How does your communication style affect relationships?

Intimacy and Relationships, Self-Development

Communication Styles in Relationships

Communication is the cornerstone of any healthy relationship, whether it’s with a partner, family, friends, or colleagues. How we express ourselves significantly impacts how others perceive us and, ultimately, the quality of our relationships. From being assertive to passive-aggressive, each communication style has its benefits and challenges. By understanding your default style, you can take steps to improve how you connect with others and navigate conflicts more effectively.

In this article, we’ll explore four main communication styles—aggressive, passive-aggressive, passive, and assertive — offering practical strategies for cultivating healthier interactions.

While childhood experiences play a big role in how you relate to others, you can develop new communication skills at any age if you’re willing to practice. This article explores how these traits may show up in ourselves and others, and what it looks like to move towards to healthy communication styles.

Aggressive Communication Style

Aggression in communication often involves prioritising personal needs over others, sometimes to the point of intimidation or disrespect. While it may be a natural response to perceived threats, aggressive communication can harm relationships and create an unsafe environment for others.

Common Traits of Aggressive Communicators:

One-sided respect: Expecting respect without reciprocating it.
Projection: Blaming others for personal flaws or mistakes.
Character attacks: Using insults or judgmental comments to overpower others.
Boundary violations: Disregarding others’ rights to speak, say no, or leave.

Every individual, consciously or unconsciously, responds to learned and/or perceived threats through various forms of communication. Depending on the individuals’ learned experience, aggression may be an acceptable or even an expected way to communicate when in conflict, where another person may experience aggressiveness as a lead up to threatening behaviour.

Leaders who don’t listen will eventually be surrounded by people who have nothing to say.

ANDY STANLEY

In recent times, being aggressive to the point of emotional, physical or psychological abuse has become punishable by law in the UK under the Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 – Controlling or Coercive Behaviour in an Intimate or Family Relationship. If you find your communication style or behaviour is affecting the lives of others in their work, the home or friendship groups, it’s advisable to speak with a professional if certain behaviours around others is causing serious harm to these areas in life.

How to Improve Direct Communication:

Use “I” statements instead of “you” accusations (e.g., “I feel frustrated when…”).
Focus on finding solutions rather than assigning blame.
Practice pausing and breathing before responding during heated moments.
Be open to feedback and willing to repair damage caused by aggressive behavior.

If the only way to get needs met is to intimidate others, you may find friends and family not returning your calls or avoiding conversation altogether. Even if aggressiveness was normalised growing up, feelings of loneliness maybe a sign for needed change.

Passive-Aggressive Communication Style

Passive-aggressiveness often stems from difficulty expressing needs or fears of direct confrontation. While it might seem like a subtle or less confrontational approach, it can erode trust and lead to resentment.

Common Traits of Passive-Aggressive Communicators

Playing the victim: Blaming others instead of taking accountability.
Relying on guilt: Using emotional manipulation to achieve goals.
Avoiding directness: Preferring half-truths or vague statements.

It’s much more effective to learn how to ask for what you want simply and directly. Manipulating or being passive-aggressive towards others can work in the short-term, but it’s a poor long-term strategy.

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

BUDDHA

Understanding these traits will make it easier to recognise them in yourself and others. If you have any of these qualities, it will be more challenging to have healthy or balanced relationships if one person is resentful towards another for not being fair in their needs for the sake of pleasing the other.

Tips for Improving Connection:

Practice being honest and direct about your needs.
Take responsibility for your feelings and actions without blaming others.
Seek win-win solutions that respect both parties’ needs.
Work on building self-awareness and healthy conflict-resolution skills.

If you find manipulation is a go to strategy, understand that it’s not necessary. If the only way to get your needs met is to manipulate others, you’re not hanging around with the right crowd.

Work on yourself to remove any tendencies you might have towards ‘points scoring’ in disagreements or wanting to intimidate others. This might even require seeking professional help, especially if you find it challenging to let go of resentment or picked up habits in environments that normalised manipulation at the expense of others.

Passive Communication Style

Passivity in communication often arises from a fear of rejection or conflict. While being passive may help avoid confrontation in the short term, it can lead to suppressed emotions, low self-esteem, and unbalanced relationships over time.

Common Traits of Passive Communicators:

Defaulting to “OK”: Agreeing to avoid conflict, even at personal expense.
Suppressed emotions: Bottling up feelings to maintain peace.
Avoidance: Evading difficult conversations altogether.
Keeping small: Uncomfortable with the sense of taking up space.

Understanding these traits will make it easier to recognise them in yourself and others. If you have any of these qualities, it will be more challenging to have mutual benefits in communication or balance in relationships.

Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love.

JULIAN ASSANGE

Tips in communication to meet your needs to help others understand:

Start small by expressing preferences in low-stakes situations.
Rehearse assertive responses to common scenarios.
Learn to say “no” respectfully and without guilt.
Recognise your needs are as important as anyone else’s and communicate them accordingly.

To build a healthy sense of self that doesn’t rely on the validation or permission from others will nurture balanced relationships and self-confidence. Practicing assertive communication styles can let others know where your boundaries and needs are, so it’s not decided for you and for you to be OK with other peoples decision to respond negatively or go test boundaries somewhere else.

It’s never too late to let people know what you will no longer tolerate in how they treat you or communicate, but be warned, others may not like this change of not making decisions for you but it will be the start of a healthier relationship and balance for yourself in your life.

Assertive Communication Style

Assertive communication strikes the perfect balance between respecting others’ needs and advocating for your own. This style fosters collaboration, trust, and mutual respect in relationships.

Common Traits of Assertive Communicators:

Healthy boundaries: Clearly expressing limits without being aggressive.
Confidence: Standing up for yourself with calmness and clarity.
Openness: Willingness to listen and engage respectfully, even in disagreements.
Non-verbal alignment: Using relaxed body language and a steady tone to reinforce your words.

A famous study by Professor Mehrabian believes that there are three core elements in the effective face-to-face communication of emotions or attitudes that are divided into the 7-38-55 rule. 7% of the meaning through spoken word, 55% communication through nonverbal behaviour (facial expressions, body language) and 38% through tone of voice.

Do what you want and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.

DR SEUSS

How to Maintain Assertiveness:

Use positive “I” statements to share your perspective (e.g., “I feel valued when you…”).
Stay solution-focused rather than dwelling on problems.
Practice active listening to understand the other person’s point of view.
Recognize that saying “no” can be an act of self-respect, not rejection.

Why Your Communication Style Matters

Your communication style shapes how others perceive you and how conflicts are resolved. While childhood experiences and learned behaviors influence these styles, it’s never too late to develop healthier communication habits. Whether you aim to move from passive-aggressive tendencies to assertiveness or address aggressive tendencies, the journey begins with awareness and practice.

Final Thoughts

Effective communication is key to building and maintaining fulfilling relationships. By identifying your communication style and actively working to refine it, you can foster deeper connections, reduce misunderstandings, and create a safe space for yourself and others.

If you’re ready to explore your communication patterns and make meaningful changes, consider working with a professional coach or counselor who can support you in this transformative journey.

Learning from Intimacy

Intimacy and Relationships

Our relationships teach us a lot about ourselves, our needs and attachments formed to those around us. Relational attachment styles can be formed to protect ourselves, to adapt with social situations or connect deeply with another. Exploring what intimacy brings up emotionally, mentally and physically highlights areas that cause inner conflict and that opportunity to re-experience intimacy in other ways.

Types of intimacy

With the many relations we form or are born into, be it with family, classmates or community – we learn from our initial attachments which ‘type of person’ is safe, and how to respond when there isn’t a sense of safety. Here we can explore, from a space of retrospective, the types of intimacy patterns we develop over time with notice areas that brings up pleasant or unpleasant judgements or feelings towards ourselves, others or the idea of intimacy in general.

Types of intimacy can be experienced in the;

Physical Intimacy: Proximity of presence and comfort levels with touch.
Emotional Intimacy: Attunement of emotional wellbeing and another person’s feelings.
Intellectual Intimacy: Sharing thoughts, ideas, beliefs and opinions.
Experiential intimacy: Connecting through subtle awareness, interactions and spiritual experiences.

When noticing pleasant or unpleasant judgements or feelings to the various areas of intimacy above, the opportunity to reflect…

“In what context am I experiencing this?”

“Is this only to towards others or only towards myself?”

“When and with whom did I decide this was so?”

Context

With family or community narratives around intimacy, this may or may not be influenced by the broader cultural environment we find ourselves in. Television, films and social media posts may display aspiring or conflicting views that brings about a sense of uncertainty or frequent comparisons to others and how we ‘should’ be experiencing intimacy.

The developmental factors add another dimension to the context in which people may form a sense of self when responding to distressing intimate relations formed early in life. The ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study highlights the effects of early childhood experiences have on a person’s health and well-being in the long run and the behaviours that develop from such pro-longed experiences.

These ‘templates’ formed, whether it’s generalised as ‘all women’ or ‘all men’, ‘authority figure’ or [insert occupation here]. When we apply this template by default on entering a new work environment or interaction, it could be useful to notice when feeling uneasy with someone, is it something they did or said, or if they remind you of someone or bring up a memory from another time?

Attachments

British psychologist John Bowlby was the first attachment theorist, describing attachment as a “lasting psychological connectedness between human beings.” in his work ‘Attachment and Loss'(1969). With this initial focus of developmental needs and safety, it wasn’t until Psychologists Mary Ainsworth’s experiment of The Strange Situation (footage of this video can be found here), that emotional connection was also considered as an important factor of attachment styles. The experiment observes of how babies respond to being left by their mothers, and in a room alone with a stranger and how the babies respond when their mother returns.

Studies continue on how the extent of attachments in early life affect human development, behaviours and defence mechanisms as well as looking at adult attachment based studies with emotional dependencies, self-worth and behaviours when it comes to dating or in marriage counselling. Most recently, the attachment styles originally known as ‘Secure, Anxious & Avoidant’, have further developed in areas of these emotional connection styles:

Secure.
Anxious-Preoccupied.
Ambivalent.
Dismissive-Avoidant.
Fearful-Avoidant
Disorganised

These may change over time as people develop, move into different environments or relationships. We may notice when an attachment style show up differently for various people. Neither are good nor bad, it’s only when an attachment style is a barrier to fully wanting to connect with another that people may seek therapy to find ways to adapt and explore alternative ways of dealing with the unpleasant thoughts, feelings or behaviours that are acting out in situations out of context.

With so many resources available, I’d recommend starting with this book from Diane Poole Heller, who looks at the ways to create healthy, intimate relationships when healing from past traumas or adverse experiences.

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“We are fundamentally designed to heal.
Even if our childhood is less than ideal, our secure attachment system is biologically programmed in us, and our job is to simply find out what’s interfering with it – and learn what we can do to make those secure tendencies more dominant.”

Dr. Diane Poole Heller

Author of 'The Power of Attachment: How to Create Deep and Lasting Intimate Relationships'

Providing Comfort in Tough Times

Counselling, Intimacy and Relationships, Life Transitions

When life hands you a tough situation, you may need to lean on other people for comfort. But what if you're the person that needs to provide the shoulder? It can feel challenging to know the right things to say or do when there's a sense to be strong for the other person.

How you provide comfort will vary depending on who you’re comforting and what they’ve gone through. However, there are universal tips to keep in mind when you’re supporting someone during a time of need.

Here are some strategies that can help you provide much-needed comfort to others:

Attune to them. When someone approaches you for comfort, chances are that they’re not asking you for your advice. More likely, they just need someone to be there for their emotional needs. Avoid trying to solve their problems unless you’re asked for advice. In that case, you’re free to provide any advice that you have. Asking “what do you need right now? Comfort, advice, or anything else” is a great way to tune in with what’s needed in that moment.

Listen well. It’s always a good idea to develop your listening skills. A part of being a good listener is truly striving to understand what the other person is saying or going through. Remember that you can provide a certain degree of comfort just by lending an open ear to the person suffering.

Offer unconditional help. Sometimes it’s comforting just to know that the other person is there. Tell the person that’s suffering that they can discuss their problems with you any time they need a lift to help them get through.

Give a hug. It’ll certainly vary depending on the relationship that you have with the person you’re comforting, but you can provide physical comfort with a hug. Hugs simply make people feel better! The human touch can melt the soul and warm them with comfort.

Be understanding. You might not know what it’s like to go through the tough time that you’re helping with, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t strive to understand. Do your best to try and understand where this person is coming from.

Understanding Grief

If the person you’re helping is dealing with loss, you’ll also be supporting them with their grief. Grief is a natural process to go through when people are facing a loss, due to natural disasters or sudden and unexpected change. If you gain a better understanding of their grief, you may know what to expect should it ever happen for yourself or someone else and feel able to respond in an empathetic manner, from a place of understanding.

The response to loss can show up in the following ways, and not necessarily in this linear order or intentisity;

Process of grief

The Stages of Grief

As outlined in the Kübler–Ross Grief model above, grief is expressed in different stages and different people spend varying amounts of time on each stage. Sometimes the stages aren’t even expressed in the same order.

Grief usually starts with the initial shock of the loss and often times denial accompanies this distress. Then numbness, pain and/or anger sets in, which may last for a long time. Sometimes depression also sets in before the person journeys into acceptance.

While you don’t want to push a person through the stages too fast, you do want to do whatever you can to help them along to acceptance. When they’re angry, be an open ear and try to reassure them their feelings are valid and acknowledge their subjective experience must be a difficult place to be in that moment. Help them see their problem or loss from a different perspective or possiblities if you pick up on it being appropriate.

Depression can be difficult to help with since the person tends to lose interest in the world around them. Your presence and willingness to be a support guide can make a difference. Show them that the world hasn’t given up on them, so they shouldn’t give up either. With your support, and the help of a professional, the process will find a way that works best for the person and their understanding of what’s happening for them.

When someone you know is going through a rough time, these tips are a basic guide in ways to console your loved one. The comfort you bring them may be the one thing that helps them make it through to better days.