Communication Breakdown: How to stop fighting
Communication Breakdown: How to stop fighting
Communication Breakdown: How to stop fighting
Are you experiencing a communication breakdown?
Whether it's with your spouse, your kids, your boss, your friend... anyone, these are super effective tools that can help communication.
If it's your spouse or a close relationship in your life, I recommend sharing this post with them, so you can both work on changing your communication together.
Over and over again, my husband and I come back to, "It's all about communication."
Here are my top tips on how to be a better communicator and a better listener.
Use Reflective Listening
Understand what is being communicated and confirm that you heard it correctly.
Welcome to the biggest secret of therapists. The biggest goal in counseling, is to hear the other person and reflect back what they just hear to be certain they understood their client correctly AND… it creates huge validation.
Has anyone ever said to you, “I hear you saying….” or “It sounds like you feel…” and you think “Ohmygosh, YES! That’s exactly how I feel. How did you KNOW that?!” It’s because we are so accustomed to people not actually hearing us!
We often listen only with the intent to reply. When we do this, we aren’t actually hearing the other person.
This technique is going to allow the other person to feel heard and understood and it also helps you truly understand them, often abolishing a preconceived notion we had based on a misunderstanding.
Offer Validation
Validation diffuses emotions. It creates a feeling of connection, safety and relief. When this happens as the one validated, we feel more compassion and openness to then listen to the other person. We no longer feel the strong urge to reply with our fight since we already feel understood; now we want to return the favor.
Use I-Statements
Now that we’ve listened and offered validation so the other person is ready to hear us, we can use something called “I Statements.”
They are structured like this:
“I feel _________ when you ___________ because __________.”
I-statements allow the speaker to take ownership over their own feelings instead of putting the blame onto the other person. When we do this, it immediately creates a defensive response.
Feel the difference:
→ You make me feel so frustrated and overwhelmed when you give me all of this work. It’s not fair!
→ I feel frustrated and overwhelmed when I have this much work because I feel like it could be delegated differently so it feels more manageable.
Communicating this way takes a lot of work. Honestly, it often feels silly, but it begins to feel natural over time. Keep at it.
I share a full section on “Mending Your Marriage” in my book, MOTHERHOOD STRIPPED where I go into more detail of these communication practices in terms of your marriage.