I mentioned this briefly in the previous lecture as well. However, when you're delivering criticism, it's really important to express displeasure in terms of your feelings and your feelings alone and avoiding as much as possible to not generalize them. Realize that when you're angry when you are provoked by someone, or someone does something to irritate you, or to displease you, your anger is going to probably captivate your mind unless you are emotionally intelligent enough to combat the situation accordingly. Another thing that happens when you are angered by someone is you end up attacking their personality, you start to attack the person themselves, rather than deal with the situation at hand. So this is exactly what you want to avoid doing. You want to avoid attacking the The person instead, you should start focusing on how can you tackle the situation by describing displeasure in terms of your own feelings.

Realize that when you're doing this to someone, especially your partner, you end up making them get defensive, and they end up retaliating instead of attempting in some way or form to enhance the relationship. This is really important because, remember, anger leads to more anger. Anger causes anger in other people. And this can go on for a prolonged length of time, if they are followed up by thoughts of contempt, and so on. If you want to break this down into a simple example, it's again going back to the icoc perspective and applying that here in the same example. You want to make sure to use I talk as much as possible.

So that Everything is described in terms of your own perspective and your own feelings, which end up getting communicated a lot more clearly versus you generalizing the problem or generalizing what has happened to the entire situation or the entire relationship. It really upsets me that you don't seem to care about my feelings when we make love. Again, instead of generalizing that the other person is not the one who is putting in the effort or you feel like your partner is not putting in the required effort in the relationship. You are phrasing it so that you feel this way instead of generalizing it to what the situation actually is. Because the situation may actually be different. This is why you focus on it, talk and describe your feelings specifically, versus saying something like You're so wrapped up in yourself that you never think of anyone else.

This kind of criticism is never going to get you anywhere. It's only going to worsen the problem and it's going to cause your partner to become defensive and retaliate. You want to work on enhancing and improving the situation rather than worsening it. Do this much. Follow the eye talk perspective, because it is always preferable over the you talk and pointing the finger at the other person. It's really easy to pinpoint what problems are there provided you are the one sharing just your perspective and not always pointing the finger at your partner.

I'll see you in the next lecture.