Determining Your Relationship Values

Episode Summary of “Determining Your Relationship Values”

Welcome to The Communicate & Connect Podcast, the show dedicated to helping you build strong, lasting relationships with your loved ones, hosted by Elizabeth Polinsky, a skilled military marriage counselor. In today’s episode, titled “Determining Your Relationship Values,” we’re exploring a fundamental aspect of healthy partnerships. Whether you’re just embarking on your marital journey or have been nurturing your bond for years, understanding and aligning on relationship values is crucial. Elizabeth shares a candid story from a recent Thanksgiving that serves as a poignant lesson on the impact of unspoken values within a marriage. Discover how personal values like respect, honesty, and community can shape your interactions and influence your connection.

In this episode, Elizabeth breaks down the process of identifying your core values and integrating them into your relationship to minimize conflict and enhance teamwork. By doing so, you become the board of directors for your family, setting the stage for a harmonious life together. She provides insightful strategies, including a detailed walkthrough of the ACT Matrix, a practical tool for couples to discuss and decide on family values collectively. This episode is jam-packed with valuable tips on how to communicate effectively, prioritize mutual goals, and create a supportive and thriving marital environment.

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Episode Transcript for “Determining Your Relationship Values”

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:00:02]:
This podcast is sponsored by Communicate and Connect Counseling, where we have a team of therapists who provide individual, couples, and family therapy services, all tailored to meet the needs of military and veteran families. To learn more about our services, visit www.communicateandconnect.com.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:00:28]:
Welcome to the Communicate and Connect podcast for Milit relationships with your host, Elizabeth Polinski, a military marriage counselor. If this is your first time listening to the Communicate and Connect podcast, please take a second to go, rate, review and subscribe to make sure you get all our future episodes. We also really want to know what it is you love about our podcast. And if for some reason you’re not loving it, we want to know that too, because we’re committed to providing the best quality content to help you improve your relationships.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:00:58]:
You’re listening to episode 24 on determining your relationship values. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Communicate and Connect podcast. This is the next episode in our series on getting ready for marriage and starting your marriage off. Well, all of this information is still helpful if you’ve, even if you’ve been married for many, many years. And I’m really kind of excited about this episode.

This one might be a little bit longer, but I’m also gonna include like a YouTube video with this episode on how, how to work through this together for your relationship. And so if once we get, once you get to the end, it’ll make a little bit more sense what we’re, what we’re doing for this exercise and why. But you’ll just want to go to this episode’s show notes at communicateandconnectpodcast.com, look for episode 24 and there will be a link to the YouTube video.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:02:12]:
I’m going to start off with a story about one of my relationship fail moments. And let’s see, last Thanksgiving, my husband and I, along with some of our friends, stayed at, got like a rental for Thanksgiving because, you know, it was during COVID and we weren’t going to travel to either of our families for Thanksgiving. So we did like a friendsgiving locally.

And yeah, so we, we stayed at a rental and we were walking around and we came across this like marshmallow. It wasn’t a marshmallow stand, but it had marshmallows. Well, it was for s’mores. It was like a stand for s’mores and hot chocolate. And they had just left kind of the supplies out.

Marshmallow Joke Sparks Couple’s Tension

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:03:10]:
And my husband made a joke about like, oh, we could just take a marshmallow. He wasn’t even necessarily insinuating that he wanted to, but at the time, I got really angry at him. It was really shocking to me that he would talk about how we could steal marshmallows. And then later that night, I yelled at him and I told him he wasn’t a good man because he would steal a marshmallow.

And so this was definitely a big relationship fail on my part because I. I never really talked about it with him and I just kind of let this, like, anger build up. And of course, that’s really hard to do when you’re surrounded by a group of friends and like, how are you supposed to have that conversation? So I can give myself a little bit of grace here. And now looking back, we both can talk about it as, like, a funny story.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:04:08]:
But for me, I got really angry that he would even think about the possibility of stealing a marshmallow just because for me personally, stealing feels very morally wrong. And so it was so shocking to hear him say that. And so this is an example of a value. So let’s just start off with what are values?

So values are qualities of being that are important for who you are, what you want to stand for in life. So, for example, these are some examples of values. So curiosity, maybe it’s really important for you as a person and who you want to be and what you want to stand for to be curious. Another one would be adventure. Some people really want to stand for adventure.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:05:09]:
Another one would be honesty, service, community. These are all examples of personal values. And so, like, for me in this story with the marshmallow, I guess it’s interesting I would have to try to think like honesty comes to my mind in. In the idea of not stealing. But I also. Oh, I think it would be respect. I think respect would be the value that is really meaningful to me and important for me and who I want to be and what I want to stand for. And to me, that would have included respecting someone else’s property, even if that was a marshmallow.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:05:58]:
These types of things. If you’ve never really thought about what your personal values are in life, I have a downloadable form. I’ll include it in the show notes for this episode on a way for you to figure out what your personal values are in life. But I think these are really nice to share with your partner and know what it is for your partner. And these can change. Not that your values change, but sometimes the priority changes.

So maybe service is really important to somebody while they are single and maybe even while they’re married and they’re doing a lot of Volunteer work and helping people in the community and things like that. And then they have kids.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:06:53]:
Service is still really important to them. They maybe would still love to do that, but now their focus might shift and they may have more of a focus on service towards their kids. So the value, like the core value of what that person wants to stand for in life has not changed. Even though the priority for how I live out that value might change with different life circumstances. But knowing these things about each other is really helpful.

And so why do they matter in relationships? Well, these values tend to be really core to who you are as a person. And when your partner has different values than you do, it can be a source of conflict. So that was the conflict that I was experiencing in the marshmallow story, because it was shocking to me.

Core Family Values in Relationships

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:07:56]:
Like, how do you not have this value, this core value of that, similar to me? And it turns out that he does have the same values, but that wasn’t being shown in that moment. So the other reason why this is important in relationships is because it’s important to be a team. And when you get married and when you are in a very committed relationship, especially if you have kids together, then you are pretty much like the board of directors for your family.

And you want to decide together as a team what you want your family to stand for and what your family core values are. For example, you want to decide what your collective family group values are going to be. Maybe that is emotional or financial support. That could be a value that you guys have. Loyalty could be one.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:09:01]:
And when you create or when you discuss and decide together on these family values and relationship values, they might be similar or they might be different from your individual core values. And so this is important because really, you are still an individual and you still are going to have your individual values, but now you’re also the board of directors for your relationship and for your family.

And you have to think about, okay, as a family, how do. What do we want our family and. Or our marriage to stand for and to prioritize in terms of values? So in. There is a type of individual therapy that I do called acceptance and commitment therapy. Or I use it when I do individual therapy. I don’t do a ton anymore since I’m mostly doing couples counseling.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:09:54]:
But we. There’s something called an act matrix, which you can use to determine your relationship values and how you guys want to work towards those values together as a couple. This is what I’m going to show you how to do in the YouTube video. And I’m Going to show you how to, like, write it out on paper, but I’ll just kind of discuss it right now. So you’re going to ask yourselves a series of questions.

And the first one would be, what is most important to us as we get married for how we want to set the stage for our marriage together. This is the first question, what’s most important to you guys as a couple? So I’m just brainstorming here. You will have to figure out together what you would put down.

Aligning Marriage Values and Actions

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:10:48]:
But maybe it would be being kind or being fair, being honest, supportive, eating together. So, like, time together, being a team, these types of things might be something that’s really important for the two of you for how you want to be in your marriage together.

The second question is, if you were living in line with those goals and those values that you identified in question one, what would a video camera pick up on you guys doing? So if, especially if I don’t have sound, if, like, let’s just imagine I had a videotape in your house, but there’s no audio, what would I see you guys doing if you were living in alignment with those values and goals?

So again, you’ll have to figure out your own answers to this. But for example, maybe it would be that I would see you guys cooking together, or maybe I would see you sitting at the table together, the dinner table, eating together. Maybe I would see you guys rubbing each other’s backs, sitting close together on the couch, versus far apart, hugging, maybe sitting down and doing finances together, helping each other, doing cleaning together, something like these types of things.

And then the third question you’re going to ask is, what sorts of thoughts and emotions might show up for either of you and get in the way of you guys moving towards your answers from question one and question two? So what sort of thoughts and emotions might get in the way of you guys being this way? So just for example, sake, anger, jealousy, feeling scared, Those might be emotions, Thoughts might be, like, it’s not fair. That could get in the way. You should be doing X, Y and Z.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:13:05]:
I should be able to have or get X, Y and Z. These might be things, thoughts anyway, that get in the way of you guys being and doing and living in alignment with your values as a couple? And then question four has two parts.

So part one is, what would a camera catch you guys doing if you were really in the grip of those thoughts and emotions? So if you were really in the grip of anger, jealousy, thoughts of, it’s not fair, you should be doing this. I shouldn’t have to do this. What might a camera pick up? Again, if there was no audio and just visually, what would I see? Maybe I’d see yelling, maybe I’d see fighting, arms being crossed, eye rolling, some like big gestures, being in separate rooms, pointing fingers, etc.

Right, part two of question number four how workable would these behaviors be in the short term and in the long term? So let’s say that you’re in separate rooms and avoiding each other. That could be helpful in the short term if things are really tense, but probably not a great long term solution since you guys are creating a pattern of being separate from each other. Maybe if you had screaming matches, how helpful would that be and how workable would that be in the short term and long term? I tend to think that it’s probably not that workable in the short term or the long term.

Building Strong Relationship Values

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:14:51]:
But again, that’s for you guys to decide on your relationship, what those behaviors might be and how workable they would would be. And then finally, at the very end, you want to ask yourselves, okay, given all of this information that we’ve discovered going through these questions, what else do we need to know to remain aware, compassionate and effective in our relationship?

And so maybe that would be we want to be gracious to each other for mistakes and shortcomings. Maybe that’s something that we need to be really intentional about. Cultivating as a value in our relationship is a sense of graciousness, maybe discussing feelings often so that way resentments don’t build up. So maybe there’s a value of communicating often and early. Not going to bed angry or setting aside a time to check in with each other might be other ways that that might be related to a value of communicating often and early.

So these are the questions that you would go through and if you your action item for this episode is to go to this episode’s Show Notes where you will be able to find the YouTube video where I will guide you through how to write this out on paper and how to do this using the Matrix, the Act Matrix. And you’ll also be able to download a list of values if you want help thinking through what your personal values might be.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:16:40]:
Again, if you do this, I would love to know how it went. Find me on social media, either take a photo and tag me or send me a message and let me know what you thought of this exercise.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:17:03]:
I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If so Please take a second to go rate, review and subscribe so you get all of our future episodes. Make sure to check out the show notes to sign up for our FREE 10-week relationship email course.

This email course is really designed for people who are maybe having trouble with communication or connection in their relationship and helping them develop some quick wins right away to start improving it. While I am a therapist, this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not considered therapy and it should also not be a replacement for therapy. If you think you need a professional of any kind, you should definitely go find one. Until next time.