Communication is the core to a healthy marriage

Good "Communication" involves listening, assertiveness, and responsibility.

Communication is about getting our needs met through and with others. A primary problem in our society is people don't understand each other, here are a few prime examples:

• We do not communicate our personal needs and dislikes in an assertive way.
• We do not understand what someone else is trying to convey to us.

When you sit down and actually think about communication in your marriage, it takes more work to NOT communicate than it does TO communicate. Communication is just expressing our needs, our dislikes being empathetic and a good listener.

As women we need to get our feelings out, we tell our friends, our sisters, our mothers, whomever we have a relationship with that has been built with communication. The first person we should be communicating with oddly enough is the last person every time?

Understanding others is easy:

• Good listening. The importance of "just" listening
• Empathize your responses. restating what was said without solutions, embellishment, or talk about ourselves. The focus stays on the "other" person.

Communication becomes an unconscious, automatic pattern that is difficult to change and involves practice and not just learning but un-learning the old familiar ways.

Communication is the healthy way of getting our needs met and stating our dislikes. When effective communication is not used or learned, people learn unhealthy tactics to cope and meet their needs.

I am guilty and I am sure many of you can relate:

• non-verbal
• passive-aggression
• isolation
• acting out
• verbal aggression
• passive anger
• numbing - "I don't care"
• depression

When you are aware of everything that you are feeling, all the time, you are in continual communication with yourself. Learning how to listen to that communication, and act on it, is your purpose. Becoming aware of what you are feeling

The choice that confronts you is whether to ease the pain you feel by escaping from it into thoughts or activities, or to keep your attention inward in order to learn where your discomfort is coming from, and heal the source of it. A way to avoid painful emotions is to escape into an activity. It is easier to focus your thoughts elsewhere than to experience the intense physical pain of a hurtful emotion.

The first step in uncovering the origin of a compulsion is the hardest. To uncover the origin of a compulsion, you must stop doing what is compulsive, therefore you must "acknowledge" and experience what you feel when you do. If you flee back into an activity or your thoughts, be gentle with yourself. If the intensity of a painful emotion is more than you can endure without striking out at another person to to experience it for one minute without distracting yourself.

The time the pain of rage, superior, jealousy, or vengefulness comes, try experience it without distraction for two minutes. Do that consciously. Being aware of your emotions is the first step. If you are not aware of what you are feeling in your body and what you are thinking, you are not aware of the present moment. When you are not aware of your emotions, your attention is focused on the circumstances around you.

Emotional awareness is the healing remedy for a fixation on external circumstances. When you are fixated on events of your life, your attention is absorbed. When you are aware of your emotions and what is occurring around you, you step into the present "real" moment.