How to Fix Communication | GrowingSelf.com

How to Fix Communication in a Relationship

Takeaways: Communication is the number one thing that couples struggle with, and it’s the root cause of so many other relationship issues. Learning how to communicate with each other in a healthy way can reduce conflict, improve your emotional connection, and keep your relationship healthy over the long haul. This article will show you how to fix communication in your relationship and develop communication skills that strengthen your connection.

Are you wondering how to fix communication in your relationship but feel like there’s just no way out of the impasse and disconnection? “We can’t communicate with each other” is probably the number-one complaint of most couples coming in for couples counseling or online marriage counseling. The underlying issue can be about anything: parenting, sex, money, priorities. But the result is the same — tense, frustrating moments for both of you. Many couples don’t even remember what half the fights are even about, just that communicating with their partner feels impossible.

Communication problems in relationships make even the simplest moments feel difficult, and like a new fight is always simmering under the surface. Even the banalest question, like “what do you want to do for dinner?” can turn into a conflict when you’re talking to your partner and having a negative reaction to their tone of voice, or the way they respond to you (or don’t respond to you), or the assumptions they make, or the fact that unresolved hurts and resentments are piling up between you.

Poor Communication and the Pursue-Withdraw Cycle

Poor communication makes relationship problems worse. It’s easy to fall into negative patterns when you don’t feel safe sharing with each other in an open and honest way. As communication problems get worse, couples stop feeling close and connected. They start to make negative judgments about each other’s character. Communication patterns like passive aggression and pursue-withdraw cycles get worse. Couples who’ve gone really far down this path may stop being affectionate, use closed-off body language, and they may even stop making eye contact.

The sooner you interrupt this cycle, the better. If you let your relationship deteriorate to a certain degree, even the best marriage counselor in the world can’t help you stitch it back together. So, even though I know that being caught in a cycle of negative communication with your partner feels frustrating and terrible all around, I can tell you that it’s actually a good thing. It’s a sign that you’re both still engaged in your relationship and you’re seeking to create positive change, even if you’re not always sure how.

The same is true if your partner seems chronically displeased and like they’re flying at you with a thousand complaints a second, which you, understandably, would prefer wasn’t happening. If you can learn to reinterpret your partner’s communication style for what it is — a deep expression of caring about your relationship, so much so that they’re willing to fight to improve it so that it can be sustainable for both of you — that can give you a starting point for working through the deeper issues together.

And when the underlying emotional injuries are healed, you’ll be surprised how much communication improves.

Common Communication Issues in Relationships

Here’s the thing about “communication issues.” When couples tell me they’re struggling to communicate, that can mean a thousand different things. That’s why it’s so important to seek help from a good marriage and family therapist who can get to the root of exactly what’s happening between you and your partner, and give you strategies for resolving those particular issues.

Here are a few of the most common “communication issues” that I see in relationships all the time as a couples counselor:

• Conflict avoidance, which leads one or both partners to fail to communicate about problems that they need to resolve together.
• Emotional flooding, where you’re not able to regulate your feelings well enough to communicate in a productive way.
• The need to develop certain communication skills, like a “soft startup,” validating each other, active listening, etc.
• Negative sentiment override, which means you’ve developed an automatic negative reaction to your partner based on past experiences.
• Difficulty feeling and articulating your true, authentic feelings in real-time. Avoidantly attached people often struggle with this.
• Fear of intimacy.
• Anxiety, which can lead you to come at your partner in a way that feels aggressive and intimidating, causing them to withdraw during difficult conversations.
• Low self-esteem can lead to difficult communication, because people with low self-esteem are often quite sensitive.
• Lack of emotional safety after bad experiences with each other. If you’ve had a lot of hurtful conflict in your relationship, you’ll have to rebuild emotional safety with intention before communication will feel different.

These are just a few of the possible causes of communication issues, and it’s rarely “just one thing.” Working with a good couples counselor will help you understand exactly what’s going on with communication in your relationship, and what you each need to do to change the way you communicate together.

How to Fix Communication Problems in Marriage

Because communication issues are such a major problem for so many couples, and I’ve been getting SO many questions about it from podcast listeners, I’ve decided to help you solve this problem and fix communication in a relationship by creating a three-part podcast “mini-series” on the subject of how to improve the communication in your relationship.

In today’s first episode, I’ll be introducing some main ideas that can help you understand why conflicts happen, and what YOU can do to fix communication in your relationship starting today.

Next week we’ll be talking about how to handle things if you have a partner who seems angry, snappish, or emotionally reactive.

And then in the following episode we’ll be talking about how to communicate with a partner who shuts down.

I sincerely hope that these ideas help you both find your way back together again. And if you’d like support with transforming communication in your relationship, I invite you to schedule a free consultation.

xoxo, Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby

Ps. Do YOU have specific questions you’d like me to answer on an upcoming podcast? Record your question for me using the “voice recording” widget on this page, or leave a question in the comments! LMB

Sources

1. Gaelick, L., Bodenhausen, G. V., & Wyer, R. S. (1985). Emotional communication in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(5), 1246–1265. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.49.5.1246
2. Bretherton, I. (1995). A Communication Perspective on Attachment Relationships and Internal Working Models. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 60(2/3), 310–329. https://doi.org/10.2307/1166187

Lisa Marie Bobby, PhD, LMFT, BCC( PhD, LP, LMFT, BCC )