Unfuck Your Communication: Using Science to Connect, Collaborate, and Make Yourself Heard

A toolkit for successful relationships

In so many facets of our lives, it can be surprisingly hard to speak up, listen well, and find mutual understanding. At some point, all of us will experience an unfortunate miscommunication with a friend or intimate partner, and sometimes there’s just no escaping a difficult conversation with a family member or colleague.

Rather than eating your words or running from confrontation, learn to communicate confidently and listen empathetically with the help of Dr. Faith G. Harper, bestselling author of Unfuck Your Brain and Unfuck Your Intimacy. In this no-nonsense guide, you’ll find conversational templates, guidance for setting boundaries, and tips for talking effectively at home, at work, at school, in everyday encounters, and even with social services and other bureaucratic entities—all of which form a handy toolkit for successful communication.

Read on for a sneak peek at Unfuck Your Communication: Using Science to Connect, Collaborate, and Make Yourself Heard by Dr. Faith G. Harper, available for preorder from our site (shipping starts 6/3/25!) or your local bookseller (officially hitting shelves 7/1/25)!

Communication is a skill that isn’t really taught, ennit? I mean, it wasn’t until I was in graduate school for a degree that was foundationally supported by communication (you know, being a mental health professional) that I got any real coursework on how we share with others, both verbally and nonverbally, and how to attend to what they share with us. And honestly, learning about communication was the hardest part of therapist training for me and most therapists I know.

No one likes to think they suck at communication. We know what we mean, right? But when we say it, sometimes others think we mean something completely different. And why is that? Because communication is based on a shared understanding, which means there are nearly 8 billion ways of understanding the world. That whole bridging your worldview to someone else’s? So you can make sure your intent is clear? This shit is hard.

In the 90s (yes, last century, I am an old person), we had a significant communication failure in community mental health that served as a warning to us all. There is a pre–industrialized society treatment for ear infections that is referred to as “fuego.” Which, yes, means fire. A piece of wax- coated paper is rolled up tightly and put into the ear canal, and then the paper is set on fire. The idea is to create a vacuum that helps pull out earwax, fluid buildup, bacteria, etc. Which promotes healing and mitigates the pain of an ear infection.

In this particular instance, a child had an ear infection, and her mama went to fuego her ear. Now, paper without the wax dip burns faster, so you use a much larger sheet of paper. Mom couldn’t find one big enough, so she pulled a sheet out ofthe phone book.¹ If you are a fellow old person who remembers the type of paper used in phone books, you know exactly what happened. The page incinerated immediately, causing some light burns to the daughter’s face.

Mom immediately brought her to the ER and was working to explain, in Spanish, what had happened. She used the colloquial expression that she was looking to get the demons out of her daughter’s ear. Again, this is the common expression used to define the practice and doesn’t mean that anyone thought there were ear canal demons. (It’s no different from me using a common Indigenous expression to compliment someone’s fit: me telling you that you look deadly means you look fantastic. But if you don’t know that expression you may take it some-kinda-way, right?)

And you can guess what happened next, right? ER staff were worried this lady had a thought disorder or some kind of psychotic break and she was held at the psych unit of the same-said hospital.
For several days.
Until someone who actually knew the cultural context of the expression interviewed her and threw down until she got released.

And you may be thinking . . . ok, Doc . . . but that was a minute ago. That isn’t a problem anymore right? We all get DEI training. (At least in the states that haven’t outlawed it yet.) It isn’t still this bad-bad. Except it is.

Take this other story from a situation I was directly involved in less than a decade ago. One of the certified family partners (CFPs) in my organization came to me to staff a case: a mom and son who were both diagnosed with schizophrenia and were receiving community mental health services. There is definitely a genetic component to thought disorders, so that’s not unheard of.

The son was eight years old. Having a thought disorder diagnosis that young is rare, but again not unheard of. As the keeper of those statistics at that time, I can tell you he was one of three prepubescent kids in the county with that diagnosis when this issue was unfolding.

Another thing that made this case unusual was that the mom and son seemed to be experiencing the same delusion, a phenomenon then called a folie à deux (now currently listed in the DSM as “shared delusional disorder” or “induced delusional disorder” in the ICD). Meaning the mom and son were experiencing the exact same delusion. Also very rare, but not unheard of. I had seen that once before in my career.

However, with these two individuals, the shared delusion was one of seeing a ghost in the home.

But now we have three very rare things stacked together. And the CFP was curious if they were missing something. Upon chatting with the mom, she realized that the family was Indigenous. Not “just” Mexican-American. Of course, most everyone with Mexican heritage is Indigenous, but many have lost their cultural roots due to colonization, and may not even know the name of their original nation. This particular family had held these traditions and practiced them. So the CFP (hi Patti!) came to me and asked if there was something that the care team might be missing that they should consider.

I suggested that the CFP ask the mom if they were ghost sick.

“Ghost sickness” is a common grief expression seen with many Indigenous peoples, not just of Turtle Island (the Americas) but also of the Polynesian Islands, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. The idea is that these spirits visit the bereaved, especially if their loved one’s death was not a peaceful one. It is one of the most common culture- bound syndromes clinicians will see.

And, yes. Mom endorsed ghost sickness brought on by the passing of a beloved uncle. We smudged and salt-sealed their home and assisted in ceremony to encourage the spirit of the uncle to find peace and move on.

And their shared delusion was cured. Both ended up released from services.

I shared this story in Understanding Indigenous Perspectives as a caution around understanding culture when providing diagnosis and care. However, first and foremost, this example is a story about communication. About the breakdowns that lie within it. And it’s a reminder that you don’t have to know all the things to be a good communicator. Patti the CFP didn’t. But she knew what she didn’t know and found someone who had a better chance of knowing and she asked. And she then used the information she learned to facilitate the care that the clients actually needed.

Want to keep reading? Check out Unfuck Your Communication: Using Science to Connect, Collaborate, and Make Yourself Heard by Dr. Faith G. Harper, available for preorder from our site or through an independent bookstore near you.

1. Back in the Wild West of the 1900s, our phones were on the walls of our homes. Not carried in our pockets. And the numbers for everyone, including businesses, were printed in a book the phone company gave you every year. (Cuz you couldn’t just look them up on the then-nascent internet.) This phone book also had pizza coupons in it, so it was quite useful. ↩︎