“Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.”
Charles Dickens
Openness is one of the five qualities that I believe is important in maintaining healthy, quality relationships. When you are open, it facilitates communication between you and the other person.
And amongst married couples, openness, and communication helps to lessen stress in difficult circumstances and improve the level of satisfaction in marriages overall.
But what does it mean to be open? What is required for you to be considered open versus a closed-off person?
Awareness of Feelings Helps with Openness
Openness is about communicating with your partner, not just about some daily mundane things. It’s about sharing what is happening internally – what you think and feel.
It can be hard to know what you’re feeling at any given time. The term “emotions” is synonymous with “feelings” for a good reason: Whenever you experience an emotion, there is a particular feeling in your body.
But sometimes, it can be tricky to identify the emotion you’re experiencing because different emotions elicit similar sensations. For example, a rapid heart rate is a sensation often associated with worry and fear. But a fast heart rate can also happen when you feel nervous or excited.
Because many of these sensations can be confused with different emotions, you need to pause and think about what you might be feeling. And once you have a good understanding of your emotional state, then you can start to share that experience with the person you care about.
What You Learned about Openness in Childhood
When working with a client and the topic turns to emotions and communication, I often ask about their childhood. The reason for reflecting on a person’s childhood is that much of how we communicate with others is highly influenced by what we learn about communication from our parents.
Many of our attitudes and ways of relating to others will often mirror how our parents interacted with each other or with other adults. For example, if your parents barely spoke about what they were thinking or feeling, there’s a good chance you will do the same.
Not only will you do the same because you’re repeating a pattern, but you may be closed off to your partners because you never learned the skills to be open or to communicate with others.
Even more so, our parents (or primary caregivers) taught us how to express our emotions.
Have you ever seen your mother or father cry? What were the circumstances? How did your parents express anger? How did they communicate with each other?
When trying to be more open with your partner, or with any significant other, for that matter, pay attention to how your behaviours might mimic what you observed in your home growing up. So often, the words we use, the tone in our voice, and how we express our emotions are strongly influenced by what we learned from other adults as children.
Openness Can Lead to Closeness
Sometimes it can be challenging to talk about your thoughts and feelings with those you care about, or you might even feel it’s unnecessary.
But when you find good people in your life whom you trust and feel comfortable with, talking and sharing about yourself, and allowing others to do the same, can make your relationship even stronger.
Richard