Navigating Healthy Love: The Art of Communication and Emotional Expression
Permission to feel: Forgiveness
Little heads up for those keeping track. Each week I write about how to recognise, process and communicate different feelings; otherwise known as my permission to feel series.
A couple of weeks ago I touched upon the subject of love, more specifically the components of healthy love, and we have found ourselves in a little rabbit warren because it turns out healthy love isn’t that straight forward.
Third on the list when nurturing healthy love is escaping the drama triangle, which I have written about here already, so let’s move on to healthy communication.
Still with me?
That’s why I love ya!
Problems with communication that don’t resolve over time can lead to strained relationships…
How can we learn to communicate in a way in which everyone can feel heard and we don’t have to surrender to silence?
Like I say in my poem, healthy communication takes the commitment of both parties to look past the hurt.
Uh, what now?
EXACTLY! I personally don’t believe that you can look past the hurt until you have felt that it has been witnessed in some way. Actually, don’t just take it from me:
In their book ‘Book Of Forgiving’ Desmond and M-Po Tutu describe the process of forgiveness in four stages.
Telling the story
Naming the hurt
Granting forgiveness through recognising shared humanity
Then renewing or releasing the relationship.
One way in which communication can break down is that people are in such dire need to feel witnessed, to tell their story of hurt, mistrust and fear that they have no space to hear the other party.
We cannot make another party hear us if they are not open to that. Trying to make someone hear our hurt when they refuse to is a form of self-harm. I KNOW, read that again!
Trying to make someone hear our hurt when they refuse to is a form of
self-harm.
First of all, we have to witness it for ourselves so that we can be responsive to it rather than react from it. This may not be easy, you may dismiss or deny your hurt which is when therapy can help.
When conflict arises, one healthy approach is to take some time out, before hurtful things are said, in order to defuse the intensity. You can say to the other person that you need to take some time out to cool down, but that you will be back to discuss it further.
Then:
Take a few deep breaths, breathing out longer than breathing in, this helps to get your body into a ‘safe and social’ state rather than ‘fight and flight’.
Name the feeling you are feeling and rate the intensity of it. Obviously, if you read my permission to feel series each week you’ll be a pro 😂, but even reducing it down to ‘mad, sad, bad or glad’ can be a start.
Do something to soothe yourself (EFT is great for this)
Go back to the rating you gave it. If the rating is above a 5 then take time to reflect:
Does something from this scenario remind me of something from my past?
Are there old messages that are being replayed in what is being said here?
Does this remind me of something from my family of origin?
Ask yourself - how am I trying to make up for what happened before in this scenario now (are you trying to correct a sense of injustice, for example.)
This is how you can witness your story so that you can then share your story.
We cannot give our hurt to someone else, but we can share it.
Often when we are in conflict we are busy trying to fling our hurt at each other, but recognising what baggage it may be triggering is a start to sharing it rather than trying to chuck it at someone else.
You can then reconvene and own your part of what is going on.
A helpful framework for communicating this is through saying,’
When you (what you observed) I felt (feeling), what I need is (state need), would you be willing to (request concrete action).
Let me give you an example. I would struggle with this quite a bit with my husband. We would both be extremely busy and I would find it hard to find the right time to talk about family arrangements which didn’t lead to him feeling harassed or overstretched, which left me feeling… harassed and overstretched.
Through doing this process we realised that I had a pattern of trying to fit in a conversation regardless of whether my husband had just walked in the door or was just about to leave the house. I was busy trying to fit things in and no time ever seemed like a good time, so in my frustration I just upped my game of trying to squeeze in conversations. Well, I am an ‘up my gamer’ kind of gal when frustration hits, so no surprise there.
At the end of going through this process, we agreed a couple of things:
For us both to ask whether it was a good time or not to discuss family matters
A shorthand for when it wasn’t ‘Time crunch’ if one of us felt under time pressure, ‘feasting’ if one of us was trying to eat in peace and needed to rest and digest and ‘landing’ when one of us had just come into the house and needed to ‘land’ in our new environment before we took on any more information.
Healthy communication takes work, but the work leads to greater integrity, deeper relationships and code words. 🤷🏻♀️
Are you interested in learning more? I’m beginning to curate a programme to help people stop living apologetically and start living poetically!
What does living poetically mean?
✨It means living imaginatively, sensitively and emotionally but with containment and style.
✨It’s being grounded in one’s own sense of self.
✨It’s learning how to handle situations based on one’s values
✨It’s living from a place of strength, not lack
Email me to be the first to find out more.