This experience has definitely been a positive for me, because I now have a more accurate model of my own behaviour which does allow me to more successfully solve problems. (Solving this particular problem has cause relationship satisfaction to shoot up from an albeit quite low slump to a real high point for both me and my OH.)
I’ll just share the main specific technique I learned from the experience, just in case it might also work for you. When I treat my conscious and unconscious as separate agents, I accept that I cannot control my unconscious thinking (so just trying really hard not to do it won’t help much), but I can /model/ how my unconscious reacts to different stimuli. If you draw the diagram with “Me”, “Hamster” (what I call my unconscious) and “World” (including, specifically to here, the behaviour of my OH), and use arrows to represent what can affect what, then it’s a two-way arrow between Me and World, a one-way arrow from World to Hamster, and a one-way arrow from Hamster to Me. After I drew that diagram it became pretty bloody obvious that I needed to affect the world in such a way as to cause positive reactions in Hamster (and for which I need accurate models of both World and Hamster), and most ideally, kickstart a Me → World → Hamster → Me positive feedback loop.
This experience has definitely been a positive for me, because I now have a more accurate model of my own behaviour which does allow me to more successfully solve problems. (Solving this particular problem has cause relationship satisfaction to shoot up from an albeit quite low slump to a real high point for both me and my OH.)
I’ll just share the main specific technique I learned from the experience, just in case it might also work for you. When I treat my conscious and unconscious as separate agents, I accept that I cannot control my unconscious thinking (so just trying really hard not to do it won’t help much), but I can /model/ how my unconscious reacts to different stimuli. If you draw the diagram with “Me”, “Hamster” (what I call my unconscious) and “World” (including, specifically to here, the behaviour of my OH), and use arrows to represent what can affect what, then it’s a two-way arrow between Me and World, a one-way arrow from World to Hamster, and a one-way arrow from Hamster to Me. After I drew that diagram it became pretty bloody obvious that I needed to affect the world in such a way as to cause positive reactions in Hamster (and for which I need accurate models of both World and Hamster), and most ideally, kickstart a Me → World → Hamster → Me positive feedback loop.