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The Magical Ingredient to Good Communication

© Jane James

That's it! Joe watches his game, and Cindy feels acknowledged, and Joe doesn't have to sleep on the sofa that night!

Good acknowledgment actually works like magic, and not just in marriages. It is a basic rule to any good, productive relationship.

I've seen it with my children, many times. Every time I find them in an argument, I find lack of proper acknowledgement as the culprit.

If the argument doesn't resolve without help, and the kids look like they're cooking up an all-out war, I step in.

Mom: "Billy, what were you trying to tell John?"

Billy: "Well, he said I couldn't use his truck, but I let him use my Spiderman and that's not fair!"

Mom: "John, did you understand what Billy was saying?"

John: "Yeah, but he said..."

Mom: "Wait just a minute, John. I want to make sure that YOU understood what BILLY was saying."

John: "Yeah, I understood him."

Mom: "Okay, tell Billy you understood him."

John (grumbling): "Billy, I understood what you said."

Mom: "Okay, Billy, did you get that?"

Billy: "Yeah, I got it."

Mom: "Okay, now Billy, what did you want to say to John?"

Billy: "I was trying to tell him that he could use my truck after I parked it in the toy garage first. I just wanted to finish parking it."

Then I make sure John understood Billy, and I have him make sure Billy knows he was understood.

This may sound silly - but trust me, it works! Like MAGIC.

So, you might ask how this applies to getting along with your spouse.

These days, when I find myself nagging my husband, my volume and ire rising, I remember this aspect of good communication and stop - often in the middle of some awful thing I started to say.

"Honey, you're not acknowledging me!" I tell my husband. "I'm talking and talking, and you're not letting me know that you have heard me!"

He looks bewildered for a moment, and then realizes that yes; he had not acknowledged my communication.

We go back to the point in the conversation where he failed to acknowledge my communication and the conversation started to turn rancid. He lets me know that he did indeed understand me, or he asks for clarification if there was something he didn't understand about what I was saying.

Maybe he disagrees with me, and then he communicates that. At that point, we are on the way to resolving the disagreement.

We have recently worked through some long-standing disagreements this way! We found that there were certain subjects that, whenever we began discussing them, he'd automatically stop acknowledging me. Once we really spotted this, and he really started acknowledging me, we were actually able to work through the problem, concoct a solution, and there you have it! The long-standing problem was smoothly resolved to a good result!