3 Tips for Mindful Communication in Intimate Relationships
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Negative communication can spell doom for intimate relationships
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Margie Ulbrick offers 3 mindful communication tips to help your relationship flourish
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We have relationship counsellors available on Welldoing here
Relationships are central to healthy lives. However, the quality of the relationship is crucial. Learning to take another’s needs into account while simultaneously looking after our own is a key difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships. When we are able to do this in intimate relationships, a genuine mutuality is fostered. No one needs to win, and useless battles about power and control tend to be less prevalent. When we learn to identify and bring loving presence to the vulnerable parts of ourselves and of our partner, we can let go of expectations that things must look a certain way and instead bring acceptance to what is actually occurring.
Relationships fail for many reasons. But generally there are long-term patterns of communication difficulties and conflict, as well as issues with intimacy. Our needs for intimacy vary and this can give rise to problems if not navigated with awareness. Even where there is not a mismatch of needs and both parties want deeper connection, often they do not know how to achieve this. Sometimes partners do not even know that this is the problem — they just experience the resulting conflict with no real idea of what is causing it.
As these difficulties arise, it can become difficult to know when and how to talk about them. Partners might hold back from saying what is truly important, convincing themselves that it isn’t really an issue anyway, while becoming consumed with resentment and tending to blame the other. To save the relationship, both partners have to be brave enough to start saying what is actually on their minds. This begins with learning how to communicate effectively.
1. The importance of timing
A common complaint we hear in our therapy practices is of a partner wanting to discuss difficult issues late at night or when the other person is stressed or tired. This can cause arguments and prevent couples from even trying to talk about important issues. It can help to have an agreement about when is a good time, or to request a discussion with a brief ‘heads up’ about what the concern is and an agreement to discuss it later.
However, it is important that an alternative time is specified so the person requesting a discussion is not left hanging or feeling stonewalled. In this way both people care for the relationship. There is a commitment to discuss important matters and not to sweep things under the carpet, but to do so in a manner and time when both can be fully present.
2. Expressing our vulnerability
It is also important to endeavour to drop beneath reactivity and defensiveness and speak from a place of vulnerability. When we are defensive or attacking, this tends to engender defensiveness and counterattacks in others. Instead, when we learn to express our needs more directly, they are more likely to be met.
To communicate effectively, we need to be connected to love for ourselves and our partner. Rather than trying to make the other person wrong, we need to just do the best we can and forgive ourselves over and over for our humanness. This requires us to be connected to our bodies, in touch with a sense of caring about our partner as well as ourselves. Then we can directly express our needs rather than talking about what our partner is doing ‘wrong’.
Demanding our partner change leads to defensiveness, whereas describing our experience in a non-blaming way makes it much more likely we will get what we need. Naming our feelings and acknowledging that we are being triggered stops us from going to the default mode of reactivity. It activates the prefrontal cortex as we in effect press pause and sense inwards, and reduces our tendency to move to blame and project the discomfort outside of ourselves. We instead start to speak our truth.
3. Experiencing emotions mindfully
It is important to make a distinction between experiencing an emotion and acting it out. For instance, when feeling angry we can start recognizing angry reactions as they occur rather than letting anger become aggressive. We can then let our partner know that we are reacting and take responsibility for calming ourselves down. Perhaps our partner can hold space and help soothe us, or perhaps we will need to do it for ourselves.
If we can’t stay in contact with our partner and use mindfulness to cultivate a sense of mental space, we might even need to negotiate taking some physical space until we can calm down. The important thing to do here is to have an agreement that we will return once we are calm and address whatever triggered us. Returning to resolve the issue prevents a pattern of avoidance being set up. Taking space allows us to acknowledge our own reactivity and to sense how to express ourselves from a place of presence.
When we take responsibility for our emotions and learn to stay mindful while experiencing them, our emotions actually become a source of wisdom. Many people are at first surprised to hear that their anger is an extremely intelligent emotion. But if we remove judgement about an emotion like anger, we can start to see that it is often a sign that a need is not being met or a boundary has been violated. For instance, we may have difficulty being with an underlying emotion such as sadness, so instead we cover over our vulnerability with anger. Once we have recognised that we are doing this, we can pause when we feel an emotion arising and become curious about what information this is giving us rather than feeding or fighting the secondary emotion.
Having realised this, we can ask directly for needs to be met or boundaries to be respected rather than just saying that we are angry — or worse, acting it out. This makes it more likely our partner will hear this as a request rather than an attack, and we are then more likely to get what we actually need.
Learning to sit with and tolerate our own difficult emotions also means we stay more present, which enhances our capacity to read emotional cues from our partner. It helps us to focus on the truth of what we are feeling and not get caught up in the stories we tell ourselves about our partner. Mindfulness lets us tolerate our feelings — and even welcome them — so we can then be curious about what they might be alerting us to. It also helps us notice when we are being reactive, defensive, critical or attacking, and to simply acknowledge these reactions rather than feeding or fighting them. Through this, we can access our feelings more fully and deepen intimacy.
Exercise: Speaking from the heart
Sit with your partner and take a few moments to both connect with each other. Open to a space of loving presence.
Now, decide which of you will speak first. If you are the speaker, first pause and sense your heart. What does your heart most want to say to your partner? Allow this to be a gentle inquiry and let the answer emerge in its own time. When words come, speak them as clearly as you can. Then pause and notice what it feels like to have spoken them. See if you can sense their effect on your partner.
If no words come, simply sit in silence, sensing your heart. Words will arise in their own time.
The listener’s role is simply to stay present and receive the words.
Don’t offer advice or feedback.
After a few minutes, when it feels right, swap roles.
Margie Ulbrick, with Dr Richard Chambers, is the author of Mindful Relationships: Creating Genuine Connection with Ourselves and Others
Watch Julie Menanno on the impact of clashing attachment styles:
