Effective Communication for Healthier Relationships: Tips from Marriage Counselling Experts
Barring the most outlying of cases, if you’re in a relationship, you will run into regular disagreements and fights. In most cases, such conflicts are healthy and move the relationship forward.
But there’s a thin line that separates constructive conflicts and destructive fights, and that line is communication.
As a leading provider of marriage counselling services, we at Faculty Minds have worked with many couples through their relationship problems. We’ve noticed a common thread in all cases—communication and confrontation don’t come naturally to everyone.
Either both partners keep their emotions bottled up, or one is vocal, and the other is silent.
In both cases, silences do more harm than good in relationships. You might think I’ll only aggravate the situation if I continue talking. You should because unspoken grievances keep piling up until they burst one day and do irrevocable damage.
Let’s explore the role of communication in a relationship, its many positive aspects, and how you can inculcate it in your relationship.
Why Communication is So Important – A Marriage Counselling Perspective
Being a long-established family counsellor in Mumbai has provided us with keen insights into relationship health. We have discovered that your communication pattern as a couple can predict the success of your relationship.
Having worked with hundreds of couples over the years, we’ve seen all kinds of patterns, ranging from completely closed communication lines to eager talkers.
Based on our findings, here are three simple reasons why good communication is important to your relationship:
- Less Conflict
As mentioned earlier, every relationship is bound to run into conflict. However, when you’re able to talk about your issues honestly and openly, you can readily resolve arguments and dissolve disagreements.
Ultimately, ready communication makes you an active part of your relationship. You and your partner both have one hand on the wheel of your relationship and can easily manoeuvre through misunderstandings, emotional strife, and hurt feelings.
- Less Room for Rumination
Overthinking is seldom healthy. Talking things out can eliminate the room for worry and rumination that stems from stewing over negative feelings. Instead, good communication becomes a conduit for discussing and resolving concerns in a positive, effective way.
- Greater Intimacy
Sharing things about yourself and listening to the other person establishes a mutual give-and-take essential to fostering a close emotional connection. Good communication is an important aspect of forming lasting intimacy.
This means discussing your beliefs, values, experiences, expectations, and opinions. To do this, you must possess communication skills that foster this close bond and allow it to deepen with time.
If it doesn’t come naturally to you, we at Faculty Minds can help you cultivate communication it as a couple. Led by experienced specialists, our marriage counselling sessions equip you with the necessary tools to improve dialogue in your relationship and work through problems as a team.
How to Improve Communication – 3 Quick Tips
If you feel negative communication or lack of interaction is hurting your relationship, here are some simple ways in which you can make communicating easy:
- Think about your attachment style
At Faculty Minds, we spend the early marriage counselling sessions exploring the attachment styles of partners. These are characteristic behavioural patterns that emerge in childhood based on the relationship with your caregivers and continue to affect your behaviour in adulthood as well.
For instance, people with insecure attachment styles engage in communication that is seen as avoidant or anxious. Recognising these patterns in yourself and your partner can provide important clues on what you may need to work on.
- Use “I” Statements
Sometimes, even the semantics of the conversation can play a major role in the efficacy of communication. If it’s always the fact of the matter and not feelings, arguments usually turn into an “I’m right, you’re wrong” contest.
Such blame games never work out well in the long run. To avoid such lines of communication, it’s best to switch the tone from “You” to “I.” This changes the overall tone—you no longer seem like you’re blaming the other person but imploring them to take your feelings into account.
For instance, rather than saying, “You’re always late,” you can say, “I get impatient and worried when you don’t get on time.”
Blaming always provokes a negative response that creates conflict. By changing your communication to first-person, you seem less accusatory and more understanding.
- Avoid Negative Communication Patterns
Communication isn’t just verbal. Your behaviour matters, too. For instance, passive-aggressive actions, sarcasm, ignoring your partner, or outright yelling can negatively impact your relationship, even if you communicate well.
Since most of these patterns are formed in childhood, it’s not easy to change them. But it’s not impossible either.
You need to become more aware of your actions. This way, you can learn to replace these destructive behaviours with healthier, more positive ones.
However, it’s a difficult endeavour, and engaging in marriage counselling definitely helps if you need a more healthy and structured way to bring about this change.
Communication Isn’t End-All-Be-All
It’s a long-standing assumption that improving communication is the key to improving relationships. However, some marriage counselling researchers cite that the answer isn’t always so simple.
Although there is a clear connection between relationship satisfaction and communication, healthy levels of communication aren’t a definitive factor in predicting how happy you’ll be in your relationship.
Other factors–including each partner’s personality traits, stress, and the amount of interaction between partners—also play a crucial role in determining how satisfied partners are in the relationship.
In a nutshell, good communication habits don’t guarantee a happy relationship. However, it’s one way to foster a supportive and positive relationship with your partner.
If communication still leads to conflict, we at Faculty Minds–a renowned mental health therapist in Mumbai–can help you uncover the underlying inhibitors, be it behavioural or mental, to help you find your footing again.
It’s never too early or too late to start marriage counselling if there are problems in your relationship. Start yours today by getting in touch with us!
