July 8, 2018 - Napthali Roberts

Facing the Hard Conversations - Asserting Yourself When You Would Rather Avoid, Yell, Minimize, or Control

We all have hard or uncomfortable conversations that we have the opportunity to engage in daily. Whether it is an expression of hurt within a friendship, relationship, or marriage, a boundary crossed at work, an awareness of injustice within your community, or a child asking about the big stuff of life (death, sexuality, abuse, discrimination, or violence). We all have “real talk” moments come up and often struggle to engage them in an authentic, direct and gracious manner. These are often moments that we aren’t always sure we want to deal with and can leave us feeling the pulls to “make it happy”, “just take it”, or explode. Today we will discover together how to recognize our own barriers to authentic communication, real life strategies for how to communicate our feelings, thoughts, and needs without making demands of others, how to recognize our go-to response patterns (fight, flight, freeze, control), and how to walk through relationship recovery after the hard conversations.