by Stephen Martin

Aug. 1, 2010 — “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” So goes the most famous line from the movie Cool Hand Luke.

Communication should be simple, right? That may be true if we are thinking of the communication of simple facts, but when it comes to emotions and aspects of a personal relationship, communication is in fact extremely difficult.

When humans develop an intimate relationship they never consider how difficult communication really is. Most of us expect our communication system to be easy, uncomplicated and rarely misunderstood. In reality, good communication is a skill the majority of people never acquire. And then we wonder why other people misunderstand us so often.

In my experience of listening to couples attempting to communicate with each other in couples therapy, the No. 1 reason people misunderstand each other is because of what therapists call “projection.”

Projection is the taking of our own attitudes, feelings, viewpoints and emotions and believing the other people we are communicating with feel the same way. In other words, we unconsciously assume everyone sees the world just as we do.

Not so. We are all unique and none of us has the same experiences as anyone else. This requires we understand that everyone we talk with does not necessarily think and feel what we do — that, in fact, taking our thoughts and helping another understand them is very complicated and often misunderstood.

The largest arena I see this dysfunction is in the belief that our partner is criticizing us, when the partner is not. What happens is we are actually critical of ourselves and assume because we are critical of ourselves, so are other people, especially loved ones. We then attack these people for feeling the way we feel ourselves about ourselves.

Now that is a mouthful. But let me give an example. Perhaps you have poor self-esteem — meaning you do not value yourself accurately, but have negative images of yourself. Because you feel this way about yourself, you will often read other people as feeling the same way about you, when in reality they do not. But because we are so invested in believing others view us negatively, we assume the worst when in reality we feel badly about ourselves and assume everyone else does as well.

This continually occurs in therapy. Many couples project their own negative feeling about themselves onto their partners and believe their partners are hostile towards them, when in truth it is their own thinking they are doing battle with.

The only way out of projection is to ask what your partner really feels about you, and then believe what you are told. Just because you feel negatively about yourself does not mean your partner does as well. However, the game of projection is so powerful it takes many sessions to correct these misconceptions. And it can only be done if you analyze what you feel about yourself.

This is not easy work. Thus many couples fight about issues that are not real; they are projections from one partner onto the other. Once you see how this works in human relationships, you can begin by questioning yourself first before you project your own feelings onto your partner. Then your communication, while more complex, has a chance of being more accurate and the fighting can begin to slow down.

Stephen Martin, MFT is a marriage and family therapist with offices in Moss Beach. He has served as president of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, the largest association of marriage therapists in the world. He can be reached at 650-726-1212 or by e-mail at stephen@healmarriage.com.