Sincere Communication

Tags

communication, discussion, effective communication, feelings, interpretation, partnership, relationships

Sometimes we think we are communicating with people when we are not. The other person is hearing things we think we didn’t say. We think we are giving them feedback they think they aren’t getting. We aren’t listening; rather, we are preparing our next point in the argument. We don’t feel it’s necessary to speak any certain way; we just have to  make our  point.

Effective communication, in any arena, is hard. It’s harder when feelings are involved, when each person is starving to be heard and have their feelings validated, if not necessarily agreed with. Effective communication is draining sometimes. Sometimes you don’t feel like going through all of that to make yourself understood; the other person should just know.

Re-establishing the lines of communication isn’t usually the problem; it’s that the communication hasn’t really been established in the first place. The best example of this I can come up with is the relationship I have/had with my father. For the longest time, he wasn’t involved in my life. I hadn’t seen him since I was two, or eight, or ten. We would never get to establish a method of communication before he was gone again. Once he got himself together and started going to church, we finally began to try to have a relationship, but the tools weren’t there to build on an existing communication relationship. He had no idea how to talk to me, and I had no idea how to talk to him, so most of our conversations were about movies we had seen and what we thought of them, or descriptions of the people we worked with or saw on a daily basis. We retreated to our stories. It’s easier. We are both great with words, but when you analyze all the conversations, we weren’t really saying anything.

My dad sent me a letter in November of 2008 that made me really mad, but it was also one of the first honest communications I had ever gotten from him. It made me mad because of the tone and the ultimatum quality of it, but I understood a few things about him for the first time ever. It made me angry to think he had been feeling the way he had for such a long time before he said anything (which, I find, is where most ultimatums spring from–holding back and biting your tongue for so long you can’t take it anymore), but I began to see my father as an actual person, with thoughts and feelings like I had, not a moviefone, a restaurant critic, a half-listening ear on the other end of a cell phone, a complaintant about my cell phone usuage. He had hurt me a lot, but apparently, so had I.

Anyway, here are a few of my effective communication rules/regulations; feel free to try them.

1. Listen to the other person, then begin phrasing your response. Make sure you hear all of what they are saying and process it before you decide how you should respond.
2. Don’t interrupt unless for clarity. It’s important to let the other person know you care about what they are saying and want to understand where they are coming from and what they mean. No one likes to be interrupted and put on the defensive, especially when they haven’t even made their position clear yet.
3. Ask questions, but let the person finish saying what they are trying to say before you attempt to respond. If you really don’t understand what they are talking about, ask them. Let them finish before taking issue with something they’ve said; if you wait to hear the whole thing, it might not be what you thought, and will save a lot of time trying to defend themselves and being angry over something you took out of context.
4. Briefly rephrase what they have said as you heard it to allow them to further explain if necessary. The way we interpret something someone said isn’t necessarily what they meant to convey when they said it. We speak the same language, but we also speak different ones. Discourse is more important than the language the discourse is in. Words, especially ones that describe feelings, have our personal experiences attached to them. We have to make sure we attach the other person’s meaning and not our feelings/experiences/pains to the conversation. 
5. Be clear. Don’t make your comments a matter of interpretation. As John Mayer says, say what you need to say, but say what you mean to say as well.
6. Meet them where they are in terms of how they communicate. If they use/need examples, if they need logic like a computer, if they need to see things visually, make sure that your communication style is adapted to that when you speak to them. You can be speaking a foreign language to them and not know it.
7. No one wins; it’s not a competition. Winning is when you both understand each other, not necessarily when you have beaten the other person down so much they will agree to anything to stop talking.
8. If this relationship is really important to you, how long it takes to communicate will not bother you. Even if you have to table a discussion for a later time, be willing to put in the effort. It gets easier the more you do it, but not always faster. My minister tells us his sermons aren’t long, we are just not focused and want to be somewhere else. We aren’t interested in what God has to say and just came to be there, so we fidget and wonder when he’ll sit down. There is some truth to that. When you don’t want to do something, it takes forever to do and you wish yourself anywhere else, but when you love it and want to understand it, time just seems to fly by.
9. Sometimes, you have to walk away and think about things. Communicate that you have things to think about and don’t feel you can constructively talk about it further  at that point instead of just walking away. No one is a mind reader. You going to clear your head can be taken as you don’t care about the conversation (or the relationship) or that you are walking away from the person altogether.
10. In personal relationships, you choose whether to be present and entertain discussions. If talking to the other person is not worth it, if the relationship is not important enough to salvage, you can leave.

I’m not the expert on communication, even though I talk A LOT! If you have any tips you want to add, or any points you want to disagree with discuss, feel free.

2blu2btru

Crystal Ball and Soothsayin’, Y’all

Tags

disagreements, dreams, interpretation, marriage, Mr. Perfect, sermon

Today was a hopeless mishmash of crystal ball gazing and warnings against divination, soothsaying, palm reading and other forms of Black Magic. It started in church, where the sermon was about Jacob’s ladder, or rather, the dream Jacob had of the ladder. We discussed dreams and how dreams are used in the Bible, who interprets them, and the dangers of erroneous interpretations of dreams.

I had a dream. I didn’t offer mine up for interpretation, 1) because a sermon is not a two way discussion but a lesson and 2) my dream took place in a sex store. Yes, it did. I was in a sex shop with Mr. P., right next to the fake “peeps” and “fleshlights,” arguing about our wedding. He was talking about some wedding he went to or heard about where the people built their own domes on the church and afterwards they had steak and blah blah blah. “I don’t want chicken or fish; why can’t we have steak. They had steak at their wedding.” “We can have steak, too. We can put murals on the walls. Whatever. What does this have to do with anything? Why are we talking about this?” Never got the answer to that question. All of a sudden we were at my aunt’s house. But of course it wasn’t her house. It looked like a mansion. My grandmother, much younger and lighter skinned with green eyes, kept telling me to stop cursing, and for some unknown reason I kept saying “hell” (the offending curse word) in sentences such as “Where the hell is Mr. Perfect”, and she started slapping me and shaking me like a crazy woman. I had the impression we were planning this aforementioned wedding, but I can’t say how I know that, that was just the feeling, even though this wedding wasn’t mentioned.

Later in the day while we hung around doing nothing, Mr. Perfect and I had one of our oft revisited discussions about marriages and why you can’t just up and get married and all the things that had to be considered. I must have put forward a hundred hypotheticals, some of which he answered even though they were rhetorical. How would we handle money? Would we keep our individual phone plans or get a family share?  What’s appropriate discipline for the kids/ how are we raising children/ are we having children? What contraception are we going with? What would be the agreed upon nookie commandments? You know, the serious questions people sometimes don’t ask because they assume “love conquers all.” Through all of this, I kinda got a glimpse of what married life with Mr. P. could be like. Hmm…something to think about.

As tempted as I would be to ask someone for a crystal ball, palm reading, tarot reading, whatever, to know whether or not I get married, who the incredibly lucky man is, how long I have to wait, whether I will have children, or if I die alone and my cats begin to eat me and no one calls the police except the neighbor who hasn’t seen me pottering around in the garden and smells a foul order coming from my house, I won’t do it. There are some things, to me, that just have to happen. In their own way, in their own time, in their own order. Any foreknowledge, other than woman’s intuition, would take the fun, and possibly the wisdom of the journey, out of it. If you take life one step at a time, eventually you’ll look over your shoulder and wonder how in the world you managed to make it this far, so far you can’t even see where you came from anymore. 

Who knows? Maybe my dreams are telling me something. As the minister preached (and provided scripture for), the one who has the dream is not usually the one who interprets it (Genesis 38-40…ish…where Joseph interprets the dreams of the baker and the butler in jail and then the pharaoh’s dreams), so it’s not for me to say what it signifies. Maybe me and Mr. P. will be engaged and having the age old debate of chicken or fish (or steak). I doubt it will be in the aisles of a sex shop, but maybe that’s just my anticipation of a wedding night, lol? Maybe my grandmother will find something to go off the deep end about and shake me silly (even though I don’t curse, and even if I did I especially wouldn’t around an elder…but I’m sure she can find plenty of other reasons to shake me silly). Maybe I’ll have a mansion. I don’t know, but isn’t it enough sometimes just to dream (and speculate?)