The Mechanics versus the Magic of Communication, Part 2: Where the Magic Lives
Last week in Part 1 of this essay, I wrote about the mechanics of communication, the techniques that are so useful and yet never quite enough to produce growth and healing. Now I want to talk about the deeper magic of communication. The Gottmans teach: "At the heart of our worst conflict lies the opportunity for our greatest closeness, because underneath every fight is a longing or a dream”. When we can express, explore, and understand that longing, something shifts in both of us. We are drawn closer, we find ourselves wanting to help fulfill our partner's longing, and none of us wants to be the person who crushes our partner's dreams.
What the Magic Feels Like
When the magic arrives, the whole room changes. The listener's shoulders drop, their face softens, and their eyes fill with something that looks a lot like tenderness, and the speaker, who a moment ago was bracing for an argument, suddenly feels safe enough to say the truer thing underneath. I can feel the electric energy of intimacy in the room as I watch two people who have been fighting for months see each other with unconditional love. Jean Baker Miller, originator of the Relational-Cultural Model, described this as a growth fostering experience defined by mutual empathy, a moment in which both people are moved by each other and each one adds "something more”. As the conversation keeps deepening, both feel more energy or zest, clarity, curiosity, and a greater desire for connection than they came in with. It is not one person performing empathy for the other, but two people being moved and changed at the same time. If Part 1 was about learning the scales, this is the music: two musicians listening so closely to each other that neither one is playing alone anymore.
I describe this as the multiple layers of seeing another person. First layer is the surface: the shape of our partner’s face, eyes, what they are wearing, and their demeanor or facial expression. Many of us stop right there and make inferences or react to their words from this layer. Second is the layer of attunement, where we notice the stress on their face, the hidden layer of emotion or lived experience we can sense inside our partner. Third is the layer where we see them through the lens of their past history, everyone who shaped them and everything they have survived. Just like a forest where some trees got sunlight, water, and space and grew tall and straight whereas others were forced to twist and bend to grow and develop into a different and yet beautiful shape. Finally there is the deepest layer, where we see our partner as a spirit or soul who has come into this life and this body, a fellow traveler having an earthly experience entirely different from our own. At the deeper layers, we are no longer listening to correct or to wait our turn. We are listening with awe, thinking, "You learned to do anger so differently than I did, and I can see what shaped you and I love you for your quirkiness, not despite it.”
The Space Between
This is where I want go beyond traditional science and research that is focused only on what we can observe and measure. Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt, the founders of Imago Relationship Therapy, invite us to look at a layer rarely considered. They describe a relationship as "two people and the Space Between them.” They note that astronomers once assumed the space between the planets and stars was empty, until they discovered it was full of powerful energy fields. The same is true of the space between two human beings, which can be filled with admiration, safety, and joy, or judgment, fear, and criticism. It is how two people care for that space that determines the quality of their interaction and ultimately their relationship. Hendrix and Hunt go further, proposing that the Space-Between is "not a metaphor or a psychological construct" but a real field of energy and awareness that connects us, an idea that echoes the emerging science of consciousness that many researchers are now exploring. Whether or not we follow them all the way there, I find it a wonderfully accurate description of what I feel in the room when the magic arrives, as the space between two people becomes warm, alive, and, in Hendrix and Hunt's words, sacred.
Gary Zukav, who has written for decades about the soul, calls our ability to sense this space a multisensory perception, perceiving more than our five senses can detect. James Redfield's novel The Celestine Prophecy, which so many of us devoured in the 1990s, tells the same story as a spiritual adventure, in which people unconsciously compete for each other's energy through control dramas, (playing the intimidator, the interrogator, the aloof one, or the poor me), until they learn to stop taking energy from each other and start giving it freely. When the listener learns to see the speaker as their best and highest self, the conversation lifts both of them instead of draining them, which is exactly what I see happen in my office when the magic arrives.
The Frightened Parts of Us
So why is the magic so hard to reach? Zukav has a wonderfully simple answer. Each of us has frightened parts of our personality, such as anger, jealousy, judgment, and anxiety, and loving parts, such as patience, curiosity, gratitude, and care, and we cannot play both at the same time. When a frightened part is running the conversation, it builds a kind of force field around us, and our partner's words simply cannot get through. I once worked with a wife who could not take in a single thing her husband said until I asked if he was doing something that made it hard. "Look at his face, he's scowling," she said, but he insisted he was not, till she held a photo of him from five years earlier right next to his face. He looked, laughed, and admitted he was clenching his jaw because he was nervous, and once she knew he was frightened rather than angry, her own frightened part could step aside, the space between them softened, and she heard him completely differently. Dan Wile, founder of Collaborative Couple Therapy, said that intimacy is often just a sentence away, and in that moment, it was.
Research supports what happened in that room. Psychologist Harry Reis and his colleagues found that when people feel their partner is truly responsive to them, they become less defensive and more open to other points of view, and psychologist Guy Itzchakov found that high-quality listening helps speakers soften and step back from rigid positions. Safety dissolves the force field, and the magic can finally get through.
Five Ways to Invite the Magic this Week:
Notice which part of you is listening. The next time your partner is talking and you feel your body tighten, ask yourself whether a frightened part or a loving part of you is doing the listening. Zukav suggests that when we want to shout in anger but choose instead to listen, we weaken the hold that fear has on us.
Listen for the longing under the complaint. Hendrix and Hunt teach that "a frustration is a wish in disguise." "You're always on your phone" usually means something closer to "I miss you, and I want to know I still matter to you." Respond to the longing rather than the complaint, and watch the conversation change.
Find your one sentence. Before you attack or withdraw, pause and ask yourself what you are really feeling right now. Then try saying it in one honest sentence, such as "I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I missed you today." That single sentence can turn your partner from an enemy or a stranger back into an ally.
Run a five-minute experiment. Choose a calm moment and let one partner talk for five minutes while the other simply tries to see the whole person in front of them, a soul like themselves with a whole history behind every word. Then pause and ask each other, "What did you notice in your body, and what changed in the space between us?"
Name the force field, gently. If you notice you cannot take in your partner's words, get curious instead of pushing harder. Ask yourself, or ask your partner, "Is there something in your face, your tone, or my own fear that is making it hard for me to hear you right now?" Wile calls this stepping up to a second level in the relationship, where the two of you look at the difficulty together rather than fighting from inside it.
Zukav describes a spiritual partnership as a partnership between equals for the purpose of spiritual growth, and I cannot think of a better description of what the magic of communication makes possible. I hope you will spend this week tending the space between you, and discover, as so many of my couples have, that the conflict you have been dreading may be the very doorway to the closeness you have been longing for.
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).
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Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (1999). The seven principles for making marriage work. Crown.
Miller, J. B. (1986). What do we mean by relationships? (Work in Progress No. 22). Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies, Wellesley College.
Hendrix, H., & Hunt, H. L. (2017). The space between: The point of connection. Relationships First.
Hendrix, H., & Hunt, H. L. (2021). Doing Imago relationship therapy in the space-between: A clinician's guide. W. W. Norton.
Hendrix, H., & Hunt, H. L. (2013). Making marriage simple: Ten relationship-saving truths. Harmony Books.
Zukav, G. (2010). Spiritual partnership: The journey to authentic power. HarperOne.
Zukav, G. (2007). Soul to soul: Communications from the heart. Free Press.
Redfield, J. (1993). The Celestine prophecy. Warner Books.
Wile, D. B. (2021). Solving the moment: Collaborative couple therapy. Self-published (ISBN 9798599009368).
Wile, D. B. (2000, November/December). Opening up a second level in the relationship. Los Angeles Psychologist.
Reis, H. T., Lee, K. Y., O'Keefe, S. D., & Clark, M. S. (2018). Perceived partner responsiveness promotes intellectual humility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 79, 21–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2018.05.006
Itzchakov, G., Weinstein, N., Leary, M., Saluk, D., & Amar, M. (2024). Listening to understand: The role of high-quality listening on speakers' attitude depolarization during disagreements. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 126(2), 213–239. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000366