Speaking Up with Care: Calling Out Behaviour that Hurts Without Hurting Back
How to name and address challenging behaviour with clarity and calm, holding boundaries without shaming or escalating.
There is a quiet art to calling out a behaviour without tipping into heat or shame. It begins with remembering that the moment you feel fiery, something in the present has touched something from your past. Your reaction has been shaped by old history. When we speak from that place, we often escalate rather than illuminate. The real skill lies in pausing, settling your own body, and addressing what happened with steadiness and clarity.
I have been seeing some examples of this in a programme on Channel 4. In Married at First Sight Australia, Season 6 Episode 25, John Aiken calls out one of the women on the show with a striking steadiness. If you watch from 21 minutes in, you will see him naming the behaviour without shaming, and very little heat. By contrast, in Married at First Sight UK, Season 10 Episode 8, the therapist Paul Carrick Brunson has a stronger reaction. If you watch from 00.21 to 00.39 seconds you’ll see a small example of the behaviour he is addressing. Then watch from 40 minutes in, you will notice there is more heat in his intervention. Though both times it is delivered well, one has more heat than the other, and it would have been even better if Paul had been more dispassionate. It just reveals how personal this terrain can become for the person giving feedback.
Imagine a partner who regularly makes small promises and then forgets to follow through. You notice a familiar tightening in your stomach, a mixture of disappointment and concern. Rather than saying something like, You never do what you say you will, which invites defensiveness, you take a moment to ground yourself. Then you say, When an agreement slips my trust wobbles a little and I feel less settled in us. I would like us to look at how we can keep our commitments more reliably. The focus stays on the emotional effect rather than on blaming their character. You are naming the reality without shaming the person.
Or consider a client who repeatedly arrives ten minutes late. Rather than scolding, you might say, I notice there is a pattern of arriving after the session start time. When that happens it affects the depth we can go to and I feel concerned for the work. What do you notice in yourself around timing? This opens a door rather than closing one. It invites reflection. It treats the behaviour as information rather than proof of wrongdoing.
The aim is to stay connected to yourself while staying connected to them. When you can name what happened without heat and without humiliation, something remarkable occurs. The other person feels met rather than criticised. Defence softens. Curiosity grows. And the truth becomes speakable. I know this, because I have been on the receiving end of feedback that I found challenging, but which was really well delivered.
Calling out a behaviour with care is not weakness. It is strength grounded in self knowledge. It shows that you can hold boundaries while feeling compassion. And that combination can change the emotional climate of any relationship.
Juliet Grayson 2025
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If you are a therapist, counsellor or health worker, and interested in thinking more about conflict, and you are a therapist, you might want to attend the Couples in Conflict module of the Certificate in Working with Couples.
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