Beyond Addiction by Jeffrey Foote

Author:Jeffrey Foote
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Relax your body and take care of yourself.

Paying attention to your body during communication will help you regulate your tone, pace, and all the other factors of effective communication. Breathe. Literally. Remember, emotional tension often manifests as held breath, which increases muscle tension, which in turn increases the emotional tension. It’s okay to step back and pause. If you struggle with the tone of your voice, consider smiling, or using the half-smile distress tolerance technique from chapter 5 (page 109). Smiling is a signal to the body to relax.

Take good care of your body the rest of the time too. Think of good sleep, nutrition, and other contributors to physical health as your fuel for positive communication. If you are sleep deprived or hungry, the resulting fatigue, irritability, and other symptoms will likely manifest in your communications. Exercising, meditating, getting enough rest, and eating well will help you keep your emotional balance.

Listen.

Really listen. Sometimes when people think they’re listening, what they’re actually doing is waiting for the other person to stop talking. They may be taking that time to think about what they’re going to say next. This is not really listening. Listening is paying attention to what the other person is saying and suspending your assumptions and opinions long enough to take it in, in good faith and a sincere effort to understand. It’s a skill you can learn.

Really listening is active, not passive, and it is harder than most people think. Changing the way you communicate requires that you monitor your own reactions at the same time that you process the other person’s meaning. If you come to an impasse where you don’t understand or disagree, try to suspend your expectations or judgments, resist the urge to contradict, and be inquisitive. You may wish that you were hearing something different. Try to stay calm—breathe—and tap into your empathy to come back with a constructive response.

To be a successful listener, you may have to change your mental framework for the whole situation. A man listening to his wife with the assumption that she’s irrational is probably not really listening. If he’s listening at all, what he’s taking in is just the evidence that “proves” him right—and justifies his next argument. What if he changed his goal, from proving his point and trying to get her to agree with him to collaborating and having something good happen? What if he listened in the spirit of wanting to walk the dog together later and enjoy the evening, rather than in order to explain what is so stupid about what she’s saying? When you catch yourself thinking “Here we go again,” or “That’s what she always says,” try to pause and ask yourself how you would like to be feeling about the relationship in an hour. Really listening puts the responsibility on you to find a way forward when communications start to break down. Instead of getting locked into being right and convincing the other person that you are right, try to make listening your goal for the moment.

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