With COVID-19 raging across the country, couples have been cooped up together at home for more than 8 months. Unfortunately, in such close proximity, conflict is inevitable.
People are experiencing a lot of emotional, financial, and even spiritual stress. Everyone has moments when they reach their limit and healthy communication breaks down. However, there are ways to avoid these problems and actually deepen your relationship.
One critical aspect of communication is the ability to fully listen to one another. Listening to your partner and having patience makes it possible to avoid these conflicts altogether.
Using ATTUNE
John Gottman, a well-known researcher who studies relationships, developed an acronym describing how couples should speak and listen to one another. He refers to it as ATTUNE, which breaks down like this:
Speaker Listener
* Awareness * Understanding
* Tolerance of two viewpoints * Non-defensive listening
* Transferring the emotion into words * Empathy
Ask you can see, Gottman notes that the first three letters, ATT, are the speaker roles in a discussion, while the last three letters, UNE, are employed by the listener.
The Art of Listening Non-Defensively
The ability to listen in a non-defensive manner is an acquired skill. It requires practice to do it right. Gottman shared what he considers to be an important but subtle rule: You need to have mutual understanding before giving each other advice.
Essentially, this means that you need to fully understand your partner and their perspective before providing your own recommendations, solutions or other quick fixes.
7 Active Listening Skills to Master
When communicating with your partner, consider these 7 active listening skills:
1. Listen to truly grasp what your partner is expressing and feeling. This may sound easy, but most of the time people actually listen, or half-listen, dimply to determine how to respond. That’s a trap! If you don’t have the patience to listen, your partner won’t feel understood.
2. Respond to your partner with curiosity. Hold back your own take and thoughts. Instead, work to completely understand their viewpoint. Ask open-ended questions that require more than “yes” or “no” answers.
3. During the conversation, summarize periodically by reflecting back or paraphrasing what your partner says and expresses to you. They will know you are trying to listen. This gives them a chance to feel heard. Also, summarizing and reflecting allows you to ask more questions and clarify anything you missed.
4. Provide empathy by validating your partner. This lets them see that you take their thoughts and feelings seriously. If, however, you don’t understand or can’t validate your partner, then return to step 2.
At this point, you may now express your feelings on the issue. Basically, you and your partner are switching roles. You are speaking and they listen.
When talking together, if you or your partner can’t maintain your cool or let go of your own attachments, one or both of you might be triggered. If that happens, take steps to self-soothe.
My recommendation is to take a break from the conversation and schedule a specified time to reengage your partner about the issue later.
5. Establish an action plan. For most issues, you and your partner will need to have an understanding of how this issue will be addressed in the future. Both of you must be clear about what this will look like before moving forward.
Even if you consider yourself a good listener, there is always room for growth and improvement. Practice these skills as much as possible. With practice, you will get stronger in your listening and communication skills.
However, there is help if you and your partner get stuck. At that point, it is important to talk with a skilled couples counselor and engage in couples counseling for the needed support.