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What are healthy relationships made of?
Communication. As it goes, so goes the
relationship. In a world where we receive a
shockingly inadequate amount of instruction in skills so
critical, none of us can afford to remain totally uncoached,
whether by practicing good communication on our own or
with a life coach.
Relationship problems are among the thorniest any of us
experience. At home, at work, and even during what's
supposed to be play, if problems of communication and
perception are left unchecked, relationship
break-up too often follows.
Yet in these venues we play out all the
misunderstandings, the conflicts, the simmering
resentments, and the explosions of anger that Daniel Goleman, in his seminal book
Emotional Intelligence, called "emotional
hijackings". In short, all too often we find
ourselves possessed by what the
Center for NonViolent
Communication (CNVC) calls the mindset
(and perhaps also the emotional repertoire) of the
jackal. How to be more like giraffes?
Mindfulness, Cognitive Therapy and Skillful Means
There are two essential means of dealing with
misunderstandings in communication, and at some level of
analysis they actually flow into one. The first
way is simply (if not so easily) mindfulness -- an
awareness of the sensations, or feelings, in the body,
as well as continual attention paid to the emotions in
the heart and mind. With awareness comes some level of
freedom, for awareness, like sunlight, is a great
disinfectant.
Mindfulness
Have you ever dealt with a difficult person by
mirroring, or reflecting, their complaint back to them?
So what I hear you saying is . . . It is
incredibly effective at defusing hijacked emotion.
In fact, acknowledging any strong or negative
emotion or thought tends to defuse it. This is
nowhere more true than when you acknowledge thoughts or
emotions in yourself, by bringing them into conscious
awareness. The very act of doing so diminishes the
emotional charge. With repetition over time, the
charge can virtually disappear.
What should you be aware of? Well, you can be
aware of the storm before it hits. Those skilled
at mindfulness, such as experienced meditators, can
discern an emotional storm even before it hits -- something most of us would rightly view as impossible,
at least in the near-future, absent practice. For most of us, we see
only that a
storm has hit, after the fact: Oh, look at all the
houses that tornado carried off. What mess, what
devastation, did I cause that?
Yes you did.
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1 - Communication for Healthy Relationships
2 - Relationship
Tips
3 - Relationship
Problems
4 - Relationship
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