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

by Harriet Lerner

“They choose happiness over righteousness.”

Our challenge as adults is to develop a strong voice that is uniquely our own, a voice that reflects our deepest values and convictions.

in many situations wisdom lies in being strategic rather than spontaneous.

My father chose to have relationships at the expense of having a self,

Before all else, we are daughters or sons.

GLIMPSE INTO THE IDEAL FAMILY

Parents calmly enforce rules that guide a child’s behavior, but they don’t attempt to regulate the child’s emotions or ideas.

Family members are comfortable sharing honest thoughts and feelings on even the most emotionally laden subjects without getting nervous about differences.

The emotional climate of family life is warm, spontaneous, and relaxed, so that children feel free to ask direct questions over time about whatever concerns them.

Children are seen objectively for who they really are, not through the distorted lens of what a parent wishes, fears, or needs them to be.

when issues are unresolved in one generation, they are often reenacted in the next.

I tend to agree with author Mary Karr, who defines a dysfunctional family as “any family with more than one person in it.” It’s all a matter of more or less—although, admittedly, more or less can make a big difference.

Observing and changing our part in family conversations is one royal road to change. In other words, if you can learn to speak clearly and to respond in a new way with your difficult mother or sister, then other relationships will be a piece of cake.

the self is continually reinvented through our interactions with others. Every relationship is a laboratory in which we can practice using our voice in new ways and observe the results of our experiments.

Getting older brings the comforting knowledge that the things we consider most shameful and weird about ourselves are actually pretty universal

Learning to not give advice, and to ask questions instead

we can usually be more supportive to distressed persons we love simply by caring about them—by being emotionally present without pulling back from their pain and without trying to take it away.

Writer Anne Finger puts it so well. “We have this notion that some dependencies are OK and others are not,” she writes. “It’s OK to need a car; it’s not OK to need a wheelchair. It’s OK to go to a hairstylist to get your hair done; it’s not OK to need an attendant to wash your face and hands.”

“If you treat man as he appears to be, you make him worse than he is. But if you treat man as if he already were what he potentially could be, you make him what he should be.”

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

The degree to which you can be clear with your first family about who you are, what you believe, and where you stand on important issues will strongly influence the quality of “voice” that you bring to other relationships.

She wrote out what she wanted to tell him and then rehearsed it with a friend. It may strike you that such strategic planning is the opposite of honesty, but as I said earlier, that’s not the case. Sometimes we can wing it, but when the stakes are high, we need to be thoughtful and well prepared.

Listening is an essential part of having voice.

Our thinking and voice will be clearer to the extent we can view our parents’ negativity simply as information about their way of managing anxiety.

If we’re needing (as opposed to hoping for) a particular response from the other person, that’s a good indication we’re not yet ready to broach a difficult conversation.

Falling in love tells us absolutely nothing about whether a particular relationship is healthy or good for us.

When you’re overly eager for a relationship to work, you will resist getting differences out in the open, looking them straight in the eye, and having a good fight when necessary.

Do as much talking and listening as you can before you entwine your emotional and financial futures.

It will help matters if she can avoid the usual communication stoppers, such as criticizing, lecturing, admonishing, threatening, analyzing, and blaming.

we should never believe that our love (or nagging) has the power to create something that wasn’t there to begin with.

It’s data if you stop voicing your wants, expectations, and questions because you’re afraid to put him to the test.

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.

Often, when we’re irritated, we go beyond asking a partner to change specific behavior, and instead broaden our statement to include a jab at the other person’s character or to bring up past sins.

The first step to establishing a bottom line is self-knowledge and from there, self-expression.

Moving forward in a couple relationship requires one thing above all else. We need to stop focusing on how impossible our partner is, and instead focus relentlessly on the clarity of our own voice—the conversations we have or avoid, the positions we take or fail to take, the places where we stand firm or cave in.