Can a family member say something to you that would seem perfectly innocuous to a stranger, yet sends you right up the wall, so furious you can’t see straight? Or do your innocent remarks make people in your family crazy, so you feel you can’t even open your mouth? READ THIS BOOK. Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand<\/i> was a brilliant, non-judgemental description of the ways most American men and women communicate differently (John Gray of “Mars and Venus” must owe most of his large fortune to her, since his concepts are just watered-down and generalized versions of hers), so I figured this would be good, but it’s actually even better.<\/p>\n
Tannen discusses communication between parents and children, spouses, siblings, and inlaws, describing the various obstacles that can cause people to talk in circles and increase each other’s frustration. The most useful concept to me was the continuum between connection and control. In YJDU she contrasted the frequent male conversation goal of figuring out who’s one-up with the frequent female one of connecting (and similarly, the styles of report-talk vs rapport-talk). Here she shows that both desires are frequently at work. One person makes a remark to establish connection (for example, giving advice) and the other person hears it as an attempt to establish control (telling me what to do), to be put one-down. Tannen recommends “reframing” (which seems in essence to mean looking at it from the other end of the continuum). A side effect of this book’s transcription of actual conversations is amazement that any real communication happens at all!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Can a family member say something to you that would seem perfectly innocuous to a stranger, yet sends you right up the wall, so furious you can’t see straight? Or do your innocent remarks make people in your family crazy, so you feel you can’t even open your mouth? READ THIS BOOK. Tannen’s You Just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}