Why can’t we talk about emotional subjects? We talk about work, chores, the children and ball games but I can’t talk to you about how sad I feel all day. There are other things we need to talk about like why we haven’t had sex in a year or why the subject of a budget makes you furious. We can talk about anything but when a feeling comes into it, you shut down.
This is a common feeling and complaint among couples, especially those who’ve been together ten years or more. You would think that the longer a couple lives together, the easier it would be to talk about difficult or intimate subjects. Not so. One reason is that for both as individuals and as a couple, body systems are ever changing and hormones get in the way of better communication.
Your husband turns forty or fifty and he discovers that his Johnson can’t hold an erection like it could a year ago. Is he going to tell you? Probably not. It’s making him nervous because its never happened before and he thinks it may be permanent and affect his sexual prowess. Or your menopause causes you to dry out prematurely and you put him off too many times. These are just two probabilities as we grow older. There are and will be many more changes that affect your body and attitudes. You either mention them as they happen and work out ways to continue as before or you let them overwhelm you with emotions you cannot control.
But this kind of communication is not as simple as just saying, “Hey Honey, my thing is not as hard as it should be, can we skip tonight?” This kind of communication is not as simple as the shortcut I gave you in the last article “Why Can’t We Talk About Us?”
My last article “Why Can’t We Talk About Us” stated that ‘most adults do not know how to bring up difficult subjects or how to talk about them without becoming argumentative.’ The shortcut enabled the use of one emotion to complete the communication. That would work for the “Hey Honey…” dilemma of the loss of an erection but the kind of communication required to talk emotionally is not so simple–if any use of emotion could be considered simple. The communication required to talk about the more difficult subjects requires trips to the Unconscious Mind to discover connections between the childhood memories and emotions and the present. For that a licensed professional counselor is needed versed in methodologies that can discover the connections. Some refer to the trips to the Unconscious Mind as the Longest Journey. From my experience it is certainly the most exciting journey a person could ever take.
Recent Comments