 2007
    

    Hm, interesting. I didn't quite read it that way. To me it didn't seem like focusing on the positive -- it made it seem like you should notice the negative things, and think of positive things only as non-negative. Like instead of just letting your husband or wife know when you appreciate something, deliberately choosing things to "praise" that go in the direction you want.

  • seregine - Feb 04 2007
    

    Everyone notices the negative anyway; animals are built to react to irritation and to sleep when everything is cool. If you compliment the positive, you spend a healthier portion of your time noticing and realizing good things about your partner, and you start feeling better about them.

    And sure, this logic assumes mutual trust and the desire on both sides to be closer to each other. I <i>want</i> to annoy my girlfriend less, and usually that involves changing little quirks that aren't a big part of who I am. But change is hard, and it's easier if she helps me by being positive about it. That's why it's less manipulative than nagging.

    If this kind of trust is missing, there are bigger problems...

  • laurel - Feb 04 2007
    

    Sure, accentuating the positive is great, I'm not arguing with that. If anyone asked me to do something I would do it in a second, if someone asked me to stop doing something I would just get nervous and stressed about making a mistake. But if someone didn't tell me what they had a problem with and just tried to change my behavior indirectly I think I would personally feel not trusted (I think that might be what I'm reading differently -- I thought the article was saying that you shouldn't come out and tell someone what you want, just try to hint towards it by rewarding things that are close to it).

    It's just that I don't think the successes in the article have anything to do with animal training. Like she doesn't want to train him not to lose his keys, she just wants to stop giving him unwanted help (which actually seems like an example of the normal get-mad-when-someone-does-something-you-don't-like method).

    Maybe it's just that the examples she gave of things that annoy her are things that I am not annoyed about and furthermore things that I do :) And that the things that I want from a relationship but never have seem really different (like see my dot 4-ish dots ago...).

    Maybe I'm completely wrong, but I think why I don't do well in relationships is less because I get annoyed at little quirks (or maybe I've just been lucky with non-annoying people), and more because I expect the sublime and beautiful to occur more often. Being in a relationship should be twice as great as being single, doing something with a boyfriend should be twice as great as doing it alone or with friends, and if it's not, I'm disappointed.

    Like when I think about it, the reason I'm disgruntled about work right now is not because it's annoying, it's because it's not fun and I don't get to do anything crazy.

    But then my problem with any therapist or counselor I've talked to since they all seem to just want me to think about my problems more, and ignore anything good about myself. I know I need to, but I don't want to :) The introspection thing is hard for me anyway because there's answer to "but, could I be wrong about that?" is always yes.

    I could be annoyed at bluedot right now because I'm all getting ads about sex offenders. Bring back the alpacas...

  • Elin - Feb 04 2007
    

    Well, as his current test subject I can say that I'm fine being treated like shamu.

  • seregine - Feb 04 2007
    

    Yeah, you need both. Real disagreements and problems should be discussed for sure. But explicit problem solving conversations are heavy on the relationship, and should be saved for major issues, not minor annoyances. Like you say, the relationship should be something that enhances both your lives, not takes up all of your attention.

    Not sure what to tell you about the rest: everyone has trouble with relationships, obviously, and I don't have it figured out. But the less you expect for yourself, the more you get ;-)

    I'm totally with you about the job. Life is too short to be spending your time coasting creatively. I don't see the analogy though: relationships have a different place in my life than work.

  • laurel - Feb 04 2007
    

    Yeah, I wouldn't mind being Mitt Mitt, one of the dogs at work. She can be amused all day with a rope bone attached to a lobster balloon.

    To try to be more coherent about the point I was trying to make, I prefer to think about increasing good, not decreasing bad (call that ignoring problems or call that focusing on the positive). And a lot of how-to-have-a-good-relationship books/therapy/counseling are about decreasing bad, and that often doesn't work for me.

    That pattern occurs often in my life, even between things like relationship and work that are very different. Sometimes it's worked for me (like work), sometimes it hasn't (like relationships).

  • seregine - Feb 04 2007
    

    I knew it! We agree after all ;-)

  • laurel - Feb 04 2007
    

    Yeah, I just don't like the article :)