12 Steps to Enhance Communication and Intimacy with Your Partner
Most people come to couples counseling hoping that their partner will change. Very few people want to focus on their role in contributing to the dysfunction in their relationship. It’s much more common for partners to build a strong case for why the other person should make the change.
Yet, the more you believe your partner should be different, the less initiative you will take to change the patterns between you. The hardest part of couples therapy is accepting that each of you will have to modify, adjust, and change your behavior for things to improve between you. Communication is the number one presenting problem in couples counseling. RCBM's Marni Stone, LMSW, shares the following 12 steps that will help you and your partner communicate more effectively.
1. Make it emotionally safe to bring up difficult subjects.
2. Listen with openness and curiosity.
3. Attempt to elicit a fuller range of feelings during discussions and disagreements. This is how you really get to know your partner.
4. Listen without comment during disagreements, even if strong feelings get activated.
5. Dare to expose your imperfections and fears. Exposing vulnerability is difficult since it goes against the instinct for self-protection, but doing so helps your partner really “know you”.
6. Maintain perspective. See your partner as you see yourself- a human being with their own wants, desires, preferences, and beliefs.
7. Remember that understanding is more than just repeating what your partner is telling you. If you really understand, you will be able to recap the importance, significance, and/or implication of what your partner is telling you.
8. In order to really empathize with your partner, you need to recap the facts and emotions of what you hear, ask questions for clarification, and inquire about why the topic is meaningful to your partner.
9. Respect your partner's desire for greater distance as expressing a need for autonomy-not a personal rejection of you.
10. Be honest with yourself. True intimacy with another can't really happen until we are accepting and honest with ourselves.
11. Avoid depending on your partner to fulfill all your emotional and social needs.
12. Don't use affection, sex, and loving behavior to reward or punish.
