The Most Important Ingredient

There is one essential ingredient to all relationships. This includes love relationships and marriages, as well as relationships between parent and child, between siblings, in friendships, as well as in the workplace. It serves as a starting place and foundation upon which all other actions and behaviors follow. Can you guess what it is?

It's mutual respect.

Seeing the humanity and dignity in each other is a key part of having successful relationships. It means that you don't feel you are a better person than the other person. It recognizes that they are allowed to have separate and different feelings or opinions than you do. In fact, it's the differences which keep things interesting in relationships.

Mutual respect means you talk to the other person using a kind, polite, and respectful tone. You abandon sarcasm. You are honest and direct. You don't play games. You are skilled enough to let the other person know directly if you are upset with something that they have done. You don't yell, scream, belittle, or ignore the other person.

Withholding and shutting out a loved one or friend is actually one of the most destructive and hostile actions you can take. That behavior pattern, of ignoring and freezing someone out, is passive-aggressive, and extremely hurtful and unskilled.

Mutual respect in families means children are respectful of parents but also that parents role-model this mutual respect in the way they speak to their children. Teaching our children by example about how to create and maintain mutually supportive and respectful relationships is about the best training for life we can give them. They will needs these relational skills all of their lives. We hand them the blueprints for their future relationships.

Couples need to examine the blueprints they got from their parents. Were your parents mutually supportive and respectful? Or did Dad criticize Mom to the kids? Did Mom belittle Dad to her friends? How did their patterns unconsciously infiltrate your own behaviors and attitudes towards your partner? You can choose to rewrite the script in your generation, and not continue the multigenerational transmission of disrespectful behaviors flow through you to your own children.

Mutual respect in friendships means your friends don't have to be exactly like you. Neither one of you is always right. Your true friend can be different from you in many ways, but there is that sacred trust, understanding, and acceptance.

If a child you are in a relationship with is disrespectful, you can be an influence for good by teaching them how to do better. Make sure you are not role modeling or enabling the same primitive behavior.
Emotionally mature adults don't participate in disrespectful behavior as payback.

With an adult child who is being disrespectful towards you, it's important to discuss how and why you feel disrespected, and communicate effectively and calmly what you need them to do in the future to make you feel more respected. You also need to make sure your own expectations of a self-supporting adult child are reasonable, and that you also treat them with the respect they are due. (Hint: you don't get to pick who they date, for example.) Respect should operate both directions.

If you are in a relationship with an adult who is disrespectful towards you, it will not magically get better. You must shift internally and renegotiate the relationship terms, knowing that disrespect is unacceptable to you. Perhaps the other person respond to the truth of your observations, and be willing to change, and give up their disrespectful behaviors and tone with you. If not, you may need to require them to go with you to remedy the situation by going to counseling to break the old relational patterns and get support and skills for doing better.

If the other person is not willing or interested in changing their disrespect, you may need to alter or sever the relationship for your own well-being. It is not healthy to stay in relationship with someone who disrespects, belittles, and dishonors you. Every human being has a right to expect better.

In Gestalt terms, relationships  between adults that have this disrespect have to be shifted from relating from a critical parent stance towards a partner as an errant child, to a more adult to adult way of relating.

Mutual respect means you don't just expect to be listened to, you also stop to listen from your heart to understand the other person. You don't play "victim" as if you are without any part in misunderstandings or upsets. You own your own part. You apologize when you are wrong and try to do better.

When you are cooking and leave out a key ingredient, like eggs in a cake, everything falls apart. It won't rise the way it should. The same is true in your close relationships. Don't forget the mutual respect, or you won't be creating anything of value. Anyone who isn't able or willing to learn how to respect you, just as you respect them, might be worth unloading or restricting their access to you. Mutually respectful relationships are your birthright.                                

Are You a Clean Communicator?

When I watch the Monty Python skit "The Argument Clinic," it always crystalizes for me why some people are much easier to communicate with than others. Like the person behind the desk at the argument clinic, sometimes it’s just too frustrating to be understood. What if each person took responsibility for being a clean communicator? Couldn't we make life easier, make communicating more satisfying, and end some drama that happens with dirty communication? I think so.

Think about who you want to speak with when you are frustrated, upset, sad or churned up inside. What qualities do you look for in someone you can open up to? Most people prefer people who listen well, ask questions to deepen their understanding, are non-judgmental, emotionally available, not distracted, direct, honest, not lecturing, and who care and listen from the heart.

Clean communication is clear and direct. If you have a concern or a grievance with someone, you have the courage to talk with them directly, not passive aggressively complain about them to a third party.

Being a clean communicator means you don't use sarcasm, or try to operate like you are "one up." You operate from a base of mutual respect and value the other person.

Clean communicators manage their own stress level. They exercise, meditate, pray, and do their own self-care. They don't make you the verbal punching bag for every speed bump in their daily life.

Clean communicators mean what they say, and say what they mean. Therapists call this congruency.
You keep your commitments, and are impeccable with your word.

Skilled communicators deliver whole communications, as in "when you did x (their behavior), I felt y (your feeling), and next time I would like z (their behavior)."

Good communicators can set boundaries with others. They can say "no." They try not to do things just out of obligation or guilt.

When clean communicators are unhappy with the way an important relationship is going, they don't start an emotional or sexual affair with someone else. They set up a time to honestly talk with their partner directly about their concerns, and see whether they can each take some responsibility for getting things back on track.

Clean communicators avoid saying "always" and "never." They choose "I-statements," rather than blaming "you-statements."

It's dirty communication to label other people, judge them, and blame them. (This is not your job!)

Dirty communication drags out the past in every disagreement and can't let go of it and move on.

Threats are the favorite ammunition of dirty communicators. They threaten to leave, to divorce, to break up with you. This dirty communication style is called being an emotional bully.

Dirty communicators attack and denigrate the other person in any disagreement. They refuse to accept that the other person may have their own perspective, and that that's often okay and healthy. We therapists call this differentiation, and it means you accept the differences between your view of the world and someone else's. Dirty communicators can't do it.

Clean communicators keep their non-verbal cues warm. This includes facial expression, tone of voice, and body language. Dirty communicators do non-verbal leakage that is cold, judgmental, and tight. Warm non-verbal cues make you want to open up. Cold ones make you want to shut down.

My theory is that everyone can look emotionally pretty healthy alone, but it is in close relationships that our insecurities and fears pop out. It gets harder to assert yourself about personal things, and with those that you care most about. The stakes are so much higher than when you assert yourself with a stranger.

For a nice review on these concepts of healthy and clean communication skills, check out the classic book Couple Skills by McKay, Fanning, and Paleg (New Harbinger Publications, 2006).

The good news on communicating cleanly and effectively is that it's entirely learnable. It's our choice every day to choose dirty communication that hurts our relationships and makes people feel they have paid a visit to the argument clinic, or healthy, clean, and open communication.