“Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.” ~ Ephesians 4:15
In the last article, we spent some time dispelling some of the rumors and misconceptions surrounding the idea of love and how it connects to relationships. In this article, I want to address some of the misconceptions involved with communication. Honest and effective communication is one of those topics that you have seen me touch on in previous articles time and time again. The reason why it is a topic that comes up so often is because honest communication is a skill that requires intentional cultivation; very few people just naturally develop the skills for honest and effective communication. In fact, so much of what people are steeped in from our culture is counter to effective and healthy communication. Many people rely very heavily on social media and the internet for “communication,” but this is not actual communication. For communication to be effective and healthy, there must be an exchange, and sending and receiving in processing information. Unfortunately, with social media and different virtual avenues for “communication” the platform is driven by the need for expression. In other words, there tends to be a lot of talking at each other through social media, and extraordinarily little listening or honest exchange and growth.
But the point is not to go on about how social media is hindering our communication skills in the world. The point is that we need to learn to be better communicators to improve the quality and depth of our relationships. To begin with, just to make the topic more manageable, I will be focusing on communication in marriage for the sake of this article, but the concepts in this article could easily apply to any kind of relationship. Also, I want to focus particularly on the subject communication in conflict. In the last article, I spent a lot of time driving home the point that conflict avoidance can do more to damage a relationship than preserve. So, to follow-up that idea, I want to focus on how we communicate through conflict, so that we have the tools needed to address conflict in relationships in a healthy way.
Before I go any further, I want to be honest and upfront about where I am drawing my information from. The communication tool I am about to present you with is known as the Awareness Wheel developed by Miller, Sherod, & Phyllis. I highly recommend doing your own research and exploring more in-depth if you find this helpful. On a personal note, using this communication tool in my own marriage has been extremely foundational and beneficial, allowing my wife and I to weather the storms of life together. With that being said, let us get into this.
To begin, we must move away from the mindset of winning or losing an argument. It does not really work. What will often happen is that as the conflict erupts, it devolves into a battle of wills, with both parties fighting to come out on top. But, for one person to come out as the winner, the other person must be beaten down into the position of the loser of the conflict. While you may win the argument, you also damage the relationship in the process, and sometimes that damage can have serious consequences for the relationship, even breaking the relationship. You may have won the argument, but a divorce or the addition of pain and bitterness to the relationship hardly seems like a great prize. On the contrary, when a conflict is treated as a “win versus lose” scenario, the result of pain and bitterness and broken relationships makes everyone a loser.
For us to move past this mindset of winners and losers, we must shift our perception of conflict into one of understanding and resolution. For understanding to occur, the Awareness Wheel goes through five steps: I do, I sense, I think, I feel, and I want. Notice that these are “I” statements. The beginning of communication and resolution must begin with our own self-awareness because we must be able to understand the lens through which we see and filter our perception of the world and experience before we can try to understand someone else’s understanding.
So, let us consider an example. A couple is home, and the wife asks her husband to take the trash out. The husband agrees to take the trash out and tells his wife that he will get it done, and the conversation ends there. An hour later, the wife comes into the kitchen to find the trash has yet to be taken out. Suddenly, taking out the trash blows-up into a huge argument. Husband and wife begin to yell and argue about taking out the trash. So, who is at fault?
Some might say the husband is at fault for not taking out the trash. Some might say the wife is at fault for blowing such a little issue out of proportion. I, on the other hand, say that the argument has absolutely nothing to do with the trash, and both husband and wife are at fault. Why? Well, let us walk through it step by step.
So, from the wife’s perspective, she asked her husband to take out the trash, and it did not get done; that would be the action, or the “I do.” For the “I sense” portion, the wife sees that the trash was not taken out, even though she heard her husband say that he would take the trash out. These first two steps of the Awareness Wheel are more concrete and factual; they can be confirmed and established. But the next three steps begin to move into a much more convoluted territory. For the “I think” step, perhaps the wife thinks that her husband forgot, or that her husband considered the task as not important enough to make a priority. This in turn, through the “I feel” step, creates a feeling in the wife of feeling dismissed, ignored, or unimportant. In the final step, the “I want” step, let us consider where those feeling may come from. Perhaps the wife came from a broken family where the father was absent. Or maybe both of her parents worked and had little time to spend with her. She wants to feel important and valued, because she was lacking that in her younger years, and this seemingly innocuous behavior just brought all those emotions to the forefront. In other words, while they may be arguing about taking out the trash, for the wife, the argument has nothing to do with the trash.
Now, before you get caught up in, “How could the husband treat his wife that way?” we need to also look at things from the husband’s perspective. “I do”: the wife asked her husband to take out the trash, and the husband told her that he would do it. “I sense”: the husband heard his wife ask him to take out the trash, he can see that the trash needs to be taken out, and he can see and hear that his wife is upset that it had not been done during that hour. “I think”: the husband thinks that his wife does not trust him when he said that he would take out the trash, even though perhaps he did not forget and just had not done it yet, and perhaps he thinks that his wife considers him irresponsible and not capable of handling this small task. “I feel”: the husband feels mistrusted, belittled, and undervalued. “I want”: perhaps the husband comes from a home where his parents treated him like he was incapable of handling responsibility, or perhaps someone in his life would often belittle him or accuse him of being irresponsible or untrustworthy. Just like with the wife, for the husband, the argument has nothing to do with taking out the trash.
So, considering the situation from both sides, who is at fault? Ultimately, you must admit that the actions on both sides caused pain and discomfort, no matter how unintentional. But, if the husband and the wife can communicate through these issues, bring enough self-awareness into the conversation, and listen beyond the issue in front of them to the pain and hardships beneath the surface, then they can possibly find a place of greater intimacy, have a better understanding of their spouse, which in turn allows them to become deeper in their relationship.
In Ephesians, Paul was writing to the church that had a fair amount of conflict and difficulty. But what was his advice for the church: “Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ (Ephesians 4:15).” Being able to communicate out of a place of love, and having the self-awareness and the ability to listen, understand, and empathize, is the only way we can communicate with any kind of truth. But the reality is that the hard work of effective and healthy communication begins with us.
Life is not lived in an emotional vacuum. We bring our experience, our wounds, our brokenness, our pain, and our blindness, into every relationship we have. It is unavoidable. While we cannot change our past or do anything to erase the pain we once experienced, by understanding our past experiences and how they color our perspective of the world, we can prevent it from defining us or controlling our lives. Perhaps Jesus said it best: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye (Matthew 7:3-5).”
While in this article we explore the difficulties of communication, in our next article, we will be exploring some actual communication tools that we can use and apply to mitigate and improve our communication within relationships. Stay tuned.