How good is your Communication?
In more than a decade of providing couples therapy, every couple who has every asked to work with me has said the exact same thing.
Me: “What brings you to therapy?”
Partner who initiated the therapy: “We need to work on our communication.”
This always means something wildly different from one couple to the next. What does working on communication mean to you?
I grew up in a family where letting each other know how we were feeling was so foreign that I didn’t get much practice even noticing what I was feeling. Because emotions were never talked about, I didn’t really understand what they felt like, when I was having them, least of all how to talk about them with other people who may have affected them. In order to tell your partner or your mom or your brother “I’m really disappointed about…” requires first knowing that you feel disappointed. If your family didn’t say much about feeling happy/sad/scared/mad, you may not have gotten much education on what each of those feels like to even know for yourself.
Mindfulness practices get us in touch with our emotions by bringing awareness to our bodies. Our bodies are where emotions happen so… spoiler! Becoming more acquainted with, aware of, and spending time focusing on the experience of being in your body is going to make you better at understanding your emotions, communicating them, and therefore improving your relationships.
In therapy, I had to learn how to communicate because, even though I can be onstage talking to thousands of people, communicating my personal emotions to the people around me was so hard. Even just saying, You upset me because of this and that was extremely difficult for me. So when I was on a tour bus seven months out of the year with my best friends, and unable to communicate how I felt to them, it was going to go wrong somewhere.
Now when I am frustrated, though, I can tell them why. When I am sad, I can tell them why — and not feel guilty for doing so. It's made touring life so much easier, and it's made communicating about work so much easier, because there's no loaded emotional bulls*** in between. ~Lizzo, NBC News