by Donna Eden
If Your Energetic Stress Style Is Kinesthetic
Know Your Vulnerabilities
If you are a kinesthetic, your core perceptual error is that your attention focuses on your partner’s suffering and your distress about it, particularly if your partner blames you for his or her unhappiness. You distort by believing your partner may not survive without your validation and protection. You lose your boundaries in this misguided attempt to protect your partner from feeling wrong or hurt, and you lose your sense of self while pursuing a soul connection at any cost. Your remarkable empathy, compassion, and capacity to bond—normally your strengths—become liabilities as your partner proceeds with no idea about what you are needing. Your instinct is to keep your partner feeling good with whatever you must sacrifice at the slightest sign of his or her pain or unhappiness. Meanwhile, your sense of being discounted contradicts your belief that you are loved in this relationship, and your disorientation becomes immense. In each interaction building to this point, however, you may only be aware of your compulsion to validate your partner and soothe his or her pain and distress.
Play Your Strengths
MENTALLY:
First separate from your partner energetically. Then you can tune into your body and make your suppressed needs in the situation known to yourself.
Remind yourself that what your partner needs is your truth rather than overcompassion while challenging your assumptions about how desperate the situation is for your partner.
BEHAVIORALLY:
Turn your strength of compassion toward yourself and actively rehearse asking your partner to understand your experience and help you get what you need.
Once rehearsed, make your unstated needs in the situation known to your partner.
This will demonstrate your trust in your partner to take in your truth, your expectation that you not be discounted, and your faith that your partner can handle disagreement or disappointment.
If Your Energetic Stress Style Is Digital
Know Your Vulnerabilities
If you are a digital, your core perceptual error emerges from separating yourself from your partner’s emotions. You distort with the conviction that you are completely right and your partner’s perceptions, feelings, and conclusions are essentially irrelevant. Your ability to navigate brilliantly using abstract logic and reason—normally your greatest strength—becomes your weakness as you isolate yourself in a fortress built of your detached thoughts and beliefs. In distancing from your partner’s struggles, you distance yourself from your own heart. Your instinct is to pull within; dismiss your partner’s irrational, emotional responses; and entertain yourself in the proverbial cave of the isolated male (or in fewer cases, female). This may all occur in an instant, and you may only be aware of the superior truth of your position.
Play Your Strengths
MENTALLY:
Challenge your assumption that you are completely right and your partner’s differing perceptions, feelings, or conclusions are simply wrong.
Stay present and open despite the disquieting emotions and questionable reasoning being displayed by your partner.
BEHAVIORALLY:
Climb out of the cave, use your strong logical capacity to form the questions that will help you build a bridge of empathy, and interview your partner about the issue at hand.
Summarize your partner’s position with greater logic and caring than he or she was able to articulate.
This will demonstrate to your partner that you can use your mind to create connections, enter the realm of feelings, and establish the relationship as your priority.
If Your Energetic Stress Style Is Tonal
Know Your Vulnerabilities
If you are a tonal, your core perceptual error is to magnify the negative in what has been said and to hear reproach in what has not been said. You suffer over what you are sure the other thinks about you or has done to you. Your great strength—that you are exquisitely attuned to life’s shades and subtleties—becomes your weakness as the slightest dissonance reverberates throughout your being, causing disruption and pain. Your instinct is to interpret tones and nuances to confirm your suspicion that the other does not hear, value, or love you. This may all occur in an instant, and you may only be aware of the part about your partner’s reproach or negative feelings toward you.
Play Your Strengths
MENTALLY:
Entertain the seemingly unlikely possibility that you are distorting the reality of your partner’s position and challenge your assumption that your partner isn’t hearing you or is disapproving of you.
Using your aesthetic sensibilities and facility for hearing the subtleties of your partner’s words, listen for what is positive rather than negative.
BEHAVIORALLY:
Identify and put into words what you hear as the positive aspects of your partner’s words and tone.
Articulate the goodwill your partner holds for you.
This will demonstrate to your partner and to yourself that you can read positive and hopeful information between the lines and affirm your partner’s love and caring.
For Everybody
These brief guidelines describe behaviors that play to the strengths of each of the four sensory modes. They contain features that can be helpful to anyone for creating more attuned, compassionate communication. These include:
Interview your partner to help build a bridge of understanding and summarize your partner’s position with strong empathy.
Ask your partner to confirm or correct your verbal portrayal.
Ask your partner to understand your experience and help you get what you need.
Put into words the positive intentions in your partner’s words, tone, and actions, and articulate the goodwill your partner holds for you.
Attuning to Your Partner’s Energetic Stress Style
In this chapter you are learning to bring two different Energetic Stress Styles into better attunement: your own and your partner’s. So far, you have reflected on the ways a person with your style is vulnerable to falling into distortions during relationship stress, and you were shown ways to use the strengths of your style to repair and reconnect. Next we turn to your partner’s sensory mode, offer a map of potential hazards you may meet, and show how to move forward in ways that circumvent the hazards while building practical, trustworthy bridges. Again, your partner’s secondary system may be at play, particularly before a flooding of stressful emotions occurs. So a partner who reverts to a kinesthetic sensory mode when under strong relationship stress might, for instance, be quite blaming (visual) under light or moderate stress. Before we focus on each of the Energetic Stress Styles, we invite you to learn a technique that will be useful whenever conflict is brewing.
A Powerful Communication Technique for All Energetic Stress Styles
Marital therapists have developed innumerable structured techniques for teaching attuned communication. These tend to be most effective before conflict has escalated to the point that you are in your full-blown Energetic Stress Styles (a strategy for when things have gotten out of hand is presented in the next chapter), but they can be effective in keeping you from going there. Our all-time favorite is called the “Do you mean” technique. It is simple, direct, and flexible enough that it can be adapted to a wide range of situations, and it is surprisingly powerful. As you practice and succeed with it, new neural networks build, increasingly making your bond sturdier.
We have been using the “Do you mean” technique during the thirty-seven-year span of our relationship, both personally and professionally. As a side story, David learned it from the renowned family therapist Virginia Satir in 1972, before we met. He was on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, doing research on community mental health, during the year that Virginia came to the dep
artment as a visiting professor. His office was directly across from Virginia’s, and he was dazzled by her abilities. They became friends and colleagues. He often drove her to her East Coast workshops, got to participate and observe her in action, and they would discuss the trainings during their leisurely drives back. He now believes that this play of good fortune was fate preparing him to meet and work with Donna, another virtuoso at inspiring people with empowering and uplifting techniques that can be self-applied, also playing on a large stage.
The “Do you mean” technique is applied to a single statement. If the statement has several parts, you might start with the one that is the most difficult to understand or the most loaded or simply explore your partner’s overall feelings. Suppose your visual partner has said to you:
“You have made a mess of our vacation plans! You’ve invited Steve and Delores to join us, you’ve scheduled a doctor’s appointment so we have to get back two days early, and I just checked Travelocity and the expensive resort you booked has a low customer satisfaction rating. Can’t I trust you to do anything right?!”
You would then ask your partner a question that begins with the words “Do you mean.” For instance:
“Do you mean you’re angry with me for the choices I’ve made about Lake Tahoe?”
Your partner’s response at this point can be:
“Yes!” (1 point)
“No!” (zero points)
“Part right, part wrong.” (1/2 point)
“I believe that to be true, but that is not what I was saying.” (zero points)
These are the four options. The rules for this technique are that your partner responds with one and only one of these answers and the two of you have no other discussion beyond filling in essential information that has no emotional charge. You then continue to ask “Do you mean” questions until you have three points (three “yes” responses; again, “part right, part wrong” is scored as half a point) or until you feel you are off track and request of your partner:
“Would you please say that again but in a different way?”
When that occurs, the game begins anew. Your partner restates and you work toward getting three points for the new statement. Suppose, in the above example, the answer to the first question was “You got that one right!” The interaction might have continued like this:
“Okay, so I have one yes. Do you mean you should have planned the vacation?”
“I’ve been wishing I had, but that’s not what I meant.”
“Do you mean I didn’t do anything right?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying!”
“Do you mean that I made some choices that have you questioning whether I should ever make plans for both of us?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I am thinking!”
“To ask the next question, I need to give you some background. Our HMO had me waiting for that doctor’s appointment for four months, and I booked the hotel because I got a great deal on it, but I hadn’t looked at the ratings. Do you mean that you would like me to change my doctor’s appointment and book a different hotel?”
“Yes, that would help.”
After achieving three yeses, summarize with a statement in the form of “I can understand how [summary of what happened] would cause you to feel [name feeling]” and ask for a confirmation that your partner feels you fully understand the initial statement.2 For instance:
“So to summarize, you are angry at me for my choices in planning our vacation; you wish you had done it yourself; and you would like me to change my doctor’s appointment and the hotel booking. Given all that, I can understand why you are feeling upset with me. Did I getcha?”
This final question, “Did I getcha?” (or any version of “Is there anything more”) is a particularly important element of the “Do you mean” technique. It is designed to ensure that you resolve each incident as fully as possible. For couples, what is not resolved will return. Or as Abraham Lincoln once observed, “Nothing is settled until it is settled right.”
If the answer is “Yes” and your partner feels fully understood, then it is your turn to respond to the initial statement. You either reach agreement (e.g., “You are right! I totally made a mess of our vacation plans”) or you respectfully make a statement that summarizes the points of difference. Your partner then asks the “Do you means” about that statement.
If the answer is “No,” your partner still does not feel fully understood, he or she offers a new or revised statement to convey what is apparently still not understood, and the interaction goes into another round. In this case, it might be:
“No. I can’t believe Steve and Delores are coming with us!”
“Do you mean you don’t like Steve and Delores?”
“No, they’re fine people.”
“Do you mean you don’t feel close enough to them to want to spend this kind of time together?”
“Well, I feel close to them, but I don’t want to share my vacation with them. So I’ll give you one-half on that one.”
“Do you mean you wanted this to be our vacation with no one else’s needs and schedule getting in our way?”
“Yes.”
“Do you mean you want me to get us out of it?”
“I’d love for you to get us out of this, but I know they’ve already booked their plane tickets, so that’s not what I was meaning. I’ll give that another half, so you’re up to two.”
“Do you mean I should have checked with you before including them in our plans and you’re pissed with me for not doing that?”
“Yes!”
“Okay, that’s three. So to summarize, you are really unhappy about Steve and Delores joining us, you wanted this to be for just the two of us, and you wish I had at least checked with you first. I can understand why you are angry. Did I getcha?”
Once the partner who made the original statement feels understood, he or she finishes this part of the exchange with a statement of appreciation to reinforce the success. You have achieved a new level of understanding about a situation that could have thrown you into an escalating mismatch. The statement of appreciation may be general, such as “I appreciate that you stayed with the instructions,” or more specific, such as “I appreciate that you have greater understanding about how upset I am with the plans.” The discussion might proceed this way:
“Yes. I do feel understood. But I still don’t understand why you invited Steve and Delores. So now you’re supposed to tell me what you were feeling during all of this and to clarify your own position. Right?”
“Actually, the next step is that you are supposed to tell me some appreciations.”
“Oh, okay, right. I appreciate that you seemed so interested and attentive while I was talking. I appreciate that you were looking me in the eye and didn’t interrupt me. I appreciate that you seem to have understood my feelings.”
While this technique is like putting the conversation into slow motion and examining each piece of it with a magnifying glass, that is exactly why it is so effective. It keeps you attuned to one another. Only now would you respond to the original statement or clarify your position or report feelings that came up during the exchange. This should again be done with relatively brief statements so your partner can clarify and stay attuned with “Do you mean” questions.
“Thank you. And yes, I would like to explain a few things. I didn’t exactly invite Steve and Delores. I told Delores we were going to Lake Tahoe for our vacation, and I asked her where they stayed when they went there last year. Soon she was telling me what a great time they had, that they were looking for an excuse to go back, and that joining us might just be the opportunity they were looking for. The next day she announced that she had talked it over with Steve, locked in her vacation dates to correspond with our trip, and was waxing on about what a great time we were all going to have. What could I do? I
said, ‘That’s just great!’”
“Do you mean you had no choice?”
“That’s how it felt. Yes.”
“Do you mean you don’t want them to come either?”
“I really don’t want them to come, but it’s not what I was saying.”
“Do you mean you got trapped into this?”
“Yes, I really want you to understand that.”
“Do you mean you know you blew it?”
“No, I think you would have done the same thing. I was trapped!”
“Do you mean even I could have gotten us trapped into this?”
“Yes, dear, even you!”
At this point, your partner may still have more to say, such as, “It was very painful that you came at me with so much blame rather than giving me the benefit of the doubt,” challenging your partner to look deeper at his or her behavior toward you. While it may take several rounds like these, the technique can transform daily misunderstandings into better harmony and deeper connection. Even though the interchanges can become somewhat laborious, the potential payoff is substantial, and the rules are really quite simple:
Short statement.
“Yes” to three “Do you mean” questions.
Summarize.
Acknowledge that your partner’s initial feelings were reasonable given what you now understand.
Verify that your partner now feels fully understood.
Partner thanks you.
You can now make a short statement about your position.