Building Better Relationships: Short Essays on Learning to Relate

Relating to other people provides the basic foundation for our lives. Our instincts propel us into connection with others, and our personalities emerge through the responses we receive and give. Relating is so embedded in our social experience that we do not think about it, we just do it. How we relate is learned in early formative experiences and we carry those with us into our adult relational lives. Unfortunately we do not learn about what we are doing; basically, we have to wing it. The book is part of a larger endeavor to bring more awareness to how we learn to relate and how our learned relational styles impact our relationships. It is hypothesized that conflict grows out of lack of awareness of our relational needs. We include detailed information on what relational needs are and how learning to communicate them brings mutuality and connection. As a therapist, I was struck by how difficult it was for either person in a relationship to turn their attention to the other persons' experience. In the presence of the other, most people were so involved with asserting their own experience and trying to get it validated, that there seemed to be no room or interest in what was happening to the other person. This is not relating. Developing a process whereby each person could express and get feedback for their own experience and then do the same for the other person, seemed to help couples get back into connection with each other. The CLEAR relational process was developed to do this. The process mimics some basic communication styles of a parent and child; fundamentally, how each person needs their experience related to and mirrored back and how two members need to learn to negotiate with each other to stay connected in a positive relationship. The collection of essays is organized so that it serves as an outline for a mini-course on relationship process. The book is divided into eight sections. The first six are on relationships and conflict and the last two explain how to use the relational process on the web.