Healthy relationships require assertive communication. Unfortunately, that is one skill most toxic relationship survivors do not have. This episode describes the difference between passive and assertive communication and provides the template for learning assertive communication.
Find out more about my work: www.melindagerdungcoaching.com
Book a session with me: https://calendly.com/gerdungmelinda/coaching-session
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Beat Provided By https://freebeats.io
Produced By White Hot
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Healthy relationships require assertive communication. Unfortunately, that is one skill most toxic relationship survivors do not have. This episode describes the difference between passive and assertive communication and provides the template for learning assertive communication.
Find out more about my work: www.melindagerdungcoaching.com
Book a session with me: https://calendly.com/gerdungmelinda/coaching-session
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Beat Provided By https://freebeats.io
Produced By White Hot
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Hey my friends. This week I want to share with you what I have personally been working on and that is assertive communication. Assertive communication is something I struggle with, not only as a survivor of an abusive marriage, but also because, in the household I grew up in, I would not have been allowed to assert my needs. That would have been a dangerous thing to do. It would have started something. I learned that you wanted to keep your feelings hidden so that other people couldn't use them as weapons against you. I learned that if you let someone see that something bothered you, that would make them do it more because now they knew how they could get to you. It was a way for others to leverage control. So I've perfected hiding my emotions. My roommate in college told me I had a stone face, and no one could tell what I was thinking. And I needed that growing up. I needed it to not be known if something bothered me. I also needed that in my marriage. Because if my ex husband knew something bothered me or upset me, he would use that as a lever that he could push when he wanted a certain reaction from me. So I did my best to hide any and all reactions from him. And this made it harder for him to control me. And obviously I couldn't hide things perfectly because he managed to find things that he could use for leverage. But he didn't find everything. And that is a point of pride for me. The point is that keeping information, specifically information about how I feel or what I want or need, a secret has always felt like safety for me. If no one knows what upsets me or scares me, they can't use that against me. I bet a lot of you can relate to this. The downfall of this though, is that I don't communicate my needs. It is very difficult to foster intimacy and healthy relationships in the absence of that sort of communication. There are also drawbacks in the sense that I don't stick up for myself if I am hiding that something is bothering me. Being able to be assertive in communication is being able to say I don't like that don't do that. When you hide how you feel from others, you don't say that and that thing that you don't like and are pretending otherwise continues. Because no one is a mind reader. And then we end up with passive communication where you hint or drop hints that something's bothering you and then get mad when the other person doesn't pick up on the hints. And that just sets up a really toxic sort of environment for a relationship. You can't have that sort of passive hidden communication and have a healthy relationship. So I have been working on practicing assertive communication with my own therapist. And I'm going to give you the template that she gave me for assertive communication. That template starts with an I feel statement. So I feel some sort of emotion and it has to be an actual emotion like hurt afraid embarrassed, disappointed. Statements that start like 'that you' is not an emotion. "I feel that you" is not the same thing. And anger is usually a secondary emotion and there's usually another emotion underneath and that is the one that you usually want to be communicating. So you start I feel some sort of emotion when you and then you describe the behavior in non judgmental terms. Like when you didn't call, when you came home late, when you slammed the door, whatever it is. And then you say I need or want and then you describe what would work for you. No one is a mind reader. So we have to express what we would like to happen instead. Right? And just because we expressed what we would like to happen doesn't mean that it will happen. People have their own free will. Like the adults get to do what they want to do. We talk about that all the time how we can't control other people. However, it ups the chance that it will happen and opens the door to negotiating something that will work for everyone. And in a healthy relationship, that's kind of how it works when you state your wants or needs. So you could say something like I feel hurt when you go out with your friends and don't invite me. I would like to be included. That would be assertive communication. Stating how you felt when something happened and then stating what you would like to happen instead. I started working on this specifically because, if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you'll remember that a few months ago, I was sexually harassed at my day job. And the one thing that bothered me about how I handled that situation was that I never explicitly told him to stop. I thought that I should have and I was disappointed that I didn't. I sort of said it. I used passive communication, which was the kind of communication that feels safe to me in the face of a threat. It is the type of communication I would have used throughout most of my life where I just kind of hinted that he should stop. I said you are going to end up in HR if you keep talking to me like that. Instead of a more assertive way of saying it which would have been I am going to report you to HR if you keep talking like that. So you can you can see the difference there right of like you're going to end up in HR versus I am going to report you to HR. I am going to take you to HR is much stronger. In future situations, because there will be future situations, that's just the way of the world. I would like to be able to speak assertively in the moment. Now I know that for a good while that when you're first learning new skills, you don't do things in the moment. That's not how skill building works. We talk a lot about that on here too. You know at first I'm probably going to think of it after the fact. But that's still okay because I can still go back and say like, Hey, I need to talk to you about something. Remember when you said XYZ? Well, I didn't like that and I don't want you to talk to me like that anymore. And I'm going to be bad at doing this. And that's okay. It's a skill like any other and it will continue to improve over time with diligent practice. So this is a skill that I am practicing right now. And I'm not just like waiting for something bad to happen to practice it. I can use it for positive things to like, when my boyfriend does something I like, I can assert that too. Like I felt really happy when we cuddled on the couch the other day. I hope we can do that more often. I can practice all the time asserting my feelings, my desires, my needs. I find that I really like practicing on my boyfriend because he is the person it feels safest to practice on. I don't really worry about him knowing how I feel about things. And I'm hoping that practicing on him will help me also be able to use this sort of communication with other people too. And I do want to underscore the fact that this type of communication would not have worked in my abusive marriage. I didn't learn to hide my feelings and desires because I was crazy. Like, I learned to do that because he legitimately enjoyed hurting me. It was in my favor to hide it from him because if I didn't react he would get bored and move on. But if I did react, I could guarantee that I would be getting more of it. This assertive communication is communication skills for life after abuse, for healthy relationships moving forward, for leaving behind the learned behaviors of living in an abusive environment. And that really is what toxic relationship recovery is all about. It's piece by piece dismantling all of the learned behaviors that once kept you safe, but no longer really serve you moving forward. And learning to have grace and kindness for ourselves as we do that process. May we all move forward on this journey together. All right, my friends. Until next time, be well