Rediscovering the Art of Conversation

When someone chooses to engage in therapy, two distinct potential truths are at play:

  • They are acknowledging that things in their life are not going as well as they could be.

    And

  • They are motivated by the hope that things could improve.

Due to the complexity of issues that characterize our lives, it seems futile that “simply talking about it” would have any utility in our hope for things to get better; and you might be right.

So how is it that “just talking about it” might prove to be useful in respect to reducing the unnecessary suffering in our lives?

As a mental health clinician, most of my day is spent having these one hour conversations with another individual. In my professional capacity I have participated in approximately 15,000 of these sessions over the course of my career.

Psychotherapy involves paying careful attention to the other individual while seeking to understand, clarify and organize the ideas being articulated. Once I understand the other person’s frame of reference, I can share some ideas, images or feelings that come up. The client will share why they agree, disagree or some ideas about what was shared as we “sort things out.” A large portion of this therapeutic process is achieved through this kind of dialogue.

While this process occurs in the therapy room, it has been my observation that clients often discover that the complicated issues they came to solve, can potentially improve by having similar exchanges with the individuals in their lives.

Another discovery that often quickly follows is how terrifying the idea of these necessary conversations can be.

This naturally leads to further exploration of the factors contributing to the fear, terror and/or anxiety surrounding the idea of these conversations. These feelings are often what contributes to our avoidance of conversation.

We might discover more useful ideas to apply in our everyday conversations by exploring what has proven to be effective in the therapy room. After all, the dialogue that has occurred in therapy is what lead you to these discoveries in the first place.

Carl Rogers is perhaps one of the most influential psychologists in recent history that put forth the idea that the exchange of truth through mutual dialogue is curative.

His approach is often referred to as a “client centered approach” and it relies on a few mutually agreed upon assumptions for it to be effective:

  • Both the client and the clinician are equals and the clinician holds no authority over the individual seeking therapy.

  • It is assumed that the client is an expert in their own life.

  • Both the clinician and the client are oriented towards the improvement of the individual.

This was a major departure from some of the more traditional psychoanalytic clinicians as they took a more “clinician as expert” approach. The focus was on providing the client with their clinical interpretations, feedback or “analysis.”

Several of the ideas developed by Rogers were so powerful that they are generally accepted as necessary for therapy to be useful. Therefore; we can reasonably assume these ideas would be useful in our pursuit of having more meaningful and productive conversations in our personal lives.

So where do you go from here? Have a dialogue with yourself about your goals for conversation with others and be willing to listen to the answers that come up (some of them you may not like). It might even be useful to write them down:

Some useful questions to ask yourself might include:

  • What am I trying to accomplish?

  • Am I seeking to understand the other persons point of view?

  • Do I want to solve a problem?

  • Do I want to demonstrate I know more than the other person?

  • Do I seek to win the argument? Destroy my opponent?

  • Do I wish to expose the other person as the idiot I already know they are so the rest of the world will realize this too? (Hint: You may run into this on social media)

  • Am I 100% certain that the ideas and perspectives I already hold are 100% complete and infallible?

  • Is it possible the other person knows something I don’t?

  • Am I seeking to improve myself and leave the conversation knowing something I didn’t?

  • Am I seeking to change the other person or their ideas?

The answers you uncover here are highly useful insights that heavily influence how your conversations will go.

Since we’ve already discussed that conversations can be terrifying, it may also be useful to accept that your pursuit of more productive conversations is one of the hardest things you can do (this is true for myself as well). It takes a lot of courage to say what’s on your mind and it does involve risk (both real and perceived).

This means you have to risk the following:

  • Failure

  • Judgement

  • Vulnerability

  • Embarrassment

  • The possibility that the ideas you hold, in their current form, may need to be sacrificed and updated as you learn new things.

Now that you have defined your goal(s), acknowledged your fears and considered the risk(s) of pursuing more “therapeutic” conversations, you may now be ready to run an experiment. One of the only ways to successfully integrate knowledge is by “playing it out” in reality.

During your next conversation try the following:

  • Assume there is way more you do not know compared to what you do know. Your mission is to discover as much of the unknown as possible. Each person you speak with is a potential source of a little portion of the vast expanse of what is unknown to you.

  • During the conversation, restate the ideas of the person your are speaking with accurately. You must do this before presenting any of your own ideas. This means that you must restate their ideas until they agree with your characterization of what they have said. In this sense you are trying to help them make their argument or ideas stronger, rather than trying to prove why they are wrong and you are right.

  • By doing this you achieve their frame of reference rather than your pre-constructed idea of what you think the person is trying to say (hint: they may have no idea how to say what they are trying to say and they need your help!).

  • You can now formulate a thoughtful response only once you have truly understood what they are trying to articulate (otherwise you are only responding to what you think they said).

  • Chances are you will not accurately articulate what you wanted to say in your response; but hopefully the person you are speaking with will now seek to understand what you are trying to say and strengthen your ideas as well.

    Result: You both leave the conversation slightly more informed than you would have otherwise been.

We hope this blog may prove useful to you. Please leave your feedback below on what you discovered when you ran your conversational experiment. It might just inspire someone to do the same.