More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 16 - November 16, 2022
Two little kids are playing together in a sandbox in the park with their pails and shovels. Suddenly a huge fight breaks out, and one of them runs away, screaming, “I hate you! I hate you!” In no time at all they’re back in the sandbox, playing together as if nothing has happened. Two adults observe the interaction from a nearby bench. “Did you see that?” one comments in admiration. “How do children do that? They were enemies five minutes ago.” “It’s simple,” the other replies. “They choose happiness over righteousness.”
Care liked this
Truth is, nothing you say can ensure that the other person will get it, or respond the way you want. You may never exceed his threshold of deafness. She may never love you, not now or ever. And if you are courageous in initiating, extending, or deepening a difficult conversation, you may feel even more anxious and uncomfortable, at least in the short run.
Having an authentic voice means that: We can openly share competence as well as problems and vulnerability. We can warm things up and calm them down. We can listen and ask questions that allow us to truly know the other person and to gather information about anything that may affect us. We can say what we think and feel, state differences, and allow the other person to do the same. We can define our values, convictions, principles, and priorities, and do our best to act in accordance with them. We can define what we feel entitled to in a relationship, and we can clarify the limits of what we
...more
But if sharing our pain digs us deeper into it, and pretending to be happy in a particular situation empowers us to feel better and act on our own behalf, then pretending may be the first order of business, or at least a reasonable first step.
Rushing in to offer advice—or to cheer someone up—may reflect our own inability to remain emotionally present in the face of another person’s problems and pain, or to experience our own. If we move in too quickly with solutions, we can make it harder for others to be in touch with their own competence and inner resources, and we unwittingly rob those we love of the opportunity to feel what they are feeling and express it to us. Learning to be an attentive, caring listener and a skilled questioner can empower others to search for their own solutions.
Having an authentic voice doesn’t mean that we say everything we think or express whatever we feel. Rather, it means that we can think about what we wish to express and what we hope to accomplish. Being our best selves may require us to exercise restraint, even to pretend, if necessary.
No one benefits from a polarized relationship where we listen, help, and offer advice, then say, “I’m fine,” in response to the question, “How are you?” We diminish people when we don’t allow them to help us, or when we act like we don’t need anything from them and they have nothing to offer us. We also diminish them when we allow them to go on and on, even after we’ve exceeded our capacity to pay attention.
When someone hurts our feelings or behaves badly, we typically respond with anger or silence. It’s normal to react this way, but when we do, we may be letting the other person off the hook. We feel as if we’re protecting ourselves, but we may actually be more concerned about how other people will manage themselves in a difficult conversation and how uncomfortable they might become. We may be nervous about gently putting the other person on the spot.
Judy Hayen liked this
Over time, we can expand the conversation. Sensitive issues are processed slowly.
When a particular topic (or person) is especially difficult, remember the “two-step.” Try to think in terms of having at least two conversations, or a series of conversations that fall into two categories.
In the first conversation, we only listen, ask questions, and try to learn more.
In a subsequent conversation, we can share our perspective and define our differences.
Speaking to the differences is not the same as trying to convince or change the other person. It doesn’t imply that the other person is wrong and that truth is on our side, although we may be convinced that’s so. Instead, it requires us to clarify and refine our differences with as much respect for the other person’s different perspective as we can muster. This respect, and our willingness to listen, can be contagious.
As Jon Kabat-Zinn reminds us, the human mind is like the surface of the ocean that gets whipped about by bad weather. We all get reactive, but underneath the waves there is a deeper calm if we can only reach for it.
Family relationships tend to be intense. They may appear calm, but that’s often because the intensity is managed by distance. As a rule, the higher the intensity, the more productive it can be to slow down, to ask questions and listen first, and then to calmly speak to the differences.
In contrast, differences—even minor ones—can drive a wedge between people. But like it or not, differences will inevitably emerge in any close relationship, and thank goodness for that. What could be more boring than hanging around with folks exactly like ourselves? Differences don’t just threaten and divide us. They also inform, enrich, and enliven us. Indeed, differences are the only way we learn.
Making a relationship work obviously requires good humor, generosity, a tolerance for differences, and a willingness for give-and-take.
The most important voice we need to trust in a relationship is our own. We need to trust ourselves to perceive and process important information. We need to use a clear, strong voice to bring our knowledge of the relationship into sharper focus and test out what’s possible, rather than comfort ourselves with fantasies about how our partner might change in the future. We need to speak up and insist on fair treatment and respect.
There are two essential voice challenges in a committed, intimate relationship such as a marriage. First, we need to clarify a bottom-line position and stand behind it. Second, we need to speak to the positive in the other person and the relationship and to warm things up.
You need to pay attention to your relationship and nurture it, you need to move toward your partner in a loving and generous way, and you need to avoid distancing or disconnecting emotionally. You can do this—and also clarify your wants, expectations, limits, and bottom line.
The longer you’re with someone, the more vulnerable you are to selective attention. You automatically register and give voice to what bothers you, and you automatically fail to give praise and to voice your appreciation.
When the emotional climate is intense, a couple may behave like two nervous systems hooked together. Neither party can identify and calmly address the important issues, listen to the other objectively, or take a position without blaming or telling the other what to do. The contagious reactivity between two people can be so high that almost any topic triggers immediate intensity. Within moments both persons are rigidly polarized in opposing camps, unable to consider any viewpoint except their own.
Why should we practice kindness when the other person is behaving badly? Such advice may seem incongruent with the challenge of speaking our truths, bringing up the hard stuff, defining our differences, and clarifying a bottom line. Actually, kindness and generosity of spirit lay the groundwork for each of these things.
But kindness, timing, and tact are not the opposite of honesty: Rather they are precisely what make honesty possible with the most difficult people and in the most difficult circumstances. There is no virtue in speaking to others in a way that makes it impossible for them to hear what you have to say or to appreciate the truth of your position.
You can behave like the partner you want him to be for you. You can be a model, not a critic.
After studying thousands of married couples, Gottman concluded that certain kinds of negativity, when allowed to run rampant, are lethal to a relationship. He calls them “the four horsemen of the apocalypse,” which clip-clop into the heart of marriage and destroy it.
HORSEMAN 1: CRITICISM A “criticism” is a personal attack that includes some negative words about your mate’s character or personality.
HORSEMAN 2: CONTEMPT Contempt can be conveyed in many forms, including name-calling, sneering, eye-rolling, mockery, hostile humor, sarcasm, cynicism—any nasty or mean-spirited attempt to put the other person down.
HORSEMAN 3: DEFENSIVENESS Defensiveness is a way of saying. “The problem isn’t me, it’s you.” We fail to really listen, to consider our part in a problem, and to apologize and change our behavior.
HORSEMAN 4: STONEWALLING Stonewalling occurs when one partner tunes out the other and disengages from the relationship. We turn away, sit there like an impassive stone wall, leave the room, or somehow communicate that we couldn’t care less what the other person says or does. We won’t let our partner’s words influence or affect us. Gottman states that people stonewall as a protection against feeling flooded, and that men stonewall more than women.
Obviously, one finds all four horsemen in the best of relationships, but when they take up permanent residence—and when there is a failure of repair attempts—Gottman claims he can predict divorce with an accuracy rate that reaches well above 90 percent.
Gottman’s four horsemen don’t mean that happy couples don’t fight.
What does matter, according to Gottman, is a deep friendship, meaning mutual respect and enjoyment of each other’s company—which leads to successful repair and reconciliation.
What is a repair attempt? Gottman uses the term to refer “to any statement or action—silly or otherwise—that prevents negativity from escalating out of control.”
The failure to initiate repair attempts—or the failure to respond to a partner’s attempts to do so—is a flashing red light in any relationship. When we refuse to take our partner up on her repair attempts, or we don’t give a partner a fair way out of a fight or tense conversation, we need to ask ourselves if we are truly more invested in our anger and dissatisfaction than we are in changing the tone of our relationship.
If the overriding sentiment in your conversations with a partner is less than positive, here’s your homework: For two weeks, increase your ratio of positive to negative statements to five to one. Be sure to initiate and respond to repair attempts. Experiment with communicating interest, generosity, and love in nonverbal ways, as well as with words and language. Do the small, specific things that warm your partner’s heart. Even small steps in this direction will allow you to know yourself and your partner better, a worthwhile venture whether your partner eventually responds in kind or not.
Men choose not to talk because they don’t know how to make themselves heard, because they believe that problems get worse when you talk about them, because they dread conflict and criticism, or because they fear getting trapped in a conversation that feels awful.
coping with criticism. I offered the following tips to remember when you’re on the receiving end: Listen attentively to the person who is criticizing you without planning your reply. Ask questions about whatever you don’t understand. Avoid getting defensive. Don’t listen in order to argue or refute. Instead, listen for the piece of criticism you can agree with, even if it’s embedded in exaggerations and inaccuracies. Apologize for that piece first. Never criticize a person who is criticizing you. There may be a time to bring up your own grievances, but that time is not when the other person
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
It helps to keep in mind that other people usually don’t criticize us with the intention of doing harm. Rather, people criticize us for the same reasons we criticize them. They want to be helpful and contribute to our betterment. Or we have a trait, quality, or behavior that bothers them and so affects our relationship, and they really do need to talk about it. They may think the relationship can’t move forward if we don’t consider our behavior and apologize.
We cannot survive when our identity is defined by or limited to our worst behavior. Every human must be able to view the self as complex and multidimensional. When this fact is obscured, people will wrap themselves in layers of denial in order to survive. How can we apologize for something we are, rather than something we did?
When family relationships are intense, it’s far more useful to use humor, lightness, and imagination to deflect complaining and negativity.
In addition to deflecting a conversation that’s overloading us, we also need to return to it. Paradoxically, we can best defuse an anxiety-driven subject by moving toward that same subject, curiously and uncritically.
Painful events happen to all of us, and we can become attached to our pain. We also get attached to the idea that if we stay angry long enough, and keep thinking about it hard enough, the person who wronged us will realize how terribly they’ve treated us—which won’t ever happen, of course.
