a couple of people sitting at a table with cups of coffee
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez πŸ‡¨πŸ‡¦ / Unsplash

I've been a therapist for over 25 years. As you might imagine, communication comes up all the time, especially with couples, but it also comes up with kids, co-parenting with exes and sometimes bosses and coworkers. Sometimes people will say they're not good at it, but most of the time they're a bit mystified about why it's not going well, just seems so hard or has to be such a big deal. I've concluded much of it comes down to some simple misconceptions and a few seriously bad habits nearly all of us have. I'd like to tell you that makes communication easy to fix, but it doesn't. Let's see why.

Listening Comes First

Let's start with the biggest misconception: communicating is about talking. When I see couples, it's extremely common for one member to say the other just won't talk about their feelings or about things that are important for some reason. Unfortunately, it's not talking that's the problem. It's listening. Nearly all of us are bad at it. When I was being trained to be a therapist, more time and energy was put into developing our listening skills than anything else. When people feel they're being listened to, they talk. If you want that certain someone to talk more, pay attention to how you listen.

"No one ever listened himself out of a job."β€Š – β€ŠCalvin Coolidge

What do you need to be a better listener? It's not all that complicated, but that still doesn't make it easy. Let's first look at what usually gets in the way. It's fear and anxiety. It pops up in a number of ways. Here are a few common ones:
You're afraid to even bring something up. You wait a long time. You finally blow up, or the other person figures something out. It's on.

You or the other person do start to talk about something. Someone has to be right or "fix" things, so someone winds up having to defend themself or go on and on to "explain" them. Often, it's both parties and nobody is really listening. You can frequently tell because the same stuff keeps coming up, the same stuff keeps being said, the same "easy" solutions keep being stressed, and no one is ever satisfied.

One, the other or both parties get fed up with not being heard, get angry and start pushing buttons. This really amps up the drama and makes sure that not only is no one listening, no one is going to be able to figure out how to change anything either. The anger is rooted in the fear that you won't be heard, the other person doesn't care, or this is never going to end.

We're Not as Smart as We Think

The second misconception is that we're rational adults. We're neither when we're hungry, angry, tired or stressed. It doesn't take much to get us into even the lowest levels of fight or flight even in good times. Fight or flight changes our bodies. The effects on our brains automatically make us more emotional and less rational. Unfortunately, one of our most common emotional reactions is that we're still "really" being rational even when we're clearly upset or even yelling.

"The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."β€Š – George Bernard Shaw

The primary reason we lose rationality is that the smart parts of our brain lose blood flow during fight or flight, so that the more emotionally driven "emergency" parts of out brain can take care of business along with prepping our bodies. In effect, the smart parts suffer a brown out. It's called fight or flight because that's what it's meant to help us do. It's not flight, flight and think. Real rational thinking can only slow us down in an emergency and our bodies treat the more stressful things in our lives like life and death emergencies. Old habits and reflexes end up ruling the moment.

So, what do you need to do here? First, you have to manage your body. Use what rationality you still have to calm yourself. Start by paying attention to your breathing. Slow it down. Make it a little deeper or fuller. Just like fight or flight automatically ramps your body up, slow full breaths automatically slow your heart down which tells your body things are OK enough to dial it back down.

Even after your body starts calming, it still has a cocktail of stress hormones coursing through it. It will take some minutes more for those to fade out. You'll have to continue to pay attention yourself, because it will remain easy for you to re-escalate while they're around. Talking less and listening more helps here, too.

What should you be listening for? Listen for the other person's point, their biggest concern, the thing they're upset or passionate about. They're talking to you for a reason. What is it? They may not be saying it very well. They might be saying it quite loudly and rudely. They might be trying to push your buttons hard through most of it, but somewhere in there is something you need to recognize and actually start to deal with, even if you don't agree with it.

It helps if you assume the other person at least started your conversation with positive intent. Now, they're trying to communicate, and you want to be heard. When you find a way to show the other person you're really listening, mostly understand and acknowledge what they're saying (again, even if you don't necessarily agree with it), they'll be much more likely to listen to you.

When you understand what's important to the other person, you can connect what's important to you to it. You can identify the things you both want and show how your concerns actually line up with theirs and start working together. You start building a bridge and can actually reconnect and stop being at odds.

Mistakes Are Inevitable

Now, even when you're doing a pretty good job listening and you're connecting up with the things you both care about, you're still going to miscommunicate. This is where we all get lost. Miscommunication happens on both ends. Whether you're speaking or listening you'll eventually say something wrong or hear something that wasn't intended.

"I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure that you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."β€Š β€“β€Š Robert McCloskey

On the speaking end of things, you might have trouble finding the words you really want to use and make do with what comes to mind only to find you were not only clumsy but pushed buttons. The magic of unfortunate word choice occasionally claims us all. It often helps to take extra care in using simple plain language and to avoid using colorful emotionally loaded wording in tense or potentially tense conversations. Lay out, briefly describe and stick to the basic facts. Your interpretations, especially of someone else's motives or thinking, will get you into trouble. If you need to talk about what someone did, stick to the visible behavior or actions and avoid saying things about their character or who they are as a human being. Talk about it as if you were a neutral third party or a camera.

On the hearing end, things go wrong, too. People, especially tense angry ones, don't always try to communicate well. They might be loud, rude and push buttons on purpose. They might be vague and scattered all over the place. All of these make it hard to figure out what they mean or what might be important. It can also become increasingly difficult to keep your own feelings in check and even want to communicate accurately back. Remember your breath and to pay attention to your body. This isn't easy. It's even harder if you have a lifelong history of difficult relationships and verbal or other abuse to deal with. Minimize your own fight or flight tendencies.

"Show respect even to people who don't deserve it, not as a reflection of their character, but as a reflection of yours."β€Š – Dave Willis

If you start noticing either of you are having trouble with getting louder, tenser, more agitated or nastier, it's time to take a break. You need a timeout. You need to stop talking. You likely need to be where you can't see each other for a few minutes. The goal is to stop triggering and escalating each other. This is easier when you can't hear and see the other person, so you can focus on calming yourself and later thinking about what really needs to be understood from the other person's point of view.

You don't need to ruminate on your own stuff. You already know what you think. What didn't you hear? What did you miss, ignore or downplay. Was there something you just didn't want to deal with? It might help to keep in mind that when it's all about the dishes, it's probably not the dishes. The same would go for the socks on the floor. Something else likely matters here even more. What might it be?

"While you'll feel compelled to charge forward it's often a gentle step back that will reveal to you where you and what you truly seek."β€Š – Rasheed Ogunlaru

When you take a time out, plan when you're going to come back. Many couples have made a habit of dropping things only to have them repeatedly coming back louder. So, talk about taking a break for 30 minutes or an hour. If something's more complicated, consider tomorrow or talk about when you'll both have the time needed to do it justice. You won't get difficult, sensitive or complicated things figured out all at once. Work on it together for enough time to make some headway and to have a few things to try out or think about further.

Be as gentle, compassionate and understanding of each other as you can. Remember, you're trying to build a bridge to connect your goals to their goals. Keep your goals in mind as much as possible even when things are heating up. Forgetting your goals, getting loud or nasty and pushing buttons will prevent you from getting what you really want indefinitely. It also damages your relationship. Repeated damage creates distance, and distance eventually creates resentment, contempt and bitterness over the long haul.

Other Ways to Minimize Misunderstanding

It's not always the speaker or the hearer alone that create a misunderstanding. When I'm trying to get a thought out of my head and into yours, I usually have not just some words but a scene in mind. When you hear what I'm saying, you're building your own scene. There's a lot that can go wrong here. Our scenes get their details from our own separate memories and experiences. They really aren't going to look that much alike, and that's where the trouble starts. My scene might be simple and straightforward in my mind's eye. In yours, it might be unclear, weird or imply things that aren't good about you, people who are important to you or things that you really care about. There can easily be problems, possibly big, alarming ones, in there.

What can you do to prevent your anger or alarm from running off with you? Start by checking yourself. Stop assuming your scene is right even if it's very compelling and has lots of your history together behind it. You need to assume there are important things wrong with your scene. It's not that you might be wrong about something. It's that you are wrong about quite a few. Mark Manson talks about this in a very interesting way. Instead of trying to be more right we need to work on being less wrong every day. Ask questions. Check your scary scene stuff out with the other person. Ask them if you understood something correctly. Let them say it in different words.

"Part of being successful is about asking questions and listening to the answers."β€Š – Anne Burrell

If you've had a habit of telling people what their motivations are or that you know what they're really thinking and feeling, you're asking for trouble regularly. You're also guaranteed to be wrong in ways that will really count with the other person every time. Stop telling. Again, start asking. Start checking it out and calm yourself with answers that paint your scene more accurately. Always take care with what you think you know. That's always a lot different than what you can actually be sure of at any point in a conversation.

The Most Basic Principles to Keep in Mind

More than anything else staying curious, asking good questions and being respectful toward one another will help you clear up miscommunication faster and make it easier to enjoy each other's company more often. Your happiness is waiting. You can start practicing today.