Talking and Listening Boundaries, the Key to Healthy Communication.

Learning a few speaking and listening tools can mean the difference in having a successful relationship.

To be heard, learn effective talking and listening skills.

by Becky Whetstone, Ph.D.

Sandra said that she took her husband’s lack of interest in her painting and artwork personally.

“I just don’t get why he can’t care about what I care about,” she said. “I try to visit with him about it and his eyes go blank. He says nothing. It hurts me that he cares nothing about something that I care so much about.”

“I do care,” said Jack, “I’m just not dancing a jig every time you bring it up. I’m understated in my reactions anyway, you know that.”

Conversations like Sandra and Jack’s are typical of what I see in marriage therapy. One person literally makes up what their partner is thinking and feeling and gets themselves in a snit about it, while the other partner seems perplexed and misunderstood. Once I teach them healthy communication skills, including appropriate boundaries for speakers and listeners, this kind of interaction will likely end.

Everyone needs to learn talking and listening boundaries.* In my opinion, it should be taught in 7th grade throughout the USA, if it was, it would change everything. The reason for learning appropriate boundaries is to be able to show up as your authentic self and to show the true you to those you care about and love, as opposed to showing up as who you think others want to see, or who you think you should be. Showing your true self means being real and vulnerable, saying what you mean, and meaning what you say. In long term relationships where two people are open and accepting of one another and using good communication as I am about to describe, it is highly correlated to better relationships, emotional well-being, joy, and deep bonding. In my therapy practice of many years, I’ve never met anyone that didn’t need to learn this. In case you’re still not sure learning talking and listening boundaries is for you, use the list below to make certain. You need to learn talking and listening boundaries if you or your partner …

  • Take things personally.
  • Blame and finger-point.
  • Jump to conclusions.
  • Put words in the speaker’s mouth.
  • Don’t listen or accuse one another of not listening.
  • Accuse you of saying or believing things that aren’t true.
  • Tells you what you think or feel.
  • Says the words, “You made me …” or “You always…” or “You never…” or “You don’t …”
  • Try to control or manipulate.

The first step for both types of boundaries is to find an appropriate physical distance for the conversation you are about to have. Each person must figure out what is comfortable for them. You do that by tuning into yourself, your body, and standing or sitting where you are most comfortable and at ease. Once your appropriate personal space is attained …

Listening and talking boundaries. Perception is a tricky thing. People tend to take what another says, run the information through a brain filter based on their own experiences, and create a meaning. Often, the meanings they make are wrong. Ever felt misunderstood? It’s probably because you were talking to someone who doesn’t practice healthy speaking boundaries. It is vitally important to learn how to check if what you are telling yourself about someone else is true. That means you have solid and direct evidence that it is. It will soon be part of your speaking boundary to only say things to the listener you know are true. You can always offer up conjecture, but if you do, you must tell the listener that what you’re thinking is just a guess.

Why? Because as soon as you tell your partner something about themselves that they don’t agree with, the next thing they’ll do is shut off and stop listening altogether. This is what couple after couple in my practice do. Someone makes an extreme accusation, like “You always,” or “You never.”

Jack shut down, or blew her off, when Sandra accused him of not caring about her art, which he knows is not true. To him, what she was saying was so ridiculous as to not merit a response. She lost her chance at meaningful communication about it because she started off the conversation with an extreme accusation that she made up from her own insecurities but had no evidence to back it up with. Many times, people do this to be manipulative. For example, it’s possible Sandra is trying to manipulate Jack into revealing his true feelings about her art, or to tease out praise through guilting him. For Jack and Sandra, and everyone reading this, the good news is that accurate and clear communication can be learned, and learning it is an important step to having the connection, love, and emotional intimacy all of us long for.

“Sandra,” before you accused Jack of not caring about your art, did you have proof that he didn’t?” I asked.

“No, she said. “It’s just that he doesn’t show me that he is, so I assumed …”

Sandra violated a talking boundary by making up what she believed to be true about Jack, instead of just asking him. She could have said, “Jack sometimes I wonder if you care about my love of painting and art, because you don’t seem to show it. Do you care?”

This would have allowed him the opportunity to correct her perception.

‘Of course, I care about your art, honey,” he might have said. “I guess I should express it more often. I didn’t know it was so important to you that I speak out about it, but yes, I care very much.”

Good communication requires being factual and accurate. If you’re not sure about what someone thinks or feels, never assume, ask them. Jack may be passionately in love with, and interested in all things Sandra, but he is introverted and quiet in self-expression. My own husband is this way, but if I create a safe space for him to be go deeper in his expressions, I can pull what he really thinks or feels out him. His personality is such that he is not likely to express the things he likes about Becky spontaneously. I can live with that so long as he’s willing to speak about it, and he is.

“My husband says I am lazy, says Shirley. “And I am not lazy. How do I protect myself from that?”

By understanding that it isn’t true. If someone tells you something that isn’t true about yourself, catch it in an imaginary baseball mitt, look at it, conclude it isn’t true, and throw it down on the ground energetically. That’s using your listening boundary. Practicing boundaries as a listener means detaching yourself from feeling emotions about what is said that isn’t true. A person who jumps out of their chair in outrage with a finger pointed at the speaker who just said something false about them is not practicing listening boundaries.

If the information the speaker says is true, and it hurts you, allow yourself to feel emotions about the truth. If what you hear is questionable, you probably don’t have enough details, so ask for more information. All too often when we are confused about what a person is saying about us, we assume the worst rather than give them the benefit of the doubt. I believe that most people, especially our romantic partners, are not trying to stick a knife in our hearts whenever they make an observation. It’s a good rule of thumb to err on the side that most people mean no harm when they make observations about us.

A listener must keep a few things in mind when practicing respectful communication. Number one is, remind yourself to not take the blame or become defensive as you listen. Defensiveness is not an option as a response. You will stand there, listen to what the person is saying, mindful of your breathing and working to stay calm, while telling yourself, “The speaker is just showing me who they are right now.” The purpose of listening is to find out who the speaker is. That’s it. Have this tattooed on your wrist if you must, but in every interaction with another, what the person says or does shows you a little piece of who they are, and how they think. It’s not about you or for you. It’s about what they are perceiving.

For example, if Shirley’s husband thinks she is lazy, there is something in his belief system driving that. He may have been in a bad mood overall, and/or raised to believe that anyone who takes a break, rests, sits down for longer than five minutes, or takes a nap is lazy. He may have been shamed by his family for wanting to slack as a child. Unfortunately, a lot of families are like that. When he called Shirley lazy, he is simply telling her what his belief system is. That’s about him, and not about her. Shirley is responsible for herself. In therapy, I would ask her husband, Jorge, about his belief system around laziness, and we’d find out where his thought is coming from right away. Usually, when we do this, it easy to see how his belief system probably needs revisiting, and maybe even an update. Even if resting is equal to being lazy, which it isn’t, it is not his place to make unsolicited observations to any adult without asking if he may do so. Adults have the right to be who they are, but sometimes some of their learned behaviors are not healthy in personal relationships. With some conversation, especially receiving professional help with a therapist, Jorge may come to see that resting is self-care, and necessary, and he may come to feel happy for Shirley when she slips away from yard work to sit for a while.

If Jorge doesn’t change his beliefs about resting, Shirley can at least acknowledge he has the right to be different. Her emotions should be tied to what she believes is true about herself, and not what anyone else thinks. No one else has the right to tell you who you are, how you think or feel, or what you ought to be doing. If you need to nap, go nap, and make it a good one. You’re an adult and have free will to take care of yourself as needed. Practicing appropriate boundaries means accepting someone as they are. Marriages won’t do well if one or both people are offering up unsolicited advice and observations, and that’s not acceptable behavior in relationships, anyway, as doing it leads to feelings of resentment. What is acceptable is to ask another if you may share what you are thinking. If they say no thanks, stop right there, then go take care of yourself. We must respect the listener if the listener doesn’t want to hear what we would like to share.

Here’s another good example of how a person failed to use listening boundaries: A spouse walks in the door after work and says, “The house sure is messy.” The speaker did not accuse or blame anyone for the messy house. They made a statement. However, on this day, the listener assumed the worst, that the speaker meant to criticize them. They jump to a conclusion that they are being blamed, their nervous system gets activated, and they aggressively respond with, “Who do you think you are? I’ve been slaving around here all day with three small kids, and you have the nerve to talk about how messy the house is? You expect too much from me!”

What would have changed the outcome is if the listener had said, “What do you mean by that? It wasn’t super clear.”

“I meant that the house is messy,” that’s it. “I understand why it’s messy, and I’m about to tidy it up a bit. Is there anything else you’d like me to help with?” Explosion averted.

Talking boundaries. The purpose and clear goal of talking to someone is to be known. You may let it be known you are too hot inside the house, for example. You may want to express frustration with the current state of politics in the United States, or let it be known you’d enjoy some affection soon. This is a great way to connect with people, by letting them know who you are, what you want, and what you need. When practicing talking boundaries, what you do not want to do is use the conversation to control, manipulate, or blame. To do any of those would be a blatant boundary violation. Another important aspect of talking boundaries is to control the tone, emotions, and energy you project when you speak. A healthy communication style does not involve harshness, dominance, contempt, or nonverbal cues such as angry facial expressions or frustrated sighs. Instead, we moderate our emotions prior to communicating, using breathing techniques if necessary. A great breathing technique is to count your breaths per minute. The average healthy breath is 10 to 12 breaths per minute. Work to get yourself there and go even lower if you can. Breathing is key to controlling your emotions and energy, try it.

When it’s your time to speak, state what happened, or what you’d like to share. Never use words that are demeaning. Here’s an example: “Darling, I can’t hear the television at such a low volume. Would you mind turning it up for me?” This is better than, “Stop being a selfish jerk and turn that damn TV volume up. Why do I have to remind you every single time? It’s like you think you’re the only person in the room!” If you want to make an observation about someone, it helps if you say something like, “I just made up that you don’t really want to go to my mother’s house this weekend, but thought I’d better ask you instead.” Another is, “I noticed you have been napping a lot lately, I made up that you are going to bed and waking up too early, before you are tired, and that’s why you need to nap during the day.” If you want to talk about your feelings, you might say, “And about your napping I made myself feel angry, because I made up you weren’t taking good care of yourself and maybe even avoiding me.”

To delineate that you don’t know the exact reason for X, it is a good idea to use terms like, “I made myself feel …” or “I made up why you …” These are examples of boundaries that work. Whatever you do, do not tell another adult what they are thinking, feeling, or doing. It’s a terrible boundary violation and it’ll go south every time.

One of the most aggravating types of behavior human beings engage in is when they don’t know or understand why someone said or did something, they make up the why. In other words, they guess. Made up and unconfirmed information about another is meaningless. Years ago, a journalist from the National Enquirer called and asked me to comment as a therapist about why Brittany Spears shaved her hair off. Practicing speaking boundaries, I said, “I have no idea, and no one else knows either unless she has told them herself.” I was appalled the next time I was in the grocery store and saw the front-page article in the check-out line. The reporter apparently called around until they were able to find a therapist willing to guess why she shaved her head. What the therapist said was meaningless garbage. And of course, my comment wasn’t used at all. In political dialogue this sort of thing happens all the time. “Why did the President do that?” All anyone can do is guess until the President tells us themself.

As I said before, it is an important step in talking boundaries to acknowledge to your listener that you don’t have all the needed information to understand what is going on, and what you are guessing is true about them is all made up. “I made up that you come home late from work every evening to avoid being with the family. Am I right?” If you don’t clarify your suspicions, you might fall into the trap of making yourself miserable over something you told yourself that wasn’t even true. I once had a client who imagined that her husband was about to file for divorce, so, like a child, she ran and filed for divorce first. Well guess what? Divorce never even crossed his mind, and his wife created a huge legal and family mess by stuff she made up in her head. Don’t become a victim of your own imagination. Clarify. Ask questions. The most important thing you can do is get whatever information you want or need from the horse’s mouth. If the two could have had an honest conversation as adults, a lot of needless drama could have been avoided.

Healthy communication is one of life’s best social skills. Take the time to learn these effective communication skills. In talking boundaries restraint is key. We can’t flop any old unfiltered phrase out of our mouths and expect to have great relationships. For example, when I was in junior high, a young man who broke up with me said, “I suppose you’re too much of a wicked witch to give me my friendship ring back.” Yup. He’d have gotten the dime store ring that was making finger green back had he been respectful in how he asked. In talking and listening boundaries, you must control, restrain, and edit yourself and take the feelings of others into consideration. When listening, make a mental note that the speaker is showing you who they are.

*Note: Talking and listening boundaries come from the work of Pia Mellody, author of Facing Codependence, Intimacy Factor, Breaking Free workbook, and Facing Love Addiction. She created a model for how to recover from childhood developmental trauma, that renders us all emotionally immature. The model helps us grow ourselves up and able to have healthy relationships. I highly recommend that every person come to know the life-changing work of Pia Mellody, and if you need therapy, seek a Pia Mellody or PIT (Post Induction Therapy) trained therapist. You can find one through the Healing Trauma Network. I will continue to write about her powerful concepts, making them user friendly, so you may have the relationships you desire. Please tell me what you think!

Becky Whetstone, Ph.D. is a licensed Marriage & Family Therapist in Arkansas and Texas*, and is known as America’s Marriage Crisis Manager® . She has worked with thousands of couples to save their marriages. She is also co-host of the Call Your Mother relationship show on You Tube, and has a private practice in Little Rock, Arkansas, and as a life coach via teletherapy. To contact her check out www.DoctorBecky.com and www.MarriageCrisisManager.com. Don’t forget to follow her on Medium so you don’t miss a thing!

*For licensure verification find Becky Whetstone Cheairs.

Additional reading

If You Want to Keep your Relationship, Stop Doing These Three Things Now.

It may be your fault that your life and relationships aren’t working well.

Although we all do our best to live in a world of equality and hearing both sides of a story before making a conclusion, as a couple’s therapist I have a very important announcement to make: Sometimes, after hearing all the complaints and experiencing how each person operates with my own eyes and ears, I can say that the cause of marital problems are sometimes, OK often, not equally divided between the two spouses. Indeed, sometimes it is primarily one person who causes the vast majority of issues in the relationship.

So there, I said it. Sometimes it is primarily one person’s fault for a relationship not working. (Note: I did not say always). But I also know that the person who I pinpoint as the dysfunctional one will fight to the death to not be seen as such. This is why we marriage therapists earn what we are paid. We wrestle alligators, we get slammed, and people call us names we wouldn’t want our family to hear.

When couples come in, I do my best to try and figure out what is going on that creates the dysfunction. My thoughts are a blank slate. Usually, the two people are nervous, and especially fearful that I will blame them – husbands seem especially concerned about this one.

So, I proceed into the sensitive waters of their marital story to try and get to the bottom of what’s not working, and many times, I quickly hit a roadblock: One person is so afraid of being seen as the only one to blame that he can’t even bear for me to ask him questions.

“Why are you focusing on me?” Bob says.

“Because I am curious about some things, and I am trying to get clarity and understanding so I can help you,” I say.

“Why aren’t you talking to my wife? It seems like you think I am the main problem, here.”

Bam! “Here we go”, I am thinking as I sense what I need to know is on display before me. I feel like a fisherman with a nibble on his line.

“Because I can’t question or talk to both of you at the same time. I have to talk to one, then the other. What makes you think I believe you are the main one to blame?”

“Because you’re focusing on me.”

Right. That little interaction has told me several things that will be helpful moving along:

1. His reality is off. He makes up negative meanings where I meant nothing negative.
2. He is extremely sensitive to the possibility of being seen as wrong or bad.
3. His self-esteem is very low. He takes things personally.
4. He is defensive as way to protect himself from harm.

This is not to say that I won’t hit dysfunctional gold when I speak with the other spouse, I might, and if I do I will have a messy cocktail on my hands. But so many times it is that one person who is so difficult to have a conversation with that I have to believe my personal experience with them is a microcosm for how they are with others. You can’t have a two-way, back-and-forth conversation with someone whose alarm bells of threat start going off the minute you ask them the first or second question. It prevents relationship, period.

The cliché “You can’t have a healthy relationship with others until you have one with yourself,” is true, and should not really be thrown aside as just a cliché. It is so important, in fact, that it is the point I make to couples very early in the process of marital therapy: You have to get healthy and confident about who you are, so you can have a back-and-forth, give-and-take relationship with someone else. Without that, it is not possible. And the really bad news is, a huge portion of our population do not feel that way about themselves.

So, what to do? I really feel that these sorts of things – how to converse in a healthy way with other human beings, how to have a good relationship with yourself – need to be taught starting in elementary school and continue all the way through high school. We teach so many subjects during these years that will be of no use, so why not prioritize something that could change family functioning and the world for years to come?

It takes courage to face the ugly or dysfunctional things about us as individuals that need to be faced. We need to start a cultural conversation that speaks to the fact that doing this is a sign of strength, not weakness, and that if your life or relationship is not working, it is best to look in the mirror instead of pointing to others as the cause.

I started off in life with what might have been the lowest self-esteem ever recorded, and through education, counseling, and diligent determination to not be unhealthy I turned myself into a confident woman who has a very good, compassionate relationship with herself. I have learned how to be relational with others, and it has changed everything. If I can do this, I truly believe anyone can, but therapy is expensive and so many people will never have access to it. If I couldn’t have afforded it, I would still be that dysfunctional, floundering woman I once was. That is why we need a better plan to provide this information to everyone, for free.

It’s best to look at yourself if your life isn’t working, instead of blaming others.

Empathize today or lose your relationship tomorrow.

You have to know what empathy is and use it often in your relationships.

Just about every adult knows that the characteristic described as empathy is a desirable trait. Without it, interactions between two people become very problematic, as I see weekly in my marriage therapy practice, with at least 50 percent of the couples I work with, at some point, declaring, “(Insert partner’s name here) has NO empathy.”

I explain the concept of empathy so often that I have to believe a lot of people don’t know what it is. So today we’ll lay it all out, and as a result I imagine this will be one of the most shared articles I’ve ever written. Why? Because so many people want and need it, and don’t get it.

I think part of the confusion about what empathy is has to do with the fact that there are different types. To be able to communicate to your partner what it is you want, you need to identify the type it is that scratches your itch, and tell your partner, “See this? This type of empathy is exactly what I need.”

So here are the three types of empathy:

Cognitive empathy is when we can put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and attempt to see things from their perspective. This can be very helpful in processing situations that make no sense to you, or when people are apt to make surface conclusions or judgments about something someone has done. Example: Why did the wife hide the receipts from the dress shop? Is it because she is deceitful and spends money she doesn’t have?

Answer: When we learn the rest of the story, which is absolutely crucial before making conclusions about things we hear, we find that she hides the receipts because her husband’s reaction is intensely negative whenever he sees receipts for things he deems unnecessary. The wife works and makes plenty of money, and so does he, but he is extremely frugal and has values that include not spending money on things that are not absolutely needed. She hides receipts to avoid his negative reaction. The cognitive empathy perspective helps us understand the woman’s situation in total, and say, “You know, I’d probably do that, too, in those circumstances. She’s not deceitful at all, she just can’t be herself around him. That is really sad.”

Emotional empathy is the kind where someone actually tunes in to the same pain you are feeling, and feel it themselves. We cannot expect that anyone do this, as people feel what they feel, and feelings cannot be manufactured. When I feel emotional empathy toward something or someone it typically catches me by surprise, like watching a commercial ad that moves me, or seeing a story on the news, or hearing a story from a client that just cuts me to the quick in the cruelty that one human being heaped on another, and I literally tune into and feel their pain in that moment.

Compassionate empathy is simply caring a great deal about what is going on with someone who is going through a trial or tribulation of some sort. The issue they are experiencing can be anything from a hangnail to a major chronic illness or impending death, it really doesn’t matter what it is, what matters is they are feeling distress. This is the kind of empathy that I see men and women starving for in their relationships, the kind that that so many people don’t receive.

Here is a typical example: The wife comes home later than usual from work and says, “I am just frazzled! I have so many things going on I can’t think straight, then, I had to go to the grocery where the lines were long, and they were training someone new and he was so slow. I just am at the end of what I can handle today!”

Right here is where the listener can either make or break an opportunity to offer compassionate empathy. The only thing this woman really needs is for her listener to care that she is in such a tizzy, to care that she is overloaded, that her life is, at least for this moment, unmanageable, and to verbalize that in a kind and loving way. Something like, “Honey, I am so sorry that your life is so stressful right now. Can I help you in any way?”

My husband says men are not on the wavelength to empathize with a complaining partner, and this will be like learning a foreign language to them. “They need to be hit on the head,” he says. “We didn’t learn this growing up, so we need to be told that this is how we should behave. If we didn’t see it in our family growing up we don’t know it is a necessary and healthy response to a complaining wife.”

But where listener/responders go off the rails is in judging the situation the person in distress is in to see if it is worthy of such upset, how it could have been prevented, telling them how what they did was wrong, or how other people are suffering far worse somewhere in the world, or offering solutions on how to fix it All of these responses will fall flat and do damage to your relationship, so you should not do it. A word on unsolicited advice: It is always unwelcome, no one likes it, and it breaks the laws of appropriate boundaries. In appropriate boundaries, we do not offer other adults insight or advice without their invitation or permission. If you feel you have the perfect solution, then after the moment of stress, and after things have settled down, ask, “May I offer a suggestion?” If your love does not want to hear or consider your suggestion, then step back and do not offer it. This is called being respectful.

Think about it this way, we humans love to be around people who are kind, nurturing, non-judgmental, and who offer compassionate insight and grace. Our romantic partner should be the ultimate person who does this for us. I tell clients all the time, “If it is not medicinal and uplifting, and not designed to make your partner feel loved, honored and cherished, then don’t say it.”

Now, here is a word about validation. Compassionate empathy needs to include a validating statement from the partner of the person in distress.  Validation is the medicine your upset partner needs from you at the moment they cry out, it is like an arm reached out that will lift your love out of the pit of their bad moment. It comes in the form of your soft tone and comforting words, to validate is to say in a loving way, “I hear you, and I care.”

Example:

Partner says, “I am in distress because of X,Y and Z!”

You: Stop what you are doing, come to them and say, “I see that. I hear that you’re having a hard time, I hate that for you, baby, is there anything I can do?”

In a nutshell, marital responses need to offer safe haven from life’s storms, not I told-you-so’s or comments meant to shame or scold. It’s “treat others as you would like to be treated” in similar circumstances. Be kind and tender, loving and caring, or keep your lips closed.

Goal: Because of you loving actions and words, your partner will feel better, not worse. It’s very simple. Shower your partner with loving action when they are in distress, even if you don’t agree with why they are distressed, and even if you think they brought it upon themselves, none of what you think about the situation matters. What matters is your response to the distress, and that must come from the best part of your personality.