How to Improve Any Relationship by Thinking Like a Therapist

Good therapists are trained to look beneath the appearance of a behavior and find the function that behavior serves.

For example: You see your 16-year-old son struggling to open a can of pasta sauce, so you suggest he tap the edges of the top with a knife to loosen it up. Out of nowhere, he blows up at you: Criticizing you for always being in his business and storming out of the room, slamming the door behind him. A bit bewildered and more than a little hurt, you chalk it up to hormones and hope the whole thing blows over sooner than later.

The surface-level interpretation is I guess he's just hormonal or, less charitably, How did my little darling turn into such a jerk? Of course, neither of these is wrong, per se . Teenagers do have complicated hormonal changes that affect their behavior. And they can simply be jerks. But to go a layer deeper, you might ask yourself: What function does getting mad at and criticizing me serve?

Good therapists are trained to look beneath the appearance of a behavior and find the function that behavior serves.

For example: You see your 16-year-old son struggling to open a can of pasta sauce, so you suggest he tap the edges of the top with a knife to loosen it up. Out of nowhere, he blows up at you: Criticizing you for always being in his business and storming out of the room, slamming the door behind him. A bit bewildered and more than a little hurt, you chalk it up to hormones and hope the whole thing blows over sooner than later.

In my work as a therapist, I see daily examples of relationships slowly dying-and occasionally exploding.

While tragic, these examples give me some insight into a common set of factors that tend to ruin relationships. And with a little reverse engineering, they also shed light on how we might strengthen and improve relationships.

I've taken these factors and combined them with with my own training as psychologist to come up with five practical tips anyone can use to improve the quality of your most important relationships.

Whether you want to strengthen your marriage, be a better parent, or get along better with your boss, learning to see people like a therapist can be a powerful way to do it.

By far the biggest mistake I see people make in their relationships is getting stuck in problem-solving mode .

When we're stuck in problem-solving mode, we immediately respond to anything difficult or painful as if it was a problem: We analyze, judge, dissect, compare, evaluate, and interrogate. And while all of these problem-solving approaches are helpful if you're building a bridge or solving an equation, they tend to backfire when applied to people.

While your intentions are probably good, treating people's struggles like a problem is invalidating. It makes them feel like it's not okay for them to have the problem or that they should be able to fix it immediately. And for someone who's struggling or upset, feeling bad about feeling bad is a recipe for defensiveness, communication breakdowns, and long-term relationship trouble.