Life in the eyes of Dee

     This week we were able to go into depth on communication and a little more on how it works, and how it is used within relationships. We also got to talk a little about counsels within relationships.      Communication is not just limited to the words we speak. We are never not communicating. There are different parts of communication including words, nonverbal signals and symbols, and tone of voice. I learned some interesting statistics about communication during one of our class periods- that is that only 14% of a message that we are getting comes from the actual words that are said. 35% of the message comes from the tone of voice that is used with the words, and then a whomping 51% comes from the nonverbal stuff. There is a process of receiving information in communication. The first part of it is when we ourselves have a thought or feeling that we wish to convey to someone else. Then we take that thought or feeling and encode it. This means that we...

     There are a lot of different factors, examples, situations, and other things that come to mind when we think of stress. As I go on to talk about stress in the family, we need to understand that stress is different than a crisis. Stress is just tension that is built up from different factors. It is the feeling of strain and pressure and unpleasant emotions. On the other hand, a crisis is something that actually necessitates change. You can have stress and not have it change anything, but when you have a crisis, things have to change in order to be solved. We learned that when you write crisis in Chinese, it puts two words together that we are familiar with. That is danger and opportunity. I feel like this really puts an understanding to what this word means and how we should perceive crisis in our lives. The first word, danger, means that there is something going on that is causing problems. We know we have to fix it in order to be okay again. However, the word opport...

     This week we had the opportunity to talk about marital intimacy! At first I was really nervous for this topic because it is something that doesn't get talked about too frequently. However, as the week progressed it was easier to talk about because I was understanding it better.      I had the privilege of growing up with parents that we had a very open relationship with. We were raised understanding that if we ever had questions about anything, we could go to our parents and they would answer it without condemning or making us feel like we were in the wrong for asking such questions. My mom was very close with both my older sister and I, and she made it a point that anytime we had alone, quiet time together, that she would open up a question discussion with us and we could ask any question or talk about any topic. My mom was always very honest with us, and if it was important enough, she would even share personal experience from her and my dad which h...