Creating Harmonious Relationships: A Practical Guide to the Power of True Empathy

Dedication

To the memory of my father

Dr. Philip M LeCompte

1907-1998

who wrote a letter opened by mother after his death

"I was often difficult to live with; I know,

but not smart enough to know what to do about it."

Acknowledgment

I am deeply indebted to Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D., for developing and teaching the Nonviolent Communication model. I am also grateful to all the participants in my workshops and classes who, through sharing their feelings, hopes and experiences, have helped me refine the communication process presented in this book. The names of people in personal stories have been changed to honor their privacy. I would especially like to thank fellow trainers and friends Carole Starr, Diana McCain, Linda Andrews, Lori Rand, Penny Verret, Tom Hansen, and Carol Hochstedler for their contributions.

In the field of social psychology, I would like to honor the pioneering research of John A. Bargh, Ph.D., of New York University. I am grateful to Cary Kmet, Martin Koski, and Carol Zickell, who introduced me to spiritual life. Thanks also to Gerald Jampolsky, M.D., Robert Gass, Ph.D., and Brent Haskell, D.O., for further enlightening and clarifying my path.

I am deeply grateful for the loving support of my mother and my son. The assistance of Kelley Conway, my insightful writing coach, and Patricia van der Leun, a remarkable literary agent, was invaluable in bringing this book to fruition. I have chosen to write in the first-person plural as a stylistic standard because it acknowledges our common humanity as we overcome old mental habits to improve our relationships.

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgment

Introduction

Difficulties in Relationships

How I Learned to Communicate

A New Psychology

What This Book Offers You

Chapter 1 What Goes Wrong?

Bill’s Story

Maggie and Kristen

Jennifer and Paul Fight (their words)

Jennifer and Paul Fight (their thoughts)

Their Problem

A Quick Review

My Projection

Chapter 2 What Makes Us Go Wrong?

What Psychologists Have Known about Unconscious Processes

The Breakthrough Discoveries

1. Perception

2. Evaluation

3. Motivation

Unconscious Influences

The new understanding of the psychology of perception and response:

Chapter 3 The Judge

Meet Your Judge

Paul’s Judge

Who Trained Your Judge?

How the Judge Sees

Projection and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

But, Surely I Am Objective

Desi and the Prince: The Judge Personified in Literature

The Judge Rules the Realm

Chapter 4 Harmonious Resolution

Sylvia and Tom Confront Each Other

Sylvia Connects with Tom

Choose Conscious Override

Judge Specificity

Human Hopes

Our Happiness Is Linked to Our Goals

Not Guilty!

Chapter 5 Empathic Listening

Centering

The Two-edged Sword

How the Judge Listens

Listening with True Empathy

Guess at their hopes

Typical Listening Example (judge in charge)

Example of Listening with True Empathy

The Goal of Effective Listening

Connecting Feeling to Hope

The Value of Conscious Listening

Additional Listening Skills

Centering

Alternatives to Listening

Conscious Listening Is Radically New

Chapter 6 Conscious Speaking

Your Judge Is Attacking Your Friends

Feelings

Stating Our Feelings

Three Cautions about Feeling Words

Judgmental Words Used in Place of Feelings

Feelings and Responsibility—The Because I Clause

Stating Our Hope

Making Our Request

The Difference Between a Request and a Demand

Pulling All the Elements Together

Why Speaking This Way Is So Powerful

Chapter 7 True Empathy and Anger

Men in Pain: A Special Case

Listening to Anger – Giving True Empathy

Transforming Our Anger – Getting True Empathy for Ourselves

Speaking Powerfully – Getting True Empathy from Others

Chapter 8 Forgiveness

Common Forgiveness Keeps Us Stuck

The Two Levels

The Power of Love

Complete Forgiveness Empowers Us

Being Practical

Chapter 9 Creating Joyful Intimate Relationships

Five Damaging Assumptions in Relationships

One Loving Intention

Freedom

The Judge’s Finger is on the Trigger

Chapter 10 Connecting with Teenagers

Our Two Options

Demonstrating Connection

Chapter 11 Being Influential at Work

Creating Respect

Managing People

Explanation of Stuart’s Mistakes

Same Scenario with Conscious Communication

Explanation of Stuart’s Conscious Communication

Chapter 12  Conversing with Your Judge

The Importance of Our Self-Image

Changing Our Beliefs About Ourselves

Getting to Know Our Conscious Selves

How to meditate

Alternatives

Dialoging with Our Judge’s Voices

Summary

When do we use Conscious Communication?

What do we do?

What we are not trying to do and why

Why are relationships so important?

Why does Conscious Communication seem to be difficult?

What do we need in order to succeed?

Practice Exercises

A Friend

Endnotes

Bibliography

About the Author

Introduction

Difficulties in Relationships

Think of a relationship or a conflict you had with someone that ended unhappily. What bothered you the most about it? Remember what the other person did. What were you thinking, and how were you feeling? If you’re like most of us, you’ve agonized about these painful relationships and wondered what went wrong. You’ve blamed the other person, and in your secret heart, you’ve blamed yourself.

Still, you’re a compassionate person, and even though your feelings were hurt and you said things you regretted, deep down, you really cared about the other person and wished things had gone better. If you could rewind the great videotape of life and repair the damage, you would.

Now, you are determined not to repeat the same mistakes. You work hard to keep your relationships healthy and fulfilling, struggling with issues as they appear in your daily life. Here are some of the situations you might be encountering:

Each time you and your spouse have to make a decision involving conflicting needs, you feel like you get the short end of the stick. When you both are upset and need support, when there’s a choice of where to go together for a long weekend, or who needs a new car, you feel that your contributions are not acknowledged and that you’re getting less. As a result, you begin to feel bad about the relationship and yourself.

Your boss criticizes something you worked hard on after you stayed late and used your personal time. You’re left feeling unfairly judged and angry. You worry about your future with this company.

A friend complains to you continually. When you talk on the phone, you find yourself timing her to find out how much time she takes up in the conversation. You like her, but you start resenting the relationship because you feel like you don’t matter.

Every time you decide to make a major change, such as switching your career so you can do the work you love, your parents tell you you’ll never succeed, and they advise you to go for a steady paycheck instead. You’re disappointed not to receive the love and support you’d been hoping for and wish you’d never told them anything.

The question is: How can you make sure you don’t end up with another painful relational conflict or loss? This is a core issue because we’re questioning our essence—whether we are good or bad. We conceive a self-image from how we are in our relationships, and this conception determines every aspect of our lives.

Recognizing the importance of this question in my own life, I embarked on a twenty-year search to find real answers. In the last five years, I succeeded finding and refining a simple but powerful way to understand and empathize with people that went beyond all other methods. The results are contained in this book. Here is my story...

How I Learned to Communicate

I know about ineffective communication from personal experience. My family boasted a doctor, a father and a mother who was powerful in local politics. Both had lively and critical intellects. Back then, however, we were inept at talking about our feelings, so certain experiences dominated my awareness. My father’s outbursts of rage terrified me, and my most vivid early memory is of being paddled with a board in the garage. On the basis of such encounters, I determined that I was a bad person. In the isolation of my childhood, I didn't know there was another way of relating.

I honed my critical skills, and in high school, my talent for pointing out other people’s deficiencies earned me the nickname the cynic. I remember saying loudly into the hush just after a kid dropped his tray in the cafeteria, Smooth move, bowels. I felt a glow hearing the laughter around me, but that kid hated me.

I wanted a pretty girlfriend, convinced she would save me from my aching sense of inadequacy. Her love and unfailing support would bring me the security and happiness I craved. I never came close. I was too shy to talk to girls I liked, never mind asking for a date. I soon learned that bourbon took the edge off and kept my dreams alive in romantic fantasies.

My friendships with men didn’t fare much better. I had a good friend, Ray, for a while in college. We got an apartment together, but he started doing unacceptable things, like leaving dirty dishes in the sink. One day I had had enough and, not knowing how to confront him, I piled the dishes, greasy frying pan and all, onto his bed. Later I decided he just wasn’t good enough and moved out.

With hindsight, I see I wasn’t just a poor communicator, I was also unconscious of what was going on inside me. I lived in reaction to other people and used addictive behaviors to mask my inner pain.

I felt closer to my older brother, Tony, than to anyone else in my family. When I was nineteen, Tony committed suicide. My parents came to be with me at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. But, typically, for my family, we didn’t grieve. That night I shared a hotel room with my father. Lying in bed, I thought about how whenever my brother came to the house, the first thing he would say was, Is Andy home? I really missed him. Remembering our close connection, I let out a few moaning sobs.

My father said, Andy, are you all right?

From lack of experience connecting at a feeling level, I took his question to mean that crying made him uncomfortable and said, Yeah, I’m OK, and stopped.

Repressing my grief took its toll. I got a severe case of infectious mononucleosis and developed an ulcer, neither of which was diagnosed for months. I lived a thousand miles from home and was convinced I was dying. Then I began to have panic attacks. Waves of terror would surge through me, and I’d immediately have to get to a safe place. I told no one about these attacks, fearing I was insane and would be locked in a mental institution. I waited it out for a year and a half as the attacks slowly lessened.

Although I didn’t have friends, I was fortunate to be a good student. I obtained a B.A. in History at the University of Wisconsin and an M.A. at the University of California, winning several fellowships. Happiness in relationships, however, eluded me.

The first positive change to my way of life came in the early 1970s. At the urging of a girlfriend, I began to meditate. Meditation allowed me to become aware of my thoughts. I saw that my mind generated thoughts all by itself and that there was a conscious me who could observe these thoughts. This gave me a new perspective on myself. I realized I had a choice; I could decide which thoughts I wanted to entertain. I didn’t need to let myself be controlled by my initial feeling-reactions toward other people.

Not long after beginning to meditate, I realized the way I had been living was not bringing me happiness, so I quit my doctoral program in history and began to read psychology. Two authors in particular, Carl Rogers and Viktor Frankl had a profound influence on me.

In On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers describes the healing power of unconditional positive regard. He validated something most of us know from personal experience that it feels incredibly good to be listened to and understood by someone who sees only the good in us. His ideas resonated deeply in me. I wanted personal confirmation that I was a good person, and I wanted to experience this in my relationships with others.

I had a negative attitude about life. Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, said, the last of the human freedoms [is]—to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.... It is this spiritual foundation—that cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful.

I wanted to find that same meaningful conviction. But I knew there was a difference between simply reading Frankl’s words about choosing one’s attitude and personally integrating that truth. Frankl gained his knowledge the hardest way imaginable: surviving three years in Auschwitz while his father, mother, brother and wife all died at the hands of the Nazis. Frankl explained that there are other ways besides suffering to discover the meaning of life. I was intent on finding meaning in as direct a way as possible.

I entered the most intensive experiential psychology training program I could find. I participated in individual, couples, and group psychotherapy. I taught assertiveness training, transactional analysis, and parent education, earning a second Master's degree in humanistic psychology and organizational development. I then took a series of jobs training executives to manage people effectively.

I became successful and was asked to join the Executive Board of my chapter of the American Society for Training and Development. In the late 1980s, I began to consult independently. Although I was highly skilled professionally, my personal life was a series of disasters; my marriage was a good example.

In my psychology program, I fell in love with a woman who was forthright in her humanistic convictions. Yet once I married her, I found I had little ability to articulate my feelings or hopes in personal, intimate situations. I wasn’t able to tell her when I felt hurt, sad or afraid. I feared she would see me as weak and would reject me, so I hid those thoughts and feelings. I then projected my inability to communicate onto her and resented her for not being able to guess what I really wanted. After several years I had stored up enough grievances against her to justify to myself that she was an inconsiderate, unloving person. I divorced her.

I expected that when she left, the trouble in my life would go with her. But as I sat in my silent house, I was shocked to discover that I was only the shell of a person. I lay on the bed with no life energy, unable to work. Then the panic attacks came back. I realized that my life didn’t work. I wasn’t better than other people; and trying to be right in my judgments of them made things worse. My worldview was bankrupt. I hit a terrible bottom of despair, depression, and suicidal thoughts.

By now, however, I had a wonderful young son. Rather than give him up, I began to look harder for answers.

I reentered psychotherapy and found myself unable to cry. I committed myself to learning how I put together a crying folder of pictures of my son and my brother. I wrote a description of the day my son, in the hopes of keeping his parents together, first accepted putting on his Sunday clothes without a fuss. I wrote about how great I felt the day I beat my brother at chess and my exultation when I finally pinned him wrestling. Tony said that I was just getting too strong for him. It was only years later that I recalled he had a genius IQ, was six years older than I and was the undefeated captain of his wrestling team. He had let me win at chess and at wrestling because he loved me.

Looking through this file, I could begin to cry; then I would keep myself at it, even talking out loud, telling my son I was sorry, telling my brother I was grateful for all he’d done for me and that I wished I could have been there for him, too. After crying hard, I would feel deeply relieved. The panic attacks stopped and never came back.

I also went to support groups and began to develop an inner life. At one of these groups, I met Cary, a man with a past as tortured as mine. But he was now happy and serene. I noticed him because when he told his story, he cried and was unashamed. I gained the courage to ask him to sponsor me. He became my good friend, the first man with whom I could be completely honest and not made to feel ashamed for feeling weak or afraid. Cary also attended meetings to discuss the book, A Course in Miracles and invited me to come along.

The course provided me with some important understandings: that I was essentially good and that my inaccurate perception of other people led me into conflict with them. Forgiving them would lead me to inner peace. By forgive, the course means to stop judging other people on incomplete evidence and see and accept their goodness instead. The course gave me a better understanding of my mind, pulling together much of what I had already learned. But how to apply this abstract knowledge in face-to-face emotional conflict situations still eluded me.

In 1993, my music teacher handed me a videotaped presentation by Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, founder of the Center for Nonviolent Communication. As I watched Marshall interacting with people, I suspected he had what I was looking for. I decided to participate in one of his intensive weekend workshops.

Dr. Rosenberg listened closely, his eyes intent, his body still and open. I was moved by his ability to connect at a feeling level with participants and to facilitate the healing of old wounds. He did a role-play with a young woman who wanted to forgive the dying father who had abused her. Marshall helped her to say what she really felt, that in spite of the anger at the trauma she had experienced at his hands, in spite of her sadness at being unable to find happiness with men, she still loved her father. As Marshall role-played her father, I could understand how much he loved his daughter and how horrible he felt about what he had done to her. As her old pain surfaced, was released and replaced by love, everyone in the room was deeply moved. Her healing helped us all.

I saw in Marshall’s nonviolent communication model a way to connect at the heart that transformed people’s attitudes toward each other. It was unconditionally loving. Attacker and defender, victimizer and victim, were gently moved from what at first appeared to be intractable differences to mutual understanding and appreciation. Here were improvements on everything I had learned so far about communication and a way to put into practice what I had studied in A Course in Miracles.

The following year I completed Marshall Rosenberg’s Facilitating Nonviolent Communication Training program in Switzerland. It was a life-changing experience for me. I learned that it wasn’t just Marshall Rosenberg who could transform perception and resolve deep conflicts harmoniously. Anyone could grasp and apply these skills. I committed myself to mastering and

teaching them.

When I returned to the United States, my personal life changed dramatically for the better. Practicing the skills, I became more conscious, forgiving and happy. I am now in a healthy intimate relationship and engaged to be married. My relationship with my former wife has turned from bitterness to positive cooperation. She recently invited me to her housewarming party. After twenty years of icy silence, I have established a warm connection with my old friend Ray. And my son's teacher told me she had overheard him telling a classmate, I have a great dad.

I have adapted the nonviolent communication model into a conscious