Our secret to a happy relationship

Written By Nik & Eva Speakman
A happy couple overlooking the sunset

We have been together for 30 years and married for 26 years. We live together, we work together, we even go to the gym together. So what is the secret to our happy relationship? In this blog we will share a few tips on that work for us. We hope they will work for you too!

Communication

You must be able to be able to talk about anything and everything. We often think that our partner is a mind reader; they don’t know what you’re thinking unless you talk about it. Talk about how you feel more, once you start expressing your feelings it starts to come naturally!

Humour

You have to laugh with your partner, look for more reasons to laugh, most of all learn to laugh at yourself. Laughing at yourself shows humility which is a great quality.  You can crack some jokes (if any of you know Nik and join us on our Monday night lives on Facebook and Instagram, you know that’s not difficult for him!)

There Is No One Reality

Appreciate that there is no ‘one’ reality. Many people say they are two sides to every story as we all see things differently.
In fact, one could argue that there’s at least three sides to every story – the third being the unbiased, impartial “truth” of the event and being the most important.

Listen to one and another and appreciate that we all see the world differently, this is important. We all have different filters, as a consequence of our life experiences from the past. It never helps any situation being argumentative, or antagonistic.  The next time you find that you come to a differing opinion or disagreement, ask your partner how they see things by trying this “oh right, I can see how you might have been upset by that, but what I actually meant was…”

Mutual Friendship Circles

If you don’t already, you should socialise together and share friends. Of course, it’s totally fine to occasionally go out with friends occasionally from time to time. However, you also need to share good times together with the most important person in your life, otherwise, you will only share mundane times with your partner, and that’s not ideal.

We enjoyed sharing these tips with you and we hope you find them useful!

We have a TikTok video that will help you share these tips with your partner in a more exciting way, which we posted closer to Valentine’s Day (although every day can be Valentine’s Day!).  You can also listen to our podcast ‘Making The Change’ for more helpful tips and advice.

Nik & Eva Speakman

We have studied and worked together since 1992. Between us we have studied human behaviour and psychology for seven decades. We both share an uncontainable passion to offer hope and to help people lead happier and less inhibited lives.

After many remarkable breakthroughs we created our own behavioural change therapy, ‘Schema Conditioning.’® Subsequent work with trauma victims and their related symptoms, led to the creation of two further trauma-based therapies.

‘Schema Conditioning Psychotherapy.’®

‘Visual Schema Displacement Therapy (VSDT)’®

‘Visual Schema Detachment & Restructuring (VSDR)’®

Qualifications from the creation of our therapies, resulted in training psychology professors, doctors and masters students at Universities in Amsterdam and Utrecht. In 2015, this training produced the two sets of scientific studies conducted into the workings of our therapy; the first two study papers highlighting the remarkable efficacy, was published in the Journal of Behaviour Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry in June 2019. A further third study was then published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology in April 2021, with a fourth clinical study with hospital patients is currently underway and will be completed by the end of 2022.

In addition to members of the public, we work with, and have treated many high-profile clients and ‘A’ list clients around the world, having had prodigious successes. We are resident therapists on ITV’s multi award-winning ‘This Morning’ and have been for over a decade, we have also had own television shows, one of which, ‘The Speakmans’, also aired on ITV and several countries worldwide. Over the last two decades we have appeared on numerous other television shows as experts, such as the multi award-winning Saturday Night Takeaway.

Our mission is to illuminate that there is ALWAYS HOPE and that overcoming trauma and improving quality of life is entirely possible. Many people have either never been given hope, or worse had hope taken away from them, our aim is to correct that by sharing our message in any way we possibly can, including live workshops, theatre tours, books, podcasts, radio, television, social media and YouTube.

At the heart of all we do, is our relentless mission to offer HOPE to as many people as we possibly can.

https://nikandeva.com
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