Helping Our Clients with Difficult Conversations

April 12th, 2010
By Irina Firstein, LCSW, Communication Problems Topic Expert Contributor

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Much of our work with clients is encouraging them and coaching them on how to communicate difficult feelings and thoughts to others. What I mean by “difficult” are a range of verbal expressions of feelings or thoughts that expose vulnerability, disappointment, and anger. Why is it so hard to communicate to others that we are hurt, scared, disappointed, upset, mad?

Our clients are willing to spend countless sessions talking about, venting to us, and complaining about how others make them feel. However, as soon as we suggest that they express these feelings directly to the person these feelings are directed towards, they shy away, expressing great reluctance. Yet this inability to communicate in more honest, authentic ways creates a real gap in every area of life. It underlies feelings of loneliness, family and marital problems, causes friendships to drift apart, creates stress in the workplace, feelings of inadequacy and self-esteem issues.

I think it is our aim as therapists to convince our patients that these difficulties in communication are extremely damaging and that this can be changed. It is crucial to let our clients know and really understand that communication patterns and styles are learned and therefore can be unlearned.

The key to understanding these issues lie in a thorough relationship history taking, discussing, examining and processing communication interactions with key figures in one’s past and present. Most of us have learned communication skills and lessons from our parents, siblings, teachers and other role models. Probably parents are our most powerful communication coaches. Through overt verbal as well as non-verbal means they early on made it clear to us what is acceptable to say and what is not, or at least what they don’t want to hear and talk about it. Robert Bolton, PhD in his book People Skills says, “We first experience the training process at an early age. Parents or parent-substitutes rewarded some kinds of nonverbal behavior, like smiling, and they communicated displeasure over other kinds of nonverbal behavior such as “temper tantrums”. When we were still quite young, they helped us frame our first words. Then they trained us to speak in certain ways. No matter how badly you hated the annual Thanksgiving visit to your aunt’s house, you have been told, “Thank your Aunt Edith for the lovely time you had”. He goes on to say you were tought to not interrupt adults talking, not to whine, not to speak a certain way to certain people, not to use certain words. Other relatives, teachers, babysitters also became part of the training process. Numerous dysfunctional ways of relating include learning to be superficial, ways to manipulate others, how to hurt and bully, how to build walls, how to talk without saying anything.

I think it is one of our main jobs as therapists to help people identify their patterns of communicating and relating to others and help and guide them to make necessary changes. The main direction of the change is that it is OK and actually conducive to creating deeper, more satisfying relationships if communication is more honest and authentic. It is OK more often then not to say what one thinks. There has to be a choice, you don’t have to feel stuck.

We all know that most of our clients, even if intellectually on board with this proposition, have inherent resistance to changing this. It is important to understand and help explore this resistance. The main reason for the resistance is that people think they are protecting themselves by communicating and relating the way they do. It is crucial to acknowledge this and then explain and teach our clients that their particular way of protecting themselves is not necessarily doing the trick and in fact creates other dangers – disconnection, isolation, hurt, and anger. It is crucial to help them understand that there is a way to take care of themselves, even protect themselves without exposing themselves to risk and harm.

Most of our clients are reluctant to express their real feelings and thoughts because they are concerned about rejection, anger or somehow alienating others. They are afraid to expose their vulnerability and be harmed. We, as their therapists, must find a way to show them how they are harmed by creating walls by not letting others know them as they really are. This really prevents them from truly being known as well as really knowing anyone else. That creates an unreal, lonely existence, based on often times false assumptions.

It is also important for our patients to understand how these patterns of communication create distance and rupture in intimacy. More often then not unexpressed resentments, disappointments, unfulfilled needs result in self esteem problems. At other times people get set off with uncontrolled anger or harmful behaviors over a seemingly minor infractions. Both of these situations push away others and disrupt closeness which dysfunctional communication attempts to solve or prevent.

©Copyright 2010 by Irina Firstein, LCSW, therapist in New York, NY. All Rights Reserved.

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