On Essential Skills to Improve the Quality of Your Relationships
As a team of couple therapists who specialize in helping people improve their relationships and feel more confident and secure in their partnerships, we often have prospective clients coming to us citing “communication” as their primary relationship problem. After all, communication is key, right?!
I’d like to challenge the idea that communication skills are the most essential skills to have to make a partnership or loving relationship work. Yup, you read that right. It’s not to say that communication isn’t highly important, it absolutely is! I’m just not sure it’s the MOST important tool for strengthening your relationship. In this article, I’ll explore how communication is indeed helpful to feel more secure in your close, intimate relationships, but I’ll also highlight some less-commonly considered aspects of human connection that I believe are equally essential to healthy, fulfilling relationships. Read on for more information about what additional skills to focus on developing to have more intimacy, security, and connection in your primary relationships.
why are relationships so important?
Firstly, let’s tackle this biggie. Have you heard Esther Perel’s quote “the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives”? I know it may sound a bit cheesy, but I really love this quote! (So much so that I put it on our homepage.) It may feel overly simplified, but as a therapist and person who’s fascinated by the human experience, I think this quote really sums up our most vital, human capacity and need: connection. I think anyone who knows me hears me say this a lot (sorry, not sorry) but human beings are social creatures who are wired for connection. We are not meant to live our lives in isolation or feel too alone for prolonged periods of time. Humans thrive when we feel we belong, we have nourishing relationships, and are a part of communities that are aligned with our purpose and values. Conversely, without these things, humans tend to be depressed, have shame and believe ourselves to be unworthy, feel horrifically lonely, and lack a sense of purpose or meaning in our lives. Relationships are vital—you literally need companionship and connection to survive.
Coming back to Esther’s quote, if we feel we have thriving, satisfying relationships, we have a greater sense of wellbeing and a higher quality of life. In fact, research shows that when we have strong relationships, we increase the likelihood of our survival by 50%! That’s a huge amount! Like, woahhhhh. But when the quality of our relationships is low, humans experience great distress which takes a significant toll on our bodies and physical health and tends to create insecurity, leaving us with a more negative perception of ourselves. In this vein, researcher Rosie Shrout’s studies on how relationships impact our physical health have “shown that couples who are more negative and hostile in their daily interactions have heightened cardiovascular reactivity, immune response, higher inflammation as well as higher cortisol level.” As you can see, the quality of our relationships, literally determine the quality of our lives, and health.
Not only do we need significant close relationships, but we also need communities and groups that incorporate relationships with multiple people simultaneously. For more information about why community is so important, check out my previous post: On the Importance of Community.
the most important skills for improving the quality of your relationships
Now that you know that humans need quality, connected relationships to be healthy and have prolonged lives, you may be wondering, “But how do I go about improving the quality of my relationships?” Great question, I’m so glad you asked!
As I spoke about in the beginning of this article, of course, communication is an essential relationship skill for improving the intimacy and connection in your relationships and helping all parties to feel more confident and secure. In case you’re wondering, when we therapists talk about communication skills, we generally mean learning to be more direct, transparent, authentic, and vulnerable in how you talk to others who you are in close relationships with. This also includes advocating for yourself—naming what you’re needing and wanting as clearly as possible, as well as setting healthy boundaries, even when this feels pretty scary!
Because I think communication is only one of many important relationship skills, not THE most important relationship skill, I want to outline a number of other vital, relationship skills that often get overlooked when we’re primarily thinking that the key to successful relationships is communication. If you’re really wanting tips for communication skills, I imagine there’s plenty of communication skills articles you can find with a quick google search! So here are seven additional relationship skills to help you improve the quality of your relationships:
Self-Awareness in Relationships
Starting first with the least relationship-y because it’s primarily about you as an individual, self-awareness is essential to deepening your connections. In a relationship context, self-awareness means knowing who you are and what you value, understanding your history and experiences in relationships and how this impacts you at present, and having a strong established sense of yourself. It also means being aware of your embodiment (what’s happening in your body at any given moment), your relational needs (what you need to feel safe and satisfied in relationships), and how you feel. You can think of this as both understanding who you authentically are and knowing who you are in the moment.
Curiosity & Generosity In Relationships
Curiosity is so important and such a delightful feeling! Remember when you were young and you’d explore the world and experience new things with a great sense of wonder and joy? That’s one form of curiosity that can benefit you in relationships. Welcoming novel experiences with openness and allowing yourself to be genuinely moved by something or someone. Additionally, curiosity means leading with a desire to know or understand, even if it’s a perspective that is quite different from your own. Curiosity supports us to build self-awareness and increase our awareness of others, which I’ll talk about a little further below.
Generosity is equally important, but perhaps not in the way you’re imagining. Yes, in relationships it’s very important to literally give of ourselves and what we have—financial support, gift-giving, making food, showing care, etc. What I’m using generosity to mean here though, is more the spirit of generosity—to give of ourselves freely and emotionally and to be kind and compassionate to those we love. Generosity is necessary to be able to lead with curiosity, which is why I’ve coupled them together here. This looks like not keeping a tally or a tit-for-tat mentality when engaging with your partner or loved one. It means trying to show warmth and tenderness and stay open, despite feeling angry or upset, or giving your partner the benefit of the doubt/assuming they have good intentions. Without generosity and curiosity, it’s damn hard to resolve a conflict! All the direct communication in the world won’t help if you’re not open and willing to learn about where the other person is coming from.
Increasing Mindful Awareness In Your Relationships
Similarily to self-awareness, Mindful Awareness in relationships is about knowing yourself and your relationship on a whole, while also knowing yourselves in the moment. Mindful Awareness is the ability to observe what you’re experiencing while you’re experiencing it, instead of merely feeling it and reacting (being on autopilot). Mindful awareness is NOT that feeling of driving home and arriving at home and then wondering to yourself, “how did I get here?” Instead, it’s kind of like that feeling when you’re present in an experience, but you’re also able to watch yourself experiencing it. Mindful Awareness, sometimes called an Observer Stance, is essential to knowing how and what you’re feeling in any given moment. It requires us to slow down, take a breath, and go inside—to sense into what we’re feeling and thinking, which then provides us the opportunity to make a choice about how to react or behave in response.
Relatedly, Theory of Mind is a psychological concept that refers to one’s ability to understand the mental states of others (ideas, beliefs, thoughts, experiences) and recognize them as different from our own. Essentially, it’s the ability to imagine that someone has a perspective that differs from yours. Empathy is a similar ability to recognize that others have different perspectives, except that empathy specifically refers to feeling into another person’s experience, or to take on how we perceive someone else to be feeling. Both of these concepts are fostered by Mindful Awareness, in that the more aware we are of ourselves and others, the more we can empathize with and hold their alternative perspective and experiences in mind. As you can imagine, when we can feel into and adopt the perspective of our partners and loved ones, then we are able to build increased intimacy and deepen our connections.
Holding Complexity In Your Relationships
This tends to be a hard one for a lot of people. Many relationship therapy clients come to Kindman & Co. with lots of strongly-formed opinions—ideas of what is good or bad, right or wrong, or all or nothing. This is often especially true when it’s your partner who’s behaving in the “wrong” way! Complexity is the ability to hold more than one idea/feeling/experience at the same time. Like, I can feel angry and disappointed with my partner while also loving and appreciating them. Did that just break your brain a little bit? I know, it’s really hard to feel and think like this when you’re really fucking pissed, right? I get it! Have no shame, we all struggle to do this. Holding complexity means that you’re attempting to keep more than one thing in mind or feel multiple emotions at the same time, and frequently, these things and emotions can feel like polar opposites. This is a vital skill to deepening relationships though, as it helps us get out of black and white thinking and move into tolerating more shades of grey. If you can meet your friend, loved one, or partner with more complexity, it will be significantly easier to feel empathy and compassion for them and hopefully they will start to do the same for you!
Increasing your capacity for complexity benefits you individually as well. When you move out of more rigid thinking, you can be more compassionate and forgiving with yourself as well as be more accepting of what’s truly happening for you. It’s a brave new world to enter when you realize you can feel multiple emotions at the same time! For example, you can feel deep grief while also having a moment of levity and laughter, which can help greatly increase your resilience during the most despairing moments of your life.
Understanding Attachment & Relationship History
I like to think of attachment as our human need to bond with others and our attachment style as the blueprint we’ve formed for how we love and build safety/trust in close relationships. There are a number of different attachment styles that we won’t go into here, but it can be incredibly helpful to understand your own attachment style as well as the style of your partner. Understanding attachment helps to increase your insight into your own behaviors and relational needs from your relationships, as well as those of your partner or close, loved one. This can help foster more generosity and curiosity for each other as well as explain many of the things we all do in relationships that we just can’t quite wrap our heads around! We’ve written many previous articles about attachment and the different attachment styles—most recently, On Secure Attachment: A Way to Increase Trust & Security in Your Relationships—if you’d like to gain more in-depth knowledge in this area.
Similarly, devoting time to exploring your relationship histories to identify areas of wounding, fears, or possible traumas as well as the ways you all like to be/feel loved and cared for, is fundamental to deepening the quality of your relationship. The more you know about the experiences you and your loved one(s) have had, the more you can understand who you all are and why you all are the way that you are. In a moment of tense conflict, it’s much easier to access empathy for someone you feel is perhaps, acting irrationally, when you understand their past pain points and fears in relationships. Knowing this also helps you better discern what either of you may be needing in this tense moment to be able to return to a more calm state and resolve the conflict. Which brings me to…
Learning about your nervous system arousal patterns in relationships
As a therapist trained in Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy (PACT), a significant portion of the work I engage in with partners in relationship therapy focuses on both increasing understanding of attachment patterns, as well as learning about what the nervous system does during a conflict. You know that feeling you get when you can start to feel tension brewing with your partner? Maybe you start to tense in familiar parts of your body, sit more upright, feel a bit more heat building in your face and chest, clench your fists, and get a gnawing pit in your stomach? That’s your nervous system at work to keep you safe!
Our bodies are both wired for connection and protection. When we sense a threat (often not consciously) our body starts to automatically engage it’s survival systems that are meant to help us get to safety and, you guessed it, survive. (You may have heard about this system of protection before as fight, flight, freeze responses.) I know what you may be thinking at this point: “Ahem! Hi nervous system, thanks for nothing!” It’s perfectly reasonable to feel frustrated with our arousal patterns when they seem to impede our ability to connect and resolve conflict. Of course, we do need these survival strategies and when they turn on in truly threatening moments, we’re incredibly grateful for them. The challenge though, is that our partner/loved ones are not bears we just unexpectedly encountered in the woods! The person sitting across from you who you loved and adored a few minutes ago, until they said that thing again, hopefully does not pose an actual threat to your safety or survival. Unfortunately, we’ve got pretty antiquated wiring in this sense—it’s hard for our bodies to discern what’s a real threat and what’s a perceived threat.
Exploring and understanding yours and your partner’s arousal patterns/threat responses will help you all to know when things have gotten too hot to try to resolve a conflict and that it may be time to take a quick break. This will also help you start to learn about what each of you needs from the other when these responses kick in to try to soothe each others’ nervous systems and be able to return to a place of decreased tension and arousal, in order to proceed with moving through the conflict. What I try to teach the partners i work with is that great communication skills mean diddly squat when your nervous system is working hard to keep you alive! We have to first prioritize managing the physical arousal to come back to enough of a baseline place where our communication skills are available to us again and we can actually be open and willing to hear each other. After all, we’re not meant to have a deeply empathic, curious, and compassionate conversation with the bear we just stumbled upon, right?
For many couples and partners, trying to understand your pattern of arousal and develop tools to soothe and regulate each other when you’re in this escalated state can be quite difficult to navigate on your own. If you’re needing additional support with this, I’d recommend considering couples counseling/relationship therapy to help. Just so you know, all of the therapists at Kindman & Co. work from the PACT approach, so you’d be in good (non-bear-like) hands with anyone here!
Showingupness In Relationships
Lastly, I deeply value showingupness in all important relationships. And yes, I do know that this is a made-up word. (To me, it’s clear that we need a real word to efficiently and effectively describe this skill.) From a much earlier blog post, On the Importance of Showing Up, “Showingupness describes the degree to which reliability, empathy, care, intentionality, thoughtfulness, and the embodiment of “just being there” is consistently demonstrated by someone.” To be frank, you cannot build security, trust, and intimacy in your relationships if you don’t feel you can rely on someone or alternatively, they cannot rely on you.
Showingupness incorporates all of the other skills that I’ve outlined above. To be a good friend, a trustworthy partner, a dedicated employee, or a loving and considerate family member, you have to show up—and you have to do so consistently. This doesn’t mean showing up perfectly and all the time, but it does mean consistently enough that people come to see you as someone who cares and that they believe you’ll prioritize the relationship when it’s essential that you do so. Your loved ones need to know that you will put them first in times of strife, despair and loss, as well as in times of joyful celebration, significant life milestones, and great accomplishment. To embody showingupness is to teach your loved ones that they can count on you and know that even if you don’t know what to do or how to help, you’ll be there. It doesn’t matter where there is, but you’ll find it, figure out how to get to it, and just show up.
I feel like it goes without saying, but just in case, if you’re practicing showingupness in your close relationships, your partners and loved ones should be doing the same for you. Period.
—
I hope that you’ve found these seven integral, relationship skills to be helpful and that they give you some guidance on where and how to start improving the quality of your connections. As it turns out, all of these skills should help you develop your communication too! If you’re interested in specific ideas of how to implement these connection-building skills, I’m planning for a Part Two: How-To, so stay tuned and subscribe to our newsletter by clicking the big, blue button below to get our newest articles in your inbox.
As always, our team of relationship therapy experts is here to help. You can learn more about our couples counseling and relationship therapy services or fill out our contact form to book a complimentary information session with our Care Coordinator and get started right away!
Kaitlin Kindman, is a co-founder of Kindman & Co., is disabled, an activist, and a feminist. Her purpose is to help her clients come to believe that they are not alone, they belong, AND they inspire—they have the power to bring about change. She works with her clients to feel more connected, so that they take actions that improve their relationships and the world.
Kaitlin is deeply committed to providing socially just and anti-oppressive therapy. She really loves working with couples to improve their relationships and deepen intimacy, with other therapists and healers, as well as entrepreneurs and other business owners. Kaitlin finds true enjoyment in cuddling with animals, a just-right temperature cup of tea, feeling the sun on her face, and dancing in supermarket aisles.
GET HELP NOW
If you are interested in therapy with Kindman & Co. and would like to learn more about the services we have to help you, follow these quick & easy steps:
Schedule a free 20-minute phone consultation with our Care Coordinator.
Get matched with the therapist who’s right for you.
Start feeling more supported and fulfilled in your life and relationships!
THERAPY SERVICES AT KINDMAN & CO.
We are here for your diverse counseling needs. Our team of therapists provides lgbtqia+ affirmative therapy, couples therapy & premarital counseling, grief & loss counseling, group therapy, and more. We have specialists in trauma, women's issues, depression & anxiety, substance use, mindfulness & embodiment, and support for creatives. For therapists and practice owners, we also provide consultation and supervision services! We look forward to welcoming you for therapy in Highland Park and online.