The intensity of emotional pain, tension, distance, and conflict are often symptoms of something amiss in your relationship. Think of them as warning signs or invitations to change the conversation. But how to change the conversation? As if you haven’t been trying to do that, right?

Let’s look at your relationship in another way, from a distance.

Picture your relationship as a house. You live in it. Sometimes you might have a problem with the conversation happening in the house. But that doesn’t mean the house is a bad house or should never have been built.

These two things get mixed up often. Instead of pulling down the house (the relationship) or testing and tearing it apart trying to fix it, you might take down a wall and make the door handles work more easily. That way you can move around and see each other more easily.

Pulling the house down or leaving the house won’t necessarily change the conversation. You might just end up in the same conversation in another house.

Change the conversation …

So if the s**t is hitting the fan – you really are getting big messages that you need to change the conversation style in your relationship. That involves changing the emotional energy within yourself which is fuelling the conversation – so you can step outside of the thinking and feeling which is fuelling the destructive conversations.  

Do you feel you’re facing a wall as you’re trying to connect with your partner? If so I invite you to try to understand the emotions that the wall is built from and also the more vulnerable feelings it might be protecting.

On the other hand if you sense that you’re under siege or being criticised and/or just can’t get your partner to understand you, then as opposed to closing up, see if you can guess what emotions are driving what you are hearing from your partner. You can change the conversation by connecting to what your partner is feeling underneath and deeper than the frustration. Their vulnerable feelings.

It’ll be strange and uncomfortable but feel good when you successfully change the conversation!  You might need help from a specialist to (coming back to the house analogy) ‘put in a new door’ so your conversations can go in a whole new direction! 

I hope this analogy and my pointers are useful. Successfully sharing vulnerably is powerful. You might reach out to me or to another Emotionally Focused Therapist

Love each other up!
Mukti