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Recently
I had a series of
private phone sessions with a person who was very frustrated. Listen to
how
this person described their situation. I bet you’ll be able
to relate to it.
This
person said they felt
trapped in their basement trying to communicate with
their spouse via Morse Code. They
said they were banging on the pipes trying desperately to be heard.
They would
bang on the pipes and wait for a response. Bang and wait...bang and
wait...bang
and wait. But each time they finished banging, there was silence. No
matter how
hard they banged and no matter how long they waited; their spouse never
heard
them.
Are
you trying to get heard? Do
you feel ignored? Is communication in your marriage pathetic?
We
live in an interesting time.
With one click, you can communicate with
anyone in the world. It’s easy,
quick, and free. You even have options. If you don’t want to
click, you could
dial, beep, page, instant-message, or Fed Ex. It’s true. Your
ability to
communicate with the outside world has become increasingly easy. But my
guess
is that your ability to communicate with your spouse has become
increasingly
difficult.
The
reason for this is that most
people confuse INFORMATION communication with
PERSONAL communication.
Technological
advancements give us all sorts of options tocommunicate information.
But how do you feel the
pulse of someone’s soul? How do you communicate the
subtleties in your heart?
You can’t text message that. You can have the latest and
greatest in
communication gadgets, but it won’t matter. PERSONAL
communication is a whole
different ball game. And it’s PERSONAL communication that
determines the
success or failure of your marriage.
I’m
reminded of a scene from a
Broadway play. A man and woman happen to meet on a train and engage in
polite
conversation. They were both headed home to New York after a day in New
Haven,
CT. After further discussion, they learned that they were going to the
same
building on Fifth Avenue. Lo and behold they discovered that they had
the same
daughter and lived in the same apartment. They finally discovered that
they
were husband and wife.
You
know what’s killing marriages
these days? EMAIL! More and more I’m seeing husbands and
wives resort to email
to communicate with each other. You want to do something tangible TODAY
to
improve your marriage? STOP EMAILING YOUR SPOUSE! Email is for
INFORMATION. But
in a marriage you’ve got to HEAR each other. And I
don’t mean hear the sounds
of each other’s words. You’ve got to be able to
hear the silence between the
sounds and interpret the unspoken meaning of pressed lips or teary
eyes. You’ve
got to be able to hear the shapes and sounds in each other’s
heart. You can NOT
accomplish this via email.
And
let me be clear about
something; you can’t do it with marriage communication
techniques either.
There’s no clinical communication therapy that can help you
and your spouse
think each other’s thoughts, feel each other joy, and cringe
from each other’s
pain. My 1-on-1 phone session schedule and the Marriage Fitness Tele
Boot Camp
are filled with casualties from traditional marriage communication
strategies
and the usual marriage counseling approach. If you’re like
most people with
marriage trouble, you’ve been down that path and you know
that it does NOT
work.
Today
my 4-year-old son came to
me with a bruise on his leg. He was crying and I could see that it was
black
and blue. He said, "Daddy, I need a band-aide."
I
responded, "But it’s not
bleeding."
He
said again, "Daddy, can
you put a band-aide on it?"
I
realized that my son’s
perspective was that when something hurts a band-aide makes it
better...even if
it’s a bruise and not a cut.
So
what does this have to do with
communication in a marriage? Because most people think that if spouses
aren’t
hearing each other that communication techniques will solve the
problem. But
that’s like putting a band-aide on a bruise. It’s
the wrong solution.
Communication
techniques can help
colleagues transmit INFORMATION clearly.
Communication
techniques belong in
seminars that teach negotiation and sales. But you’re not
trying to complete a
transaction with your spouse; you’re trying to renew a
relationship. I can
almost guarantee you that your problem is not clarity; it’s
concern.
Ironically, communication techniques sometimes give people clarity that
they
don’t care what their spouse thinks or feels. They "got it,"
but
"it" doesn’t matter to them anymore.
How
do you get back to the place
where you and your spouse care again?
This
is one of the things that’s
unique about the Marriage Fitness approach to repairing a relationship
versus
traditional counseling. Most approaches to marriage success preach
communication skills. But communicating effectively will NOT create
love in
your marriage. In fact, the correlation is the opposite. Creating love
in your
marriage paves the way for effective communication. I’ll
prove it to you.
Think
about when you fell in
love. How was your communication? Good, right? In fact, when
you’re in love,
you communicate with the wink of an eye and you can finish each
other’s
sentences. And yet you haven’t known each other that long and
you haven’t
learned any communication techniques.
Then,
years later, after getting
to know each other inside and out, employing psychologically tested and
proven
communication strategies, and taking into account all the differences
between
Mars and Venus, you can’t get through to each other.
Listen
carefully: Communication
has very little to do with techniques or knowledge of each other. It
has
everything to do with the depth of connection between the communicators.
The
question you should be asking
is NOT, "How do I communicate effectively with my spouse." The
question you should be asking is, "How do I connect with my spouse
again?" Once you reconnect, you won’t be sitting in silence
in the basement.
You’ll hear the sound of the pipes from above.
It’ll be your spouse. You were
heard.
If
you
want to learn how to connect with your spouse again, if you want to BE
HEARD, enter your name and email below and I'll send you free
advice on
how to transform your marriage communication.
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