When not officiating weddings,
among other things, I teach at UCLA Extension.
Last month I finished up my eleven-week course, The Dynamics Of Interpersonal Communication.
All of my communication work
(including my pre-marital communication coaching) is based in the belief that
we all do what we do and say what we say for a reason. No one “just is”. Flowing from that is my conviction that in
every relationship, over time, we fall into dance steps, patterns for dealing
with conflict as well as for expressing feelings, needs and desires. The question, though, becomes – are those
dance steps working for you or are they sabotaging you and your partner?
Earlier today I got an email from
Pamela, one of my students. She wrote:
Recently my
boyfriend and I have really been working on our communication. For perhaps the
very first time I noticed that when I'm upset and need to ask him something, I
get very frustrated and then just explode into accusatory statements instead of
explaining what I want or what I’m feeling.
Usually that
sets off our “normal” fight of “YOU never. . .well, YOU never. . .” but
this time I stopped and told him, “Look,
I have a lot of trouble with this so can you please hug me and work with me
instead of reacting to me?”
And he actually
did!
It was an
interesting moment for both of us. He
said to me, “Well, I never knew that. I
thought you were just cruelly accusing me, doing your usual annoying girlfriend
thing.”
We talked
about ways I can bring up issues without waiting too long and then
exploding. And now he’s being less
reactive to my tone and more understanding when I repeat something three times
in a row – he gets that it’s because I'm having difficulty expressing my self and
am caught in a “broken record mode”.
Now when I
do that (which I did this morning), he just pretends to be a broken record too
and we make it a joke between us.
I’m excited for Pamela and her
boyfriend because of the good that has come about from their mutual kindness
and determination to break a habit that chipped away at the quality of their
life together.
Pamela’s boyfriend thought her
lashing out was just a “girlfriend thing”.
It wasn’t. However, it wasn’t
until she came clean and actually asked him for what she needed that he was
able to really understand what was going on.
This was a breakthrough moment in
their relationship. And, hey, never
underestimate the power of a good hug!
Pamela reminds us all that life
really can be far simpler than we make it out to be!
No comments:
Post a Comment