Accepting your emotional reality and holding an awareness of those feelings helps us to be conscious of how we are currently being influenced … understanding this influence opens up the possibility to use reflection to guide your actions towards your best interests and towards the most ideal interaction patterns.
Tag Archives: improving communication
Anger and Arguments – Are you defending the topic or your self?
Quick summary: as part of increasing your self-awareness I suggest that you take a look at the topics that really get you ‘heated’ with the goal of coming to an understanding of how you personally identify with that topic. In this self-exploration you might just find that your emotion has very little to do with the topic and is perhaps more related to: an unresolved occurrence from you past, or an attempt to create a stable sense of who you really are (your identity), or both.
Externalization – you are with the problem… you are separate from the problem
Quick summary – externalization is a technique from Narrative therapy which uses language to separate a person from their problem so that the person is better able to manage that problem. The basic idea is that it is easier to fix a concern if the concern is not rigidly attached to the person’s identity or personality (you are not stubborn… you use stubborn behavior). In this way the therapist would help a person to see that they are not a depressed person… but rather they are a person living with depression. This process offers perceptual freedom to a person… If they no longer view themselves as innately depressed then they can choose what to do with the depression which is with them (as it never was truly part of them). Narrative theory tends to view diagnosis as counter productive as a diagnosis encourages a person to over identify with the label… this takes away the person’s freedom and hope.
Argumentative? – substitute the word "but" for "and"
Always use the conjunction “and” instead of the conjunction “but” to dramatically reduce defensiveness, to encourage harmonious conversation, and to increase you dialectic ability (which is basically open-mindedness).