Modifying Communication Patterns

 It's important to realize that these are just habits, culturally and personally learned behaviors that can be un-learned and new ones learned in their stead. Role playing or psychodrama can be an adjunct to this kind of re-education, in a process of personal development for people who are essentially pretty healthy, as well as part of psychotherapy. Assertion training for the timid and anger management for the more explosive are two sets of re-training programs that could make great use of attention given to nonverbal styles of self-expression, internal cueing, and communications.

This role training may be a source of insight as well as merely behavioral re-conditioning. The enactments of nonverbal behaviors may be associated with scenes in which these behaviors occur and where there were first learned. Such enactments can help people connect their behaviors with underlying attitudes, such as expectations of others, fantasies that criticism will be catastrophically destructive, or a forlorn hope of magical rescue. And then re-playing these scenes with various alternative elements may help re-align those underlying attitudes.

Summary

People react to the unspoken, as much (if not more) to how something is said as to what are the explicit meaning of the words. Misunderstandings can often be clarified if the people involved have the ability to notice and comment on the nonverbal communications in an interaction. People will benefit from learning the range of nonverbal behaviors in order to clarify the often subtle dynamics of the situations they find themselves in. For example, in a marriage, sometimes the other person gets irritated by some mysterious event: Exploring what was the problem may lead to an awareness that the way something was said communicated an unintended meaning!  By making the nonverbal communication more clear, misunderstandings can be resolved.

The field of nonverbal communications has grown rapidly over the last few decades, and it has applications in business, media, international relations, education, and indeed any field which significantly involves interpersonal and group dynamics. Certainly there is a need for more psychological mindedness in all these realms.

In Part 2 of this Topic, on another webpage, I discuss how techniques of experiential education can help to learn about this dimension and how to become more sensitive to these dynamics.