Connected Communication
Exploring how energy talks and affects conversation
Communication does not just reflect the words we say and hear. All of our beings are in constant communication with other people. If we enter a room full of strangers, energetic intermixing is what prompts us to instinctually be attracted or repelled by people. This is most obvious in physical attraction, where we may feel a sexual pull from someone without even knowing them or getting a good look at them.
When we learn how to send clear signals coupled with connected words, there are less surprises in communication.
People will respond to our own clarity and we will more easily sense other people’s lack of clarity.
How often do you say something and feel like it is taken up in a completely different way than you meant it to be? What if this is not so much about what you are saying but the energy you are using to say it? People respond to everything that is being said - energy and words. When we are speaking words with defense, people may react to the energetic defense and not the words. Our energy affects our interactions more than the vocal content. Statistics show that only 25% of what is being said is heard. This means that most of what we are trying to communicate to people is being lost.
Our energy is unconsciously digested more readily than words.
Checking in and feeling our own energy is a step many of us forget to do when we are engaging in fast paced conversation and conflict. Taking a breath and feeling the self, questioning what is being said, and understanding what is going on in the body sometimes creates uncomfortable pauses. When was the last time you asked someone for the space to check in and breathe before continuing with the conversation? It's weird, right? If you can put aside the pressure to respond instinctively and instead practice responding authentically, everyone gets more out of conversation.
When conflict is happening, those of us who are trying to change patterns and self reflect do often attempt to check in. Yet I wonder how much of that check in is because we want the conflict to go our way. This means we have created a demand on the situation. This also means our energy is going to shift, control, defend. We are then not going to hear all that is being said. We react to what is coming towards us or being denied us. We are not listening. We are responding.
In my practice I hear a lot about communication that happens during conflict. I rarely experience someone willing to express everything that is happening inside themselves. I then wonder if the communication that is happening is causing conflict. I wonder if we are actually creating what we are trying to avoid.
Conscious Demand
One of the ways that we often communicate is with demand. This can be conscious or unconscious, although the unconscious can often be difficult to admit to ourselves. We do this for a variety of reasons from wanting to control an outcome or not feeling safe in a situation. Regardless of why we are in demand, the people we are communicating with are feeling it.
Think about a parent who is mad at their child for having a fit in a store and using love language to get the child to calm down. The language might say, "We don't use our loud voice indoors." The voice might be quiet or sweet in its statement of what "we" need to do with our actions. The demand here is "Do what I say right now." The emotion is anger and the intent is control. Children FEEL the parent's anger but don't hear it. This kind of communication is confusing to the child. Everything feels tight and shut down. Ironically the control might lead to deeper rebellion. A clear statement of boundary and emotional honesty might be more like, "I need you to stop flipping out right now. I feel like I am going to flip out if you continue yelling." We might even add on "I'm feeling embarrassed. I need you to stop."
Let's use another example. We walk into a room full of strangers and we want to be liked or seen in a specific way. However we're grumpy and not feeling happy to be in the situation. Perhaps it is a professional situation and we want to come off as competent. Perhaps the situation is social and we want to be seen as nice and funny. As soon as we have an expectation on ourself, we have a demand. Couple this with the fact that our emotions and sense of self aren't really where we want them to be. This demand is not acknowledged to our self, we just default to a comfortable mask. As a result, we hide and communicate from the place of our demand instead of what we are actually feeling. But in doing so everyone we meet is responding to all of us. On some innate level they sense what is going on. We are tiring ourselves out trying to pretend. The connections we make feel empty and fake.
Unconscious Demand
Unconscious demand happens when we are controlling or suppressing what we are feeling while simultaneously having a demand on the outcome of a situation. This can be obvious and it can be subtle.
We may be afraid of conflict and use positive language to mask anger. We may want a person to react in a specific way and control how we speak and what we say to get the reaction we want. Maybe there is a personal judgement on an emotion that underlies all of our communication with a person. We might manipulate to avoid clearly stating boundaries or needs. We pretend a person doesn't feel anything but our words. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
How do we know we are in demand? We are in conscious demand when we want to control someone. We may want to shift an action or reaction, suppress our emotion or someone else’s, or create thoughts that agree with what we want. When we are in conscious demand we know that we are doing this. We know that we are not using our entire being with clarity and we have a justification that rationalizes why this is okay. Parents feel this all the time when they don’t want a child to know how they feel because they are scared of the affect the emotion would have on their child.
We are in unconscious demand when we have no idea this is happening. Some of us are in unconscious demand all the time! That’s hard to admit, isn’t it? We may not want to explore our emotions. We may constantly assume that people can’t accept us for who we are and change our way of being instinctually into what we think is more acceptable.
We go into situations in a habitual defense that hides who we really are.
Connected Communication
How often is communication felt by your entire being?
How often do you say something and it feels "right" from the core of who you are as it comes out of your mouth?
Most of us may have never experienced this. We don't take the time to explore our emotions, desires, boundaries, and needs enough to actually communicate clearly with our energy and our words. Imagine how much clearer and safer our relationships would feel if we could do this? Also feel into the vulnerability. Those pesky negative emotions might need a voice. We might have to acknowledge not knowing something. We might have to explore our images around being our authentic self. There is risk.
Connected communication requires slowing down and checking in. We have to know how we feel about the person we are talking to, ourselves, and the situation we are in together. Sometimes even our surroundings are important. We have to get beyond trying to manipulate a situation into the outcome we desire. We need to trust the person we are talking to with us. We need to trust ourselves to be able to handle every way a person may react and interact with what we are saying. We also have to trust ourselves to have any emotional response that may or may not be welcome. This sounds like a lot, right?
Connected communication isn't easy or simple. It is nourishing. It does support relationships that energize us instead of exhaust us. It can be messy. It is intimate. It's often edgy. When we learn how to communicate with connection we crave it. Full body communication is relaxing because we can just be our authentic in the moment self. There is so much less pressure.
All we have to do is learn what the alignment of self feels like and speak from there. The need to manipulate dissipates when we replace it with trust and surrender.
For those of us who deeply care about other people or about what people think, this way of speaking can be very challenging. Don't give up. Just slow down and practice. You'll figure it out if you go slow.
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