I f you listen to this song, “Paradox” by Lipless, or even just look at the lyrics, we can look at a great example of how our day-to-day conversations and culture at large tend to place ownership (or, responsibility) for our emotional experiences onto others or otherwise outside of ourselves. The lyrics here are mostly a repetition of the phrase, “oh, what you put me through…I love you.” Clearly there’s some challenging emotion going on for the speaker. But while this wording is likely familiar to most of us, let’s see what happens when we change it to, “oh, what I went through” or “oh, this was hard for me.” This transformation is called “non-violent communication.” TERRIBLE name! (It doesn’t sound approachable or even desirable at all, sure it’s NON-violent, but “violent” certainly doesn’t communicate the feel of what we’re going for here.) It would be more aptly named, “emotional ownership communication.” Let’s see why.
When we say something like “you put me through hell,” or “you were so mean and hurtful,” we place responsibility onto the other person for our emotional experience, and we assert that there is consensus between us that someone’s actions toward us can unequivocally be characterized “mean and hurtful.”
What if we change this to, “I went through hell,” and “I experienced you as mean and hurtful.” Sure, this latter sentence structure in particular may not feel quite so familiar or natural to you, but that’s the problem. We don’t frame things this way very consistently (or maybe at all!). But what this does is places ownership of our emotional experience more inside of ourselves and leaves space for conversation about the shared experience where our perception or prior autobiographical experience may be playing a role in what emotions came up for us in a particular interaction. What if the other person here was actually making quite an effort to be kind in their communication, but the speaker experienced the situation as “mean and hurtful” at least in part because it associated to some specific prior experience that was interpreted that way? Or maybe they tend to see what my otherwise be considered reasonable boundary-setting as “mean and hurtful?”
By speaking in this way, we open up space for conversation and come off as less blaming or aggressive toward the other person. The thing is, it’s precisely when we’re most emotionally worked up by something that we can slip out of this approach, so the key here is to practice it regularly especially in less-charged circumstances so that we can notice our language structure during harder times and express ourselves in this way more readily.
