Lack of Communication Is Not the
Problem
J
ust as Marla and her hus- band Rudy sat down in the office of Dr. Denise Loeb, Marla turned to the therapist and asked, “So are you going to tell us how to communicate?” “Why do you ask that?”
Dr. Loeb responded. “Because you’re the fourth counselor we’ve seen in three years. Every one of them has told us we need to work on our communication skills. We’ve tried to do what they’ve told us, but nothing has changed. We’re still miserable with each other.” Going back at least to the middle of the 20th century, the typical perspective of those who have tried to improve the func- tioning of conflicted relationships—especially in marriages and families—has been that improved communication is the obvious need. Clearly the underlying concept of books like Five Love Languages (main idea: people desire affection to be communi- cated in specific ways) and Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus (main idea: gender determines how we communicate) is that improving communication allows us to overcome inter- personal conflict. This line of thinking has resulted in some intriguing insights
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into human behavior, as stated in writings such as those mentioned above. Other researchers have noted that some people rely more on visual communication, while others rely upon sound or upon touch. One famous example of the impact this distinction makes upon communication is the vignette in which a woman (visually oriented) complains to their counselor that her husband (audially oriented) never expresses any affection to her:
Wife: “He never shows me
that he loves me.” Husband: “Honey, I’ve told you again and again I love you.” Wife: “You see what I mean?” The conventional idea behind all of this is: if we can just learn to express ourselves and grasp what is being expressed to us more clearly, our conflicts will melt away in the clarity of understanding. Institutional chaplains—who became the unof- ficial ombudsmen of hospitals, prisons and industries in the last century—have long been taught that “the majority of all conflict is the result of miscommunication.”
The Family Systems perspective on this, however, is quite different. From an Emotional Process view, while all these insights
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