Tone-Deaf: Your Tone of Voice is Destroying Your Relationship. Here’s How to Fix It
Netflix’s car-crash dating show Love Is Blind provides such a rich insight into relationships. You don’t have to be watching the series to get what I’m talking about here, so read on.
This was a mic drop moment for me…
Tone is so important.
When Chelsea and Kwame woke up that morning, Kwame asked her how she felt, she spat back ‘How do you think I feel?’
When you use tone – the hard, critical, sarcastic kind – or loaded rhetorical questions, you’re doing it to make the other person feel uncomfortable or even hurt their feelings.
In the show, you could see how deeply hurt Kwame was.
Tone is weaponized words and emotions.
I was discussing this on facebook this week, and someone commented ‘Sound is energy in motion. Knives and daggers’. Exactly.
You might be doing this consciously or subconsciously, it doesn’t really matter.
What matters is how your tone impacts your partner.
If it’s habitual, you wear down trust in your relationship because it ceases to be a place of safety.
Your partner is on eggshells, confused and pushed into a position of either tolerating it and stepping over their hurt, or questioning it and risking more of the same.
Using tone is a great way of thinking you’re making your point, but also washing your hands of any responsibility for your partner’s feelings.
This will corrode your relationship from the inside.
If someone who habitually uses a harsh tone reacts to being called out by saying ‘you’re too sensitive’, or ‘get over it’ or, like Chelsea, ‘I’m just being direct’, they’re not understanding the relational damage they’re doing.
And it’s likely they’re struggling with a fear of intimacy.
Their work is to get curious about the impact on their partner, and listen when their partner calls them out.
And it might be true that the recipient has a heightened sensitivity to a particular tone, and they can use that awareness to explore what’s getting triggered (likely an experience from childhood with a parent or caregiver).
The recipient’s work isn’t so they can ‘get over it’, but so they can stay present and grounded in the moment it occurs, set a boundary if necessary, and offer feedback to their partner from a place of love and capacity.
For the person using the tone, the work is to slow down and notice what they’re feeling and what their need is in the moment, and communicate that from a place of love and capacity.
Any of the following are actually direct. Delivered straight and without tone these can become invitations for a conversation instead of feel my pain:
‘I feel hurt’
‘I’m scared about our relationship’
‘I’m still angry about that thing you said yesterday’
There’s some deeper work for this person too. It’s likely they were spoken to in this way in their childhood, and possibly speak to themselves in this way.
Because if you choose to, relationships always offer ways into introspection and healing.
Talk to Matt about having fewer fights and more intimacy. Book your free discovery call here.