The Dance of Connection: How to Talk to Someone When You're Mad, Hurt, Scared, Frustrated, Insulted, Betrayed, or Desperate

by Harriet Lerner

The challenge in conversation is not just to be our self but to choose the self we want to be. What we call “the self” is never static, but instead is a work in progress. That’s why we don’t discover who we are by sitting alone on a mountaintop and meditating, or by being introspective and “going deeper,” as valuable as these disciplines may be. The royal road for both discovering and reinventing the self is through our relationships with other people and the conversations we engage in. In a sad paradox, the more important and enduring a relationship (say, with a partner or relative), the more we tend to participate in narrow, habitual conversations where our experience of our self and the other person becomes fixed and small.