Interpersonal_Relationships

Interpersonal Communication in your Relationship COM 200 6/22/11 Dear Jason and Amber, I am writing in response to your request asking for some advice on interpersonal communication in your relationship. As you know my husband and I have been attending classes that help with communication in relationships. We also believe we can give you some dire advice based on our own personal experience since we have six years behind us. Being a newly engaged couple and asking for advice before marriage lets us know you are both serious in committing to one another. This also makes it seem you are both committed to keeping your relationship alive and well. The best advice I can give you is to keep your communication alive and well. In this letter I will give you some advice on the concepts of good interpersonal communication. I will explain what we have been learning in our classes and also what I can explain to how we have experienced this in our relationship. The first basic but important skill to communication is listening. Listening to each other shows that you both respect one another and care about what the other is saying. There are three important types of listening and they are: active, critical, and empathetic. The first skill that we will discuss pertaining to the listening is actively listening. Active listening is assertive communication that develops a sense of trust. In my personal relationship letting your spouse know that you are listening lets them feel important and build trust within your relationship. Actively listening in your communication will allow you to build trust because of the openness that it builds. Openness within active listening makes your spouse feel a connection which leads to building trust among the two of you. Based on the interpersonal communication texts actively listening has four advantages which are: real communication, understanding, intimacy/trust, and appreciation of each other. These listening advantages create a stronger bond between the both of you as well as creating self confidence in your relationship. Real communication allows you both to feel important and knowledgeable in the communication part of your relationship. With the understanding it allows you to interpret the feelings of one another. The fact of intimacy/trust of listening allows you both to be compassionate with each other while having an openness of trusting relations. All these will lead to you both being able to create an appreciation for each other’s feelings and communication. Critical listening is very important because it allows you to analyze, understand, and draw a conclusion to what your spouse is saying. This is important to our communication within our relationship because it allows us to interpret what they are communication or trying to get across to us. Critical listening in my own relationship has helped me to analyze what my spouse was saying and draw a conclusion to what I was going to respond with. Critical listening and responding back with something intelligent will surprise your spouse and catch them off guard. This listening here allows you to better understand what is being communicated. Sometime our spouses believe we are mind readers and critically listening will enable us to ask the right questions and understand the conversation. Empathic listening is the basis of all the listening skills. Empathic listening is direly important to listening to your spouse when they have an issue or problem that they need to talk about. When we empathically listen then we can set aside our own feelings and concentrate on the feelings and comfort our spouse in their time of need. I can remember one time in my own personal relationship an incident to where my husband lost his father. I tried to understand how he felt but I couldn’t because I had not lost either one of my parents. Here I had to learn quickly that he was in pain and needed empathy. I empathized with him and listened to him describe his feelings, and this brought us so much closer. I believe empathic listening will help you form strong bonds within your relationship. According to statistics the main problem with empathic listening is we have a problem of wanting to be selfish. We listen to our spouse but we tend to try and change the focus to ourselves. The study shows that we do not console them in their time of need we instead try and focus on our past happenings that relate to our spouses issue. This is one factor you don’t want to happen instead you want to comfort them and empathically listen to them. This will ensure that they get the feeling that you care and understand and this will bring a closer bond in your relationship. Active, critical, and empathic listening are all crucial parts of listening in interpersonal communication, and without this listening it will eventually create barriers that will tear your relationship apart. The second important aspect of interpersonal communication is to avoid common communication problems, and learn how to avoid these behaviors and keep barriers out of our relationships. There are three common barriers that disrupt our relationships and they are: silent treatment/refusing to communicate, appeasing the situation, and again listening and not ignoring the situation. Keeping these barriers out of your relationship will keep your relationship strong, and help you avoid major conflicts. The first barrier to avoid is the silent treatment or refusing to communicate. This barrier is one of the most problematic barriers that couples face in communication. From my personal experience in our relationship we have had many problems that would get us to the point of giving one another the silent treatment or refusing to talk to each other when spoken too. This hurt our relationship and made it feel as we were both unwanted or hated. This is not a good feeling to have. Our issues would keep piling up because of this refusal to talk or the silent treatment until one day they all exploded on us. This was the worst possible thing that we could have ever let happen. I know now to cool off and then get every problem solved to ensure that you are both satisfied with the outcome. The silent treatment may be your way to punish your spouse for something you didn’t like or something they done wrong, but remember unless they know you are just cooling off this silence is killing your relationship. Psychologist say that the silent treatment makes trust issues arise and it is also said to be a type of emotional abuse. The silent treatment will also not work on males very well. You may hurt your relationship and damage it, but most males will just ignore the fact of the silent treatment. ("Silent treatment from," 2002). This is important to avoid because it keeps the trust and well-being of your relationship stable. Avoiding the silent treatment barrier will also help your relationship avoid the strains and emotion abuse that is causes. The second and third issues that create barriers are appeasing the situation and not listening. These both can be very critical to creating conflicts within your relationships communication. By appeasing the situation you will make the situation worse. You will give your spouse what they want in order to resolve the situation. From my own personal experience this makes them think that they can get their way every time a conflict arises. This will only enable them to think of you as an easy going not caring kind of person. This has happened to me and it took me forever to make them see that this would not work every time. As for the not listening in the communication barriers it will only create major problems in your relationship. Listening is a key factor in interpersonal communication as we discussed before. Being open and listening will create trust and make a relationship stronger. These barriers can lead to stressful situations and even conflicts between you so if at all possible you should avoid these barriers, but if you can’t and a conflict does arise be sure to follow the next steps of managing conflicts. The third communication skill is learning how to manage conflicts. No relationship is perfect and we all at some time or another face conflicts. If we did not have conflicts and have perfect marriages then marriage counselor would be without jobs. If you can use these three strategies then you can avoid having to spend all the money on a marriage counselor. The three strategies for managing conflict are humor/affection, empathize, and cooling off time. These three strategies will enable you to work out your conflicts while also keeping composure in your relationship. The first strategy to try is to add humor or affection to help deter the emotions until both parties have had time to cool off. This is an experiment and will not work every time, but believe me it is worth a try. From personal experience the humor or affection can slow the process of a heated argument to a point that you can talk the issue out. From my own personal relationship I have found at times by using humor or affection it helps deter the situation long enough, and it may save you both from saying something that you may regret later on. The humor/ affection according to studies have saved many heated arguments from happening. The stress that the humor/affection can relieve this stress can be very harmful in many ways to your relationship. The stress can cause either of you to say things that you may regret or that may be very hurtful which can cause you to end the relationship, if these things are real bad. The next two strategies to managing conflict are to empathize and cool off. Empathizing can let the other person know that you care about their feelings. Personally I can give you one example of advice that I believe is very good. Personal experience has taught my husband and I that you must listen and understand the others feelings/emotions in order to understand why they feel the way they do about the issue that the conflict is about. This will help you both understand what feelings/ emotions are bothering you about the conflict and come to the best solution that you will both agree upon. According to Help organization you must have a readiness to forgive and forget to use empathy correctly. This will help you avoid using yelling and hurtful language. According to the Help organization this is a critical part of effective communication while managing conflict.(Segal,J., Smith,M., 2010). The next step to managing conflict if the first two doesn’t work is take time to cool off. This will avoid the stress and maybe a huge fight. Based on previous conflicts in my relationship a cooling off period will help the conflict and also help the both of you from regretting what you did or said. This experience has taught my husband and me to listen to one another’s point of view and understand that we must come to agreements that will help us both. According to the Help organization this cooling off time is very important for the conflict and your relationship. This cooling off time will help you to avoid being resentful to one another. This resentment can cause many issues with your communication and also with your relationship. This resentment can cause you all to start rejecting one another and fear that you cannot trust one another. (Segal,J., Smith,M., 2010). These strategies for managing conflict are very important concepts to learn to help your relationship stay strong and keep faith in your hearts. Although you have learned this far how to manage barriers, conflict, and how to listen effectively you have to learn to understand the differences in culture and gender. The strategies for avoiding conflict are important to learn since you both come from different cultures. The fourth communication skill to effective interpersonal communication is learning that you both come from different cultures, and that gender plays a role in how we perceive things. Culture is the beliefs and values that you have that may have been passed down from your family. The first thing you must do is both come to an understanding that you come from different cultures. This could create conflict since most likely you have different beliefs and may have different values. Based on my relationship experiences you must find these beliefs and values that you may have that are different and come to a solution that you will both agree upon and be happy with. One example from my marriage is the factor that we both believed in different ways of celebrating Christmas. He had been raised that you celebrate and open gifts on Christmas Eve, and I was raised that you only celebrated it and opened gifts on Christmas day. We had to compromise and agree that with his family we could do it on Christmas Eve, but at our home and my family’s home we would only do it on Christmas Day. This was a cultural difference that we had to change and compromise upon. Some couple may perceive this as a problem but if you can work out a solution on these cultural differences then things will work more smoothly. According to a woman who comes from the Hispanic culture this can be a learning experience for the both of you. (Jooss, R., & Cook, J.. (2008, November) . You can take these different cultural beliefs and values and learn new ways to do things that will make them your own, and pass them down to your children. This will also help you to learn others ways of living and make you better understand the different cultures. The second thing that can cause conflict is the issue of gender. Have you ever heard the saying “Women are from Venus and Men are from Mars'”(Grey,J., 1992). This is a great saying to help explain this to you. This is true in the fact of the way we communicate because men and women communicate differently in a relationship. According to doctors who specialize in gender within interpersonal communication women usually get frustrated that men don’t listen and most of them ignore you when you ask them something (Thomas,R.,2008). This is very true on the basis of my personal experience because I know of many times I have had to ask my husband are you listening to me. This can be frustrating in an important conversation that you may be trying to communicate. Also I have found that asking a man to do something is like taking candy from a child. This is just a man’s way and the better you come to understand the less conflicts it will cause. On the other hand men get frustrated with the fact women communicate indirectly, they also feel as women think they don’t do enough, and they also believe women try and control them with their friends. The first important concept to learn here is to be straight forward and not be indirect in your communication. This will help the man’s insecurities about having a woman say one thing but mean another. The second thing here is be sure to tell him that you appreciate everything that they do for you eventually this will make their insecurity of not doing enough go away. The last thing to work out with gender is trying and let them have some freedom with their friends. Smothering them will cause tension and conflict. A resolution for this is for you both to set aside a boy’s night and a girl’s night out like twice a week. I would also recommend that you let him have some time to bond with his friends because a man is superior to his friend and once married they will pick on him, and this will bother him. Make sure you understand this and you will understand how he needs this boy’s time. Therefore, I hope this interpersonal communication skills help you all with your upcoming marriage. I know that it has helped out our relationship very much. Try and follow the rules to listening, managing conflict, avoiding barriers, and understanding gender/culture. This will allow you both to understand the communication effectiveness within your relationship. I wish you both well and hope that if you need anything else you will not hesitate to ask. I wish you both the best of luck. Sincerely, Christy and Keith Create many conflicts. Jooss, R., & Cook, J.. (2008, November). THE ART OF LISTENING. Credit Union Management, 31(11), 13. Retrieved June 23, 2011, from ABI/INFORM Global. (Document ID: 1603358511). Rodriguez, Maria Elena. (1994, July). Forum: Our Responsibility. Hispanic,84. Retrieved June 23, 2011, from Research Library. (Document ID: 581315941). Segal, J, & Smith, M. (2010, November). Building the skills that can turn conflicts into opportunities. Retrieved from http://www.helpguide.org/mental/eq8_conflict_resolution.htm Silent treatment from spouse can ruin relations,. (2001). Informally published manuscript, Newspaper, Texas Christian University, Texas, Texas. Retrieved from http://www.skiff.tcu.edu/Fall2002/101702/silent.html Staker, D. (2002, September 11). Critical listening. Retrieved from http://changingminds.org/techniques/listening/critical_listening.htm. Retrieved on June 18, 2011. Thomas, T. (2008). Examining Relationships between gender role and conflict and interpersonal guilt in men. The Wright Institute. Retrieved from ProQuest document id.1680046681.Retrieved on June 24, 2011.