Are you sending invitations or accusations in your relationship?

The moment you try to communicate your hurt and frustration with your partner, you have two options in how to go about it. If you’re a bit like me, most of the time you probably end up sending an accusation to your partner, essentially encouraging their defensiveness. And when they respond in defense, you get more frustrated and withdraw or reinforce the cycle of conflict. The other option is to ask for what you needed in the moment, and send your partner the message that they are invited to meet that need or discuss how that need can be met by other means.

The nature of sending an invitation versus sending and accusation is broken down into two parts: awareness and intent. You need the awareness of your own emotions and experience to be able to voice it. You need the intent to be kind and loving to your partner. When you can learn pause in the moment and be curious about what is happening inside you, you grow your awareness. As you become more aware of your feelings and thoughts about your feelings, you enable yourself to be intentional to pursue your partner with kind words while speaking for only your experience.

Another aspect to consider in this scientific breakdown on communication is the role of owning your experience instead of assuming your partner’s motives. What I mean is that you have to speak more about how you feel than the actions that caused the feeling. If you only talk about the offending actions, then you are not allowing your partner to understand you, just making them feel bad for what they have done. This automatically puts them on the defense, not giving them a chance to show you empathy or connect to you.

So if you want empathy and to feel understood… give them the chance to give that to you by invitation not accusation. Doing this will equip you both too build trust, resolve conflict faster and deepen the level of relational intimacy.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you! If you want to process this in your own counseling journey, you can start here.