Communication – Rules for Life

Communication – Rules for Life

by | Nov 3, 2017 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

Rules for Communication (or Rules for Life)

I’m an accountant. Accountants are notoriously bad at communication, and there’s usually a reason: numbers are straightforward, clear, concise, easy to line up and sort. I love doing taxes. You put the numbers in their place, finalize the return, send it off, and you’re done.

Except you’re not, not always. Sometimes the Canada Revenue Agency wants to talk about that dinner meeting, or those moving costs, or that dependent credit. That’s when you realize numbers were never as clear as you thought.

I saw this everywhere in my work, but nowhere more than in my years as a Financial Neutral in the Collaborative Divorce Process. I discovered I was working more with communication than numbers, and that the real work happened in communication, which is hard, especially for an accountant. The numbers are so clear. Why can’t my client decide?

Wanting a concrete answer, the way accountants do, I ended up with five rules. I call them rules for life.

Rule 1: Know Yourself and Know Your Financial Situation

After my divorce, I enrolled in a career program to learn how to write a resume, having been out of the workforce for five years as a stay-at-home mom. Six weeks later, I sent out resumes and heard nothing, zip, zero, nada.

The problem wasn’t the resume. The problem was I didn’t want any of those jobs, and it showed in every cover letter I wrote. I was following someone else’s template because I didn’t know what I actually wanted.

I spent six months waking up in a panic about money, writing cover letters I didn’t believe in, finding ways to scrape by in between. Slowly, with the help of a coach, I got to know myself well enough to realize I needed to start my own business, despite a vow I’d made to myself at fifteen that I never would. As soon as I said it out loud, people started calling to ask for my help. I had to look honestly at my finances first, panic filters and all, and once I did, I saw I could manage the short-term dip it would take to get there.

Rule 2: Know the Person You’re Communicating With

The flip side of knowing yourself is knowing the person across from you. This is where it gets tricky and emotional, which accountants tend not to love.

I had to tell my co-parent I was starting a business, since his child support depended on my income. I told him by email. He responded almost instantly, which was unusual. I got defensive. We went back and forth until we hit a six-month deadlock, and eventually ended up in court.

Which means I broke Rule 2 before I’d really learned it, and had to detour through Rule 3 to get back to it.

Rule 3: Set Up Neutral Time and Space to Communicate

Court is not neutral. It’s public, it’s stressful, and a judge who has heard it all before will look at you like you’re both being unreasonable, then send you off to try again before he’ll even set a hearing.

That’s what happened to us. Instead of a hearing, we were assigned time with a mediator to try to resolve things privately, at a time we chose together, without an audience. She listened to both of us and made us listen to each other, then sent us to counselling. Back to Rule 2.

Rule 2, Again

We sat in a counsellor’s office for three hours doing one thing: taking turns speaking and repeating back what the other person said, before either of us was allowed to respond. I wanted to interrupt constantly. I was rolling my eyes, squirming, nearly at a breaking point.

Rule 4: Shut Up and Listen

If you actually want to resolve a conflict, you have to understand what it’s about. I could have argued my case all day and never once understood what was driving my co-parent. The counsellor made me sit still and paraphrase what he’d said, feeding me the words when I couldn’t find them myself: “Renée, say this back to him.”

So I did. And as I sat there repeating his feelings back to him, I noticed something. Something in him settled. Some of the fight went out of the room. He looked like he felt heard.

Then it was my turn to speak, and his turn to repeat what I’d said. Hearing my own words come back to me, without being argued with, took some of the fight out of me too. I felt heard.

When I’d finished, the counsellor asked, “How can you help him with how he’s feeling?”

“I don’t know. I can’t fix it,” I said.

“And you don’t need to.”

That single line took apart every argument I’d been building. I couldn’t change how he felt, and he couldn’t change how I felt, but just having it acknowledged did something neither of us expected. I understood, finally, that what he was doing had nothing to do with me.

If you find yourself interrupting, or feel a “but” rising in your throat, that’s the moment you’ve been triggered. You don’t have to argue with how someone feels. You just have to hear it. Arguing only entrenches people further, since now they need to defend the feeling instead of moving through it.

Rule 5: You’re Never Done

Being an accountant, I hoped that would be the end of it. Resolved, filed, closed. It wasn’t. There are always new numbers to wrangle, new issues to sit through. I got a lot of practice, and in the process, learned enough to help other people do the same.

Avoid then capitulate

by | Oct 31, 2016 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

Avoid, Then Capitulate

Collaboration works through exploration. Here’s what I mean by that.

We’re all a bit like icebergs. A small part of us shows above the surface, but the real mass, the values and experience that actually shape how we respond to things, sits underwater where no one else can see it. Other people only see the tip, and they build assumptions about us from that alone. Most conflict comes from exactly this gap: neither person can see what’s actually driving the other.

To work through conflict, you have to explore what’s under the surface, both yours and theirs. Once you both understand what’s actually going on down there, solutions tend to become obvious, and because you both arrived at it together, you both actually buy into it.

The catch is that almost none of us are trained to be collaborative, and the moment you actually need the skill is usually the moment you’re too emotional to use it. So instead, everyone falls back on whatever style of conflict was trained into them, not through a course, but through personality and life experience layered together over time. Some people are trained to fight and win. Some avoid. Some capitulate.

I was trained to avoid first, then capitulate once avoidance stopped working. I know this about myself. I know it doesn’t serve me. I still fall into it every single time.

Knowing that, I’ve built myself some guardrails.

Rule 1: Never answer right away. Give yourself time to think, even when you feel completely certain, calm, and clear. You’re probably not as settled as you think.

This past weekend, someone asked me a favour. I said I needed time to think, even though I already knew my answer was no. I felt sure of it. I said I needed time anyway, because I’ve surprised myself before.

Rule 2: Don’t poll people outside the conflict. I broke this one almost immediately, because I assumed everyone would agree with me. They didn’t. What I got instead was a pile of other people’s values and beliefs that had nothing to do with mine, which left me more confused and a little guilty, not more decided. Interestingly, the opinions split cleanly along gender lines: the women leaned toward capitulating, and the men said, “Do what makes you happy.”

Confused and stuck, I spent Sunday morning just sitting with each possible answer to see how it felt. Saying yes felt bad, and saying no felt equally bad.

Rule 3: When you start to cry, snap, or turn into someone you don’t like, stop and take a break. So I rode my bike. That should be its own rule. Find your version of the bike ride. It feels indulgent when there’s a conflict to resolve, but it’s not optional. Most of us were trained to think enjoying ourselves is somehow wrong, especially with work left undone.

Rule 4: Once you’ve fallen back into your old pattern, return to the process. After my ride, I felt clear again. This morning I emailed the person who’d asked the favour and asked to meet again, since there’s no clean answer yet. We need to explore what’s actually underneath the request, and what’s underneath my resistance to it. Once we both understand that, a solution will show up that actually works for both of us.

If the other person doesn’t want to meet that way, that’s simply a new conflict, and the only real move is to explore why, using the same process all over again, more practice. Endless practice.

Rule 5: Implement the solution, then go live your life. Sooner or later, another conflict will show up, and you’ll get to do all of this again.

I still don’t know how this particular one turns out. But writing through it, same as the collaborative process itself, has already done what it needed to do.

Ex Flare-Ups

by | Jan 10, 2016 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

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Ex Flare-Ups

Some things in life flare up on you. No warning, no pattern you can predict; they’re just suddenly there.

That’s how I’ve come to think of dealing with my ex. Not constant, not even frequent, but when it happens, it happens fast and hits harder than you’d expect for something so infrequent.

I’ve noticed these flare-ups tend to cluster around the predictable stress points: birthdays, holidays, the usual suspects. And I have exactly as much control over the timing as you’d expect: none.

I know the honest counterargument here: I chose to marry him, and whether something he says or does actually counts as a “flare-up” is really just my own interpretation. It’s not an illness. It’s a reaction. That distinction matters, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

But the useful part of the comparison holds anyway: whether something is a genuine crisis or just my own reaction to it, having a strategy for managing the reaction still matters. So over time, I built one.

The flare-ups come on suddenly, out of nowhere, infrequent but sharp. I never see them coming. Instead, I built a response system for after they hit.

First, I write out my full, unfiltered, knee-jerk emotional reaction, everything, no editing, no restraint, in an email. I ensure the “to” field is empty before I even start typing, so there’s no chance of accidentally sending it to him. When I’m done, I send it to a dummy account of my own instead. I don’t fully understand why it works, but it does. Something about hitting send, even into the void, gets it out of my system.

Then I give myself time. I don’t run straight to my support network to vent about whatever the latest thing was, not for a few days at least.

I breathe. I try to meditate. I remind myself that things rarely turn out as badly as my imagination insists they will.

None of this makes the flare-up disappear. But it does take the edge off the worst symptoms, the sleeplessness, the short temper, all of it.

More importantly, it gets me to a place where I can actually deal with him productively. Before I had any of this in place, my instinct was either to fight or to avoid entirely. Fighting feeds the flare-up. Avoiding leaves you sitting in dread, waiting for the next one.

So this time, I emailed him and proposed we talk in person, with some ground rules set in advance to keep the conversation collaborative.

After a few conversations, things settled. We’re back in a good routine, and I’m still working on ways to keep these flare-ups further and further apart.

Empathy Works Both Ways

by | Oct 15, 2015 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

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Empathy Works Both Ways

Empathy is an interesting thing. I’ve always felt like I have a bit too much of it. I empathize easily with someone in pain, and I’ll spend a good chunk of time trying to figure out how to help them. If I can’t, I feel bad about it.

For a long time, I thought of this as a trait that mostly benefited other people and mildly cost me, all that energy spent trying to solve problems that weren’t mine, followed by guilt whenever I couldn’t fix them.

Recently I had a bit of a rethink. Empathy has actually been helping me more than I realized. Understanding that other people are carrying their own real struggles helps put my own in perspective, and my own problems often start looking a lot smaller by comparison. My life starts looking pretty good. I get happier. Things flow better.

This came up recently while thinking through a hypothetical I sometimes use with clients: two co-parents, newly separated, splitting time with their kids roughly evenly, each trying to rebuild their own life around a new schedule. One of them is stepping back into paid work after years focused on the kids, and she’s scared her kids will feel abandoned and that she’ll miss them on the weeks they’re gone. The other is taking on a much bigger share of hands-on parenting than before, and he’s stuck on the fact that he’s still paying support while doing more parenting than he ever has.

In a conversation like that, it’s easy to watch two people get more and more entrenched in their own position, each one certain they’ve drawn the short straw; each one stops actually hearing the other. Once people get to comparing whose situation is worse, they’ve usually stopped listening entirely.

Watching a dynamic like that, what strikes me is how much unseen fear is actually shared between them. Both people are stepping into something new. Both are afraid of what they’re about to lose. If either one could actually see that the other person’s fear is just as real as their own, they’d probably stop spending all their energy defending their own hurt and start being curious about the other person’s instead.

That’s what real collaboration looks like when it happens naturally. And it comes from exactly one place: empathy for the person on the other side of the table.

Sometimes the gap is too wide in the moment, the dislike too fresh, the fear too loud. In those cases, the best move is usually just a break. Time and distance, given enough of it, tend to let a little natural empathy creep back in on its own.

Rules for Email

by | May 20, 2015 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

Rules for Email

When my ex and I first separated, I spent a long time carefully crafting every email to him, trying to make sure there was nothing in it that could be read as offensive. I didn’t want another attack coming back at me; reading those was genuinely painful. How could this person I’d been partnered with for twenty years, who I’d had children with, who I’d put first for most of my adult life, write the things he was writing?

So I spent hours on each email. Clear, concise, no blame, no judgment.

I’d still get an attack back. Something always got misread or twisted.

I’d try to defend myself, take just as much care crafting that reply, and still get something upsetting in return.

It was brutal. He kept finding ways past every defence I put up, every boundary I tried to hold.

One day something finally pushed me over the edge. I was exhausted by the endless back-and-forth. I needed out of that cycle, whatever it took.

So I built myself some rules:

  • Keep emails short. Five sentences, maximum.
  • Wait a day or two after an upsetting reply before responding.
  • Don’t defend myself, especially when asked to. That’s just handing him another opening to attack my values.
  • Don’t discuss the emails with anyone else afterward.

These rules are hard to actually stick to. I get plenty of practice failing at them and trying again. If you’re newly separated, I’d bet you’re getting the same practice.

Eventually the emails got shorter on both ends, and further apart. Not because either of us changed, but because I stopped feeding the cycle new material to work with.

What an attack email does

by | May 20, 2015 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

What an Attack Email Does

My ex sent me a doozy of an attack email the other day. He sent it on Monday, and it’s now Wednesday. It was a good reminder of everything I’ve learned this past year, and of the havoc these kinds of emails can cause. I actually have to thank him for it, since it’s inspired me to write something that might help other people and given me a chance to test my own theories on communication in real time.

Let me start with what the email actually did to me. Despite all the work I’ve put into myself this past year, I still take his words in, and I still have to run them through my own internal processing system before they stop provoking a reaction. I’m writing this partly for anyone tempted to fire off a good zinger of an attack email themselves. If you understand what it actually does to the person receiving it, maybe that gives you pause. It helps stop me, at least.

Here’s how I process one:

The first thing that happens is I don’t want to open it. Monday’s was fourteen paragraphs, seven hundred and seventy words. I knew before I read a word that it wasn’t going to be good.

I do a quick speed-read for offensive or attacking language. This one had plenty.

I try to pull out whatever actually needs a response, skip past the barbs, and reply only to what’s necessary, resisting the urge to attack back.

I do a little internal happy dance and pat myself on the back for staying strong and not engaging further. Look at that, all this work actually paid off. (I think about what would’ve happened without the work: I’d have fired something back, and based on past experience, the conflict would’ve dragged on for a solid week.)

Then I try to get back to whatever I was doing before the email landed, in this case, working from my desk. Except now there’s a cloud sitting over the rest of my day, and my billable hours take the hit either way.

I realize I need to actually process this before I can concentrate on anything else.

I journal. I go back and reread the email, break it down, see how it fits the usual pattern, and analyze it properly.

I think about calling a friend to vent. I don’t. I already know that doesn’t actually help. (More on that here.)

I think about what an idiot my ex is.

I think about how to get even. I resist getting even.

I scrub my porch.

I go for a walk.

I go to bed.

Tuesday, I’m better. Productive all day.

Wednesday, it creeps back into my head, though I feel pretty good about how I handled it. Should I follow up with him, walk through what happened so it doesn’t repeat?

Nah. I’ll write this blog post instead.

And then I’ll write this one. (How to write an email to your ex.)