How to Deal with an Overly-Critical Spouse - Rabbi Akiva Rutenberg

what do you do when you feel your spouse is being overly critical how do you address that Rabbi Ruttenberg okay so this is a very very common common question that one spouse may both spouses feel that their other spouse is it's too critical of them in other words yes I make mistakes but why are you always focused on my mistakes why aren't you seeing my my strengths why aren't you focusing on my good qualities so I would just say first of all we have a tendency as human beings to see our strengths and others faults right and often this can be a challenge because our spouse sees our faults and we see their faults so I would suggest first of all going back to our saying before that if your spouse is there is critical of you maybe you first have to look into yourself and see if the thing that they're critical of you about is actually something you need to work on normally we have like a defense mechanism that just goes up very quickly and it's like a little wall that gets pushed up or a big wall and it's just as soon as somebody criticizes us our knee-jerk reaction very often is oh yeah you think I'm that what about what you do or why would you say that I'm not that I'm let's say a husband a wife is saying to her husband that you're not attentive enough with the kids you're on your cell phone too much right could happen sometimes right and the instead of the husband looking to himself and saying you know what maybe I am he'll say you also do it or why always focusing on my my my problems but I think that as mature adults when we need to try to do is when somebody criticizes us to actually think about it and say maybe there is some merit to it maybe there is something that I should be working on I very often and I'm sure the panel here has the same situation where people come to us for counseling they tell us rabbi how is it that the same advice you told my spouse I've been telling it to him for six years the same thing you said tonight and suddenly you said it and like a light bulb we're not we're not in his head right why is that true and the reason is is because criticism very often is not able to be accepted if it's presented in a certain way that makes the person feel judged and feel put-down so I would suggest that when it comes to criticism in general that we try to do a few things that will make the criticism much more likely to be accepted and the first one is is to never criticize the entire person you never want to say you're always late you don't pay enough attention to me you're not whatever fill in the blank because most human beings have no way to process that information and as soon as somebody tells us that we shut down so first and foremost even if you think that that's true which hopefully you don't think that's true but even if at the moment you think is true you don't want to focus on the entire person you want to focus on a specific situation a specific event this time when you were with the kids I saw you on your phone a lot I really appreciate if you don't do that so criticism I think it presented the right way makes a very very big difference and also just good advice in general is as we say this regarding parenting but I think it's very true with our husband and wife as well is to catch the person doing something right and what that means is is that you find ways to say positive things for every negative comment you should strive to have four or five some people say than six positive comments and very often in our very fast-paced life we're so busy just trying to keep everything together that we end up being a lot more critical than we realize we are [Music] [Applause]