A Facebook friend wrote this today. “I have been talking about “you” statements, how they are deadly, how I try to avoid them, how it will take me a week of trying to get to an “I” statement before I can talk about something that is upsetting me. I love it. I love “I” statements and what I have learned about myself….So I am reading this NYT article about people fighting by texting. There is an example of an exchange between a married couple via text that is CLASSIC battle of the “you” statements! Each is an emotional slap and an escalation.
The FB friend tried it out with her own friend. She continued, “I ended up mad at him. Mad. At. Him. And leaving the room. To my credit, I never used a “you” statement. Not to my credit, I did get mad instead of embracing that he is a different person than I am.”
On NPR yesterday the host conducted this experiment. Two tones were played to a studio audience. They were asked to raise their hands if the first tone was higher than the second. Half the audience raised their hands. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? The tones they played were called Shepard’s tones. From Wikipedia, “A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves.”
These tones were C and F# played in octaves. In other words, if you played six octaves of “C” notes, they would be both higher and lower than F# notes also played in octaves, so some Cs would be higher than some F#s, and some lower. The same is true for all the F#s.
We may hear the same things, but we hear them differently. The FB friend wrote, “…he is a different person than I am.” When we hear the same sounds, do we hear them differently? And if we see the same things, do we see them differently? When you taste sauerkraut do you taste what I taste?
Forty-seven years ago I took a photograph of one of my brothers holding his baby son. On his face was what I perceived as love and affection. When my other brother saw the photograph, he asked, “Why is he so mad?” Maybe we see the same things, but we perceive them differently.
And this becomes abundantly clear when it comes to seeing ourselves. Today my favorite politician, Marjorie Taylor Greene, tweeted this about the failure of Republicans to sweep the midterms.,
One response: “Irony is dead.” Another: “The definition of oxymoron.” That Marjorie can’t see that she is perhaps the least qualified candidate to serve in Congress, that if she believed that“candidate quality” was a factor many, like me, would have her tender her resignation on the spot.
I studied “I Messages” In a college psychology class. Instead of blaming or pointing fingers we were advised to rephrase it to begin, “I feel…” We don’t say, “You ignored my birthday last week,” we turn it around to say, “It makes me feel good when people remember my birthday.” Then let the chips fall where they may.
When Jason was in his early teens he covered his walls with posters of half-naked women. Jadyne was uncomfortable when she walked in. I suggested that she not direct Jason to take them down, but to say something like, “I feel uncomfortable when I walk into your room.” She tried that. He said, “Fine, don’t come in.”