Communication Psychology

      Though communication is intrinsic to all human activities it is a process that is little understood, studied, or practiced in a way that increases understanding of its crucial importance in life. The word communication comes from the root word communicare which we means to make common, to share in common with. We can also trace the similarities between the words communicate and commune, communion and community all of which infer the realization of some type of union, intimate fellowship and rapport. To communicate is to transmit information, thought, feelings and or images so that they are satisfactory received or understood. As we will see in the following chapter on the mirroring process, there is an imperative need for receiving confirmation that exchanges of meaning and feeling have actually taken place for their to be “real” communication because without feedback or “mirroring” there is no real interaction, no real exchange, no sharing and nothing being made common.

    Communication is as basic to life as breathing and disturbances in our communications with others draw immediate and powerful reactions from us. Though not normally seen this way, communication is our most important way of mixing human consciousness. Through different forms of communication we flow out of ourselves and into others and those others flow back into us if the communication is two-way. Like the gene pool, and how it mixes through sexual contact, on higher levels of consciousness we interchange through communication with each other. Being human is as much about the quality of this mixing and sharing as it is about our individuality. In reality we are not hard-shelled rock like creatures that have little to do with what lies beyond our skin. 

      Human activity, commerce, trade, industry, work, sex, play and sports all have to do with humans interacting and depending on others for these interactions to take place. The basic problem with humanity is actually on the playing field of the in-between. If we did not have problems ‘between people’ we would not have so many problems in our internal spaces of being. If we had been surrounded by pure love from conception through adolescence we would be experiencing the state of our being quite differently. We would not have as many problems if intense fields of love surrounded us. Perhaps we would have none.

Love grows and matures as it feeds on love.
Without the proper nourishment our beings do not grow
 and thus they fail to express themselves.
Our capacity to love and be loved in return
 is the most vital part of our being nature.

     The fundamental reality on earth has been dark. Social and family realities are too often appalling surrounded us with conflict, violence and sometimes even the deliberate abuse of our beings. So bad and violent is the history of society that we have naturally created spiritual and psychological pathways that hope to rebuild the individual in the face of social insanity. The thrust has been, if we fix the individual, or control him or her with moral codes of behaviour, life and society will become more harmonious. But nothing has worked really and skyrocketing rates of depression, violence, and a host of other psychological and spiritually motivated diseases are reflecting this.  

      Humans are obsessed with their individualities and expect everything in life to flow from that point. From this paradigm we as individuals are supposed to save the world and we are supposed to gain the power, skill and understanding to withstand or survive any attack on our body or being. Christ was on the cross forgiving them. The spy is trained not to spill the beans under torture. Children are supposed to remain happy no matter what is happening in their families and no matter how abusive their educational environments are. When things go sour with children psychologists diagnosis ‘them’ as having a problem and too often today choose to medicate the children instead of addressing the real problems the children are struggling with. We are avoiding confronting the truth that it is the systems that are sick, in need of attention, healing and change. Communication Psychology addresses the system simultaneously with the individual who is imbedded in that system.

Communication is the engine of change
 in all organizations and social systems.

     Communication Psychology is a form of social yoga that heals our inner world by focusing attention on our individualities interaction with other individualities. It provides a powerful engine of change that will reflect to our exterior social material life as human beings as well as into our interior existence as individual entities. What Communication Psychology offers is a special link that connects the material to the spiritual, our inner world to the outer, the mental with the heart feeling world of being. Communication Psychology demands that we understand the context in which our thoughts and feelings are arising. It demands that we pay as much attention to the system, to our environment and the significant people in it as we do to ourselves. So for example, when a child communicates that he hates school, instead of judging and diagnosing such a child with pathology, we will probe to the possible truth that there is something objective happening to draw this reaction. When someone is being tortured we do not take out the psychiatrist’s couch we stop the torture.  

     Psychologies and spiritualities that concentrate on the individual at the expense of the social and quantum level of interaction between beings give us an unbalanced and distorted view of reality and this is why they are ineffective. Both psychology and spirituality have not expected change out of society and thus they give us instructions to maintain balance within the context of environments that attack and abuse us. Communication Psychology shifts the emphasis back to the in-between where the social and environmental factors take on as much importance as the individual happenings in our internal worlds. It lays the burden on the individual to communicate, to interchange, challenge, and even revolt against situations and people who will not respond to our communications. One of the principle sicknesses of both psychology and spirituality is in fact centred on this absolution of the system. They both place the burden on the individual and this is not really fair. So unfair really, especially with our young ones, that we can actually interpret this as another form of abuse that terrorizes people.  

Communication is not a concept; it is something we do,
 it is something we practice with others.

     Historically and presently in the world communication is not an option as perhaps the following story illustrates.

When the Chinese went into Tibet they created mayhem. Typically they would go into a monastery and kill everyone they could find. In one such situation an execution squad burst into the meditation hall. They shot the monks one by one until they came to the head abbot. The captain said to him: "I have just killed all of your monks, are you not afraid of me?" “No, I am not afraid.” “Why not? I have complete control over your life. I move my finger a quarter of an inch and you will die!” “No, you are quite wrong. You do not control my life.” “Indeed! What, then, do I not control?” “You cannot make me hate you.” Now I imagine this monk was in agony and was not denying the pain of the experience. It is doubtful that he tried to make himself feel something else; try to make himself feel better about losing his closest friends and disciples; losing his way of life, his culture. There was nothing he could do or say about the situation but he was able to do one thing that mattered much and that was not to hate.

     This is just one illustration of the paradigm that has conquered the world. Communication as a way of resolving conflicts has not been modelled in history or in the bible. The sword not the mouth has traditionally resolved conflicts and today we see this all repeating itself. This abbot was trained to face the worst and maintain his inner centre and this does make sense in a crazy world that does not care for our inner being. Yet this spiritual centring, though important and crucial for the individual has not been enough to work on what is really rotten in society, it has not created conditions of change so the violence has gone on and on and will continue to do so until we change the paradigm of religion, spirituality and psychology.

     Communication Psychology is the art and science of using communications as a path toward creative transformation and change. It is also the secret of heart to heart communion, love, openness and trust. Deep communication is very bonding to our spirits. We crave this experience and it is essential for our beings to establish deep connections with others. When our communications with others are dysfunctional our life will be dysfunctional and all the meditation, prayer and therapy will avail little unless you totally dedicate your life to God like the above monk.

Meaningful open and vulnerable communication
 is absolutely essential for the manifestation of real love
and caring between beings on this planet.
Without deep levels of both, separation, misunderstandings and the hurting of love will always manifest in human relationships.

    There are many reasons why communication remains superficial and why we suffer so much as individual human beings. Essentially we suffer from the breakdown in human relationships, from the lack of love we find in our social existence on earth. This lack of love is seen in the lack of meaningful communication. The defining principle of Communication Psychology is that communication is love and listening is love so disturbances in love correlate with distortions in communication process. Problems with love get translated into problems with communication and problems with communication get experienced as uncaring, as the lack of love.

      On earth we swim in deep seas of insanity marked by separation, uncaring, violence, and deep barriers to meaningful communication. Conflict and suffering are both marks of the absence of communication and that absence is experienced as a lack of love. Most people have had to, and still have to surrender and accept the basic sea of misunderstanding and impossibility of communication. That monk certainly was not thinking of being able to reason with the invading Chinese. He was much more concerned with facing the transition of death. His internal commitment was to eternity and how he would meet it. World Psychology is committed to changing the world and the human consciousness that inhabits it. In HeartHealth we will concentrate much more on the individual, on inner balance and emotional and feeling intelligence. Communication Psychology is a tool we can use on our spiritual pathway but its obsession is not just with the self, with the individual. It is with actual world and social change. Instead of we can change the world if we change ourselves we find that when we change our communication (social existence) our life changes with it. In reality there is a balance that must be struck between the inner and outer and finding that balance is one of the greatest challenges of life. In the past people have gone either into political and ecological activisms or into spiritual ones that reject the social realm. World Psychology solidly embraces both sides and sees one without the other as an imbalance that needs healing. Communication Psychology is the place where it all meets; it is a form of activism that covers the internal and external.

     If human problems arise from misunderstandings, which result from the breakdown of human interpersonal communication and exchange, learning how to communicate, how to share our beings, and learning how to listen to the beings of others goes to the heart of what is wrong with life on earth. Human life is confusing because we are living in a world where almost everyone believes they are separate (the space of non-communication) and society certainly reinforces this dream spell, so we live in a world where everyone thinks they are separate and they act in accordance with this belief. Communication is much more difficult when we have to reach across high mental barriers that separate us from each other.

     Communication Psychology breaths fire into our efforts of conquering the separate power of our egos for the first step in the process of learning how to listen demands that we learn to put our egos temporarily on the shelf. Thus Listening Psychology is the key to Communication Psychology.     The ground floor of our ego is found in its power and need to remain separate, its job is to keep others distant and separate from us so we don’t have to risk getting hurt so much or we do not have to risk hearing feedback that might challenge us to change. The ego maintains the separation between selves. The ego is sensitive to and hates differences so it gathers around others who agree to stay on the track of tightly defined similarities. When we separate we cut the communication process. That is how we remain separate.

All relationships begin a rapid death when
communication breaks down.
Love  gets destroyed when communication breaks down,
 because people are not interested in change or deep listening.

      Authentic communication heals the sense of separation that is so normal to human consciousness. The kind of communication being referred to hear is not just the communication of information and ideas, it is referring to the communication of feelings, the sharing of heart and being. Communication Psychology challenges the very idea of ourselves as separate beings and draws us closer to the heart. It challenges us to step out of the mind and ego, which are reinforced by our identifications as individual physical identities. This work goes to the very core of the deepest pathology we find in our consciousness, this strange idea that we are separate entities with no real interconnectedness. The joy of being in deep communication with another being is very bonding to our spirits for the simple reason that parts (us) are merging into a bigger whole (with them). Authentic communication is the process that cuts across the barriers of ego separation that people normally feel and maintain between each other.  

     Communication as a spiritual discipline confronts the basic core of man’s ego separation. The pure light of being to being communication penetrates across the barriers and cracks the walls of separation that our egos erect to maintain themselves. Communication flows more naturally through poles that feel connected. Like a closed circuit, the energy or meanings just flow. But with ego consciousness we have short circuits that interfere with communication. Ego consciousness creates barriers to significant transfers of meaning. Messages just don’t get through. Separate egos are not capable of receiving the being of another. This means they are not able to communicate and listen on deep levels. Thus the separate ego reins supreme as long as communication is limited and kept on superficial levels. This is the crux of the world problem in a nutshell. If you say what you mean you lose friends. If you speak the truth in your heart it will be used against you. If you put honesty and integrity first in life we risk losing those who are close to us. Yet we know that if we do not communicate the full flavour of our beings we will live half a life by living half a lie. When we block the full meaning of our expressions this creates a shallow superficial existence with only half of us alive and expressing itself. Fear of communication cuts us off from family, friends, and even from our own children. Superficial communication environments create the space for separate worlds, separate ego bubbles that never really come together at any depth. Relating to people deeply, openly and from the heart is the anti-thesis of the basic drive of the ego preserves its own idea of itself at all costs.  

It is through our struggle and the efforts we make
 to increase our ability to communicate and listen
that we see the deepest and most fruitful changes. 

     In the Marriage of Souls, that aspect of World Psychology that deals with the most intimate and personal level, we work on loving each other on the deepest levels of being and commit to proving that love day by day by communicating our most subtle feelings and vulnerabilities. The depth of our communication fields raises the personal love and romances we find with each other toward the divine. We prove our love by listening, by our devotion to change and by always being tuned to the growth of love. Our willingness to change, which is a natural parallel of our willingness to listen, is the only way we can convince others and ourselves that we are in fact absolutely committed to love.

Our race will eventually evolve itself as a whole
 through more enlightened communication
 and creative social interaction.

     Not everyone is open to deep communication and listening. There are those who have no intention of mixing or interchanging on any level of being, so walled up in their sense of separation they are. Such people instinctively create patterns of behaviour that do anything to avoid communication. In fact many brutally repress communication. The deepest source of human unhappiness results from growing up in families, and a world, where emotional expression of any kind is at best frowned upon and at worst strangled. For meaningful communication to happen, both speaker and listener must be open to exchange both ideas and feelings. Thus the human universal tendency toward the repression of feelings and emotions represses the process of communication and this hurts our being and makes us sick in both mind and heart.

     One of the reasons communication between people does remain shallow is the fear of confrontation and the inability to navigate through conflict skilfully. A commitment to communication is a commitment to working through conflicts. The very basis of Communication Psychology is really the psychology of change. Communication Psychology recognizes that communication itself heals by leading us into a deep process of growth and change. It recognizes that communication taken to the therapeutic level leads a person into a confrontation with the ego that wants to dam our inner truths behind high ego walls of separation. A commitment to authentic heart felt communication and listening leads one down the razors edge of real change. It is impossible to communicate and listen from the heart and not change. We either change or we break the stream of communication.  

     Communication Psychology directs us to pay attention to ourselves in a new way. The key is found in our sheer will and love of pure communication. Since we define communication and listening as love it is really the love that pulls us through and takes all those risks that will keep communication on track, meaningful, and on the level of heart and being. Love either grows or dies depending on our willingness to look at ourselves honestly and change. If we do not want to listen to others because they are communicating about something that we do not want to see, we destroy the very thing that we so much want in our life, love. Love and therapeutic process lives or dies on the fire bed of intense fields of heart-felt communication. 

     All change and transformation is carried on the crest of some kind of communication, on some kind of interaction with others. Therapeutic communication can be defined as any interaction between caring human beings that facilitates the resolution of conflict or pain. When we arrive at a “pure” concept of what communication we unleash the effect and healing power of communication and it does not matter where that communication happens, on the street, behind closed bedroom doors, in virtual spaces, or in the professional therapists office. When we communicate and share our beings, that is, in and of itself, healing, magical and therapeutic.

It is easier to find and maintain love when we are living
with people who are committed to authentic communication.

     There is nothing more frustrating than when a loved one will not communicate, listen or respond. Love either grows or dies depending on our willingness to communicate. So if we are not able to listen to others because they are communicating about something that we do not want to see, we destroy the very thing that we so much want, love. There is a strong correlation between listening, spiritual growth, change and love. 

Our willingness to change and listen 
is the only way we can convince ourselves and others
 that we are in fact absolutely committed to love.

     The real test of our souls comes with our ability and openness to look at those difficult things. Those things that we need to see about ourselves, that we do not see. Life continually tries to mirror us (communicate), tries to shed some light on what is dark inside of us, what we resist in life. Life is a mirror that reflects back to us the quality of our consciousness. The greatest measure of our souls is seen in our willingness to listen to what we need to change.

     We do not want to get too close and communicate (expose) our real vulnerable self because we really prefer to remain safe behind ego walls that maintain that safe protective distance. The less hurt and the less suffering the better we think and yet in this thinking we are wrong. For in protecting ourselves from this we continue to isolate ourselves and keep communications to a minimum. Keeping communications to a minimum maintains our sense of separation and it is this separation that creates our suffering, pain and disease. We prefer our false self or separate ego self to our real self because we do not really want to face our real self. World Psychology is suggesting that when real selves get together they grow most magnificently toward the light of beautiful sweet and tender love.

We can change the world with total communication
                                                                           Sharon Sullivan

sircus@worldpsychology.info