Communication – Direct and Indirect
My approach to recovery centres around three things, relationships, communication and meaning making. So I am saying that the difficulties you have are connected to one or all of these.
Communication is everything
Today we are going to focus on communication and the part it often plays in your unhealthy and addictive behaviour.
Now when you hear the word communication what do you think of? Let me tell you what I think of, EVERYTHING! You see communication is not only generally a much bigger thing than you think. But when you have finished reading and understanding this, you will see why I say that communication is everything! We are always communicating something (not always what we want to) because someone is making meaning from what we are doing.
How we communicate more than we meant to
Did you ever decide not to speak to someone? Let me ask you something, did they make meaning from what you did? Of course they did! Everything we do communicates something. Now let’s see how you apply this to your recovery.
Communication – Direct and Indirect
To explain this I need to make a distinction, let’s split communication into two, we will call our two types ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’. Let me describe them, direct communication is when you tell someone what you are feeling in a simple and personal way, “when you said that it really hurt me” would be an example of direct communication. Indirect communication is everything else! That time you closed the cupboard door a little too loudly, when you rolled your eyes, tutted and sighed. It’s the tone you use, the expression on your face.
Now, direct communication we can probably leave alone but looking at the area of indirect communication will bring tremendous benefits in our recovery, so let me define it a little more sharply. You communicate something indirectly when you want someone to know something but you don’t want to say it.
Now that wouldn’t be a big problem except for one thing, they never get it! You might think they got it because when you looked angry they stopped bothering you but it’s not the same thing. This is because of another communication principle, meaning is made by the receiver not the sender. It will not be the meaning you want them to make!
The Practice of good communication
Now, how do you put these ideas into practice? I am certainly not suggesting that you simply make everything direct! Just think about someone you have met that seems to say everything on their mind without much in the way of self-censorship. They are not usually doing very well in their relationships, for obvious reasons. No there is a process and it looks like this;
1 Raise your level of awareness
2 Accept your own reality
3 Act on what you learn
You will probably recognise this from the AAA post and I encourage you to read that and study the ideas in it.
Awareness
Now I will take all of these in turn. Firstly raising awareness. Without changing anything else that you do, start to notice the little things you do, and ask yourself regularly, what did I want them to know by that? Now all of this can be done without changing your behaviour or relationships. Of course raised awareness itself changes things, but that change is not managed it is just part of a natural process. Often raised awareness on its own brings major changes towards health.
Acceptance
The next step is to accept (or own) what we wanted to say, and, as part of this acceptance begin to ask ourselves what is it that prevents us from saying those things directly. This is based upon a very important recovery principle which is that we cannot change until we look at ourselves. As soon as we start to raise our awareness around our own difficulties we start to grow.
Action
The final step is one of action and so we need to understand the process of healthy action. I want to offer a process that I have found to be effective in improving relationships through communication. But before we do that I must emphasise that this step comes after the first two. The whole process becomes healthy when we take it a step at a time. I have spoken about this as a process in another Blog post (please see AAA Awareness, Acceptance and Action). We cannot take effective action until we accept something and we cannot accept something until we are aware of it.
The practice
So the process of action goes as follows;
1 Tell yourself what you really wanted to say when you communicated indirectly (even including the swearing)
2 Take the communication through the three filters of politeness, assertiveness and authenticity.
3 Decide whether to communicate directly.
So let’s take this process one step at a time.
Step 1 We ‘translate’ our act of communication into a simple sentence. Now because we are never going to say this to anyone else we can start to be honest with ourselves but because we are new to this we need to realise that this is not easy, we need to concentrate and practice to make sure that we have got to the real meaning.
Step 2 is where we take our translation and filter out the things that make it difficult for us to say. We take out the offensiveness, next we take out the aggression, and finally we take out the falseness that can come in as part of the first two filters. So firstly we simply make it a polite message, by removing this we make our communication easier to hear. Next we make it assertive, it is important to understand that in communication terms telling someone to do something is ‘aggressive’, so this filter makes us the agent of change not the other. I will give examples of this at the end. The last filter is to really make sure that in using the first two filters we have not lost the main idea in the communication, in other words we keep it real.
Step 3 is about choosing to tell the person directly or not. Telling them is not always the best idea. We should take time to practice and get better at translation. Just understanding ourselves better will be a huge health promoting activity.
Let me finish now with a couple of examples that should make this process more clear.
Make the shift to assertive communication
Remember the last time you communicated something indirectly. We might have something like “stop BLEEP bothering me! You are always BLEEP going on at me”. So we have been honest and let ourselves know what it is we wanted them to know. Next we filter it. First we make it more polite and get something like “leave me alone, you never stop criticising me”. Next we make it assertive which takes it back to the ‘I’ position and we get “when you go on at me like that I feel got at and not good enough”. Finally we make sure it is authentic and we end up with “When you go on at me like that I don’t feel good enough and I want to ask you to leave me alone but I don’t know how to say it”.
Finally you need to decide if it is time to say this directly to the person in question, or if you should just reflect on this disclosure ourselves.
Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I hope it helped you to improve your self-knowledge. If you practice you will get better and it will tell you a lot about yourself and your relationships.
A2R – Processing what you own
Hi and thanks for taking the time to read this. I am assuming that you are an interested party in the area of recovery generally, either an addictive personality yourself, or wanting help for a loved one. Today I want to take the idea of direct and indirect communication a step further. First a quick review.
In the first post we looked at the idea of communication generally and how we can make a useful distinction between direct and indirect forms of communication. Secondly we looked at how it is important whenever we spot ourselves communicating indirectly to ‘own’ our own feelings and ‘truths’. If you have not seen these posts I urge you to read them and understand them before reading on here.
Today I want to help you to process what you owned in the last step, and once again, it is a simple process. Like every thing else I teach on this blog it is the discipline and commitment to practice that is the most effective part of the principles. So, let’s get to it!
Let’s take a typical example of an addictive experience in early recovery, it really doesn’t matter what type of addiction you have suffered from. you are at work and having a busy day when, somewhere in the dark recesses of your mind, an alarm bell goes off. it is so faint! You really have to be committed to hear it and recognise it because you are so trained to ignore it (minimise, denial). So you take the correct action and take five to spend some time looking at what set it off. Now seated with a coffee and a few minutes to think about things you become aware (let yourself know) that you have got into trouble with your feelings. So how are you feeling? Resentful! Why? Because of what a colleague has been doing, in fact he has been doing it all day! Good! So now we know, time to own it (Please see the process on the previous blog entries). Once we have owned it, we now need to process it and this is what today’s message is about.
So how do we process it? It is all about locating the indirect communication and then translating it into direct communication. First take your resentment statement “I am resentful at Jim, because he keeps talking over me and this affects my professional esteem“. Now ask yourself what you want to say to Jim (this part may be unprintable), don’t hold back! You will not need to say this to anyone so be honest! Okay, that bad huh! Now you nee to realise that you have already said this. Oh yes, you said it alright, but you said it without saying it! It was a certain tone in your voice or the way you shut the office door a little too firmly. The problem is that when we communicate like this there are several problems. The first is that they never get it! That’s right! No one ever gets indirect communication! But the second reason is more important, because you communicated indirectly, you still did not process the feeling, and it’s still with you. We need to do more.
We now need to translate that in to direct communication using this guideline. It should be polite, assertive and authentic. It can take the form of a question or a statement. The important thing is to not lose the authentic part of the message! So, “Jim, stop talking over me, your driving me crazy!!!! is translated as either “Jim, I really need everyone to hear what I want to say so could you wait till I finish please”? Or “Jim, when you start talking in the middle of my sentence, it makes me feel like you don’t respect me”.
If you want to know what the really authentic part of the message is, look in the ‘reaction’ part of what you felt. It may be anger or embarrassment. Remember, to process it fully you must include the authentic part of the message.
Now, I am not suggesting that you start communicating directly with everyone straight away! It takes practice to get it right so first of all, just practice processing, this will keep you much healthier by itself, and when you feel more confident that your direct communication passes all the tests, try it out!
Well, that’s all for today, leave any comments for me and I will answer them. Good communicating!
A2R – Auditing confirming your progress
Hi there, thank you for taking the time to read this. Today I wanted to cover in some detail the method of ‘auditing’. You have probably heard the term in other contexts but we need to understand what a powerful tool this can be in the context of recovery, so let’s get started!
The first thing we need to address is the concept of ‘positive bias’. We need to level the playing field here! What I mean is that if you have been suffering with forms of addiction for several years then the ‘playing field’ is probably leaning way over to the ‘low self image’ side. You have probably been putting yourself down for years and without realising it you have created a warped view of yourself and your behavour. In order to correct this we need to be committed to daily practice of ‘positive bias’. What does this mean exactly? Well the best way to think about it is to think of a boat that you are steering across the bay to the harbor on the other side. There is a wind blowing from the right, say twenty miles an hour. Now, if you steer straight for the harbor what is going to happen? Exactly, you are going to miss it, so what do you do? You ‘allow’ for the wind, steering somewhat to the right and you end up where you want to go. So in this picture the boat is your attitude, the harbor is recovery and the wind is your negative bias, get it? You will.
It’s the same with your attitude, for years you have been putting yourself down until it has become ‘normal’ for you. We need to introduce a positive bias so you will end up where you want to go. This is the auditing process. Let’s look in detail at how it works.
When anything feels different from how it used to, take five minutes to do an ‘audit’ on it. Just sit down and picture in your left hand what you would have done before you started the recovery process. Let’s say you just had an argument with your partner and you are a little confused and down. Ask yourself what you would have done in the past. It could go something like this “I would always go and get drunk after a fight”. Now it’s important that you allow yourself to go to the very worst case scenario here, don’t make anything up but remember the very worst thing that happened in the past. Go through the event and when you have done it look at your right hand and tell yourself what you did different this time, it might go like this “we had a bad fight but I did not want to drink during any part of it, or after”. Keep looking at what was different and better. Now compare the two and find your gratitude, feel good about your progress and congratulate yourself, really go to town with the celebration, speaking it out loud if you can. Over time this will make for a level playing field and help you take a more neutral view of what is happening around you.
So that is the auditing process, sounds simple but it is very powerful and will expose your negative attitudes, and help to change them!
Till next time, keep going, it’s working!