Bookin' with Bingo: THE POWER OF THE MIDDLE GROUND: AUTHOR ARTICLE, REVIEW, & WINNER

The Power of the Middle Ground:
A Couple's Guide to Renewing Your Relationship
BY MARTY BABITS

TO READ MORE ABOUT THE BOOK AS WELL AS ANOTHER ARTICLE BY MARTY BABITS, GO TO MY ORIGINAL POST HERE!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Marty Babits, LCSW, BCD (New York, NY), author of The Power of the Middle Ground: A Couple's Guide to Renewing Your Relationship, is a psychotherapist in private practice and a member of the Executive Supervisory Committee of FACTS (the Family and Couples Treatment Service) of the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy.

For more information, view Marty Babits's Web site.

AUTHOR'S ARTICLE:

SEVEN GUIDELINES FOR
MIDDLE-GROUND COMMUNICATION

By Marty Babits, LCSW, BCD,

If you need help regulating and resolving conflict, these guidelines are for you. They can help you make difficult conversations productive, steer you and your partner away from destructive talk, and help you nurture an atmosphere of emotional safety. Adopting these guidelines, whenever pertinent, will safeguard the middle ground within your relationship:

Avoid generalizing and stereotyping. Do not generalize about your partner's moods. When you think you know how your partner feels, but don't stop to ask or listen, they'll often feel neglected and misunderstood. Rule of thumb: there is often a difference between how your partner feels and how you think they feel. Your partner's sense of emotional safety, as a result of generalizing, can become depleted.

Do not blurt responses. Do you identify with the following statement: "I didn't even know what I was going to say until I heard myself saying it." If so, this is an especially important guideline for you. Monitor your thoughts while speaking with your partner. There is always more than one way to say something, choose according to the effect you want your remark to have. Do not blurt the first thing that comes to mind at your partner.

No name calling. If you are disgusted with something that is going on and call your mate something mean, the communication flow stops. And turning it back on becomes more and more difficult, in proportion to the amount of name-calling that goes on. When thinking before speaking, edit out the put-downs. Basic as the guidelines may seem, under stress, sticking to them is a challenge for us all.

Speak honestly and judiciously. The abiding ways that you feel -- positive and negative -- need to be represented in your dialogue with your partner. Keeping dominant thoughts and feelings buried will not further the relationship. But pay close attention to how you share information. Notice for signs that your partner is getting flooded. Do not keep talking if they are feeling overwhelmed! Conveying your messages with finesse and forethought will payoff big time in trust and emotional safety dividends.

Develop patience. Sustain it. Patience within a specific talk and in the pacing of your dialogue overall can make a critical difference to relationship healing. Patience and humility blended together compose emotional stamina, which is fundamental to the creation of a secure long-term love relationship. Healing your relationship without patience? It's impossible. So work on this one!

Think about what your partner says in terms of who your partner is. You need to develop a "relationship" perspective that features a good grasp of how the situation is understood by your partner as well as by yourself. Remember -- understanding how your partner feels from within his or her purview does not mean you are acknowledging that their perspective is correct. You are not surrendering your point of view. You are simply acknowledging that yours is not the only legitimate point of view.

Time-out signal -- have it in place; use it as needed. Using time-outs can allow you a sense of control in the pacing of your dialogue. In the case of complex and/or difficult emotional issues this can make the difference between whether you can or can't discuss an issue productively. Without a pre-arranged signal to allow a safe method for temporarily suspending the dialogue, restarting it will be more difficult. Using time-outs does not mean that difficult issues go unaddressed. It does mean that partners have to work as a team to keep the flow of conversation going -- not simply within a single talk but between talks as well. Carve a niche in your relationship that honors this dimension of awareness and sensitivity.

Can these seven guidelines help save a floundering relationship? The short answer is yes. Yes, they can. If you follow them consistently, you will see results. Putting these into practice with your partner will help you both learn to understand each other better, and come to find your middle ground.

MY REVIEW:

THE POWER OF THE MIDDLE GROUND: A Couple's Guide to Renewing Your Relationship is an exceptional self-help book. Written by Marty Babits, an experienced couples therapist and educator, he explains methods for managing relationship problems. The focus is on creating a place where each partner deals with problems constructively and neither dominates. They build a relationship that brings love and compassion together as one.

In THE POWER OF THE MIDDLE GROUND, Babits includes stories of real couples moving from pain to progress as they make use of his caring and intuitive guidance. The book will help you to get to know yourself and partner better. That is easier said than done but as he shows, it is the best thing to do in order to build a strong while flexible, lasting relationship with each other.

The stories in the book are touching and Babits’ recommended exercises and his involvement will inspire readers to try it themselves. He also shows you how to get started. This is not a book only for couples who are in dire straits, but also all couples who want to work on their relationships to make them better at any point in their lives.

Babits’ method creates a way to get past anger and the way you respond in those situations. He describe his methods very clearly, and enables couples to start to listen and hear each other better and in a more productive way. The examples in the book of couples who are able to reach this “middle ground” by using Marty Babits’ program are quite interesting and inspirational. They are more respectful of each other and the way they feel and care about each other is quite impressive. If, like Marty Babits says in this article, want to “nurture an atmosphere of emotional safety”, then you need to read THE POWER OF THE MIDDLE GROUND.

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WINNER OF
THE POWER OF THE MIDDLE GROUND
*****************************
THANKS TO JULIE AND MY GOOD
FRIENDS AT FSB ASSOCIATES, I
HAVE ONE COPY OF THIS DYNAMIC
BOOK TO GIVE AWAY!

THE WINNER HAS BEEN NOTIFIED
BY EMAIL AND HAS UNTIL NOON,
MARCH 2 TO REPLY WITH THE
INFORMATION OR A NEW WINNER
WILL HAVE TO BE CHOSEN!

THE WINNER IS:

#8 Misusedinnocence

CONGRATULATIONS!