PRDV212: Interpersonal Communication

Reading 3-1: Saying What's In Our Hearts

Honest conversations viewed as counseling and counseling viewed as conversations that allow for honesty by Dennis Rivers, MA

I wrote this essay for my students during a time when I was teaching a class on peer counseling. I was trying to describe in everyday language some of the good things that happen in counseling, that ALSO happen in friendship, good parenting, mentoring and ministering.

According to the psychotherapists Carl Rogers (in the 1960's), Margaret and Jordan Paul (in the 1980s) and Brad Blanton (in the 1990's), there is one main reason people suffer in their relationships with one another. And it's not best understood as some jargon about ids and egos and superegos. It's that we need to face more of the truth and tell more of the truth about what's happening in our lives, about how we feel, and about what we ourselves are doing.

Many people, probably most of us at some time or other, struggle to deal with troubling feelings and problem situations in life by using a whole range of avoidance maneuvers: we may pretend nothing is happening, focus on blaming others, or try to find ways of avoiding embarrassment, distracting ourselves and/or minimizing conflict. The problem with these ways of dealing with inner and outer conflicts is that they don't work well in the long run. If we try to deal with our problems by pretending that nothing is wrong, we run the risk of becoming numb or getting deeply confused about what we actually want and how we actually feel. And from tooth decay to auto repair to marriage, avoidance maneuvers won't protect us from the practical consequences of our difficulties.

Now what, you may ask, does this have to do with counseling? Well, a counselor is someone to whom you can tell the truth. And as you start to tell more of the truth to the counselor, you can start to admit the more of the truth to yourself, and rehearse compassionate ways of talking about it with others.

This is not an easy task. Early in life, according to Rogers, most of us discovered that if we said what we really felt and wanted, the big important people in our lives would get unhappy with us, (and, I would add, perhaps even slap us across the face). And since we needed their love and approval, we started being good little boys and good little girls and saying whatever would get us hugs, birthday presents, and chocolate cake. If we are lucky in life, our parents and teachers help us to learn how to recognize our own feelings and tell the truth about them in conciliatory ways. But this is a complex process, and more often, our parents and teachers didn't get much help on these issues themselves, so they may not have been able to give us much help. As a result of this, many people arrive in adult life with a giant gap between what they actually feel and what the role they play says they are supposed to feel, and with no skills for closing that gap.

For example, as a child you were supposed to love your parents, right? But what if your dad came home drunk every night and hit your mom? How do you handle the gap between the fact that you're supposed to love your dad and the fact that you don't like him? These are the kinds of situations that bring people to counseling (or to the nightly six-pack of beer). And life is full of them.

It all boils down to this: Life is tough and complex, ready or not. It is always tempting to try to get what you want (or to escape what you fear) by saying or doing whatever will avoid conflict, even if that means saying things you don't really mean, doing things you don't feel good about, or just blanking out. After you've been around for a while you start to realize that the cost of this kind of maneuvering is a heavy heart.

From what I've seen, there is no secret magic wand of psychotherapy that can instantly lighten a heart thus burdened. Psychotherapists are in the same human boat as the rest of us; they get depressed and divorced and commit suicide just like ordinary folks. You and the person you are trying to help are in the same human boat. There is no life without troubles. Roofs leak. The people you love get sick and die. Our needs turn out to be in conflict with the needs of people we care about. The best made agreements come unglued. People fall out of love. And it is always tempting to pretend that everything is just fine. But I believe very strongly that we will all like ourselves a lot more if we choose the troubles that come from being more honest and more engaged, rather than the troubles that come from various forms of conflict avoidance and self-deception, such as "I'll feel better if I have another drink". or "What she doesn't know won't hurt her". etc.

Our truthful lives will probably not get any easier, but they will get a lot more satisfying. Good counselors, psychotherapists, mentors and friends, whatever their degree (or not), hold that knowledge for us, as we struggle to learn it and earn it. As adults there are many new possibilities open to us that were not available to us when we were children. We can learn to negotiate more of our conflicts, to confront more of our difficulties and to be honest about our feelings without being mean. So the fact is that we don't need to run away from our problems any more. What we need is to get in touch with ourselves and to learn new skills.

A counselor is someone who does not condemn you for your evasions, mistakes or lack of skill, and believes in your worth as a person, your capacity to tell the truth and your strength to bear the truth, no matter what you've done up to now. That's what makes counseling similar to being a priest, a rabbi, a minister or a really good friend. When we started pretending in order to please others at age three or four, that was the only way we could figure out how to get what we wanted. Now that we are adults we are capable of learning to tell the truth in conciliatory ways and we are capable of getting a lot more of what we want just by being courageous enough to ask for it. A good counselor, whether that person is a peer-counselor or a psychiatrist, is someone who invites us out of the role of maneuvering child and into the role of straightforward adult.

A counselor won't force you to tell the truth. It wouldn't be your truth if it were forced, it would just be one more thing you were saying to keep someone off your back. But a counselor is willing to hear how you actually feel. In this approach there are no bad feelings, there are only bad actions. It's OK to hate your drunken father; it's not OK to pick up a gun and shoot him. A big part of counseling is teaching people to make that distinction. In fact, the more people can acknowledge their feelings, the less they need to blindly act them out.

It's not the counselor's job to pull that stuff out of people; it's the counselor's job to be there to receive it and acknowledge it when it comes out in its own time. And to encourage the new skills and all the little moments of honesty that help a person toward a deeper truthfulness. There's a direct link between skill and awareness at work here. People are reluctant to acknowledge problems they feel they can't do anything about. As counseling conversations help a person to feel more confident about being able to talk things over and talk things out, a person may become more willing to face and confront conflicts and problems.

As we realize that the counselor accepts us warts and all, clumsy coping maneuvers and all, we start to accept ourselves more. We are not angels and we are not devils. We are just ordinary human beings trying to figure how to get through life. There is a lot of trial and error along the way and that is nothing to be ashamed of. No one, absolutely no one, can learn to be human without making mistakes. But it is easy to imagine, when I am alone with my mistakes, that I am the stupidest, crummiest person in the world. A good counselor, (...friend, minister, parent, support group member) is someone who helps us develop a more realistic and forgiving picture of ourselves.

These relationships based on deep acceptance help to free us from the fantasy of being all-good or all-bad, help to free us from the need to keep up appearances. Thus, we can start to acknowledge and learn from whatever is going on inside us. Freed from the need to defend our mistakes, we can actually look at them, and get beyond the need to repeat them. But these are hard things to learn alone. It really helps if someone accompanies us along that road.

Sometimes you will be the receiver of that acceptance and sometimes the giver. Whichever role you happen to play at a given moment, it's helpful to understand that honest, caring, empathic conversations (Carl Rogers' big three), just by themselves, set in motion a kind of deep learning that has come to be known as "healing". "Healing" is a beautiful word and a powerful metaphor for positive change. But "healing" can also be a misleading word because of the way it de-emphasizes learning and everyone's capacity to learn new ways of relating to people and navigating through life.

Here are five of the "deep learnings" that I see going on in almost all supportive and empathic conversations.

• In paying attention to someone in a calm, accepting way, you teach that person to pay attention to themselves in just that way.
• In caring for others, you teach them to care for themselves and you help them to feel more like caring about others.
• The more you have faced and accepted your own feelings, the more you can be a supportive witness for another person who is struggling to face and accept his or her feelings.
• In forgiving people for being human and making mistakes and having limits, you teach people to forgive themselves and start over, and you help them to have a more forgiving attitude toward others.
• By having conversations that include the honest sharing and recognition of feelings, and the exploration of alternative possibilities of action, you help a person to see that, by gradual degrees, they can start to have more honest and fruitful conversations with the important people in their lives.

These experiences belong to everyone, since they are part of being human. They are ours to learn and, through the depth of our caring, honesty and empathy, ours to give. I believe they are the heart of counseling.

Reading 3-2: Peer Counseling With the Five Messages

A three-point analysis of using the Five Messages to help people face their problems in more satisfying ways. by Dennis Rivers. MA

Point 1.

Life includes conflicts and difficult situations. People who are in need of emotional support and/or who show up for counseling are usually feeling some combination of fear, confusion, "stuckness", frustration and loss. These are usually healthy distresses, signals from the person's body-mind and life that something needs attention. (As psychology professor Lawrence Brammer points out in his book, The Helping Relationship, most people who need counseling and emotional support are not "mentally ill"). From a humanistic, existential or Rogerian perspective, the point of counseling is not simply to make these distressing feelings go away, it is to encourage a person to find their own way of changing what needs to be changed, learning what needs to be learned and accepting what needs to be accepted. Here is a list of the typical kinds of life stresses that cause people to reach out for emotional support and guidance.

Afraid: (examples)

to face the feelings I'm having, (don't know any safe way to "let off steam")

to tell people I don't like what they are doing

to face the mistakes I've made because I'll feel ashamed, (so I keep on making the same mistakes)

to confront people with a mistake I think they have made / are making

to admit that my needs are in conflict with the needs of important people in my life of losing people's love, respect and acceptance if I say what I really feel or want

Confused by changes in life, and need to develop new sense of competence and inner strength: (examples)

kids grow up and leave home -- the struggle to stay connected with them

new boss at work -- lose job -- change job -- no job

go to college or move to a new community -- no emotional support

start or end a relationship -- have to reorganize my life -- who am I now?

get pregnant -- have to make big decisions and reorganize life -- who am I now?

parents get old, need me to take care of them, feels like I'm their parent now

my body is changing without asking my permission, and I don't know what to expect next (truest for young teens & elders)

Stuck/frustrated: (examples)

in a family that I both love and hate, always colliding with other people

in a job that I don't like, or stuck in jail -- don't know where to go next

in a relationship that seems to have gone flat -- don't know how to restart some good feelings between me and my partner

Feeling a sense of loss: (examples)

my best friend moved to another town

my child died -- one of my parents died

in order to have a place of my own, I have to leave home

one of my parents became an alcoholic and I don't like being around him/her

Point 2.

People often don't know how to negotiate and how to work their way through difficult situations like the ones just listed, so they cope by using a variety of avoidance maneuvers or they act out their distress in ways that hurt themselves or others. The problem with the responses listed below is that they don't work well past the first moment.

• Deleting -- I just don't mention that I took that money out of your wallet.
• Distorting -- I say "it broke" when what happened was that I broke it.
• Generalizing -- I get mad and say "you never" or "you always" in order to avoid having to say "I'm frustrated" or "I need your help/love/time…"
• Distracting -- I start a fight, get drunk, watch lots of TV, start a new romance, move to a new town -- all these can be done with the unconscious intention of running away from my feelings
• Pretending -- I act out feelings that I don't have in order to avoid the ones I do have. (Anger is frequently substituted for sorrow).
• Denying -- Blanking out -- I don't feel anything and I don't know what you're talking about -- often accompanied by alcohol
• Spacing out -- I'm not really here -- I'm somewhere else -- often accompanied by drugs or alcohol. Extreme forms include going crazy to extricate oneself from what seems like an impossible situation.
• "Acting out" -- I express my distress by breaking things, hitting people, running away or doing something that will get me arrested (and out of the original problem situation).

What people actually need is consciously to express more of their feelings and more of the significance of their situation, usually in words and conversations (but it could be in drawing or clay, etc)., in order to be able to think about what is happening in their lives and feel their way to their next step. Feelings of embarrassment ("I'm no good if I've got a problem"). and lack of skill make it harder for a person to face their difficulties.

By adopting an attitude of deep acceptance, a counselor reassures a person of their fundamental worth, and thus makes it easier for people to admit their feelings and get actively engaged in changing what needs to be changed, learning what needs to be learned and accepting what needs to be accepted.

Point 3.

Encouraging people to listen and express themselves with the Five Messages is one way of helping people become more directly engaged with their life challenges. Those processes of changing, learning and accepting mentioned in Point 2 require intense involvement. Working with the Five Messages is one way of overcoming one's own avoidance maneuvers -- by systematically exploring the questions, "What am I experiencing?" and "What are you experiencing?"

From the Five Messages' point of view there are five different activities going on inside a person, whether that person is you or I. It would help our selfunderstanding if we would pay more attention to all five. And it would help our communication in conflict situations if we would express all five and listen for all five:

1. observing -- what I am seeing, hearing, touching (a simple description of "just the facts")
2. emoting -- the emotions I am experiencing, such as joy, sorrow, frustration, fear, delight, anger, regret, etc., acknowledged in an "I statement"
3. interpreting, evaluating, associating and past wants -- a large part of my emotional response (sometimes all) to a situation can be caused by my own wants and my interpretation and evaluation of other people's actions.
4. wanting, hoping -- what I want now in terms of action, information, conversation or promise
5. envisioning, anticipating results -- what good situation will come about if I get what I'm asking for. It helps people understand and empathize with requests when the "happy ending" is expressed as part of the request itself.

Here is an example of a person understanding and communicating her or his own feelings and wants, in a situation where it would be easy to be bossy or condescending:

The Five Messages:	Example (social worker to runaway):
1. What are you seeing, hearing or otherwise sensing? (facts only)	"Hi there! I'd like to talk to you for a second... When I see you sitting out here on the street in the cold...
2. What emotions are you feeling?	...I feel really concerned about you...
3. What interpretations, wants, needs, memories or anticipation's of yours support those feelings?	...because I imagine that you are going to get sick...
4. What action, information or commitment do you want now?	...and I want to ask you to come with me to our city's teen shelter...
5. What positive results will that action, information or commitment lead to in the future? (no threats)	...so that you can get some food to eat and have a safe place to stay tonight"

Working with the Five Messages can be a powerful and creative way of:

• becoming aware of more of what I am experiencing
• telling the truth about what I am experiencing
• listening for the truth of your experience ("listening with five ears")
• encouraging you to say more about what you are experiencing (by sounding you out with open-ended questions about each message)
• reflecting back elements of what another person is experiencing (especially feelings, so that a person knows they've been understood)
• summarizing a big chunk of my own or your experience
• taking responsibility for my emotional responses and encouraging you, by my example, do the same

Suggested exercise: Make a list of emotional-support situations in your life in which you could use the Five Messages to deepen the quality of the emotional support you give.