Communication Makeover: “Why do people keep attacking me?”

(Time to read: ~4 minutes)

Donna (not her real name) felt both angry, and like there was something fundamentally wrong with her.

“It happens so consistently in my life. It seems like everywhere I go, someone starts attacking me – when all I’m trying to do is be heard.

I don’t understand why it happens. And I want to figure out what I can do so things will be different. Because, right now, it’s really hard to feel good about myself.

I feel like I need to be ‘on guard’ everywhere I go. If I don’t, whammo! it happens again.

And then all I can do to protect myself is to cut people out of my life. But my life feels like it is getting smaller and smaller – when I want the opposite.”

We worked together to identify what was going on – and to put together an action plan to help Donna have the kind of relationships she wanted.

What’s going on?

We started with a recent incident. Donna shared the flow of the conversation as best she could recall it.

Comparing that conversation to the communication model that I teach, we noticed three key things:

1. She tended to disagree with what other people said.
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   This happened both silently in her mind, and in the words she spoke.
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   This type of response tends to have three impacts:
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   1) Other people don’t feel heard,
   2) They don’t feel that their point of view is understood, appreciated and valued,
   3) They will tend to start disagree with whatever she says.
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   Over time, this produces a very unpleasant dynamic in a relationship, that also starts to affect everyone else around.
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   We’ll talk in the next section about what Donna decided to do about this and the other two discoveries.
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2. She asked other people “why” when she tried to address relationships in which she felt attacked.
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   Being asked “why” they do what they do tends to put people on the defensive.
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   It can be heard as suggesting that the reasons for their behaviour are strange or unfathomable.
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   What I treasure about NVC is that it reminds us that the intention behind any human action is the desire to meet needs that all of us share.
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   The action may not be successful in meeting those needs – and it may leave many other needs unmet.
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   But if we can connect to that original intention, it provides a doorway into a more satisfying future for everyone involved. And a pathway for healing the past.
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3. Emotionally triggering words popped up in her sentences.
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   Just a single emotionally triggering word can create disconnection with another person. I’m sure you’ve experienced this yourself on the receiving end.
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   When this happens, the other person often stops being able to “hear” what we say, as they marshall their inner defenses.
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   And the effect tends to be cumulative. Every additional triggering word spoken builds a bigger and bigger wall between us.
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   So even when Donna was trying to deliver a very “positive” message, if she used these emotionally triggering words, the other person was receiving a “negative” message.
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   The challenge was that Donna couldn’t recognize which words were likely to be emotionally triggering. They just seemed the same as other words for her.
   

What could she do?

Donna’s Action Plan

After exploring various alternatives, Donna chose two different strategies to experiment with:

1. First, acknowledge and appreciate other people’s ideas, before sharing my own.
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   This took Donna several months to be able to implement consistently.
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   As a first step, she started spending a few minutes once a day reviewing one of the meetings she’d had in which she felt attacked.
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   She did her best to recall how she had replied to one of the ideas she disagreed with.
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   If she had replied with acknowledgement and appreciation, she celebrated that and put a check mark in her “appreciate yourself to success” chart. (for how to construct one for yourself, see the Sept 2015 blog post – opens in a new window).
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   If she had not replied with acknowledgement and appreciation, she wrote out what she might have said that would have fulfilled her intention, and tried saying it out loud, modifying the draft until it felt comfortable and natural to speak.
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   And she gave herself a check mark in her “appreciate yourself to success” chart. After all, our minds can’t tell the difference between things that we actually do and things that we imagine doing.
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   Gradually, over time, Donna found herself more and more frequently remembering to acknowledge and appreciate other people’s ideas.
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   And she noticed that she had fewer and fewer moments of “feeling attacked”.
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2. Review Conversations with Feedback
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   The second major objective that Donna chose was learning to recognize emotionally triggering words, and to find comfortable and natural ways to replace them when she spoke.
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   Once a week she would type or write out her best recollection of a conversation she had with someone that had left her feeling “attacked”, hurt or unheard and send it to me – usually just four or five key sentences.
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   Then we’d get together on the phone and go through it. I helped her learn to recognize words and phrases that were likely to be triggering to the other person.
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   We’d also identify how she could deliver her message in a more connecting way. And how she could help restore connection after a triggering message from the other person.
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   Donna was surprised and pleased to discover that she just needed to learn and practice a few variations on how she had learned to speak, to make a big difference in how other people responded to her.
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   She really enjoyed the increased sense of connection she started to discover everywhere she went.

Do you have a communication challenge?

• Is there a pattern that occurs in one or more of your relationships that you don’t enjoy?
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  Would you like to have your own “communication makeover” to see how you can shift the pattern to one that is easier, more peaceful and more satisfying for you?
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  You can book a one-on-one session here.  Just put “communication makeover” in the comments field.
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  And if you aren’t sure if what I do is a good fit for your situation, feel free to either email me about it – or you can book a free phone consultation to check me out “live”.
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  Warmly,
  🙂
  Glenda

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