My husband and I have been talking the past few nights about some of the issues we have- a lot related to how i think about myself-- )also see my post, "which came first-anxiety or low self-esteem?" ) We have a mostly great marriage of 12 years and have 3 wonderful children. we have some areas in our communication that we tend to go round and round about and we really want to improve.

First of all, for many years we had a pattern-- he is extemely outspoken, has strong opinions and doesn't ever hesitate to confront and came from a family that would be verbally abusive at times and yell a lot. He has been determined to overcome that and he has never been one to yell or be abusive, but often I would feel like he was condesending or critical. I naturally hate conflict, i tend to see myself as a victim and have a hard time expresssing my feelimng and worry about what people think of me. As you can see this created a disfunction in our relationship-- I just wanted to keep the peace, so i wouldn't tell him when I was upset with him very often. Anyway about five years ago, thanks to the help of some family members we began to realize what we were doing. He has become aware and worked very very hard to learn how to talk gently and respectfully to me and how to listen. He's not perfect, of course, but he asks me for feedback and is open about his stuggles to change. What I am just now realizing is my response to this. I still react to him in the old way, I still assume he's thinking the worst about me, that his expectations are too high, etc. even though a part of me can see that he's changed. It's weird because I should be so happy that he's changed, i prayed a lot for that, but even though I've forgiven him, I think i still feel a lot of the pain from before when we get into a tense situation. It's like how they say an alchoholic will get sober and the family doesn't know how to deal with it because the way they've related has to change. And also , I havn't changed in the area of my disfunction much yet and it's very uncomfortable to do so, but i want to ( see my other post) I want to think true and postive thougths about myself, to become secure so that I don't always assume someone's mad at me and even if they were i could handle it better. The areas I need to work on are being assertive and positive thougth replacement. I have been asking myself, what am i getting out of this? I guess attention, and it's comfortable, it's habit. Also I need to be in the "present moment" of my marriage. i can't change the past, and we really love eachother. And he tells me all the time, he wants me to be honest, he wants me to feel good about myself, etc. well, I guess realizing where I'm at with all this and beginning to write some thougth replacements will be a good start.

Communication is probably one of the most difficult aspects of any relationship. We all bring our own 'life experiences' to the table and tend to process what is said to us through our own filters.

One thing that I have found that helps is what they call mirroring. You listen to what your partner is saying, then they pause and you tell them in your own words what you heard them say. They then get the chance to correct you if you misunderstood, or tell you that you heard them correctly. Then you do it in reverse, with your partner listening and you doing the talking. To make it work, the person that is doing the listening must not interrupt the person who is talking, even if what the talking person says triggers an emotional response.

It really does work, but it may feel ucomfortable at first and it takes practice. When I first started doing this with my then boyfriend, I was really misunderstanding alot of what he was saying. Once I felt that emotional response start by something that he said, I also found that I stopped listening and allowed my low self esteem to take over and started to think the worst.

I hope that this helps you in some way.

Wolfie

thank you for your kind replies! We have continued to talk through some of this and it has been great. I continue to remind myself that any change I want to make will require getting out of my comfort zone, but it will be worth it and it will get easier.