Having a conversation about the conversation creates the possibility of possibility. This makes meta-conversations a central tool for navigating into extraordinary human relationship where possibility is abundant. The keys to being able to start a meta-conversation are: 1. possessing your attention so that you can move your attention about freely, 2. being centered so that you are not giving your authority away, and 3. going nonlinear so that you are not limited by the apparent reality barriers offered by the space of a conversation.
Meta-Conversations with Children
In just a few moments, having a meta-conversation with your child can create wonders that you may have already concluded could never occur. In general, children less than fifteen years old are still in the testing and formatory stages of Box building. The structure of their Box is still being determined. After fifteen years of age, the Box tends to stop evolving and start crystallizing, unless a person is brought through some kind of rite of passage where they become cognizant of and take responsibility for having a Box. A child has more flexible habits than an adult. When you, as an adult, initiate a conversation about the conversation with a child, the child will usually slip right into the new conditions with an easefulness that would startle most adults.
The reason adults fail to create meta-conversations with children is not that the children cannot go there with them; it is that the adults avoid functioning from the perspective that the conversation that is happening right now is not the only possible conversation that could be happening right now. We adults tend to defend the original options that our Box allows us to see, as if these were the only options that could be seen. So, when a child-adult conflict arises, the adults shift into a power struggle using physical size, physical strength, age, position, role, education, or financial status as weapons to overpower the child into submission.
Isaac Asimov used to say, “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” The adult’s particular incompetence in this case is the inability to “go nonlinear” – that is, to not assume that the present conversation or struggle that you are having right now with your child is the only possible conversation that could be happening. In fact, many other kinds of conversations are available, and waiting for you to enter. All that you as the adult need to do to get there is to start a meta-conversation. If you start a meta-conversation, the child will tend to join you immediately in the new world opened up by the meta-conversation. Not only that, but the child will learn how to go nonlinear and make meta-conversations themselves in their lives. I still remember when my daughters, in their early teens, first started using meta-conversations on me and their mother to create what they really wanted for themselves instead of being trapped by the limits of what their mother and I could imagine was best for them. The children will use this ability for the rest of their lives.
Meta-Conversations You Could Have With Your Children
• This living room is not a jungle gym. How can you do what you want to do without using this room like a jungle gym?
• A relationship between brothers / sisters is an honor and a privilege. Through teasing or physical violence you lose the privilege of being together. Each of you please go into a different room for the next two hours. Then we can speak about what you are asking for that is expressed in fighting.
• I notice that you are talking a lot just to fill up the space with your voice. What is really going on for you behind all this talking?
• It looks like you are having a feeling. What feeling is that?
• Is there a problem? Whose problem is this?
• How do you like how it is going so far?
• Did I hear you well? Could you give me another chance to hear what you are saying?
• What are your biggest complaints about being a child in this family?
• It seems that you disagree. Can you propose some other options?
• How was that for you?
• I hear your reasoning. What I said is a boundary. I will not argue reasons about this. But I would like to know more about what you need. Then perhaps we can find a different way to get there together.
• What is really going on here?
• This choice is up to you. No matter what you choose I love you and I respect you.
• This is what I want to do. What do you want to do?
• What could you tell me so that I could get to know you better?
An important element in successful communication with children is your ability to listen. The adage, “Children are to be seen and not heard,” runs deep in our culture. When children are not heard and are also not given boundaries to work with, they will take over spaces and do anything to get adult attention, even if all they get is negative attention. When we make our cursory attempts to listen to children and find them speaking nonsense, we only strengthen our commitment to the adage. You can discover richness and depth in your communications with children (and with adults) when you use meta-conversations to distinguish between babble and authentic sharing.
SECTION 6-O
Using Adult Communication
Love, they say, is a function of communication. When you think about it, this makes sense. When you look from the Adult perspective, what is the purpose behind communication? What is the central message behind every communication? Why do people communicate with each other? Why do people talk to you? When someone talks to you what is the core energetic of every communication?
We do not often recognize, consciously, that the core message in every communication, no matter what the communication is, is “I love you.” Even when a person says, “I hate you,” the core message in that communication is, “I love you,” or they would not bother telling you that they hate you. They would just not bother to communicate with you at all. Let this idea sink in for awhile. The prime motivator that transports every communication is deep caring love.
Now you have an important experiment to do. Use the proposal that “I love you” is the underlying message in every communication you receive and see what happens. To do the experiment, split your attention. Use 50 percent of your attention to listen to what a person is saying to you, to read their note, their letter, their email, etc. And at the same time use the other 50 percent of your attention to remember that what is moving them to communicate to you is their love for you. Beneath all the layers, even within complaints, blaming, ridicule, or negative feedback, the motivating force of the communication is love. What they are really saying in so many words is, “I love you.” With this Adult perspective in place, notice what happens to the quality of your relating. Spend time enjoying what you notice.
As explained on the Map of Communication, the purpose of Adult communication is to complete communications. The underlying principle of Adult communication is that a communication persists until it is received. Receiving communications completes them. When a communication is completed, that communication vanishes with a “Bing!” and you sink to the next subtler layer in the communication.
Communications often have many layers. Through receiving communications, we complete layer after layer and move ever closer to the central message, which is “I love you.” If we do not receive the first layer of a communication, in whatever way it is offered to us, then the further and perhaps more important layers will never be revealed. If a communication is not completed, the communicator is frustrated and must try again later, in some other way. By blocking communications we are saying no to love.
As it is, we do not know how to receive and complete communications. We have not been trained. In fact, we have been trained in the opposite, how to avoid receiving and completing communications. The avoidance of receiving and completing communications is a characteristic of ordinary human relationship. Again, if we wish to enter extraordinary human relationship, we have to learn new skills. In this case, we need to learn and practice receiving and completing communications.
Communication originates in the conscious and unconscious intentions of the se
nder. The sender experiences an urge to communicate and then does the best they can to encode the communication into a form that can be transmitted to the receiver. Most often the encoding is spoken language, either directly in person, over the phone, or through some other media. Encoding can also include written or typed words, drawings, musical notes, schematic diagrams, designs, shapes, or constructed objects. In whatever form the message is encoded and transmitted, the receiver must then decode the message to receive the communication, as shown on the map.
MAP OF COMMUNICATION (partial)
A communication persists until it is received.
We think this is how communication works. However this map is incomplete. Half of the process is missing! Without including the other half of the process our communications fail because they are not completed.
As you know from experience, this urge-encode-transmit-decode-impression process is lightening fast, delicate, complicated, and quite susceptible to glitches, assumptions, errors, expectations, misinterpretations, mixed messages, projections, crossed communications and so on.
In addition, we assume that this diagram of the communication process is complete, and it is not complete! We do not realize the consequences of using this incomplete communication model. Our fractional understanding of communication causes failure and breakdown in most of our relationships, and traps us in the ordinary no matter what else we try.
The missing component of our communication process is the “completion loop” where the listener repeats back to the speaker what they heard the speaker say. If what the listener repeats accurately reflects what the speaker said, the speaker almost involuntarily says, “Yes.” When the speaker hears himself saying “Yes,” he confirms that the listener has indeed heard his original message and something relaxes. You can see the relaxation happen. The speaker’s original intention is satisfied because the communication comes back to where it started. The completion loop consumes the original urge and the whole communication vanishes into itself. Acceptance has occurred. With the first communication fulfilled, a completely new communication can begin. But, until the first communication has been completed, no new communication can start.
Thousands of intelligent people in trainings have consistently demonstrated that they do not know how to generate a completion loop. Few of us have ever had a communications class. We learned to communicate by imitating the communications delivered to us. Few of our parents ever had a communications class either. Largely by imitating our parents, we learned to generate communication roadblocks instead of completion loops.
Roadblocks to Adult Communication
Dr. Thomas Gordon described twelve communication “roadblocks” in his groundbreaking book Parent Effectiveness Training. When I first read this list it shattered my world. I had to copy the list and carry it around with me, and read it whenever I was communicating with someone. I had no idea how to communicate without killing communications with roadblocks. A roadblock is whatever you say – no matter what it is – that does not repeat back and prove you heard what was said. My habit to deliver roadblocks was so deep that I had to start all over with my communications. Probably you do too. (Sorry…)
Plan on being consciously (meaning painfully) incompetent for three to six months, as it takes about that long to make a shift in communication habits. But do it. Make the effort, now, before more time goes by. Whole new worlds of trust and intimacy can open up as a result of you learning to stop making roadblocks and start making completion loops.
Twelve Roadblocks
Communication Response
1) “I hate you.” “Shut your mouth. Do not say things like that to me!”
Roadblock #1: ORDERING / DIRECTING / COMMANDING
2) “I hate you.” “Say that again and I will walk out this door!”
Roadblock #2: WARNING / ADMONISHING / THREATENING
3) “I hate you.” “Good people do not hate. If you hate it comes back to you.”
Roadblock #3: MORALIZING / PREACHING / PHILOSOPHIZING
4) “I hate you.” “Maybe you should do rage work or see a psychologist.”
Roadblock #4: ADVISING / GIVING SOLUTIONS / GIVING SUGGESTIONS
5) “I hate you.” “Hate comes from misunderstandings or sloppy thinking.”
Roadblock #5: LECTURING / TEACHING / GIVING LOGICAL ARGUMENTS
6) “I hate you.” “It is stupid to say that. You caused this argument anyway!”
Roadblock #6: JUDGING / CRITICISING / DISAGREEING / BLAMING
7) “I hate you.” “You are so brave to express yourself. I understand.”
Roadblock #7: PRAISING / AGREEING
8) “I hate you.” “You are overreacting again! Look how red your face is!”
Roadblock #8: NAME CALLING / RIDICULING / SHAMING
9) “I hate you.” “Probably you are just tired and your blood sugar is low.”
Roadblock #9: INTERPRETING / ANALYZING / DIAGNOSING
10) “I hate you.” “It’s alright honey. I’ll help do things and you will feel better.”
Roadblock #10: REASSURING / SYMPATHIZING / CONSOLING / SUPPORTING
11) “I hate you.” “What’s wrong? When did you start feeling this way?”
Roadblock #11: PROBING / QUESTIONING / INTERROGATING
12) “I hate you.” “Just when I was thinking of getting ice cream. Want to go?”
Roadblock #12: WITHDRAWING / DISTRACTING / HUMORING / DIVERTING
Even giving intelligent suggestions or providing sincere sympathy destroys the completion loop and therefore kills the relationship simply because what you say does not complete the communication. The speaker cannot experience being heard by you if you do not repeat back what you heard them say. When you seriously consider this list of roadblocks most people come away thinking, “My God! What else is there? This is all I ever say in my communications.”
The Completion Loop
Using the completion loop can feel remarkably strange at first. All you are doing is repeating back what you heard the person say. Repeating back what a person says is not a normal part of our typical speech patterns because we already know what we want to say before the other person has even finished with their sentence. We are not really listening to them with our heart and soul; we are dueling with them with our mind. As a result most of our conversations occur between intellect and intellect, rather than between the whole complex of four bodies.
Mind chatter is like Ping Pong: Ka-ping ka-pong ka-ping ka-pong ka-ping ka-pong, the communication zips back and forth between intellects, never really landing in our souls. We give each other ideas, but walk away feeling a kind of emptiness, because we have not really connected and shared ourselves. We have not let ourselves be known. True, head-to-head communication feels safer (to Westerners). But what is so great about feeling safe anyway? Communicating from heart to heart may well be the exciting adventure that provides the energetic food our soul has been hungering for. The adventure starts with you learning Adult communication that includes completion loops. When using completion loops our communications quickly get to the heart of the matter. Sit for awhile with this next example of how communication can be when you finally use the completion loop.
Communication
Response
1) “I hate you.”
“You hate me.”
Completion Loop: REPEATING BACK WHAT YOU HEARD THEM SAY
2) “Yes.”
BING! (The “yes” is the
“Bing!” the sound of a completed communication. You have finally listened. The speaker has the experience that you have actually heard what they said to you. Now their next deeper message can finally be communicated to you!)
3) “I hate you because you never listen to me when I tell you that I love you.”
Completion loops also work when communicating with children. So often we adults assume that we already know about children (after all, we were one once), that we already know about our children (after all, we have been
living with them since they were born), and that we already know what the children are communicating to us (after all, we have already heard it a million times from them). We consistently react with one of the twelve roadblocks because we think this is the most expedient way to handle the kids (after all, kids are problems that are our job to handle…). So much is missed.
Listen to this sample conversation between twelve-year-old Johnny and his Dad:
Johnny: “Dad, I hate school.”
Typical answer with roadblocks: “You can’t hate school. Everybody has to go to school. I had to go to school and for me it was a privilege. If you don’t go to school you won’t learn what you need to get a good job. Then you will be out there on the streets picking up garbage for a living. Do you want that? Just buckle down and do your homework. Only eight more years to go. Say, do you want to help me remodel grandpa’s living room this weekend?”
MAP OF COMMUNICATION (partial)
A communication persists until it is received.
This completion loop is destroyed by a communication roadblock. The communication is not completed so it must be repeated.
Now this time, the same communication but with completion loops: Johnny: “Dad, I hate school.”
Dad: “You hate school.”
Johnny: “Yes.” (That “yes” is the automatic Bing! of a received and completed communication. You have just won the battle against your Box jumping in with what it wants to say. Instead you are listening, not your Box. Your goal is to complete as many communication loops as you can, knowing that at the heart of each communication is the message “I love you.” You just used a completion loop. Can you do it again? And again?) “Yes. I really hate school. Especially my teacher Mr. Dandy.”
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 25
