Transcript: 

What the T? Get What You Need Without Yelling

Welcome to the Us & Kids podcast. I am your host Jan Talen. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, a wife, a mom, and a grandma. This Us & Kids podcast is about how to be married forever while you parent together and you and I both know this isn't easy to do. So I'm going to remind you, subscribe to the Us & Kids in your favorite podcasting app so that you can get these words of encouragement and a little bit of teaching each week. I'm glad you're here because we want your marriage and your home to be fulfilling and really good.

Well, you and I both know that there have been some unusual things happening around our world and so today we're going to take a little bit of slang that isn't something I really want and household because it ignites fear. But let's talk a little bit about, there's something that goes "What the" then we stop or we keep going. But I'd like you to play around with me around the what the T because becoming together or becoming separate can create quite some relationship strain as we go through this time of a Covid virus and other things. So, you just want to think what do we want the outcome of this time in life in 2020 to be, what's our desired outcome? We got to figure that out.

Probably don't want experiences that we don't want to remember. We'd rather have memories that are like, Oh yeah we did that. Oh yeah, it was fun. And it can be hard right now to think that you're not messing everything up. So let's walk through some T's here. But to start this, I'm going to encourage you, we have a little bit of a game and so you'll see some things in the printable that comes out, but you'll also play this game with me. If you have some place to write down about eight words, I'm going to tell you them, okay? And they will help you play this game. But also think about how you want the memories this next week or two weeks or month to be. So let's see, so the words put one on each piece of paper. Time, touch together, trust, tenderness, and then plus, helps, and to build.

So if these were on separate sheets of paper, I'm going to have you over the next week or so play with those words and make different sentences. Now you'll probably have to add some other connectors. But there are lots of different ways that we can put those words together that will help us. Instead when we want to say what the, we can move towards a T word instead of an F word and we can make it so that our memories of being together in close quarters are delightful memories that will make us giggle in the years to come. Not memories that make us want to crawl under the bed and shame or re-ignite with anger. So I'll tell you a few of the ways that I put some of these together. Okay. And you can then play around with them however you want. You have kids, they can help you.

They can come up with more T words and you guys can make all sorts of fun sentences. You can take them up on the walls, you can write them on your mirrors, you can make them on your refrigerator. Lots of good things to do with this. Okay, so first of all, let's talk about this one time and tender touch together builds trust. Now time. So we know you're spending a lot of time together in the same house together. Maybe in the same yard but time. So how are you using that time? Are you remembering to have some eye contact? Are you remembering to use it so that people know that you're there with them and not just hidden in your phone or in your game or asleep or little sloshed from alcohol or from pot? Oh, how's your time? Are you using it in a way that by the end of the day you're like, yeah, not bad.

Don't go for perfect right now folks. Just go for not bad. Okay. And make it that not bad. So if you do time and to do tender touch together, those two together, I just talked about time. Let's talk about tender touch for a minute because we can do touch, but a touch is sometimes a get down, get away from there, move aside. You're in my way. I was sitting there, okay. And those touches of little shoves here and there in my world aren't really tender. We can ask them to move, but often it helps more if we take their hand, especially if they're little. But even if they're big and we say, we'll just slide over a little bit. That's a tender touch with a tender tone and we don't have tone on one of those T words do we? But we could. If I take that tender touch and I am sort of squished on the couch and I'm like, if you just move the pillow, I have room.

If you've can tenderly hold a hand or even tenderly reach across and say, do you mind if we scooch the pillow over a little bit? Then I'd have a little more room. Now we're spending time and we've just been tender. And those two together gather. We'll build trust that will be together we'll be okay and that we are going to fall apart the way the rest of the world feels like it's falling apart. Let's take another one. Taking time together will help build tenderness. Taking time together. Taking time has intention in it. It means, yes, let's go for a walk. Yes, let's sit on the porch and drink our coffee together. Yes, it's taking time has a yes in it and it has both the emotional energy of. I'm willing to bring myself into this and when we bring ourself into it, we comb our hair, we put on a hat, we take off our sort of PJ pants and we actually put on clothes, brush our teeth.

That's a sentence of I'll take time with you. I'll be present with you. And when I do that with honor and with protection, it builds tenderness and then that sentence right before, when we build tenderness, it builds trust. So let's move on to another one. You ready? Tenderness teaches us how to trust. And I just sorta said that, didn't I? This is really important for kids and for our marriages and partnerships. Tenderness teaches us how to trust. Trust is not built in fear. Fear diminishes the trust very, very quickly. It does. It diminishes it. Tenderness builds trust. When there's fear, the brain freezes. So when you yell at a kiddo, when you yell at your spouse, when you say what the, and it's not a T word, the kids become frightened, so are you, and so is everybody else. The connections all diminish very quickly.

There's a crumbling that happens real fast, but if we move to tenderness and say, Whoa, I'm really surprised what's going on and how can I help? Tenderly said, gently said, rebuild that trust and now we can have cooperation. Let's move on to the next one. Trust helps us enjoy being together. Oh yes, he does. Think about that once. Do you have fun with people you don't trust or are you always a little on the edge and a little cautious and a little, huh? Trust helps everybody relax. When we can trust emotionally that they're going to be kind, that they're not going to be mean or demeaning or cruel. Use us as an example, make fun of us or mock us. It doesn't matter how old a two year old gets it as well as a 22 year old and a 12 year old.

They know when you're messing with their head and being mean. Watch your words. Watch that attitude and instead work towards that tenderness and then build trust because then you'll find out that you really do like being with each other. And that's much better because trust does help us enjoy being with each other. Moved a little bit differently. Same idea. Touch done tenderly builds trust. Well, we said this in the first sentence of time and tender touch builds trust. An emphasis here on the tenderly that that tenderness, holding hands a little bit of back, rub a kiss on the cheek or on the head when you talk them in their car seat and say, Hey, so glad you're going where it's gonna feel good to get out of the house for a little bit and maybe you're just going for a car ride. Maybe you're going to a park, maybe you're just going to go to a different street and walk down somebody else's sidewalk for a change of scenery.

But touch just done really tenderly builds trust. Do it, do it a lot. Everybody's a little scared, just tender touch. Tender tones really just lowers the anxiety. And then similarly time share tenderly builds trust. When you do things together, you share the time, even if it's just reading books, but instead of sitting way far apart from each other, like, fine, you read your stuff, I'm going to read mine. I don't like what you read anyways. Come and sit by each other, share a little snippets of it back and forth. Sometimes time is well you just rubbed my feet or rub my back for a few minutes. Tenderly do that. Don't roll your eyes. Don't scowl. Just do it gently because it builds that trust in that trust builds togetherness, cooperation. It builds confidence and it builds courage and we all need some of that at this time.

Keep doing it. So now we're going to put it together a little bit. Trust with tender touch builds more trust by you knew that was coming, didn't ya? There's a circular piece in here that makes it strong, holds everything together. When you use trust in the beginning and you add tenderness and yet add time, and you add tone, that's good. It builds more trust and that circle when it keeps building and building becomes stronger and stronger. Work at it. Do it together. If you have to reset or say, Oh delete, I got to try that again. Do that, delete it. Try it again. What's next? More trust builds tighter togetherness. So the more we do these circles, the more trust that grows and the better the connections grow. Better, more enjoyment, more relaxation, more cooperation. All of those things are are part of togetherness and by bit this really sort of loosey goosey ball that nobody be able to throw in a straight line becomes more solid.

It doesn't become hard, but it becomes more solid or steady so that where you want to go as a family and as a couple is actually dependable, like a ball that's round when you want to throw it. If it's not round, it's not going to go. Even if you try to throw it straight, it's not going to do that. Make it round in steady and as you do, as you add the last one more touch over time, helps that trust grow stronger. You can hear me say weave these things together, make them so they keep winding into and around each other so that your ball becomes round and strong, tightly pulled together because it's in that that you make a really strong relationship not just with your spouse but with your whole family and that is really good to do so that at the end of this memory of 2020 you will be able to say, we did become stronger.

We did connect better. We are more balanced than what we were before. This is good. Do it. Grow into it. Change your ways so that you come out of this better as a person in your relationships with your adults and in relationships with your kids. This is so worth it, so worth the effort and right now you may have some time to do it. Take the time. I want to thank you today for listening and joining me. We'll have a little review of this up on the Facebook live. Towards the end of the week, there'll be a printable that you can of course pick up and the DNA for fun communications course. A bit of what we talked about today, is where did we want our memories to go? And that's part of that desire. Look at what do you want in the end game? How do you get there?

That's what we worked on here. That communications course is going to be relaunching again in two or three weeks, so that's a watch the website. You can hop on there now and sign up and say, send me info for when it's restarting and then join the wait list and that would work as well. I'm cheering for you guys and just hoping that you are a bit inspired today to when you want to say what you go with, what's the tenderness that I can use. How can I do the time better? How can I build trust so there's more competence and do it, do it, do it. Jan Talen and find an offer this week. I'll look forward to hearing from you and talking with you next week. Take good care of each other. Bye, bye.