What Are the Communication Problems in My Life?
And What Can I Do to Overcome Them?
Today, I invite you to an area of awareness on the benefits the combination of Transactional Analysis information with coaching provides for the sessions, which is a continuation of my previous article.
Everything I have expressed about emotions, thoughts, beliefs, forms of communication, and impasse or resolutions in relationships, we will now consider them in depth with two sample sessions. In this article you are reading, I hope you will reach analytical awareness solving the communication problems you have in your life and in the relationship areas you wish to create.
We have relationships where we project each other onto one another. You will discover how to liberate yourself from your feelings intertwined with abstract expectations and concrete steps that prevent you from achieving what you desire.
With the mastery of communication, you will break free from your world of illusion you imprisoned yourself with your forced relationships that you pretended to be happy and content with; while your inner world was full of longing, yearning, and sadness that you feel for those emotions you could not experience.
You will see the possibility of this in the stories of session. You will areas places in those stories that are similar to you and what you have been through. Because no matter how different people, events, situations are, there is an ultimate truth that is needed in all types of relationships. In the basic area of communication, everyone wants to be understood, to be listened to; and the main point for each of us is to feel special, valuable, and good in the relevant relationship.
Inside each of us, there is a space of hidden motivation and hidden saboteurs, apart from what we think and show. It is the life events that we observe or experience that make up this area. The versions of our ego selves in life positions, revealed by Transactional Analysis, feed on these two sources. Our whole lives are built on this space, so, let’s go on a journey with you.
As a mentor Coach, I would like to ask Majnun, who found his essence while he was trying get to Layla, what does the spirit of that desert you are crossing teach you?
What are you deprived of on those roads?
In communication problems that you experience;
What are you really thinking at that moment?
What does he/ she really think?
What are you assuming?
What do you take personally?
What words upset you?
Do you really hear what is being said?
Or are you approaching with reactions somewhere between what you hear and what you understand?
And you?
How is the distance between what you want to say and what you actually say?
In the attitude and behavior you display, whose role do you reflect in your life at the time?
Are you really exhibiting a behavior that belongs to you?
What would you do differently if the challenges in front of you were on your side instead?
How free would you feel communicating in a space with no judgment and where there is emotional intimacy and understanding?
What would that provide you with?
How would that make you feel?
I can see the beautiful smile on your face. Now, let’s explore a story together.
In one session, a client came up with the following case; I have the potential to achieve all that ask for in life. I can be self-sufficient and can move forward and grow in life, but due to my responsibilities to my family, I constantly put off my dreams.
Even enjoying the little luxuries of life is very difficult for me, and when I think I am not enough for life, I close myself to many things. Every time I take action towards what I want, I see a reaction from my environment.
Life sometimes becomes such a battlefield for me that when I struggle with a range of challenges, I hurt my loved ones by becoming intolerant; and in the face of problems, I am afraid of being alone. This is why I am someone who manages their relationships by constantly making sacrifices in their social circle, said my client.
As he continued to describe himself, his trembling jaw and his constant swallowing as he spoke caught my attention, and I asked him, what do you want to leave this session with?
I need to invest in an area where I can improve my career, but with my resources and income, right now I can only make a living for my family. I am about to make a risky decision that can convince everyone of the solution. I cannot predict the consequences, I don’t know what to do. But I don’t want to give up. I want to come out of this session with a decision that I am sure I can implement, he said.
Are you, too, familiar with not being sure, not approving of the position one is in, not being convinced of the process, taking refuge in excuses, inability to accept, doubts, heavy emotional burdens, not being able to make one’s own way, compromised values, melancholic energies, perceptions, projections and questioning that starts at the end of a period, the desire to get rid of anxiety, career life, family and social environment relations, the need for restructuring, the ambitions that arise with the fear of being not being enough in life?
At a later stage of the session, there was a moment of great awareness. My client, the eldest child of divorced parents, took charge of the nurturing parent ego state in life positions brought about by a life script in which he had to be a parent to himself and his sibling since childhood.
So much so that he was putting himself off by even parenting his own parents. In his communication with family members, his attitude has largely interfered with their areas of responsibility.
While living with thought patterns such as “I can do it, I solve it, I can protect it, I can defend it”, when things got to an unbearable point, he had to face the facts he escaped in life.
When he observed the communication conflicts he was experiencing, what he noticed with coaching questions was that the whole process would be solved if, as an adult, roles in all areas of life on a logical plane were restructured into the right positions.
Seeing the fact that he had no other alternative inspired him and increased his odds with brilliant ideas. He determined what needed to be done so that his parents could truly take on parental responsibilities, as for his attitude towards his brother, seeing the places where he was on the way of his growth, and it was revealed that he would only be a brother to him.
He saw where he was making mistakes in business, and created new ideas about pursuing strategic paths instead of struggling with a difficult start. He decided to create his own best version, with the potential of progress to fulfill what he asked for from life, instead of being stuck on suspended issues.
Attitudes in communication, establishing and maintaining the boundaries towards parents, showing willpower, gaining respect, not being enslaved by one’s feelings, taking a decisive stance in dilemmas, evaluating the roles, purpose, and duties of everyone in their living areas, experiences, and taking on unnecessary burdens by causing involuntary behavior are issues that many of us need to solve.
What do you think is the saboteur of my client in this example?
Not feeling safe, the call for help in his soul, a search for financial security, the restlessness of risky actions and decisions, not being understood, concerns for the future, insecurity…
And what is his inner motivation? The dreams that are unwittingly prevented by him in life, the belief that he has the potential, using opportunities that come in his way in to find out a way, trying to stay in balance despite being in a difficult situation,…
In the story of another client who was looking for solutions to the problems he has experienced with her partner in his relationship, let’s see which side you will see.
This client, who came to the point of separation in the relationship he was in, came to the session because of the fear of losing his wife and the regrets he felt. Even though deep down there is a sense of reconciliation, and the life energy of his partner constantly attracts him; not being able to cross the boundaries of pride and ego, being in a situation that he does not approve of and does not tolerate, self-esteem problems under his ego and not being able to adapt to change were important points for my client’s despair.
He had to go through fundamental changes to move his life to a better place. He wanted to come out of the session knowing what he had to do with the desire to overcome the challenges, to receive recompense for his work; and we had reached yet another special story that deepened with coaching questions.
I am not appreciated for what I do in my relationship, I cannot make time for myself, I neither accept my wishes nor support my dreams, I get poisoned by other people’s thoughts, I walk away whenever there are problems in our relationship, it makes me very sad after that intervening distance, I feel guilty and I react angrily at moments when I feel like there are hidden secrets.
My client was in an ongoing narrative that continued, “When I get defensive, I break everything in fear and unease; I have difficulty in showing my love.”
The point we reached with our subsequent session with Transactional Analysis-based coaching questions was again based on ego states in communication. My client who was an adult, had the child ego state in the behavior he mostly exhibited in his related problem, while his partner communicated with an attitude of the critical parent ego state.
Many issues of his life story such as the severe traumas he witnessed, great wounds from the past in his relationships, constantly being defense, pessimism, circumstances from his childhood where he remained silent against manipulative parental behavior, inability to forgive, losses, deepening pains, fear of experiencing the same things again, the embarrassment of his feelings, resistance to change, the motive to protect what he created without giving up, commitment issues, belief patterns, destruction of the values he believed in, not taking his dreams seriously throughout his childhood, not being able to adapt to this social environment, and encountering unexpected realities were all processes of recovery for him.
Changing your way when you hit a rock, not being able to change your point of view, being afraid of going in the wrong direction, making the wrong decisions are situations that many people avoid.
Uncertainties in communications and open-ended sentences that go clarified, do not convince anyone. The most basic need of my client in this example was to be able to maintain a healthy communication in the adult ego state, within the field of love of his relationship. The coaching questions and the perspectives he attained with self-awareness had already made him find a solution.
My task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that I have built against it. In saying she does not love me, she will not be with me, I have worn out my wife and myself to the extent of the feeling of losing myself.
When I found love in myself, when I found the barriers in the way of loving myself, and with the experience of I getting rid of them, I look back at my relationship, how well I loved, how did I love; did I love full of loyalty, full of compassion? The best moment of life is being able to share love! Said my client, and the point we reached at the end of the session was magnificent.
You are precious, we are all precious; we are worth loving and being loved.
What have you wished for from your heart until today?
How much of it has happened; how much has been left in dreams?
What have you done in the process of what you have achieved, what you have experienced?
Keep doing the same. What kind of effect did the things you could not attain have on you?
Is it anger, giving up or persevering?
What brought you to yourself?
What emotions drove you away from yourself?
In Yunus Emre’s beautiful words, a person who makes no mistakes is a person who does nothing. And the biggest mistake in life is to think of yourself as faultless. Let go of the feud with ego, do not stray away from conversation, let the heart be filled with love; be tolerant.
Because at the point where you accept your mistakes and yourself for who you are, change takes place. No one should violate the boundary of being and self, none of us should allow this.
However, forgiveness is of great value as well. When you witness that a person wants to back down from a mistake they really regret, that person’s consciousness has taken all the share he should take from that mistake.
Here is the self-coaching question that needs to be asked at that moment, what are the communication problems in my life and what can I do to overcome them?
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