Communicating Without Walking on Eggshells
A 90-Minute Online Relationship Skills Class
Do you find yourself carefully choosing your words because you're worried about how your partner will react? Maybe difficult conversations quickly turn into arguments, defensiveness, anger, withdrawal, or silence. Over time, walking on eggshells in a relationship can make it difficult to communicate honestly and leave both partners feeling disconnected, misunderstood, and resentful.
Communicating Without Walking on Eggshells is a live, 90-minute online relationship class designed to help couples and individuals learn how to communicate openly and directly without attacking, blaming, shutting down, or avoiding difficult conversations.
Using practical skills informed by Relational Life Therapy (RLT), participants will learn how to recognize the patterns that make communication feel unsafe or unproductive and develop healthier ways of speaking, listening, setting boundaries, and repairing conflict.
What You'll Learn
During this class, you'll learn how to:
Recognize why you may be walking on eggshells and identify the relationship patterns keeping you stuck.
Understand how your Adaptive Child can take over when you feel criticized, rejected, controlled, ignored, or misunderstood.
Recognize common losing strategies, including criticism, defensiveness, withdrawal, retaliation, controlling behavior, and self-righteousness.
Regulate yourself before responding so difficult conversations don't automatically escalate into arguments.
Speak honestly about what you're feeling and needing without attacking or shaming your partner.
Replace complaints and criticism with clear, specific requests.
Listen to your partner without immediately defending yourself, explaining, correcting, or trying to prove them wrong.
Learn the difference between healthy boundaries and controlling your partner.
Use a healthy timeout when a conversation becomes too heated—and learn how to return to the conversation instead of avoiding it.
Step out of your Adaptive Child and into your Wise Adult during difficult interactions.
Practice accountability and repair when you've said or done something that has hurt the relationship.
Communicate with greater confidence so you don't have to choose between staying silent and starting a fight.
What You'll Take Away
The goal isn't to teach you how to avoid conflict. It's to help you become better at conflict.
You'll leave with practical communication tools you can begin using immediately to express yourself more clearly, respond less reactively, establish healthier boundaries, and create conversations where both partners have a better opportunity to feel heard.
Most importantly, you'll begin answering a different question. Instead of:
“How do I say this without upsetting my partner?”
you'll learn to ask:
“How can I tell the truth with compassion while staying grounded, respectful, and connected?”
You can attend with your partner or on your own. Your partner doesn't have to participate for you to begin changing how you show up in your relationship.