The Nuance of Emotion
One piece of work I do regularly with my clients is help them better understand the nuance of their feelings/emotions. Often someone will come in and tell me they feel "bad" or "pissed off" - perfectly legit ways to feel - but a little further digging into the context of the feelings often reveals that what they are actually experiencing is disappointment, frustration, hurt, sadness, etc or some combination of any of these. What my client often lacks in these moments is a vocabulary to describe their emotions. Further than just lacking a vocabulary, they often lack a sensitivity to the nuance of these emotions, which is needed even before you can begin to attach a vocabulary to them...
Conflict & Tension
Conflict is 100% natural in relationships. Sometimes in couples’ therapy, my clients say “we never fight” to indicate the strength of their relationship. But in fact, if you don’t ever have a conflict with your partner, that’s actually a red flag - it usually means that one or both persons are withholding their true thoughts and feelings!
We tend to think of conflict in terms of a battle - a fight - but it’s more helpful to think of conflict as what happens when two people, thoughts, feelings, or ideas don’t match the others , causing tension in the relationship....
It's Not What You Say - It's How You Say It
None of us are born knowing how to communicate perfectly with other people. Some of us are born with better role models of communication, where we watched adults and caregivers express their thoughts, needs, and feelings in healthy and productive ways. Others grow up learning more dysfunctional ways of communicating - or not communicating at all, or downright destructive and abusive ways of communicating - and may carry these learned habits with them into their own relationships.
Communication is a skill. That means it is something that must be taught, learned, and practiced...
What exactly does it mean to "work" on a relationship?
Many of my clients understand that relationships take work. What is often less clear is what exactly is meant by "work" in a relationship. Sometimes people stay in bad relationships for a long time, believing that they just need to keep "working" at it, when no amount of work is going to salvage the relationship and the smart thing to do is move on. But what does "work" really mean?
Let's clarify what "work" means in healthy relationships...