How Couples Counseling Can Help Improve Your Communication

It is not uncommon for marriages and long-term relationships to go on the rocks eventually. Different expectations, past traumatic experiences, a lack of intimacy, and the stress of daily life are frequently the root causes of communication problems in relationships. These things take away the feeling of safety in a relationship.

If you constantly fight with your partner, you might lose touch with them and become emotionally distant, not knowing how to fix things and get close again.

Couples counseling may be a great place to learn how to improve communication and rekindle feelings for each other.

How to Improve Your Communication: Learn to Identify Your Patterns

For decades, the Gottman Institute has been committed to a research-based approach to relationships to support couples in repairing broken relationships and strengthening healthy ones.

During his extensive research, Dr. John Gottman found that happy couples turn to each other much more often than unhappy ones. Being able to turn toward each other in search of connection and identify negative patterns in your communication is the first step to developing healthy communication.

Dr. Gottman uses the metaphor of "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" from the New Testament to talk about the behaviors that hurt a relationship the most. He uses the concept of "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" to describe the forms of communication that can harm a relationship or even predict its end. Among these different ways of communication are:

• Criticism
• Contempt
• Defensiveness
• Stonewalling

Criticism

When you criticize your partner, you attack their personality instead of their behavior ("You're so selfish! You don't think of me at all!"). Criticism causes us to feel hurt, attacked, and unloved, so this communication pattern usually leads to the other three "horsemen of the apocalypse."

Dr. Gottman's research shows that the best way to deal with criticism is to discuss how you feel using "I-statements."

Contempt

When you and your partner are angry, you are cynical and sarcastic and treat each other poorly. Eye-rolling at each other or calling each other names are examples of showing contempt, among other things ("What a jerk! You're acting like a fool!" Research shows that contempt is the main predictor of relationship failure.

The best way to overcome contempt is to cultivate a mindset of appreciation within your relationship and treat one another respectfully.

Defensiveness

When we feel blamed or wrongly accused, we often act like victims and search for excuses to defend ourselves. While it is customary to protect yourself when you believe you are being attacked, defensiveness entails implicitly blaming your spouse, which will only intensify the issue.

Accepting responsibility for your role in a conflict is the best way to combat defensiveness in your communication.

Stonewalling

Stonewalling is typically a reaction to being treated with contempt. When you stonewall your partner, you turn off and withdraw from the conversation, refusing to communicate. Such a reaction often results from emotional flooding, which is a state in which you cannot discuss the problem or act rationally.

The antidote to stonewalling is taking a break while feeling emotionally flooded and returning to the conversation when you calm down.

Why Do We Feel Emotionally Flooded?

Being emotionally flooded means, you experience many feelings all at once.

According to research, while under stress, the prefrontal cortex, where impulse control and sophisticated planning occur, essentially shuts down, causing you to act impulsively.

Couples counseling can help you understand and tune into each other's feelings. Also, marriage counseling can help you learn how to calm down and resolve arguments in productive ways when under pressure.

How Emotional Bids Affect Your Relationship

To describe the dynamic that occurs between two people in a close relationship, Dr. Gottman proposed the concept of "emotional bids." We make an emotional bid every time we act or say something to show that we want attention, validation, or some other kind of positive connection.

According to research by Dr. John Gottman, the purpose of making emotional bids in a relationship is to develop, maintain, and reignite connection.

There are three ways of responding to an emotional bid:

• Turing toward – sends a message that you hear, see, accept, and support your partner.
• Turning away – ignoring or missing each other's bids for connection.
• Turning against – responding with disrespect, intentional insult, defensive response, and aggressive or critical reaction.

Turning toward the bid provides the connection and attention we all seek. But, on the contrary, turning away or against leads to disappointment, unhappiness, and rejection.

You risk passing up chances to connect when you reject your partner's bid. As a result, your partner's bids will eventually decrease, or they can start seeking a connection somewhere outside of your relationship.

According to Dr. Gottman, the same thing may happen to your relationship if you turn against your partner's attempts to connect with you.

Counseling for couples may assist you in identifying these patterns, teaching you how to break them so that you can instead focus on responding to each other's bids for connection.

Improving Your Communication with Couples Counseling

When partners struggle to communicate with one another, they often end up feeling stressed out, frustrated, and lonely. People tend to either lash out at each other or withdraw and stop talking when they cannot communicate effectively and find a solution to their problems.

If your relationship has reached this point, you may both gain something by attending couples counseling.

During marriage therapy, you will work through your harmful communication habits until you understand how these patterns damage your relationship and well-being. You will also develop new, constructive communication skills and learn how to be open with one another in a safe and accepting way.

To help you learn how to improve your communication, manage disagreements, work on affection and intimacy difficulties, or balance your parenting styles, your couples counselor may utilize the PREPARE/ENRICH model to assess your couple's strengths and development areas.