There are a number of common traps that couples can fall into when they communicate, particularly if things start to get heated, if they cross the boundary between “discussion” and “argument”. Here are some guidelines that I often give to couples who struggle with communication:-
——————————————
Rules for Good Communication

• We will choose the best time and place for serious conversations. We will agree on this and we will keep to our agreement. If necessary we will set a time limit to the conversation, and come back to it later.
• We will stick to the real issues. We will not bring in “red herrings” as a way of avoiding topics that we find difficult to talk about.
• We will own our feelings and not blame partner for how we are feeling
• We will listen to each other and not blame ourselves for how partner is feeling
• We will not interrupt each other and we will not monopolise the conversation ourselves.
• We will not use physical violence. We will call a time out if (and only if) it is necessary to avoid this.
• We will not walk out in the middle of the conversation (except by calling a time out), we will not sulk or “use” tears as a way of controlling what is going on.
• We will not be verbally abusive (no name-calling, no personal attacks etc.)
• We will not bring up grievances from the past
• We will not manipulate each other by withdrawing love or sex
• The aim is not to have a winner and a loser but to negotiate and compromise a jointly agreed solution
• We will admit our mistakes, apologise for them and talk about what we will do differently next time. We will accept our partner’s apology and move on.

Words to Avoid

Never and Always
Don’t say : “You never take the dog for a walk”
Do say : “I feel that I do more of the dog walking than you and I’d appreciate it if you’d walk him more often”

Right and Wrong
Don’t say : “You’re wrong” or “I’m right”
Do say : “I have a different opinion about that” and then maybe explore what experiences have led to you holding those opinions.

True and False
Don’t say : “That’s not true” or “You’re lying”
Do say : “I remember that differently” or “That’s not how I interpreted that”

But
Don’t Say : “Yes, I know what you mean but…..” because this implies disagreement
Do Say : Yes, I know what you mean and…..” because this implies understanding
—————————————————————–

Of course, this list is by no means exhaustive, and you may be able to add more rules that you and your partner can agree to work to. There may also be some traps that you are not aware of, and coming to counselling can help to identify them because your counsellor is able to view things from the outside.

This blog is intended to give you a flavour of how I work as a counsellor. You can find more information about me by clicking one of the links above.

As a couple, there are bound to be times when you disagree.  You are two individuals and it is natural that sometimes you will have different opinions.  Some of your differences may be about “important” things like politics, or religion or schooling, some will be about more trivial things like how best to stack the dishwasher or which way round to hand the toilet paper.  Some of your differences will be easy to live with, others may cause problems – and this has nothing to do with whether the differences are about “important” or “trivial” topics.

So, differences are often a source of conflict in a relationship, but they do not need to be.  A common pattern is that each partner will try to convince the other that their point of view is the right one, or that their suggested course of action is significantly better in some way.  Along with that goes that idea that if one of the couple is right, the other must be wrong.  And if either partner feels that their partner always needs to be right, they can start to feel inferior – and the battle to be right can become intense and acrimonious.  A power struggle can develop that can become much more significant than the question in hand, whether that be religion or the toilet paper.

So who is right?  As a counsellor I sometimes find clients expect me to take sides, to make a judgment, and in that they are invariably disappointed.  For though you may disagree fundamentally on many issues, it is still possible for both of you to be right!  You are two different people, with different histories, different values and different experiences.  Holding different opinions is natural and does not mean that one of you is wrong.  Your individual opinions exist in the context of your different lives and are equally valid.

More than that, if you see yourself trying to persuade your partner round to your way of thinking, ask yourself why that is important to you.  Is it in some way threatening to you if your partner has a different opinion?  Is it important for you to be proved right?  Why does this matter?  Do you feel good if you win an argument with your partner?  Does this say something about your own self-esteem?

Counselling can help you to think about why you argue and why your partner holds the views they do.  It can help you to realise that if you were in their shoes you would be quite likely to hold the same opinions as they do.  This understanding can lead to a new respect for your partner’s views and an ability to discuss difficult subjects openly and honestly to reach “win-win” solutions.

A successful relationship is not based on one partner being right and the other wrong, but on being able to understand each other’s point of view, and to negotiate good compromises.

How do we come to trust some people more than others? We might say of someone “I wouldn’t trust them as far as I can throw them”, or “I’d trust them with my life”. How to we come to make these judgments about people? What are the signs that tell us that it’s safe to trust some people more than others?

One of the main ways that we develop our opinions about whether or not we can trust other people is through a sort of “trust dance”. When we first get to meet someone we will most likely be a little cautious, and in our early conversations with a new acquaintance will be testing the water. So, we might perhaps make a slightly humorous remark to see if the other person smiles. Do they share our sense of humour? If so, we will feel that we have permission to relax a little and use humour more with this person. If not, we might be a little more guarded. Similarly we might explore other aspects of that person’s character, with a remark like “Fred’s driving me nuts today”. If the other person responds in kind : “Yes, he’s an annoying twit, isn’t he”, we will start to feel safer to express more of our opinions. If they disagree with us, or ignore what we’ve said, we’ll be less likely to open up to them in the future.

These are just a couple of examples of the sorts of things we might say to get an idea of whether we can open out with someone. There are many more, for example:-

• Do they keep confidences – things we tell them, and things others tell them?
• Do they confide in us?
• Do they fulfil commitments, such as arranged meetings?
• Are they punctual?
• Do they return things we lend them without prompting?
• Do they make fun of us, or of others?

This list is quite a personal thing – punctuality, for example, may be very important to some of us, but not at all important to others. And we will all set different store by different types of things – so that for some of us, repaying a debt will mean a lot, for others, keeping a confidence might be much more important.

It is apparent from this that building trust is (for most people, at least) a slow process. So what happens if it goes wrong? What do we do if, during this trust dance, our partner steps on our toes? Our reactions will vary, of course, according to circumstances. We may grit our teeth and pretend it never happened. We may invest in a pair of steel-toed shoes and attend the next dance session better defended. Or we may choose a different partner and start a dance with them. Or perhaps we may even decide that dancing is too dangerous, and shut ourselves away at home instead.

At the risk of stretching the dance metaphore too far, another option is to take some lessons, maybe with your partner, to get some expert input into what you might do to avoid crushed toes in the future. Counselling won’t restore trust immediately, but it can help you to build, or rebuild it more rapidly. And once you’re learned the steps, you can repeat them over and again.

This blog is intended to give you a flavour of how I work as a counsellor. You can find more information about me by clicking one of the links above.

What do counsellors actually do?  We spend a lot of time listening to our clients, encouraging them to talk, sometimes giving small signs of encouragement with our facial expressions, or with a few words.  We spend a lot of time in silence, not actually doing or saying anything.

In adopting this really quite passive position, we hope to be providing a space where you, the client can talk in a free way – free of distraction, interruption, advice, judgment – free of all the things that would probably take place in a conversation with a friend.  And the idea of this, of course, is that it gives you time to expand your thoughts, express your feelings and think in a different way about the issues you might be facing.

So, can you do this without a counsellor?  If you go and sit in a quiet place on your own and ruminate, can you achieve the same result without having to pay £50 an hour for the privilege?

To a certain extent, I think you can, or at least, you can learn to.  I worked with a client recently, who at the end of counselling said that he found himself thinking about himself in a different way in between sessions.  In counselling we had spent quite a lot of time understanding how his past experiences linked to his behaviours today, and we had looked at alternative ways of behaving.

For example, you might be annoyed if your kids leave their dirty shoes in the hall, and your instinct might be to shout at them about it.  But that is not the only way to deal with your annoyance.  You might instead choose to stay calm but deduct an amount from their pocket money.  Or you might choose to ignore it, not to make an issue out of it.  None of these choices is right or wrong, but some may be more helpful than others, and your instinctive reaction may be more about how your parents treated you, than about how you might choose to treat your children.

I digress : to return to my client, he had developed the ability to stop and ask himself why he was feeling the way he was, why he was behaving as he was.  He was looking at himself in a different way, understanding himself better, and also looking after himself better – thinking about his needs and how best to meet them.

In doing this, I would say that he was counselling himself – and that this is something we can all learn to do to a greater or lesser extent.

However, I also think that there are limits to this process – we cannot deal with all situations in this way.  Sometimes our emotions are perhaps too strong, or the difficulties we face are too complex.  Or perhaps we might run out of ideas : “I want to stop shouting at the kids but I just can’t seem to stop myself”.  There are times when, however good our own DIY skills might be, it is time to call in an expert….

This blog is intended to give you a flavour of how I work as a counsellor. You can find more information about me by clicking one of the links above.

While there can be “breakthrough moments” in counselling, very often progress is slow, and that can be frustrating.   This can apply in both individual and in couple work.  For example, an alcoholic can only recover an hour, a day, a week at a time.  So too, with depression, recovery can be a slow process.   If you’ve come to counselling for help in making a big decision, it can take a while before things start to become clearer.  In relationships, restoration of trust after an affair is usually very gradual (though in this case that trust can be broken very suddenly). 

The frustration you might feel is natural.  Probably you have lived with your current situation for quite a while before coming to counselling; it may even be that counselling is a “last resort”.  So you are likely to be very eager, even impatient, to move on, to find an answer, but you are likely to find that you need to give the counselling process a bit of time before things start to change.  You will need to tell your story, and probably look at things from a number of different angles before things start to look different, though occasionally it can happen that something “clicks” and things can change for you after one or two sessions.

In cases where counselling seems to be moving quite slowly, it can be helpful to take a step back and review the last week from a new perspective.  The positives (and there nearly always are some positives, however small) can be highlighted and built upon.  If an alcoholic has managed one day without a drink, that can be captured and repeated, so that next time it can become two days without a drink.  If you have had a few hours when you have felt less depressed that normal, you can talk about what you were doing, and how that felt, and then seek to replicate those circumstances.  If you and your partner have had one relaxed evening when you haven’t argued, you can both think about what you did to help that to happen, and to do that again.  Similarly, the times that have been less good can be analysed and new strategies can be developed to help you to avoid or minimise those situations in the future.

Of course, there will be ups and downs; usually progress is not a steady, upward line.  It can sometimes feel as if, having worked really hard to make some slow progress, one negative event takes you right back where you started.  However it is generally true that if you have gone from A to B once, you can do it more easily the second time.  Counselling can help here too, by enabling to view progress as a whole and focus on the improvements you have made over a long period, to keep the shorter term issues in perspective.

Making changes is often about taking small steps and reviewing them.  What has worked for you and what hasn’t?  How can you repeat the small successes and avoid repeating the failures?  As you keep asking yourself these questions, you will develop more understanding of yourself, so that that process of changing becomes an easier one.  So be patient, small steps can lead to big changes.

This blog is intended to give you a flavour of how I work as a counsellor. You can find more information about me by clicking one of the links above.

Honesty can be difficult in relationships.  We care about our partner and don’t want to hurt them, and so sometimes it is tempting to tell a “white lie”, to bend the truth a little, or just not to mention something at all, in order to protect our partner’s feelings.  Sometimes that’s what our partner wants – the classic example is the “does my bum look big in this?” question, but there are many more examples; very often when we ask our partner’s opinion, we want them to agree with us, or at least not to tell us that we are doing something wrong.

So, sometimes those little white lies are sensible.  But when is a lie white?  If your partner thinks you’ve given up smoking, but then you just smoke one cigarette when they’re not around, there’s no point in telling them, is there?  They’ll just be upset, or disappointed in us, or angry with us, when it’s just one little cigarette – they’ll “overreact”.  So we protect them by not mentioning that we’ve had a smoke.  But are we protecting them, or is it more the case that we are we protecting our own feelings when we do this?  We would feel guilty, ashamed or a bad person, perhaps, if we said something to upset our partner – or we don’t want the difficult atmosphere there might be if they are angry.  Very often we are really thinking about ourselves when we lie, or hide things – we pretend we’re doing it for our partner’s good, but in fact it’s more about ourselves.

Lies, of course, can grow.  That one cigarette can become two or three, and can grow into a regular habit, that becomes more and more difficult to talk about.  It is the same in lots of other cases; a bit of flirting, a drunken kiss, a one-night-stand – these can seem harmless enough but they can become habitual or develop into a full-blown affair.  Drinking, watching pornography, spending money, gambling…the list of possible deceptions is endless.

Sometimes we lie by omission.  The cigarette example above is relevant here.  Whether we actually say “I didn’t smoke”, or we “forget” to tell our partner about the cigarette, it’s still a deception; we deliberately leave our partner believing something that isn’t true.  Either way, if (or more likely when) our partner does find out, the effect is the same, and they will end up wondering what else they haven’t been told, waiting for the next revelation to hit them.  These deceptions undermine trust and create barriers in relationships – and in a healthy, intimate relationship, most of us seek to build trust and break down barriers; that’s what intimacy is about.

So I tend to encourage honesty in the counselling room and in relationships.  Secrets, however small, are potentially poisonous things.

It seems important, as well, to think about how you might react to a confession from your partner.  If they’ve promised to give up smoking and then own up to having crafty cigarettes when you’re not around, how would you react?  I’ll talk about this more in my next post.

Fairy stories present us, at an impressionable age, with an unreal idea of “love”. In counselling, it’s a word I approach with great caution. What do we mean when we say that we love someone? The trouble is, that it means different things to different people, and different things to the same people in different situations. We might say we love a partner, a mother or daughter, a son or daughter, a pet, a friend, a football team or a favourite singer. We might love chocolate, or helping people, or climbing mountains, or getting drunk, or watching the world go by. But these might all be different sorts of love; it is a word with many different meanings, and many different emotions need to co-exist to make up the feeling of love.

I sometimes ask people, if they talk about being in love, to break the word “love” into other emotions. It is amazing how many different parts there can be to “love”. Security, safety, permanence, excitement, anticipation, joy, connectedness, sexual excitement, fear of loss, obsession, jealousy, certainty, dependency, independence, caring, being cared for…. the list goes on and on; some of these feelings are contradictory; not all of them are healthy or desirable, but they are all feelings that some of us associate with the word “love”.

The different meanings we ascribe to the word “love” can leave us with very different expectations of our loved ones. Some people seem to believe that being in love is akin to some sort of telepathy : “If you loved me you wouldn’t have to ask, you’d know what I’m thinking” or “I know just how his mind works, I can tell exactly what he’s thinking”. For others, it implies a form a servitude : “If you loved me you’d check my tyre pressure”. Or the ability to perform miracles : “If you loved me you’d be able to put things right for me”. Sadly, being in love does not suddenly imbue us with super-powers; as humans we remain fallible, imperfect and unsure.

In fairy stories, love is really easy. “They fell in love and lived happily ever after”. If only! Some people do enter relationships with that idea, of course. They think that there’s a Mr. or a Ms. Right out there, and once they have found that person, everything will be perfect. It is a picture of love presented to us by books, magazines, TV, cinema, and by our friends and relations. However, it is, in my opinion, pure fantasy.

Relationships are hard work, and to maintain your love, whatever meaning you may give to that word, requires sustained effort by both parties. If you treat your partner like a servant, they will probably come to resent it. If you expect miracles from your partner, you are in for a lot of disappointment. And if you rely on telepathy for communication, you may well be in for some unpleasant surprises!

This blog is intended to give you a flavour of how I work as a counsellor. You can find more information about me by clicking one of the links above.

Some of us have “good memories” and can recall a lot of details about the past, others of us have “bad memories” and can remember very little of certain periods of our life. I have a pet theory that memory is related to how we process things at the time they happen, or soon afterwards. For example, if you are someone who reflects a lot about your experiences you are likely to remember them better in years to come. If, on the other hand, your tendency is to park things and move on, your memories of the past will be much less vivid.

Whether you are someone with a good memory, or a bad one – and whatever the reasons for that might be, you may find yourself feeling that you want to remember more about certain periods of your life. It is sometimes useful to look back to childhood to understand yourself better. For example, if you are trying to overcome a fear of flying, it might be useful to talk about your experience of flying, to recall your feelings, and how others you were with behaved towards you. It is probably relevant to recall when your fear of flying first started. It may be useful to broaden the topic, to talk about other forms of transport and whether you feel the same or differently about them; it may also be useful to think about other situations that you find difficult to see if there is a link with flying that is important.

Such exploration can be a useful part of counselling, but it all depends on you being able to recall past events; on your having a good memory. Suppose you haven’t? Is it possible to bring back memories or, is it the case that memories, once forgotten, are gone forever? I don’t have a clear-cut answer to these questions, but certainly one thing that can help to bring back memories, or to add more clarity to “fuzzy” memories, is to look at old photographs.

There are different ways of approaching this. One is to get a bunch of photos and flick through them quite quickly, without putting much, or any, conscious thought into the process. The idea of this is to “wake up” some memories – to get that part of the brain that stores memories moving. Repeating the “flicking-through” process each day, maybe with the same photos, maybe with different ones, often starts things moving. You may find that certain photos stick in your mind, or that certain events come back to you, which you can then explore in more detail.

Rather than flicking through the photos quickly, you may prefer a more ordered approach. Some people find it useful to arrange photos chronologically – and you may want to write down key events in your life as you do this. You may also want to a pick a photo that seems interesting and important, and absorb yourself in it for a while, perhaps 5 to 10 minutes, looking at it in great detail. Look at the people, who are they? What are they thinking and feeling? What was happening for each of them at the time the photo was taken? What are they wearing? Where are they? Why are they there? What are your memories of that place? What objects are in the picture? What ornaments or furniture can you see? What are people carrying? What is the weather like? Who is not in the picture?

There is nothing magic here – looking at photos is simply a way to blow cobwebs off your memory – to get some rusty parts of your brain moving again. And the hope is, of course, that the memories give you a better understanding of the past; and that makes it easier to shape the future the way you want it.

This blog is intended to give you a flavour of how I work as a counsellor. You can find more information about me by clicking one of the links above.

If you find that you have got in someone’s way, or inadvertently pushed in front of them, you will probably say “Excuse me” or apologise in some way. Do you do the same if you get in someone’s way in conversation; if you interrupt them?

Being interrupted can be quite a hurtful thing; you can feel that you are not being listened to, that the listener feels you don’t matter, or that they are finding you boring. To interrupt you it must mean that what they want to say is more important, in their opinion, than what you are saying, and while it might feel like that to them, it may not, of course, feel the same to you.

I was talking to a couple recently about this; we were exploring a particular incident when the man interrupted his girlfriend to tell her that she had a smear of jam on her face. She felt quite hurt; she felt ignored, that he wasn’t interested in what he was saying, that she occupied just a small place in his world, that she was low down his priority list – and that on top of all that, he was criticising her appearance!

Her boyfriend explained that his motives in the interruption were none of these. He said it had felt to him a bit as if they were having a conversation in the street and he observed that behind his girlfriend’s back, a double-decker bus was careering towards her, out of control. Should he listen attentively while she finished what she was saying – or rather, failed to finish what she was saying because she was run over by the double-decker bus? Or should he interrupt to say that, interesting as he is finding her conversation, she might like to move out of the path of the onrushing vehicle?

He was concerned that she might go to work still with the jam on her cheek, and so wanted to save her that embarrassment. In retrospect, he acknowledged that the jam on his girlfriend’s cheek was not going to cause her an injury in the next ten seconds; he could have waited before pointing it out, there was no great urgency to interrupt. And she recognised that her feelings of hurt, the anger she felt about being interrupted, were out of proportion to the incident; that it would have been helpful if she could have put those feelings on hold rather than just to conclusions about her boyfriend’s motive in interrupting her.

So people may interrupt us for different reasons; and sometimes maybe it is because we are talking too much, boring our audience, or repeating ourselves. If you are someone who talks a lot, it might be that sometimes your partner feels that the only way to get a turn to speak is to interrupt. And sometimes we may feel like interrupting when it is inappropriate, before your partner has finished what they are saying.

Counselling can help by slowing these conversations down and giving you time to understand each other, rather than guessing at your partner’s motives. It can give you a safe environment, free from double-decker buses.

Suppose I asked you to draw up a list of the people who are important to you, and to rank them, putting the most important people at the top, and the less important at the bottom. There are various ways you might make your decision on the ranking – one way you might think about this is to ask yourself who you would rescue from a burning building – suppose that all the people on your list were trapped inside – who would you pull out first? Or you might think about who you give most time and attention to, or who you would miss most if they weren’t around.

You might also add other things to your list. Work, for instance, might feature, or hobbies, or study. You can’t exactly rescue a round of golf from a burning building but it may be something that is important to you – more important than some (or all!) the people in your life.

If you have a trusted friend, relative or partner, it can be interesting to ask them to write down their ideas of your priority list – who or what do they think are most important to you? In comparing their list with yours, there are likely to be differences, and these differences are interesting; one reason for them is that we don’t necessarily show outwardly what we feel inwardly. What I mean by this is that we may feel that our kids are the most important people in our life, but we may not show that to others. We may feel deeply attached to our kids without giving them a lot of time, or physical affection, or the other things that are noticeable to others.

In itself, the exercise of drawing up a list is thought provoking; and comparing it to someone else’s list even more so. The next step is to put yourself on the list. How important are you? Are there people you would help before you help yourself? Are you top of the list? Are you at the bottom? Do you feel, as one of my clients recently suggested, that you don’t deserve to be on the list at all? And what’s the opinion of your trusted friend on this?

So, you have your list. It’s not cast in stone, of course; it will change over time, but it is also something that you can think about changing yourself. Maybe, when you look at it, you think that you are a bit too high on the list. Then you can think about playing with the kids a bit more, ringing your mum more often, giving your partner more hugs, spending less time at the gym. Or maybe you’re right down at the bottom of the list, or not on it at all. Then maybe you should allow yourself to sit down and read once in a while, or go for a walk on a sunny day, or go away for a weekend occasionally.

The key thing is to find the right balance – for yourself, and for those who are most important to you.