170: Keeping the Positive Perspective in Your Blended Family: Part 2 – Accepting Influence

The Remarried Life

Brian Mayer discusses how to maintain a positive perspective within you blended family. Negativity can become a very common mental state for many if not all members of the family. In this three part series we will take a look at ways you may not have thought of to help maintain more positivity for you personally and in your relationships with your family. We hope you are inspired by today’s message. For more information and additional resources please visit our website at http://www.theremarriedlife.com

Today's Goodies

• Today in part 2 of our series on maintaining more positivity, we will focus on accepting more influence from our partner.
• John Gottman a very well known couples and relationship researcher, discovered that the more influence each person allowed the other to exert in the relationship the happier that relationship usually is.
• So what does it mean to allow your partner to have some influence.
• Maybe on a Saturday if nothing is planned and your partner has some ideas about what to do, accepting influence means starting with a more positive response and attempting to go more often with what your partner wants.
• So if your spouse says they really want to go antique shopping and want you to go along, accepting influence would mean that you would do your best to make this happen.
• Gottman says that relationships in which men allow women to exert more influence, are generally happier than those that are the other way around. He says that women typically will allow influence of their male partners almost by nature. But he says men typically are not wired this way.
• So I would encourage both of you but maybe the men more often to allow partners to have influence when it comes to decision making both small and large.

Resources:

• None Mentioned Today

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As always remember that marriage is not something you have, it is something you do. Talk to you next week unless you are binge listening in the future in which case I will talk to you in about a minute! Take care.