Showing all posts tagged communication

Falling in Love- Again

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Falling in Love- Again

Feel like you need to reconnect? With the responsibility to work, family, chores, and any other commitments you have, it can be easy to find yourself spending less and less quality time with your partner. You feel tired, stressed, and stretched thin. You start to feel like you’re energy level allows you to merely flip on the T.V. and fall asleep in front of it. With this kind of pattern, your relationship can start to feel less rewarding. You want to feel closer, but you can’t seem to find the time.

While it’s great to share stories about your day, catch each other up on the latest who-did-what and your experiences, there are other, more intimate ways to ground your relationship than the standard “how was your day?” approach. Here are a few simple strategies that can yield increased positivity between you and yours.

After your long day, when you get home and see one another, initiate intentional physical contact with one another. Sometimes it might be in the form of a sustained hug and a kiss. Maybe other days it will be something more playful and light-hearted. Experiencing one another’s touch, smell, and physical proximity in this way is a powerful catalyst for reconnection.

Another impactful technique you can use is to let your loved one know how much you’ve missed them, thought about them, or how glad you are to see them. Saying the words, “You’re home! I missed you today,” or “ Oh my gosh, I’m so glad to see you,” can express to your partner the appreciation you have for them, the warmth you feel, and your desire to feel close. What they can experience after hearing those words is powerful- an experience of being nurtured, wanted and held. (And who doesn’t love feeling that?!)

Eye contact is another simple way to reground yourselves in your relationship. During an embrace, gazing into one another’s eyes can heighten the feeling of intimacy at that moment. Talking with one another about your day, how glad you are to be home with one another while making eye contact engages more of your whole self. So much can be communicated through eye contact- their appreciation for you, your need for support, mutual admiration, and so many other feelings. This can strengthen the connection between you and allow both of you to feel more held in the relationship.

Set aside technology at some point during the evening. Agree to an amount of time if you wish 20, 45, 60 minutes- whatever seems feasible, and turn off your T.V.; silence your phones, tablets, computers, and other devices you have. Turn them over or put them in the next room and focus on one another. We compromise our connection and ability to be present with one another when we split our attention. Sure, multitasking has its place, and that place is not between you and your partner as you spend quality time together.

These are just a few strategies that you can put toward reigniting the intimate connection between you and your partner. Maybe you can’t find more time, but with a few tweaks here and there, you’ll see that you can make some. And a little quality time can go a long way.

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

Reduce Arguments, Yelling, and Fighting in Your Relationship

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Reduce Arguments, Yelling, and Fighting in Your Relationship

Why do we get into arguments and why do we continue engaging them once we’ve recognized they’ve begun? Most of the time, we don’t aim to argue when we enter into a discussion. In fact, a lot of us might say that they just seem to happen; as though independent of us or our involvement, arguments mysteriously happen. Luckily for us, arguments don’t just spring out of nowhere, and we can manage them in an effectively.

Don’t get me wrong; there are venues in which it’s an asset to don a steely arguing style. This kind of arguing has no place in our intimate relationships. Better save that for when you’re fighting for social justice.

When we’re arguing with someone, we love it’s most likely because both members were trying to be heard, seen, and understood. Somewhere during the conversation, we felt that our needs weren’t being met, we became frustrated, and our need to be right took over.

What we’ve begun to do- yell, blame, self-defend, none of it will be helpful to our connection with our loved one. It’s alienating and will take us further from our goal of connection and mutual understanding. As soon as we’re aware that we are stepping into or have already begun engagement in an argument, we need to pause. It’s helpful for us to think about what we were trying to communicate to our partner(s) at the start, before the yelling, before the detours.

Then, it’s helpful for us to be mindful of our voice. Lowering our tone and slowing our cadence begins to calm us and allows for our loved one(s) to calm. This gives us all some space to breathe, think about, and listen to what’s being said instead of enduring rapid fire. Do you notice that you’re talking over one another? Yeah, not a lot gets heard that way. Let’s make sure everyone is given their time to speak. Respect one another’s voice. If someone jumps in and starts talking over someone else, it’s ok to say something like, “Wait a minute, I’m not done,” or whatever you feel represents you.

Stay away from accusation and fabrication or hyperbole. Now is not the time for us to be critical or exaggerate about anything.

It’s also helpful for us to keep ourselves compassionately curious. Engaging our compassionate curiosity allows us to wonder about our loved one. Where are they coming from? What must they be feeling and why? What was their expectation and how is it different from what is presently happening? This encourages us to feel empathy for our loved one. It’s much less challenging to interact in a calm, respectful way that is easy to understand when you are coming from a place of compassion and empathy.

Once we’ve connected to our empathy, we can think about admitting our mistakes. Taking responsibility for any wrong-doing cleans up our side of the street and helps decrease any resentment experienced on the other side.

As the tension de-escalates and we ground ourselves, we have the energy to put toward respecting our partners’ opinions, experiences, and feelings, however, different from our own.

Once we’ve reached an agreement or tabled the discussion, it’s a great idea to exercise our humility with the proceedings and outcomes, whatever they are. We’re on the same team as our loved ones, remember? The objective is to feel more connected to and understood by one another, not alienated and distant. When we think about arguments in such terms, we allow ourselves to see that we’ve been misidentifying our actions when we refer to “winning an argument.”

Love and Be Loved,

Natalie             

Cultivating Emotional Connectedness in Your Relationships

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Cultivating Emotional Connectedness in Your Relationships

How often do you find yourself thinking, “We’re just not as close as I wish we were,”? You might have this wish about any relationship, a partner, a friend, a family member.  When you don’t feel as connected as you’d like to be to someone you love, it can feel destabilizing and incredibly dissatisfying. If you’ve had this particular conversation with said loved one, expressing your desire to be more connected and you’re still not experiencing the closeness you desire, it can begin to feel hopeless.

Sometimes the two of you can have conversations about this that feel helpful. It allows you to feel that you’re working together to shift this, to deepen the relationship. Other times, you feel as though your conversations go nowhere and you’re on your own. You’re both dissatisfied with the level of emotional connectedness, but it feels as though the other member of your relationship is unwilling to put in the work.

Whichever less-than-ideal situation you find yourself, there are things you can do to empower yourself which will help you to take active steps toward cultivating the emotional connected you seek.

An important place to start is by showing up for yourself. Showing up for yourself allows you to feel self-supporting, nurtured, and in touch with your resilience. This might look different for each person, but there are some basics. Taking care of your health is an essential target that many people miss. Balancing the time you need for sleep, exercise, work, and play doesn’t always feel like a choice. It helps if you look at how you choose to spend your days. Whether you are going to school, pursuing a dream of starting your own business, or working two or three jobs. Ask yourself if this is your choice. If it’s not then the next question you might want to ask yourself is “why am I doing this?” If you answered, “because I have to,” take some time to check in with yourself about why. Most of us have more choices than immediately occur to us. Showing up for yourself also looks like employing thoughtful and nonreactive self-advocacy when you don’t like the way you are being spoken to or treated. You can show up for yourself by being protective of your time and ensuring that you provide down time for yourself. Showing up for yourself also means not taking on more in a relationship than you what you genuinely feel comfortable. This means emotional, financial, household, and any other type of responsibility. When you show up for yourself you are less likely to martyr yourself in relationship, more likely to show up fully for others, and less likely to experience feelings of resentment.

A second strength you can exercise to cultivate emotional connection is finding compassionate curiosity in yourself about the other person. Why does this person do what they do, say what they say, react the way they react? What is their experience in their relationship with you? You’ll notice that I put the words “compassionate” and curiosity” right next to one another. This curiosity is something that will benefit you and your quest the more genuine it is so, be sure to practice it freely and often. Ask your loved one how they experienced what you’ve just said that’s gotten them so upset. Allow yourself to be open to their feelings. This isn’t the time to defend yourself; you want to know why they’re upset, not how you can get yourself off the hook. I get that it can be difficult to feel compassionately curious about anything when you’re arguing with someone or engaged in an escalating conversation. Try it out when you are feeling calm or only mildly irritated. When you allow yourself to be genuinely and compassionately curious about someone you love the conversation can become about understanding and less about arguing and yelling over one another.

Another great way to work toward emotional connectedness is by exercising active listening. (This can also be used while you are compassionately curious!) When you are actively listening to someone with whom you are trying to build your emotional connection, you are not seeking convenient places to jump in to argue your case, set up your next defense, or find inconsistencies in their statements. You are trying to find out how they are feeling, what they are thinking, what their experience is, and what has caused them to think, feel, and experience these things. How can you find out this valuable information when you are preparing what you’re doing to say next? (The answer is: you cannot.) You want this person to hear you, right? They want you to hear them, too. Start by slowing down these interactions and give them your full attention. It will catch on.

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

Conflict and Connection in Familial Relationships

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Conflict and Connection in Familial Relationships

As clients have come through my door, I’ve noticed that there are some things we as humans take for granted. These things tend to fluctuate from group to group and cohort to cohort, but there is one pervasive idea, seemingly present in all groups, woven deeply into relationships. It’s the one that causes adult children and their parents to be surprised when, looking at their parents/children, this thought crosses their minds, “I don’t know you…” and the feelings that follow.

If you’re lucky, this thought does creep into your consciousness every so often, instead of lingering on the fringe of awareness or deep in the inaccessible regions of your unconscious. I’m sure you can imagine that it’s much more challenging to deal with things that cause you pain when it feels like you can hardly identify what it is that’s causing the pain. It’s not all that complicated; people feel better when they know what’s bothering them, address it, and find what works for them to resolve it.

Now that you’re ok with painful thoughts being present in your consciousness (Woah, that was fast. You just cut your time needed for therapy right in half!), let’s focus on this particular thought, the one that can make parents and their adult children feel like they’re preparing for war when they reunite for holidays, the one that makes one (or both) members of the group(s) avoid phone calls and take an extra long time to return them, the one that makes a visit between the two groups feel obligatory and not warm or enjoyable, the one that makes us feel like familiar enemies and strangers, at best.

Nearly everyone I see comes to me because there is a relationship that they want to change in some way, have a better understanding or strengthen; almost all have reported a wish to realign themselves with their parent(s) at some point, but aren’t able to experience it. This is usually because we tend to have a long chain of memories and events from the past that accompanies these relationships and our feelings and reactions to these events and memories. For some of you reading this, you might feel that there is something you have to do or say (to yourself or your loved one(s)), some action that must take place before you can practice this exercise. Only you know what you need to allow yourself to practice this so, trust yourself.

 

Most often in my posts, I have multi-step processes. You’ll find that in this post I have a single step:

 

  1. Experiment with letting go of needing to set the record straight.

 

This takes a) a lot of patience b) a strong commitment to change your relationship c) compassion for both yourself and your loved one, and d) trust in yourself. The process allows both sides to stop trying to force the other to see either version of what happened (since you can’t force anyone into or out of their experience of something); it stops the relationship from playing an inauthentic win/lose game. Whether you are the parent or the adult child, if you start to reveal yourself for who you have become instead of who you used to be (or who you think you used to be), you will find yourself in a more curious and connected place to one another. You will make enough space in the relationship to move away from blame, resentment, needing to be right, enough to both see your loved one and be seen by your loved one. Sometimes this will happen quickly, sometimes slowly. Sometimes your loved one might not be able to reciprocate in a positive way at all. While you cannot control what the other chooses to do or acknowledge, you can continue to be a reflection of your authenticity.

To some of you, this might sound a little backward, “Shouldn’t we come to an understanding about the past before we’re able to forge ahead?” For some people (and many reasons), it isn’t possible. Others of you might be a little skeptical at the thought of letting anyone off the hook. It isn’t that. It’s just making room for a different part of the relationship that didn’t have enough room to breathe until now. When you can begin to see and appreciate one another for who you have become, you will be more open to hearing one another’s past experiences of one another as you will have strengthened the connection between one another.

Find the willingness within you to set aside the story by which you have lived. The idea that “He/She/They don’t want to have a relationship with me,” is rarely true. Most often we just don’t know how. We experience a lot of pain within the relationship, and we stop trying. Either side tells themselves that “If he/she/they loved me he/she/they would find a way to make the relationship work,” and either side is right. Or wrong, depending on how you see it.

Maybe part of your story is that your parent(s) judged you more critically than your siblings and you felt you were never accepted nor understood. (And maybe your parent(s) experienced themselves as pushing you toward the success of which they knew you were capable, and they don’t have a clear understanding of why you’re unhappy with them.) Maybe your story is that you did everything you thought was right for your kid, worked long hours to be a good provider, sent them to good schools, and s/he is decidedly unhappy and suffering. (And maybe your kid’s story is that you were not present in her/his life because you were always working and when you came home from work, you constantly pushed homework.) Neither side is wrong, but each lived experience is completely different. Letting go of the need to set the record straight, just for a while, can increase greater understanding of the other, start to answer questions like, “why can’t we ever get along” and “who are you” because it allows us to begin to see our loved one through a different lens… and see them.

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

Secrets to Stop Yelling and Start Talking

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Secrets to Stop Yelling and Start Talking

Chances are, most of us have entered into conversation and, before long, ended up defending ourselves with variations of phrases like, “that’s not what I meant!” and “you took it the wrong way!” We have fallen prey to misunderstanding, and a discussion has become an argument. This can happen when our intention differs from our impact.

“Intent”, by Merriam-Webster’s definition, is “the state of mind with which an act is done.” Maybe our goal was to come to a better understanding, offer support, explain something, or even apologize. From the time we spoke them to the time our words were processed, our intended message was skewed. It can be confusing and strike quietly, but the difference between intent and impact can have nasty outcomes.

Merriam-Webster defines impact as “influence, effect.” We might have intended to say one thing, but we had another effect. The compliment we thought we were giving about someone’s outfit today might have been received as a derogatory statement about the outfit they wore the day before. The genuine support we thought we were offering after someone failed a test might have been received as an indication that they didn’t try hard enough.

It’s easy to become defensive of our intent when we are coming from a place of love and are met with anger or hurt feelings because of the impact our words had on a loved one. We can’t always foresee these misunderstandings and prevent them from happening because it’s not possible to predict our impact on others 100% of the time. We can, however, use methods to support a more successful recovery from these moments.

When we find ourselves in this situation, it is helpful for us to be genuinely curious about the other person’s experience. How are they feeling? What about the interaction caused them to feel like that? Being curious about the other’s experience and our impact on them will foster our understanding of what is happening and will eventually bring us closer to one another. It is not helpful to continue our attempts to show the other person how wrong they are for feeling the way they feel and different ways in which it isn’t our fault.  This will expand the divide.

It can be challenging to lead with our curiosity, but perhaps this will be motivation; 1) Practicing this interest will almost always diffuse the situation faster. 2) There is a new sense of safety in the relationship since the both members have experienced one’s wish to understand and courage to talk about what didn’t feel like it was working for them.

Often, our go-to technique is to be defensive. It’s familiar to us, and it makes us feel powerful when we think we need it most. I have not had one person come to me and say, “Wow, I’m so glad I was so defensive with my partner. It helped them feel like they could talk to me.” I have had many people come to me and say that they are glad they exercised curiosity while discussing a conflict.

Most of the time we have loving intentions, but when love is not the impact our loved one’s experience, we need to be curious about why.

Love and Be loved,
Natalie