I have been reading several books lately on interpersonal communication and conflict--newer books--The Guide to Compassionate Assertiveness (2012), The Triangle of Truth (2011), Conscious Communication (2010), Breaking the Argument Cycle (2009), and How to Hug a Porcupine (2009).
These books Should be the latest and greatest knowledge on communication, yet I am under the impression that most of these books are complete garbage.
Conscious Communication seems to be the best book I have ever read on interpersonal communication. I think it comes closest to reality and the "truth" as Plato would put it. In one section of this book, Miles Sherts begins to touch on the evolution process of man and my mind began to mix with his thoughts and I think I completely understand where he is going with this thought:
One of the things that separate us from Animals is that we have the ability to create complex noises to communicate with one another and formulate sentences; we also have the ability to think about thinking--which supposedly animals cannot. Most importantly, we have the ability to recognize our feelings and to name them. We can assess ourselves and determine: I am sad right now, I am happy, I am grateful, I am distraught, I am angry.
Yet even though we can create complex sounds and communicate how we are feeling--we haven't advanced very far in this field as a human race.
Most of us communicate logically rather than emotionally. We make assumptions and treat them as facts. When someone does something that hurts us, we say "You are a bad person" and we live on the assumption that that person is out to get us, out to hurt us, out to dishonor our families and circumvent our lives. It is the simple: "Because of this, therefore this." Logic. That's what that is. But that's now how logic is supposed to be used, because it isn't an avenue to the truth.
Rhetorical tools, Logic, Ethos, Pathos, Kairos--these are supposed to bring us closer to the truth, not theory. They are supposed to bring about good in the world, not fear. They are supposed to help you learn or teach, rather than narrow your mind to new ideas.
The thing I have learned from my recent studies has been that the NEW avenue of evolution--the area in which we humans NEED to evolve in order to survive, the area in which we have been fighting generationally to overcome this and unfortunately it has been a slow process can be explained as follows:
We have found a way to gather resources so that all of our physical needs are easily taken care of, but our emotional needs, because of society and the culture required to reach this level of human advancement, have taken a back seat. Instead of addressing emotional needs we focus on physical needs as the means to an end, but it doesn't help to heal emotional wounds.
We run away from emotional pain or blame others because of 'logical' associations we make between other people and our emotional pain. Because our emotional needs aren't met and more importantly, because we don't know how to address or resolve emotional wounds, we sever relationships, we lash back, and we "fight" to survive.
But emotional pain isn't like physical pain. We don't need to fight for our emotional well being like we do for our physical well being. Gaining possessions, securing more resources of food and water, these might help us resolve our physical well-being, but our emotional well being isn't resolved by securing more relationships. If you don't resolve your emotional needs, having more relationships will only bring more opportunities for conflict and can ultimately lead to you pushing away your relationships or hurting other people and making your emotional pain even worse because the closer people are to you the more likely they are to bring out your emotional wounds.
As a society, but more importantly as individuals, we need to focus on resolving our emotional needs ourselves and being more compassionate to others who are suffering emotional pain. But before we can do that, we need to evolve so that we can recognize emotional pain--in ourselves and in others. And then we need to learn how to resolve emotional pain, because emotional pain can be triggered by other people, but resolving that emotional pain is an individual process in which we might rely on the support of others but ultimately must make the journey ourselves in the confines of our own minds.
You shouldn't walk away from other people simply because they trigger emotional pain in you, just like you shouldn't blame the fire for burning you.
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