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Put a little "spice" into your relationship · Head Shrink Inc.

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey guys, Dr.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: David here.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Today I want to talk about spicing up your relationship.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it may not be what you think, so listen in.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: You are listening to drinking your answers to life relationships.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: Daily living.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's it's day whatever of it.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: And depending on what state you live in, um, you are either on still on the lockdown or your state's opening up.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: So hopefully your state's opening up.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: My state supposedly is supposed to stay closed till May 31st.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: We shall see.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um in my family, we have a daughter that's been on a ventilator before and is uh is immune compromised, has lung disease.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: So we've been taking it pretty seriously, and all my sessions have been happening via Zoom.
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  SPEAKER_00: Um and I've been meeting with people in my shorts.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's great.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so you know I say that.
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  SPEAKER_00: So if anyone wants to reach out to me for some consultation anywhere in the nation, feel free to do so because Zoom can happen anywhere.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so let's get down to it.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: So when I first started the podcast today, I talked about spicing your relationship up.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of times when people hear that word spicing their relationship up, they think, okay, we're gonna talk about bedroom sex stuff.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: And uh nothing could be further from the truth.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh while that is an important place to have some uh excitement and spark, a spice, whatever you want to call it, um, I think it's much more important to um have great communication.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so when I talk about spice, I it's a little bit of play on the words or the thing I'm gonna say.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and the spice that I want to add to your uh relationship is salt.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now, salt's an acronym, of course, right?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't literally want to put salt in your relationship, but like anything that we need to remember, it's helpful to have acronyms.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: So it's an acronym A S-A-L-T.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: So here's where this here's where the spice relates to or where the salt relates to in your relationship.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of times I meet with couples and they talk about these arguments that they get into over and over and over again.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: And and the problem is there's predictable patterns to these arguments that they don't see, but I do see.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And as I've been working with couples, I I came up with this idea.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: And now I'm not trademarking it.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Someone else may have come up with this idea before, but this idea is new to me.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: This acronym is new to me.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: It could be a completely old acronym from someone else that has created it, but uh today you've heard it first.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: I created this acronym for myself, I've never heard of this before.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so if someone else has done it, good for them.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um so a lot of times the biggest thing what happens in relationships is so an argument starts out and someone makes a uh statement of possibly fact, but they make a statement.
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  SPEAKER_00: You never do, you know, fill in the blank, whatever it is.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: You never pick up your clothes, you never do the laundry, you never uh come home on time, whatever it is.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um the first problem with that is like an absolute.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: We should not use absolutes in relationships.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's for another podcast.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: But but what often happens is you never do blank is met with, well, you never do blank either.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then once that uh once that response is given to the you never do or you're always whatever, there's there's no usually there's no coming back from that because then people are take defensive stances and they're just going back and forth, back and forth.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: No one gets heard, uh no no resolutions come, and and so then nothing happens, and then you go away and you're angry and you put it, uh sweep it under the rug until the next issue comes up, and then you find yourself back in this.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: You never do this.
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  SPEAKER_00: Well, you never do this either, right?
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  SPEAKER_00: So then it's this back and forth, back and forth.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, one of the things that that that kind of arguing relates to is a low emotional intelligence.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I talk to people about emotional intelligence all the time, and it's not an insult to have low emotional intelligence.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm not saying you're stupid, right?
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  SPEAKER_00: It's just how we were raised, um the skills we have to talk about emotional things, those all come into play when we're talking about emotional intelligence.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so, what I want to bring in, what I do bring into couples, and what I'm encouraging you to do if you find yourself in arguments like that with your significant other, is to bring this spice in your relationship, this spice called salt.
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  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, salt is an acronym.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's not actually pouring Morton's salt on your partner or kosher salt if if you're into kosher stuff.
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  SPEAKER_00: You don't need to pour that onto your partner unless that's something that you like, then I guess go ahead and do it.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's gonna be kind of messy, it seems, but I'm talking an acronym.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: So here's what SALT stands for: stop, S.
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  SPEAKER_00: A is for assess, L is for listen, and T is for take responsibility.
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  SPEAKER_00: So S A L T SALT.
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  SPEAKER_00: Um, here's how that would look in an argument.
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  SPEAKER_00: Um, and again, if you do if you decide that this makes sense to you and if it's something that you want to try in your relationship, good for you.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's gonna be awesome.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: I encourage you to try it.
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  SPEAKER_00: The challenge is it's gonna be kind of clunky at first.
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  SPEAKER_00: And if your partner doesn't know what you're doing, they're gonna think you're acting weird.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're going to do this, this may be something you want to share with your significant other as a thing that can help your arguments go a bit more effectively.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: So here's how it looks um Partner A says, When you do this thing, it really bothers me.
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  SPEAKER_00: Could you stop doing this thing?
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  SPEAKER_00: Now the typical response would be, well, you do this thing and you don't stop it, right?
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  SPEAKER_00: That's what you want to avoid.
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  SPEAKER_00: So partner one says, You do this thing and it really uh I really don't like it.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: It really hurts my feelings.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: So using this salt spice method, you would stop right there, right?
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: You're instead of responding, you would stop, you would assess that statement, right?
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: So uh my partner just said I uh do this thing.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Do I actually do this thing?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is where some brutal honesty comes into play because you got to have some insight into your behavior.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you assess it and you think, yeah, I actually do do that.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: I actually do say hurtful things, I do call names, I do storm out of a room, I do throw things.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um so once you assess, so you've stopped, you've assessed, you listen to yourself, right?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: So once you assess it and you think, yeah, I do do this thing, wow, that could be hurtful.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: You listen to yourself and you think, okay, I do this thing, it's not a good thing.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: I need to change that because it's hurting my partner, and then that leads into the T, take responsibility.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so we can take responsibility in a number of ways.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we can say, Yes, I do this thing, you use the stop, you assess, you listen to yourself, and then you take responsibility.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: So then you you tell yourself, I'm gonna stop doing this, is one thing.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: Another way is you tell your partner you're gonna stop doing this thing, or you're gonna work on stop doing this thing.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Or you tell your kids you're gonna stop doing this thing because maybe your significant other has told you that you do this thing to the kids, but the kids aren't um able to talk to you about it because they're fearful of you, or you just don't have that kind of good relationship with them to be able to talk through these kinds of things.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: So the taking responsibility could be any number of things.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: This take responsibility could also be um how you treat people at work or how you treat other family members.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: It could be any number of things and could relate to any number of things.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the moment you and your significant others start doing uh the salt method or start putting a little spice, quote unquote, into your relationship by using SALT, stop, assess, listen, take responsibility, you guys will have a radically different way that you start communicating with one another.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: It will be less hostile, it'll it will be less blaming, it will be less accusatory, it will be more loving, it will be more compassionate, it will be more empathetic and sympathetic because once your partner sees that you're trying to do things differently, they will join in with you on that and try to do things separately themselves or differently themselves.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um so a key to this salt method is to have a good conversation with your partner and say, hey, this is what I'm gonna try to do now.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna be great at it, but I just want you to know it's something that's important for me to try, and I'm gonna really try hard to do it.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um so yeah, so that's that's pretty simple.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: S-A-L-T.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Stop, assess this information, listen to yourself, and then take responsibility for what you've discovered.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Right now, this could be hard for some of you because some of you um don't like to look at yourselves, you just rather point the finger at someone else.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: But the moment you can start looking at yourself, the moment you can start changing, and your spouse isn't changing you, your partner isn't changing you, you're looking at yourself and you're deciding you're gonna change yourself, which is a huge benefit to relationships.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and again, that's a whole nother podcast, right?
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: People feeling like they're they're being manipulated by their partner or they're being controlled by their spouse or whatever.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is you taking control of yourself and your behavior and changing it for the betterment of your relationship.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, hope that's been helpful.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, if you like what I have to say, please share, please comment.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, let me know that you're listening.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, stay safe.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: The weekends here, it's gonna be probably a great weekend, at least here in the Pacific Northwest.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's looking great outside.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, hope you stay safe with your family.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Have a great day.