More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
As my editor, you’ve been a consummate sculptor, shaping my words and thus always enhancing my message. In your art, you combine gifts of the poet and the surgeon.
Good description of my aspiration as an editor.
We have been using the rules of war as the basis for human conversation.
quandaries I had puzzled over since childhood— why people shut down instead of opening up when they feel hurt or threatened, and why power struggles and even violence seem normal.
“To be open is to be vulnerable, and to be vulnerable is to be weak” underlies all the defensive maneuvers we use
we think that being guarded and closed is our best protection.
Creating a barrier between ourselves and the other person is usually the first step in our defense.
we seek to protect intangible things, such as feelings and beliefs, from being hurt or controlled. We try to protect our ego, our self-image.
image-making stimulates many of us to react defensively to entire groups of people. Fearing them, we build emotional barriers that prevent us from understanding that most of them, like most of us, are regular human beings who just want to live their own lives. This defensiveness opens the door for any group to legitimize its assaults on another.
This rationale creates a psychological process through which we deny our own responsibilities in conflict, project unethical motives onto others, and blame them for a wide range of problems, including our own behavior even as we attack them. I refer to any group or person who is functioning in this way as acting as a “superior-victim-attacker.”
As we build emotional barriers, our second defensive reaction is to hide any thoughts, beliefs, feelings, behaviors that make us feel vulnerable. We assume that exposing information might give others power to hurt or control us.
we often associate honesty with exposing ourselves in a way that might lead others to reject us or give them control over us.
It is astonishing how many of us actually hide evidence of our way of life—religious artifacts, alcohol, books— before the visit of a family member.
In trying to please our customers, we may abdicate our responsibility to give them our best professional advice.
Another kind of information we frequently hide is “flaw revelations”—feelings of inadequacy or some perceived weak point in our character that might make others disrespect us.
We choose to be unknown rather than expose ourselves by opening the door to rejection or control.
The power we perceive others to have over us may be to fire us from a job, judge us harshly, reject us, or simply refuse to hear what we have to say.
When we focus on the other person’s power over us, we are usually not focused on our own strength, or even on the other’s vulnerability. Our psyche shifts instantaneously into the position of victim,
having to defend ourselves can create insecurity and make us feel less confident,
Most people say that having to defend their competence makes them feel less adequate.
When we add defensiveness to our interactions with each other, we create a reality that is completely different from the one we would have if we were non-defensive. We create hidden agendas, poor self-esteem, and incompetence. We build relationships that are rife with conflict and devoid of intimacy and respect.
A power struggle is essentially a fight in which we use our words, tone of voice, and body language as weapons of war in order to gain control over someone else.
These struggles for power can include two or more people, each trying to gain influence over a family, classroom, business, community group, or cluster of friends.
Four Aspects of Defensive Behavior in Any Interaction •Building emotional walls •Hiding information about feelings, thoughts, beliefs, or actions •Seeing the other person as working against our goals—an adversary •Engaging in power struggle
during our power struggles. We become simultaneously bound to and alienated from the other person. We become so compulsively locked into our conflict that we spend a great deal of energy thinking about the other person, complaining to others, rehashing our last battle, planning for the next one, and carrying it out—going the next round.
Winning the argument becomes far more important than gaining understanding or resolution.
While we often feel compelled to try to win any power struggle we engage in, we may also be terrified of conflict
Therefore, if we want to stay out of a power struggle, we avoid conflict
Far from helping us to achieve our goals, power struggle blocks us from meeting two basic human needs: to feel connected with others in love and to maximize our capacity for individual growth.
When We Engage in Power Struggles, We •treat power as if it were an external object to fight over •become simultaneously bound to and alienated from the other person •make winning our primary goal •accelerate rather than reduce conflicts •focus on fears of scarcity and loss •often try to avoid conflict, and are left with unresolved feelings •engage in a process that becomes an addictive cycle
Defensive reactions fall into three well-known categories: fight, flight, and surrender.
I have observed that each of these categories—surrender, withdrawal (flight), and counterattack (fight)—actually contains both a passive approach, undertaken primarily for self-protection, and an aggressive approach, undertaken for retaliation as well as self-protection.
Our preferred defensive style is often such an integral part of our interaction with others that it is seen by those around us, and even ourselves, as our “personality,” a significant part of our identity. Each of the six defensive modes therefore corresponds to a common label that describes a certain personality type.
In verbal interactions, we may exchange our compliance out of fear for our physical safety or for our emotional security.
Surrender–betray is a passive format for protecting ourselves. We betray ourselves by giving in to someone who is mistreating us and then go so far as to see our own behavior—instead of the other person’s— as the cause of the problem.
Many of us make excuses for co-workers, friends, or family members who treat us rudely, rationalizing as to why they are in a “bad mood,” as if we are doing them a favor by allowing them to treat us poorly.
When we surrender totally, we usually aren’t aware that we are doing so. We suppress our own capacity for critical thinking, adopt the other person’s viewpoint as our own, and defend the other person’s behavior,
People who use this defensive mode are often labeled as having a “codependent” personality.
The second and more aggressive form of surrender is surrender–sabotage.
We comply with the other person on some level and then use “hidden” aggression to get even, replacing open rebellion with sneak attacks.
we are overtly complying and covertly attacking.
One way in which we give double messages when we use surrender–sabotage is to make a commitment and then not fully keep it.
Maligner
In this case we sabotage by maligning the person’s reputation.
Martyr
Our body language and tone of voice communicate that we are helping at great cost.
We may agree to do something we would rather not do and then procrastinate and fail to get it done by the designated time.
Sometimes a person may agree to do a particular task and then perform it carelessly,
Many relationships are damaged by sloppy work that is a thinly veiled if not an obviously outright form of sabotage.
When we follow a supportive sentence with a subtle—or perhaps direct—put-down, we sabotage.
Another commonly used form of sequential contradictory statements occurs in business situations, where managers have been taught to use positive feedback as a preface to negative feedback.
