What’s the ‘Thing’ to Help Your Relationships

When we communicate, it is often done with carefully thought about responses, questions and statements.

Why? Well because we have tendency to try and conform to what is ‘right’. Something inoffensive, correct and appropriate.

Also, we are communicating from our place of ‘unsurety’ of the outcome, our defence mechanisms are in play and we are creating a smokescreen that we even find it hard to see through ourselves.

The problem with thinking things through in this way, is what you end up saying is multi-faceted, complicated and ambiguous, and in relationships, this can lead to disaster!

It creates an avoidable problem or adds to the problems you are trying to address in the first place.

People will communicate poorly in their intimate discourses for several reasons:

• Avoiding mistakes. 
• Enabling future denial. 
• Lowering conflicts. 
• Protection from pain.
• Distance from intimacy. What is the price of clear communication?

What the avoidance of the above can lead to is:

• Saying nothing or saying too much so you are really saying nothing.
• Forces mind-reading of your intentions, when we know that no one really knows exactly what you are trying to say.
• Conversations going round in circles, nothing is resolved.
• Stagnation and boredom. Due to resolving nothing, you keep coming back to the same things and it all feels a bit ‘stuck’!
• Lack of openness and intimacy and eventually trust. 

So, what is the ‘Thing’?

If you haven’t guessed it by now, then it is to Say What You Mean - so actually it is Your Thing!

What is your reality in that moment? What is happening for you in the here and now? What do you really want to say? What is your truth?

If you can just use the skills of ‘immediacy’, you can allow yourself to be open, honest and understood. Deepening the bonds of a healthy open relationship.

The benefits of saying Your Thing:

• Your confidence and self-respect increases. You are being authentic and congruent, building self-esteem and worthiness.
• Taking full responsibility for saying what you want, your actions and pulling your partner up if required gives the ability to face your own vulnerabilities and create surety.
• Freedom! Being you, saying what you want and need gives you licence to be free, and on top of that attracts people to you because of who you are and not who you are trying to be (if that isn’t the people currently in your life, then as you enact your freedoms, they will disappear).
• Communication is easy. No more mind reading for either of you, acceptance of what the other really thinks, feels, wants and needs.
• Openness and intimacy. Both if you feel less pressure when opening up with your truth, honesty increases trust and a lessening of your barriers to intimacy and connection. 

Like most changes that you make in your life, saying your thing requires time, practice, and a bit of courage. You may find that your partner responds in a negative way at first, but that is to be expected as you are changing the dynamic of the relationship and they may want it to stay exactly where it is.

You may meet resistance in yourself to change as your brain likes the surety of where you were and to keep you emotionally ‘safe’.

The important thing to remind yourself of is – you don’t want it to remain the same.

As mentioned earlier, if you meet too much resistance then it may be time to move on from these current relationships, or learn to manage them that allows you be you regardless of the reactions (such as with family and at work).

Please feel free to comment on this and contact me on here if you have any questions, or call 07709 350019.

Be good to yourself.