Listening

 I work with a lot of people who ask for help with communication skills.  Communication issues often interfere with happiness or contentment in couples' relationships.  When you think about communication skills, what comes to mind? 

Of course, it's important to be able to express yourself well and say what you mean, but it is equally important to become a good listener.  Good listening is at least half of communication.

What I find is that very often people don't really do a great job of listening.  This is true for a variety of reasons:

• They are thinking about what they will say next instead of what the other person is saying.
• They are reacting internally and their feelings are interfering with their ability to listen.
• They are so focused on "winning" that they, quite honestly, don't really care what the other person thinks, feels, or needs.

Solving a problem often starts with good listening.

In order to solve a problem with your partner, it is important to sit down and have a discussion about the problem.  Listen intently to each other in order to see the problem through your partner's eyes.  Once you each see through the other person's eyes, you can very often understand why the problem exists in the first place and you can work to resolve the issue. 

Good listening is a gift to your partner and to your relationship.  It communicates respect and an openness to change.  It leads to deeper understanding, and it can lead to greater intimacy over time. 

Fog

We have been having an extra long period of fog here in our area. I'm not talking about fog that burns off by 9 or 10 a.m. This fog can last until early afternoon and then rolls back in in early evening. It is frustrating. It causes all kinds of road mishaps. It is something that builds uncertainty into our plans for the day sometimes.

When I'm driving on the freeway in thick, thick fog (the kind where you can barely see 1/4 mile ahead of you) it always has a feeling of uncertainty. What if there is an accident ahead that I can't see? What if the fog gets worse up there? Maybe I should get off and wait. But what if just 1/2 mile up the road it is completely clear? What to do. What to do.

I think that there are some things about fog that can be applied to our relationships. Mostly in the area of understand what our partner is thinking, feeling, wanting, or needing.

When there are things in our relationship that cause us issues, it is probably because we "can't see through the fog" and neither can our partner.

Here is an example:

A woman sees her husband's frustration in looking for something he has misplaced. She feels compassion for him, and offers to help. He gets very angry and yells at her, "I can do it myself."

She feels confused and literally "in a fog" as to why he would react so strongly and negatively to her offer of help. On her side of the "fog," she felt compassion and love and care which prompted her to offer help. On his side of the "fog" he feels angry and put down when she offers help.

The only way to break through the fog is to talk it out and see "through the fog" and understand what is on each side of this murky abyss.

They sit down later and talk about what each was feeling. It turns out that he had been beating himself up for misplacing the thing he was looking for, and in his head the tapes were playing. Tapes from his childhood of his dad telling him he was a loser and would never amount to anything.

Aha, now it makes sense to her why he reacted as he did to her offer of help. He wasn't reacting to her. He was reacting to his dad and the old tapes.

So what is the "fog" in your relationship? When things "don't make sense," try to remember that on your partner's side of the "fog" it makes perfect sense to him/her. Talk about it so that you can peer through the fog and see what is on the other side.

Things that make no sense to us make perfect sense to our partners, and the only way to understand is to communicate.