The Difference Between External And Internal Processors

Are you and your partner internal or external processors? This was one of the hardest lessons I had to learn in my own relationship, but also one of the most valuable to greatly simplify this. Basically, what an internal processor means is that you process your thoughts and emotions in your own head before you share them. And an external processor is you say things out loud in order to process them. So I am an internal processor. I take a lot of time to sit with my thoughts, sit with my feelings, figure out what it is that I want to say and how I want to say it before I actually say anything out loud. Now, Xander, on the other hand, is an external processor. So the way that he figures out what he's thinking and feeling is by saying it out loud. So he'll literally say, I feel X. And then once he hears it out loud, he'll take a moment and think. Actually, no, what I'm feeling more is why. And this was very, very hard for me to deal with because I'm an internal processor, by the time I'm actually saying things out loud, I know that that is what I feel or what I think. So I would take him very literally at face value. Like, if he's saying X, he means X. When he would try to change it to no. Actually, it's Y. I would think, no, but you already said X. But once I learned about the difference between internal and external, even just was able to put a name to it, I was able to realize it's not that I'm right or he's wrong. We're both trying to process things, and we're both trying to share things in the most beneficial way that we can. Now that I know there's a name for it, and I can understand that, it makes it so much easier to actually listen to what he has to say.