I ran across some old notes from a workshop, but fail to remember when or where, with the following “Seven Deadly Habits”:
Criticizing
Complaining
Nagging
Threatening
Punishing
Rewarding to control
Blaming
Anyone of these produces negative outcomes in relationships and combining them would destroy most relationships. Yet I hear people using one or more of these when I am working with families and/or couples.
Criticizing (even constructive criticism) leads to the object of it feeling devalued and causes low self esteem. It is very discouraging to hear what is wrong, especially when there is no positive feedback.
Complaining leads to you feeling worse about the situation. It sometimes leads to depression. Complaining rarely leads to change.
Being nagged makes most of us angry. We just want to tell the other person to shut up.
I once was told by a supervisor in a treatment program to “never make threats, make promises.” You could not control the children we were working with by making threats. You had to be able to carry through with any consequences to get them to behave. In a marriage if someone makes threats to leave when things don’t go their way it breaks down the commitment in the relationship.
Punishing often leads to revenge. The person being punished does not feel like they are being treated fairly.
Even with children giving rewards to control them eventually backfires. They begin to demand the reward before they will do something. Ultimately we can not control others, they need to do something because they want to do it not as a result of being controlled.
Blaming can become a bad habit. It is hard but first we need to look at ourselves and think about our role in the problem. How/what can we change to make things better?
Learn to avoid letting any of these deadly habits come into your relationships.
