Keeping Your Head After Losing Your Job (17 page)

You can also examine some of your beliefs about communicating with your partner who has lost their job. Here are some examples of beliefs some people have that might contribute to more problems.

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I need to keep at my partner to motivate him/her to get a job.

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I have a right to complain. After all, it’s hard on me.

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My partner let me down. I need to tell him/her they can’t do that to me.

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I need my partner to hear and agree with all of the things that I am feeling and thinking.

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I just can’t help myself. I’m too emotional not to just say what I am thinking.

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There’s no use in talking with him/her. It’s a waste of time.

If any of these thoughts are your thoughts, then you are probably nagging, criticizing, complaining, ruminating, feeling sorry for yourself, feeling angry at your partner, or just brooding and feeling alone, refusing to answer questions. None of this is good.

Let’s take a look at each one of these beliefs about communication and see if there is another way to look at it.

Leaving the blame behind

Blaming and nagging your partner who is unemployed will not achieve results, but you may not realize the effect that your words may have on them.

EXERCISE: LOOKING CLOSELY AT BLAMING AND NAGGING

Look through the list below to focus on the kinds of things you might be saying and whether you think they would be helpful if they were said to you:

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Are you blaming and nagging your partner?

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What are the advantages and disadvantages of blaming and nagging?

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How would you feel if someone talked to you this way?

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When you blame your partner are you discounting the positives, labeling them, focusing on the negative, over-generalizing and judging them severely?

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Take responsibility for what you say. Are you trying to convince yourself that you are entitled to blaming and criticizing? Do you think you don’t have any control over what you do? Are you blaming your partner and then justifying this by blaming them for your own behavior?

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How would you challenge your idea that you need to blame and criticize your partner to get them motivated?

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How would support, encouragement and mutual problem solving work better?

6: Be a better listener: the power of active listening

If your partner is unemployed and you want them to communicate with you, it’s essential that you become better at listening. One way of thinking about how to listen is to ask yourself how you want your partner to feel after they have opened up to you. Do you want your partner to feel that you care about their thoughts and feelings, that you respect them, that you have patience, that you are on their side, and that you support them? Or do you want your partner to think that you are contemptuous, judgmental, rejecting, competitive, impatient, bored, or frustrated with them?

What makes a good listener? Some people think that good listening is the same thing as saying nothing, just silently and passively sitting there and “listening,” like a tape recorder that doesn’t say anything. Let’s say your wife has lost her job and she feels she needs to talk about it. Let’s assume she is like most people—she wants to feel that you understand her, respect her, and care about her feelings. Well, you might not be doing a great job of this, if you do or say the following when she is talking:

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Sit silently and say nothing while she is talking.

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Interrupt her and say, “I got the message, you don’t need to repeat yourself.”

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Say, “Snap out of it and move on.”

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Tell her, “You’re complaining too much.”

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Say, “You’re unrealistic.”

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Tell her exactly what she has to do to solve her problem—if she hasn’t asked you to solve the problem.

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Be sarcastic, condescending, or dismissive.

You might say, “I listened. I heard what she had to say, I just don’t want to hear it again.” It’s understandable that as a listener it’s taking some work to hear it again, but how much work is really involved in that? I can imagine several thousand things that might be more difficult for you to do than spend a few minutes listening to your wife complain or describe how she feels. But you might think to yourself, “Look, if I don’t interrupt, if I don’t tell her she’s going on too long and whining, she will go on forever. I’ve got to put an end to it.”

Or you might think, “She’s just complaining. I’ve got to get her to solve problems, not focus on feeling.” Of course, the irony of this jump to problem solving is that unless your partner believes you care enough to hear the feelings, you won’t get to solve any problems. In fact, you will have created a new problem: “You don’t care about how I feel.”

These are the thoughts of a poor listener. Communicating contempt, boredom, or sarcasm for the message and the messenger will only make matters worse. Jumping to problem solving will mean that problems become magnified, not solved.

What can you do?

Fortunately, there are some simple rules to follow to be a good listener, and you can start today. If your partner is talking about something that is bothering them, you might try the following:

Rephrase what they say:
“I hear you saying that you spent a lot of time today looking for a job and there just wasn’t anything out there.” By rephrasing you communicate exactly the message that you heard. It also gives the speaker a chance to correct your misinterpretation of what they said. Sometimes we rephrase what we thought the speaker intended (for example, “You don’t think you should have to look for a job”), rather than what was said (“No, I understand I have to look for a job. It’s just a real pain to have to do this.”).

Empathize:
Identify the feeling that your partner is sharing with you: “It sounds like you were feeling frustrated (angry, anxious, sad, hopeless, helpless, like giving up, etc.).” This communicates that you care enough about your partner’s feelings to notice them. By recognizing—clearly—that your partner feels frustrated, you are connecting with their experience so they know that you know and that you care enough to know. It’s often not about facts as much as it is about feelings.

Validate:
Try to find the “truth” for your partner in those feelings: “I can understand it would feel really frustrating to be looking and to find nothing today, since you are trying hard to find the next job.” By finding the reasonable truth in having the feelings that your partner has, you communicate that they make sense, they are not alone, they have the feelings that a lot of other people would have, and that you respect their feelings enough to validate them and normalize them.

Ask for more:
“Are there other thoughts or feelings that you were having about this today?” When you ask for more, you invite your partner to share whatever they need to share, you are making time and space for them to connect with you—and for you to connect with them. You are showing patience, respect, and inclusion.

Think about each step in this Active Listening model—rephrasing, empathizing, validating, asking for more. What are you communicating by listening in this manner? I think you are telling your partner that you are really interested in their feelings and experiences. You understand why they feel the way they feel and you respect their right to their feelings. You are communicating that you have time for listening, and you care enough to hear more.

Your non-verbal signals

Another part of good listening for the partner of the person who has lost their job is the non-verbal communication that you engage in. For example, when you are listening, do you make faces, look down or away, occupy yourself with your computer or other distractions rather than looking directly at the speaker? Does your voice sound impatient, or does it sound accepting and open? Are you crossing your arms across your chest, or are you sitting loosely and openly directed towards your partner? What are the signals you are sending?

By using these active listening skills, you automatically have a go-to plan for listening. Rather than showing contempt or sarcasm, you can go into this “mode,” rephrase, validate, ask for more, and find that it is a lot easier for you, as a listener, to accept your partner’s thoughts and feelings rather than withdrawing or jumping at them.

EXERCISE: LISTENING

Use the list below to find out what kind of listener you are:

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Are you a good listener or a poor listener?

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Do you think that listening and validating will open a can of worms?

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Do you think that listening patiently is simply indulging whining?

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Are you sending out non-verbal signals of indifference or contempt?

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What is the consequence for you and your partner of being a poor listener?

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Try Active Listening Skills:

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Rephrase

2.
Empathize

3.
Validate

4.
Ask for More

7: Solve problems together

Did you ever play basketball or baseball as a child? There are five people on each basketball team and nine for baseball. But imagine that the other team only had one member against your five members. Unless that one-member team was a professional player who is seven feet tall, your five-member team would win. Teams win against loners. The same thing is true for families and friends of the unemployed.

You and your partner—and your entire family and circle of friends—can all team up to solve problems together. We have already discussed how this is about
all of you
—not just the single person who is unemployed—but I want to expand more on teamwork and solving problems together.

Let’s face an obvious set of facts:

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Unemployment can lead to problems for the entire family.

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Conflicts within the family are best solved if everyone works together to solve them.

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Sharing the responsibility to solve the problems removes the burden of blame on one person.

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By working on problems together, you build more positive feelings. By blaming one person and telling them it’s their problem you divide the family, increase resentment and defeat your goals.

Here’s an example of the opposite of mutual problem solving: “Karen, you’re the one out of work, so it’s your problem. You got yourself into this situation, so it’s up to you to solve the problem. Don’t dump your problems on the rest of us. You aren’t pulling your weight. I have enough to deal with without having to deal with your problems.” It’s pretty clear here what the message is! This is rejecting and isolating the unemployed person. They will now think, “I was fired from my job, and now my family is rejecting me.” Could there be anyone who would be better off receiving this approach of blaming and isolating?

As I said, focusing on mutual problem solving—where you and your partner, your family and friends all pull together—empowers everyone. Teams beat individuals.

Help your partner who has lost their job realize that you know how hard it is, but gently suggest that you are open to brainstorming ways of solving the problem. For example, you might say, “It’s a hard time and you probably feel discouraged. You’re human, and that’s natural. But if you like, we can brainstorm together and think about strategies and things to do. Let me know if that would be helpful.” Validating the difficulty of being unemployed can help open you both up to working towards solving real problems. But if you don’t offer some validation of how hard it is, your partner might think, “You don’t really understand how hard my life is. All you want to do is make things better for yourself.” Problem solving is often a balancing act where you acknowledge the difficulty of the problem while suggesting the possibility of a solution.

Working through step-by-step

Let’s go through each of the steps in mutual problem solving and see what it would look like in your family. Let’s say Karen has lost her job and Mike, her husband, wants to work together with her to make things better. Mike not only wants to communicate respect and support for Karen, but he also wants to work towards solving some problems in the family and in their relationship. Here are the steps.