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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Psychotherapy, it seemed to me, was without a goal except that of continued introspection.
When anxiety runs high in the group, the group makes emotionally based decisions that really amount to nothing more than taking sides.
Different people might assume leadership roles at different times for different purposes without threatening others or competing with them. Perhaps this sounds like Utopia. This kind of interaction among individuals becomes more nearly realized, however, when people begin to interact at higher levels of personal functioning.
Just as ethologists observe animals to learn the facts of their behavior and systems, human family systems thinkers stick to the facts, asking what happened, how, when, where, and to whom. They avoid asking why, which would lead into interpretation and speculation about motivation.
When one is thinking systems, one is less prone to adopt the closed-minded position in which one claims to know all the answers, since systems thinking assumes a complexity in reality that is open-ended and always allows for the admission of new data.
Usually what people do in a relationship crisis is more of the same thing they have been doing, only more intensely and more anxiously.
Reactive adaptation
At the point of this awareness, the work becomes most difficult. The goal of taking back all blame and discontinuing all relationship positioning and posturing promotes and coincides with taking unilateral responsibility for developing more basic self.
Accurate awareness of the emotions of other people grows out of the immense work of understanding and taking responsibility for one’s own emotions.
It is impossible to have high-level communication unless both partners are skilled listeners,and it is probably as difficult to learn to be a good listener as it is to be a clear, direct, nonreactive talker.
Listening skills
Storytelling is an excellent technique for getting oneself heard.
Emotional immaturity carries with it chronic anxiety, which, when expressed in relationships, wreaks havoc.
A logical intellectual process, one relatively free of anxiety, is quite different from the illogical, inconsistent, intellectualized verbalizations of a person whose thinking system, fused to the emotional system, is awash with anxiety.
Life is learning, and learning done in one relationship can be applied to others.
The triangle is the smallest stable relationship system.
Love is used as a reason to stay together, and lack of love as a reason to terminate a relationship. This line of thinking is indulged in most often by people who are living their lives based more on emotions than on thinking or inner guidance by principle.
The better the quality of the relationships in the workplace, the better the quality and the quantity of the work itself.
