Your ability to communicate can be your greatest asset. In truth, the most powerful tool available to you lies in the choice of words and nonverbal behaviors you use in your relationships with those you love. It is through your exchange of words and nonverbal behaviors that you exercise your power to build—or hinder—nurturing, strong, and mutually beneficial family relationships.
In other words, what you say and, especially, how you say things matters. Communication is often the key to unlocking the power you have to transform your life and relationships.
Why is communication a critical capacity?
Communication is critical because it is the means by which you exercise your personal power, which is both a vital human capacity and one of your core human needs. Personal power assists you to exercise your ability to make choices to live life in a way that you satisfy other core human needs, such as those for safety, belonging, love, esteem, fun, contribution, purpose, among others.
Talking signals that you want to share your experience of life with others you care about, and that you want to be known, understood and recognized for the ideas, choices and unique perspective you bring. The yearning to be appreciated, loved, and valued—regardless any limitations or mistakes, or even talents and successes—is a strong impulse within each of us.
Communication is also our means of showing others we care about them, their perspective, contribution and concerns—through how we listen to their talking. Since we all share these inner values in common, knowing how to express our love and appreciation in ways that our talking and listening inspire and energize our loved ones, is really, really important.
Why Conscious Communication?
Conscious Communication is a way of talking that focuses on the protection and building of strong, nurturing relationships. The purpose of Conscious Communication is to build quality relationships in which the needs of each person are equally valued and met through natural giving. Whereas the conscious use of communication unlocks doors to getting what you want and avoiding what you do not want in your relationships—the focus on protecting one another’s dignity makes it more likely that conscious listening to one another takes place.
In contrast, unconscious or habitual ways of communicating with your family members often have the opposite effect. When we communicate reactively, out of frustration, with anger, irritability or anxiety, this tends to produce defensiveness in others, thus, our attempts to influence them, regardless how helpful we are trying to be, are met with some or much resistance.
Conscious communication involves growing our awareness of what is going on within—our inner mental, emotional and physical experience of our interactions with others. This deepening of conscious living involves growing your awareness of relationships at two levels. You seek to grow awareness of how you relate to others, and at the same time, perhaps even more importantly, you grow awareness of how you relate to…YOU. This means developing awareness of what you tell yourself in your mind (self-talk), your feelings, wants, needs, hopes, expectations, and, in turn, the connections between your self-talk, feelings and behaviors.
In truth, to achieve the balance we want and need in life, it is equally important to learn to treat self with the same respect we want to show others—as it is to treat others as we want to be treated. The more we are able to consciously treat our self, mind and body, with gentleness, the more tenderness and compassion we create in our lives. Learning to understand and pay attention to what we feel and need also allows us to generate the loving energy it takes to truly care for who and what means most to us.
The questions of how “should” versus “choose” to Live?
At this point, you may be wondering, if talking is such a “loving” activity why do you experience so much pain in your communications with those you most care about? Alas, the yearning to be known and valued without conditions sets us up for possible conflicts in our relationships—simply because the “others” in our life share the same yearnings.
This in and of itself however does not produce the enormous problems we face. There is another explanation that is likely the real cause of so much pain in families: Most of us have been conditioned from childhood to compare and judge ourselves and others relentlessly.
This conditioning has taught us to look at self and the world in terms of external standards of what people “should” do that determines their “worth” in terms of dichotomous labels of inferior/superior, deserving/undeserving, powerful/powerless, friends/enemies, and so on. Too many of us, on too many occasions, have learned to focus our talking (and listening!) on fault-finding, blaming, and judging types of communications—seemingly persuaded that if we can “only” convince others to “see” how wrong they are (and how right we are), all problems would be solved, and everyone will be happy.
Naturally, since being judged and evaluated does not meet our needs for acceptance, love, esteem, etc., in our relationships, this triggers certain levels of fear and anxiety accordingly. In fact, it is the “shoulds” we tell ourselves in our self-talk that fuel the intensity of negative emotions of rage, depression, anxiety and fear. As an outcome, in a fault-finding environment, the natural—and strong—impulse to be valued unconditionally expresses itself as a sensitivity to conflict, and, in extreme cases, an avoidance of conflict. (And the avoidance or withdrawal from conflict is one of the most destructive patterns in couple relationships.)
This patterned mind-set robs us of feeling like the agents of our lives, and instead we succumb to feeling like victims. Another problem with this worldview is that it keeps us so busy looking outside ourselves to others for approval as to what we “should” do that we forget to look inside. Thus, we miss out on tuning into inner resources, such as our intuition and wisdom, to develop the inner confidence and stamina we need to protect ourselves from taking what others do and say personally.
The ability to not take things personally is a vital skill to have. It supports you to maintain your calm, for example, so that you are able to give the understanding a loved one needs to regulate and heal from a painful emotional experience.
How we get our basic needs met, in essence, depends on whether we view the world. In your worldview, is there an external set of “shoulds” that you use fear, shame, and guilt to get yourself and others to do, regardless of the outcomes on your joy and relationships?
This worldview also sets us up to think of conflicts as a competition. Who wins in these competitions? Of course, no one. Patterns of communication that involve blaming, fault-finding and attacking the other’s character, leave both parties feeling emotionally disconnected, detached, and drained. Even worse, it leaves persons, who intellectually “know” how much they love one another, feeling like enemies.
We need a compassionate way of talking with self and others that nurtures and strengthens our connections. The focus of change needs to be on making shifts in the way we talk to others—and ourselves.
Conscious Listening and Conscious Talking?
Conscious Communication involves both conscious listening and conscious talking.
Conscious listening is a way of listening with our heart. Often when we talk to each other, we do not listen mindfully, that is, we have not made a conscious intention to listen with our hearts to “know” and “understand” and “connect” to the feelings and yearnings beneath what we and others say and do. We may be distracted, partially listening, and partially thinking about something else. Or, it may be the case that, when we are engaged in a conflict, we are busy formulating a defensive response in our minds to what is being said. We do this because we assume we “know” the other. After all, we may tell ourselves, we have heard what this “opponent” is saying many times before, so why pay attention, when we could focus instead on how to respond so we can “win” the argument by making the other wrong, or blamed, or at fault?
Conscious talking is your opportunity to share your experience of life with others in a way that you increase the chances you will be heard and understood, in other words, in a way that will fulfill some of your core yearnings. You do this when your choice of words and body language honor the dignity of each person involved in the interaction. When you honor the need in you and others to be treated with dignity, you exercise your power to consciously protect and nurture your relationship. And, the building of a strong and secure relationship is what makes it more likely we can influence the other to respond to our requests, wants, and yearnings. Conscious talking involves the conscious use of our voice, words, touch, eye contact, and other non-verbal ways of communication, to consciously nurture and preserve the relationship.
Conscious Communication as a therapeutic tool?
If you and your loved ones find it difficult to respond to one another without habitual, automatic reactions, take heart. The reactivity is likely due to deep rooted meanings and past wounds, often stemming from childhood experiences, which are impacting your life and relationships today. The human brain does not know the difference between physical and psychological threats. How you express what’s on your mind, however, determines whether you and your family members will feel like team members or “enemies.”
Reactivity simply tells us that our brain has triggered our “fight or flight” survival response because we interpreted a situation to be “unsafe” for us. In such cases, therapy may provide life tools for individuals, couples and families to go about changing the way they communicate, consciously, at deeper levels of experience. Since automatic reactions are learned patterned responses that have formed, as a result of habitual practice, neuropathways in the brain, they can be transformed by the practice of available tools that support the development of new, more life enriching conscious responses.
Conscious Communication supports you to focus on protecting the quality of our relationships in a way in which the needs of all family members may be met through giving from a place of love and joy, rather than fear, guilt or shame. Free and open expression of thoughts and feelings is a hallmark of a healthy marriage. It is also the hallmark of healthy family relationships. When communication between members feels safe, loving, and satisfying, your relationships feel secure, gratifying and fulfilling.