Christopher Doyle on Strengthening Family Bonds: Effective Communication is Vital to Healing the Family
Healthy family relationships are built on effective communication. Effective communication promotes the vital understanding, trust, and emotional connections that are the lifeblood of all loving families. Meanwhile, from a family counseling perspective, it’s a catalyst for growth, healing, and change.
It’s an area of particular expertise for Christopher Doyle, a licensed psychotherapist, certified clinical trauma professional, and author of Healing the Family. A board-approved supervisor in the Commonwealth of Virginia, Doyle also founded the Institute for Healthy Families in 2015, located in Manassas, Virginia.
Effective Family Communication
Effective family communication goes beyond verbal exchanges; it encompasses active listening, empathetic understanding, and clear expression of thoughts and feelings. It involves not only speaking but also listening to and understanding one another’s perspectives. It creates a space where family members feel valued, respected, and understood.
Psychotherapist Christopher Doyle says it’s often about asking questions and turning criticism into curiosity. What we say is important, but that’s not everything. How we say it is just as vital. The distinction between making judgmental or critical statements and, instead, asking carefully considered questions is of the utmost importance.
One aspect of healthy communication within family relationships involves precisely that: turning criticism into curiosity. Instead of telling our children to not do a particular unhealthy behavior or say something unkind, we should take the time to ask them, “What are you feeling that you would say such a thing?” or “What is your goal in doing this?”
Alternatively, consider asking what they might need or inquire why they want to do something a particular way. A great question is often, “Can you tell me more so that I can better understand how to support you?”
Importance of Effective Communication in Family Therapy
In Doyle’s family therapeutic work, effective communication is pivotal in strengthening family bonds and resolving interpersonal conflicts. Healing the Family empowers families to address underlying issues, navigate challenges, and build healthier relationships by providing a platform for honest communication and empathetic listening.
Healthy communication is a cornerstone of effective treatment in family therapy. It underpins a myriad of systems and techniques enabling individuals to share their thoughts and feelings while promoting awareness and sympathy among family members. Four critical components of effective family communication are listening, expression, validation, and conflict resolution.
Active Listening
Active listening involves an absolute commitment to the speaker, both verbally and non-verbally, to understand their message completely. It requires giving undivided attention, maintaining eye contact, and offering feedback. Active listening also includes paraphrasing, outlining, and mirroring emotions.
Clear Expression
Clear expression entails voicing ideas and emotions and requires a direct and assertive approach that uses “I” statements to communicate personal experiences without guilt or judgment. It promotes transparency and honesty within a family household, enabling individuals to communicate authentically and sincerely.
Empathy and Validation
Empathy involves putting oneself in the speaker’s shoes to recognize their feelings with warmth and compassion. This includes validating the speaker’s experiences and emotions while asserting their worth and value. As a result, empathy and validation form the basis of a supportive environment where family members feel acknowledged and understood.
Conflict Resolution Skills
Conflict resolution skills are essential for addressing disagreements and conflicts. At their core, and in the simplest terms, they involve identifying underlying issues, listening to each other’s perspectives, and working together to find resolutions while simultaneously opening a gateway to emotional intimacy.
When family members learn to really listen to each other’s hearts, they experience a deep level of emotional intimacy where solutions begin to emerge naturally.
A Gateway to Emotional Intimacy
Effective communication doesn’t just aid in conflict resolution and foster closer family connections. It’s also a gateway to emotional intimacy. Understanding different levels of emotional intimacy helps families understand and grow with each other. Without emotional intimacy, conversations often lack the necessary depth to be meaningful.
While it’s not always possible to have the deepest levels of intimacy in every relationship, Doyle’s Healing the Family model helps mothers, fathers, and children understand that most families live day to day on the most superficial levels. Simply put, many children today, in particular, desire more connection with their siblings, parents, and extended family members; and while it may not be possible to have deep intimacy in every relationship, it’s important to realize that many families live day-to-day on the most superficial levels. That reality is that many children are starving for more attention and love.
If family members can’t or won’t allow access to the parts of them that lie deep within, their children will search elsewhere – sometimes in unhealthy places. All children long for people with whom they can fully express themselves. Unfortunately, some families have only very superficial ways of interacting – often resulting from exclusively surface-level intimacy in the home.
To realize this, families must use effective communication to strengthen bonds. They must look at the things that may have wounded them in the past or made them afraid to open up fully. For some families, this process is quick. For others, it may take time.
But if families are willing to challenge and tell the truth about themselves, even low levels of communication can progress into deeper opportunities for emotional intimacy. Effective and meaningful change happens when families intentionally adjust their communication styles to reflect deeper levels of intimacy, going beyond life’s cliches, facts, and surface-level opinions and delving into feelings, fears, hopes, and dreams. Only then can families more fully communicate with each other while helping each other fulfill their legitimate needs.
Asking the Right Questions
Counselor Christopher Doyle says the most effective communication skills don’t always come naturally to people and regularly require practice. Utilizing the most effective communication skills involves learning to ask the right questions. It also encapsulates how we share our thoughts, feelings, and desires without blaming or dictating.
Doing so helps the listener receive your message. If you use “you” statements rather than “I” statements, the listener may become defensive and shut down. The solution is to use reflective listening. Reflective listening means paraphrasing what someone says and empathizing with their thoughts and feelings.
However, it doesn’t mean always agreeing with what the other person is saying. It simply means that you understand their perspective and shows how much you care. The best questions are those that are open-ended. For example, “When did you begin to experience this problem or conflict you have?”
Then, use reflective listening to continue the conversation. Always move the conversation toward thoughts, feelings, and needs while avoiding judgmental statements. Meanwhile, remember to be a good listener. Make eye contact, too. It’s vital to look into the eyes of whoever is speaking to you to show attentiveness and concern.
Body Language, Tone, and Words
Like asking the right questions, observing body language, tone, and words is similarly critical, as is the spirit of expression. This observance of body language is one reason why eye contact is essential. You can often perceive more about people from their facial expressions, gestures, and movements than just their words.
It’s also vital to let silence have its place. Silence is one of the greatest gifts you can give to another person. Don’t fill empty moments with unnecessary words. Just be in the moment with the other person. Sitting with them silently lets them know you’re there for them and allows them to go deeper into their thoughts and feelings.
“Why Am I Communicating?”
When exploring family communication, people typically first consider each family member’s needs and how they experience, receive, and give love. However, Christopher Doyle’s Healing the Family model teaches that it’s imperative to start by asking, “Why am I communicating?”
The same is true whether asking or answering questions. All family members must express themselves, their needs, and their feelings about those around them. Otherwise, how do they know they’re loved and cared for? Are they missing something? If someone isn’t communicating within their family, they’re likely getting their needs met elsewhere.
They may communicate instead with their friends, teachers, colleagues, or even people they’ve met online. Family members need to feel connected and for their siblings and parents to understand them. Communication is the number one way to foster that connection so they can have their needs met while also loving and being loved.
Role of Effective Communication in Counseling
Ultimately, effective communication in counseling is about fostering understanding and building trust. It promotes mutual understanding among family members, allowing them to communicate their ideas and feelings while listening to others’ viewpoints. It also builds faith within a family, establishing a safe space for loved ones to share their problems without fear of judgment.
Establishing a safe place for family members to express themselves should also include laying out guidelines for sharing. Meanwhile, it’s similarly crucial for family members to stay focused on their experiences and feelings rather than trying to speak for others.
Christopher Doyle Doyle’s Healing the Family model recommends avoiding ‘group-think and group-speak’ while emphasizing each member’s voice, focusing on using “I” statements, not “us” or “we” statements. Establishing common goals for families in counseling involves a thorough understanding of the dynamics of the family system and therapeutic interventions.
Family System Therapeutic Interventions
Christopher Doyle’s Healing the Family therapeutic model is based on Murray Bowen’s theory of the family operating as a system. Like many systems we encounter in society, some aspects of the family system function well, others are dysfunctional. Interventions examine historical patterns of emotional functioning and how family traits may be inherited from previous generations. Inherited family traits are commonly transferred to future generations who fail to differentiate between healthy and unhealthy relational patterns. Factors that promote therapeutic success in family systems include:
- Understanding hereditary and intergenerational family patterns
- Analyzing psychological factors associated with birth order and childhood roles
- Utilizing family history genograms
- Incorporating effective processing of traumatic family experiences
- Teaching healthy communication patterns and boundaries among all family members
- Resolving past and present conflicts
- Establishing appropriate models of emotional intimacy
- Encouraging healthy attachment and bonding
One of the hallmarks distinguishing family system therapeutic approaches from other forms of counseling is that its goals do not focus on changing one person in the family. Instead, they’re about overcoming obstacles like anxiety and finding relief from the symptoms of these obstacles.
It’s also about increasing each family member’s level of differentiation. With that, they can adapt to changes in and outside of their family, differentiating the patterns of both and ensuring healthier emotional interactions with each other in the process. For more information on Christopher Doyle’s family systems therapeutic work, visit: www.healing-the-family.org