How to communicate better with your partner
Partnering can be emotionally messy business, and talking about hard feelings with your partner can be even messier. Like it or not, making someone your significant other is like handing them a set of keys to the most tender parts of your heart. And since no one is perfectly attentive, patient and understanding all the time, you’re inevitably going to sting each other time and again without even trying. Learning how to communicate more skillfully about your feelings and your needs can mean the difference between a minor kerfuffle and week-long standoff. But by slowing down and being intentional with timing and language, you and your partner can get back into secure connection in time for dinner.
If your efforts at communicating about sensitive things feel like they’ve been backfiring or falling flat, try out some of these principles, inspired by the techniques we use in couples therapy.
Step 1: SLOW YOUR ROLL
Most of the time that we are feeling freshly offended by a partner, we are flooded with some combination of anger and fear - anger over how sad or ashamed they made us feel, fear over how they will react to being confronted about it. When we are anxious or angry, our bodies are moving faster - more blood pumping, more breath moving, more energy metabolizing, more neurons firing. When we start speaking from this state, we are more likely to fall into self-protective habits, and say something harsh or accusatory that will cause our partners to defend and close up, when what we really want is to reach their hearts. From a calmer body state, it is much easier to communicate with clarity and directness about exactly what you need from your partner.
Luckily, all you need to do is wait. Your nervous system has built-in mechanisms for calming itself down after a surge of emotion. They kick in automatically if you give them some time. Even the amount of time it takes for one or two deep breaths can be enormously helpful. Meditation teacher Tara Brach calls this strategy taking the “sacred pause”, opening up a little space in time, into which rushes choice and possibility. The longer the pause, the more our abilities to witness ourselves, consider context, and empathize with others come back online. From that more choiceful, less reflexive state, we have a better chance of saying what’s important and leaving out what’s not.
Step 2: TALK ABOUT YOURSELF
The next principle is to, as best you can, speak only about your experience. As Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication system teaches, a lot of well-intentioned sharing goes awry because it focuses too much on the offender and not the victim. Even a calm, measured communication can easily get derailed if it includes too much speculation about the offending partner’s state of mind (e.g. “You clearly just don’t care about my feelings” or “You did this because you still can’t let go of that thing from last year”). Partners will very likely tense up or shut down when they feel pigeonholed or therapized, and then the important part of your message - the feeling you’re having and what you need next- won’t have a receptive place to land.
At the ninja level, see if you can even avoid editorializing about what was done to you. For example, rather than “Why did you attack me like that?”, try “Why did you say that to me?” The second option honors a legitimate need you have (for an explanation of their intentions), without also making an accusation along the way. This helps your partner keep their attention on you and your experience, rather suddenly needing the spotlight on their own reaction to your word choice.
Step 3: MAKE A REQUEST
Therapists train themselves over thousands of hours to be able to respond skillfully to any feeling a client brings, even if it’s a negative feeling about us, the therapist. But for the average person, however wonderful they may be, it is not intuitive how to be helpful when a feeling is shared point blank, ESPECIALLY if it’s about something they themselves are responsible for.
Knowing this, we can make it easier for our partners by coming to them with a specific request. Rather than just talking about how I feel and leaving it for my partner to figure out what to do next, I complete my communication by asking for exactly what I need. Here’s an example:
“I feel really hurt when you answer every text while we’re talking, like I’m not interesting enough.”
If I stop here, I’m leaving it to my partner to figure out precisely what I need or how to soothe me. If they get it wrong (over-apologizing, under-apologizing, giving excuses, getting defensive, and on, and on), I leave myself open to getting even more hurt and disappointed. But if I instead continue…
“Would it be okay for us to keep our phones in our pockets when we’re hanging out?”
Now I’ve given my partner a very simple emotional task, one that you don’t need years of supervised practice to handle skillfully. If they understand their impact on me and feel willing to meet my needs better in the future, they can indicate that simply by saying yes. And if their answer is no, then that is very important information too. It might be that my partner has a competing need that they can help me understand (e.g. it’s busy season at work), in which case I can take their behavior less personally and adjust my expectations. Or, the no answer can bring our attention to important stuff that needed to be addressed, perhaps revealing a deeper clash of values or unaddressed tensions in the relationship.
Try these out the next time you have something sensitive to tell your partner, and encourage your partner to get into it too. And of course, for all the issues that are too thorny to communicate about at home, there’s always couples therapy :)