Communication Compass

What if most of your suffering doesn’t come from what actually happened — but from the story you made up about it? In this opening episode of The Stories We Tell Ourselves series, Dr. Malynnda Stewart challenges one of the most common myths about self-talk: that it’s just background noise. Drawing on Brené Brown’s research on narrative and meaning-making, Jerome Bruner’s work on narrative cognitio...

You’ve learned the vocabulary. You’ve named the patterns. Now comes the part no one talks about enough: what do you actually do with all of it? In the final episode of the When Words Are Weapons series, Dr. Malynnda Stewart gets personal. Drawing on her own experience with a damaging relationship, and the therapy, community, and deliberate work that rebuilt her, she offers a research-grounded, dee...

You were taught that being a good person means being sensitive, showing up, and putting others first. But what happens when those very qualities become the mechanism of your manipulation? In this episode, Dr. Malynnda Stewart breaks down four tactics that work specifically through your empathy: emotional blackmail, toxic positivity, victim narratives, and performative vulnerability. Drawing on Sus...

The patterns you’ve learned to name don’t stay in one relationship. They show up at the dinner table, in the conference room, in your closest friendships, and in your social media feed. In this episode, Dr. Malynnda Stewart maps manipulation across four contexts: family systems, workplace politics, friendships, and social media, drawing on Bowen’s Family Systems Theory, organizational psychology,...

Manipulation doesn’t always look like cruelty. Sometimes it looks like someone who just can’t seem to do anything right. Sometimes it looks like overwhelming affection. Sometimes it looks like you somehow becoming the villain in a story where you were the one who got hurt. In this episode of Communication Compass, Malynnda Stewart unpacks six tactics — gaslighting, DARVO, guilt trips, love bombing...

Most of us believe we'd recognize manipulation if it were happening to us. That belief is part of what makes manipulation so effective. In this What We Think We Know segment, Malynnda Stewart examines the myth that gaslighting is simply dishonesty, and reveals the far more complex truth: that manipulation exploits our deepest needs for safety, belonging, and connection. Drawing on the research...

You're not antisocial. You're not a bad communicator. You're exhausted. Communication burnout is real, and it's different from general fatigue. It's what happens when the emotional labor of showing up in conversation, managing conflict, navigating difficult relationships, and performing connection becomes too much to sustain. In this episode, we unpack what communication burnou...

Your nervous system knows before your mind does. It reads the shift in tone, the quality of attention, the feeling of being managed rather than met, and it responds, often before you've found words for what's happening. In this episode, we explore your communication immune system: the biological and psychological system that is always scanning your interactions for safety or threat, and wh...

Most of us treat our relationships like a car with no maintenance schedule: run it until something breaks, then deal with it. But by the time a relational issue becomes visible enough to force a response, it's usually been accumulating for a long time. In this episode, we explore communication hygiene, the practice of tending to our communication before it reaches a breaking point. We look at...

Most of us know what a draining conversation feels like. The particular exhaustion of an interaction where we were managing rather than connecting, monitoring our words, reading the room, making sure nothing landed wrong. But healthy communication has a different signature entirely. It feels safe. It feels respectful. And it leaves you more whole than when you started. In this episode, we get spec...

Most of us have stood next to someone who seems to effortlessly command a room and thought: they were just born that way. But what if that belief, comfortable and familiar as it is, is the very thing keeping you from growing? In this month's myth-busting episode, we examine the idea that good communicators are born, not made. We trace its origins in classical rhetoric and media culture, look a...

The conversation you've been avoiding has already been happening. The other person has been making sense of your silence, your distance, your carefully managed neutrality, and filling in the gaps with whatever story they have available. In this episode, we look closely at why difficult conversations feel so threatening, what's happening neurologically when we're in one, and how to prep...

Why do we keep saying yes when we mean no? Why does setting a boundary feel like a threat to the very relationships we're trying to protect? In this episode, we explore boundary debt, what accumulates when we consistently set aside our own needs, limits, and values to manage everyone else's comfort. We draw on Brené Brown's research showing that the most compassionate people are also t...

What if the silence isn't just silence? In this opening episode of our communication debt series, we take a close look at what actually happens, cognitively, emotionally, and relationally, when we keep choosing not to have the conversation. Drawing on the Zeigarnik Effect and its finding that unresolved tasks actively compete for our cognitive resources, Arlie Hochschild's groundbreaking r...

Don't rock the boat. Pick your battles. Some things aren't worth fighting over. These are the phrases we reach for when conflict feels like too much, and they feel like wisdom. But according to decades of relationship research, they may be some of the most damaging communication habits we have. Welcome to Things We Think We Know, a new special segment where we take the beliefs about commun...

We spend so much energy trying to do differently, building systems, setting goals, tracking habits, without ever asking the deeper question: who am I becoming? In this final episode of our Forward Momentum series, we explore what research in behavior change and narrative psychology consistently shows: lasting change doesn't come from willpower or the right plan. It comes from a shift in identi...

We have a cultural story about achievement that centers the individual — the person who put their head down, worked hard, and figured it out alone. But the research tells a different story. In this episode, we explore what accountability actually is, why the controlling version of it backfires, and what happens when it's offered with genuine support instead. Drawing on self-determination theor...

Most of us have been taught that more thinking leads to better decisions. But there's a point where thinking stops being helpful and starts being the barrier. In this episode, we look closely at rumination, the kind of repetitive, anxious overthinking that loops back on itself without resolving anything, and why it's one of the strongest predictors of anxiety and depression that researcher...

Most of us are waiting for motivation to arrive before we begin. This episode makes the case that we have it backward. In this second episode of our July series, Forward Momentum, we look at what behavioral science, neuroscience, and habit research actually tell us about how change happens , and it turns out, it almost never starts with a surge of inspiration. It starts with a small, specific, man...

What if being stuck isn't a character flaw, but a signal worth understanding? This episode kicks off our July series, Forward Momentum, by going beneath the surface of stuckness to look at what's really driving it. We explore the neuroscience of fear and decision paralysis, the paradox of having too many choices, and the surprising way perfectionism functions as avoidance rather than ambit...

What if collaboration isn't just a better way to work, but a better way to live? In this episode, we zoom out to look at the broader impact of collaborative communication across the places that matter most: our families, our workplaces, and our communities. Drawing on research from neuroscience, social psychology, and community resilience, we explore why human beings are wired for connection,...

Most of us were taught to debate, to hold our ground, defend our position, and persuade others to come around. What we were rarely taught is how to genuinely collaborate with someone who sees things differently. In this episode, we explore the science behind why disagreement feels threatening, what intellectual humility looks like in practice between disagreement and disconnection, because they ar...

We spend so much time learning how to show up for others, how to be the good friend, the reliable partner, the one who always comes through. What about the other side of that equation? What happens when someone tries to show up for you? For many of us, receiving support is genuinely harder than giving it. We deflect, we minimize, we say "I'm fine" before we've even checked whethe...

Someone offers to help. And something in you says: I've got it. Even when you don't. This episode unpacks why asking for, or accepting, help feels so hard. Drawing on research from Brené Brown, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, and Social Exchange Theory, Dr. Malynnda Stewart explores the three hidden mechanics behind help-resistance: the vulnerability exposure, the need for control, and the reciproc...

"I'm sorry you feel that way." Five words. Zero accountability. And somehow, it makes everything worse. In this episode, Malynnda Stewart breaks down why most apologies fail — and what genuine accountability actually looks and sounds like. Whether you collapse into shame or deflect with a non-apology apology, both patterns do the same thing: they protect you at the expense of the rel...