Until you fully understand what your spouse is saying and what your spouse is not saying, there is no way you can build a desirable marriage. Someone said marriage is a relationship between two forgivers, but how do you forgive when your spouse keeps repeating his mistakes? Often times, we grow so tired and weary because of a bad habit that has refused to go away and we fight and do everything to try and solve the problem in our own way without seeking to find the cause of the problem. My mother used to say to me that when you tell a limping man that the load he is carrying is not balanced, he would naturally respond that it is because you are looking up and not down, because if you look down, you would realize that the imbalance up is a function of the imba lanced legs.
There are several factors that affect our communication and until we fix some of these factors, everything we would have been doing would just be dancing on the same spot. So, what are those factors that are responsible for the way people communicate?
1. Upbringing: Too many of us have had our communication messed up by the kind of upbringing we had. Our first exposure to life damaged too many of us that we are yet to recover from the damage that was done to us.
What kind of upbringing did you have while growing up and how did it affect your ability to communicate and relate? I feel for ladies who have been labeled rude or saucy and it looks as if they are unable to sustain a relationship, yet no one seeks to find out what has happened in her past that is responsible for who she has become.
If you were born in a polygamous home for example, where you were baptized with the water of strife, competition and suspicion; I am talking about that man or woman who grew up hating the father for bringing a strange woman into a peaceful family, whose entrance changed ‘my loving father’ to ‘our absent father. Somehow, your time with your father was taken away from you and a man you once looked up to as a friend suddenly became a stranger to you.
We may not really be able to quantify how that experience could shatter the esteem of a child as well as his perception and interpretation of reality.
We sometimes wonder why someone is battling with uncontrollable anger such that his communication is almost like a military officer and we fail to check how his upbringing may have shaped him.
The sad thing about our world right now is that broken people are raising broken people, because there are so many dysfunctional children who became dysfunctional singles and became dysfunctional couple and now becoming dysfunctional parents, yet the circle continues without us sitting back to find out where things went wrong.
There are different types of upbringing and it affects the communicational style people eventually grow up with unless there is an intervention.
(a) Authoritarian, or extremely strict upbringing is a highly controlling upbringing where what a child gets are commandments on how to live and not to live. A child in this situation is not given the chance to air his opinion because discussion is not allowed which leaves a child with all kinds of bottled up anger and emotions.
The damage this does to a child is that his personality and originality are suppressed and the child is deformed such that he/she also begins to look forward to a controlling adulthood. This child grows into adulthood and you could see from his communication that all he/she wants to do is to control and they do this by either throwing tantrums to blackmail their partner into doing their bidding or they become commanding in a way that the partner also begins to lose his/her originality. To them, it’s either my way or no way.
People from this background need a lot of help as a matter of urgency because they will keep losing fantastic relationships and even when married, they live in a fool’s paradise, thinking about people that respect them by being afraid of them, not knowing that no one is actually following and that is why they become very lonely in their old age.
If you are like this, you need to see a counselor and break the ties from your background and relearn new ways of living so that you can enjoy the beauty of relationships.
To be continued.