Ep 76: If Communication Isn't Your Marriage's Real Problem — Here's How to Find What Is

And I would suggest to everyone watching that this is a cutting edge.

I mean, I don't know that, I'm not sure how much I do that's cutting edge, but this is cutting edge because what we're doing, and we're going to summarize, this is our second podcast on the topic of whether communication is really the issue And that's why most people say they go to counseling because we have communication problems and we are rattling that cage.

We are suggesting, I'd like you to help me summarize what we said last time, where we are saying to people, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, step back, just step back.

And we want to help you think about this in a more complex way.

And what we want you to think about everyone is, is communication really your problem? Or is there something deeper and perhaps even more serious that is taking place? Take us, take it from there, Dr.

Hudson.

Well, yes, Dr. Hawkins, when we did the first part of this series, we talked about how communication is often identified as the thing that we see, the thing that we experience.

And we believe in a lot of practitioners, you and I included.

have grabbed a hold of that.

For sure.

Okay, that's the obvious thing that we need to work on.

And that's somewhat of a disservice to our clients because we are not taking the time historically to look deeper and see that communication problems are typically a symptom of a much deeper issue.

Now, there certainly could be and will be communication issues and things to learn, skills to learn, but it's not really going after the meat of the problem.

We highlighted last time, Dr. Hudson, I'd like you to just maybe briefly comment on each of these issues.

We detailed out, and by the way, I would encourage everyone to go back and watch the first podcast that we did on this topic, but we detailed out, Dr. Hudson, that It could be that there are issues with emotional unsafety.

It could be power and control dynamics.

It could be pervasive emotional immaturity.

There could be emotional abuse.

There could be dismissiveness, blame shifting, lack of accountability.

Oh my, oh my, oh my.

Every one of those issues, if there's one of those, it's going to derail an entire relationship.

And then I want to highlight what you just said, the fallout from it.

is communication.

That's not the original problem.

It could be all of those other issues.