Music. Welcome to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy, the podcast that empowers you to transform life's challenges into opportunities for personal growth and healthier relationships. We're your hosts, Tim and Ruth Olson, licensed marriage and family therapists and trauma experts. As experienced therapists with backgrounds in addressing trauma and mental health disorders, we believe there is hope and there certainly is healing.
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We're so glad that you're here with us today. So today's episode, we will be jumping off our last episode where we talk about love maps. So if you haven't listened to that one, I would suggest you go back and listen to that one. And then come back over here as we jump into today's episode. So let's do a quick recap on what love maps are. They come from the work of Dr. John Gottman. And really think of it as a GPS for your relationship. Where you can navigate your partner's inner world.
You know what their favorite color is. You know what their favorite restaurant is. You know what makes them cry. What makes them laugh. You know, their dreams and their fears. And all of this just helps us to navigate our relationship better. It helps us to navigate when we have conflict, when we have losses. It helps you to celebrate achievements together. And so in the last episode, we laid that foundation of what love maps are. And then we gave four examples of how to build love maps.
And those were doing daily check-ins, taking interest in each other's worlds, tracking changes. So that's really updating your map. We give the example of there being road construction all the time around us, and my GPS and my phone will update that and give me detours and let me know where different roads are closed or new roads that have been created. So you want to make sure that you're tracking those changes in your own love map.
And then the fourth way is to deeper that emotional exploration. So today we're going to talk more about how to strengthen your love map, as well as common pitfalls and how to avoid them. So first, we'll talk about how to strengthen your love map. As you look at your love map, maybe you have the basic blueprint and layout where you think, huh, my love map could use some updating. And this really can be a fun process. So let's talk about some tips to strengthen your love map.
So the first thing that we're going to talk about is creating a ritual. And it's something where you want to be implementing, discussing or talking about or exploring the love maps on a regular basis. Because if this is something that you only do like once every five or 10 years or something like that, you're going to miss a ton of the benefit that you could have with it. So it doesn't necessarily have to be something that is every single day basis type of a thing.
But it's something you want to institute on a relatively regular basis, where we are checking in, we are talking about it, maybe we're doing some questions. Actually, there's a book that I've recommended to some of my clients is called The Year of Us.
And it's 365 questions to ask your partner and some of them are very surface level funny or interesting but then some of them really get down to the deep crux of the matter of the relationship and i think couples who are having a hard time awarding them i think it's day two or three there's a real banger of a question where it's like oh that's that's an intense and tough question and i tell them if they're in a rough spot it's
like hey maybe you might want to skip that day go on to another day and then maybe that's something we could discuss in session but But that's something else that you could do is you could get a resource, something like that, to help you if you struggle with identifying a way to go deeper. Or there's another thing, and this is something that we will post on our Facebook page.
Gottman has a love map questionnaire, and we will post a questionnaire on there to really help you kind of get the ball rolling. And you may get on there and you may be like, oh, I know a lot of that stuff. And that's great. So you already love mapped without realizing that you've love mapped. But then there might be some things on there where it's like, oh, I've never thought to ask that, or that's just never come up before.
And you can just do a quick internet search, too, of questions to ask your partner. And the results might be deep questions to ask your partner or fun questions to ask your partner. So really, there are a ton of questions that can be asked. And I even think of, like, the newlywed game, right, where there's all these questions.
And I know that I've played the newlywed game. And surprisingly, sometimes it's the newer couples that have won that, as opposed to these couples that have known each other for way longer. But that's because they haven't kept their love map updated. And I know that we've done that with friends. And there's always a question where, you know, I gave the example of what's their favorite color.
And then that person will write it down and be so sure because that was a color that when they met, that was their favorite. And so they're both raised up their answers. And then after the answers are revealed, they get into this like mini fight and they just playfully joke, but maybe one of them really is confused. Like, what are you talking about?
And so I think it's funny because although maybe on its own, each of these questions aren't important, but as a whole, knowing who your spouse is and what they're interested in and what their fears are is important. And it can make them feel heard and seen. And another thing we want you guys to keep into consideration is that in general, don't get me wrong, there's going to be maybe some heavy hitting or some deeper things, but as much as you can, you want to try to keep this playful.
This isn't a competition. This isn't, oh, we should know each other better by now. So it's not something we want you guys to shame each other over or anything like this. That's what we're doing, right? We're taking some time and we're working at getting to know each other better. And then a couple months, a year down the line, man, we will know so much more about each other because we'll have such a better defined love map for each other than when we started this process.
And so when we're getting into it, remember, this is an exercise of getting to know each other better, but we also want it to be fun and engaging. Because again, if we want to do this on a regular basis, but it's this kind of morbid or drab experience where we're not having any fun and all it is is causing conflict between us, then we're never going to keep doing this on a regular basis. We're going to want to kick it to the curb.
And I do want to also point out, I would say, if when we are trying to create these love maps we're running into a lot of conflict or we're arguing a lot about it that probably does indicate you might need a little bit of additional assistance and you might want to consider counseling but just to your point of keeping it playful you can turn it into a game right like put some questions in a jar and draw one daily. Or get a book like Tim said, or print out some of the questions.
And it doesn't have to be the sit-down formal discussion, where today we are going to love map, right? But just keep it fun and playful. And the next point is to practice active listening. When you ask your partner about their new interests, or their feelings, or any of these questions, you want to really tune into it and listen to them actively.
So avoid interrupting them. put your phone down don't half listen you want to turn toward them and just really be a safe place for them to share because even though you're asking light-hearted questions these questions can be a springboard for deeper questions although it might have been a lighter question it may spring into well that preference has changed because since I lost my mom I really have been interested in this.
And so although you asked a super basic question, some great conversations and deep connection can come out of it. And so put your phone down, turn toward each other, and practice active listening. The last thing we have on our list here is you want to check in after conflicts. Now, a lot of couples, they want to avoid each other after conflicts, or they want to avoid the subject altogether because, well, we just talked about
it and it didn't go so good. So I don't want to breach that subject again. But one of the things to know is that conflicts very oftentimes stem from some level of misunderstanding. And so maybe you have a misunderstanding of your partner's preference because we didn't update our love map. So then you can come into this conversation and say, hey, did I miss something or did something change?
Help me to understand what happened in this conflict. And this is something we've talked about in a previous podcast where we talked about the idea of debriefing after conflict and trying to create a new script so that we don't run into that same problem again or when that same problem does arise, we know how to diffuse that situation. And so although conflict can be scary, it's a wonderful opportunity to actually get to know each other on a deeper level.
Right, and so remember that building these love maps and strengthening them is about genuine curiosity, wanting to get to know them better. And over time, as you're intentional about this, you'll find that it naturally deepens your connection. So let's now switch to common pitfalls and how to avoid them. And we're just going to talk about three pitfalls to watch for. So the first one is assuming you already know everything.
And we've already touched on this multiple times in this episode and in the last about keeping things current and tracking those changes. Recognize that people grow and change. So keep checking in. Don't rely on who your partner was five years ago. I'm glad I'm not the same person that I was when Tim met me. I'm glad I'm not the same person I was even five or ten years ago. But I've changed and I've grown, and Tim has too.
And it's beautiful to see these changes. And as we are growing individually, we're also growing as a couple. So you want to be careful for this pitfall of assuming that you already know everything. The next one is we definitely don't want to turn this into an interrogation. We don't want to keep it generally light. Don't get me wrong, sometimes there's going to be some deeper level or more difficult questions. We want to be gentle with each other, and we want it to be a mutual interaction.
Sometimes one partner is going to be a little more talkative than the other, and that's fine. But definitely be careful if you're the more talkative one not to start dominating the whole conversation or interaction, right? We want this to be a mutual exchange of information. Which goes right into the last pitfall for getting to reciprocate. You want to make sure that you're asking these questions to your partner.
You want to make sure that you're also sharing and you don't even have to wait for your partner to ask questions because sometimes we don't know the questions to ask because if things have changed for you, your partner may not know to ask about that. So as things come up for you, you can just share it with your partner to make sure your love mat stays current.
As much as this is part of living life alongside each other, it's so easy to, like we said before, live those parallel lives where once the kids leave, now you don't even know them. So as your friendships change or you've met new friends and you are developing deeper friendships. Talk to your spouse about that as your favorite color changes or your food preferences changes.
It's just those small interactions on a daily basis where you're sharing information with your partner and you're updating them on things. So those are the three pitfalls you want to avoid, assuming you already know everything, turning it into an interrogation, and forgetting to reciprocate. All right, guys, we hope these episodes on love mapping has been helpful for you. And next time we're going to be jumping into nurturing your fondness and admiration.
This is another one of Gottman's relationship strategies, and so we'll see you in the next one. All right, guys, thank you for listening, and remember, your mind is a powerful thing. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. We hope that you enjoyed today's episode and found it helpful. If so, would you take 30 seconds and share it with a friend? Also, we'd love for you to leave us a review on Apple Podcast. It lights us up to know that this podcast is helping you.
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