The Mechanics versus the Magic of Communication, Part 1: Why Good Technique Is Not Enough
Most couples come into therapy asking for help with their communication. They tell me they just cannot communicate, that they get caught in the same loop over and over again, and that every trip around that loop leaves them more frustrated, angry, and hopeless than the last.
The way I see it, the problem is not an inability to communicate. They are expressing their thoughts well enough. They just don’t like the kind of communication they are having.
It makes sense that stuck conversations are so painful, because most of us would like to believe that we are good communicators, that we speak clearly, and that our words and the intentions behind our words are easy to understand. Social psychologists Ross and Ward, called this naive realism, the quiet conviction that we see the world as it really is and that anyone who sees it differently must be uninformed, unreasonable, or biased. In their research, people were quick to spot bias in others while rating themselves as far more objective, a pattern they named the bias blind spot.
Why We Get Stuck
At the same time that we trust our own clarity, we tend to experience our partner's communication as vague, inaccurate, obtuse, or even deliberately misleading. We might interrupt our partner in the middle of a sentence because we are so sure they have the facts wrong, and hidden underneath that interruption is the belief that our memory of the event is more accurate than theirs. Since we are so confident in our own mental record, our emotions start to bubble up the moment we hear a different account, so our correction is rarely neutral and it tends to land as criticism and judgment, sounding something like "That is ridiculous, how could you possibly say that happened first?" or "What is wrong with you that you would remember it so incorrectly?" Of course, our partners are equally sure they have a corner on the truth, and the fantasy that never comes true is that I will correct my partner and they will slap their forehead and say, "How could I have been so wrong, thank you for correcting me, you are absolutely right." In my own marriage, when I hear my husband telling a story, I can be so convinced he has it wrong that I can barely sit still and let him finish. On good days we catch it and have a little laugh about my “ants in pants” behavior.
Closeness, it turns out, makes this worse rather than better. Psychologists Kenneth Savitsky, Boaz Keysar, and Nicholas Epley seated married couples back to back and asked each person to convey the meaning of ambiguous everyday phrases, sometimes to their spouse and sometimes to a stranger. Spouses understood each other no better than the strangers did, and yet speakers were much more confident that their spouse had understood them. The researchers called this the closeness-communication bias, meaning that the more familiar we are with someone, the more we assume they already know what we mean and the less effort we make to check whether they actually do. So it is very common that two people who love each other will end up in a comparative memory battle that has no end, each growing more irritated, suspicious, and hurt, until they begin to question each other's intentions, hidden agenda, or even their hold on reality. This is usually when they reach out to a couples therapist, hoping the therapist will break the tie.
The Mechanics
Every major model of couples therapy emphasizes communication, and most of them teach some version of the same technique called Active Listening. One partner is the speaker and the other is the listener, and the speaker gets the floor for a little while as the listener listens and takes notes. Then the listener summarizes, mirrors, or in some other way shows that they heard and understood the speaker’s words to the speaker's satisfaction. Sometimes the listener goes a step further and offers validation and empathy for the speaker's experience. Then the partners switch roles and repeat the sequence. My colleague, Ryan Welborn, came up with an apt acronym for this sequence, LOVE, which stands for Listen, Orient, Validate, and Empathize. I teach this structure, I believe in it, and for many of my couples it is the first time in years that either of them has been allowed to finish a sentence.
Active listening makes logical sense but it is not natural. When the Gottmans observed 130 newlywed couples, they expected active listening to be highly predictive, since therapists had been recommending it for decades. Instead, they found that happily married couples rarely paraphrased each other, rarely summarized each other's feelings, and almost never validated each other in the middle of a disagreement, and that active listening did not predict which marriages would last. They concluded that active listening asks too much of people who are in the heat of conflict. It does not mean the speaker-listener technique is useless but it does tell us that the structure was never where the healing lived.
Scales and Music
Think about learning to play the piano. Scales are essential, no one becomes a musician without practicing them for years, and yet we are not moved to tears by a scale. The speaker and listener exercise works the same way, because it builds the muscle, but it is not the music. Sometimes the couple, or the therapist, gets so lost in the structure that the exercise turns into a technical recital, where the listener is paraphrasing correctly while privately waiting for a turn, and the internal dialogue is something like, "If I listen to you, I will get points for it, and then you will have to listen to me." The speaker, meanwhile, is judging the paraphrase instead of feeling grateful for having the floor and being heard. So even if every note is correct there is still no music worth enjoying. If done poorly the mechanics actually crowd out curiosity, compassion, and understanding, and the couple walks away disappointed, wondering if this is all there is, and if their relationship is beyond help.
The magic does not live in whether each partner plays their role accurately. The magic lives in being moved by our partner's experience, in letting their words land and change something in us, even though we remember the story differently. When the listener is truly moved, the speaker can feel it long before any paraphrase is offered, and the whole conversation comes alive and builds closeness.
Three Places to Start This Week
Notice the urge to correct. When your partner is telling a story and you feel the pull to jump in with the "real" facts, pause and notice what is happening in your body. That rush of certainty is naive realism at work, and it is a signal to get curious rather than a signal to interrupt. You will have your turn, and the story will still be there.
Hold your memory lightly. Your memory is one version of what happened, and your partner's memory is another, and both were shaped by where each of you was standing and what each of you was feeling. Try saying, "I remember it differently, and I want to hear how it was for you," and then actually listen to how it was for them.
Listen to be moved, not to score points. Before your partner starts talking, set an intention that has nothing to do with getting your turn or getting credit for listening well. Ask yourself, "What would it take for me to really let this in?" and notice how differently you hear the same words when that is the question you are holding.
In Part 2 of this essay, I will share what I believe the magic in communication looks like, including how we can see our partners at different depths each producing greater attunement and authentic intimacy, and what to do when something invisible seems to block their words from reaching us. While many of us need to learn the mechanics of communication first, the ultimate destination is that magic, which is the crux of what we long for in our committed relationships.
Vagdevi Meunier, Psy.D., is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in Austin, Texas with over 40 years of experience as an author, therapist, educator, and consultant, specializing in multicultural relationships, trust recovery, and the impact of technology on relationships. She is a Senior Certified Gottman Therapist, Consultant, and Advanced Clinical Trainer for the Gottman Institute since 2006. She is the founder of The Center for Relationships, a relationship therapy and education center in Texas that Inspires Love across all relationships. Follow her on LinkedIn, Facebook at the Center for Relationships, and Instagram: The Center For Relationships (@thecenterforrelationships).
-
Ross, L., & Ward, A. (1996). Naive realism in everyday life: Implications for social conflict and misunderstanding. In E. S. Reed, E. Turiel, & T. Brown (Eds.), Values and knowledge (pp. 103–135). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Pronin, E., Lin, D. Y., & Ross, L. (2002). The bias blind spot: Perceptions of bias in self versus others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(3), 369–381.
Savitsky, K., Keysar, B., Epley, N., Carter, T., & Swanson, A. (2011). The closeness-communication bias: Increased egocentrism among friends versus strangers. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(2), 269–273.
Gottman, J. M., Coan, J., Carrère, S., & Swanson, C. (1998). Predicting marital happiness and stability from newlywed interactions. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 60(1), 5–22.