Communication Skills for Marriage and Family


Transform your Family Relationships Immediately
when you clean up harmful communication patterns
and replace them with with ones that work
Communication Skills for Healthy Relationships

What relationship do you want to improve…husband-wife, sister-sister, brother-brother, mother-son, mother-daughter, niece-aunt, boyfriend-girlfriend?

Conflict and friction with a spouse, your children or siblings makes communication a chore and struggle. Feeling discounted and misunderstood wears us out. Furthermore, friction-filled relationships keep us off-centre and emotionally depleted.  They erode our sense of self and result in emotionally competitive relationships.  When you feel angry, anxious, frustrated, disappointed, inadequate, guilty or hurt before or after speaking with a family member, it’s time to get off the emotional roller coaster and learn some communication skills that work to improve your relating.

Just as unpleasant emotions signal the need for better communication skills, our ‘thought-reactions’ point to strained relationships.  When you think a family member is ‘taking advantage of you,’ ‘accusing’ and ‘judging’ you, ‘disobeying your requests because they don’t care,’ or ‘talking over you all the time,’ taking initiative to make a relationship healthier will pay off in spades.  Why allow harmful communication patterns to linger like black clouds over a relationship when they are easily blown away with the warm winds of education and self-awareness?

Unfortunately the degree to which you are hurting yourself and a family member, may be outside of your awareness.  You may not be aware of how destructive your current communication patterns are, because you and your daughter are already caught in a spider web, confined by an action-reaction cycle. Consequently, you may not realize that yelling and reinforcing a children’s disruptive behavior gets more of the same.

Since most of us did not learn effective communication skills in our families or school, sibling rivalries can lead to regret and hurtful words spoken, even though you and your sister are now grown-ups. Please consider that a jealous brother or sister’s behavior can get diffused, once you know what to do and say. Strikingly, once we sort through the worst of what we unconsciously modeled of mom and dad’s behaviors and beliefs (called “the family mind” by psychologists), we can decide what we want for these special family relationships. There are a variety of ways to respond to a mate’s annoying comments and questions

As human beings, we all share the common desire to experience others in healthy ways. Hence, even though unpleasant relationship situations come in different forms, by reviewing and renewing your ‘relationship-perspectives’, miscommunication can be relieved and new ways of relating can be fostered. 

Learning effective communication skills that help an individual to:

  • avoid or prevent fighting and replace it with constructive communication
  • release conflict within themselves and present their messages clearly and congruently
  • stop ruminating and obsessing about past hurts and misunderstandings
  • own their contribution to disagreements and replace unhealthy behaviors
  • convey a message in a way that will be heard
  • build a bridge of safety and trust between themselves and a family member
  • set healthy boundaries and make distinctions between ‘mine to do’ and theirs to do.’
  • shift guilt, resentment, shame and anger into clarity and focus

Depending on your desired outcomes with a particular person, the following are a list of some of the important communication skill-sets that a person can learn to master and consistently employ.

  • “Yes-and” Set: starts from a ‘place’ of agreement, alleviates competitive right-wrong thinking and builds a bridge for conversational flow
  • Well-formed Outcome: alleviates blame and directs internal thinking and outward communication towards a goal
  • Non-verbal Rapport --- meeting a person ‘where they are at’ and matching them in posture and voice, which in turn, leads to greater influence and receptivity to what you are saying.
  • How to uncover and address the unspoken Hidden Agendas that lead to misinterpretation.
  • How to Frame Conversations with a ‘caring’ and ‘accepting’ mind-set—the first words out of mouths often set the stage for what is to follow.
  • How to employ Solution-focused Language – some comments and questions lead us deeper into a problem and are best not verbalized. We want to chose our words wisely and guide ourselves and a family member to constructive possibilities.  
  • How to use Softeners to ask questions in a non-abrasive, non-judgmental manner that invites participation. 
  • Pacing another person’s comments and Positive Intentions: learning to pace another person’s communication enables them to experience ‘feeling heard.’ To acknowledge that all communications have some type of positive intention underlying their expression, is a powerful principle you will come to understand through our work together. 
  • making clear distinctions between Harmful Criticism and Useful, Descriptive Feedback – we shape our world through the words we use. A person may not realize how critical they sound and the impact they are having. Using descriptive language can really help family members understand one another.
  • revising Vague Language so that a person can know specifically what you want.  Some of us “Big Picture” communicators do not realize how vague language confuses instead of clarifies.


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