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Be Seen, Be Heard In Your Relationships

June 13, 2016 by Scott Gornto Leave a Comment

Broadly speaking, the Auxano Communication Approach© benefits people because it helps them establish and maintain healthy relationships through honest truth-seeking about a situation or a relationship.

But this communication approach I suggest to all of my clients has more specific benefits too:

1. The Auxano Communication Approach© suspends defensive behavior.

When you’re challenged to share from a deeper place, the walls around your heart must necessarily come down. Protective, defensive behaviors like control, passive-aggressiveness, and criticism are suspended so that the health of the relationship might take precedence over one’s need for emotional safety.

2. The Auxano Communication Approach© creates an environment to really know another person.

As I said in my previous post—or as Suzanne Wallace said—we need to learn how to “listen to learn and speak to be known.” Once we can do this on a consistent basis, that creates a firm foundation for healthy relationships to form and endure.

3. The Auxano Communication Approach© creates an environment to be seen and known by another person.

The best relationships require that both people are invested in and working on the relationship. In the same way that open communication by another person helps reveal them to you, your open communication likewise reveals you to them. This is the place where true connection occurs.

4. The Auxano Communication Approach© assists you in “standing on your own two feet” by calming your anger and anxiety.

Seeking to honestly engage another person can sometimes lead to conflict, but learning to stand apart from that conflict—to avoid emotional reactivity or mirroring the other person’s emotions—is a key skill in being able to communicate effectively.

To learn more about these benefits, read Chapter 13: Toward More Connection and Fulfillment in The Stories We Tell Ourselves.

Filed Under: Blogs, Uncategorized

Listen to Learn. Speak to be Known.

June 6, 2016 by Scott Gornto Leave a Comment

One of my favorite quotes about listening comes from therapist Suzanne Wallace Kaufman:

“Listen to learn. Speak to be known.”

When you incorporate these short, memorable commands into your daily conversations, you may witness a world of change take place in your relationships.

Listening to learn means:

  • putting aside the stories you’ve told yourself about that person and the stories you may even be telling yourself about that person as you’re talking with them.
  • not thinking about your reply while the other person is still talking.
  • attempting to understand the other person’s perspective.
  • trying to obtain a more well-rounded and objective view of the situation at hand, especially if the relationship is experiencing conflict.
  • seeing the other person as a human being, with dreams and fears of their own, and not just an extra in the background of the movie of your life.

Speaking to be known means:

  • learning how to be honest and vulnerable, but still with healthy boundaries in place.
  • using “feeling” words to let the other person know how you feel about the situation. (Read “How Large is Your Feeling Vocabulary?”)
  • revealing your own humanity, i.e., your hopes and fears, which can lead to points of connection and empathy.
  • showing your hand, so to speak, so that the other person understands your desire to seek after the health of the relationship.

When you learn how to listen to learn and speak to be known, your relationships will flourish, deepen, and lengthen. The next time you enter into conversation, remember that quote and try to enact it as best as you can.

Filed Under: Blogs, Uncategorized Tagged With: listening, relationships, vulnerability

How Large is Your Feeling Vocabulary?

May 24, 2016 by Scott Gornto Leave a Comment

Therapists often get a bad rap for seemingly always asking, “How does that make you feel?”

While there’s certainly truth to that assumption, I believe counselors the world over ask that question so often because it’s rarely ever asked of adults in any other spheres of their lives. When’s the last time you were asked such a question?

Even in my office, my clients sometimes have trouble answering that question. Their “feeling vocabulary” is rather limited. Part of my role is to work with them to develop a stronger feeling language and explore healthy ways of expressing their feelings, especially about the challenges they’re facing.

Expanding your feeling vocabulary and learning how to clearly and confidently express what you’re feeling is an essential aspect of healthy relationships.

As presented in The Stories We Tell Ourselves, Step 3 of the Auxano Communication Approach© is, “Share with the other person the feelings you have as a result of the story you made up in your mind.”

This means the speaker may have to dig deeply into their feeling vocabulary. You’ll know when a speaker isn’t sharing his or her feelings if they’re actually sharing their perspective, opinions, or beliefs and not their feelings.

One of the phrases I recommend such people use to help kickstart their ability to relay their feelings is, “After hearing you say that, what I’m telling myself now is ….” This ought to open the door on how they truly feel about the situation at hand.

Filed Under: Blogs, Uncategorized Tagged With: Feelings

Why Your Relationships Need a Sliver of Space

May 24, 2016 by Scott Gornto Leave a Comment

After listing the four-step Auxano Communication Approach© in Chapter 13 of The Stories We Tell Ourselves, I discuss a notion within relationships I’ve termed “the sliver of space.”

Webster’s defines “sliver” as “a small and narrow portion.” In other words, you don’t need much, but you do need some.

As I wrote in my book, “This sliver represents the separateness of the two individuals in the relationship, but it also serves as a reminder for the listener to let the speaker have and express their own feelings without taking on the other person’s emotions.”

It’s that last part that’s so important to having a sliver of space in your relationships, especially when conflict arises.

If you’re arguing with your friend and the friend becomes visibly angry, you don’t want to take on their anger. You want to remember that a “sliver of space” exists between you two and that you don’t have to reflect their emotions. This ought to then allow you to truly hear the other person without your emotions clouding your judgment.

The saying is true: “Cooler heads prevail.” Relational conflicts can often be better resolved when both parties remember to allow for a sliver of space between each other.

Filed Under: Blogs, Uncategorized Tagged With: Anger, conflict, relationships

The Auxano Approach to Communication: Step 4

May 17, 2016 by Scott Gornto Leave a Comment

If you have yet to read the first three steps of the Auxano Communication Approach©, please take a moment and read my previous three posts. It’s important that each step is taken before advancing to the next.

The last step toward better communication in your relationships is:

Step 4: Seek more information.

To most effectively accomplish this step, do what author and professor Brené Brown calls “passionate listening.” Attempt to tune out external distractions and internal mental meanderings as you seek to discover objective facts about the situation, the other person, and the other person’s take on the situation.

One of the most effective (and often most difficult) ways to do this is to refrain from thinking about your own response while the other person is still talking. Again, Brown has wise words on this:

When I really listen rather than thinking and formulating my response as people are talking, the entire conversation takes on a new cadence. It’s slower and there’s more white space between exchanges. It’s a little weird at first, but it’s also very powerful (“Passionate Listening”).

In The Stories We Tell Ourselves, I present one way for my clients to add more “white space” to their conversations:

Visualize placing [your] thoughts on a shelf for a few minutes. [You’ll] know where to find them later, but for the moment, they need to be somewhere just out of reach. [You] should listen with interest and seek to truly understand what the speaker is saying.

This takes practice, and I encourage you to try it the next time you’re speaking—and listening—to someone with whom you’re in conflict.

And if this final step of the Auxano Communication Approach© fails to result in a positive outcome for the relationship, go back to Step 1 in due time and repeat the process. Eventually, you ought to see, hear, and experience a breakthrough that will take that relationship to a new, deeper, and more authentic level.

Filed Under: Blogs, Uncategorized

The Auxano Approach to Communication: Step 3

May 17, 2016 by Scott Gornto Leave a Comment

This week, we’ll continue and conclude the four-step Auxano Communication Approach©. As a reminder, the first two steps are:

Step 1: Observe and talk about what you just noticed.

Step 2: Invite the other person to hear the story you’re telling yourself.

Today, we’ll look at possibly the hardest step that may demand the most from you:

Step 3: Share with the other person the feelings you have as a result of the story you made up in your mind.

As I wrote in The Stories We Tell Ourselves, “If we only share the story we’ve been telling ourselves, we leave out half of the relevant information as to why we’re sharing that story.”

In other words, if you just relate the “facts” of the stories you’ve been making up and not how those stories are making you feel, you’re not exactly telling the other person the entire narrative.

To achieve relational connection, and even relational wholeness, you must be able to endure the awkwardness of telling someone else both the stories you may have been making up about them as well as how those stories have been affecting you internally.

To do this, fill in the blanks of this sentence when you’re conversing with the person about whom you’ve been fabricating stories: “Based on the story I’ve been telling myself about you, I’ve felt ____.”

This will demand vulnerability and honesty from you, but your truthfulness ought to help the relationship grow. In fact, the other person may even mimic you and relate how they’ve felt about the stories they’ve been telling themselves about you.

And once both of you have disavowed yourselves of the fabrications possibly surrounding your relationship, a foundation for a stronger, healthier relationship can be built.

Filed Under: Blogs, Uncategorized

The Auxano Approach to Communication: Step 2

May 2, 2016 by Scott Gornto Leave a Comment

As the second part of a four-part series, it’s imperative that you read “The Auxano Communication Approach: Step 1” before reading any further. This approach to strengthening relationships is a four-step process that requires you to progress from one step to the next.

Now, the second step of the Auxano Communication Approach© is to invite the other person to hear the story you’ve been telling yourself.

This is a hard step, because it means you have to be honest with yourself about the possible lies you’ve been making up about the person sitting directly across from you.

Depending on the severity of the situation, you may have to muster up as much courage and vulnerability as you possess. You’ll also need self-confidence to face the reality that you have no idea how the other person may respond to the story you’re telling them about what you’ve been telling yourself.

I encourage my clients to accomplish this step by starting their conversations with phrases like:

  • “The story I’m telling myself is …. ”
  • “The picture in my head is …. ”
  • “The way that I hear that is …. ”

This invites the other person into the fabrications you may have created about them and about your relationship.

And while their response may be negative, your vulnerability ought to engender more trust within the relationship, and may even lead the other person to reveal the stories they’ve been making up about you—which leads to Step 3.

Filed Under: Blogs, Uncategorized Tagged With: communication, conflict, marriage, relationships, vulnerability

The Auxano Approach to Communication: Step 1

May 2, 2016 by Scott Gornto Leave a Comment

Over the course of the next two weeks, I’ll share each step of the Auxano Communication Approach© in its own post. The entire approach is detailed in Chapter 13 of my book, The Stories We Tell Ourselves.

In my previous post, “Your Spouse is Not Your Nemesis,” I discussed how important it is to the marriage relationship that each person approach the other as a human being and not as someone who’s “out to get you.” When conflict arises, it’s imperative to the health of the relationship that each person seek to be “nonjudgmentally inquisitive.”

In other words, each person needs to learn how to communicate better by asking the right questions of themselves and of their other half. This is not a shocking truth, but how we can go about learning to communicate better—in our marriages as well as in any relationships in our lives—is the point of the Auxano Communication Approach©.

The first step in this approach is to observe and talk about what you just noticed.

This means realizing you’ve likely fabricated stories in your mind about the other person or the troubling circumstances your relationship is facing. Some of what you’ve made up may turn out to be true, but there’s no way to know that for sure unless an honest, humble, and vulnerable conversation takes place.

But before turning to the other person, your first step is to attempt a benign, objective observation about the story you’ve been telling yourself. Does your story really mesh with the facts of the relationship’s problems? Or are you just filling in the blanks based on your feelings?

We’re all guilty of telling ourselves stories about other people on a constant basis. The first step in the Auxano Communication Approach© is to realize you’re doing so, then to assess what “facts” you actually need to corroborate with the other person—which leads to Step 2.

Filed Under: Blogs, Uncategorized Tagged With: communication, conflict, couples, humility, marriage, relationships, vulnerable

Your Spouse is Not Your Nemesis

April 25, 2016 by Scott Gornto Leave a Comment

In my counseling practice, I use a particular psychological approach that helps married couples in conflict learn how to work together against a problem instead of either spouse seeing the other as the problem—even if only one spouse is the major problem within the relationship.

To do this, I encourage my clients to learn how not to approach their spouses as enemies, especially when either spouse is seeking truthful, factual information from the other.

In Chapter 13 of The Stories We Tell Ourselves, I wrote:

When you approach another person as an enemy in an effort to seek information about a troubling issue between the two of you, your perspective on the problem is myopic at best in that you are solely focused on the other person’s words, behaviors, feelings, or attitude. If you view them as your enemy, you may also be approaching them in an emotionally charged state, like anger, frustration, or irritation.

In other words, you’re setting yourself up as the hero of the story you’ve been telling yourself, and if only you could get your nemesis to admit guilt for his or her wrongdoing, then you’d be proven right and win the day.

But even if that scenario played out, you wouldn’t have won because your perspective of winning would be fairly myopic. You would have won the battle of “Who’s right?,” but you would have lost the war of “Who’s on my side?” You would have further alienated your spouse, all in the name of being “right.”

And the next time you sought factual information from your spouse, it’s even more likely that he or she would fight you or withdraw from you because of how the previous conflict played out. So, a negative relationship cycle begins, and all because one spouse wanted to be right more than they wanted a healthy marriage.

Like I said in my book,

When you do the hard work of truly seeing and relating to this other present person as a human being—someone with thoughts, motivations, and feelings of their own that you aren’t privy to—you’re working to proactively prevent yourself from casting them as your antagonist in the movie of your mind.

Even in the midst of challenging conflict, remember: your spouse is not your nemesis!

Filed Under: Blogs, Uncategorized Tagged With: conflict, fights, marriage, nemesis, relationships, spouse

How Much Do Your Relationships Cost?

April 25, 2016 by Scott Gornto Leave a Comment

It’s a bit of a strange question.

Try to take a step back from your closest relationship and view it as an outsider granted insider information. What would that outsider say in regard to how much that relationship costs you in time, money, effort, emotions, words, stress, or heartache?

If this is your closest relationship, I’d assume the assessment would be, “That relationship is costing you a fortune!”

But many don’t perceive relationships this way.

Rather, we view our closest relationships as having inestimable value.

In other words, whatever you give to the relationship, you ought to receive in return. You may even feel like your “return on investment” is doubled.

In the best relationships, both parties feel that way.

Consequently, loving well is not about how much your relationship costs you.

It’s about how much it’s worth to you.

Filed Under: Blogs, Uncategorized Tagged With: emotion, heartache, investment, money, relationships, stress

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About R. Scott Gornto

R. Scott Gornto, Counselor and Therapist
R. Scott Gornto, MDIV, LMFT, CST is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Certified Sex Therapist and Expert on Relationships and Personal Development. Scott is in private practice in Plano, Texas where he works with individuals, couples, families, groups, and businesses. He is the author of The Stories We Tell Ourselves™ and a is a columnist for the Huffington Post and Psychology Today.

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R. Scott Gornto, MDIV, LMFT, CST is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Certified Sex Therapist and Expert on Relationships and Personal Development. Practicing in North Texas since 1999, Scott works with individuals, couples, families, groups, and businesses from Plano, Frisco, McKinney, Allen, Prosper and Dallas and the surrounding areas. He is the author of The Stories We Tell Ourselves™ and a is a columnist for the Huffington Post and Psychology Today.

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