I’m going to argue that “Yes, but” is a FABULOUS linguistic device WHEN you know how to leverage it correctly.
I typically use this switch for relationship work. But its applications are certainly not limited to relationship issues. As a rule, the client who feels hopeless to improve a condition or circumstance is putting the “Yes, but” after everything they feel that they cannot have, do, or be. They’ve got a million reasons why the wonderful things cannot happen. And they believe every one of them.
That’s because they’ve put the “Yes, but” part after every positive thing. The cure is to put the “Yes, but” after the negative thing.
Here are just a handful of recent examples in my practice:
1. “My husband is a great dad and a good provider, but he doesn’t appreciate me or MY work.”
2. “I love my wife very much, but she blows up over every little thing and I just have to take it until whenever she calms down.”
3.”My partner is a happy-go-lucky extrovert who is so much fun and so creative, but he’s a complete SLOB and I can’t STAND it.”
In each of these cases, there was a reliable fix that couldn’t be simpler. We put the “Yes, but” after the negative trait. I asked each of these clients to name the “character defect” that their partner possessed, and that they believed was destroying the relationship. And then tell me WHY they thought their partner behaved in that way.
Here are the fixes:
1.” My husband doesn’t realize how much I do to make his life comfortable, BUT he works hard to make MY life comfortable, too.”
For this couple, it turned out that since she had quit her job to stay home with the children (a mutually agreed-upon decision that affected them equally), it turned out that there was a bit of a competition between them to see who “deserved” more appreciation and special treatment. I suggested that she let him “win” by asking herself:
“What can I do to show how much I appreciate his efforts and remind him that I like to feel appreciated as well?”
Within 3 days of asking herself this question every day, he came home with flowers for “no reason”. On the 4th day, he volunteered to pick up the dry cleaning on his way home from work. At the end of that week, he told her that he thought they deserved a weekend away, just the two of them, and since he had a 3-day weekend coming up he had asked her mom to sit the kids and wanted to know where she would like to go. She spent her final session with me resolving a completely unrelated problem.
2. “My wife overreacts to minor upsets, BUT she had a really hard childhood.”
For this couple, the husband had expected that his tremendous love would be sufficient to help his wife “be happy” after an extremely abusive and traumatic childhood that left her hyper-vigilant and chronically overwhelmed. While she was venting, he remained stoic in an effort to help her feel calm, feeling that he could not voice HIS lack of safety. He thought that since his love was not enough to help her feel good
all the time, that meant that the marriage was “rocky” because she was clearly unhappy a LOT of the time and he was helpless to help her feel better. Together, they embarked on a daily program of meditation, using breathing techniques that improve vagal tone to soothe the anxiety response. She began a separate course of EMDR to assist in re-framing her own responses to past decisions and trauma in HER life. And they instituted a “safe word” that allowed her to recognize that he felt threatened when she was angry and that his departure was not an abandonment of HER, but a need to calm his own distress.Interestingly, his chronic eczema cleared up almost immediately.
3. “My partner is a complete slob who leaves a trail of disaster in every room, BUT his creativity and enthusiasm make him just an amazing business and life partner.”
This man was able to recognize that with the help of his partner’s rather ADHD creative genius, he was in fact now earning enough to hire someone to help keep order in the house. Relieved of the most basic housekeeping chores, he could focus on the one or two rooms where his need for order was sacrosanct and explain how violated he felt by his partner’s visual clutter and chaos in every room. As his partner agreed to make a special effort to be neater in those areas, he naturally began taking more care in other areas as well, picking up dirty dishes and discarded clothing, rearranging sofa cushions, and gathering up books and papers before going to bed. And my client was able to view his partner’s “chaos” as an endearing side effect of his brilliance and enthusiasm.
Each of these clients was able to minimize their partner’s perceived faults by putting the “Yes, but” in the correct order. This allowed them to see their partner’s great STRENGTHS as a dominant feature, with the “but” canceling out the preceding complaint.60 seconds can turn the deadly “Yes, but” into a SOLUTION. Because WHAT you see is never so important as HOW you see it.
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