Heart Versus Head
A podcast that helps couples fight better and connect again.
Heart Versus Head
I Love You AND You're Wrong
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Sometimes couples need to argue. Maybe a boundary has been crossed. Maybe your partner and you can't agree on the next car to get - Randy and Beverly had that fight. So how do you have a tough discussion without someone becoming immediately angry, defensive or withdrawing completely? In this episode, you and your partner can learn the best way to start an argument so that you don't start a fight, a riot or a divorce. You're about to learn the power of "I love you AND..."
Want to learn more? Find the hosts at HeartAndHeadCoaching.com
#ILoveYouAnd #relationshipgoals #relationships #howtofight
Heart Versus Head is a podcast about relationship styles and how those relationship styles influence communication in the most important relationships. The hosts - Randy Hampton and Beverly Craddock - are a married couple who are sought-after relationship coaches, award-winning authors and regular people who (like everyone in relationships) are just trying to stay connected through all the noise of life in the modern world. You can learn more about the couple and their work at HeartAndHeadCoaching.com, where you'll learn to fight better and connect again.
Welcome to Heart vs. Head, a podcast that helps couples communicate and fight better. Here are your hosts, Randy Hampton and Beverly Craddock.
SPEAKER_02:Hey everybody, it's Randy and Beverly. Welcome to the podcast. Hey, Beverly.
SPEAKER_01:Hey.
SPEAKER_02:How are you?
SPEAKER_01:Never been better.
SPEAKER_02:I don't, I'm not sure I believe that with the way that you said it. You did a thing today. Last podcast, we were talking about a headache and how hearts, you know, kind of transition that into, well, I don't feel like. But today it was you had something, you did something to your jaw.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I was eating my lunch and I opened my mouth too much, too big and gave me a little twang of muscle pain.
SPEAKER_02:Which doesn't hurt. It doesn't make any sense, actually, because if anybody's going to open their mouth too big, it's always me. I'm constantly running my yap, so I should be the one with jaw damage. Before we jump into the topic today, I wanted to point something out. First of all, thanks to all of you that are listening to this and trying to figure out relationship communication. We're glad you're along for the ride. But it's really kind of cool when you host a podcast. We've got access to a lot of analytics out there, places like Buzzsprout and Spotify and Apple. Apple and all of the different podcast hosting sites. And so it's kind of fun, actually, as you begin to grow an audience to see where all these people are listening. We, of course, have a lot of listeners here in Hawaii. We're in Honolulu, Hawaii. So we get a lot of listeners in Honolulu City and County of Honolulu on the island of Oahu and lots of those. But I guess we should give a shout out to some of these people that are out there. Portland, Oregon, Indianapolis, Indiana, New York, New New York, Steamboat Springs, Colorado, Red Bank, New Jersey, places I've never heard about nor been, Forest City, North Carolina, folks listening in Bend, Oregon. Hi, how are you in Bend? Palo Alto, California, home of Stanford University, Prineville, Oregon, Charlotte, North Carolina, Dallas, Texas, LA, lots of West Des Moines, Iowa, Newcastle, Indiana, and actually listeners in Juneau, Alaska. So, hey to them. But it's also kind of cool that you can see there are people internationally that have apparently tuned into the Heart vs. Head podcast. Thanks for joining us internationally. Turkey. We've had some listeners recently in the United Kingdom. So, hey to our English friends. But the weirdest one, Beverly, I guess we've got to get back to your Swedish ancestry a little bit. Actually, listeners recently and a couple of different podcast episodes in Norbotten County, Sweden, northern Sweden. So if you are our listener in Norbotten County, Sweden, send us an email. We'd love to hear from you and we'd love to actually come visit because the Ice Hotel in Norbotten County looks absolutely amazing. And that would be super cool to do sometime.
SPEAKER_01:Well, you figure love is kind of universal. So, of course, this podcast would provide tips that would radiate all around the globe. So I'm actually not surprised.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, okay. I'm kind of surprised. I don't speak lots of different languages and all of that stuff either. I'm stuck with bad English. Here we are. Anyway, so thanks for everybody for tuning in and we're having lots of fun doing this and we hope you find it to be useful. One of the things that we did want to talk about, and by the way, if you want to drop us a note, you want to drop us a question, you want to go, hey, just found you guys, please send us a message. say hello, info at heartandheadcoaching.com. You can drop us a note at info at heartandheadcoaching.com. We'd love to hear from those of you out there. And if there's topics you want us to talk about or cover or any of those things, we are happy to do that. One of the things we wanted to talk about today, because a question came up after last week's podcast, I think I made a comment about how you want to start a disagreement with something nice. You want to make sure that your partner knows that you're on the same team. And somebody was listening to that and they went, well, how do I do that? So that's what we're going to talk about today. And so we want to cover what I think we spend a lot of time talking to clients about. And it's a technique that we try to teach all of our clients in the moment of conflict, in the moment when you've got a problem.
SPEAKER_01:Or miscommunication.
SPEAKER_02:Partner's gone a different direction. And you need to be able to talk about it. We always teach our couples to say... I love you and. I love you and you're wrong. I love you and you're crazy. I love you and you're acting ridiculous. I love you and. And it doesn't have to be that big. I mean, it can be I love you and I think we need to talk about that more. I love you and. Not but. But is one of those words that means everything you say before it probably isn't true. So I love you and we need to argue about that.
SPEAKER_01:And what I love about little pun there. What I love about I Love You And is that a lot of advice out there for couples in conflict would be to look at your partner and try to separate them out from their choices. And while that can possibly be helpful, I think by uniting as a team is a more powerful position. I think when you can actually take that moment, take a breath, look at your partner, remember that you're working to solve a problem together. We're a team. And that's where I love you and comes into play. So we really teach clients that statement, that sentence, and have them really repeat it in their mind enough so that in the heat of a conflict or miscommunication, they can really look at their partner and remember that sentence. Because if you start it that way, anything after that is going to go a lot easier. If you say, I love you and And if I find your socks or shoes in the
SPEAKER_02:hallway one more time, I'm going to kill you. And those shoes in the hallway are going to be the death of me or you. It makes it so it puts that team part of it up front. It separates to the fact that we love our partner. We just have disagreements with that person who is a different person from us.
SPEAKER_01:Right. We've said multiple times we're two different people cohabitating or navigating life together, parenting, all these different things. issues that are complex in our world today. Anytime that you can remind that person that you are a team, that you do love them, then that's going to go a long way to build that connection. It helps each person feel respected. It also allows you to address the problem from, again, that team kind of approach. I think the hardest part is if you are both already triggered If you've let it go too far and now we're ankle deep in emotion, it can be difficult to bring out, I love you, aunt.
SPEAKER_02:A heart has never been ankle deep in emotion. That sounds like a really chill day with a heart. Maybe waist deep or chest deep or I need a snorkel deep in emotion.
SPEAKER_01:I'm usually drowning
SPEAKER_02:in it. Drowning. I'm drowning in it. the emotion, please. What you're saying is true, and it's what everybody that's listening is probably saying in their head, and it's certainly what couples say when they're sitting in front of us. They go, well, yeah, that's great. That's super cute, Randy, Beverly. I love you, Ann. That's super cute. However, we're fired up at that moment. This is part of the process that will make you so strong as a couple. It takes some training to get your brain instead of to immediately go to defense or immediately go to offense, immediately go to anger or immediately go to defensiveness, immediately go to withdrawal. Because our brain has those habits. We've learned it in all of our relationships up until now. We've learned it through all the things we've been through, how to protect ourself. And so when somebody comes at us with something, our response is going to be so innate, so based in just that natural response that we have raw emotion it takes that training of your brain to just say okay feel it getting elevated i love you and that's not true i do it with beverly all the time when i notice she's reacting so when beverly gets triggered with something stupid that i have said and there are a billion examples of stupid things randy has said we could we could have a podcast on stupid things randy says um and we'd probably have to go more than once a week with that
SPEAKER_01:i was gonna say four or five hours but okay
SPEAKER_02:smart smart stuff randy says yeah well we're you know that's a once a month podcast when i say something stupid and i see beverly getting triggered that's where i'm able to really jump with this one and go i love you and that's not what i was going for i love you and that wasn't my intention. I love you and I wasn't trying to set you off. I wasn't trying to make you angry. In that way, it can be really useful. And maybe it's a little bit easier in those situations, but it almost becomes a better way to back up a conversation too. I love you and I love you and I wasn't trying to trigger you. I love you and that's not what I was going for. I love you and we need to talk about that. I think it sets the end tension better.
SPEAKER_01:Of course, that's easier for heads because heads are internal processors. So I think heads can be very, very successful fairly quickly with that technique. I think hearts sometimes struggle a little bit more. So my advice to a heart would be if you find yourself reacting instead of responding, and the difference would be a reaction like a knee reaction. It's when somebody says or does something and we don't think at all, we just immediately come out with the words. Those are moments like Randy and I driving the car home, commuting an hour. This was back before COVID, a different location in Hawaii. And Randy just creating small talk, you know, we should get an electric car and me saying, that's the dumbest idea ever.
SPEAKER_02:That's the dumbest idea ever. It's wow, really?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that was not my finest moment. And I will say it was very emotion laid. And the backstory on that one, as you know, there's a lot of backstories to our podcast. The backstory on that one is the car we were driving was a Toyota RAV4, which I had for 10 years. I loved that car. I shipped it to Hawaii. And my goal was to drive it until it died. So we were far from that. As you know, Toyota, they run for years.
SPEAKER_02:Run and run, especially in Hawaii, where you're putting really limited miles on on the island of Oahu, you can't put a lot of miles on a car.
SPEAKER_01:So in that moment where he is kind of hitting me cold with getting an electric car, my first thought was, no, this is the car I love. I love this car. Why would I want to get rid of it? I think as we've talked on other podcasts, a lot of the listeners know that hearts can be attached to not only people, but things like cars, cars that have memories of road trips, and fun times together in the car. So immediately getting rid of the car, selling it, getting something different was really an emotional twinge, I guess, at that moment. So the words came out without even thinking about it, typical heart form. And in that moment where I've already said it and you can feel that silence, the dagger hitting Randy with disrespect and criticism. In that moment where it's silent, that is where a heart can work on step two, recovery. In that moment is where I could have said, wait, wait, wait, I love you. And when you said that just now, you really freaked me out because I love this car. And Mama Bear came out defending the car. However, I realized that I shouldn't have said that. That wasn't very respectful.
SPEAKER_02:Well, see, it gives you you that space to kind of back it up. It really kind of cures my reaction to it, which is, oh, ow. It doesn't have to be, I love you. And there's a lot of these techniques where you can put team first saying, we're a great team. We're so good together. And so I want to work this out. We're best when we're both okay. And so we need to talk about that. that. Just pull all the butts out of it and stick to the and. But you can say anything as long as you're putting that team up front and giving your partner that understanding that, okay, we see it differently. Now we can have a conversation about it without being angry about it because the goal is to work it out so the love remains.
SPEAKER_01:Another benefit of I love you and is the fact that we are showing niceness. We're being kind. We're not criticizing, defensive, firing back at our partner. We're actually being nice. We're saying, I love you. And the thing about that is even studies back it up, that if you can be nice in those moments, it really goes a long way in your relationship. In fact, the studies were really compelling about couples following them up after six years and they're still together, all because they were nicer to one another during conflict and also showing that couples are happier together because that person in that heat of the moment chose to be nice or kind instead of mean.
SPEAKER_02:Hey, Beverly. I love you, and I'm really glad we talked about this on the podcast today. Is there anything you want to add before we get out of here?
SPEAKER_01:I love you, too. And next time you talk about selling a car, I will think harder.
SPEAKER_02:Next time I talk about selling a car, I won't talk about selling a car. I think we both learned from that experience the things you can do.
SPEAKER_01:Well, actually, the cure was we bought a car. that I have absolutely no care for.
SPEAKER_02:We did. We were looking for another car eventually. And so recently we bought a car that I truly believe I don't like, Beverly doesn't like. And the only reason we bought it was because we don't drive that much and cars get beat up in Hawaii. The roads are terrible. The drivers are, well.
SPEAKER_01:Just as bad.
SPEAKER_02:And so it's like you're going to get door dings and all this other stuff going on. So the good news was we bought a car that we don't have to care about that much. So I suppose if I ever say we want to get rid of the Nissan, Beverly will say, yeah, that's a great idea.
SPEAKER_01:There is no personal attachment to that car. I love you, and that's
SPEAKER_02:the smartest idea ever. All right, everybody, we'll talk to you next time on the podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Aloha.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for listening to Hartford Thank you.
