Compassionate Assertiveness and Behavior Change in Love

If you live with someone other than an identical twin, you differ in genetics, metabolism, family histories, and life experiences, with likely different core vulnerabilities and coping habits. Your brains are bound to make different autopilot judgments and assumptions. You’ll employ different radar screens to notice and emphasize different tasks and preferences in your common environment. You will have different set points of what feels right. It’s not surprising that you need to make frequent behavior requests of each other. The ways you seek behavior change can enhance love or diminish it, facilitate emotional growth or impede it.

The most common approach is persuasion—get your partner to do something through reasoning, seduction, cajoling, coaxing, or pleading. It can work in the short run, but its effectiveness deteriorates with predictability. When partners see it coming, attempts to persuade result in standoffs:

Here we go again; you're right, I'm wrong.

Manipulation

Manipulation usually includes a certain amount of deceit or, at best, hidden agendas. It undermines the honesty, openness, and trust necessary for the long-term health of intimate relationships. Manipulated partners can feel like the love they gave was really stolen.

Manipulation is prevalent in relationships that suffer power imbalance. When one party controls the couple's resources and key decisions, manipulation is inevitable.

Manipulation is one of those things we detest in others, while oblivious to how often we do it ourselves. Partners manipulate each other primarily through blame, which evokes guilt and shame. The most common phrase of manipulation:

You should be ashamed of yourself. Shame on you.

Don’t confuse blame with accountability. The latter is owning responsibility for behavior. The former is transferring guilt and shame onto others. Accountability is another of those things that’s easier to demand of others than live up to ourselves. Think of people you know or public figures who most virulently hold others accountable. They are likely to be indiscriminate blamers, yet intolerant of being blamed or held accountable.

Coercion

Coercion can take the form of criticism, demands, intimidation, and devaluing behavior. In its covert form, it includes withholding affection, cooperation, and goodwill. The clear message is that you will lose something or suffer in some way if you don't do what I want.

The objective of coercive behavior is submission. Those who coerce assume superior rights, privileges, intelligence, talents, sensitivity, or entitlements. The constant implication is this:

If you don’t agree with me or do what I want, you’re not a good partner or parent or not very smart.

Partners don’t need to articulate these assumptions to prompt a negative response; they’re manifest in body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice. The unavoidable result of coercion is frequent power struggles, resentment, bitterness, hostility, and, eventually, contempt, if not abuse. Yet partners who coerce are likely to think that they're merely trying to “get their needs met.”

Negotiation

Negotiation has built-in respect for both partners. It puts more value on the relationship than the specific behaviors under negotiation, so that neither partner can lament:

Getting what you want is more important to you than I am!

The goal of negotiation is cooperation. The "spirit of cooperation” is a willingness to support each other and practice teamwork. The goal must be to arrive at something that both partners can feel OK about, with neither feeling taken advantage of, put upon, or disregarded. When people feel valued, they tend to cooperate. When they don't feel valued, they resist what feels to them like submission. If you want resistance, all you need do is devalue, criticize, demand, act superior, or otherwise show ill will.

But don't think about showing value to get cooperation, which will smell of manipulation. Focus instead on feeling value for your partner. This will lower emotional intensity and shrink the subject under negotiation to manageable proportions.

Regardless of your stance on any specific issue or behavior, you must negotiate from your core value, mindful that you’re negotiating with someone you love, a person more important to you than whatever behavior request you want to make.

Compassionate Assertiveness

Compassionate assertiveness is standing up for your rights, opinions, and preferences while respecting the rights, opinions, preferences, and vulnerabilities of loved ones.

Consideration of your partner’s vulnerabilities means that you ask for cooperation, not submission. You try to empower, not devalue, or make your partner feel ashamed or afraid.

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Some people mistakenly think that increasing compassion in your relationship means that you will tolerate, condone, or excuse bad behavior. Quite the opposite. Modeling compassion helps partners behave in accordance with their deeper values.

Compassionate assertiveness typically engages the reflective brain, which is where cooperative decisions are reached. Demands, resentment, and anger engage the autopilot brain, which is defensive and resistant.

Compassionate assertiveness is easier when we recognize that partners do not have to do what we want and that we need to appreciate when they do. Appreciation is likely to garner cooperation. Demands will almost certainly cause resistance and conflict.

The A’s below are examples of compassionate assertiveness. Compare them to the B’s and decide which you prefer, which are more likely to increase your self-value, and which are more likely to evoke cooperation.

A: What do you think of doing X? Does that seem fair to you?
B: If you don’t do X, you’re not a fair person.

A: I know we’re both busy, but could we make time to do X together?
B: You never make time for me; it’s always what you want.

A: I know in your heart you didn’t mean to hurt my feelings, but that put me a little on edge. Can we lower the tone? We need to be respectful.
B: You’re scaring me. You’re abusive, selfish, inconsiderate…

The words you use in compassionate assertiveness are not important. It’s crucial that you make behavior requests respectfully from your core value.

Note: Violations of core value are not negotiable or subject to behavior requests. That includes purposely hurtful behavior, threats, dishonesty, and infidelity. But partners’ rights, opinions, and preferences are equal. When they conflict, they must be negotiated respectfully, with sympathy for each other’s vulnerabilities and without character judgments.