Justifying v Explaining Yourself When Your Partner Misunderstands You: Episode 170
EmPowered Couples with The Freemans
Aaron & Jocelyn Freeman
5.0 • 589 Ratings
🗓️ 1 July 2021
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode you will hear:
- The subtle difference between justifying and explaining
- The major difference between Intent vs Impact
- 4 steps to explain yourself in a way that your partner can receive it
Resources For Your Relationship:
1) Take the Relationship Assessment and do the results call with us. There are 2 spots discounted from the $1000 course to just $147. To snag one of those spots either:
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About Us:
We're The Freemans, your go-to couple for authentic and actionable relationship advice. Send us your relationship questions for the show with a DM on Instagram. As you listen to the episode, tag us on an IG story and let us know what you loved.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Empower Couples podcast where here you get modern, non-boring relationship |
| 0:05.5 | advice for you and your partner to communicate like pros, fight smarter, and stay on the same team |
| 0:11.0 | no matter the challenge that you face. |
| 0:12.9 | I am one of your host, Aaron Freeman. |
| 0:14.4 | And I'm Jocelyn Freeman, but you all just know us as the Freeman's. |
| 0:17.4 | And this episode is all about justifying versus explaining yourself when your |
| 0:22.7 | partner misunderstands you. Yes, we actually got this message in our DMs on Instagram |
| 0:27.9 | right after the episode had published just two days ago on sources of defensiveness, you know, |
| 0:35.8 | what to do when you and your partner are getting defensive behavior. |
| 0:38.4 | And literally there probably has not been an episode where we got more messages from that |
| 0:44.4 | episode, which is actually what's driving this episode. |
| 0:48.0 | Exactly. |
| 0:48.5 | And so we wanted to read this question to you because it was so poignant and we actually |
| 0:51.7 | posted on the stories and many of you were like, I feel the same way and please cover this and so we figured we need to. And the question was, |
| 0:59.7 | what is the difference between justifying and just explaining how you feel like your partner |
| 1:05.0 | misread your intentions? Sometimes I feel like we're fighting over a version of me that doesn't |
| 1:10.7 | feel true and I can't tell if that's just me being defensive. |
| 1:16.1 | Now, I got to say, this is such a good question, and so many other people said, that's how I feel. |
| 1:23.2 | And when you and I really deliberated on our drive, which by the way, we just landed in Arizona |
| 1:29.7 | after our 40-hour drive. |
| 1:32.6 | And this hit home for so many people coming off the back end of defensive behavior on Tuesday |
| 1:39.1 | that we said, we have to land in Arizona that we drove 40 hours. |
... |
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