The Toughest but Most Important Relationship Skill: Non-Defensive Listening
The Toughest but Most Important Relationship Skill: Non-Defensive Listening
Trevor Crow, LMFT, 8/17/11
Most of us struggle with our relationships from time to time. Out of the blue it seems we get into fights with our partner that make us feel frustrated and disconnected from one another. As a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, I talk to couples trying to understand how they get to that distant feeling like two fighters sitting in opposite corners of a ring.
One of the biggest places we loose connection with each other during a fight is when our defenses rise up and block us from hearing what our partner is saying. That block, or feeling that we are under attack, either signals us to fight back or to shut down or to flee.
Our defense systems are set up to protect us, usually a habit we created in childhood to keep us safe from a critical, unsafe parent or situation. Many of us have a defense style that fights back like “the best defense is offense”. If we feel we are attacked for not doing something right, we hit back hard in order to feel safe. Some of us have a defense system that shuts us down, rendering us speechless, to “play dead” or to run away. These defense styles are called fight or flight or freeze. They are natural and keyed into our DNA by thousands of years of evolution.
When attacked, our bodies go into a sympathetic nervous system overdrive: our stress hormones go up, cortisol, adrenaline increase rapidly while our heart beat and blood pressure is elevated. In every fight, both partners, the fighters and freezers all feel the same nervous system overload.
It is understandable when we are so triggered that it is so hard to slow down and hear what our partner is saying. What I teach my couples is to take a deep calming breath, (getting the parasympathetic nervous system going), slowing the heart beat down and turning on their non- defensive listening skills.
Non-defensive listening is exactly that: mustering all of our listening skills, present focus, and open heart and non-judging stance and truly listening to our partner. Sometimes we will hear something we had no idea was there, maybe our partner is afraid, ashamed, lonely, or, he or she needs to be heard fully and lovingly.
When we are there for our partner, truly engaged, attuned and listening and allowing our partner to be entirely who they are, that is when we are connected. Attunement or the ability to feel our partner’s mood, presence and person is where we come together and feel loved. Attunement is the antidote to the feeling of two fighters in the ring at opposite corners, fully connected and having the felt sense that our partner is there for us and vice versa.
