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Let your partner confront themselves rather than you whenever you have the choice

Let your partner confront themselves rather than you whenever you have the choice - Communication tools for relationships

Here’s a simple relationship rule: Never, ever re-enforce your partner’s negative self-talk.

In other words…

Let your partner face their own inner critic, rather than your criticism

Before you offer criticisms of any kind, ask yourself if they already have that voice telling them the same thing in their head. If they’re feeling down on themselves because they made a poor decision, let them confront their own inner critic before you jump in.

Whatever their struggle, do they really need you echoing their own hurtful inner dialogue?

In many cases you might not need to say a word. If they ask you, try gently putting it back to them. Ask how THEY feel about it. If you agree with their assessment, you can say so. I’m not saying you should lie about what you think or how you feel, but let their confrontation be with themselves rather than with you whenever you have the choice.

It’s through self-confrontation, and by creating a relationship environment where that is possible and encouraged, that growth happens. Like so many keys to growth and change, this depends on “catching yourself in the act” and changing habitual, reflexive behaviour.

Are you robbing your partner of their personal growth?

You might not have noticed this, but every time you take on the role of critic, you potentially distract your partner from an important task.

Here’s a brief example from an article I wrote a few years ago

Leila works full time at a very stressful job and feels guilty about not spending enough time with their infant son. Their current childcare is not sustainable. Leila is thinking about preschool, but has mixed feelings. She struggles with her familiar internal dilemma. Franz sees her struggle and steps in with his own opinion, which is always the rational point of view.

“Think about it Leila, preschool is the only logical solution.”

Leila reflexively snaps at Franz and accuses him of being cold. The internal struggle that Leila was facing has now been externalized, and Leila no longer has to feel her dilemma. She can now project the criticism that she had for herself out onto Franz.

Don’t turn an inner conflict into a relationship conflict

It is vitally important that each of us wrestle with our own demons, our own mistakes, our own dilemmas, and our own meanings of an event or situation.

If your partner is having an inner conflict, let them. When you butt in and take over one of the voices in their head, their inner conflict gets externalized and becomes a conflict between the two of you. Then, not only do you create unnecessary (and unproductive) conflict between the two of you, you also rob your partner of a golden opportunity to resolve something within themselves.

This doesn’t mean you can’t weigh in or be a sounding board or be supportive, just practice good emotional boundaries and recognize what is theirs and what is yours.

If you can add this to your communication protocols and toolbox, you’ll help support your own growth, your partner’s growth, and the growth of your relationship.

Want help learning to let your partner confront themselves? Check out my book The Re-Connection Handbook for Couples (download a free sample chapter here).

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Campbell River Marriage Counselling Justice Schanfarber

Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counselling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples on the issues that make or break relationships – Sessions by telephone/skype worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

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Communication tools for your relationship – What you need to know

The truth about "communication tools" and your relationship

The truth about “communication tools” and your relationship

Many client couples come to therapy in the hopes of achieving better communication (and thus more understanding and ease) in their relationship. This is a great motivation, and with the right kind of work much success can be achieved. But there’s a very basic and poorly understood fact about communication in relationships and the communication tools that are often prescribed:

We communicate precisely at the level of our personal development.

In fact, our quality of communication in any given moment is a direct reflection of who we are in that moment. What does this mean for the many communication tools, methods, models, and techniques that are promoted for helping relationships? Consider –

Communication tools only make a lasting impact on our relationship if using them changes us.

Put another way, it isn’t the tool itself that is valuable. It isn’t even how we use it (at least not in the long run). It’s who we must become in order to properly use any particular communication technique or method that makes the difference.

Again, a communication model or method doesn’t magically change our relationship. It only changes our relationship if it changes us inside, if it changes how we see ourselves and each other, if it nudges us along to the next rung of our personal development.

The value of a good communication tool or technique is not so much in the immediate impact it has on our partner (though that can be welcome), the bigger benefit is that to use any of the leading communication methods well and consistently requires us to “level up” in our personal growth.

Every popular communication method or tool that you learn in books, online, or in the therapist’s office – non-violent communication (NVC), reflective listening, active listening, empathetic speaking, love languages, “I”-statements, 24-hour rule, radical honesty, talking stick etc – have certain things in common; they help us –

What do all these qualities point us toward? What is the common thread?

In a word… maturity.

Using communication tools skillfully and consistently shapes us into more capable and mature people

The communication techniques, skills, and tools that we seek have one real purpose: using them forces us to develop more maturity in ourselves and in our relationship. With this maturity comes increased capacity for dealing with the inevitable and necessary challenges that a relationship brings. When a communication tool or technique fails to make a significant lasting impact it’s not just because you’re not doing it right, it’s because you’re not ready to let it change you. We “forget” to use our tools in heated moments not because we are forgetful, but because we haven’t yet changed ourselves to reflect the purpose, philosophy, potential, or world-view embedded within the tool or method.

This isn’t to say that communication tools and techniques aren’t valuable. They are, but for different and deeper reasons than most people initially understand. After the tool or technique has been integrated and internalized, after it has changed and matured us, then in retrospect we can usually see how it has done its work upon us, but when we are initially searching for solutions to acute relationship difficulties this truth remains hidden.

I’m sharing this in the hope of setting you up for better success when you go looking for tricks or tips to solving communication problems in your relationship (which I think is a good and worthy pursuit). As you practice new communication techniques and methods, try to feel how they are changing your outlook, let them be something that changes you from the inside out.

Follow me on social media for sex and relationship tips, tools, and insights – Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

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Campbell River Marriage Counselling Justice Schanfarber

Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counselling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples on the issues that make or break relationships – Sessions by telephone/skype worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

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This simple communication tool terrifies most people

Communication tools for marriage and relationshipsCommunication tools for marriage and relationships

Many people are in love with the idea that there is a communication tool that will solve their marriage or relationship troubles with a minimum of discomfort or risk. The fantasy rarely comes true, for reasons I discuss elsewhere, but there is one tool that does change everything. Ready for it?

I call it… Telling the truth.

Telling the truth is one of the simplest, most difficult, and most terrifying “communication tools” available to us in relationship. It’s far more intimidating than trying to learn your partner’s love languages, remembering to use “I-statements”, or practicing active listening.

Interestingly, popular communication tools and techniques that promise to create more intimacy in relationships often succeed at doing precisely the opposite, while telling the truth remains one of the surest paths to authentic intimacy. So why do we avoid it?

Telling the truth is hard

When we tell the truth we put ourselves on the line. When we tell the truth we open ourselves to our partner’s questioning, judgement, criticism, rejection, even disgust.

Sometimes we try to bargain away the risk of truth-telling – “I’ll tell you but you have to promise not to get mad or to judge me.” An angry or judgemental partner is apparently more than many people can tolerate.

Obviously not all truth-telling is wise or constructive, though the most profound truth-telling does inevitably carry a risk of destruction. Our innocence may be at risk of being destroyed. Or our upper hand, our righteousness. We might risk destroying something in our partner: their image of us, their sense of safety; we may fear destroying their happiness, or their love and acceptance of us.

What does it take to tell the truth?

The truth might be painful, but real truth-telling is not cruel, it is courageous. It is not manipulative, it is genuine. Cruelty and manipulation is a misuse or distortion of telling the truth. Real truth-telling presents something unarguable, something deeply subjective, something from our experience for the other to consider. Real truth-telling draws a line between our experience and our partner’s experience. It is an act of respect, integrity, and differentiation.

Telling the truth might mean confessing an action or behaviour, but the most significant truth-telling more often involves revealing difficult or complicated feelings

“I don’t like being touched like that.”

“I’m not sure I love you anymore.”

“I don’t feel attracted to you.”

“I don’t think I want children.”

“I’m having doubts.”

“I disagree.”

“I’m attracted to someone else.”

“I want something different.”

“I’m having a hard time with something you’ve done.”

“I’m angry.”

“I’m sad.”

“I’m ashamed.”

“I’ve been deceiving myself, and you.”

“I hide myself from you.”

“I punish you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t respect you.”

“I want more.”

“I want less.”

Notice that there is no technique. Nothing fancy. The truth is straight-forward and needs no special dressing up.

Each of these examples opens the door to what we imagine will be difficult conversations. Telling the truth opens doors, but it may also close them. Most relationships are normally built, at least partially, upon untruths, and these untruths provide an uneasy equilibrium. Truth-telling is destabilizing at first; it narrows the path and demands growth. No wonder we avoid it; we’d rather find a technique that allows us to keep our relationship more or less status quo, but also somehow “better.”

If we’re really honest, we want communication tools that will make our partner understand us, even as we hide the most difficult and salient truths from them. And if we’re even more honest, we might admit that when we say we want understanding, we actually mean we want agreement; we crave some tool that will make our partner validate us and hopefully see things our way, even when we don’t have the courage to tell them the truth in plain language.

I’ll leave you with this quote from psychologist and author James Hillman. I like how he connects truth-telling to shame and fantasy for another perspective –

When Freud’s patients lay down and began to reminisce, they found their fantasies embarrassing. Freud also found them embarrassing. Alone with each other and these fantasies, teller and listener did not look at each other. Their eyes did not meet. Why are our fantasies embarrassing to tell, and why are we embarrassed hearing the intimate tales of another’s imagination?

The shame about our fantasies gives testimony to their importance. This shame is now called professionally ‘resistance’. but what function does this resistance perform? I do indeed resist telling my daydreams, my scorching hatreds, my longings and fears and their uncontrollable imagery. My fantasies are like wounds, they reveal my pathology. Resistance protects me. Fantasies are incompatible with my usual ego , and because they are uncontrollable and ‘fantastic’ – that is away from my the relation to ego reality – we feel them alien. We are not embarrassed in the same way about our will and intelligence; indeed we proudly exhibit their accomplishments. But what breeds in the imagination we tend to keep apart and to ourselves. Imagination is an inner world – an inner aspect of consciousness. These affections and fantasies are the imaginal or unconscious aspect of everything we think and do. This part of the soul that we keep to ourselves is central to analysis, to confession, to prayer, central between lovers and friends, central in the work of art, central to what we mean by ‘telling the truth’.

Read my book The Re-Connection Handbook for Couples to get help with telling the truth in your relationship.

Follow me for sex and relationship tips, tools, and insights – Facebook | Instagram

Like what you’re reading here?
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Read the first 10 pages free.

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Campbell River Marriage Counselling Justice Schanfarber Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counselling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples on the issues that make or break relationships – Sessions by telephone/skype worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

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