Tone and Conflict Management

[lady_jem]

Okay, this is kind of an outgrowth from the "tone argument" post, but it's really a separate question...

Anyone who's been through any kind of relationship or group communication counseling (maybe this is an assumption?) has probably gotten the same basic template for "how to have a difficult conversation":

Person A: expresses something
Person B: says

Comments

[danneeness]

I've rarely had that established model work for me in any conflict. Maybe it's just me, but I find it extremely patronizing.

[cheshire23]

It is NOT just you. I-statements are pretty much guaranteed to aggravate me because they are, to me, the equivalent of "PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE CAN I HAVE A COOKIE! YOU HAVE TO GIVE ME A COOKIE NOW PLEASE BECAUSE I ASKED NICELY!"

[lady_jem]

WHOA--okay, this is great, thank you, a big light bulb just went off for me here

[logicalargument]

Very big "click" here for me, too.

[liminalia]

You know, I had those exact same thoughts go through my head a while earlier, and the conclusion I came to was that a model designed for people you're already in a relationship with does not work well for talking to random strangers on the internet who have no reason to trust your good faith in engaging in the discussion.

[hsifeng]

This.

[rhosyn_du]

This times a million. In my experience, there has to be both trust in all parties' good faith and a contextually even power balance between all parties for this to be an effective conflict management tool.

[supermouse]

YES! That's it.

[supermouse]

I don't know, but you are making me wonder.

[emily_shore]

I think it does work as a method, IF the privileged/powerful person is the one who's doing most of the listening and checking to find out whether they've heard correctly. In my view this is as true in marriage counseling as it is in anti-racist discussion.

[netmouse]

My impression from discussion about things like the "those tears" poem however, is that we also need to be careful how we're doing the "reflect-back active listening thing" because to people not familiar or comfortable with the format that can sometimes sound a lot like "I heard you said this so now I'm going to spend a lot of time talking about connections to my experience and my reactions instead of listening more."

[unjapanologist]

When you have text, I can see it really, really, coming off as condescending, since you can reference text

That makes a lot of sense, thanks. Also, in online discussions, you generally have the time to go off and google around before getting back to the other person(s) in the discussion. When you're told that something you said was clueless/racist/bad in some way, it's generally not hard to find a clue on the net. Continuing to try and clarify your own position instead of reacting to the content of the other person's original message doesn't seem like a very useful way of resolving conflicts in this particular medium. "You told me to RTFM but I'm just a beginner and I can't slog through a gazillion manual pages, you have to explain it to me yourself" doesn't work anymore, either. On most subjects, there's plenty of "for dummies" info to be found online.

I used to think that that conflict management template made a lot of sense. But it can be a fantastic way to simply avoid the topic at hand (and probably not just online).