Tell me More!
When I talk with friends, teach, or begin coaching sessions, I most often hear that people are struggling to find the connection, intimacy, and honesty they long for in their significant relationships. Especially when they are in distress. One person says something the other doesn’t like, both people are now enveloped in all kinds of strong feelings. Neither has the capacity to find enough calm to ratchet down the energy and the arguing begins, practically instantly.
There are many simple solutions to this and yet so difficult to achieve in real time. What does it take. You guessed it. PRACTICE. If you don’t practice something different, it is really hard to make the new neural pathways to do something that isn’t what you always do.
When you are with someone who is telling you stuff, and you get triggered –meaning you have strong feelings, what do you do?
Likely you take your energy and mind and heart away in some way. You create more distance, while at the same time, long to create more or deepen connection --moving into the stress response we call fight/flight/freeze. Fight means letting them know how what they did impacted you (possibly with words that offer blame, yet maybe not). Flight means leaving the conversation without saying much, yet thinking that they are at fault in this situation. Freeze looks like not saying anything, leaving another indiscretion as unspoken, building resentment. None of them offer you the connection and understanding you are hoping for.
So, what do you do? You are now disconnected, sad, frustrated and depending how often this happens, approaching hopeless for finding a new way.
Don’t give up just yet!! I have an idea. I have many ideas, although I’m simply sharing one. Why? Because it is simple. In those moments of distress, if you have only one thing to remember, it will be easier than finding your worksheet and going through all the options you actually have.
In those moments, just say:
Tell me more.
No matter what. Even if they are saying things you don’t like.
How will this possibly work?
It allows for you to stay in conversation. Giving you time to consider the needs of the other before stepping away, or yelling back, telling them how what they are doing is wrong –which will only encourage them to defend even more. Often when someone is ‘yelling’ or ‘complaining’ they tend to be told to shut up in some way. Being invited to say more is so counter to anything they have ever heard they are jolted into thinking about what they saying. If you add, “I want to understand what’s important to you”, further invites them into offering the needs that are alive for them. In a way, it is emergency empathy, thrusting the both of you into an empathetic conversation and out of fight/flight/freeze.
Likewise, if you tend to get quiet, (or they tend to get quiet), inviting them to say more about what’s alive might encourage someone who is scared to speak up when they might not normally have the capacity or courage needed to do just that.
Whenever either person remembers to say, Tell Me More, it just might happen. They might just stay in the conversation with you. If you have only one thing to remember in those challenging moments, it might be easier to interrupt the pattern that has captured you in your history of automatic responses and connect you to what’s truly alive between you right now.
Give it a try. Put signs up in your house, use temporary tattoos, get creative about remembering this one simple thing. Say it often. Then report back here and let me know how it went. And, if not this one thing, what’s your one thing you say or do to interrupt your unwanted communication habits?