Couples tools: “You Hurt Me” Tennis vs I-Statements and Reflective Listening

Posted on September 01, 2022 by Tony Borodovsky, One of Thousands of Relationship Coaches on Noomii.

I would like to tell you a story as old as time. Two people who have lived together for a while are both feeling frustrated by their interactions. The first one takes their current emotion, remembers an incident from the past which contributed to it, and says to the second one,

“You know that thing you did yesterday? You made me so mad when you did that!”

Because they’re caught off guard and feeling on the spot, the second person isn’t able to hear their partner’s concern or understand the change that they’re asking for. What they hear the first person saying is “You’re bad! You hurt me!”

Now, the second person feels like they’ve been unfairly accused – and they feel hurt. They remember a time from the past when the first person made them feel the same way – even if it has almost nothing to do with the event the first person described. They remember it and say

“You know that thing you did the other day? You made me so mad when you did that!”

And now the first person is feeling hurt that the tables have been turned on them, and that their initial request for change has gone unheard. They remember a time when they felt the same way, and they say… Well, you can see where this story is going, right?

The worst part of this particular trap is that the two participants never actually get to talk about the underlying problems which affect them both – they’re stuck on discussing their inability to feel heard and say what they need to say.

Changing the way we communicate with I statements and reflective listening can feel very odd at first. So much of our daily language relies on describing situations and facts objectively, that framing everything in terms of your subjective experience feels strangely intimate, and it takes people a while to find their feet.

The challenge is to change every sentence around so that rather than saying “you made me / you did this” you phrase it as “I feel this way when this happens.” You describe the situation as it impacts you without blaming the partner, and really try to help them understand how they contributed to that interaction.

The real magic comes when the second person uses reflective listening to tell you what they think they heard you saying. Couples are often amazed how many tries it takes before they actually realize what their partner has been saying all along. It can take a few back-and-forth revisions of you clarifying your message, and your partner saying it back to you before you meet in the middle, but when that moment happens – you suddenly feel like something unspoken is just there between you, finally clear and understood.

Once you have that good feeling of being heard, you then return the favor for your partner. You hear them phrasing their experience in terms of I statements, and you reflect it back to them until they feel like they’ve been heard and understood. The feeling of rapport that comes from reflective listening can build trust between partners, and give them hope that they can resolve their issues effectively.