Posted By Compassion Services on Jun 17, 2013 | 2 comments

Communication, or should I say communication breakdown, is one of the major causes of conflict in marriage. What happens? When we fall in love we spend hour after hour talking and sharing our hearts … and then a few years down the track we tip-toe around each other and find communication extremely difficult. How come?
As with everything there is no simple answer, but I believe one of the main reasons we struggle is because of conflict. As a relationship grows, and as we love our partner more and more, the natural tendency is to avoid conflict. This works well in the short term but wreaks havoc in the long term. Almost daily I will hear one of the partners in couple therapy express, “I DON”T KNOW WHO I AM ANYMORE”. Just today one client described themselves being “about one third the size they used to be!” (No, not talking about her weight)
So what happens? My observation is that people give up their opinions, their desires, their wants, sometimes even their rights, in an attempt to avoid conflict. As they do this they shrink back and disempower themselves. Sometimes this “shrinking back” is done under significant duress, and in extreme cases this occurs with domestic violence. But my experience tells me that often this shrinking back happens slowly and progressively …” I don’t want an issue so I just keep quiet”. If this happens often enough it becomes a pattern. The pattern eventually becomes entrenched and the end result is a disempowered spouse who has lost his/her voice. This can happen in a specific area of a relationship (e.g. finances, raising kids, sex etc) or in the relationship in general.
Often when I ask the couple when this problem occurred they simply say: “It just happened – we simply just can’t talk anymore”. As couples avoid conflict, slowly the safe zones become smaller and smaller until eventually there are very few safe areas left open for discussion …” Pass the salt please!”
Allow me to introduce Communication Rule Number 1: (would Principle be better than rule?)
Intimacy (emotional and intellectual communication) will inevitably involve ANXIETY.
It’s so important to just get this out there. When you are sharing something you care about, anxiety is normal. It happens! Why? Very simply, when we share something that is important to us we run some risk of being rejected, misunderstood or at least disagreed with. The greater the value of what we are sharing – the higher the risk. This is compounded in our relationships because the more important a person is to us, the more their rejection or disapproval can hurt us. Put simply, in many many relationships spouses stop taking the risk. As soon as this happens, intimate communication starts to die.
In the next blog I will talk about how to combat this impasse and I’ll introduce the topic of ‘self-soothing’.