Host: What happens when our needs clash?
Chris Wright: When these fundamental core personality needs clash, people get really threatened. Remember now, our endless relationship at our commitment to being responsive to each others needs, we recognize that’s the basis of our fulfillment, our happiness together. In many ways it determines the success of this relationship, and so when these needs, when these needs do clash, when they collide, when they conflict, boy, it can threaten your whole reality.
I mean, it can really create a lot of agitation inside and we saw previously from the show Wife Swap where wives when they were put in completely different environments, how much aggravation they went through, I mean, the whole show, the television shows heated confrontations throughout because what happens is when these needs aren’t met, people start blaming, get angry, accusing and difficulty is that, it then makes it worst, it makes it harder to respond, to adjust your bar to meet your partner s needs.
So, when somebody is accusing me or making me wrong, I start to become defensive, I sort of get sucked down this channel of my own emptiness and I start feeling angry back and I start getting a sense of righteousness about my world and how you don’t get it and how wrong you are and I get hardened, and I get rigid so, whatever changes you’re looking from me to be more responsive to your needs, it’s going the opposite direction. I am not even wanting to respond to your needs, by the way you are dealing with me.
So, how you communicate these needs, how you respond to each other, if it’s not honoring, it can cause the person actually the bar can trap instead of show goodwill in terms of wanting to you’re your needs and that’s the problem, people get stuck. They get so defensive, they get stuck and yet the very thing that people need is to expand out of their narrow reference point and expand and see it from a fresh point of view, a broader point of view.
Again, on the show Wife Swap, you could see that each of the families goes so narrow in the way that they turpitude reality and that it gave them an opportunity, when they exchanged to another family, to see a whole different perspective on it and so that they could come out of the experience from a much broader angle now, seeing more clearly about how maybe we were over the top in certain areas, and so it is too in our relationship as well, when we clash, it is an opportunity for us, both to expand out of our narrow reference point, which is a trap, it is too narrow and start seeing it from a broader point of view, that is important. That is how we grow as human beings but if we do not communicate in a way that is honoring of each other s world it tends to exacerbate, we get even more stuck in our world, more righteous in our world. So, clearly we need to learn frameworks and tools that enable us to speak in a way that in a way shows emotional support for each other to make these necessary changes.
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