Healthy Communication

Many barriers to healthy communication exist. What these look like, and how they are navigated, is entirely subjective to each of us. Some of us need ample time and space to process, others may feel the need to address things in the moment.

How each of us communicates most effectively will also impact our ability to communicate with each other in healthy ways.

Consider someone who has a military background, jargon and acronyms are commonplace. These can feel like a completely different language to someone who does not share the background.

This can happen with any cultural gap; whether that be by age, ethnicity, geography, or any other social grouping. Asking for clarification when someone uses jargon or slang we are unfamiliar with is natural, healthy, and facilitates communication.

Emotions are the most common barrier to communication. Conveying our feelings to our partners can be overwhelming and scary. We need to face those concerns if we want our relationships to thrive. How we do so is by practicing coping skills so we respond to our emotions instead of reacting to them. When we react, we often lash out and cause more harm; when we remain silent, for whatever reason we may have, that emotional wound can, and likely will, fester and damage a relationship.

• Verbal

• Written

• Non-verbal

• Dangers of Subtlety

Love languages are great! They give us a medium to explore how we feel and express our love and appreciation to those around us.

What many of us forget to explore is how we receive love languages. We know how we communicate our love, but how do we receive the way our partners communicate their love?

Love languages are meant to help us understand how we complement each other. Not create divides. Remaining open to receiving all of the love languages allows everyone we care about to communicate their love to us in their way; just as we communicate ours in our way.

Communicating to each other our love languages should be an exchange of understanding each other better. For instance, while Joe may not like receiving gifts, the light in their partners' eyes serving as words of affirmation as they give the gift and the quality time spent selecting the gift are what they use to interpret the partner's communication through a gift.

How we communicate our love to others is not how we receive love. How we receive love is our responsibility to interpret. The important part is that we reach an understanding that our partner(s) is(are) conveying their love to us. What else is more important than that?

Importance of stepping away to allow for grounding.

Tips on how to step away/how to set a boundary for space to process.

Tips on receiving boundary setting.

Means having the difficult conversations.

Owning our mistakes.

Calling out partners' mistakes.

Setting boundaries.

Clearly communicating boundaries.

Clearly receiving boundary expectations.

• Growth rates are subjective.

• Individuals will grow separately and together; balancing this.

• Accepting when growth rates are irreconcilable.

• It gets worse before it gets better; triggers, emotional instability, focus on working through the darkness.

• Importance of patience, understanding, and open and honest communication.

• Growth separation.

• Projection and Displacement; Can blow-back on partners

• What it means to support.

• What it means to enable.

• How enabling partners can lead to codependency patterns.

• Avoiding enabling; Challenging and emotionally charged, can damage relationships, firm boundary setting is hard.