Our Favorite Tool from Our Therapist: The Daily Check-in
Some people are surprised by this, but Dusty and I have been in therapy for as long as we’ve been a couple. We always say, “We like our relationship, we want it to be better, so we talk to a therapist!” Therapy—like a gym membership—is expensive but worth the sacrifice. We try to normalize going to therapy as a discipline of maintenance rather than recovery or rehabilitation. We maintain our marriage for the same reason we maintain our vehicles: we don’t want to wind up broken down on the side of the road.
Ten years ago our therapist, Robert, gave us a tool that we use to this day: The Daily Check-In.
The Daily Check-In is simple (as most powerful things are). We each ask and respond to two questions:
What did you like best about us today?
What did you like least about us today?
We usually ask and respond to these questions in the dark, after switching off the lights and right before we fall asleep. It’s our pillow talk. Asking these questions opens up the space to bring up things—positive or negative—that we might have forgotten to mention in the moment, but that are important to acknowledge. Things like, “I liked going to the gym with you,” or, “I didn’t like the interactions we had while we were grocery shopping. It seemed like we were mad at each other for no reason.”
This nightly check-in also gives us an opportunity to rehash and reframe interactions that may have been charged with negative emotion in the moment but were either too public or too time-pressured to address. It’s common for one or both of us to say, “Thank you for that,” or “I’m sorry I treated you that way.”
The check-in also gives us the opportunity to celebrate and highlight moments and interactions we liked, in order to reinforce that kind of behavior in the future. It’s usually as simple as, “I really appreciated that you helped me out with that task,” and yes, one or both of us does occasionally count having sex as the “Us” highlight of the day. Picking out one thing that each of us liked best about us for the day gives us the chance to communicate a moment of gratitude to one another and celebrate the good. It’s a reminder that there’s always something good to acknowledge.
Some couples are communicational pros. They stop, drop everything, and address the things they need to address in the moment. But not us. For those of us who don’t address things in the moment, there’s The Daily Check-In.
We’re forever grateful to our therapist, Robert, for teaching us this valuable practice all those years ago.
