Slowing Down Your Communication

As a relationship coach and couples therapist, a lot of my work is about helping couples not only communicate but dive deeper with each other about their profound attachment needs. You can use many of the same tools of slowing down and observing to improve the quality of your relationships and connection at home.

When something happens (the trigger/event), we take it (somatically) into our body.  Our experience is physical and emotional. That first step of actively experiencing is not rational, it is not cognitive, it doesn’t have any meaning attached to it. It is just sensation in the body and maybe emotion.

After experiencing the trigger inside your body as both a somatic experience and a feeling, our mind begins to make meaning out of it. We begin to tell ourselves stories about how this experience connects to the rest of our lives. If we’ve been having negative feelings related to the trigger, we will code whatever the trigger is as negative; i.e. we will tell a story that fits with the stories we’ve already been telling ourselves. If we’re feeling positive and happy, we will tell a story about that new experience that fits with the happy story. We’re constantly attributing meaning to a situation; and the meaning we attribute fits with our previous stories and our existing schema. 

We work with the trigger cognitively to fit it into our story and to our sense of meaning in the world. This cognitive phase is the meaning making, story telling, attribution of cause and effect, and fits the new situation into our preexisting cognitive sequence of the world. We organize the new information to match what we already know.

Next we take action. Sometimes the space between the  provoking event and the action is so quick because the other phases are happening below our radar. We are almost unaware of the feelings and that we have created meaning. We just decide that something happened and it means something.  Our reaction could be completely opposite if we had coded the meaning differently. 

Let me give you an example: I have a date to meet my husband for dinner. He doesn’t show up and doesn’t call. I wait for 30 minutes. I call him shouting that he clearly doesn’t care about me. I have skipped my sadness that he isn’t there and have attributed a context to the plain facts (he could have been late because he had an accident, he saved a stray dog, had a heart attack) but I assumed the worst of him. (Negative Sentiment Override). I did not give him the benefit of the doubt. I did not go to my soft feelings of sadness or worry. I went straight to anger and attack. If I had been able to slow down my processing of the situation and not just believed my old stories, I would have been able to approach my husband with out an attack and heard what happened. Now regardless of if he has a good reason to be late or not, I have attacked him and put him on the defensive. Our chance of having a romantic date is severely reduced. 

When we begin to slow things down and take pauses in between the situation/trigger and our reactions, we allow space to acknowledge our own feelings. We slow down the dance, we slow down the stories that are traveling so fast and creating meaning. We then have space to slow down old patterns, the assumptions and my reactivity that gives way to your reactivity, which sticks us right in the middle of an endless cycle of conflict.

Slowing down gives each of us a chance to really listen and to take in the meaning (rather than jumping into old assumptions and stories).

Are you looking for help with your relationship? Do you feel that a relationship coach could help you working on your couples skills? Is communication an issue? Have you ever considered couples therapy or counseling? As a psychotherapist and relationship coach, I am uniquely positioned to help you through these moments of disconnect and conflict.

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Learn more about my approach to life consulting and relationship coaching here or get in touch for your free 30-minute consultation here! Don’t forget to follow along @LilyManne on social for more regular updates!