Communication
& Relationship Skills
for Couples
by Ellen Gregory, LMFT
A simple, down-to-earth approach to
communication and relationship skills
Hi! I’m Ellen, a licensed marriage and family therapist with over two decades of experience helping couples relate better, together.
Poor communication skills can destroy any relationship. I’m sure when you fell in love you had hopes and dreams of a love story with your best friend. Someone who knows you, and gets you. Someone you can feel safe with. You see, all couples have a vision of their future filled with hopes and dreams. And it’s good, while life is easy.
Then, normal life challenges and distressing events begin to happen. The chemically driven high wears off and you start to get frustrated by each others differences. And you begin to hurt one another. You try to communicate about issues but you don’t know how to speak thoughtfully when your emotional. So you hurt each other even more. Then, you fall into repetitive hurtful patterns of communication that make you feel disconnected, unheard, hopeless, angry and sad.
Then one or both of you just starts blaming the other. “You did… You never… You always… What’s wrong with YOU!
You can’t speak about emotional topics without accusations, assumptions, criticism, disdain, and contempt. Defensiveness becomes normal. You may use past examples as evidence to defend your point and prove your case. The smallest things become arguments. And all of this creates hurtful patterns. So much so that you both start to get scared to communicate about difficult topics. Maybe one of you avoids issues and the other pokes, and pokes, and pokes. Then you both end up yelling at one another. Someone threatens to leave. Nothing gets solved. It’s the same stuff over and over again. You feel even more disconnected and start to act out in hurtful ways.
Is this you? If yes, I have courses to stop this.
Are you on your way here? I have courses to stop this.
Don’t wait too long – you may ruin your love story beyond repair.
Communication Skills Program
for Couples
Learn to communicate through emotional topics in a thoughtful way
Our communication skills program for couples is a live virtual course by Ellen Gregory, LMFT. It consists of 5 weekly sessions and an exercise filled workbook to learn and practice speaking differently. In just 5 weeks, you CAN TRANSFORM the way you communicate with your partner, family, friends, kids – really everyone! You can take these classes as an individual or a couple. A new course begins each week.
Thoughtful Relating:
Relationship Skills Program
The Best Investment you can Make for your Marriage
Consider this relationship skills course the premarital foundation you didn’t have. Learn the key ingredients to create a safe, loving, connected and thoughtful partnership. At the end of every day, if you look in the mirror and ask yourself – was I a loving and supportive partner to you? If you can’t, learn how you can…
The Core Classes
Ellen’s 5-step Approach to ending hurtful patterns of communication
Thoughtful Relating is a self-directed course consisting of live classes and exercise filled worksheets to learn and practice speaking differently. In just 5 weeks, you CAN TRANSFORM the way you communicate with your partner, family, friends, kids – really everyone! You can take these classes as an individual or a couple. They are broken down into individual classes so you don’t miss one. You can register for the next lesson that fits your schedule.
Take the classes in order. Step 1, then Step 2, etc. Even if you need to miss a few weeks because you are busy or traveling. Don’t proceed to the next step until you fully master the current one. Use the workbook and exercises sheets. Do the exercises every day to change your imprint and build new emotional wiring. It may take some people a week to learn each step, and others, a few weeks. You can keep practicing the exercises on your own, or you can simply register for the same step, again. The virtual classes are 50 minutes in length and held weekly.
The 5-Core Classes
Here is a brief description of the classes. Click here to go to the registration page.
Step-1: The Set-Up
Learn why and how to set up a conversation for success. It’s about thoughtfully identifying the need/ point you want to communicate and picking, or asking your partner for a time that works. A time where you partner has the capacity to listen, hear, and take in what you are saying.
Step-2: Speak Your Experience and Mirror
Learn how to speak in a way you can be heard. It’s from your experience. When you speak this way, all feelings, needs, desires, wishes, etc. are valid. And speaking from this place really is the only way your partner can hear and understand your needs. Once you, the speaker, shares your experience and needs, your partner learns how to Mirror. Simple repeat back what you are saying so you can feel heard and understood. It sounds simple! – it’s actually quite a difficult process to learn if you are emotionally reactive.
Step-3: Validation
If you learn to speak your experience, and your partner can learn to mirror you, the next step is realizing that all feelings, needs, wants, desires, etc. – are valid! These three steps are what we need to happen to feel seen. This is what couples want. To be seen and understood.
Step-4: Invite Feedback and Switch Places
When steps one, two and three are mastered, you can move to this next step – inviting your partner to speak about what you just said. This is where you ask, “How do you think and feel about what I’m saying?. The speaker switches places and now the listener, who just worked really hard at hearing, mirroring, and validating, now gets to speak their thoughts and feelings in a safe, compassionate way. And the original speaker now becomes the listener, tasked with hearing, mirroring and validating.
Step-5: Conclusions
Once the three previous steps are mastered, there needs to be a conclusion. It’s either empathy and compassion, connection, repair if the conversation didn’t go so great. Or it’s focus on problem solving and behavior change.
Experiences
“I didn’t realize that the words I was using were attacking. I thought that because I was staying calm, my boyfriend shouldn’t get defensive. Ellen showed me that the words I was choosing were like throwing arrows and he was fighting that. Now I am trying really hard to speak just about me. ” K.H.
“I’m so thankful I found Ellen after we tried two other marriage counselors! We couldn’t speak to each other without a fight. I took a listening coaching course through work. I thought it would help but it didn’t really. I know now that I was trying to make my partner agree with me. I had no idea what enmeshment trauma was. I knew about boundaries but this was different. I’m still trying not to do it but now I can recognize when I want my husband to feel the same way I do. And to think the same way I think. Ellen just knew right away how we were stuck.”
“We didn’t talk in my family. About anything. Feelings… forget about it. I don’t even know what I need or want. I learned that I complain and criticize my wife because I don’t know how to express myself. I want things to be different but I didn’t know how to say what I wanted. I hope I can keep using what I learned here and build on it. I want to make my marriage work. Its like I just wasn’t equipped from the beginning. But now I have some tools to build on.”
You can change things
It’s not too late to turn that love story around. How you communicate is so foundational to your relationship that it means everything.
Did you think that your relationship would be this difficult? Don’t worry – you are not alone. What you are going through is actually quite normal. Relationships are very difficult, and unless you both had the perfect example of a healthy and thoughtful marriage from your parents, you don’t know how to do it.
Did you parents’s show patience with you when you were emotional? Did they ask you what you needed and encourage you to not only identify what you needed relationally, but also to ask for it? And did they respond to your needs by changing their hurtful behavior? Or did they invalidate your needs. Did they send the message that feelings weren’t accepted. That if you cried you were weak. Or were they just emotionally abusive. Calling you names when you were upset, putting you down. Attacking you when you tried to express something you didn’t like. Maybe criticism and contempt was their normal mode of parenting. Maybe they made you submit and suppress your natural feelings and desires. Maybe they were emotional toddlers and their emotions would take over yours, and caused you to shut down. And take it.
Or maybe you suffered through enmeshment trauma. What is that? It’s when couples can’t see the other person as separate. When you think your partner should think like you, feel like you, or want the same thing you do. It’s when your partner might have a different opinion or perspective and you just can’t validate it. It’s when you just assume that your partner will know what you know, and feel what you feel. It’s setting expectations internally that don’t get met because they weren’t SPOKEN. It’s when you don’t respond to what your partner needs because you think the requests are wrong, or stupid, or not-important. It’s when you put yourself at the center of the universe and ignore the needs of your partner.
And now you have found yourself and your partner doing the exact same things. You were programmed to repeat these hurtful patterns. you can’t just change them on your own. You both need help.
Take my classes. They can help you.
My program is designed to be taken however many times you need, to practice and learn a specific step. The core 5 classes ARE the exercises on how to speak differently. However, the supplementals are probably needed to create the mindful awareness and emotional regulation that you need. Consider them prerequisites.