How to Easily Improve Communication In Your Relationships

Do you ever feel unheard or misunderstood, even in your closest relationships? With your partner, your mom, your boss? Maybe it feels like they just don’t get what it’s like to be you or how you’re feeling. Although it’s not impossible that you’re just dealing with a jerk who truly doesn’t listen to you, there may be another issue with the communication in your relationships.

Although it may be hard to accept that you’re partially responsible for the relationship tension, it might actually be a good thing! It means that maybe you have the power to improve your communication and therefore the overall quality of the relationship with this person—maybe even with people in general.

Our limited emotional vocabularies may be playing a significant role in our ability to communicate in relationships leaving us feeling disconnected, misunderstood, and lonely.

Why is communication in relationships so hard?

Brene Brown, Queen of Communication that she is, describes in her book Atlas of the Heart a survey she conducted asking over 7,000 people to list all the emotions they could both recognize and name as they were experiencing them. The average number of emotions people felt comfortable naming was three: happy, sad, and angry. That’s it.

What does our limited emotional vocabulary mean for our relationships?

Our limited emotional vocabularies pose a two-fold problem in our communication.

Without the right vocabulary, you can’t accurately articulate what you’re feeling in a way that allows someone to understand and empathize with you.

For example, if you’re feeling embarrassed, but you either haven’t identified that distinct feeling for yourself or you’re not using the correct word to describe it, you’ll have a very hard time finding meaningful support.

Without using the prescribed language to communicate your feeling, it will be difficult for someone to realize they’ve felt the same emotion before and offer you the empathy that you’re consciously or unconsciously looking to find by talking about it.

Instead of finding empathy and support, you may find intensified feelings of isolation and shame from having initiated a vulnerable conversation with someone who apparently can’t relate.

Without the right words, we’ll simply try to smash whatever nuanced emotion we’re experiencing into some other word-box (i.e., “happy,” “sad” or “angry”).

After all, we are social creatures who are probably going to talk about our feelings regardless of whether we’re using the most accurate language to do so.

The inaccurate labeling of a feeling is going to elicit a mismatched reaction from a potential empathizer.

Your conversation partner may believe they’re responding appropriately to the label you offered, but you think they’re being a jerk because they aren’t responding the way you would expect of someone who understood what you were really feeling.

Let’s use the example of being embarrassed again. Imagine that I’m feeling embarrassed but instead of using that word to describe it, I use one from the short list of vocabulary words that come easily to me, and I tell my boyfriend that I’m feeling “sad.” In his best attempt to support me, he’s probably going to react in a way that makes me feel even worse. He might offer pity or tough-love or even a joke in reaction to my “sadness,” which in turn will make me feel like A. He doesn’t get it. B. I don’t want to tell him things anymore. And C. Maybe I was wrong to feel the way I felt in the first place.

In one short conversation, by being imprecise with my language, both my own self-confidence and my relationship with my partner have taken blows. (For tips on how to build your self-confidence, check out this article.)

How can we expand our emotional vocabulary and improve communication in our relationships?

Here is a helpful little tool called a “Feelings Wheel” that you can use to begin expanding your emotional vocabulary.

Although it may feel silly the first time you put this into practice, if it can save the relationships that are most important to you then I’d say it’s worth a little silliness! Wouldn’t you?

Here’s how to use the Feelings Wheel: Start in the center of the circle and identify the broad emotional category that your feeling fits into best. Then, follow that category to the connecting ring and look at the slightly more specific words associated with that feeling. Identify all the words in the second ring that resonate with how you’re feeling. Write them down if you need to. Finally, follow those words out one more time to the outside ring, and choose the most specific word or words that resonate with what you’re feeling. Don’t be afraid to look up the definition for these words!

It’s important to note that language is only effective if both parties in the conversation have the same meanings tied to the words being used. If you’re using a word that’s pretty new to you, chances are it may be unfamiliar to whomever you’re talking to as well. Don’t be afraid to SHARE the resources you find like this wheel, dictionary definitions, or other accounts of the emotion word you may find in your research to make sure you’re on the same page.

You may even consider inviting the important people in your life to use the wheel as well and find the language to describe their own feelings more accurately to you!

With this new emotional vocabulary, your improved communication will allow you to discover a whole new world of empathy and understanding in your relationships. Good luck!