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Communication
How to Enhance and Enrich Your Marriage
By Garrett Coan, Psychotherapist
Any marriage counselor will tell you that one of the most common
problems observed when couples come for help is poor communication
skills. People get into trouble in their marriages because they have
not developed their ability to listen and communicate.
Barriers to Communication
These are a few of the things that prevent people
from communicating effectively:
• Not knowing how to communicate properly
• Not taking the time to think through what you
want to say
• Not taking the time to anticipate what your
partner might be thinking and feeling
• Fear of revealing too much of yourself
• Fear of your partner’s anger
• Not wanting to hurt your partner’s feelings
Empathy and Acceptance
People marry because they want to spend the rest
of their lives with their partner. They have every hope of growing
together and creating a relationship that makes them feel
emotionally healthy. Two factors that are necessary for this to
happen are empathy and acceptance on the part of both partners.
Empathy is the capacity to put oneself in
another’s shoes and understand how they view their reality, how they
feel about things.
Demonstrating empathy and acceptance is critical
to maintaining a strong relationship. Let’s look next at some
communication skills that enable you to create a climate of empathy,
acceptance, and understanding. First we will explore a skill called
Active Listening.
Active Listening
Active listening is a way of communicating that
creates the important climate of empathy, acceptance, and
understanding.
• It is a two-step response to a statement made
by your partner.
• It includes reflecting back what emotion you
detected in the statement, and the reason for the emotion. This is
what active listening sounds like: “Sounds like you’re upset about
what happened at work.”
“You’re very annoyed by my lateness, aren’t you?”
Why Active Listening Is a Valuable Skill
Active listening is a valuable skill because it
demonstrates that you understand what your partner is saying and how
he or she is feeling about it.
• Active listening means restating, in your own
words, what the other person has said.
• It’s a check on whether your understanding is
correct.
• It demonstrates that you are listening and
that you are interested and concerned.
Actively listening does not mean agreeing with the
other person. The point is to demonstrate to your partner that you
intend to hear and understand his or her point of view. This is good
for your relationship for several reasons:
• When someone demonstrates that they want to
understand what you are thinking and feeling, it feels good.
• It creates good feelings about the other
person.
• Restating and checking understanding promotes
better communication and fewer misunderstandings.
More Active Listening Examples
Here are some more examples of active listening:
“You sound really stumped about how to solve
this problem.”
“It makes you angry when you find errors on
Joey’s homework.”
“Sounds like you’re really worried about Wendy.”
“I get the feeling you’re awfully busy right
now.”
More Communication Skills
Although our space is limited in this short
newsletter, there are a few more communication skills that I must
mention. These include asking open-ended questions, making summary
statements to check understanding, and encouraging your partner to
open up and elaborate by using neutral questions and phrases.
Open-ended questions begin with what, why, how do,
or tell me.
• These questions get the other person to open
up and elaborate on the topic.
• Asking these kinds of questions gets the other
person involved by giving him or her a chance to tell what he or
she thinks or knows.
• These questions are designed to encourage your
partner to talk.
• They are useful when the other person is
silent or reluctant to elaborate.
• They are also useful in dealing with negative
emotions (such as anger or fear), since they help encourage the
other person to vent feelings.
Summary Statements
Summary statements sum up what you hear your
partner saying.
• A summary statement enhances your partner’s
self-esteem by showing that you were listening carefully.
• It also helps you focus on facts, not
emotions.
• It helps your partner clarify his or her own
thinking by hearing your summary.
• Summary statements also help you deal with
multiple disagreements so you can deal with them one by one.
• They help eliminate confusion by focusing on
the relevant facts.
• Summary statements also help you separate the
important issues from the trivial.
Neutral Questions and Phrases
Neutral questions and phrases get your partner to
open up and elaborate on the topic you are discussing.
• These questions are more focused than
open-ended questions.
• They help your partner understand what you are
interested in hearing more about.
• They further communication because they help
you gain more information.
• When you ask these kinds of questions, you
demonstrate to your partner that you are interested and that you
are listening.
Business Skills for Marriages
You might be surprised to hear that the same
skills that help people succeed in business can also be used to
build a better marriage. Like any business, a marriage is a
partnership of people.
Many of the skills that make businesses run successfully—planning,
organizing, and setting goals—also can be applied to running your
marriage successfully. These are some of the skills that will
strengthen any marriage:
1. Create an overall vision of what you want
your life to be like; consider all life areas.
2. Develop a long-range strategy.
3. Set short-term and long-term goals.
4. Plan the steps that will help you accomplish
your goals.
5. Organize projects.
6. Manage projects.
7. Manage people.
8. Evaluate progress and results at regular
intervals.
9. Revise goals as needed.
Garrett Coan is a professional therapist, coach
and psychotherapist. His two Northern New Jersey office locations
are accessible to individuals who reside in Bergen County, Essex
County, Passaic County, Rockland County, and Manhattan. He offers
online and telephone coaching and counseling services for those who
live at a distance. He can be accessed through
http://www.creativecounselors.com
or 201-303-4303. |
