What you do during communication that distances you from your partner
How many times has it happened to you that you have felt discomfort in a situation where communication becomes tense or is broken by a gesture from the person with whom you are having a conversation?
In relationships, most problems and misunderstandings are caused by a lack of communication skills. emotional management and communication tools, as well as the use of gestures that add tension to the moment; We are going to see how these gestures damage the relationship little by little and how to realize what is happening to change that pattern.
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Nonverbal communication and its impact on relationships
The relationship can diminish because the people involved do not know how to express themselves or assume that the other person knows what is inside their head, and if we add to this body or facial gestures that show our dislikes, it becomes more difficult to understand each other.
People grow and mature with life experiences, but
we lack education on an emotional level and we do not know other ways of reacting or gesturing than those learned in the childhood and adolescence of our family and social environment, with which some remain childish in their bodily reactions when it comes to talk. It is as if when we speak we continue to use the same words that we used when we were children.The gestures
Gestures refer to the movements we make with our face and body, with which we react to a situation or comment. There are gestures that often harm communication and people do not realize that they are making them, such as when we rotate our eyes by turning them up as a sign of annoyance, or by pursing the lips, tightening them and moving the jaw forward as a sign of non-acceptance or non-acknowledgment of something that we they say; also grumble as a sign of resistance. Another of the gestures is to close your eyes slowly voluntarily while clenching your back teeth as a sign of disgust. Or give yourself a touch on the forehead with an open hand, bringing your fingers together as a way of communicate something that makes us impatient or a way of indicating that the other does not think, perhaps insinuating that it is silly; It is usually accompanied by a snort or sigh, also standing with arms crossed in anger.
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The sounds
Nonverbal communication also includes noises or sounds that we can translate into onomatopoeia, such as when we breathe. deeply and we blow air with force and the lips a little together, creating a sound as a way of communicating that we are upset trying digest a complicated emotion. Or when we snort as a sign of boredom or boredom, apathy or indolence, or that we don't agree, those that are written as pfff or jumm.
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The need to learn to communicate well
As we can see, this form of language represents thick emotions that need to be expressed and we do not know how to understand or manage them to be communicated with verbal language; these forms of bodily communication clearly indicate our internal emotional state, they are learned in childhood and we never reassessed them. We are not talking about the fact that we must repress emotions in order to control the bodily reaction that communicates that emotion in a gestural way. It is important to validate the way we feel, but we must observe our reactions and behaviors at the body level if they are like those described above, since they are reactions coming from the way we interpret what is happening to us, that it is still childish, since we have not done the conscious work to understand if we are acting in this way and make a change in the pattern.
Observing ourselves objectively, we will be able to recognize at what level of self-knowledge and emotional maturity we are, and thus grow. It takes humility and courage to accept when we are being childish in the way we are reacting, because leads us to question whether we are adequately interpreting what they communicate to us.
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How to achieve it?
The exercise consists of pay attention to our body and how he behaves at those certain moments, attentive to those emotions that are transiting inside; feel them trying to describe them with words, how are the emotions feeling in the body?
Another way to become aware of ourselves and if we are being a victim of these automatic gestures is to close your eyes and enter into the memory of that conversation we had that did not end well, and without blaming anyone (we just want to know if we have incorporated these gestures), observe our person as if it were someone else, (imagine that you are someone who does not know you). Watching you, watching you closely. How do you move? How do you react? How do you say things, what tone do you use? And the key question: Am I using these gestures? Is it necessary to add tension to the moment with these attitudes? Don't judge yourself or reproach yourself, just be aware and pay attention to yourself.
No problem, nobly accept if you are using automatic gestures, which do not help to have good communication, because from here, having a vision of yourself, you understand what you have to avoid in order to never again be a victim of your boss when reacting.
In order to manage and control these forms of communication, it is necessary to go through this process of observation; We have to take this training as a research process, also observing other people in similar circumstances and assessing how they act and react, assess to what extent the participants get uncomfortable, how it affects the state of mind of the other, what they contribute and think what would be a more appropriate way of gesturing the body.
Imagine that whenever you have to have an important conversation with your partner, they react with gestures, attitudes and behaviors of this type; there will come a time when you even avoid communication because it becomes tense and uncomfortable, and you tired, solely because the other person is having childish body language that is easy to to mature.
It is about being aware of our body and how it feels the emotions, to understand what are those signals that we send with our gestures to the other person and that changes the context of the communication, which does not help it to flow naturally without creating an environment with bad energy.
It also helps to apply body relaxation techniques, before uncomfortable conversations, take deep breaths, tension exercises and muscle distension. In this way we relax and unload the body a little. Let's remember that emotions are felt in the body, we must involve it in managing them.