SUMMARY (repeated from Introduction) Slow down and give your listeners more information about  what  you  are experiencing by using a wide range of   “I-statements.”  You are likely to get more of your listener’s empathy if you express more of what you are seeing and hearing, feeling, interpreting, wanting, and envisioning. In the pages that follow we will explore each of these aspects of experience and how to express them more clearly.

Anytime one person sincerely listens to another, a very creative process is going on in which the listener mentally reconstructs the speaker’s experience. The more facets or dimensions of your experience you share with easy-to-grasp “I statements,” the easier it will be for your conversation partner to reconstruct your experience accurately and understand what you are thinking, feeling and wanting. This is equally worthwhile whether you are trying to solve a problem with someone or trying to express appreciation for them. Expressing yourself this carefully might appear to take longer than your usual quick style of communication. But if you include all the time it takes to unscramble everyday misunderstandings, and to work through the feelings that usually accompany not being understood, expressing yourself more completely can actually take a lot less time.

Filling in the missing information. If you observe people in conversation carefully, you will begin to notice that human communication works by leaving many things unsaid and depending on the listener to fill in the missing-but-implied information. For example, a receptionist may say to a counselor, ”Your two o’clock is here ,” a sentence which, on the face of it, makes no sense at all. She means ” Your client who made an appointment for two o’clock has arrived in the waiting room ,” and the counselor knows that. It’s amazing how much of the time this abbreviating and implying process works just fine. But, in situations of change, ambiguity, conflict, or great emotional need, our “shorthand” way of speaking may not work at all for at least three possible reasons. First, our listeners may fill in a completely different set of details than the one we intended. Second, our listeners may not understand the significance of what we are saying (they get only some of the details, so miss the big picture). And finally, without actually intending to mislead anyone, we may leave out important parts of our experience that we find embarrassing or imagine will evoke a hostile reaction. The more serious the consequences of misunderstanding would be, the more we need to both understand our own experience better and help our listeners by giving them a more complete picture of our experience in language that does not attack them.

According to various communication researchers, there are five main dimensions of experience that your conversation partners can use to recreate your experience inside their minds. The more elements you provide, the higher the probability that your listener’s re-creation will match your experience. In this Workbook I will refer to these elements or dimensions of experience as “the five messages.”

Examples in table format. The example in the table below outlines a five-part way of saying more of what we are experiencing. The shorthand version of the message below would be something like, “Stop that racing!”  Here are the details of the five messages that are left out in the shorthand version: (Please read down the columns)

 

The Five Messagesexpress:Example (in a hospital, nurse to young patient):

seeing, hearing…1. What are you seeing, hearing or otherwise sensing? (facts only)“John, when I see you racing your wheelchair down the hall…

and feeling…2. What emotions are you feeling?…I feel really upset…

because I…3. What interpretations, wants, needs, memories or anticipations of yours support those feelings?…because I imagine that you are going to hurt yourself and someone else, too…

and now I want…4. What action, information or commitment do you want now?…so I want you to promise me right now that you will slow down…

so that…5. What positive results will that action, information or commitment lead to in the future? (no threats)…so that you can get out of here in one piece and I can stop worrying about a collision.”

Note: My deep appreciation goes to the work of Marshall Rosenberg for helping me to understand Messages 1 through 4, and to the work of Sharon and Gordon Bower for helping me understand Message 5. For interesting variations on Theme of complete messages, see their books noted below. 

 

The Bear in the Woods! In the table that starts below and continues on the next page you will find eight examples of statements that would give your listener a full range of information about your experience. Notice how a person’s feelings can change according to the needs and interpretations they bring to a situation. (Please read across the rows)

1. When I saw/heard…2. I felt…3. because I… (need, want, interpret, associate, etc.)4. and now I want (then I wanted)…5. so that (in order to)…

When I saw the bear in the woods with her three cubs……I felt over- joyed!……because I needed a picture of bears for my wildlife class……and I wanted the bear to stand perfectly still…so I could focus my camera.

When I saw the bear in the woods with her three cubs……I felt terrified!……because I remembered that bears with cubs are very aggressive……and I wanted to get out of there fast…so that the bear would not pick up my scent.

MORE EXAMPLES OF THE FIVE MESSAGES IN ACTION:
 

1. When I saw/ heard…2. I felt…3. because I…(need, want, interpret, associate, etc.)4. and now I want (then I wanted)…5. so that (in order to)…

When I saw the dishes in the sink……I felt happy……because I guessed that you had come back from your trip to Mexico……and I want you to tell me all about the Aztec ruins you saw……so that I can liven up some scenes in the short story I’m writing.

When I saw the dishes in the sink……I felt irritated……because I want to start cooking dinner right away……and I want to ask you to help me do the dishes right now……so that dinner will be ready by the time our guests arrive.

When I saw the flying saucer on your roof…… felt more excited than I have ever been in my life……because I imagined the saucer people would give you the anti-gravity formula……and I wanted you to promise that you would share it with me……so that we would both get rich and famous.

When I saw the grant application in the office mail……I felt delighted……because I think our program is good enough to win a large grant……and I want to ask you to help me with the budget pages……so that we can get the application in before the deadline.

When I saw the grant application in the office mail……I felt depressed……because I can’t see clients when I’m filling out forms……and I want you to help me with the budget pages……so that I can keep up my case work over the next three weeks.

Exercise for Challenge 3: Exploring the Five Messages. Re-tell the story of some of your conflicts, frustrations and delights using the five-message format. Write one Five Messages statement a day in a journal or notebook. Here are some suggestions for expressing each of the Five Messages more clearly:
 

Message One:Suggestions for expressing more clearly:

What are you seeing, hearing or otherwise sensing? (facts only)A. Begin by stating what you actually see or hear rather than how you feel about it or what you think of it.

B. Describe specific actions observed, avoid generalizing such as “you always…” or “you never…”

C. Be specific about place, time, color, texture, position and how often.

D. Describe rather than diagnose. Avoid words that label or judge the actions you observe such as “slimy,” “lousy,”  “neurotic,”  etc.

E. Avoid descriptions of a situation that imply emotions without actually stating them, such as “totally disgusting” and “horrible.” State your feelings explicitly in Message 2 (described next).

For example: “When I saw the big coffee stain on the rug…” is easier to hear and understand than “When you ruined my day, as always, with your slimy, stinking, totally disgusting, rotten antics…”

 

Message Two:Suggestions for expressing more clearly:

What emotions are you feeling?A. Use specific emotion describers such as “I feel…”: glad, angry, delighted, sad, afraid, resentful, embarrassed, calm, enthusiastic, fearful, manic, depressed, happy, etc.

B. Avoid feeling words that imply the action of another person: “I feel.., ignored, manipulated, mistreated, neglected, rejected, dominated, abandoned, used, cheated (etc.)”Notice how these words indirectly blame the listener for the speaker’s emotions. In order to help your listener understand what you are feeling, translate these “implied blame” words into an explicitly named emotion (see Suggestion A, above) and an interpretation or unmet want (Message 3).For example:  “I am feeling totally ignored by you” probably means “I am feeling really sad (or angry) because I want you to pay more attention to me, (spend more time with me, etc.)…”

 

Message Three:Suggestions for expressing more clearly:

What interpretations, wants, needs, memories or anticipations of yours support those feelings?A. Express the interpretations, wants, hopes, understandings and associations that support your feelings:

… because I imagine that… … because I see that as…

… because I remember how… … because I take that to mean …

instead of  … because YOU …(did, said, did not, etc.)

B. Under our interpretations there are often unmet wants, hopes and needs. Explore and express the unmet wants that also support your feelings: … because I wanted … … because I would have liked … … because I was hoping that… … because I needed … instead of …  because YOU …(did, said, did not, etc.)

 

Message Four:Suggestions for expressing more clearly:

What action, information or commitment do you want now?A. Ask for action or information, or for a present commitment to future action or information giving. Since most people cannot produce emotions on request, it is generally not productive to ask a person for an emotion (“I want you to cheer up.” “I want you to be angry about this issue.” Etc.)

B. If your want is general, ask for a specific step toward it. Translate .open-ended requests, such as for “consideration, respect, help, understanding, support” etc., into specific action verbs such as please “listen, sit, lift, carry, tell me, hold me,” etc.

C. State your want in positive terms: “Please arrive at eight…”rather than  “Don’t be late…”  

D. Include when, where, how. Including the details can help you to avoid big misunderstandings.

 

Message Five:Suggestions for expressing more clearly:

What positive results will that action, information or commitment lead to in the future? (no threats)In describing the specific positive results of receiving your request, you allow the other person to become motivated by feeling capable of giving something worthwhile. This prepares the ground for later expressions of appreciation, and points your relationship toward mutual appreciation and the exercise of competence (more enjoyable to live with), rather than guilt, duty, obedience or resentment (much less enjoyable to live with).

 

Exercise for Challenge 3 (continued): Re-tell the story of some of your conflicts, frustrations and delights using the five-message format.
 

Elements of your experience:  …expressed as five different “I-messages”:

1. What are you seeing, hearing or otherwise sensing? (the facts without evaluation) (I saw, heard, etc., …)

2. What emotions are you feeling? (I felt…)

3. What interpretations or wants of yours support those feelings? (because I…)

4. What action, information or commitment do you want now. (and now I would like…)

5. What positive results will that action, information or commitment lead to in the future? (so that…)

 

Elements of your experience:…expressed as five different “I-messages”:

1. What are you seeing, hearing or otherwise sensing? (the facts without evaluation)(I saw, heard, etc., …)

2. What emotions are you feeling?(I felt…)

3. What interpretations or wants of yours support those feelings?(because I…)

4. What action, information or commitment do you want now.(and now I would like…)

5. What positive results will that action, information or commitment lead to in the future?(so that…)

 

Elements of your experience:…expressed as five different “I-messages”:

1. What are you seeing, hearing or otherwise sensing? (the facts without evaluation)(I saw, heard, etc., …)

2. What emotions are you feeling?(I felt…)

3. What interpretations or wants of yours support those feelings?(because I…)

4. What action, information or commitment do you want now.(and now I would like…)

5. What positive results will that action, information or commitment lead to in the future?(so that…)

 

Elements of your experience:…expressed as five different “I-messages”:

1. What are you seeing, hearing or otherwise sensing? (the facts without evaluation)(I saw, heard, etc., …)

2. What emotions are you feeling?(I felt…)

3. What interpretations or wants of yours support those feelings?(because I…)

4. What action, information or commitment do you want now.(and now I would like…)

5. What positive results will that action, information or commitment lead to in the future?(so that…)

Reading 3-1: SAYING WHAT’S IN OUR HEARTS

Honest conversations viewed as counseling
and counseling viewed as conversations that allow for honesty

 by Dennis Rivers, MA

I wrote this essay for my students during a time when I was teaching a class on peer counseling. I was trying to describe in everyday language some of the good things that happen in counseling, that ALSO happen in friendship, good parenting, mentoring and ministering. 
 

According to the psychotherapists Carl Rogers (in the 1960s), Margaret and Jordan Paul (in the 1980s) and Brad Blanton (in the 1990s), there is one main reason people suffer in their relationships with one another. And it’s not best understood as some jargon about ids and egos and superegos. It’s that we need to face more of the truth and tell more of the truth about what’s happening in our lives, about how we feel, and about what we ourselves are doing.

Many people, probably most of us at some time or other, struggle to deal with troubling feelings and problem situations in life by using a whole range of avoidance maneuvers: we may pretend nothing is happening, focus on blaming others, or try to find ways of avoiding embarrassment, distracting ourselves and/or minimizing conflict. The problem with these ways of dealing with inner and outer conflicts is that they don’t work well in the long run. If we try to deal with our problems by pretending that nothing is wrong, we run the risk of becoming numb or getting deeply confused about what we actually want and how we actually feel. And from tooth decay to auto repair to marriage, avoidance maneuvers won’t protect us from the practical consequences of our difficulties.

Now what, you may ask, does this have to do with counseling? Well, a counselor is someone to whom you can tell the truth. And as you start to tell more of the truth to the counselor, you can start to admit the more of the truth to yourself, and rehearse compassionate ways of talking about it with others.

This is not an easy task. Early in life, according to Rogers, most of us discovered that if we said what we really felt and wanted, the big important people in our lives would get unhappy with us, (and, I would add, perhaps even slap us across the face). And since we needed their love and approval, we started being good little boys and good little girls and saying whatever would get us hugs, birthday presents, and chocolate cake. If we are lucky in life, our parents and teachers help us to learn how to recognize our own feelings and tell the truth about them in conciliatory ways. But this is a complex process, and more often, our parents and teachers didn’t get much help on these issues themselves, so they may not have been able to give us much help. As a result of this, many people arrive in adult life with a giant gap between what they actually feel and what the role they play says they are supposed to feel, and with no skills for closing that gap.

For example, as a child you were supposed to love your parents, right? But what if your dad came home drunk every night and hit your mom? How do you handle the gap between the fact that you’re supposed to love your dad and the fact that you don’t like him?  These are the kinds of situations that bring people to counseling (or to the nightly six-pack of beer). And life is full of them.

It all boils down to this: Life is tough and complex, ready or not. It is always tempting to try to get what you want (or to escape what you fear) by saying or doing whatever will avoid conflict, even if that means saying things you don’t really mean, doing things you don’t feel good about, or just blanking out. After you’ve been around for a while you start to realize that the cost of this kind of maneuvering is a heavy heart.

From what I’ve seen, there is no secret magic wand of psychotherapy that can instantly lighten a heart thus burdened. Psychotherapists are in the same human boat as the rest of us; they get depressed and divorced and commit suicide just like ordinary folks. You and the person you are trying to help are in the same human boat. There is no life without troubles. Roofs leak. The people you love get sick and die. Our needs turn out to be in conflict with the needs of people we care about. The best made agreements come unglued. People fall out of love. And it is always tempting to pretend that everything is just fine. But I believe very strongly that we will all like ourselves a lot more if we choose the troubles that come from being more honest and more engaged, rather than the troubles that come from various forms of conflict avoidance and self-deception, such as “I’ll feel better if I have another drink.” or “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.” etc.

Our truthful lives will probably not get any easier, but they will get a lot more satisfying. Good counselors, psycho-therapists, mentors and friends, whatever their degree (or not), hold that knowledge for us, as we struggle to learn it and earn it. As adults there are many new possibilities open to us that were not available to us when we were children. We can learn to negotiate more of our conflicts, to confront more of our difficulties and to be honest about our feelings without being mean. So the fact is that we don’t need to run away from our problems any more. What we need is to get in touch with ourselves and to learn new skills.

A counselor is someone who does not condemn you for your evasions, mistakes or lack of skill, and believes in your worth as a person, your capacity to tell the truth and your strength to bear the truth, no matter what you’ve done up to now. That’s what makes counseling similar to being a priest, a rabbi, a minister or a really good friend. When we started pretending in order to please others at age three or four, that was the only way we could figure out how to get what we wanted. Now that we are adults we are capable of learning to tell the truth in conciliatory ways and we are capable of getting a lot more of what we want just by being courageous enough to ask for it. A good counselor, whether that person is a peer-counselor or a psychiatrist, is someone who invites us out of the role of maneuvering child and into the role of straightforward adult.

A counselor won’t force you to tell the truth. It wouldn’t be your truth if it were forced, it would just be one more thing you were saying to keep someone off your back. But a counselor is willing to hear how you actually feel. In this approach there are no bad feelings, there are only bad actions. It’s OK to hate your drunken father; it’s not OK to pick up a gun and shoot him. A big part of counseling is teaching people to make that distinction. In fact, the more people can acknowledge their feelings, the less they need to blindly act them out.

It’s not the counselor’s job to pull that stuff out of people; it’s the counselor’s job to be there to receive it and acknowledge it when it comes out in its own time. And to encourage the new skills and all the little moments of honesty that help a person toward a deeper truthfulness. There’s a direct link between skill and awareness at work here. People are reluctant to acknowledge problems they feel they can’t do anything about. As counseling conversations help a person to feel more confident about being able to talk things over and talk things out, a person may become more willing to face and confront conflicts and problems.

As we realize that the counselor accepts us warts and all, clumsy coping maneuvers and all, we start to accept ourselves more. We are not angels and we are not devils. We are just ordinary human beings trying to figure how to get through life. There is a lot of trial and error along the way and that is nothing to be ashamed of. No one, absolutely no one, can learn to be human without making mistakes. But it is easy to imagine, when I am alone with my mistakes, that I am the stupidest, crummiest person in the world. A good counselor, (…friend, minister, parent, support group member) is someone who helps us develop a more realistic and forgiving picture of ourselves.

These relationships based on deep acceptance help to free us from the fantasy of being all-good or all-bad, help to free us from the need to keep up appearances. Thus, we can start to acknowledge and learn from whatever is going on inside us. Freed from the need to defend our mistakes, we can actually look at them, and get beyond the need to repeat them. But these are hard things to learn alone. It really helps if someone accompanies us along that road.

Sometimes you will be the receiver of that acceptance and sometimes the giver. Whichever role you happen to play at a given moment, it’s helpful to understand that honest, caring, empathic conversations (Carl Rogers’ big three), just by themselves, set in motion a kind of deep learning that has come to be known as “healing.” “Healing” is a beautiful word and a powerful metaphor for positive change. But “healing” can also be a misleading word because of the way it de-emphasizes learning and everyone’s capacity to learn new ways of relating to people and navigating through life.

Here are five of the “deep learnings” that I see going on in almost all supportive and empathic conversations.
 

In paying attention to someone in a calm, accepting way, you teach that person to pay attention to themselves in just that way.

In caring for others, you teach them to care for themselves and you help them to feel more like caring about others.

The more you have faced and accepted your own feelings, the more you can be a supportive witness for another person who is struggling to face and accept his or her feelings.

In forgiving people for being human and making mistakes and having limits, you teach people to forgive themselves and start over, and you help them to have a more forgiving attitude toward others.

By having conversations that include the honest sharing and recognition of feelings, and the exploration of alternative possibilities of action, you help a person to see that, by gradual degrees, they can start to have more honest and fruitful conversations with the important people in their lives.

These experiences belong to everyone, since they are part of being human. They are ours to learn and, through the depth of our caring, honesty and empathy, ours to give. I believe they are the heart of counseling.