How to Communicate with Your Spouse and FEEL HEARD

Figuring out how to communicate with your spouse and feel heard in times of conflict can be challenging. Passions run high and you probably both know exactly how to press one another’s buttons. But do you know how to hear each other and bring the conflict to a close?

When I work with couples I often help them to really listen to what their mate is saying. We all know how to talk, so it might sound funny that a couple would need a professional to help them hear, but that is sometimes what is needed.

Dealing with anger in a relationship can be difficult. Anger can push us away from our partner, so learning how to control anger’s influence on our lives and partner is incredibly important. Many of us don’t develop effective tools for dealing with anger until later in life, if ever. If you’re reading this, maybe you could use a helping hand.

If you get angry at your mate, you are not alone. If you get really mad and yell or do other things to your partner when you get upset… again, you are not alone. Anger is pretty common in relationships. And this is not an article about how terrible it is. This is a message about what to do about it.

If you are human, you have felt jealous. You might even have some early memories of really feeling the pain of jealousy when you were young. I like to think it’s pretty common for all of us as we grow up to experience the hurt associated with being jealous.

But why do we keep feeling it and how to do we deal with it when we grow up and are in what we consider an adult relationship? Why is it we often still get re-injured or we re-injure our mate and it always centers around jealousy?

As a couple counselor I work with people in relationships. Often the difficult issues surround feelings of jealousy. So let’s talk about it and understand what happens to us and our partner when we feel it.

By the time we are in a relationship most of us are pretty good at navigating life. We have probably achieved some sort of successes with school or jobs and just the ability to accomplish things in life.

So when we finally connect to the person we fall in love with, why is it that so many of us feel as if we can’t figure out how to fix simple things, like misunderstandings and disagreements? If we as humans are good at other things in our lives; taking care of people, working, going to class, why do we fail at simple things like getting along with another person?

When we fall in love with our person we pretty much land in a wonderful place full of possibilities and promise that leads us to wanting more of this great feeling we are both sharing with each other. Falling in love is one of the most miraculous things we do as humans.

So why, after finding our person do we spend so much time trying to understand how they think and act and get frustrated in the process? Sometimes it can even feel as if we are partnered with someone we just don’t get. “Why do they do things the way they do?” We might be asking our self this question. Or, “Who thinks like that?” When we ask these questions we are not sure about our mate. They are so different we just don’t understand them.

I know every time I am feeling good and I say yes to something I always feel better. It’s as if good positive energy becomes bigger. I noticed this recently when I was reading an article about humans and their pets.

A recent study talked about how when pet owners look into the eyes of their pet, both animal and human get a dose of the pleasure hormone in their bodies. That hormone is called dopamine. And it happens naturally when we are engaged with our pet at a deep level.

Annoying girlfriend, boyfriend, or spouse getting on your nerves? There are peaceful, loving, productive ways to deal with it. This article examines some of those ways, and also some of what not to do.

All of us sometimes in our lives get annoyed with people we love. It’s only normal that when humans interact in close quarters they are inevitably going to get on each other’s nerves. And in relationships this annoyance can happen regularly. In fact in many relationships it does.

It would be helpful if all of us in relationships knew exactly what love is supposed to feel like. If we knew, then we would know if we were in love or if we weren’t. We wouldn’t wonder about it. As a couples specialist I work with a lot of people in relationships who are often not sure about the love they feel.

Some people will be very angry at their mate and tell me all the things the partner does to make them pull their hair out. Then I ask the same person, “Do you think about ending the relationship?” Then they scold me as if I haven’t been listening and then they tell me, “I can’t leave, I love him.”

Learning how to handle conflict in a relationship is tough, because it forces us to challenge our instincts.

When people get their feelings hurt, most of us don’t want to go near the person who hurt them. This holds true in families, with co-workers and in relationships. It’s just easier to back away when something painful happens. It’s just the way many humans are wired.

As a couples specialist I know that even with the person we love, for some of us it’s instinctive to pull away when things get messy. I work with people who love each other who just want to know what to do when they fight. They usually wonder if they could do the fighting part better so they don’t have to stay wounded and apart for so long.

Many people struggle with taking responsibility in a relationship. They feel victimized, they blame, and they feel miserable. It doesn’t have to be this way.

One of the hardest things I see couples struggle with is the idea that each person in the relationship is responsible for his or her own part of the problems that surround them. It’s not uncommon for people to want to blame the other person for how they feel as if the partner did something to cause the upset. Something bad happens and people start pointing fingers at the other person.

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Tag Archives: arguments

How to Communicate with Your Spouse and FEEL HEARD

Dealing with Anger in a Relationship

How Jealousy in a Relationship Divides Us

It’s Never Too Late to Improve Your Relationship

Why Understanding in a Relationship is Hard to Come By

Dopamine, Love, and Connectedness in Relationships

Annoying Girlfriend, Boyfriend, or Spouse Driving You Crazy?

What Does Love Feel Like?

How to Handle Conflict for a Happy, Healthy Marriage

How Taking Responsibility in a Relationship Brings Peace