Your words matter. Often what happens when people are just talking to each other in their everyday lives is that they are just talking and talking and no one is really listening.
Then when every once in a while somebody does listen, they have some kind of overreaction to what someone said or how someone said it; therefore, there’s a great deal of miscommunication going on, and you don’t create a sense of intimacy and connection between you and the other person. Most of the time when people speak to each other, they’re doing a number of things that ultimately don’t lead to good communication. For one, people are very reactive in the ways that they respond; they hear something and, even before they realize what they’re hearing, they have emotional responses.
People can get very defensive very quickly, and therefore we’re not always keeping an eye on how we are responding to what someone is saying. You also recommend that people keep their communication brief. Scientists identify neurotranmitters that lead to forgetting. While we often think of memory as a way of preserving the essential idea of who we are, little thought is given to the importance of forgetting to our wellbeing, whether what we forget belongs in the "horrible memories department" or just reflects the minutia of day-to-day living.
Despite the fact that forgetting is normal, exactly how we forget -- the molecular, cellular, and brain circuit mechanisms underlying the process -- is poorly understood. Now, in a study that appears in the May 10, 2012 issue of the journal Neuron, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have pinpointed a mechanism that is essential for forming memories in the first place and, as it turns out, is equally essential for eliminating them after memories have formed.