Relationship Series: Communication Recap

Unlock the Secrets to Healthy, Honest Communication That Transforms Your Relationships

Are you tired of misunderstandings, hurt feelings, or feeling unheard in your relationships? Discover the proven principles that elevate your communication from surface-level to deeply authentic. This episode unveils practical strategies to speak truthfully, take people at their word, set clear boundaries, and listen to understand—not just respond. Whether you're navigating marriage, family, or friendships, these insights will help you build trust and connection that stand the test of time.

You’ll learn why honesty isn’t just about avoiding lies—it's about sharing your true feelings with love and grace. Christy Dragotta breaks down how to communicate expectations clearly, handle boundary violations gracefully, and the importance of listening with the intent to understand. She shares powerful frameworks like taking people at face value and responding from a place of love instead of defensiveness or assumptions. Discover how to turn conversations about tough issues like boundary setting, expectations, and conflicts into opportunities for unity and growth.

We break down the importance of addressing wounds from the past before engaging in difficult conversations and how to use prayer to root out pain that can distort your current communication. Christy emphasizes that effective communication requires both speaking and listening with purpose—listening to truly understand rather than just to reply. Plus, she reveals how seeking wise counsel and aligning your words with God’s love can prevent misunderstandings and foster peace.

Ignoring these principles risks ongoing conflict, resentment, and disconnection—leaving your closest relationships vulnerable to misinterpretation and harm. But by applying these biblical, practical tools, you can create relationships rooted in truth, respect, and love. Whether you’re in a marriage, parenting, or friendship scenario, this episode offers clear actions to improve your communication instantly.

Perfect for anyone eager to deepen their relationships through honesty, boundaries, and active listening. Tune in and learn how to communicate in a way that heals, uplifts, and transforms your most important connections. Your authentic, loving relationships start with the words you choose—and the ears you open.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey guys, I'm so glad you're with me today. In this relationship series, I've shared a lot of stories and I want to continue to share a lot of stories, but that makes the episodes longer. And so I want to pop on and do a recap because I don't want the main points to get buried underneath all of the stories, but I also want you to have those stories as I share them because it just gives you something to put your hands around and it helps you to imagine yourself in certain scenarios in your life and take these and apply what I'm actually saying. So this is going to be a quick recap of everything that I have talked about so far. We're talking about healthy communication. That's our first piece in relationships is to make sure that as we communicate, we are doing it in healthy ways and ways that are not false and not forced. The very first part of that is to be honest. And of course, I'm talking about not lying. That's just if you want to have good relationships, you don't lie. But more than not lying, what I'm trying to communicate here is when you are speaking, you're not saying what you think people want to hear. You are saying what's actually true. And you can say it with love and with grace, but you need to be speaking truthfully and not what you think somebody else wants to hear. Because a lot of times when you're perceiving what you think somebody wants you to say, it's not even true. And for example, let me just give you a quick one. Oh hey, are you gonna be at the movies tonight? We were gonna go with the group, and yada yada. Oh yeah, I'm gonna be there. And you know you have no intention of going, and you're just gonna make up a lame excuse later why you didn't. Just be honest from the get-go. No, I'm not gonna be able to make it tonight. And you don't have to over-explain. This is something I am terrible about. I will overexplain because I really don't want to hurt people's feelings. So I want them to understand if I failed to send that text message back or if I thought I answered something but I didn't, and now it's been four days and it was really important. I want to over-explain all the things that were happening in my day that caused me to miss it. Don't do that. You don't need to over-explain. If somebody wants to ask you, then you can give them the explanation. But sometimes when we overexplain, we're just making it more complicated for everybody, and they don't really care about the details. They just want your true answer. So, no, I don't think I'm gonna make it tonight. We can have our reasons and we don't have to explain them to people. So I didn't really talk about that. So I'm calling this a recap, but this is just bonus information, okay? Um, so we're gonna say things that are truthful, we're not gonna say what people want to hear, we're gonna speak the truth. The next thing is you take people at their word. If somebody says to you, oh yeah, I really can't wait to do this thing with you, then you just take them at their word. You don't read things into it, you don't try to say, Well, they said this, but I think what they meant is this. Take people at face value. If somebody says, Oh yeah, I want to bring you a meal today, and da-da-da-da, okay, that's great. I'm taking them at their word. I'm going to tell them that sounds wonderful. We normally eat around six. What did you want to bring? But if they're just saying that to be kind, that's on them. If they are saying it to be kind but they don't mean it, it's not really kind. It's just trying to look kind. And so that's what I'm talking about with this honest communication. You're gonna take people for what they say to be true, and then also you're gonna be the kind of person that what you say is what you actually mean. And so they don't have to wonder, oh, is she just saying that to be nice? Or is she just saying that because she's gonna want something later? We aren't going to assume that anyone is communicating in such a way to manipulate us. But if they are, then when that comes out, we deal with it that way. Oh, I'm sorry. When you said this, I thought that's really what you meant. But it seems like from what you're saying now, you are offended that I took you at your word. I mean, we can be honest with people when we're just trying to pretend and everybody's just going around trying to pretend, nobody knows what's true and what's not. So we have to speak truthfully and we have to be a person of our own word. And then if somebody calls us out on it and we said something that we didn't mean, we need to be quick to admit, you know what, you're right. I did say that. And looking back, I just wasn't trying to hurt your feelings. And I'm sorry because I should have just been honest. Another thing is if you have expectations, voice them. Don't just let people live underneath a bunch of broken expectations that you have. There are many programs, including AA, that say expectations are just premeditated resentments. And so if you have expectations on somebody, the least you can do is to communicate them to those people. And so let's just use that example that we used in the first communication episode. If you have a newborn baby, you have to communicate what things are okay for people to do and what things are not okay for people to do. And it's your responsibility to see that people hear your expectations. Now, you can't control what anybody does. So if somebody does not do the things that you're asking them to do and they can't respect your boundaries, then you just don't give them access to your baby anymore. That is your right. If you have communicated clearly your expectations and your boundaries, and somebody is choosing to dishonor your boundaries, then the next thing you do is communicate again, hey, we said not to do this, we noticed that you've done this, what's going on here? And maybe at that point they go, Oh my gosh, I completely forgot you said that or something else. And again, you're gonna take them at their word and you're gonna say, Well, this is the boundary, please honor it. If another time they do the same thing, let's say you've just asked them not to kiss your child on the face and they did that, and then you you're gonna confront them and you're gonna say, Hey, you did this, and we asked you not to do this. Help me understand why that's hard or why you did that, and then they have the opportunity to speak back to it. If legitimately they just forgot or they didn't hear you say that in the beginning, okay, but now you've had a discussion about it, you know they know, so you move forward with the understanding you have this information now. If they continue to dishonor your boundary, you just set a new boundary, and that boundary looks like until the baby is this old, you can't be around them because you continue to kiss our child when we've asked you not to put your lips or your face near the baby. It's just it keeps everything simpler. When we're honest, when we communicate our expectations, we don't have to worry about whether someone is gonna be mad at us or not. And I know that's hard for a lot of people. It was super hard for me because I am a people pleaser and I really hate it when people are upset with me. I don't like it at all. But if I base what I say on making everybody else happy, I'm gonna be miserable. I'm never going to be living authentically who I really am because I'm constantly gonna be putting on a face to become who I think other people want me to be. So in our communication, we have got to be clear and we have got to be honest. So healthy communication does include boundaries and loving communication includes boundaries. If you're on this other side of that, right, and you don't know, let's just say you don't know where someone stands and you have all these questions that are in your mind about where someone stands about something. Ask the question. Don't try to assume, don't try to figure it out on your own. Don't ask their best friend or their cousin, okay, what do you think about this? Go directly to them and ask them. That's communication. You talk to the person, not to other people regarding that person. So you aren't trying to do recon to figure something out. You just go to them and you ask them if you have questions. Hey, I wasn't sure if I'm allowed to post pictures on Facebook of your baby. Are you letting people do that? Or is that something you don't want? If you don't know, but it's a question that comes up in your mind, just ask them. Let them answer you so that you know clearly where the boundaries are. That's just honoring other people and treating other people the way that you want to be treated, which in communication is really important to treat others like you want to be treated. If you wouldn't want somebody to say that thing to you, then you need to weigh out, is it the right thing for you to say? And that doesn't mean you don't have hard conversations because there are times you're gonna have hard conversations with people and you don't want people to say hard things to you like that. But I just mean you don't tell somebody, well, gosh, if you'd have just used your brain, blah blah blah, you don't want somebody to say that to you. Sometimes we all do things that are scatter brained. So that's what I'm talking about. Another thing I wanted to touch on real quick is that it is the responsibility of both the speaker to communicate clearly and the listener to listen to hear. And that's the part where most people struggle. We are listening to respond, we are listening and formulating what we're gonna say next or in response to that, rather than listening to hear what somebody is actually saying. And so if we're just present in the moment and not trying to skip ahead to other moments, we will listen to hear. And then we can respond appropriately. I didn't include this scripture in my original communication episode, but it's a really important scripture, so I want to put it here. And it is Proverbs 26, 12, and it says, Do you see a man who is wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him. So if you're that person that is always right in your own eyes, you're always wise in your own eyes, the Bible literally says there is more hope for a fool than for you. When we are listening to other people, listen to understand and listen to learn. And even if what they're saying you don't buy into, let's say that somebody brings another religion to me and they're gonna talk to me about this other religion, I'm not gonna have to buy into it just because I listen to understand. I want to hear and ask questions based on where they're coming from in that religion. How can we ever have conversations with people that we have differing opinions from if we don't hear what they're saying and ask questions to find out why they're saying that? Where are they coming from so that we can continue to have dialogue with somebody? I want to retouch on communicating when you're wounded because we're going back into that marriage relationship and looking at all of those things that happen so often in marriage. We get wounded and our feelings get hurt, and we are operating from a place of rejection or something that actually came from a trauma that we had from when we were younger. And it's just because we've never dealt with those wounds and those traumas, we are allowing them to speak into our marriage relationship. And so communicating when you're coming from a wounded place is important, but there are steps that are really vital to be sure that you have healthy communication and not just this wounded back and forth communication from two people who are still drowning in their past trauma. The first step in that is gonna be that you go vertical before you go horizontal. You're gonna talk to the Lord and you're gonna say, Search me and know me and show me anything inside of me that is offensive to you, Lord. And you're gonna ask, ask God the questions and search within yourself of, okay, when He said this, I'm really offended. It really hurt my feelings. Before you say, Well, that really hurt my feelings. Go inside and say, Why does that hurt me so bad? Take a pause, put yourself in time out before you get all emotional and respond in a way that is hurtful. Find out why are you feeling that way? Go back and go discover, ask yourself those questions, like why does that hurt me so bad? And just be honest with yourself. Write it down if you need to, process it out loud if you need to, but just go back and find out what is the root. So do the hard work of pausing and then going to find the root of it. Where was the first time I felt this way? Why do I feel so strongly this hurt? And maybe it's rooted in other things that have happened in your marriage. Okay, but maybe it's rooted in something that happened when you were a child and you have never resolved it. So just the best that you can, you and the Lord, have those conversations about why that hurts so bad and let the Lord filter out. He acts as that filter that shows you this is the part where you can say to him, This is what hurt about this, but this is the part you need to resolve with me. And there's a lot of our relationship issues that we need to resolve with God first. We need to ask him to show us our part. We need to ask him to reveal things that we aren't seeing so that when we're communicating with other people, we're communicating from our true self and not from this wounded child that came out of a lot of trauma. So don't let your past trauma create tension and separation in your current relationships. And it's hard, that's really hard, and it really does take work to dig in and find out. And so if you have an extensive history of trauma, find a counselor or somebody that will walk through that with you so that you can process these things, especially if you see repeated behaviors in your communication and in your relationships. We're gonna discuss that more in a different episode that is really geared toward trauma in relationships. But for now, how I want to end this recap is don't use your words to hurt other people. And in Ephesians 4.29 through 31, I'm gonna actually read the whole thing because I think it's just really beautiful. But you know, once your words are out, you can't get them back. Once you've said something painful, no matter how much you wish you could take it back, it's out there and you can't. And so it's important in communicating with people. Obviously, if you say something that is hurtful, be quick to repent, be quick to say, I am sorry, I should have never said that. But it's even better. When your emotions are high, the best thing you can do is pause and don't say anything until you know that what you're going to say is actually beneficial to be said. And so with that, I will end with Ephesians 4, 29 through 31. And it says, Don't use foul or abusive language. Let everything you say be good and helpful, so that your words will be an encouragement to those who hear them. And do not bring sorrow to God's Holy Spirit by the way you live. Remember, He has identified you as His own, guaranteeing that you will be saved on the day of redemption. Get rid of all bitterness, rage, anger, harsh words, and slander, as well as all types of evil behavior. Instead, be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgiven you. And that's the NLT, the New Living Translation. I just really love the way that it says those things. But the scriptures always tell us use your words in ways that build people up and not tearing people down. And so if that's something that's a struggle for you, I know people fast a lot of things, but maybe you need to fast your words. Maybe you need to be quiet for a time and do a lot of listening. And that can really refine you as a person. First of all, you'll learn a lot about the people around you. But second of all, it will help you to not always come at that conversation from I have something to say next, or just listening to respond. It teaches you to just be quiet. And unless you're directly asked something, you don't answer. You just listen. And that's especially important in groups. If you're in Bible study groups or if you're in a book club, listen more than you speak because we've heard this your whole life. You got two ears and one mouth, and so listen more than you speak. So that's my recap on the first part of our communication series. On the marriage part, I really wanted to recap a few things, and that looks like don't make small things big things. Okay, something like the laundry left on the floor. You know, I went into a pretty extensive dialogue on all of that with the laundry, but at the end of the day, it's a small thing, it's not a big thing. So just pick up the laundry and put it away. It doesn't hurt you to do that. I understand how it feels to ask something and have it not be listened to, but once you communicate, if he doesn't continue to do it, then you just pray and you just do it as a service to him in your marriage, which is really as a service to the Lord, and that's what the Lord says. And so I would say for husbands, maybe that looks like your wife doesn't have dinner ready when you get home from work, especially if she doesn't work outside the home. There may be some expectation that she has dinner ready by the time you get home from work. The thing with that is if she doesn't, the loving thing is not communicate every day when I come home from work. I expect that you have this and you haven't done it. Help her find out why and listen to understand why she struggles with having dinner ready and then do what you can to help. Maybe sometimes that looks like a call on your way home and say, Hey, did you have a chance to get dinner ready? If not, let me pick something up for us. Or just be proactive when you get home helping take care of the kids so that she can finish cooking the meal or just communicate about it. But in relationships, especially in marriage relationships, it is so important that you are communicating, but that you are serving one another in love. I promise you, if you're always trying to outserve the other one, the clothes on the floor are going to stop being a big issue because it's just not a big issue. So there are ways to communicate when you have expectations of your spouse, but if you see that repeatedly all that's doing is putting them under a load of pressure that they can't meet, figure out a new way in love, in service to your spouse. Figure out a new way and communicate about it. And that is where you're gonna find so much healing because there are gonna come big things in your marriage that you have to figure out your way through. There are big things, financial things. There are gonna be things that impact your family in ways that you never expected, maybe loss or different situations that come up, maybe with parents and with taking care of elderly parents or with children who struggle with addiction. You're gonna have big things come up in your marriage. So don't make the laundry and the dinner the big things. They're just not, those are not big situations to argue about and hold resentments. If those are the things that you hold petty resentments over, your marriage will not last. So you have to figure out a way to deal with it. And the best way is to do what Jesus said and look at serving your spouse like you're serving him and do everything in love. So important. Another thing I wanted to point out is you want to be more concerned about being loving than being right. And I won't belabor the point because I know that I did go into that at length too. But just be loving, don't be concerned about being right, and then remember the verse in Proverbs we talked about earlier. I do want to say this: when those big things do come up, first of all, seek the Lord together as a couple, communicate together with God on those big things because you're gonna need his help every step of the way. And the other thing that you want to make sure, you want to seek wise counsel. In Proverbs 15, 22, it says, Plans go wrong for lack of advice. Many advisors bring success. And that's the New Living Translation. But it tells you that there is wisdom in having many counselors, and so that doesn't mean you need to go find 10 different people to talk with about your marriage, but go find some wise counsel, go to leadership in your church, go to a good counselor and find out how you navigate these hard things because just the two of you who are filled with emotion and tied so closely to the relationship may not be able to get to the point of agreement on things that are really emotional without having some wise counsel and wise people speak into it. And so I would say if you are dealing with helping your elderly parent through Alzheimer's or through something that's really difficult, go find someone that has been, call your church, call your pastor, ask, do you know someone who has walked these steps before? Because I need to know how to do this, and I don't know how to do this. Always seek out people who have done it before you that you respect, and then you can have good advice on how to go forward. There are so many people who would love to share their story with you if you just ask. So seek out wise counsel when you're in those big moments because they will come, and it's imperative that you have good counselors that you can go get advice from. And then finally, we want to make sure that we are being loving and not just being right. And when we have used our words to hurt somebody or when we've been wrong in our communication, it's vital that you go back and apologize. Admit that you were wrong, say that you're sorry, admit where you failed, and concentrate more on restoring that relationship than being right. And you will be blessed in your relationships if these are principles that you will institute first in your communication, but also in your actions. So admit when you're wrong and say you're sorry. To me, communication is one of the most pivotal parts of relationships because there's communication with our words and there's communication with our actions, and there's communication with our face. And so we want to make sure that in our communication we are loving people the way that God wants us to love people because that's what He's called us to do is to love all people. People who are like us and people who are different from us, people who call themselves our friends, and people who call themselves our enemies. Our communication, even and especially with our enemies, can make a dramatic change, not just on our interpersonal relationships, but literally on our cities, our nations, and our world. If we treat others the way that we want to be treated, it will impact everything. And a huge part of that comes from our communication. So thanks for being with me today. I've enjoyed my time with you, and I look forward to seeing you next week.