Sarcasm and put-downs

Sarcasm is an easy way for us to share our feelings without being confrontational. Buried within many sarcastic remarks is a nugget of truth for the person making the comment. What’s delivered as a joke can hold real feelings that end up causing real pain for the person on the receiving end of the sarcasm. Just because a comment is wrapped up in a joke doesn’t mean it cannot cut another person.

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Empathy in the relationship

Empathy is the understanding of how others feel and being compassionate toward them. In other words, empathy is the awareness and acknowledgment of others’ feelings and emotions. Empathy means the ability to sense another person’s feelings and emotions even when they don’t talk.

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Improve your listening skills

Poor listening could lead to assumptions and misunderstandings. These lead to errors, ineffective decisions, and/or costly mistakes. On a personal level, poor listening leads to hurt feelings and a loss of team cohesion. This deteriorates trust and weakens communication even further.

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Score-Keeping

An unhealthy phenomenon in many long-term intimate relationships is the tendency to keep score. It is not so much keeping score that is the problem, but that when partners do keep score, they tend to unfairly focus on the negative. Rarely in couple therapy, my line of work, do I hear couples delineate all the good, loving, or wonderful things that their partners did in a certain week. Most often, I hear a list of all the things a partner did not do or things he or she did that were insufficient or hurtful.

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Blame game in relationship

The blame games. It can make you feel tiny: like nothing you do is good enough or ever will be. It can break down your sense of trust in your partner and replace it with a growing sense of resentment and anger. And, if it persists for a very long time, constant blame in a relationship can be a symptom of emotional abuse.

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Difficulties of expressing feelings or emotions

Feeling like your partner is guarded with their feelings can be really frustrating. People often worry that when their partner is not showing them emotional expression, it means something bad about them or the relationship itself. While there are situations where that might be the case, there are also times that your partner may not be demonstrating affection and they have nothing to do with you or the health of your relationship. Here are some reasons behind your partner’s lack of expressing feelings…

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Unrealistic expectations

Unrealistic expectations include things like wanting your partner to change their values, being the source of all your happiness or going against their natural masculine or feminine polarity. You want The Perfect Partner. Some people create this fictional person in their head before the relationship even starts. This perfect love, where everything is going to come together and work out in the end. Unfortunately, that is not how it works.

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Aggression words

How to improve communication in a couple's relationship? It’s hard to listen to someone who is insulting you. The healthier way to communicate is to make sure you are not accusing your partner. Aggressive words make it difficult to hear the real meaning behind the message. There are a few ways that aggression words will manifest.

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Casual jealousy

Casual jealousy is another area where one of the partner/spouses is jealous about a text he/she received, and asks who that is from. Not answering and causally saying it was from my friend, and got busy and laughing when reading the following text, so this dragged for more minutes. When such behaviour occurs, it will not create a safe atmosphere for any of them.

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