Messages that Hurt

“Every hour that we are awake, we are told twenty-two times that we are not rich, thin, young, beautiful, ripped, or stylish enough.”

When I first came across this quote in the book Healing Spiritual Wounds, I had one of those Wait! What? moments. There was something altogether unbelievable about what I had just read. The idea that we are riddled with advertising and messages in an attempt to get us to buy another product wasn’t new - if anything, twenty-two messages seemed a little low. My pause for reflection was about what those messages say to us about us.

You’re not good enough.
You’re worthless.
You don’t matter.

How overwhelming!
How discouraging!
How damaging!

Even if this number is remotely true, it’s no wonder that so many people struggle with shame and unhealthy ideas about themselves. We are constantly being told that we are not enough. Maybe we resist for a while but for many of us a sense of learned helplessness can set in. It can feel futile to resist. Worse still, the incessant repetition of these messages means that these harmful ideas have a way of wedging themselves into the deep-down circuitry of our brain – the place where assumptions come from. A place that can be incredibly difficult to change.

Once these messages lay down their deep, spindly roots, they begin to reproduce. Negative notions of ourselves have a way of coloring the way that we interact with our partners or loved ones. If our own childhood was blanketed by an ever-present shame, our default may be to replicate that shame in the lives of our own children. What is meant as a simple complaint from our spouse about something we do at home, can devolve into an all-out war triggered by deeply-rooted messages from some other time in our lives. Though they’re often the loudest and boldest, it would clearly be unfair to ascribe all of the blame for these ideas to advertisers and their ulterior motives.

One of the sources of shaming messages that I often see in my practice is a person’s faith community. It doesn’t much matter if that faith community is an active part of an individual’s life or if it is represented by internalized messages from the past. A structure that insists that there is a god who demands that people comply with strict codes of belief or behavior or face eternal punishment is often the birthplace of many damaging messages. Do right or be punished. You’re only accepted if you believe or do as we say. Women are second-class citizens and have to be sure never to cause a man to stumble by wearing too much makeup or clothes that are overly revealing. Sexuality is sinful and shouldn’t be thought about.

For so many of us, the faith community is the place where we find a sense of identity. We share our lives with those who believe like us and approach life as we do ourselves. It is important, though, to know that this identity is not always healthy. Complicating things is that we’re taught that faith communities are good and have our best interests in mind. Often, the belief is that God called these communities into existence to do some sort of sacred work on earth. But what happens when we hear these messages over and over?

God loves you when you do good.
You do not deserve God’s love.
You are weak, but God is strong.

These messages are just like any other negative message that we might hear. When they settle in and we rehearse them over and over, they become our truth. Along with doctrines of the universe and eternity,  we can adopt the tangential beliefs that we are frail, dependent, not-good-enoughs. Despite our communities’ best efforts, we can come to accept devastating ideas about ourselves and our value as human beings.

As a therapist, I am constantly listening for the messages about ourselves and others that have become deeply embedded in our brains. What are the ideas about what it means to be you that you carry with you every single day? I am weak. I am not worthy. I am not a good person. My value is conditional. These are not messages that are helpful or healthy. These are messages that are limiting, controlling, and worthless.

What is is like to recite these ideas about yourself?

I am valuable.
I am loved just as I am.
I am enough.

What surfaces for you as you say these words? Do they resonate? Even if it feels awkward, is there some part of you that wants these things to be true? Do you feel a sense of warmth or a sense of emptiness?

How you experience these questions will say something about what you believe about yourself. If you’re able, make rehearsing these phrases a part of your daily routine. The only way to extract the negativity permanently is to replace it is positive, healthy messages. If you’re not able to say these things about yourself – if it feels untrue or inauthentic – maybe it’s time to find a trusted confidant, a friend, or a therapist to begin processing the difficulties and working towards fostering a deeper sense of self-compassion.

If the beliefs about yourself and others were reinforced by a spiritual community, maybe it’s time to reconstruct your ideas about God. As the author of Healing Spiritual Wounds asked, “What’s the point of religion if it doesn’t bring you hope?” Questions like these may be disruptive but, when they’re processed in a place of safety, they can open up new ways of seeing the world, others, and ourselves that can help us believe in ourselves again.

How to Heal from Spiritual Trauma

Faith is an important element of many people’s story. Whether you were raised in attending church or in a home that was more secular, our histories often contain elements of faith or spirituality, even if those definitions vary wildly from family to family. For some, spirituality speaks to the sense that we are all connected and that there is an energy – some would say a divine energy – that flows through all of the natural world. For others, the idea of faith evokes images of an old man in the sky character who is wholly responsible for creation and punishes those that would defy him.

Being a part of a faith community can have many positive benefits. We are inherently social beings and joining with others who share our beliefs can be enriching. It can increase our social bonds. We form relationships with others who can come alongside us when we need help. Knowing that there are those who share a similar outlook on the world as our own can help to validate our experiences. Awe and wonder, as is experienced in the worship of God or when we engage in a set of contemplative practices, have been shown to make important contributions to our overall sense of well-being.

It’s important to know that not all communities are healthy, safe spaces. In their unhealthy state,  communities like these can become oppressive or damaging. Depending on how a community interprets and practices a particular set of beliefs, a person may be exposed to harmful guilt and shame. People may be told that they’re not good enough in their current state and need to repent or risk burning in hell. Research has shown that if we believe in a god that is angry and frightening, our stance toward the world will likely be one of anger and fear. In the unhealthiest of faith communities, those in power might even take advantage of others for their own gain, justifying the experience with belief or scripture.

In the clinical world, trauma is not a word that is used lightly. However, when it comes to experiences like these, we can certainly become traumatized. When painful or frightening situations are intense, and outside of our control, our bodies have evolved techniques essential to our survival. These are most widely known as our fight or flight responses, however, that doesn’t capture the whole story. Without our awareness, we go through a sequence of responses that increase in intensity. The first is a social response. In times of fear, maybe we scream or yell. We engage in some social interaction as our first attempt to stop the situation. If that doesn’t work, our bodies move into preparations for fighting or running away - this is the classic fight or flight that you may have heard of. Adrenaline, cortisol, and other chemicals are released and surge through our bodies. If we cannot fight or flee from the problem, our final response is to freeze. It is in this final phase that we often hear about people who dissociate from reality and have an experience of observing themselves and whatever is happening to them. At each level of response, our brains process information differently. We store memories in a way that is optimized for identifying potentially similar threats more quickly in the future. Sometimes, this even means that the memories are incomplete. The particular characteristics of these memories are often what we think about when we think about trauma. Smells, sounds, or objects associated with a traumatizing event can trigger our body’s response sequence as if we were experiencing the event all over again. In these situations, our brains have filed some component of the memory away as being a threat all on its own.

Our bodies are sensitive to threats of any form. This sort of survival response and the subsequent potential for trauma can result from a psychological threat or a threat to our membership in a community in the same way as it would for a physical threat. Trauma is the experience of being in danger and unable to get away.

Spiritual trauma occurs when we have one of these experiences within a spiritual community. One example is from members of the LGBTQ community who are raised in the church. Commonly, they are told that their attractions, their sexual identity, is wrong and sinful. They receive the messages that God must have made a mistake when God created them. Now,  in order to stay within a community that has been an important part of their lives, they have to displace a core part of who they are. When a person is constantly invalidated like this, it can become traumatizing.

Another unfortunate but common example is when people are the victims of physical abuse that becomes justified with beliefs and biblical references. Most often, this takes the form of a father or husband justifying his role as the head of the household and exerting power to ensure that all other family members are submissive to him.

These and dozens of other experiences can be traumatizing in and of themselves. However, many people add that their interior space often does not feel safe either. For those that believe in God, if God knows their heart and mind, then it might also be sinful to question the correctness of what is happening. There is always someone watching. Many people who experience this kind of spiritual trauma do not know what it means to have a place of safety, even in their internal world. When everything is judgment, it can feel like a part of you has to die in order to protect yourself as a whole.

HOW TO HEAL
It can feel cliché but healing begins with recognizing that you have experienced some sort of trauma. Ultimately, healing is about the integration of those internal parts of your that had to be exiled in order to keep you safe. It is about allowing the disintegrated memories to be relieved of their traumatizing power. So much of your story has to be deconstructed and reconstructed in a way that brings life rather than fear and anxiety.

As good as this might sound, it can feel disruptive. For many people, learning to see the world through a different faith-lens can feel scary, especially if you have been told that you must believe a certain way or risk eternal punishment. This is why safety is critical to this work. Finding a therapist who can help you hold your difficult questions and experiences in a way that allows you to grow is essential.  This person should help equip you with tools to manage the trauma response when you feel it arising as well as helping you to reprocess the experience. It might also mean evaluating what it means to leave a spiritual community and a therapist can help you navigate the anxiety that might arise when a decision like this is the right one to make.

Healing takes time and effort. But we can heal from traumatic wounds, even spiritual ones. We can learn to see the divine in an entirely new way.
 

Three of the Best Apps for Your Relationship

“Before technology allowed us to be anywhere anytime, conversation with other people was a big part of how we satisfied our brains’ need for stimulation.”
Sherry Turkle

This is a big year for for smartphones. It’s the tenth anniversary of the iPhone.  Everyone knew that Apple would do something big to mark the occasion. Google has been involved too and has released their new Pixel phone. It stores all of your photos in the cloud so you’ll never run out of room.

For all of their features, though, most people would likely say that their apps are what really make their phones worth using. Without the apps that we love to use, our phones would just be fancy slabs of glass and aluminum that send really gorgeous text messages. Apps open up the ability for me to make FaceTime calls, or do my banking online, or track my mountain biking, or write this blog post.

As a couples therapist, I often have couples that tell me how much their phones are interfering with their lives and their relationship. When they reunite after a day at work, couples say that their phones serve as an all-too-easy distraction that reduces the quality of their time together. It can keep them from having important conversation. It can keep their mind partially at the office instead of being fully present at home. It’s a real problem – we’ve talked about it a previous blog post, too.

In her book, Reclaiming Conversation, researcher Sherry Turkle talks specifically about the impact that phones are having on the quality of our relationships. She enjoys technology and all the benefits it brings – and I do too! – but she knows that it’s important for us to realize the cost it has for our relationships. From parenting to physical intimacy, the type of relationship we have with our phone impacts the relationship we have with the humans we love.

Are there apps that can help? Maybe, but I’m not sure they’re the downloadable kind. Instead, there are three apps that might be helpful in keeping a positive perspective on the device that you have in your hand.

1. Be Approachable

Your phone might enable new, dynamic forms of digital conversation but it can be a barrier to the intimate and in-person. Turkle’s research shows that that the mere presence of a phone, even if it is turned off and laying face down on a table, can change what people talk about. It’s a powerful social and even physiological cue. Knowing that a person is within an arm’s reach of their phone signals that they are only partially or temporarily available to us. Why would we begin to have a conversation about the things that matter to us when we might get interrupted at any moment?

Being approachable is really about putting the phone down and being available to others. In-person conversation allows emotional connections that are simply unavailable in digital form. As Turkle puts it, “When we invest in conversation, we get a payoff in self-knowledge, empathy, and the experience of community.”

It might be worth installing this app right away!

2. Apologize In Person

If you’re investing time and energy into building a relationship with someone you love, at some point, you will say or do something that offends them. They will be angry with you. A conversation that involves making amends and owning up to the mistakes that we make – especially if we’ve hurt someone else – is a difficult conversation to have. It is so much easier to send a text that says “I’m sorry.” Include a few heart emoji and it can feel like we’ve done what we needed to do.

People don’t generally like having difficult conversations. Turkle, however makes the point that the difficulty inherent in these conversations actually makes us healthier, more empathetic human beings. The guilty person is able to see the pain in the face of the person that he hurt; these cues become a reinforcer to keep the same thing from happening again. But the person receiving the apology also gets to see and assess the genuineness of the regret in the apologizer’s face and actions.  In Turkle’s words, “It is this realization that triggers the beginning of forgiveness.”

When you realize that you’ve done something that has hurt a person that you love, move towards them. Put down the phone and use this app to start you on the road to restoration.

In Turkle’s words, “Conversation cures.”

3. Appreciate the Present Moment

You can go anywhere. Sure, the virtual experience may not be as good as the real thing. With your device in hand, though, you can literally escape to any destination, real or imagined. You can experience what it is like to walk on the surface of the moon or you can get lost in the fictional worlds of your favorite characters. Today, you can even augment the reality of what is around you by summoning objects that appear to be sitting on your coffee table but only when you interact with them through your phone. You can share time and space with someone but yet be immersed in a completely different world.

You don’t need to wear augmented reality glasses or be lost in a Kindle book to escape the present moment. The dozens of notifications you get each day to your phone or the visceral buzzing of a smartwatch can take you away to another place. It can change your frame of reference to another relationship or work engagement. It can take you from a place of boredom to a place of excitement or a place of anxiety to a place of calm.

It can keep you from appreciating the value of the present moment.

Turkle says that we now have the opportunity “To avoid life’s challenges and boring bits.” She goes on to make the case, however, that it is in these moments – when we stay engaged with boredom or anxiety –  we have opportunity to grow. Both, in fact, are signs that we are moving towards something that can help us to develop or to see the world in a different way. When we disengage from these things, we are forfeiting amazing potential.

And that’s just for ourselves.

When it comes to our relationships, being present is essential. It’s critical that we make eye contact or that we reach out and touch our partner. It’s not enough to occupy the same physical space. We need to learn what it is like to share our emotional space with our partner as well. Empathy helps us to understand the things that frustrate or frighten the people that we love. Having a new experience of someone can be anxiety provoking, but we have to stay engaged if we really want to move to the deepest levels of connection. We can’t bail out. We can’t escape to another place. We have to be present for the good times as well as the challenging times.

Appreciating the present moment might be the most important app you ever install.

I want to let Sherry Turkle wrap things up with one more quote from Reclaiming Conversation.

“Every time you check your phone in company, what you gain is a hit of stimulation, a neurochemical shot, and what you lose is what a friend, teacher, parent, lover, or co-worker just said, meant, felt.”

Don’t neglect the people that you love. Install these three apps in your relationship today.

Recommendation: Reclaiming Conversation is a fantastic book to help you get an idea of the power of conversation. Highly recommended.

Photo Credit: "apps" by Sean MacEntee is licensed by CC BY 2.0

The Most Important Characteristic?

Often, people come to our office and ask what they can do to improve their lives, to fix their relationship, or to make the work experience more rewarding? It is not an easy question and there certain are no easy answers. Everyone has their own unique experience that we explore in the counseling process.

Still, over the last several weeks, there has been an idea that has been surfacing for me around some of the things that I have been reading and listening to. One book even said that it was the most important characteristic for people looking to develop their leadership skills. I'd argue that it's probably true for anyone trying to make changes in any part of their lives. 

That characteristic? Self-awareness.

So much of our lives are lived by reflex. We respond harshly when our partner asks us a question or uses a certain tone of voice. It's not something that we are aware of – it just kind of happens. If we make a mistake, why is that that we can be so hard on ourselves? Many people – myself included – have to fight a real sense of shame when that happens. We can think things about ourselves that we would never say about other people. 

In the space between every experience we have in the world and the way that we choose to react, I like to think about a space. It's really a window of opportunity. When we react in a reflexive way, that window is very small; it's almost non-existent. But what happens when we start to look inward and figure out what the real motivations are behind the things we do? How do things change when we start to open up that window of opportunity so that there's more space to think and to act in a more self-controlled way?

When we work towards our own sense of self-awareness, we can change the way that we respond to our loved ones. When we understand our emotional space and motivations, we can have a more compassionate stance towards ourselves.

When we increase our level of self-awareness, everything can change.

Desmond Smith is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist Associate. He and his wife, Kristy Yetman, run Yetman Counseling Services and provide therapy for individuals, couples, and families.

Photo Credit: "Home" by Kevin Doncaster is licensed by CC BY 2.0.

Resources for Foster Families

Kristy shares four books that may help with adjustment to the transitions experienced by those who choose to make fostering a part of their family's experience.

The Four Books

• Love You From Right Here – by Jamie Sandefer
• Maybe Days – by Jennifer Wilgocki
• Kids Need to be Safe – by Julie Nelson
• Murphy's Three Homes – by Jan Levinson Gilman

Do you have other suggestions for resources for foster families? Feel free to leave them below in the comments.

Recovering from Infidelity

There are few things in a relationship so painful as the experience of infidelity. Reaching outside the relationship for physical or emotional connection can take many forms but all of them can feel overwhelming and devastating. In order to heal from these experiences, it often requires deep levels of understanding from both partners and help from a trusted & highly-trained professional.

In addition to things like apologizing and changing behaviors, there are at least three things that couples can expect to experience in the process of working to heal from infidelity.

1. Everyone Experiences Infidelity Differently

In any experience of infidelity, it’s important for partners to understand that the way they each feel about it will be vastly different from one another. Regardless of how the infidelity came to light, the partner that reached outside of the relationship will have lived with full knowledge of what happened. This means that this partner will have had time to process their decisions, to try to come up with reasons, and even to come to terms with their own pain. They will already have had time to grieve.

For the partner who feels betrayed, however, their experience of the infidelity will be quite different. It could be devastating and crisis-inducing. This was not a gradual reveal but a shock that impacts the entire system. It is brand new and these partners often have no suspicion of any unfaithfulness. Realizing this can be intense and traumatic.

Openly and honestly acknowledging the discrepancies in how partners experience infidelity is a vital first step for couples in working towards resolution.

2. Giving Permission to Feel

Just as both partners will experience infidelity differently, each will have a range of emotions that will fluctuate frequently. In the early stages, it is possible that this will happen many times a day. It is important that partners allow each other permission to experience these emotions. This can be harder than it seems. The partner who feels betrayed will experience a great number of difficult emotions. They are hurting and rightfully so. Sometimes they feel the need to seek revenge, to humiliate the person who hurt them so badly. Even if the partner who was unfaithful is apologetic, the betrayed partner often feels the desire to attack them. Such apologies may be genuine but can seem to have little effect. It is such a difficult tension to navigate.

More difficult still is for the partner was does feel betrayed to allow the unfaithful partner to experience their own emotions. Often, the unfaithful partner will feel guilt and embarrassment. It can be tempting to continue to heap on more of the same. While the betrayed partner sometimes feels a sense of momentary gratification, it is rarely helpful in the process of healing,

For both partners, granting permission for the other to feel whatever emotions that may be surfacing is an important step towards healing. There are no timelines or prescriptions in these situations. The emotions that surface are natural and shouldn’t be ignored. So, if you’re willing and able to in the face of infidelity, try to grant a little grace to one another. In the face of this dramatic emotional upheaval, resilient couples are able to see beyond the infidelity.

3. See Beyond Blame

Contrary to what many people think, blame is often not that helpful in resolving a problem – especially one as complex around infidelity. Again, it can take some time for the betrayed partner to be able to get to this place. Adopting a non-blaming stance, though, can be vital for partners working through their experiences. This is not to say that the person who was unfaithful to the relationship is off-the-hook. But to understand how all of this came to happen in the first place, it’s important to keep everything on the table. When working to heal from infidelity, everything matters.

As they embark on this examination process, many couples report that the infidelity actually started years before. Maybe there was a process of falling out of love or a slowly building sense of disconnection. Some talk about distractions from the relationship like intense demands at work or with the kids and how there was little time left to nurture the relationship itself. In some cases, couples even connect their infidelity to experience from their own childhoods that created some lingering or unresolved needs. Whatever you find out, in order to understand it and to keep it from happening in the future, it’s important to be able to talk about it in a non-blaming way

Healing from infidelity is hard work that involves commitment and trust. It involves simultaneously holding your own personal grief, pain, shame, or pride while working to understand the characteristics of your relationship. Often, it requires the guidance of a professional with specific training in working with couples issues.

If you have experienced infidelity in your relationship, Yetman Counseling Services can provide the safe, knowledgeable, and professional environment to begin the process of healing.

Schedule a consultation today and help your relationship heal.

Photo Credit: "Golden Boat" by Abhishek Jacob is licensed by CC BY-SA 2.0.

Seeing Through Their Eyes

Intimacy is Everything

What is it that people need in order to have a fulfilling relationship? It’s a question that couples have been asking for almost as long as there have been couples! And, as with most questions about love, the answer isn’t always easy. Everyone has their own ideas about what being fulfilled means. Everyone has unique needs and wants so it might seem like a waste of time to try and come to a single conclusion.

Still, with what we have already learned in the Everything Matters series, we can lay a foundation for building a great relationship.

Before we get to that, let’s start by talking about intimacy. Usually, that word conjures up images of sexual intimacy. And that’s OK. The type of intimacy that we’re going to be talking about is about way more than sex but sex gives us a great metaphor for understanding where we are going with this conversation.

Just like with committed relationships, sex is not something that we share with everyone we meet. Sex is something that we reserve for a relatively small number of people. We have all sorts of reasons for choosing who we want to have sex with and to give this part of ourselves to but perhaps the most important is how emotionally risky it is. Sexual intimacy with someone else requires a high degree of vulnerability. Before you literally lay yourself bare on your lover’s bed, you have to feel safe, you have to trust them. Nothing is hidden.

Great vulnerability like this has the potential for great risk. But it also carries the potential for deep connection.

The same thing is true of emotional or relational intimacy. If you’re like me, you probably interact with a lot of people in the course of any given week. But I can also count on both hands the number of people who I feel close and safe enough with to be able to share my emotional vulnerabilities. Of all the people that I meet, there are just a few who I want to share everything with. These are the people that know me – that I’ve hidden very little from. These are the people that see parts of my life that I don’t feel safe sharing with anyone else.

In some ways, intimacy is a measure of how much someone know about you compared to how much you know about yourself.

When we are able to know ourselves deeply (like in part one), and when we learn to be aware of exactly what we are communicating (like we talked about in part two), we have the foundation we need to become more deeply connected to the people we love. We develop the skills to make our own needs known in our relationship but also to hear and understand the needs of our partner. We begin to understand that true intimacy is about the willing dance between what you need and what I need.

The same safety and trust that allows me to trust my partner with my body is required if I am to trust them with my emotional self, as well. When we lay our emotions, our wants and desires, bare before our partner, they will not be mocked or ridiculed or minimized. They will be celebrated, honored, and shared. This is incredibly risky but, when that connection is made, there is no more fulfilling feeling.

Let’s take this idea back to where we started this series: the brain. When you get to know some deeply and intimately, your brain literally changes. You begin to wire that person into the very fabric of who you are. Just like as you begin to sort through those things that formed you and colored the lenses through which you experience the world, and just as you understand that others have their own set of lenses, intimately knowing someone’s emotional world can help you interpret the world how they might interpret it. It’s like you gain a copy of their lenses and you are able to see things close to how your partner might see them.

And when that happens – when you’ve communicated and shared and loved and grown – the needs that they have can seem less like nagging and more like those needs are your very own. You can celebrate when they are happy, and not be jealous. You can hold them when they are sad and not feel the need to fix it or a sense of blame. You don’t just understand them intellectually, you can begin to see the world through their eyes and experience the world through their senses.

Intimacy like this is powerful because it unlocks the most basic secret to fulfilling relationships. When our own needs are understood as being a part of who we are, our partners willingness to meet them feels a lot like love. When our needs are rejected, it feels a lot like we, ourselves, are rejected too.

The foundation for a fulfilling relationship then? It’s an intimacy that allows us to be able to be present with the people we love, to truly listen, to fully understand, and to care without any ulterior motive getting in the way. It’s an intimacy that allows our partners to be the same for us.

Intimacy is the ability to see the world through your partners eyes – to experience what it must be like to be in their skin.

Intimacy provides the safety to share your own areas of vulnerability without fear of repercussion.

Intimacy is awareness of the things that lead our partners to feel happy, angry, sad, or wild with ecstasy.

Intimacy is everything.

And, it’s about coming to the realization that everything matters.

Everything Matters Webinar

This blog post is part of a series based on the Everything Matters Seminar that Desmond has created. There is now an online version of this seminar and you can learn more about it – or sign up for more information – today. Visit EverythingMattersSeminar.com.

Photo Credit: "Mini Me" by lindsayΔlachance is licensed by CC BY 2.0.

Do You Know What You're Saying?

This blog post is part two of our Everything Matters series where we explore how knowing your partner more deeply can lead to the best relationship possible. If you haven’t read it yet, check out part one here.

Everything communicates.

It’s one thing to being to come into a greater awareness of the beautiful complexity of who you are. It’s completely another thing to realize that there is an equally beautiful – and equally complex – person sitting across the table from you. How do you even begin to navigate the process of getting to really know one another? How can you let them know that you appreciate their depth? Can you learn to communicate more effectively?

If you ask any therapist who works with relationship issues, they will tell you that every single couple they see will say, at some point in the process, “We just need help communicating.” If you’ve ever thought that – or said it aloud – know that you are definitely not alone.

I have to admit, though, I think there is way more going on than just that. Yes, I am being a little technical here, but I happen to think that we are constantly communicating. Every word, every action, every eye roll and smirk, every time we raise our voice or cry or go outside to let off steam. Everything communicates. It’s not that we need help communicating as much as we need help to be more aware of the messages that we are sending and receiving.

If you’ve read part one, then you already have a head start. Refining your communication with your partner starts with developing a greater understanding of yourself – knowing what it is that you actually want to say requires knowing yourself on a deeper level.

And give yourself some grace before you start. When you begin to break it down, communication can become pretty complex. Take, for example, this list of actual phrases that we might use in our relationships:

• “I Love You.”
• “Please do the dishes.”
• “I have a headache.”
• “Don’t you ever listen to me?”

As you read these, you might be aware that some or all of them are causing a reaction in you. Maybe you have heard them before (Maybe you’ve heard them today!). Whatever you’re experiencing right now, it’s quite likely that you’re adding emotion to these statements that isn’t actually there, at least in their written form. Those kind of emotions are stimulated every time you hear these or other phrases from those you love and those emotions impact how your conversations go! Knowing how to deal with these ahead of time instantly improves your communication.

It’s also important to know that communication is a lot more than just the words we speak. In fact, some researchers would say that as much as 95% of our communication is non-verbal – the eye rolls, facial expressions, sighs, gentle touches. Most of these things are automatic responses that we don’t think about and all of them contribute significantly to what gets said communicated and what gets understood. Becoming more self-aware allows you greater control over everything that goes into communication.

Listen Up

Of course, sending messages is only one part of the equation. Receiving messages – listening – is just as important. As therapists, sometimes we consider ourselves professional listeners. It’s definitely a skill that can – and should! – be refined with practice. You can learn to listen like a therapist and, when you do, you have a few important roles.

First, approach listening with a sense of responsibility – in other words, it’s important to give the speaker your full attention. It’s also important that the speaker feel safe. Nothing will shut down communication as quickly as feeling ridiculed, judged, or on edge about what is going to happen. Belittling, cutting off, and minimizing the speaker’s words are all big no-nos. Third, when listeners reflect back to the speaker what is being heard, the speaker has an opportunity to correct anything that may have been misstated or miscommunicated. Sometimes, we react to things that were said in a less-than-ideal way instead of what is actually true. Finally, good listeners validate the speaker – listeners let the speaker know that they were heard and understood and what they said makes sense.

When your communication skills are developed, it opens the door to true intimacy - not just sexual intimacy, but a complete understanding of who your partner is. And, as it turns out, Intimacy is Everything.

More on that in part three!

Everything Matters Webinar

This blog post is part of a series based on the Everything Matters Seminar that Desmond has created. There is now an online version of this seminar and you can learn more about it – or sign up for more information – today. Visit EverythingMattersSeminar.com.

In Relationships, Everything Matters

If you’re going to be a human being, then relationships are going to be a part of your life. We are social creatures and when we find ourselves in a safe and loving relationship with another human, we have an opportunity to thrive. Close relationships – whether they’re romantic or not – come with many benefits (I hear they even have healing powers!). When we fall in love, though, we might not be remembering that relationships are also hard work!

That’s why, over the next few blog posts, I want to give you some ideas about enriching that loving relationship you’re in or that you want to be in. When it comes to understanding relationships and how they work, everything matters.

The big picture is basically this: People are beautifully complex. You, as a person, have biological systems and childhood memories and everyday experiences that make you who you are. It can be a lot to get your mind around, especially if your days are as busy as most peoples’ seem to be. It’s hard enough getting to know yourself. Then you meet someone?!? They’re just as complex as you and somehow you have to learn how to navigate and appreciate and live with these differences. You have to tell each other about who you are and you soon discover that everything communicates: everything you say and do and everything you leave out! But, if you’re persistent and committed and can trust the other person you start to develop a deep sense of understanding – an intimacy – with you partner. And Intimacy is Everything!

It’s a tall order!

The Everything That Matters

We could spend a lot of time discussing all of the things that seem to be important in making a person who they are. But, I’m going to try to keep it to just three.

And, we’ll start with the hardest one: the brain. If you’re going to understand anything about yourself, it’s important to understand why the brain matters. There are two big things that I think are important about the brain. First, your brain exists to keep you alive. We can do a lot of amazing things with our brain – iPhones, the Mona Lisa, and tiramisu all started as a thought in someone’s head. But, its first job is to keep us alive and that means that when we’re scared or unsafe or threatened in any way, your brain is going to act more on instinct than creative thought. This impacts how you exist in a relationship. There are times when the more animal-like parts of our brains take over. In those cases, it helps to try and help your partner feel safe.

The second thing about the brain is that it is astoundingly complex. For perspective, researchers say that there are more potential connections between the cells in your brain than there are stars in the entire universe. And, every day, those connections change based on the experiences that you have. If you meditate or get angry or stub your toe on the door, there are changes that happen in your brain because of it. In other words, who you are today won’t be who you are tomorrow.

After the brain, the second thing that makes an impact on who a person becomes is their childhood. It’s cliché for a therapist to talk about this, I know. But, the experiences that you have as a kid impact who you are as an adult. The relationship that you have with your parents or those that take care of you, for example, start to form a template for all of the relationships that you will ever have. It even impacts how you see yourself. I’m not trying to say it’s all about your mother, but I am saying that a person’s childhood experiences are powerful and formative.

That leads us to the third thing that impacts who we are: our ongoing experiences. Remember all those potential brain connections? Everyday, every single experience has an impact on those connections. With time and repetition, parts of our brains can change. The structure, the size, the way our brains function - all of it can be changed by experience. It colors how we see the world. When you understand that your experiences have had an impact on you, you can start to understand how people can be so different.

All of these things matter. Moving towards a healthy relationship involves first understanding that each of these things matter to who we are as individuals. And if they matter to us, they matter to everyone.

When we understand that, we can start to to truly appreciate another person.

In our next post, we'll talk about how we start to communicate all of this beautiful complexity to the people that we love!

Photo Credits: "Hieroglpyhs" by Andrea is licensed by CC BY-SA 2.0.

Everything Matters Webinar

This blog post is part of a series based on the Everything Matters Seminar that Desmond has created. There is now an online version of this seminar and you can learn more about it – or sign up for more information – today. Visit EverythingMattersSeminar.com.

The Healing Power of Relationships

It’s a pretty recent development in human history that we have medical classifications for things like anxiety, depressions, and other concerns. We spend a lot of money researching and treating these issues and a lot more more developing medicines that can be used to help people feel better. The reasoning goes something like this: since these issues can be traced to chemical process in people’s brains, if we can adjust those chemical levels, we can eliminate the concerns.

Before we get too far, let me say that I’m not here to make an argument against medication. As a therapist, I fully affirm that medications are an important part of treating many of the concerns that people have. Medications are a tool and they have a role in a larger ecosystem of treatments to help people feel better.

We also have to understand that we live in a culture where we want our hamburgers in sixty seconds and we get annoyed when Netflix starts to buffer in the middle of a good binge. These ideas impact who we are and how we think about the world. It makes sense that we also want quick fixes for the things that are bothering us.

I don’t have time to be depressed.

When my anxiety keeps me up at night, sometimes I have to load up on caffeine the next day.

We don’t want to be held back or slowed down. In a world like that, medications can become the primary means for eliminating symptoms. But they don’t always fix the problem. It’s only part of the story.

I believe that true healing – not just symptom reduction – involves healthy, safe, and responsive relationships.

We know that drugs regulate the chemical levels in a person’s brain. There’s a lot more that we know about the brain too. We know that it’s impacted by the relationships we have with others. When we feel safe – not judged – and validated by another human, the parts of our brain that respond to threats and dangers and amp up our anxiety levels start to relax and free up resources for other parts. In the closest relationships, we have research that shows us that parts of our right hemispheres begin to synchronize. This is most prominent in babies who we believe use their caretaker’s sense of calmness to begin to regulate their own emotions. This circuitry never leaves us, so when we’re connecting with a friend over coffee or a partner over a romantic dinner we feel safe and calm and connected in a way that goes beyond anything we could consciously describe.

It feels like there is something electric between you because there is.

This is the foundation of empathy. Dr. Sue Johnson, a renowned couples researcher talks about how empathy helps at the most basic level by letting us know that our story and our emotions make sense to another human being.

Understanding and empathy are the keys to healing and growth. If you’ve been told for your entire life that you’re not good enough,  having a relationship with someone who provides you with support can be a healing and restorative  experience. If that person gets frustrated with your low self-esteem or your hesitancy to connect with others, it’s an indication that empathy isn’t really present.

Empathy is so important because, in part, it provides a person with an opportunity to feel like they are safe and understood. It allows the parts of our brain that are focused on survival to relax and the parts of our brain that make sense of the world to take the lead. In fact, I would argue that safe, empathic relational experiences are the natural way that humans experience healing and growth. These relationships quite literally begin to rewire our brains. They provide conditions for our dysregulated brains to readjust. They allow our inborn tendencies for resilience and growth to come to the surface.

Sadly, like home cooked meals and vacations, relationships often become a casualty to our fast-paced lifestyles. We come home from work or carting the kids around and we are mentally spent. It’s easier to connect to the TV than to connect with our partner about how their day went.

Incidentally, these ideas are the same concepts that makes therapy effective for helping people experience a greater sense of well being. Yes, therapists are highly trained in specific techniques and these are important. None of this would be effective, though, without an ability to create a safe, open, empathic environment. Therapy harnesses the power of empathy to mobilize the resources that are already inside you. In fact, when we have people that truly understand us, the effects are undeniable. Our relationships have the power to literally reshape our brain and transform who we are. They have the power to help us see the world in an entirely new way.

They have the power to heal.

Photo Credit:  "Heart" by Thomas Meier is licensed by CC BY-NC 2.0.

Desmond Smith is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist Associate. He and his wife, Kristy Yetman, run Yetman Counseling Services and provide therapy for individuals, couples, and families.