Healing our Relationships Using Conscious Communication

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
~ Mother Theresa

In my last post, I promised to continue our exploration into healthy communication. I mentioned that I had just read a book titled Conscious Communication: How to Establish Healthy Relationships and Resolve Conflict Peacefully While Maintaining Independence by Miles Sherts.

The author starts out by saying that when we are in conflict with someone, we typically assume the source of our frustration is them, not us. But, he says, “A way through conflict opens when you see that the cause is not the other people who seem to be opposing you — it is the way you perceive those people and the assumptions you make about them.”

Sherts invites us to challenge the stories we tell ourselves about what’s going on with others so we can see what is actually happening with them. This harkens back to my very first post on this blog, about how curiosity is such a useful relationship tool.

Throughout the book he suggests practices that help us disrupt our tendency to interpret the actions of others as personal attacks, so we can see the situation from their point of view. Hard as it can be to believe it in the moment, conflict can resolve spontaneously when we take the time to ask questions and understand fully why other people are doing what they’re doing. At that point, we’re able to change our approach to them, and take positive steps to heal the relationship.

The author makes the point that the communication patterns most of us learned when we were young were not as healthy or effective as they could have been. They were unconscious—we simply learned to respond the way we heard others respond. But social rules are changing rapidly, and now that we know more about what inspires healthy interactions, we need a conscious reset on how we communicate.

As we discovered in last week’s post on boundaries, changing our patterns as adults requires quite a bit of effort, but the rewards are great. Once more of us learn the new tools (as opposed to rules), more appropriate for the times we live in, we will be better able to stay calm and listen to each other in order to avoid conflict. When we’re able to clearly articulate our needs and feelings, we will also be able to negotiate our differences.

Before delving into the healthy tools, Sherts devotes a whole chapter to the “Blocks to Connection” in our typical responses that prevent us from having more peaceful relationships. They come from judging, advising, blaming, shaming, and imposing our own values, which set us up for power struggles. To get beyond them, he says, we need to look inside and ask ourselves what we want from our interactions. He asks “Is the way you’re communicating helping you feel more connected to the person or is it creating more distance?”

Too much of our conversation these days is about trading opinions, especially online, rather than listening to understand. Talking about ideas is more comfortable (and less vulnerable) than talking about how we feel and what we need. But when we have a clash of ideas, and our egos get involved, it can lead to us being overly emotional. In the heat of the moment, we can say things we don’t mean, which can be hard to pull back from.

Most of us have not been taught healthy ways to deal with our emotions, which involve properly identifying and naming them, as Brené Brown teaches us in Atlas of the Heart, and then doing the internal work to figure out what we need. That’s why much of Conscious Communication is dedicated to the idea of independence—that is it our job to learn to handle our own emotions rather than blame others for us getting out of control. We can ask others to be sensitive to our triggers, but at the same time we should be working on the root cause of them so we can heal ourselves.

As I suggested last week, this book pairs well with The Book of Boundaries by Melissa Urban. We are much better able to keep our emotions in check when we’re able to set limits with ourselves and others. If we do so on a daily basis, we will be far calmer much of the time rather than being ready for a fight at a moment’s notice. Boundaries allow us to create a safe space for ourselves and others, and keep our connections intact because we are meeting our own needs most of the time.

Many of us are increasingly distressed about the divisiveness in the country, but feel helpless to do anything about it. Strong (and mostly negative) emotion seems to be a hallmark of our times. One step we can all take is to learn more about healthy communication and practice using the tools that allow for not only calmer discourse, but discussion that actually leads to more loving connections. At this point it seems that the only way to heal our country is from the inside out—to look at ourselves rather than expecting the change to come from others.

We have work to do, my friends, but I believe in our ability to evolve. As Oprah has often said, quoting her friend Maya Angelou, “When we know better, we do better.”

Affectionately,

Elaine