SANDRA LOWEN SPEAKS AT THE 19TH ANNUAL WFWP ASSEMBLY

COMMUNICATION: THE LIFEWATER OF RELATIONSHIP

Communication goes on at every level of human life. It is the stuff of every molecule in our bodies; it goes on at the cellular level. It happens within our every organ and between organ systems. Individuals interact with each other, impact the environment, social systems and ultimately the universe.

It then is such a disaster when communication breaks down.

According to religious and spiritual traditions, the entire cosmos was created by 'The Word of the Creator. In the same way, the rift in the universe between humankind and every other being and creation came about, according to every religion's account, through miscommunication: the words of the serpent, the actions of the two primordial beings.

Therefore, right communication takes on significance in all human interactions.

But if we are all seeking right communication, why is it so hard to achieve?

When we fall seriously ill, we require life-water: a mixture of 5% dextrose and 0.9%saline in a hydrous solution with the potential to nourish and revive ebbing life. In the same way, good communication requires a bit of sweetness, a dash of spice and lots of hydration.

In his book The Five Love Languages , author Gary Chapman points out that the key issue in most relationships is the assumption that everyone is speaking the same language that we are. Think: we have all had the experience of trying to talk with someone who did not speak our language. What did we do? In all probability we spoke louder, and when the object of our communication still failed to speak, we upped the volume even more. And how effective was that behavior? Think about it: the person to whom you were speaking was not deaf; there was nothing wrong with his or her auditory system. The issue was simply that s/he did not share an understanding of the words that we were using. But again and again, we meet a person with whom we cannot effectively exchange information, and the decibels go up.

In the mental health field, repeating the same ineffective behavior and expecting a different result is a definition for mental illness. No one here is in a straitjacket or under heavy medications, but we continue to carry out the same techniques that have resulted in failure time after time is not just counterproductive, but actually destructive.

Forms of Relational Communication

Usually when we think about communication we think about verbal interaction. Words are indeed the way we relate to communication most consciously. In his book The Mystery of Marriage , Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh points out that "The tongue has the power of life and death" .

One of cartoonist Gary Larson's most famous 'Far Side' cartoons is that of a man chastising his dog. "Ginger! He shouts and berates Ginger, and even ends with a threat. But what does Ginger hear? "Blah-blah-blah-blah, Ginger. Blah-blah-blah-blah, Ginger!" (Fig. 1). Humans respond in similar ways. After a while, our constant reminding, prodding, prompting and berating just becomes one big noise. And mothers, what happens when a baby finds him/herself in a noisy room? S/he falls asleep. That is why, despite your remonstrations, the garbage doesn't get taken out, the clothes don't get picked up off the bedroom floor and the toilet seat stays up.

How do we use the amazing power of the word? Psychologists tell us that by the time s/he reaches age 18, the average person has heard over 180,000 negative messages about him/herself. And despite the proliferation of communication devices and the fact that they appear to be sprouting from everyone's ears these days, the average couple spends an estimated 12 minutes in communication with a spouse. Much of that time is communicating instructions from the "Honey-Do" list: "Paint the bedroom", "take out the trash", "pick up a quart of milk on your way home", or complaining, "Why don't you take me out? Frank takes Mildred out every Saturday night.

Blah-blah-blah-Ginger!"

Complicating matters is the recipients' ability to listen. Marriage counselors tell us that the average person cannot listen for more than 17 seconds without interrupting. That means that, the person listened for 17 seconds minus the time it took to formulate the interruption, minus whatever time it took for the listener to be distracted. Once that person latched onto something in your conversation that caught his/her attention, the rest of your conversation was lost. It is rare indeed to capture people's attention wholly. That is why news reporters put the most important details of their articles in the first paragraph.

Many times we become upset with others, because we are speaking the same language. However, we have to ask if we really speak the same language, even if we grew up in the same house with the same parents, went to the same school and lived in the same hometown all our lives. No two people mean the same thing when they say words like 'Big' or 'sad' or 'tall' or 'happy'.

Most of our conversations, therefore, are almost pointless. We communicate in a language that is full of unclear verbs, unqualified comparisons, unreal absolutes and unquestioned rules to people who are constantly tuning out our words, so that they can interrupt us with their unclear verbs, unqualified comparisons, unreal absolutes and unquestioned rules.

Fortunately, words alone are not the only communication tools that we have. Just as linguists report that English readers read shapes, rather than actual words, so it is not only words that people deal with, but also every other aspect of a human. One may speak nice words, but turn the body away in a rejecting attitude. Facial expression may betray a superior attitude.

"Show Me": Not Just a State Anymore!

Steven G. Jones, author of numerous works dealing with how the human mind works, emphasizes the need for any human to appeal to the five senses when communicating. He notes that some people relate to the world through their eyes, some through their ears, others through touch, smell or taste, and that appealing to their dominant way of relating to the world will best facilitate communication with that individual.

A visual person will communicate, "I see". That person will wear bright colors, demand that things relate well to each other and be fascinated by shapes. Showing this person what needs to be done will work best. I recall, for instance, the years and years that I spent trying to get our son to clean his room. I threatened to withhold his allowance, to ground him, and to deny him the TV remote. Nothing worked. But when we visited him after he had been in the Army for only eight weeks, we were shocked to find his bunk made to quarter-bouncing perfection, his socks and briefs rolled, his T-shirts smoothed in his drawer and his shoes polished to a high gloss and neatly stashed under his bed.

"What happened?" I asked him. "I yelled at you for eighteen years and your room was always a wreck!" He smiled. "My sergeant has a gun," he said. "You didn't have a gun. And besides, you just told me what to do. He actually showed me." "Blah, blah Ginger!"

The Listeners

The hearing person is the one who loves music. S/he is the best listener, usually, and can appreciate oral directions. In fact, s/he may even start a conversation with, "Listen..."This is the person who, when s/he does not want to hear, does the best job of tuning out. This person can substitute a full Brahms symphony in his/head (or Christine Aguilera, or Nirvana) for the sound of your voice in his/her head.

"Touch Me, Feel Me"

The TOUCH person speaks of 'feeling' things: "I feel that's what I want to do", s/he says. This is the person who is most likely to put out a hand to touch when speaking. Conversely, to hold his/her attention, a speaker may want to touch him/her.

Many parents agonize over communicating with their children. "I don't know why he's so disrespectful; why she won't listen to me; how he could possibly have gotten a girl pregnant; I've given him everything. I work my fingers to the bone...etc., etc.

For years I worked with troubled teens as well as supposedly stable adolescents. What I heard most often from them was the complaint, "I wish my dad would hug me sometimes...I wish my mom would just sit down and talk to me...I wish they'd stay home more..." And I cannot forget the words of the sad fourteen-year-old, five months pregnant and withering under her parents' baleful and rejecting glare: "My dad doesn't play with me anymore," she said. "He doesn't even look at me. I met this boy that was older than me...and he would talk to me, and then he would just hold me. And then things just happened."

This is such a competitive age. Parents want the very best for their children. They want to get them into the best colleges, which may be a six-figure proposition. They want nice houses, so that the children are not ashamed to bring friends home. Fifty-one percent of American families have both parents employed. Even in households with children under a year old, fifty-nine percent of mothers are at least employed part-time. The largest percentages of working mothers reside in households with teenaged children: a whopping seventy-three percent, with fifty-nine percent employed full-time, according to the U.S. Bureau of Census. And so today's children have it all: iPods and iPads and x-boxes and Playstation 3s, 3-D TVs and bulging closets crammed with the latest styles of designer clothes. But what do those children really want?

It is not too large a stretch to realize that this out-of-control generation is acting out with premature sexualization and chemical abuse out of a longing, aching need just to be kissed and held and made to feel good by a loving parent.

Touch, the language of love, is perhaps the most desired of all. People can lie. We can mistake what we hear. But touch is undeniable. The epidermis, or skin layer that covers each of us, is the largest organ in the human body. Behaviorists know that from the moment a baby comes out of the womb, it requires touch, or it will die, if deprived during the first month of its life, even if it receives all the food, liquids and other factors that it needs for its life. In fact, one of my high school volunteer jobs was to work in a well-baby hospital with abandoned infants. My job description involved only picking them up and playing with them.

All too often, when someone brings us a problem, we set about fixing it. We dole out advice. We take action. We provide services. But sometimes all someone needs is just to have our arms open wide and that shoulder to drop to receive their aching heads upon our broad shoulders.

"Talk to Me!"

There is so much silence in the world today. Since the invention of earplugs, people seem to be listening to something else. Particularly our children, who used to badger us on long trips with the question, "Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" now climb into the back seat of the car and turn on their tunes. No more counting red cars on the highway, or sing-a-longs, or conversations about trivia like what happened to grandpa's teeth or how Aunt Betty met the man she is about to marry. Now there is a driver, a person looking out the right-side window, and 2.2 children in the back seat, and the loudest thing in the car is the sound of the motor. At home, the children plug into the Wii or the X-box, and the only sound one hears is the occasional, "Woo-Hoo!" or "Aww-MAN!", depending on how their game is going. Dad comes in. The couple shares its twelve minutes of conversation and maybe sits down to a meal and perfunctory conversation, though, according to research by the National Council of Addiction and Substance Abuse only 58 percent of families share meals together at least once a week. It is more likely that, because children are so involved in sports and academic after-school activities and so loaded down with homework, and because moms and dads must frequently work long, grueling hours, family members eat alone or with extra-familial dinner companions, in places such as fast-food restaurants or drive-through parking lots, or in front of TV with pizza or Chinese food, barely tasting the food as they stare transfixed at the screen.

Research vouches for the increased stability and durability of families that eat with each other; that share that time of bonding to strengthen lines of communication, whether visual, verbal, aural, tactile, gustatory or olfactory. Yet precious few families value that stability and durability sufficiently to sacrifice money or popularity for it.

A Glance

Ever had someone say, "I don't like that guy; I don't like the way he looks at me!" We communicate so much through our eyes.

In the animal world, humans are a dynamic mixture of predator and prey. The location of our eyes on our heads, straight ahead, allows us to locate our prey, just as a lion or a tiger would. On the other hand, we have developed peripheral vision that in some humans exceeds 180 degrees, allowing us to check for any predator that might be stalking us.

Frequently we put ourselves in the position of predator or prey, and that is how we relate to the world. We turn hard eyes on those around us, mindless of whether they would harm or help us.

It becomes important that we consider what we communicate to others with just a glance. We have the hard, terrorizing look down; now we need to learn how to look at people with softer eyes. When we look at our children, at our spouses, at anyone we care about, we should practice letting our view go slightly out of focus. This softened glance gives us a more approachable look, one that attracts people to us, rather than that gives them pause or pushes them away.

How to Utilize the Life-water of Communication:

Stop, Look and Listen

First of all, when someone speaks, we should give our whole attention. It is essential to avoid multitasking, even if we are good at it. There are, in this world, people who go on making dinner while their children try to talk to them, or who keep typing when a co-worker brings up an issue or calls for help, or who plan their grocery lists or next move in a complicated business deal in the middle of lovemaking. When someone attempts to communicate, stop everything else. Take that person aside. Look into his/her eyes. Listen intently. Touch the person, if appropriate. Assume a listening posture.

In social work school, one of the first things we learned was the "seven-degree lean"; a therapeutic stance that says to a person, "I am listening to every word you say. Your every syllable is value and golden to me", as indeed it should be. In a practice, one receives pay just for listening.

Stephen Covey , in his first of perhaps the greatest series of self-help books ever written, outside of the Bible and other holy texts, indicates the seriousness of communication. In his book, The Divine Principle Rev. Sun Myung Moon states that the linchpin of the universe itself is 'the action of give-and-take', or the communication around the basis of a common interest of two beings, from sub-atomic particles to vast galaxies in outer space. How essential, then, is effective communication; not merely the taking of turns to talk, but actual completing of circuits: a sender giving a clear and unmistakable message to a listener, who processes it and sends back a crystalline indication that s/he 'got' the message and understood it.

Adam Chapman indicates that more and more businesses are abandoning the cut-throat, detached, business communications of the past for developing listeners who possess sympathy, trust, understanding and empathic concern.

Give Feedback

We've all had conversations with people, whether face-to-face or by telephone, that said nothing when we were done laying out whatever our spiel was. We've all said to what we thought was a buzzing phone line, "Are you still there?" And were we shocked to discover that they were! Though people sometimes lampoon therapists for their empathic sounds, those very sounds may comfort the human being who is in pain. There are actually methods of using these various types of listening indicants that reassure the client: you are not alone

Understand, even when you don't agree.

How many times has someone said something to you—perhaps about a political candidate or a social stance—that you thought was ridiculous? Our tendency would be to shut down immediately. Why listen to what we don't agree with or believe in?

In these outrageous times, you are not likely to agree with everything someone tries to communicate, nor do you need to. However, you do need to understand what the person is saying and what the person's reasoning is. Listening does not mean that you agree; itmeans simply that you have listened to understand why the person feels the way s/he does.

Our children come home explaining why they want to dress oddly or hang out with a particularly strange group of companions. Do we hear their need to be accepted by others or to make a statement, or do we merely hear that they are doing something we would not and don't want them to do either? Our spouse announces that he would like to move the family to Tasmania to take advantage of an exciting business opportunity or to fulfill a spiritual desire. Do we hear his desire to move the family to a safer or more meaningful -life, or do we get stuck wondering where we are going to get our nails done in Tasmania? People think through things when they can bump an idea up against us. And sometimes – not always, but certainly once in a while—they want to hear 'no'; but they want an informed 'no', not an emotional one.

Step back.

Everything is not about you. "I love my mom's meatloaf" does not mean that yours sucks. "Millie has lost so much weight!" doesn't indicate that you had better hop to on your diet. Be willing to hear things, even unpleasant things, without jumping to the conclusion that someone has it in for you. While there may be an embedded message when your children give you a size XXX blouse for your birthday, imagine the message you'll give them when you request the receipt and get that size 1X!

Werner Erhard the founder of Erhard Seminars Training ('est'), which later became the Landmark Foundation following his retirement, noted that, "humans are meaning-making machines". We want to communicate effectively, but often when someone says one thing we hear something else; not 'blah-blah Ginger', but "I think you are lazy and stupid and I want to kill you, but you are not worth the shot it would take to blow your brains out" Ginger. It becomes important to listen to what someone says with an independent ear. Of course, if the person really says "I want to kill you, etc. etc, take care.

Think before you speak!

I was the queen of the 'mouth-o-graphical error. I still blush at the day I made a terrible mistake. At the time I was working in a hospital as a volunteer. Poor Mrs. Muschetti had a soft food diet. She didn't like the pureed food, and I used to cheer her up by announcing at her door, "Lunch is ready, Mrs. Muschetti". One day I asked a nurse why the otherwise healthy-looking woman had to eat baby food. "She left her false teeth at home," the nurse informed me. "But don't mention it, because she's very sensitive about it." With that piece of information in my mind, I blundered into her room and announced, "Lunch is ready, Mrs. Dentures!"

Saying the first thing that comes to mind simply doesn't work. Remember the poor guy who blundered up to a stranger when the temperature hit a hundred and remarked in a jovial way, "Hot enough for you?" The stranger shot him! Give a little consideration.

Say something worth hearing.

The Bible states that speech should comprise "no filthiness, no foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place" . Too often we ramble on. Our words are empty. We communicate nothing. We talk to hear ourselves talk. People tune us out and we don't even notice.

There is a reason, most humans acknowledge, why God created us with two ears and only one mouth. We need to take that hint from nature!