Communications Process
The communication process is used in every kind of relationship. It could be
in a friendship, an acquantance, a significant other, a family, and many more. I
found out these processes can be harder than you think three years ago. My
father got remarried and I was forced to become up close and personal with
complete strangers, my stepfamily. The communication process language in my
stepfamily describes the concepts and ideas of the transactional communication
model and the social penetration theory.
The transactional communication
model is used daily in my household. Although, the messages are not always
successfully sent nor received along the channels due to major amounts of noise.
It is hard to have a shared meaning when you have five strong, new opinions in a
family. For instance, my stepsister might be trying to tell me her side of a
story but my stepbrother will interrupt the message with external and semantic
noise. Therefore, enabling me to decode correctly and send appropriate feedback
to reach a shared meaning. This happens a lot in my stepfamily. We have "family
meetings" that are supposed to help us listen to one another and drown
unnecessary noises. These meetings are not as triumphant as they could be
because we all have difficulty with self-disclosure. I personally find myself
withholding, masking, not displaying, and not describing my feelings with my
stepfamily. We are all just getting to know each other so, I think, we are still
in the sharing of biographical data and personal ideas. I know in particular,
with my stepsister, that I can not achieve the level of sharing my feelings any
time soon. I believe that we both messed up and went against the "guidelines for
appropriate self-disclosure" because we opened up too much, too fast without
having full trust or knowing that it would be reciprocated. On the other hand I
have a wonderful relationship with my father. He and I express our thoughts and
feelings openly about everything. It wasn’t always so open though. Like most
men, my dad had trouble disclosing his feelings. Fortunately, he and I overcame
that obstacle together, because I wasn’t good at it either. It took a lot of
time and effort to get our relationship to where it is today but it was worth
it.
The communication process is not yet perfected in my stepfamily but
then again is it perfected with any relationship? Who’s to say if it is or
isn’t, as long as it works for the individual. I hope one day that everyone in
my stepfamily will be able to reach the point where we can disclose ourselves to
each other. Until then, we will go on with our cycle of sending, receiving,
encoding, decoding, and just trying to get along.
The communication
process is used in every kind of relationship. It could be in a friendship, an
acquantance, a significant other, a family, and many more. I found out these
processes can be harder than you think three years ago. My father got remarried
and I was forced to become up close and personal with complete strangers, my
stepfamily. The communication process language in my stepfamily describes the
concepts and ideas of the transactional communication model and the social
penetration theory.
The transactional communication model is used daily
in my household. Although, the messages are not always successfully sent nor
received along the channels due to major amounts of noise. It is hard to have a
shared meaning when you have five strong, new opinions in a family. For
instance, my stepsister might be trying to tell me her side of a story but my
stepbrother will interrupt the message with external and semantic noise.
Therefore, enabling me to decode correctly and send appropriate feedback to
reach a shared meaning. This happens a lot in my stepfamily. We have "family
meetings" that are supposed to help us listen to one another and drown
unnecessary noises. These meetings are not as triumphant as they could be
because we all have difficulty with self-disclosure. I personally find myself
withholding, masking, not displaying, and not describing my feelings with my
stepfamily. We are all just getting to know each other so, I think, we are still
in the sharing of biographical data and personal ideas. I know in particular,
with my stepsister, that I can not achieve the level of sharing my feelings any
time soon. I believe that we both messed up and went against the "guidelines for
appropriate self-disclosure" because we opened up too much, too fast without
having full trust or knowing that it would be reciprocated. On the other hand I
have a wonderful relationship with my father. He and I express our thoughts and
feelings openly about everything. It wasn’t always so open though. Like most
men, my dad had trouble disclosing his feelings. Fortunately, he and I overcame
that obstacle together, because I wasn’t good at it either. It took a lot of
time and effort to get our relationship to where it is today but it was worth
it.
The communication process is not yet perfected in my stepfamily but
then again is it perfected with any relationship? Who’s to say if it is or
isn’t, as long as it works for the individual. I hope one day that everyone in
my stepfamily will be able to reach the point where we can disclose ourselves to
each other. Until then, we will go on with our cycle of sending, receiving,
encoding, decoding, and just trying to get along.