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Guest Post by Jonathan Robinson
In my many years of experience counseling couples, I’ve found that what most people want above all else in a relationship are moments of care, understanding, and empathy—I use the acronym CUE. When we feel our partners truly “get us,” it feels fantastic. When our partners are upset, we need to take the cue to be on CUE. When our partners feel that we understand their pain or know their joy, they feel loved by us. How sweet that can be. Regrettably, however, such moments are rare in most relationships.
While we all want to feel understood, the way we tend to communicate makes this harder and harder. Even when communicating face to face, people often misunderstand each other. And talking by phone or communicating by text or email makes empathic understanding even more challenging. Yes, emojis can sometimes help, but they certainly don’t replace the impact of a lover holding your hand, eyes welling up with tears, as you describe an awful day. We want to know that our partners truly care, and we often don’t care what they have to say until we feel that they really do care.
When people are stressed, they are generally not at their best. After millions of years of evolution, we respond to stress in one of three ways—we fight, we flee, or we freeze. Perhaps you’ve noticed fighting words coming from your partner when you’ve given them some simple feedback. Your statement “I don’t think that outfit will be appropriate for the party” can be met with vitriol and venom—“Look who’s talking. You don’t look so great yourself.” And the fight is on. Conquer or be conquered. This used to be helpful when faced with a tiger on the plains of Africa 200,000 years ago, but it is not useful when dealing with your mate.
Another way we’re conditioned to react to stress is to take flight, or flee. Once again, when facing a tiger, this is an effective strategy. But if you avoid needed conversations in your relationship, those needs don’t magically go away. In fact, they can soon pile up into a wall of resentment. The next thing you know, you’re paying your hard-earned money to a therapist to avoid an impending divorce. Since the whole point of a partnership is to share love and joy, fleeing is not an effective strategy.
A third survival strategy people fall back on when under stress is simply to freeze. You can see this in other animals as well. When a mouse’s life is in danger, it sometimes simply “plays dead,” hoping that the cat won’t bother it. In my couples counseling practice, I often see partners “numb out,” or simply not communicate anything about what they feel or want. Their hope is that, if they appear frozen, their partners won’t bother them and will leave them alone. In fact, sometimes this strategy can work. Even when it does “work,” however, the results are less than satisfying for both people. Eventually, partners can simply “give up,” as all the love that was once in the relationship is replaced by animosity and resentment.
Because people today are dealing with more stress than ever, it’s critically important to know how to communicate when under pressure. Unfortunately, our biologically programmed reactions— fight, flee, or freeze—tend to make matters even worse. Just when we need to be at our best, we tend to lose our heads. So what can couples do to avoid these ingrained instinctive reactions? What they need are new communication skills and new mechanisms to make sure they use them.
Even though I teach workshops and write books about communication, when severely stressed, I find that it’s easy to forget everything I know. For couples who have much less training than I do, I can imagine it may be nearly impossible to go beyond fight, flight, or freeze responses when faced with a big problem. That’s why I’ve developed tools that can work under even the most stressful conditions. Whether your immediate goal is to connect deeply with your mate or to tackle a thorny issue, you’ll find practices in this book that can create miracles.
Currently, about 45 percent of marriages end in divorce—and the failure rate of second and third marriages is even worse. That means people aren’t getting better at relationships and communication just through repetition. Most of us have had very little communication training, so our communication skills are weak and ineffective. Learning how to master these skills is a bit like building muscles. The structure of the practices in this book will allow you to build your communication “muscles” in a safe and deliberate manner. Once your communication abilities are well developed, you will no longer need as much structure to get to your desired outcome. You will have the communication strength to handle almost any situation.
Finding the Target
Since care, understanding, and empathy are things that we all want, why are they so hard to get? First, we forget (or don’t realize) that empathy and understanding are our true goals. So we often lose track of what the real target is and spend our time, energy, and words in pursuit of other ends. For example, you think that proving your partner wrong will help you to feel good—and indeed, feeling you are right and your partner is wrong can temporarily make you feel very powerful. Yet there’s always a price to be paid. It may feel good in the moment to blame our partners and put them down, but the result of such behavior is never more love and less conflict.
Simply having a clearly defined target will get you halfway to your goal of more love. I learned the importance of having a clearly defined target while in college. One day, my roommate challenged me to a game of one-on-one basketball. He was a great basketball player. In fact, he was the only freshman on the varsity team. However, I felt I could use my brain to overcome his talent. I accepted his challenge on one condition—that I be allowed to place a one-ounce object anywhere on the court before the game began. My roommate accepted my terms, and we headed for the court. Once there, I took out my one-ounce object—a blindfold— and placed it in a strategic location—over my roommate’s eyes. Then I announced: “Let the games begin!”
Admittedly, it still ended up being a rather close game! But I was able to beat one of the best basketball players around because I knew exactly what the target was—and he did not. Despite my total lack of skill, I found that, if I threw enough balls in the general direction of the basket, sometimes one would go in. In the same way, if you throw enough words in the direction of care, understanding, and empathy, you will occasionally score. You don’t need to say the perfect words if you aim for the right target.
From: More Love, Less Conflict (Conari Press) by Jonathan Robinson
Jonathan Robinson is a psychotherapist and a professional speaker, who conducts workshops on communication, leadership, and team building at Fortune 500 companies.
