Is anyone else out there feeling like you are starting to lose it a little? I sure am. I am noticing that I am quick to anger in situations that just a few months ago would not have grabbed my attention at all. My fuse is short and strong emotions are just under the surface. I found myself sobbing during a car commercial the other day, featuring a family celebrating a birthday together. Am I coming Unglued? My motivation level is not what it used to be. At the beginning of this thing, I was obsessed with doing every home project that I had been putting off. Now that the walls are painted, the curtains are up and the dust has settled from the recent construction jobs, motivation has left the building, along with the contractors, and tasks like cleaning out the refrigerator seem daunting. The impact of all that is going on in the world, social isolation, an absence of routine and no end date to look forward to has definitely taken a toll on our internal environments.
Why am I bringing this up right now you might be asking, as an intro to our second week examining connection with our significant others? Well, here’s the thing…our internal environment, created by our belief systems, our thoughts, and our emotions, greatly impacts our relationships. They color our perceptions of interactions with the people we love and also affect the way we use or don’t use healthy boundaries in communication.
This week, I will be broaching the topic of how to handle conflict in relationships and also taking it a step further, how to utilize these experiences of conflict to bring you closer. What? Conflict can bring you closer? Yes, it absolutely can do just that when we approach the situation in a relational way. First, we will look at what conflict actually is and why it occurs. Next, we will discuss a few tools you can start applying right away in your own relationships to decrease unhealthy conflict and increase connection with your significant others.
Conflict…The “C” Word! Conflict has a bad wrap for sure and when asking a room full of 100 people “Conflict: welcome it or avoid it?”, I would bet at least three quarters of those people would choose the later. So, why do we look at conflict as a negative thing anyway? When we ask ourselves what conflict is, most of us would come up with descriptors such as a fight or altercation. Most would also agree that it is a negative experience and that it is uncomfortable. If this is true, then why would we welcome something so unpleasant? Wouldn’t we try to avoid it at all costs? The first issue we need to address here is the misperception that conflict is a bad thing. The Merriam Webster definition of conflict used as a verb is this: “to be different, opposed, or contradictory : to fail to be in agreement or accord.” Relational conflict occurs when two people have different perceptions about an event or topic. Is it “bad” to have a different idea or experience than another person? Of course not, that is what makes conversations engaging and life interesting. If we were all the same, we would be bored to death. The unpleasant connotation that the word conflict denotes arises not from the definition of the word itself, but through our memory of a culmination of all of our past experiences of conflicts that have occurred and how they impacted us emotionally. We also equate disagreements or miscommunication as something being “wrong” with the relationship. Many times this belief inspires a fear response of being hurt or someone exiting the relationship. I would like to offer a different perception.
Maybe conflict is an opportunity to bring us closer together in our relationships. If I have a different perception than you do about a certain event, if we can share about this in a respectful and functional way, we each receive the gift of getting to know one another better. Relational connection is NOT about who is right and who is wrong. It is about gaining an understanding of each others’ experience of the event and then from there being able to move into a place of resolution for the future. This is where many get hung up and I believe the main reason people avoid conflict. When communicating about something that has a high level of emotion attached to it, sometimes it can be difficult to share in a way that allows for functional conversation.
So, now that we have a shared definition of conflict, let’s now move into some tools…
Less is More:
First, when we communicate, we want to be sure we communicate in a way that people can hear us. One thing that helps in this goal is using soundbites. The average person can only take in about 2-3 sentences of information at a time. When we receive information, automatically our minds start to process. If you give the receiver too much information at once, something is going to be missed and/or it could be overwhelming to that person. Keep the conversation to one item at a time and leave plenty of room for conversation back and forth to clarify what is being communicated.
Sharing to Be Known:
As we discussed previously, intimate communication is really not about who is right or wrong, it is about understanding one another better and deepening the attachment in the relationship. When sharing with your partner about an experience, we need to do this without intent to change their mind, make them believe the way that we do, or manipulate the situation in any way. It is not an opportunity to shame, blame or control. It is simply sharing to let them know a little more about who you are. When we get into sharing to manipulate, we have lost the opportunity to create meaningful connection.
The Gift of Curious George:
On the other side, as the receiver of information in communication, when our partner is sharing their reality, sharing to be known, we need to work on being present and curious. When they are sharing (hopefully with soundbites) we are not in our head’s formulating a response or getting defensive. If we do this, we are not actually listening to what they are saying. Instead of getting defensive and taking it personally, it helps to think of Curious George. Take an emotional step back and think “Isn’t that interesting that when I was scrolling through Facebook while my husband was talking to me that he was thinking that he is not important to me.” Instead of returning an exchange like this with a defensive statement such as “I can’t believe you think that, do you not see everything I do for you?!?!” being able to stay in that curiosity and not taking on blame or shame about what is being said enables us to come up with a functional statement such as “I see that you are hurting and did not know that you were thinking that you are not important to me. You are very important to me.” This kind of statement allows both people to have their own perceptions or reality of the event and helps them move to a greater and deeper understanding of one another.
Putting it All Together (Data, Thought, Emotion):
In order to put the concepts we have discussed so far together, I would like to present to you a tool for organizing communication into effective soundbites. When communicating with your partner try to use one sentence for each (data, thought, emotion).
The first sentence is Data and is simply what happened. This is the closest thing to a truth of an event that you both can agree on. It does not have any thoughts or emotions attached to it. An example is “When you came home an hour late last night and did not call to let me know.” The data is concise and specific. It is something the receiver of the information can process and agree or disagree with. Once the data has been delivered and it has been determined that the receiver understands what the person sharing is talking about, we move on to Thought. The thought is simply what the sharer made up about what happened. It is the story they told themselves about the experience. This might be something like, “I didn’t know if you were safe” or “my feelings are not important to you.” It is important to separate this part from the last which is the Emotion. These are the feeling words. Don’t mistake this for a place to insert more thoughts. What is the emotion or emotions attached to the thought “I didn’t know if you were safe” or “My feelings are not important to you?” Putting it all together looks like this:
“When you came home an hour late last night and did not call to let me know” (Data)
“What I thought about that was: I didn’t know if you were safe and that my feelings are not important to you.” (Thought)
“And about that I felt scared and hurt” (Emotion)
This type of communication creates a space for two people to form deeper connection and attachment with one another.
One More Tip: Letting go of words that don’t serve you:
If you only take one thing from this article, please let it be this. I want you to throw away one phrase completely and in addition two and sometimes three words that are guaranteed when used during conflict to illicit defensiveness and disconnection.
The phrase I would like you to eliminate from your life is any statement that begins in “You made me feel…” The truth is nobody can make us feel anything. When I talk about this truth with clients, it often receives a sideways look coupled with a frown and maybe even arm crossing. Even now as you read this you might be thinking about the guy who cut you off and pulled in front of you in the Starbucks drivethru. Of course he made you mad. I mean, if he hadn’t been such a jerk and purposely cut you off so he could get in front of you in line to shave time off his day, you wouldn’t have been mad right? So here’s the thing, what he did, the actual behavior, did not make you mad. You made yourself mad. What he did, his behavior, elicited thoughts from you. Thoughts that you created based on your core belief system and past experiences. The behavior was simple, you were in line at the drivethru and he pulled his car in front of yours. That behavior, that data, is completely benign, until we assign meaning to it. So, you “make up” things like “That jerk, I can’t believe he thinks his time is more important than mine” or “What a selfish (insert your choice of expletive here)!” These thoughts are triggered by a belief/thought that this human did this behavior on purpose, which created a bunch of unpleasant emotions around the event. This was not because of what he did, it is because of what you made up about it and how you internalized the experience. When we say that someone made us feel something, we are giving away the power to create our own realities. We are blaming others for our emotions and state of being. Giving that power is dangerous, as we pigeonhole ourselves into a state of victimhood. This only becomes more intense in personal relationships. In a disagreement, when we use the words “you made me” we are casting blame and using this statement will create an environment in which the other person is defensive. Using the data, thought, emotion skill we discussed previously in this article will help you avoid this trap. Using “I statements” instead of “you statements” allows you to stay in a place of reality, keeps the discussion on an even playing field and can greatly reduce defensiveness which gets in the way of functional communication.
The other words I would like you to remove from your communication lexicon are “always”, “never” and sometimes “ever.” “You always interrupt me” or “You never listen to what I have to say” or “Will there ever be a time when you don’t take over the conversation?” All of these examples imply that something is occurring or not occurring 100% of the time which is 99.9% of the time just not true. When using these statements, the receiving person will get stuck on that piece of inaccurate data, will become defensive, and the communication will go nowhere. Going back to data, thought, emotion, be specific about the data. Instead of “You always interrupt me”, use a statement such as “yesterday I was sharing with you about having to deal with a customer complaint at work and you interrupted me before I was finished” This type of statement is much more effective in terms of intimate communication.
All of the concepts presented today over time can vastly improve the depth of and connection in your relationships. The important thing to remember is that the tools we talked about today are actually skills and skills take practice. My challenge to you this week is to read this article with your partner and actually talk about the way you communicate. Perhaps give a few of these skills a test-run and we will see you back next week!