A Practical Guide to Being Heard and Hearing Others

Posted on by helpingsoul

Communication Tools for People Whose Brains Are Wired Differently — and for the People Who Love Them

A practical companion piece that brings together what I have written about interest-based attention, communicating across different attention architectures, and the research on what great listeners actually do. This is a working toolkit rather than an essay.

This guide is built for a specific situation. Two people who care about each other are trying to communicate, and their brains are wired differently. One may have ADHD or an interest-based attention system. One may have a trauma history that shapes how they hear and respond. One may simply process information at a different pace or in a different style than the other. The conversations keep going wrong, and neither person fully understands why.

This is a practical toolkit rather than an essay. It synthesizes three areas of my previous writing: the nature of interest-based attention and how it differs from the conventional model, the work of communicating across different attention architectures, and the research on what genuinely effective listening involves. It is meant to be used rather than only read. Return to it. Try the tools. Notice what helps.

Part one: understanding the architectures in the room

Before any communication tool can help, both people need a shared understanding of what is actually happening between their two nervous systems and attention systems. Most communication breakdowns are not caused by lack of care. They are caused by two differently-built systems trying to interact without understanding how the other one works.

Interest-based versus importance-based attention

Many people, including most people with ADHD and many people with complex trauma histories, have what is sometimes called an interest-based nervous system. Their attention is reliably engaged by interest, novelty, challenge, urgency, and passion. It is not reliably engaged by importance alone. Telling an interest-based person that something is important does not summon their attention the way it summons the attention of an importance-based person.

This is not a character flaw or a failure of caring. It is a structural difference in how the attention system allocates its resources. The interest-based person is not choosing to tune out the important-but-boring conversation. Their attention system genuinely does not engage with it in the same way.

If you are in a relationship where one person is interest-based and one is importance-based, naming this openly changes everything. The importance-based person stops interpreting the interest-based person’s drift as not caring. The interest-based person stops interpreting their own difficulty as moral failure. Both can begin to work with the actual architecture rather than against it.

Pace and processing differences

People process at different speeds and in different styles. Some people think out loud, generating their ideas through the act of speaking. Others think internally and present conclusions only after processing. Some people need time to formulate a response and experience being pushed for an immediate answer as genuinely disregulating. Others lose the thread if a response is delayed.

These differences are not preferences that can simply be overridden. They reflect how the individual nervous system actually processes. The conversation goes better when both people know which style the other has and stop expecting the other to perform their own style.

Trauma-shaped hearing

A person with a trauma history often hears communication through a protective filter. A neutral question can land as criticism. A request can land as a demand. A pause can land as withdrawal of approval. The trauma-shaped system is scanning for danger, and it sometimes finds danger in communication that was not dangerous.

This matters for both people. The trauma-shaped person benefits from knowing that their hearing is filtered, so they can check their interpretations rather than acting on them automatically. The other person benefits from knowing that their neutral communication may be landing as something harsher, so they can be more explicit about their actual intent.

Part two: tools for being heard

If you are the one trying to communicate something and you keep feeling unheard, the following tools help.

Lead with the headline

Interest-based and busy listeners often lose the thread if the important content is buried in the middle of a long preamble. State the core of what you need to say first, in one sentence, then provide the detail. I need to talk about our budget, and here is what is concerning me is more effective than five minutes of context followed eventually by the actual point.

Name the kind of conversation you are starting

Tell the listener what you need from them before you begin. I need to vent and I am not looking for solutions. Or I have a problem and I would actually like your help solving it. Or I need to tell you something difficult and I need you to just listen for a few minutes. This single sentence prevents the most common communication mismatch, in which one person wants to be heard and the other person starts problem-solving.

Choose the moment with the listener’s architecture in mind

If the person you need to talk to is interest-based, do not start an important conversation when their attention is already engaged elsewhere. If they have a trauma history, do not start a hard conversation when they are already activated. The same words land completely differently depending on the state of the listener’s system when they arrive. Timing is not a minor factor. It is often the difference between being heard and not being heard.

Make requests specific and concrete

Vague requests do not give the listener anything to act on. I need more support is hard to act on. I would like you to handle the morning routine with the kids on Tuesdays and Thursdays is specific and actionable. The more concrete the request, the more likely it is to be heard and met.

Check what landed

After you have said something important, ask the listener to tell you what they heard. Not as a test. As a way to catch the gap between what you said and what arrived. The gap is often significant, and catching it in the moment prevents the accumulation of misunderstanding.

Part three: tools for hearing others

If you are the one trying to listen well, particularly to someone whose brain is wired differently than yours, the following tools help. These draw directly on the research about what genuinely effective listening involves.

Clear your internal noise first

Before an important conversation, take a breath and set down whatever you have been thinking about. The listener who is mentally elsewhere cannot produce the quality of attention that genuine listening requires. A few seconds of deliberate clearing changes the conversation that follows.

Remove the distractions

Phone in another room. Laptop closed. The presence of a phone, even face down, has been shown to reduce the felt quality of connection in conversation. The conversation you are about to have deserves the removal of competing inputs.

Listen as a trampoline, not a sponge

The best listeners are not silent absorbers. They are active participants who ask questions that help the speaker discover and clarify their own thinking. Ask questions that promote insight. Reflect back not just the words but the meaning underneath them. The speaker should leave the conversation thinking more clearly than when they entered it.

Tolerate the silence

When the speaker pauses, do not rush to fill the space. The deeper material often arrives in the second wave, after the surface content has been spoken and the speaker is willing to access what is underneath. The capacity to sit with silence is one of the most powerful listening tools available.

Ask before you solve

Even when you can see exactly what the speaker should do, ask them what they have already considered, and ask what they want from the conversation. The speaker who feels heard often arrives at their own solution, or becomes far more receptive to outside input once the hearing has occurred. Premature problem-solving is the single most common way that well-intentioned listeners lose the conversation.

Watch the body, not only the words

The majority of communication is nonverbal. Notice the speaker’s face, posture, breath, the small physical signals. When the words say one thing and the body says another, the body is usually more accurate. Listening with the eyes as well as the ears is foundational to deep listening.

Acknowledge the emotion explicitly

When you can identify what the speaker is feeling, name it and reflect it back. It sounds like this has been really exhausting for you. The felt sense of being seen — of having one’s internal state accurately recognized by another person — is one of the most regulating experiences a nervous system can receive.

Part four: tools for the conversation itself

When two differently-wired people are in a conversation that matters, the following structural tools help the conversation hold together.

Regulate before you engage

Conversations that begin from an activated state rarely go well. Before a hard conversation, both people benefit from regulating. A few slow breaths with the exhale longer than the inhale. A short pause. The conversation that begins from two regulated systems is a different conversation than the one that begins from activation.

Take silence when you need it

If you feel yourself becoming activated mid-conversation, you are allowed to take silence. Three slow breaths, counting four on the inhale and seven on the exhale, repeated three times, takes about a minute. The silence regulates you and often gives the other person time to settle as well. Silence in a conversation is permitted. It frequently produces a better conversation than pushing through the activation would have.

Name the process when it goes off track

When a conversation has become heated or confused, you can step out of the content and name the process. I notice we are both getting activated. Can we slow down? Or I think we are talking about two different things. Can we figure out which one we are actually discussing? Naming the process, rather than continuing to fight about the content, often resets the conversation.

Repair when something lands wrong

When something you said landed harder than you intended, name it and try again. That came out sharper than I meant. Let me say it differently. Repair is one of the most powerful tools in any relationship. The capacity to recognize when something has gone off track and gently bring it back is what distinguishes relationships that endure from relationships that erode.

Schedule the hard conversations

Important conversations do not have to happen in the moment of activation. For many couples and families, the most difficult conversations go far better when scheduled — a set time, both people regulated, distractions removed, both people having agreed in advance to discuss the topic. The scheduled conversation prevents the ambush dynamic in which one person raises something hard while the other is unprepared.

Part five: a note for differently-wired couples and families

If you are in a relationship or family where the attention architectures genuinely differ, the most important tool of all is the shared understanding that the differences are real, structural, and not anyone’s fault.

The interest-based partner is not choosing to forget the important task. The trauma-shaped partner is not choosing to hear criticism in a neutral question. The internal-processor is not choosing to be slow. The think-out-loud partner is not choosing to be scattered. These are the actual architectures of the actual nervous systems in the room.

When both people understand this, communication shifts from a contest in which each person tries to get the other to communicate their way, into a collaboration in which both people work with the actual systems present. The interest-based partner uses external structure and reminders without shame. The importance-based partner stops interpreting the other’s drift as not caring. The trauma-shaped partner checks their interpretations. The other partner becomes more explicit about intent. Both people, understanding the architecture, can build a communication system that actually fits the people in the relationship rather than fighting the people in the relationship.

This is the work. It is learnable. It takes practice. And the relationships that do this work — that build communication systems fitted to the actual people involved — become significantly stronger than they were when both people were trying, with the best intentions, to communicate in ways that did not match how the other person was built.

A closing thought

Communication across different brains is one of the more demanding things two people can attempt. It is also one of the most rewarding, because the felt sense of being genuinely heard by someone whose brain works differently than yours — and of genuinely hearing them in return — is one of the deepest forms of connection available.

None of the tools in this guide is complicated. All of them take practice. Choose two or three to begin with. Work with them. Notice what helps. Add more over time. The accumulation, across months and years, builds a communication system that fits the actual people in your life.

The goal is not for everyone to communicate the same way. The goal is for differently-built people to understand each other well enough to build something that works for the specific brains in the specific relationship. That is possible. It is worth the practice. And the connection it produces is worth the work it requires.

Related reading: This guide draws on my previous articles on interest-based attention and on what great listeners actually do, both available at courageous-arts.com, and on the broader literature including the work of Stephen Porges on the social engagement system and the research on neural synchronization in conversation.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida specializing in EMDR, sex therapy, and couples counseling. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

What Actually Builds a Lasting Partnership

Posted on by helpingsoul

A Therapist’s Reflections on What the Research and Eighteen Years of Clinical Work Have Taught Me

A substantial revision of an earlier 2009 post on meeting and marriage. The original used a prescriptive timetable that real relationships rarely follow. This version draws on current research and clinical experience to describe what actually produces lasting partnership across many forms.

In 2009, I wrote a post that mapped what I thought of as the path from meeting someone to marrying them. The post laid out an eight-step timeline — meet, build friendship, set boundaries, develop respect, love revealed at nine months, marriage at one to two years. The framework reflected what I believed at the time about how the strongest relationships developed.

Sixteen years of clinical work later, I would not write that post the same way. Several things have changed.

The most important change is the recognition that relationships do not follow timetables. The couple who knew they were going to marry within three weeks of meeting can have as durable a partnership as the couple who took five years to decide. The couple who lived together for a decade before committing to marriage may have stronger fundamentals than the couple who married within months. The timing varies. The fundamentals do not.

The second change is the recognition that lasting partnership takes many forms. Marriage is one. Long-term cohabitation without legal marriage is another. Partnerships within queer relationships have their own histories and forms. Polyamorous and non-monogamous structures, when they work, work according to similar fundamentals as monogamous partnerships. The legal and cultural form of the relationship matters less than the underlying dynamics. The work of building something that lasts is recognizable across forms, even when the forms differ significantly.

This refreshed essay describes what I have come to understand about those underlying dynamics, drawing on current research and on the work I have done in my practice with couples across many configurations.

The conditions that produce lasting partnership

Several conditions, present together and developed over time, produce the kind of partnership that endures.

Friendship as foundation

This was true in the 2009 post and remains true. The strongest partnerships have a deep friendship underneath them. The capacity to enjoy each other’s ordinary company. The genuine interest in each other’s inner lives. The willingness to spend time together that is not about romance or sex but simply about being with this particular person.

John and Julie Gottman, who have studied couples in their laboratory at the University of Washington for decades, identify friendship as the foundational element of relationships that last. Their research consistently shows that couples who maintain what they call a sound relationship house — the underlying friendship and shared knowledge of each other — weather conflict and transition far better than couples whose connection is primarily passionate or primarily logistical. The friendship is not opposed to romance. It is what allows the romance to continue across decades.

Secure attachment within the relationship

Sue Johnson, who developed Emotionally Focused Therapy and has spent her career applying attachment theory to adult couples, identifies the felt sense of secure connection as the central work of lasting partnership. Each partner needs to know, in their body, that the other is reliably there — that emotional reach will be met, that need will not be dismissed, that distress can be brought to the other and will be received.

Building this kind of security is the work of years. It develops through small repeated experiences of being met. The partner who turns toward you when you reach out, even when they are tired. The partner who returns to repair after a conflict rather than letting the disconnection settle. The partner who notices when something is wrong before you have named it. These small moments accumulate into the felt sense of being securely held by the relationship itself.

For partners who arrived in the relationship with insecure attachment patterns from childhood, the work is more demanding. The nervous system that learned not to reach has to learn to reach. The nervous system that learned to defend against connection has to learn to receive it. The relationship itself, when it is functioning, becomes the corrective experience that updates the original conditioning. This is slow work. It is genuinely possible, particularly when both partners understand what they are doing.

Respect as daily practice

Respect is the felt experience of being treated as someone whose thoughts, feelings, and choices have weight. It is not the same as agreement. Two partners can disagree substantially and still treat each other with respect. They can fight hard about what matters to them and still convey, throughout the fight, that the other person remains worthy of consideration.

The Gottmans’ research identifies contempt — the felt sense of looking down on the partner, dismissing them as beneath you — as the single most reliable predictor of divorce in their studies. Contempt is the opposite of respect. When it enters a relationship and is not addressed, the relationship is on a trajectory toward dissolution that is statistically very difficult to reverse.

Maintaining respect requires daily attention. The small ways you speak about your partner when they are not in the room. The small ways you respond to them when they share something with you. The small ways you handle conflict when you are tired or activated. Respect is built or eroded in these small moments. It is rarely built or eroded in dramatic events.

The capacity for repair

All relationships experience rupture. The strongest relationships are not the ones in which rupture never occurs. They are the ones in which both partners have developed the capacity to repair after rupture has occurred.

Repair is its own learnable skill. It involves the willingness to recognize when something has gone wrong between you. The capacity to take responsibility for your part without becoming defensive. The willingness to make a genuine acknowledgment of harm caused, however unintentional. The patience to let the other person have their own response to the repair attempt without controlling how they receive it. The follow-through that demonstrates the repair is more than words.

Stan Tatkin, who developed the psychobiological approach to couples therapy, writes extensively about repair as one of the central practices of lasting partnership. His framing — that secure functioning couples treat each other’s regulation as their joint responsibility — points to something important. The repair is not just about the specific rupture. It is about the ongoing maintenance of the relationship’s underlying safety. Each successful repair tells both partners that this relationship can hold difficulty. Each failed repair, particularly accumulated, communicates the opposite.

Differentiation alongside connection

Esther Perel has written extensively about the tension in long-term partnership between connection and otherness. The relationship needs both. Partners who completely fuse — who lose their individual identities into the relationship — often lose desire for each other over time. Partners who remain too separate, who do not actually allow themselves to be known and to know the other, miss the depth that long partnership offers.

The work is holding both. Maintaining your own friendships, interests, and inner life that are separate from the relationship. Continuing to develop as an individual across the years rather than freezing into your role within the partnership. And also doing the work of genuine intimacy, allowing yourself to be known and to know the other deeply, building the shared history that only long partnership can produce.

Differentiation is not coldness. It is the capacity to be fully present in the relationship while remaining recognizably yourself. Partners who maintain this capacity often find that their desire for each other endures across decades, because the other remains genuinely other rather than dissolving into a version of the self.

Shared sense of meaning

Lasting partnerships typically develop a shared sense of what the relationship is for beyond the immediate enjoyment of being together. This may be raising children. It may be building a business or pursuing creative work together. It may be participating in religious or spiritual community. It may be navigating significant challenges — illness, loss, large life transitions — that the partnership has helped both partners through.

The shared meaning is not always articulated. Sometimes it lives in the unspoken understanding that this relationship has been the container for the life both partners have lived. The relationship is not just a source of pleasure or companionship. It is the structure within which a life has been built. That kind of meaning, accumulated over years, produces a depth that newer relationships cannot match no matter how passionate they are.

Commitment as ongoing choice

The 2009 post talked about hundred percent commitment as the defining feature of marriage. I would say something slightly different now. Commitment in lasting partnership is not a one-time decision made at the altar or at the moment of agreement to be exclusive. It is a daily choice that gets remade across the years.

Every long-term partnership goes through periods when one or both partners genuinely consider whether they want to continue. This is not a sign of failure. It is a sign that the partnership is real and consequential. The partners who continue across these moments do so because they have made the choice to continue. The choice is not always certain. It is often made in conditions of doubt. But it is made, and remade, and remade again across the years.

This framing changes how we understand commitment. It is not the absence of doubt. It is the willingness to act in the direction of the partnership despite the doubt, and to bring whatever the doubt is about into the relationship rather than carrying it alone. The strongest partnerships have rooms in them for the difficult conversations about the partnership itself.

What I would tell a younger version of myself

If I could speak to the therapist who wrote the 2009 post, I would tell her several things.

The timeline does not matter. What matters is what happens within whatever timeline the relationship actually unfolds along.

Marriage is not the goal. The goal is a partnership that allows both people to live in a way that feels genuinely theirs, with someone who knows them and is known by them, across the long arc of a life.

Friendship matters more than passion. Passion comes and goes in long partnership. Friendship, properly tended, deepens.

Repair matters more than avoiding conflict. The couple who never fights is rarely the couple whose relationship lasts. The couple who fights and repairs is.

The work continues. There is no moment when you have arrived at a lasting partnership and can stop building it. The building is the partnership.

If you are in the early stages of a relationship

If you are in the early period of a relationship and trying to determine whether this person could be a lasting partner, here are the questions worth asking yourself. Not on a timetable. Whenever they become relevant.

Is there a genuine friendship underneath the chemistry? Do you actually enjoy this person’s company when you are not romantically engaged with them?

Can you imagine being known by this person at the depth that long partnership requires? Are they capable of receiving you, and are you capable of receiving them, beyond the surface?

How do they handle conflict and repair? Are they capable of taking responsibility for their part in difficulty? Can they offer genuine acknowledgment without becoming defensive?

Are their values and life goals genuinely compatible with yours, or are you assuming compatibility that has not actually been tested?

Do you feel respected by them in the small daily moments, and do you respect them similarly? Is there any contempt in either direction that has begun to enter the interaction?

Are there patterns from their family of origin or yours that you can see playing out in the relationship, and is there room to work with those patterns together?

Do you both have the capacity to maintain your individual lives within the partnership, or is one or both of you losing yourselves into the relationship?

These questions take time to answer honestly. The relationships that last typically allow the time for these questions to surface and be addressed. The relationships that move too quickly past these questions often arrive at the larger commitment with answers that have not been earned.

If you are in an established partnership

If you are in an established partnership and reading this article, the questions are different. The work is not whether to commit. The work is how to sustain what you have built.

The same elements apply. The friendship needs continued tending. The attachment security needs daily renewal. The respect needs to be protected from the small erosions that accumulate over years. The repair after conflict needs to remain a practice rather than something that has become rare. The differentiation needs to be preserved so that you do not lose yourself into the relationship. The shared meaning needs to be allowed to evolve as the lives you are living evolve. The commitment needs to be remade rather than assumed.

Couples therapy can be useful at many points in lasting partnership — not only when the relationship is in crisis. Working with a clinician who understands attachment, who can hold both partners’ nervous systems at once, who can address the somatic dimensions of long partnership rather than only the verbal ones, often produces real growth in relationships that are already functioning. The work is not about fixing what is broken. It is about deepening what is already real.

A closing thought

Lasting partnership is one of the most demanding things a human being can attempt. It is also one of the most rewarding. The partnership that endures across decades does not endure because it was easy or because both partners are uniquely well-suited to each other. It endures because both partners have done the daily work of building and rebuilding it across the years.

If you are in a relationship that is working, honor it. Tend to it. Notice what makes it real, and continue investing in what makes it real. The relationship is not a destination you arrive at. It is the daily practice of choosing to remain in it, to develop with it, to be changed by it across the years.

And if you are searching for a lasting partnership and have not yet found one, the search is real and worth doing. The conditions that produce lasting partnership are recognizable. With enough self-knowledge and enough willingness to do the work, the conditions can be met. The path is rarely linear. The destination, when it is reached, is worth the journey.

Further reading: John Gottman and Julie Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work and What Makes Love Last. Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight. Stan Tatkin, Wired for Love. Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity. For clinical work with couples in California or Florida, visit thecourageousself.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida specializing in EMDR, sex therapy, and couples counseling. She trained in sex and couples therapy at AACAST at UCLA. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

How to Speak Clearly When Things Get Heated

Posted on by helpingsoul

 

A Practical Approach to Assertive Communication, Updated for What I Have Learned in the Years Since I First Wrote About This

A substantial revision of an earlier 2014 post titled 6 Tips to Improve Communication with Difficult People. The skills are largely the same. The framing has matured.

In 2014, I wrote a blog post called 6 Tips to Improve Communication with Difficult People. The skills in it were sound. The framing was a product of its moment, and there is one thing I would change before anything else.

The word difficult, in that title, located the problem entirely in the other person. The reader was the reasonable one. The other was the difficult one. This framing was popular in self-help writing of the era, and it has not aged well, for two reasons.

First, almost no one is purely difficult. The person who feels difficult to you is usually someone whose own nervous system is activated, whose own communication patterns developed in their own history, and who is responding to you according to dynamics that include both of you. Naming them as difficult flattens what is actually a co-created pattern.

Second, the framing implicitly excuses the reader from examining their own contribution. The communication you are struggling with is rarely produced by the other person alone. Your response patterns, your tone, your timing, your assumptions about what they meant — all of it is part of what is happening. Naming them as the difficult one closes off the more useful question, which is what would shift if you changed something about how you are showing up.

So this refresh begins with a different framing. The skills below are for any conversation that has become activated, whoever is producing the activation. The goal is not to learn to manage difficult people. The goal is to learn to communicate clearly when the conditions for clear communication have started to deteriorate — which can happen with anyone, including yourself.

Where assertive communication comes from

Most of us did not learn assertive communication in our families. We learned other things. We learned to suppress our own thoughts and feelings to keep the peace. We learned to manage other people’s emotional weather to keep ourselves safe. We learned to say yes when we meant no, to swallow what we needed to say in order to stay connected to someone we feared losing. We learned to be invisible when visibility had been costly.

These patterns were not failures of character. They were survival adaptations. The child who learned to suppress her own voice did so because her voice was unwelcome, mocked, criticized, or punished. The body that learned to swallow what it needed to say was protecting the relational connection that the child needed to survive. The adaptations made sense at the time. They worked. They kept the child safe.

As adults, the same adaptations cost us. The voice that learned to suppress itself in childhood continues to suppress itself in adult relationships that could actually receive it. The body that learned to swallow needed words continues to swallow them with the people who could actually hear them. The conditions have changed. The system has not yet updated.

Learning assertive communication as an adult is the work of updating the system. Slowly. With practice. With the recognition that the skill was suppressed for survival reasons and is being rebuilt now under different conditions. The skill is learnable. The work is real. And the relationships in your life that can survive your assertiveness will become stronger as you develop it. The ones that cannot will reveal what they actually were.

Regulate first

Before any technique, before any acronym, before any specific words you might use, the most important element of assertive communication is the state of your nervous system. Words spoken from activation almost always fail. The technical content of what you said may be perfect. The delivery, shaped by the activation in your body, will land as something different. Your face will signal something other than what your words say. Your tone will carry the urgency that came from the activation rather than the steadiness that effective communication requires. The other person, sensing the activation, will respond to that rather than to your content.

The single most important thing you can do before initiating an important conversation, or in the middle of a conversation that has begun to get heated, is to regulate. Not perfectly. Just enough.

If you can, take the conversation somewhere quieter. Walk away if necessary and return when you are calmer. There is no rule that important conversations have to happen in the moment of activation. Most are better when both parties are regulated.

If you cannot leave, take silence in the conversation itself. Three deep breaths, slow, with the exhale longer than the inhale. Four counts in, seven counts out, three cycles. About a minute of silence. Silence is allowed. It often produces a different conversation than the one that was about to happen.

Notice your own body. Is your chest tight? Your jaw clenched? Your breath shallow? These are signs the system has moved from social engagement into mobilization. From this state, the words you say will not land the way you want them to. Regulate first. Speak from steadier ground.

The skill itself — what I called PASARR in the original

With the regulation in place, here is the structure of an assertive exchange. The original post called this PASARR — Pause, Acknowledge the Truth, Stay True to Self, Ask for a Request, Repeat, Repair. The acronym still works as a memory aid. The content of each step is essentially the same now as it was then, with some refinement.

Pause

Before you respond to what was just said, take a moment. Notice your own reaction. Notice what wants to come out of your mouth. Notice whether what wants to come out is actually what you mean to say, or whether it is the reflexive defensiveness, justification, or compliance that your earlier conditioning trained you to produce.

The pause is short. Sometimes only a few seconds. But it is the space in which choice becomes possible. Without the pause, your response is automatic. With the pause, you can choose.

This is a learnable skill in its own right. People who have spent decades responding reflexively often need to practice the pause many times before it becomes natural. The early attempts feel awkward. The other person may notice the silence and ask if you are okay. You can say yes. You are just thinking before you speak. This is allowed.

Acknowledge what is true

If the other person has said something that contains accurate information, acknowledge it. This is not capitulation. It is not agreeing with the entirety of their position. It is acknowledging the specific kernel of truth in what they said.

If your partner says you have been distracted lately, and you have been distracted lately, do not deny it. Say yes, I have been distracted. Tell me more about what you have been noticing. This acknowledgment de-escalates the dynamic. It signals to the other person that you are not going to fight them on every point. It also clears space for the actual conversation, which is usually somewhere underneath the surface complaint.

If your boss says your work has been below standard, and you can identify one specific instance where this is true, name it. *You are right about the report I turned in last Tuesday. That was not my best work. The presentation I delivered on Thursday, on the other hand, was strong.* Specificity matters. Generalized criticism becomes more workable when met with specific acknowledgment of what is true and specific clarification of what is not.

If the other person has said nothing accurate, you do not have to invent something. But often there is something accurate in even the most charged communication. Finding it is part of the work.

Stay true to yourself

Use I statements. Not the cliched I-feel-when-you-do-this format that has become a parody of itself, but the genuine practice of speaking from your own experience rather than reporting on the other person’s behavior as if it were the only fact in the room.

Instead of *you never listen to me*, try *I have been feeling unheard in our conversations this week*. The difference is significant. The first is a global statement about the other person that they will resist. The second is a report from your own experience that the other person can engage with.

This is harder than it sounds, especially when the activation is high. The instinct in difficult conversation is to focus on what the other person is doing wrong. Learning to redirect that energy toward what you are actually experiencing is part of the practice.

Ask for what you want

After acknowledging what is true and speaking from your own experience, name what you would like to be different. Specifically. Concretely. In a way the other person can actually respond to.

*When you are late and do not call, I find myself worrying and getting angry. Would you be willing to text me if you are going to be more than ten minutes late?* That is a specific request that the other person can say yes or no to.

*You need to be more considerate* is not a request. It is a vague criticism. The other person cannot do anything specific with it. They will respond defensively because the statement does not give them a path to action.

Specific requests, made from a regulated state, with acknowledgment of what is true and speaking from your own experience, are the actual mechanism by which relationships shift over time.

Reflect and repeat

Ask the other person to share what they heard. Not as a test. As a way to ensure mutual understanding. *Can you tell me what you are hearing me say?* They will often paraphrase back something slightly different from what you meant. This is information. You can clarify. They can clarify what they meant when they said the thing that activated you. Over time, the gap between intent and impact narrows.

Repair

If the conversation has gotten heated, if either of you has said something that landed harder than intended, name it. *That came out sharper than I meant it. Let me try again.* Repair is one of the most powerful tools in any relationship. The capacity to recognize when something has gone off track and to gently bring it back is what distinguishes relationships that endure from relationships that gradually erode.

Repair does not require either of you to be the one entirely at fault. It just requires the willingness to attend to what is happening between you and to try again with more care.

A note on what makes this hard

Reading these steps, you may notice that none of them is complicated. The skills are simple. They are also profoundly difficult to do in the moments when they would help most.

This is because the moments when you would most need these skills are also the moments when your nervous system is most activated. The pause is harder when you are flooded. The acknowledgment of truth is harder when you feel attacked. The I statements are harder when the urge is to focus on what the other person is doing wrong. The request is harder when what you really want is to be understood without having to make a request.

This is the work. You practice the skills in low-stakes moments so that they are partially available in high-stakes moments. You catch yourself, sometimes after the fact, and reflect on what you might have done differently. You return to the practice. You get better, slowly, over years.

And in the meantime, you are not failing. You are practicing a skill that most of us were not taught and that takes most adults a long time to develop. Patience with yourself is part of the work.

Where to begin

Pick one upcoming conversation that you anticipate being difficult. Before it happens, rehearse what you want to say. Use the structure: pause, acknowledge what is true, speak from your own experience, ask for what you want.

Notice your own state before the conversation begins. If you are activated, take five minutes to regulate first. Walk. Breathe. Place your hand on your heart and your belly. Do not begin the conversation until your system is closer to baseline.

Have the conversation. Notice what worked. Notice what did not. Notice where the practice was easy and where you reverted to old patterns. None of this is failure. It is data.

Repeat with the next conversation. Each one builds capacity for the next. Over months and years, the skills become more available. The relationships that can hold your developing voice will deepen. The relationships that cannot will reveal themselves.

And the felt sense of speaking your truth, in a moment that requires it, from a regulated state, with care for the other person and care for yourself, is one of the most powerful experiences available to a person who has spent decades silencing themselves. It is worth the practice. It is worth the awkward early attempts. It is worth the patience the work requires.

In love and dignity, speak the truth — as we think, feel, and know it — and it shall set us free.

— Melody Beattie

Further reading: Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Anger. Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability and difficult conversations. For the companion piece on detachment with love, see The Art of Detachment with Love on courageous-arts.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

Where Does the Playful Spirit Go?

Posted on by helpingsoul
Baboon laughing

An essay on laughter, play, and the slow rediscovery of what gets squeezed out of adult life

This essay is a revisit of an old 2013 post on the same theme. The earlier version was a list of benefits. This version is a longer reflection on what gets lost when we stop playing, and what becomes possible when we begin again.

“Of all the gifts bestowed by nature on human beings, hearty laughter must be close to the top.” — Norman Cousins

“A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” — Proverbs 17:22

Laugh out loud. Play. Be silly. Joke around. Have fun. These are some of the words I think of when I watch children play. Years ago I wrote a blog post about laughter and the lightness of children’s play, and the question that has stayed with me since is the one I asked then. Where does that spirit go?

Some days I see a child make ordinary life into a moment of joy and I am reminded of the answer. The spirit does not actually leave. It gets buried under the weight of what we begin to think is more important — the deadlines, the responsibilities, the bills, the lists of things we have not yet done, the conviction that adulthood is not the time for silliness. The playful spirit does not die. It gets covered over. And what changes is not the spirit itself but our capacity to access it.

One afternoon recently, walking through the neighborhood, I saw a small girl turning an ordinary sidewalk into an entire world. She was with her grandfather and her mother. She tagged her grandfather. She spun toward her mother. She skipped, twirled, and laughed at her own laughter. She made a destination out of nothing, simply because she was moving through the world the way children move — with imagination treating every step as material for delight. Her family was laughing along with her. Other adults on the sidewalk were smiling without quite realizing they had begun to smile.

I watched her for a moment longer than was strictly polite. She was, in some ways, more accomplished at being alive than most of the adults around her. She was not earning her joy. She was not waiting until her tasks were complete. She was not making sure she deserved to enjoy herself. She was just enjoying herself, fully and uncomplicatedly, in the most ordinary moment possible.

And I wondered again. Where does that go? When does it get traded for the somber-faced productivity that most of us mistake for being a competent adult?

Laughter as medicine

There is older literature on this question that has held up beautifully across the decades. Norman Cousins, the journalist who used humor to recover from a serious illness in the 1970s, wrote in his book Anatomy of an Illness about the specific finding that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter gave him at least two hours of pain-free sleep. He pursued this discovery deliberately. He watched Marx Brothers films. He read humor. He treated laughter as a clinical intervention, and his recovery surprised the physicians who had not expected it.

Cousins’s work was anecdotal but it pointed the way for more rigorous research that followed. Laughter does measurable things. It releases endorphins. It reduces stress hormones like cortisol. It improves immune function. It increases blood flow. It helps regulate emotions. It strengthens relationships. It diffuses tension in conflict.

Albert Einstein, of all people, understood this. He kept extensive notebooks. Some were filled with mathematical equations. Others, less famously, were filled with jokes. He took breaks to laugh. He understood — perhaps because his mind was working so hard in such serious territory — that the brain works better when it is allowed to breathe. The same insight, less articulated, has been carried by every culture that has held space for ritual humor, for the trickster figure, for the holy fool, for the necessity of comic relief in tragedy.

And it is not only humans. Marina Davila-Ross, a researcher at the University of Portsmouth in England, has shown that chimpanzees use laughter to strengthen social bonds. The vocalizations chimps make during play — short, rhythmic sounds — are not random. They serve the same function laughter serves in human social groups: they signal safety, they invite continued connection, they create the social glue that holds bonds together over time. Laughter is not a uniquely human invention. It is something we inherited from a long line of primates who used it for the same reasons we use it now.

What laughter is doing in the nervous system

Contemporary research on the nervous system, particularly the work of Stephen Porges on polyvagal theory, gives us another way to understand what laughter is doing in the body. Porges describes a part of the autonomic nervous system that handles social engagement — the felt sense of being safe in connection with other people. He calls this the ventral vagal system. When it is active, the body is open. Breath is easy. The face is animated. Eye contact is comfortable. The voice has prosody. And the body is available for the spontaneous responses, including laughter, that mark genuine human connection.

When this system is not active — when the nervous system is in a state of threat activation or chronic shutdown — laughter does not come easily. People in chronic stress states often report that they cannot remember the last time they really laughed. They produce polite social laughter on cue. The deep belly laughter, the involuntary kind that takes the body over, is absent. The system that produces it is not online.

This is one of the clinical observations I have made repeatedly in my work as a therapist over the years. The absence of laughter in an adult’s life is often not a personality trait. It is a symptom. It is the body’s report that the social engagement system has been offline for a long time. And the restoration of laughter, when it happens, is often one of the most reliable signs that nervous system regulation is genuinely returning. Clients who have not laughed in years begin, sometimes shyly, to find themselves laughing again. The first time it happens they often look surprised. The body has remembered something it had forgotten.

What the research has not quite captured

The research on laughter tends to focus on what laughter does — the benefits, the mechanisms, the measurable outcomes. What it does not always capture is what laughter is. Laughter is, in its deepest sense, the sound a body makes when it is willing to be moved by the world without trying to control the response. It is the body saying yes to being delighted. It is the body trusting that the moment is safe enough to let the diaphragm shake.

This is why laughter is so closely connected to relationships, to safety, to the felt sense of being seen by another person. We laugh more easily with people we trust. We laugh less easily, or not at all, with people in whose presence we feel exposed or evaluated. Children laugh more than adults because children’s nervous systems are not yet carrying the accumulated armor that adult life teaches us to develop. They are not constantly assessing whether laughter will be received well. They simply laugh.

Adults who have spent decades in environments that did not welcome their joy — critical families, demanding workplaces, relationships in which lightness was treated as immaturity — often arrive at midlife genuinely uncertain how to play. The instinct has not been killed. It has been carefully suppressed for so long that activating it feels foreign. The same person who laughed easily at five may find at fifty that laughter requires conscious permission and even then arrives reluctantly. The body remembers how to laugh. The system that gives the body permission has been overruled for too long.

How to begin again

If you recognize yourself in this description — and many adults in my practice do — the work is gentle and slow. You cannot force laughter. You cannot make it arrive by deciding it should. What you can do is make small moves that put your nervous system in environments where laughter becomes available again.

Spend time with people who laugh. Not people who tell jokes, necessarily. People who laugh easily, who find ordinary moments funny, who can be in the kitchen together and crack up about something neither of you can quite explain afterward. The body learns from other bodies. Your social engagement system was built, originally, through the eye contact and shared smiles of the people who held you as an infant. It can be re-tuned, in adulthood, through the eye contact and shared smiles of the people you choose to be around now.

Watch something funny on purpose. Not as a self-improvement project. Just because you want to laugh and you have given yourself permission to want it. The current era has good options that the original 2013 version of this post could not have anticipated. Bridesmaids. Ted Lasso, which is gentle and warm and tends to produce both laughter and tears, sometimes in the same scene. Schitt’s Creek, which became a touchstone for many adults during the pandemic precisely because it modeled a kind of family warmth and absurdity that many people had been missing. Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Stand-up specials from comics whose voices feel like company. The classic films from the original 2013 list — A Thousand Clowns, Patch Adams — are still there for those who want them. Add what speaks to your particular humor.

Notice the absurd. Adult life is, when you look at it without the filter of seriousness, often genuinely ridiculous. The way we line up obediently for things. The earnestness with which we sometimes respond to small inconveniences. The peculiar ways our bodies behave when we are not paying attention. Comedians make their living by pointing at exactly this. You can do it for free in your own day. The amount of comedy in ordinary life is roughly infinite for anyone who learns to look.

Be silly with someone safe. Not in service of being funny. In service of remembering what it feels like to not be performing competence for a moment. The grandparents who play horse with their grandchildren. The partners who do voices for the cat. The friends who break into spontaneous dance moves in the kitchen for reasons neither can later explain. These are not childish behaviors. They are the behaviors of nervous systems that have remembered how to engage with each other in the absence of evaluation.

And laugh at yourself. Not the cutting self-deprecation that is actually self-attack disguised as humor. The real version. The genuine recognition that you, like every other human, do absurd things and that those things are sometimes funny. Tripping over nothing. Walking into a room and forgetting why. Saying the wrong word at the wrong moment. These are part of being a body in a world. The willingness to laugh at them is the willingness to be human without requiring yourself to be flawless.

A gentle reminder

Some days the laughter will not come. The work will be heavier. The body will be tired. The losses will be too close. This is also true and also human. Forcing laughter on a day when grief is what is present is not the work. The work is making room for whatever is true, and on days when laughter is true, letting it have its full place in your body without apology.

If you have been doing hard inner work — therapy, processing trauma, working through grief, navigating significant change — you may have found that the seriousness of the work has temporarily covered over your access to play. This is common and it is not permanent. The work is not opposed to laughter. They are companions. Some of the deepest moments in my own clinical practice have involved laughter — clients who reach a hard truth and then begin to laugh at the absurdity of having carried it for so long without naming it. The laughter does not diminish the truth. It honors it.

Joy and seriousness are not opposites. They are different colors in the same range. You do not have to wait until your life is fully repaired to laugh. You can laugh in the middle of the repair. The laughter is part of how the repair happens.

Final thought

If a child can turn a sidewalk into a moment of joy, you can turn five minutes of your day into something lighter. You do not have to earn this. You do not have to deserve it more than you do.

Find one thing today that makes you laugh out loud. Not a polite social laugh. The real kind. The kind your body remembers from before you learned to suppress it. The diaphragm shaking. The breath catching. The sense afterward of having been, briefly, fully alive.

Your nervous system will thank you. And the part of you that has been waiting, since you were a child, to be allowed to play again, will notice that you have come back for it.

Further reading: Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness. Marina Davila-Ross’s research on primate laughter at the University of Portsmouth. Stephen Porges, The Polyvagal Theory. For the clinical companion piece on laughter and the social engagement system, see thecourageousself.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

The Four Taboos of Communication, Rule Two: Stop Demanding. Start Requesting. The Difference Changes Everything.

Posted on by helpingsoul

This essay is a revisit of an older post on the four taboos of communication. The original list was useful. This version develops the second rule — no demanding — with what years of clinical work have taught me about why demands fail and what works instead.

Years ago, I wrote a series on this blog about what I came to call the four taboos of communication — four patterns of speech that consistently produce bad outcomes in close relationships. Rule one was no name-calling. Rule two was no demanding. Rule three was no past-baiting. Rule four was no threatening. The series did well at the time and continues to be one of the most-read parts of this blog.

This essay is a revisit of rule two, no demanding, because that one in particular has continued to develop in my clinical work over the years. The original framing was correct — demands undermine connection — but the full picture of why this is true, and what to do instead, has become clearer to me with more clinical experience. This piece is that expanded picture.

What a demand actually is

Most of us did not learn the difference between a demand and a request growing up, because most of us grew up in households where the language was used interchangeably. A demand and a request can sound similar on the surface. Both involve one person asking another for something. The difference is what is implied if the other person says no.

A request says: I am asking you for this. If you say no, that is information about what you can offer, and we will figure out what to do from there.

A demand says: I am asking you for this, and there will be consequences if you do not give it to me. The consequences may not be named, but they are present in the tone, the body language, the felt sense of being pressured. The other person is not free to say no without paying a price.

This is the part most people miss. Demands are not always loud. They are not always angry. They can be delivered in the most reasonable voice. What makes them demands is not the volume but the implied threat of relational consequence if the other person does not comply.

Why demands fail

In close relationships, demands consistently produce the opposite of what the demanding person wants. This is not a personality issue or a communication preference. It is the way nervous systems respond to felt pressure.

When the other person experiences your demand — whether or not you intended it as one — their nervous system goes into some form of protective response. Fight. Flight. Freeze. Fawn. None of these states is conducive to genuine cooperation. Even if the other person complies with the demand, the compliance is shaped by protection rather than by genuine willingness. They give you what you asked for and they feel less safe with you afterward.

This is why so many couples find themselves in a pattern where one person feels they have to demand things to get them done, and the other person feels increasingly resistant to doing the things even when they would have been willing to do them without the demand. The demand itself produces the resistance. Removing the demand often produces the cooperation that the demand was trying to force.

The deeper damage is to the relationship itself. Demands accumulate. Each one teaches the other person that being in relationship with you involves periodic pressure to comply, that their no will be received as a problem rather than as information. Over time, this changes what kind of relationship is possible. The person on the receiving end of demands becomes either reactive (a demander themselves) or quietly absent (going through the motions while their inner life withdraws to where it cannot be reached). Neither is what the demanding person was hoping for.

Why we demand

Understanding why we demand is essential to changing the pattern. People do not demand because they are bad communicators. They demand because the demand is doing something for them — usually managing an underlying anxiety or unmet need that feels too vulnerable to name directly.

The husband who demands that the dishes be done a certain way is often, underneath the demand, expressing an anxiety about household order that he learned in a childhood where chaos felt unsafe. The wife who demands that her partner respond to her texts within a specific time frame is often, underneath the demand, expressing an attachment anxiety about being forgotten or unimportant. The parent who demands that the adult child call more often is often, underneath the demand, expressing a fear of being left behind as the child builds their own life.

None of these underlying needs is wrong. All of them deserve attention. But they cannot be met through demands, because demands hide what is actually going on. The husband saying you never do the dishes right is not actually communicating his anxiety about order. He is delivering a command that the other person experiences as pressure. The conversation about what is actually underneath never happens, and the pattern repeats.

What to do instead

The alternative to demanding is requesting — and requesting well is more skillful than it sounds. Several elements distinguish a real request from a softened demand.

First, name what you want clearly and concisely. Vague requests invite vague responses. Be specific about what you are asking for.

Second, name why it matters to you. Not as justification or as pressure, but as honest information. The vulnerability of saying I am asking for this because it matters to me invites the other person into your inner world rather than positioning them as someone to be managed.

Third, make space for the other person’s no. This is the heart of it. A real request includes genuine willingness to hear no. If you cannot tolerate the no, you are making a demand, not a request, no matter how polite the words sound.

Fourth, regulate yourself before you ask. Many requests come out as demands because the asker is activated when they ask. The same words delivered from a regulated state and from an activated state land completely differently. Take three slow breaths before you start. Notice your own tension. The body of the asker shapes what the asker is actually asking for, regardless of what the words appear to say.

Fifth, follow up with curiosity rather than judgment. If the other person says no, ask why. Not as challenge but as genuine interest in their experience. Their no contains information about them, about the situation, about what might be possible. Receiving the no with curiosity often opens a different conversation than the original request anticipated, and that conversation is frequently where real solutions emerge.

A concrete example

Imagine you have been doing more of the household labor than feels fair. You want your partner to take on more. There is a demand version of this conversation and a request version.

Demand version. *You never help around the house. I do everything. You need to start doing more.*

This is delivered in a tone of frustration. It positions the other person as a failure. It includes the implied threat that if they do not start doing more, the frustration will continue or escalate. The other person hears the demand, their nervous system activates, and they either defend themselves, withdraw, or comply resentfully. None of these outcomes produces a real shift.

Request version. *I have been feeling overwhelmed by how much household labor I am doing. I would like us to look together at what each of us is currently doing and see if there is a way to redistribute it that feels more sustainable for me. Are you willing to have that conversation?*

This is delivered in a regulated tone. It names what is happening for you without blame. It invites the other person into collaboration rather than positioning them as someone to be corrected. It explicitly asks whether they are willing to engage, which honors their autonomy. The other person can say yes, and a real conversation begins. They can say not right now, which gives you information about their state. They can say no, which gives you information about something deeper in the relationship that needs attention.

Every one of these outcomes is more useful than the resentful compliance the demand version would have produced.

The deeper invitation

Learning to make real requests instead of demands is one of the most consequential skills in any close relationship. It is also, for many of us, genuinely hard, because the patterns we learned in childhood often included demands disguised as expectations, and we may not have grown up seeing what a real request looks like.

The work is gradual. Notice when you are about to demand. Pause. Ask yourself what is actually underneath. Make the request from the underneath rather than from the surface. Be willing to hear no.

Over time, your closest relationships will change. The people in your life will trust you more, because they will learn that their no is genuinely received rather than punished. They will offer more freely, because they are not constantly defending against pressure. The cooperation you wanted will arrive — not because you forced it, but because you stopped making it the thing that had to be forced.

This is rule two. Stop demanding. Start requesting. The difference, in close relationships, is not subtle. It is everything.

For the clinical perspective on why demands trigger nervous system responses and what real requests do differently, see the companion piece at thecourageousself.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

 

Overcoming Defensiveness in Relationships

Posted on by helpingsoul
woman covering her face with her hands

The key to transforming conflict into deeper intimacy

There is a quiet moment in conflict that often goes unnoticed—the moment just before defensiveness takes over.

It’s the split second when you feel exposed, misunderstood, or accused. Your chest tightens. Your thoughts begin to race. And instead of leaning in with curiosity, you instinctively move to protect yourself.

You explain. You justify. You push back.

And just like that, the opportunity for connection disappears.

Many individuals, couples, and families attempt to resolve problems by focusing on feelings. While emotions are essential, they are often misapplied. Not every conflict requires an emotional deep dive—some problems are practical and require clear, logical solutions.

However, when a situation activates something deeper—when it stirs the nervous system in a way that feels disproportionate to the moment—that is when a feelings-based conversation becomes necessary.

Research in interpersonal neurobiology shows that when we perceive threat in relationships, the brain’s alarm system—particularly the amygdala—activates, often bypassing rational thought and moving us into protection rather than connection. At the same time, studies by John Gottman have consistently identified defensiveness as one of the primary predictors of relational breakdown when left unaddressed.

In these moments, we are no longer responding to the present—we are responding from unresolved emotional memory.

This is where emotional communication becomes one of the most powerful tools for building trust and intimacy.

When feelings are understood—both in the present and in their deeper origins—clarity emerges. And from that clarity, meaningful and lasting solutions can be found.

Creating Structure for Safe Communication

For emotional conversations to be productive, they must be structured. Without structure, they quickly become reactive.

One of the most important agreements is assigning roles: the speaker and the listener.

Expressing feelings matters. But listening—truly listening—is what creates transformation.

Healthy conversations require a safe emotional environment grounded in respect, boundaries, and shared agreements.

The Role of the Speaker

The speaker’s role is to describe their internal experience using “I” statements.

This includes:

  • Naming the feeling
  • Connecting it to a specific event
  • Explaining how it impacts your sense of self

For example:

“I felt hurt when you walked away while I was talking and slammed the door.”
“I felt angry when you accused me of something I didn’t do.”
“I felt fearful for your safety when you drove home after working a double shift.”
“I felt disappointed when you canceled our date.”
“I felt frustrated when plans kept changing.”

A more complete expression might sound like:

“I feel hurt when I try to share something important and you look at your phone. It makes me feel like what I’m saying doesn’t matter. I start to feel invisible, small, and unimportant.”

The intention is not to criticize, but to reveal the emotional impact.

From there, the speaker may explore whether the reaction connects to earlier experiences:

“It reminds me of when my father used to yell at me and demand that I explain myself. I would become so scared that my mind went blank. The more he yelled, the more I shut down.”

This reflection helps both partners understand that the reaction is not just about the present—it is about a sensitive neural pathway that has been activated.

The final step is to express a need or request—without turning it into a demand:

“What would help me is if, when I’m sharing something important, you could pause and make eye contact. That would help me feel heard and valued.”

A request is an invitation, not a requirement.

The Role of the Listener

The listener’s role is equally important—and often more difficult.

To listen well requires setting aside your own agenda, thoughts, and reactions in order to fully understand your partner’s experience.

This requires presence, curiosity, and restraint.

A skilled listener reflects and validates:

“It sounds like when I’m distracted while you’re talking, you feel invisible and unimportant. I can understand how that would be hurtful.”

They also deepen understanding through questions:

  • “Can you tell me more?”
  • “When else have you felt this way?”
  • “Does this connect to something from earlier in your life?”

Listening in this way communicates care, respect, and emotional safety.

The listener also helps maintain the integrity of the conversation by recognizing when one of the four taboos of communication emerges:

  1. Criticism
  2. Demanding
  3. Defensiveness
  4. Angry outbursts

If emotions escalate beyond regulation, a pause is necessary. A time-out is not avoidance—it is emotional responsibility.

Before separating, agree on a specific time to return to the conversation. Even if you are not ready at that moment, returning as agreed builds trust and reinforces a shared commitment to resolution.

Regulating the nervous system—through walking, journaling, breathwork, or reaching out for support—restores clarity and makes reconnection possible.

The Third Taboo: Defensiveness

Defensiveness is a protective response to emotional discomfort.

When we feel criticized, blamed, ashamed, or afraid of being wrong, the nervous system shifts into self-protection.

Instead of listening, we justify, minimize, or counterattack.

Defensiveness often sounds like:

  • “That’s not what happened.”
  • “You’re overreacting.”
  • “You do the same thing.”
  • “I only did that because you…”

While these responses may provide temporary relief, they communicate something deeply invalidating:

“Your feelings are wrong.”

At that point, the conversation shifts from understanding to proving—who is right, who is wrong, and who gets to be heard.

And connection is lost.

In reality, defensiveness is rarely about the present moment alone. It is a shield protecting deeper emotions—pain, shame, guilt, fear, or the vulnerability of feeling inadequate.

Moving Beyond Defensiveness

The antidote to defensiveness is not explanation.

It is emotional honesty.

When you notice yourself becoming defensive, pause and turn inward:

  • What am I feeling right now?
  • What about this feels threatening?
  • What part of me feels exposed?

Then, instead of defending, reveal:

“When you said that, I noticed I became defensive. I think a part of me felt ashamed and worried that I disappointed you.”

This shifts the conversation from conflict to connection…
from protection to vulnerability…
from distance to intimacy.

At the same time, the listener remains grounded—curious, open, and empathetic, even when activated.

With practice, couples begin to understand something profound:

Emotional honesty creates connection. Defensiveness destroys it.

Closing

If your communication patterns often fall into criticism, demands, defensiveness, or uncontrolled anger, you are not alone—and change is possible.

With awareness, structure, and practice, you can learn to communicate in a way that restores safety, deepens trust, and strengthens intimacy.

If you would like support in transforming your relationship, I invite you to reach out and begin a course of action toward building a more connected and secure partnership.

 

 

 

The Four Traps of Communication

Posted on by helpingsoul

Communication is key to unlocking a growing, adaptable relationship with trust, closeness, and intimacy. When communication goes array, at least one of the four taboos of interaction has taken place. The relationship becomes stuck in a rut and trust and affection is broken. He runs away and avoids conflict and she latches on with more force and power. The relationship is headed into a cat and mouse chase, separation, withdrawal, affair(s), or therapy.

While seeing a therapist, the four communication pitfalls can be addressed and the relationship can become close and intimate again.

The four pitfalls in communication include:

  1. Criticism
  2. Demanding
  3. Defensiveness
  4. Angry outburst

What is criticism?

Criticism is unconsciously belittling another. It is assessing and disapproving of another. Without awareness, you feel superior and your spouse feels condemned.

Sure, criticism can be rationalized as helpful advice, constructive feedback, or behavior modification, yet any perception of ‘improving’ another is based on an agenda to change and a need to be right. Judging and blaming preface criticism which all lead to distance, distrust, and defensiveness. The relationship stalls and doesn’t improve.

Criticism involves looking at your partner as an extension of you. Rejecting and forbidding your partner to be a separate, autonomous person is pathological and unhealthy. With an agenda to change and a need to be right, your self-esteem rises and your partners’ confidence deflates. Most often criticism continues because giving up your position would feel like you have to give up a portion of yourself, which can feel all consuming, dominating, and threatening.

The solution is not to criticize. Instead, talk from a feeling perspective about your inner world, about the event and the behavior that triggers such disapproval.

What is demanding?

Demanding is acting domineering, controlling, and ridiculing. Similar to criticism, being demanding is not constructive and does not benefit the receiver.

Demanding results most often in your partner becoming passive-aggressive and punishing you for your demands. It’s a vicious cycle of retaliation with intense anger and pushing away.

The solution is to pause when a demanding thought enters your brain and count from one to ten. Give yourself time to think before speaking and assess what soft spot was hit that brought forth this demand. Talk to your partner when you are calm and clear in your understanding of your inner world.

What is defensiveness?

Defensiveness is a reaction to justify your behavior and serves to protect. Most often it functions to make yourself feel better and make your partner wrong. The defensive behavior usually results in blaming, criticizing, or counterattacking. Defensiveness is vented with anger and protects against pain, shame, guilt and fear.

Defensiveness may also result in withdrawal. Similar to anger, isolation is used to protect you from feeling pain, shame, guilt, and fear. Withdrawal produces distance and disconnection.

The solution is to share your feelings about your internal psyche that was stirred-up during the particular event. Express how it made you feel about yourself, the relationship, and what sensitive area from your past was ignited.

What is uncontrolled anger?

Uncontrolled anger is vented with raised voices, yells of derogatory names, and can lead to physical violence – throwing dishes, grabbing and shaking, pushing, and beating. If an interaction has reached the point of vented anger, it is time to stop, take a break and reconvene when you have calmed down and can talk with a normal tone all the while staying away from criticizing, demanding, and defensiveness.

It is important to stay away from the four taboos of communication to develop an evolving, growing relationship with trust, closeness, and intimacy. Following the rules of communication couples can learn to understand, empathize, and attune respectfully to each other’s triggers.

If your communication is falling into the trap of criticism, domination, defensiveness, and uncontrolled anger, give me a call (424) 258-5416 or email me at april@aprilwrighttherapy.com and let’s begin a course of action so that you may find each other again.

8 Healthy Coping Skills for Strong Emotions

Posted on by helpingsoul

Emotions can be overwhelming. They can make us feel crazy and out of control. They can ruin our relationships and cause tremendous havoc.

There is a better way. Emotions don’t have to rule our world. We can learn to control our emotional state. It begins with understanding what emotions are, where they originate, how they affect us, and healthy ways we can manage them.

What are emotions?

Emotions are not our enemy. They are assets to tap into, nurture and put to good use. Emotions are physiological, cognitive, and behavioral responses to a personally significant event (http://www.apa.org/research/action/glossary.aspx). They are complex patterns of change that protect us from danger, ignite feelings of love, and indicate internal calm. Emotions provide valuable information. All we have to do is stop, notice and listen.

How do emotions function?

Emotions affect our body, mind and behavior. Emotions influence how we communicate and influence others. Emotions manage and motivate action. Emotions bring life and vigor to our thoughts and actions (http://www.dbtselfhelp.com/html/emotion_function.html).

Emotions Assess for Safety

When danger arises, we automatically react with flight, fight or freeze. We flee when we see an exit or an escape. We fight when trapped. We freeze when we have exhausted our efforts to fight or flee

Emotions Influence Memory

Emotions are attached to memories. When current events trigger unresolved past reminiscences, feelings are compiled.   We not only respond to the current event but also the past.

This behavior is typical. Our reaction is signaling that we have past trauma or abuse. We are responding to all the thoughts and feelings aroused by our history ignited in the present.

Knowing this helps to understand our current emotional intensity. With understanding, compassion is possible. We can soothe our thoughts and feelings. Self-compassion is number one for coping with intense emotions.

8 Coping-Skills to Manage Emotions

  1. Self-CompassiHelp to Manage Emotionson

Self-compassion is a matter of relating. When we can relate, understand, and feel the difficulties of another, we can translate the same experience to our self.

Compassion is not about pity. It is a desire to help from a place of kindness and understanding. It is the ability to recognize without judgment or ridicule when others fail, make mistakes, and show imperfections. Compassion recognizes that we all have faults, make slip-ups, and possess limitations. It is part of our shared human experience.

Self-compassion is taking the same attitude toward others and giving it to our self. Just as we listen and empathize with our friend who lost their job, relative who had surgery or stranger homeless on the street, we can transfer those same nurturing thoughts and feelings to our self.

  1. Nurture

We can get out of our head by nurturing and socializing with others. Problems are distracted when we tend to children, friends, and relatives. By occupying our minds and lending a hand to someone else, we help ourselves. What could be more rewarding than that?

Developing and maintaining social alliances lowers stress. When we interact with those we care for, Oxytocin is released.   Oxytocin is a hormone that naturally calms.

Sharing our feelings with those we trust can help to normalize and validate emotions while helping to get out of isolation and see other perspectives.

  1. Notice the Breath

Becoming aware of our breathing helps assess our feelings. For example, when we breathe shallowly we may be feeling anxious. When we are breathing deeply into our abdomen, we may notice we are feeling calm or restful. Observing our breath at the moment gives us indicators as to how we feel.

We have control to deepen and slow down our breath. Paying attention to the location of our full inhale and exhale gives the opportunity to change our state of mind. We can choose to take a deep breath and breathe in our abdomen. Abdomen breathing calms a racing pulse and scattered mind.

Observing the muscles especially around the shoulders, neck and jaw may also give us a gauge into how we are feeling. If our muscles feel tight, we can choose to move around, stretch, and relax any tight areas.

Using our imagination to visualize the tension flowing out with our breath as we relax any tense muscles can have a tremendous effect on our mood.

  1. Visualize

Sometimes when we are flooded with feelings, it can be difficult to manage. It may be helpful to think of a calming visualization when we are calm. Thus, we have a tool from our toolbox we can resort to in times of stress.

Here is an idea, try putting emotional pain in a treasure chest. We can bury our treasure chest of emotions for the time being and come back to them when we have time to give them our full attention. It is important to make time for our feelings. They need acknowledgment, validation, and nurture just like a crying child. By tending to our emotions, we are caring for our self.

  1. Take a Break 

Sometimes we just need to pause for a moment. There are times when it is not appropriate or convenient to express intense emotions. During these incidences, it is best to excuse our self for a few minutes.

Try saying, “I need a moment to get my thoughts together. I’ll be back in ten minutes.” Make sure to return at the time indicated. Following through with your word ensures trust and reliability.

Taking the time to calm down and compose our thoughts and feelings, gives us a moment to think clearly.   We can then determine the best approach for expressing our self and finding solutions that are agreeable to all.

  1. Write

Writing can be extremely useful. Studies showed that survivors of traumatic events lowered their distress levels significantly by journaling.

Transforming thoughts and feelings ruminating in our mind to paper helps to stop the spiral. When we are in the thick of things, our thoughts manifest and continue in a downward twist. Externalizing them in a journal gives us the opportunity to clarify what we are thinking and feeling. It is valuable to practice self-compassion and validation when writing.

Closing our journal can also be symbolic. We are physically putting away our distressing feelings and letting go from the upsetting event.

  1. Speak Up

It is important to speak up when an issue is bothersome. Otherwise, we build up resentment. Built up anger causes us to lash out and nitpick at the tiniest of incidences.

It is most effective to think about the problem and clarify our position. It is at times like these to step away, breathe, and formulate a plan of action. We are then able to voice our concerns with an even tone and clarity.

Changes in our relationships are a process. It takes time to adjust to a new way of thinking and behaving. Impulsive confrontation never results in positive outcomes. With practice, talking about what bothers us becomes easy.

  1. Feelings are Temporary 

Emotions are like waves in the ocean. They are always moving and changing. It may be helpful to remind our self that we have not always felt this way. This too shall pass.

Think of previous times when intense emotions were felt. Remember that they eventually faded. Knowing they are temporary can help to begin the process to feeling better.

It may be useful to use a visualization of the ocean. Associate each wave with an emotion. Watch how each emotion moves through the continuum of the water, builds with momentum, crashes on the shore, and then washes away into the sand and current.

Taking time to acknowledge what we are feeling and understanding intense emotions are temporary can help calm a turbulent sea.

Managing our emotions becomes easy with practice. If we recognize the full range of feelings from fear, anger, sadness, and depression to happiness, inspiration, peace, and love, we can use them to protect our self and balance negative experiences. We can make the most of our emotions by opening our mind and utilizing healthy ways to manage them. Choosing what techniques work best for us in the situation is optimal.   We can learn to stabilize an out of control state of mind.

Exercise for Thought

Getting to know our emotions helps us to decide how we want to act rather than act. We can learn more about our feelings by keeping an emotion diary. Choose without judgment the strongest, longest lasting or most difficult or painful feelings. Describe the prompting event and the response in body, mind, and behavior.

Step Ten of Alcoholics Anonymous — A Life Journey

Posted on by helpingsoul

Responsibility: No single drop of water thinks it is responsible for the floodStep 10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

Steps one through nine provide tools to awaken internal realizations and relational manifestations.  They offer help to accept the past and heal what is possible.  The first nine measures give guidance for honesty, faith, hope, courage, and humility for responsible lives.

Step ten is based on the principle of responsibility.  Being responsible is using our authority to make independent decisions for our actions and for our failures to take action.  We are accountable for our actions and their consequences.

The tenth step uses the basis of responsibility and applies it to daily life as an ever evolving journey.  Throughout the stages of life, we are in a in a constant state of transition, emerging, evolving, and becoming.  We are continually discovering and making sense of our existence.  As we repeatedly question ourselves, others and the world, it is important to continue looking within and practice being accountable for our behaviors especially when we are wrong.  Paying attention to our varying degrees of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors helps improve conscientious decisions-making.  Keeping abreast to our internal being and being true to ourselves and others maintains balance and happiness as we progress in our lifespan.

To help encourage awareness make time each day to practice stillness.  Stillness is slowing down from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.  Set up a quiet sanctuary for your practice.  Maintain a personal ritual in a quiet place where you can focus internally.  It’s a time to just notice and listen in the moment.  This is not a time for judgment or ridicule.  Just allow thoughts to surface and pay attention to where the feeling is sensed in the body.

The concept is simple, yet can feel difficult to perform.  To assist, you might create a place dedicated solely for the purpose of reflection.  Form a tranquil space with pillows, blankets, and memorabilia that are personally special.  Wear comfortable clothing.

Nature is another sanctuary.  Ensure there are no external distractions such as electronic devices or interruptions.  Take the time to focus internally and scan your body and listen to your inner being.

Begin by taking several slow, deep breaths.  Start your practice remaining silent for five minutes and as your meditation muscles strengthen, add more time.  Increase in one to five minute intervals each week until you reach thirty or forty-five minutes, or as much as feels right for you.

In the beginning taking time for mindfulness may seem like a waste of time. Allow for the process to transpire and you will reap many benefits. You will have more clarity and decisiveness.  With less wandering of the mind, you are able to make quick, precise decisions.   You are more centered, well-balanced and connected with your core and inner being.  Having greater connection to your body and mind provides more awareness.  Being aware supplies consciousness to peace and confidence in your authenticity.

Stillness is your sacred time to connect to your spiritual power and to reflect inward.  It is a valuable time solely for you.  With practice, you will adopt, habituate and notice positive changes in all areas of your life.

Now that you are more aware of your thoughts, emotions, and actions, challenge yourself to experience fearful situations and remain there knowing you can manage your emotions and take responsibility for your behavior.  Each person has unique thoughts, emotions, and urges.  They are a natural part of life.   Distinctive thoughts and feelings are not right or wrong.  Labeling them good or bad/right or wrong is passing judgment.  Acceptance is a state of non judgment.  Reassure yourself, that your thoughts and feelings matter and are of value.  They equate just as much as everyone else’s.

The more in tune you are with your thoughts and feelings, the more you can create a safe place for you to express them in a healthy way.  This means stating your wants and desires.  If you are not getting want you want, it is your responsibility to express your needs.  People are not mind-readers.  The only way to have a healthy discussion is to communicate openly and honestly.  Allow the other person to speak, express their thoughts, desires, and feelings; and then do the same.  Use respectful dialogue.  Establish ground rules such as no name calling, blaming, yelling, or stonewalling. If the conversation elevates to such a level, take a time out with a specific day/ time to reconvene and continue the discussion.  Ensure you return at the established day/ time.  This builds trust.  With practice, responsible responses will habituate and become easier over time.

Having an awakening to your internal psyche creates more options and alternatives. Exposure to communication brings deeper connection and better relationships.  We are our choices.  Thus instead of using alcohol, drugs, sex, shopping, gambling, and relationships to restrain what you think and feel, you have the capacity to notice, acknowledge and choose how you manage your internal workings.   Your relationships will show the improvement.

Step 10 encourages you to notice and allow whatever thoughts and emotions you are thinking or feeling to surface.  By observing your interior consciousness you are awakening to a richer life of happiness, joy, and serenity as well as managing your own life for safety and protection.  Having thoughts and emotions are normal and healthy.   Allowing them to surface doesn’t mean you have to act on them.  It’s being in charge, building a relationship with your fears and distress, and strengthening your confidence to know you can handle difficult experiences.

Responsibility Sure Glad the hole isn't at our end.

Forgiveness – A Crucial Component of Step 9 in the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous

Posted on by helpingsoul

Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself.Forgiveness is a process and a choice.  It is the opportunity to untie the bindings of your pain from the past.   As part of the course of action, forgiveness involves confronting your fears and compassion to allow yourself time to physically and emotionally heal.  Exposing yourself to persons, surroundings, or objects that you fear offers the opening to have a corrective experience.  You are able to reorganize your memories and repair those recollections.

For example, as a child you may have experienced being attacked by a Rottweiler.  You were not physically hurt but the immediate threat startled you.  As a result you froze.  This is a natural fear response.   The terror was never discussed by your family or friends.  Thus the thoughts and emotions were not processed and disorganized memories formed.  Avoiding the discussion of the incident caused your fears to worsen.  Unprocessed feelings transform to generalized fears and all or nothing thinking.  Consequently you became fearful of all dogs and avoidant of the neighborhood where the attack occurred.

By exposing yourself to another Rottweiler that doesn’t attack gives the opportunity for a remedial and healing experience.  Difficult memories are allowed to surface.  The thoughts and emotions that were once suppressed can now be processed.   Processing gives way to reorganizing your memories.  You learn that not all Rottweilers show aggression.  You broaden your capacity for more knowledge and understanding.  All Rottweilers don’t attack.  There are some aggressive dogs and others that are very loving.  Black and white thinking transforms to accepting that Rottweillers and all animals have trustworthy and safe parts and some that are not.  For example, a cat that was once abused as a kitten associates touch as a threat.  Thus when you pet him, he bites.  As long as you don’t pet the cat, he is kind and playful.  Animals and experiences are complex and make up many parts not just good or bad.

The same is true for people.  Most parents, loved ones, and friends do not intentionally try to hurt you.  The hurtful behavior that was endeared was taught and passed down from their parents.  As a child, you have no choice but to tolerate the emotional, physical, or sexual abuse.  You are completely dependent upon your caretakers for safety and protection in whatever capacity they can.  Thus you learn to protect yourself, suppress your emotions, and tolerate abuse.  The abuse continues until you learn that as an adult you have a choice on what to tolerate.  You can now tune into your emotions and express them in a healthy manner.  As an adult you can courageously choose and confront those in your cycle of abuse.  You can choose to forgive.

The persons on your list from Step four are participants of the cycle of abuse.   By respectfully approaching those on your list, you may be able to have an open discussion, grasp a better understanding from their perspective, explain yours, and possibly heal old wounds.  All participants must be willing to have an open mind and to listen and speak compassionately from the heart.  It is possible to heal hurt with positive, respectful dialogue.  As you both come to a new understanding, unresolved emotions are replaced with restored, transformative memories to a place of forgiveness and healing.