How to tell people what you feel about them

• Always try to express your feelings in terms of how you feel, rather than in terms of what you think the other person has done wrong. This reduces the extent to which the other person feels that they are being "told off" and is less likely to evoke a defensive response.
• Always remember that how you felt about the way in which someone behaved might be very different from the intention behind their behaviour. Most of the time when we feel hurt or angered by someone, they were not intending to make us feel bad.
• Try not to see the sharing of feelings as a battle, in which one person is right and the other wrong, but as a dialogue in which you are attempting to overcome the mis-communications and misunderstandings that have occurred.
• Remember that sometimes you'll be more capable of talking about your feelings than the person you are talking to. Men often assume women are better at expressing their feelings, but women can get blaming and defensive too, and sometimes you will need to be the one who keeps the dialogue on a non-combative footing.