RELATIONAL PATTERNS

Supportive and Defensive Climates

The orientations of individuals within relationships and their patterns of communicating with one another create the climate of communication. Climates and individual behaviors can be characterized along a continuum from highly supportive to highly defensive. Each statement above is a comment on how supportive or defensive the speaker perceives another person—and the relationship overall—to be at a particular point in time.

There are a number of communication behaviors that tent to create and maintain defensive climates within relationship.

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• Evaluating: Judging other’s behavior
• Controlling: Striving to control or manage other’s behavior.
•  Developing strategy: Planning techniques, hidden agendas, and moves to use in relationship, as you might in a chess game.
• Remaining neutral: Remaining aloof and remote from other’s feelings and concerns.
• Asserting superiority: Seeing and expressing yourself as more worthy than others.
• Conveying certainty: Assuming and acting as though you are absolutely certain in your knowledge and perceptions.

In contrast, the following behaviors are seen as contributing to a supportive climate:

• Describing: Describing rather than judging or evaluating the other person’s behavior
• Maintaining a problem orientation: Focusing on specific problems to be solved.
•  Being spontaneous: Dealing with situations as they develop, without a hidden agenda or “master plan”
• Empathizing: Looking at things from the other person’s viewpoint.
• Asserting equality: Seeing and presenting ourselves as equal to others.
• Conveying provisionalism: Maintaining a degree of uncertainty and tentativeness in our thoughts and beliefs.

Dependencies and Counterdependencies  

The dynamics of dependency and counterdependency are prevalent in many relationships at various points in time. A dependency relationship exists when one individual in a relationship who is highly dependent on another for support, money, work, leadership or guidance generalizes this dependency to other facets of the relationship.

When this occurs, a dynamic is set in motion that can have farreaching impact and consequences for the indifiduals as well as relationship.whether people are discussing politics, sex, or religion, whether they are trying to decide where to eat or where to live, the dependent person comes to take cues from the other, on whom he or she has learned to rely.

Progressive and Regressive Spirals

Progressive spiral is when the actions and reactions of individuals in a relationship are consistent with their goals and needs, the relationship progresses with continual increase in the level of harmony and satisfaction. Regressive spiral is when each exchange contributes to a progressive decrease in satisfaction, in harmony. There is increasing discomfort, distance, frustration, and dissatisfaction for everyone involved. 

The spirals that characterize any relationship alternate between progressive and regressive. However, in order for a relationship to maintain strength, momentum, and continuity, the progressive phases must outweigh and/or outlast the regressive periods.

FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE PATTERNS

Stage of Relationship and Context

Naturally people meeting each other for the first time and interact in a different manner different than people who have lived together for several years. This patterns are different and also have varies depending on the context in the conversation, and the place. For example, people who meeting in library talking about lesson, books, poems, writers, literature etc, but people who meeting in the a bar or café, they’re talking about their experience like what they did last weekend, holiday, and anything else but informal. That’s why it has a very different context and needs.

In a relationship to the next level and make a permanent commitment, knowing which relationship stage you're in will help you determine if things are headed in the right direction. While not all relationships go through every specific stage, most relationships can be broken into the five different stages described below, each one displaying differentiating characteristics. In this article, you'll be able to explore the current stage of your relationship.

Interpersonal Needs and Styles

Often noted as  especially important in this way are the interpersonal needs for affection, inclusion, and control. We each develop our own specific needs relative to control, affection, and inclusion, as we do in others areas. Interpersonal style also plays a key role in shaping the communication patterns that emerge in relationship.as discussed earlier,some people are more operating in an outgoing ,highly verbal manner in their dealing with others, while others characteristically adopt a more passive and restrained interpersonal style, due either to preference or apprehension about speaking in social situations.

Power

Interpersonal communication within relationship is also shaped by the distribution of power. Where one individual is employed by the other, for instance, the relationship is asymmetrical, or uneven, in terms of the actual power each has in the job situation.

In peer-peer, colleague-colleague, or other relationships of this type, there is the potential for symmetry. Where this possibility exists, interpersonal communication creates rather than perpetuates any dependencies that result.

Conflict

The presence of conflict—“an incompatibility of interest between two or more people giving rise to struggles between them”—can have a major impact on communication dynamics.

Sillers finds that there are three general communication strategies used in conflict resolution:

·      Passive-indirect methods:  Avoiding the conflict-producing situation and people.

·      Distributive methods: Maximizing one’s own gain and the other’s losses

·      Integrative methods: Achieving mutually positive outcomes for both individuals and the relationship.