Family Communication

Your home is supposed to be your safe place…

… but often, it’s the place we experience the most triggers, arguments, and overall stress.

Communication skills seem easy enough from the outside, right? Make eye contact, one person talks at a time, maintain a calm tone and volume, validate…

But try doing that at the end of a work or school day with multiple people, under one roof, each with their own unique triggers, and all while everyone is feeling tired, hungry, and low on energy and patience.

It then becomes the impossible task. We react, avoid, isolate… walls go up… and the trust and openness you would expect to have with your family starts to fade.

Emotional Cutoff and Broken Relationships

Effective communication is one of the most important ingredients to a healthy functioning family system.

Once you let communication break down, you are agreeing to continually perpetuate unhealthy family patterns from previous generations onto the next. Even more, you aren’t allowing your own voice to be heard, which reinforces our internal messages of not being worthy or deserving enough to have our needs heard.

Poor communication leads to emotional wounds that are incredibly difficult to repair. I’m sure you can remember that one phrase or hurtful message that your parent, relative, peer, or other adult in your life said to you that still sticks with you today.

Even indirect, unintentional messages can lead to your development of negative core beliefs…

… inaccurate and painful beliefs about self that trigger our feelings of low self-worth. Without working on communication, these wounds are left untreated, and as a result your defensive wall goes up.

You cut off from those who are hurtful or drain your energy. You may even end entire relationships with family members or move far enough away that the physical distance helps you feel safe or less triggered; but once you stop home for a visit, it all comes back.

You may even choose to stay in these relationships (because, well, family is family, right?); but you never truly feel heard, respected, or valued by the people that you love and trust the most to understand you.

I wish I could say that this is where it ends. That once you let go of the family issues all is well, but it’s not. You then take these unresolved emotional wounds and unmet childhood needs into your future relationships with peers, partners, bosses, in-laws, and your own children, continuing yet another cycle of unhealthy – or at the very least – unsatisfying and broken relationships with others, and with yourself.

Let your home be your safe place once again.

Communication is one of my favorite things to work on with clients. There’s not much else out there that feels better to anyone, at any age, than feeling heard, respected, and valued by the most important people in their life.

My goal is to make it easier for you than you think. To be honest, communication skills aren’t actually that hard to learn. The skills themselves are fairly simple concepts, so once you understand the purpose and how they work, the hardest part is practicing them at home.

I’ll teach you core communication skills that you can use in any relationship or dialogue, and we’ll practice them together in session until we have it right. We’ll then plan out some realistic steps to incorporate these into your day-to-day life for consistent practice.

We’ll pinpoint unhealthy ways of communicating and take a closer look at generational patterns of disconnect and emotional cutoff. We’ll work on interventions that reduce the amount of isolation and withdraw. We’ll role-play and practice ways to express genuine validation, which will help prevent reactivity and intense arguments. And we’ll use these new skills to rewrite house rules, boundaries, and expectations from each other.

Let’s get you reconnected.

If you’re ready to take the next steps together in breaking these broken, ineffective patterns of communication and start engaging in relationships that help you feel heard, respected, and valued, give me a call today to get started: (267) 989-9113.