Hearing Loss LIVE! Talks What We Learned: Communication Boundaries

We like to close each month with a short on what we learned. This month our Let's Talk Tuesday was a gold mine!

Be Present as brought to us by Cynthia Greenfield. It is the root of setting communication boundaries that will stick.

Join us next month when we bring in the role our hearing partners play. Sign up today at Hearing Loss LIVE!

Transcript

Julia: Good morning, and welcome to Hearing Loss LIVE! This month has been about setting boundaries of communication and your hearing loss and your hearing partner and how those kind of work together. We like to end our monthly series with kind of what we learned what we feel, can help others what others taught us. And this month is no different. We hope you like, subscribe and are sharing our content and enjoying this series of workshops that we're putting out there. This month, we're gonna try a little different format for our close. So you'll have to tell us what you think hopefully you will reach out to us. You can reach out twist through Buzzsprout, you can reach out to us through Buy Me a Cup of Coffee, you can reach out to us through our YouTube page, many many different ways or even at our website. So we do hope you enjoy this short that goes through what we learn this month with hearing loss, communication and boundaries with Gloria Pelletier. 

Julia: Here at Hearing Loss LIVE! We often talk about how important it is to join us for our live workshops. Our live workshops are built so that we can share information with you that we have looked into for that month's topic. But it also is a place where every time we have these live workshops, we learn something new from someone else, right? Tribe is where we truly find what we need sometimes to help us understand hearing loss and communication boundaries. This is what we got from our talk about it Tuesday, "Let's Talk" Workshop that happened this month.

Chelle: The other thing I thought we'd talk about for this podcast would be how Cynthia told us about

Gloria: Staying present. 

Chelle: Yes. She says, "when you're hard of hearing you're forcing yourself and others to be present." And I thought that was so profound to me. Because, yes, we have to stop and focus and give you our attention. They have to stop and focus and give us our attention.

Julia: Are we emulating what we want? Are we being present when they come to us and say I need to talk to you? Are we being present-- You guys talked about this all the time? Sometimes you forget, because you live with hearing people that you don't focus on the rules on yourself. How do we change that? And if you swear to god, you're doing that and the person still won't change? Well, then you need to seek help, right? There's something deeper than the hearing loss that we can't cover. You need to get ,you know, that's your, then you're --Are you in or are you out? Are you in? And this is how it's going to be and I'm fine with it, because I'm just going to keep working on myself. Or is it time to pack bags and I'm moving on, not because I need a new relationship, but because I need a new relationship with myself.

Gloria: That's important.

So

Gloria: Write that down. 

Julia: Yeah, I-- (talking over each other).

Chelle: I had this myself. I had this problem myself the same exact thing where I was trying to tell Ken something. I felt like was pretty serious. And I sat down and the first words out of his mouth were "uh-oh." [laughter] And then I was like, "well, you know, I, I want to talk to you about something. Can you put your phone down?" He was, he was making a comment on a dog picture. A friend's dog picture. You know. [sighing noise] and he sets it down. But halfway through, he comes back and picks it up. And, and I again, it's like, "can you put that away?" And so it is an issue and it is not being present with each other.

Julia: One of the things we found was a common thread when it comes to boundaries is do you emulate what it is that you want someone else to do? Because truly the only people we can change at the end of the day is ourselves. Here's some thoughts we had about that.

Julia: If you expect everybody else to change and cater to you, you're still going to be miserable. You want better communication outcomes, you both gotta practice it--

Chelle: Model the behavior

Julia: You got to model it with everybody you meet. You've got to decide when is it relationship and when is it hearing loss? And let's stop blaming everything on the hearing loss. If you want better communication tools, right?

Gloria: We expect them to come into the room to talk to us. But people are kind of like, if you have to do that, if I have to do it, so do you. And so he's right, I will talk to Chelle from the other side of the room, because I have hearing partners. And so I think that that's the one thing that he said that I just kept zeroing in on and I thought, you know, maybe we need to also be doing exactly what we asked other people to do.

Chelle: We got-- we brought this up, but the other day with this friend here on Tuesday, and he says, "well, how many times you talk to me from another room?" I said, "but I always go, oh, and I go into the other room don't I?" He couldn't say anything.

Julia: And that's what it takes, right? I'm following the rule. You're, you're following the rule. I'm talking to Denton from the kitchen with the water running, and he says, "are you talking to me?" I don't earn the right to be mad. [dog noises in background] I chose to be in a position whether he has a hearing loss or not to have a difficult communication, right. So I know how to fix that. That's the difference. But on the same end, he will do it too. And if I say, are you talking to me, he knows he needs to stop what he's doing or whatever or you know, we've just done it for so long. So part of me is jaded. Like, like when people say I've asked every day and they never do it. Are you doing it? 

Gloria: I don't know the answers to these things. I just go back to the basic concepts. How respectful are you? If I'm being respectful? I don't get in trouble.

Chelle: Demystify it for me. Tell me what you need. And this is communication boundaries or needs or however you want to put it.

Gloria: But let's see, I wanted to have a [new] relationship. That's gonna be a tough conversation. 

Julia: Let me ask you why?

Why is it a tough conversation in a new relationship? This is where I struggled because I followed these rules for so many years. I sometimes don't understand the struggle. Does that make sense?

Gloria: Absolutely. 

Julia: Is that dumb? 

Gloria: No. Here's why. It, here's why it works with you. I think you were in human resources, you have a level of respect that you communicate with. I think there are people who are out there that don't even understand that's part of the world. But also what I've noticed is as much as people don't want to believe it to be true, that there's still that old stigma that if you have a hearing loss, you're not too bright. And I run into it all the time, Julia. And it always surprises them. When I can verbalize more than "huh?" [laughter] And so as much as we would like to believe it doesn't count it does. And people have that in their brain. And I've actually seen people walk away thinking that's just too much trouble. That's just too much trouble to communicate with her. And it really is maybe how we present it, Julia. Because if we present it, you know, I like the old manners. Stand in front of me. That was the big deal, right? When I was a kid. Don't chew with your gum in your mouth-- don't talk with your gum in your mouth. And maybe it's because we're approaching that wrong you know, how did you approach it?

Julia: I don't know.

I do know, in my opinion, the more aggressive you approach me with something or force it on me, the more likely and this is personal right? This me as a human, the more likely I'm going to put my feet in the mud and do this at ya-so

Gloria: I think that's all three of us.

Julia: You know, I have to sit with it for a minute on certain things. I always have, you know, sometimes-- coming at me aggressive, I'm not going to be able to verbally communicate with you. I'm going to shut down.

Gloria: You get mad at somebody who's crossed your boundary. You go right up to getting mad about it, and then you stop. And then you internalize it. And she's, Chelle's going yes. And you take it on. And how much is that because you weren't sure what you heard? And people made you feel like it might be your problem, because you didn't hear it right?

Chelle: Oh, that's my first husband. That even happens now time to time.

Gloria: So I'm going to tell them, they're making me mad, and why they're making me mad and how I feel. I feel like a second class citizen, I'm not gonna accept that from you. I would say, in the past, I would just stop and just eat it right? And, of course, that's probably why I have a heart problem, but I would just eat it. And now I'm going, I'm going to say my truth. You guys have been saying yours. So, you know, I'm gonna say mine. And and that happens with a lot of hearing loss people. Even with grief, we just kind of swallow it. Because how? And I like Julia, that you put it that way, because I'm actually doing what you're talking about, I take concepts and see how it happens with hearing loss. Gaslighting is a is a thing that people use to get control. And so they don't have to take responsibility. So if I'm, if I have a boundary, and I want you to respect that boundary, and you don't, and then they say to you, "oh, you just didn't hear it, right." I heard that so many times in my life. Now I say, then it's your responsibility to make sure I understood you. And that kind of stops it because communication is two way responsibility. It's not one way. So it's, it is an easy Julia. And I really appreciate your viewpoint because I think that because my therapist has always been saying, Oh, you make everything about your hearing when this is just how human beings are. Then after she saw the podcast [Hearing Loss and Greif], she's like, Could this be part of your hearing loss?

Chelle: Well, that's good that she was educated on it.

Gloria: Oh, I just wanted you guys to know that, that it, it changed her perspective, and some other people who watched it. So if we could change one person's perspective, for me, I have achieved. Because that one person will go to another person and another person, another person. So um, but boundaries is a little more complicated than people realize. I think. I think it takes a lot more respect than people realize.

Julia: I think so too. And yet, do we forget that we set boundaries, because we have a hearing loss and we're so consumed with worrying about the hearing loss that we think we can't set boundaries? Are we disassociating a boundary setting and the hearing loss and so busy doing, you know separating, versus I have a hearing loss, so this is the boundary for me to understand you, which is what I want to do. So that our communication can

be better.

And how that looks for both sides. Keeping in mind you can only change yourself, right? The only person you truly at heart can change is yourself. You can emulate what you'd like those around you will pick it up, especially if they do want to communicate with you. But it's not going to fix all the boundary issues as long as we keep separating the two 

Gloria: Yes, keep going--

Julia: points but. Yeah, I'm trying to flesh it out in my head. And I think some of it is again, we don't like to say the word boundary. Right. 

Julia: We hope you enjoyed this short podcast, we are going to do it a little different. I know I usually say goodbye at the end, but we're going to close with a quote we found about communication and boundaries. We hope this helps you have better communication boundaries with your hearing partners, whatever they look like. And next month, our workshop on Tuesday, April 4th, 6pm Mountain Time, we're going to introduce what we think about hearing partners in this journey with hearing loss. So we hope you are able to join us look forward to seeing you soon.

Chelle: "Pay attention when people react with anger and hostility to your boundaries. You have found their edge where you their respect for you ends."