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William Gaultiere, Ph.D.
Executive Director of New Hope, Crystal Cathedral
New Hope CE, December 2004

How many of you have ever had a stressful conflict with someone important to you that you didn't handle very well? Raise your hand if you've ever had a problem confronting someone? I think there were a few people who didn't raise their hands. You're in the wrong room tonight. Down the hall someone is giving a seminar titled, "De-nile is not a river in Egypt!"

Everyone of us has conflicts in relationships with family, friends, co-workers and bosses, people we're trying to help. We especially have conflicts in dating and marriage, don't we?

It's no wonder. There are two times when a man doesn't understand a woman - just two times - before marriage and after marriage.

And we have big problems with expectations, don't we?

A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't.

A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change and she does!

And money. Men and women fight about money a lot. It's been said that.

A man is a person who will pay two dollars for a one-dollar item he wants.

A woman will pay one dollar for a two-dollar item that she doesn't want.

Joking aside, what if you knew one strategy that would help you resolve any conflict that you got into with someone you're close to? What if there was one basic approach to help you get through any difficult conversation with a friend or family member? I think you'd want to know how to use that strategy!

We're going to talk about "A Strategy for Every Relational Conflict." This strategy works. I've used it for 20 years with family, friends, clients in therapy, even God.

In fact, the only time NOT to use the strategy we're going to talk about is if you're not safe in the relationship. For instance, if you're dealing with an abusive parent, a critical boss, or an uncaring co-worker then this strategy may feel too vulnerable for you and it may not be strong enough to help resolve the conflict.

This strategy is rather easy to understand, but it takes some emotional maturity and practice to be able to use effectively. It's described in Cloud and Townsend's book, Boundaries: Face to Face, as "When You Do 'A,' I feel 'B.'"

This is an effective strategy for inviting people to understand how their actions affect you emotionally. Let's look at the different pieces of this approach.

"When You Do 'A,' I feel 'B.'" To use this strategy you need to be able to differentiate between "I" and "you," "self" and "other." My behavior and your behavior. My feelings and your feelings. My problem and your problem. Every relationship problem I've ever worked with in my counseling office has had big boundary problems: overlapping boundaries, crossed boundaries, no boundaries.

Being able to define and express your boundaries is essential to conflict resolution.

Let me ask you a question: When you're dealing with a relationship conflict what should be your main focus: self or other? Self!

So whatever you say about the other person should be brief and calm. Put most of your words and emotion into inviting the other person to understand you. (I'll come back to this point in a minute.)

You Do

This part is the dangerous part of the "When You Do 'A,' I feel 'B'" approach. This is the part where you're giving some feedback to the other person. You're confronting with the truth, as you see it.

One danger is that you may not be accurate in your assessment of the other person's behavior. You're relying on your perception and memory, both of which are imperfect.

But let's say your observation is accurate or mostly accurate. You need to realize that your feedback may be experienced as critical or hurtful. So you need to be sensitive. Not only is this the compassionate thing to do, but also it's the wise thing to do! Time and again I see people hurt themselves by the way they confront someone they're angry with. If you want someone to understand your feelings or be more helpful to you it's not a good idea to verbally attack the person!

Furthermore, you need to realize that when you confront someone you're making a withdrawal from his or her emotional bank account. Before you make a withdrawal ask yourself if you've deposited enough funds. Have you listened? Affirmed? Been kind? Extended forgiveness? These are deposits that we all need. When you make deposits like these you show your care and it helps people to consider your feedback.

"People don't care what you know until they know that you care."

Feelings. At the heart of the "When you do 'A,' I feel 'B'" approach are feelings. To resolve conflicts you need to know what you feel, take responsibility for your feelings, and express them. By "feel" I mean experience or sense. I don't mean perceive. A lot of people mix these up. They say things like:

"I feel that you going out drinking with your friends is more important to you than I am."

A woman said this to her husband in my office the other day. Well, there was some truth to her observation. But she wasn't expressing a personal feeling. It's not her experience; it's her perception. You might think that this is a small difference. No, it's a BIG difference! This woman wasn't talking about herself, but her husband.

How do you think he liked that? Not very well! He felt blamed for her depression and he was being blamed. She wasn't taking ownership for her part of their conflict and working on changing herself. She just wanted him to change.

His reaction just made things worse. He got defensive. He tried to show her that the problem wasn't about him being critical. Then he shot back:

"You're overemotional. You get upset and just won't stop nagging me!"

"Well, you make me angry!"

Attack, defense, counterattack. Attack, defense, counterattack. Back and forth they went. The tension was escalating. They were getting angrier and angrier. And neither of them were sharing their hearts. Neither of them were taking ownership of their struggles and needs.

Nobody makes us feel a certain way.

Her nagging doesn't explain or excuse his inattentiveness.

His criticism doesn't explain or excuse her anger.

We're each responsible for how we react to other people. We each have choices on how to respond to the things that people do or say. Our feelings and moods are about us, not other people.

Well after about 10 minutes I stopped them and said:

Look what's happening here. There's no vulnerability from either of you. You're not taking responsibility for your part in the problem. No caring is being expressed between the two of you now. Each of you has used your turns to talk to complain about the other and blame him or her for your problems. I can't help you if this is what you're going to do.

When I give you the floor you need to use your time to share wisely. Take the opportunity to invite your spouse to understand what's it's like to be you. Help your spouse step inside your skin and experience your hurts, desires, needs.

Then I helped them to take ownership for and clearly express their feelings; we put words to their experiences, emotions, and needs:

The wife was feeling rejected and lonely. And her part in their problem to work on was that she needed to stop pushing him away with nagging and reproaches.

The husband was feeling criticized for his faults. And his part to take ownership of was that he was denying his mistakes to ward off bad feelings from her judgments (and his own self-condemnations). Instead, he needed to learn to apologize!

And he needed to follow the old advice: "Any married man should forget his mistakes - no use two people remembering the same thing!"

Stay Focused on the Issue

Sometimes, even in a generally safe relationship, the "When you do 'A' I Feel 'B'" strategy doesn't work: You don't feel understood and cared for. The other person reacts with combativeness, defensiveness, changing the subject, or minimizing your feelings. Or maybe you're having trouble verbalizing your deeper feelings and needs. What do you do then?

Stay focused on the issue. Just stay focused on the issue. Stick to your point!

The easiest way to do this is to use the "broken record technique." How many of you are old enough to remember records? Before CD's and before cassettes we had records! You remember when you had a scratch in your record and the same syllable kept repeating over and over and over! Well that's one way to try to get your point across.

Better yet, a more powerful approach is to use "meta-communication." Meta-communication means communicating about the communication that just took place. In other words, talk about the person's unhelpful response to what you shared.

What if the couple I just mentioned had done that? Remember the wife was trying to tell her husband that she felt rejected when he would go out to shoot pool with his friends one or twice a week, but rarely go on a date with her. And he responded by saying that she was overemotional.

What could she have said to return the focus to the issue she started with?

"We can talk about my emotional responses later. Right now we're talking about how I feel unimportant to you. I need time with you, time to get away from the kids and the house to just have fun. It disappoints me when we don't get that."

Balancing Grace and Truth

Balancing grace and truth is crucial to conflict resolution. Every person and every relationship needs both.

The Apostle Paul taught us this. He said that an important mark of Christian maturity is "speaking the truth in love" (Ephesians 4:15, NIV). We can't grow up and we can't have good relationships unless we're honest and caring with ourselves, others, and God.

Our model is God himself and the way he is with us. In God, "Mercy and truth have met together; Righteousness and peace have kissed" (Psalm 85:10, NKJV). "Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ" (John 1:17b, NIV). And if you read the gospels in the Bible you see Jesus demonstrate a wonderful and powerful balance of grace and truth, compassion and correction, gentleness and confrontation.

Jesus knew when to give tender love and when to give tough love. My favorite example of this is recorded in John 8:1-11:

But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, 'Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?' They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, 'If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.' Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, 'Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?'

'No one, sir,' she said.

'Then neither do I condemn you,' Jesus declared. 'Go now and leave your life of sin.'

Jesus was so tender with the woman caught in adultery. She was broken and ashamed over her sin and he demonstrated grace (compassion and acceptance). And then he challenged her with the truth-feedback she needed to hear: "Go and sin no more."

With the religious leaders Jesus also balanced grace and truth, but in a different way. They were proud, hard-hearted, and blaming. They certainly weren't coming to Jesus as needy or hurting. They didn't even think they had a problem. They thought everybody else was the problem, namely the woman for committing adultery and Jesus for forgiving people like her. So, in a few calm and direct words, Jesus gave them the truth to look at - "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her"- and then gave them grace - time to think about what he said.

That's what you want to do. With someone who is struggling or fragile give grace first and mostly and then share the truth you need him or her to understand. With someone who is thick skinned and denying their problem offer the truth in a few calm words and then back off to give them time to process.

Empathy

If we're going to err on one side or the other in giving grace and truth to the person we're in conflict with then we want to go to the side of grace. Usually, the best way to do this is to be empathic. If you want the person you're in conflict with to understand you then you're best to start by trying to understand him or her.

In the last ten years I've taught over 1,000 volunteer New Hope Counselors at the Crystal Cathedral basic counseling skills, especially active listening in which you demonstrate your concern and compassion for others. We find that it helps people so much in their personal life when they learn how to not only listen to others, but also to show their caring by focusing on what others need, asking questions, and reflecting feelings.

It's amazing to me how few adults have these foundational relationship skills for empathizing with others. Time and again I've worked with people in psychotherapy who aren't able to progress in a conflict with their spouse or adult child or friend. First, they need to learn how to empathize, to set aside their needs for a moment and offer compassion to the other person.

When I got married in 1986 I wasn't a very good listener. I'd listen to my wife for a few minutes and then give her advice. That's what we men are good at right? Solving problems! Well, that just made things worse! It was hard for me to empathize with her, to see life from her perspective and understand her feelings, desires, and needs.

It was even harder for me to admit things I was doing to hurt her. When she brought up issues with me I tended to get defensive because I felt criticized. More than that I felt this pressure that I had "make her" feel better when she was upset. I had lousy boundaries. I felt responsible for my struggles and other peoples', which is how I felt all the time as a child.

I learned more about listening and empathizing and maintaining my boundaries in my marriage then I did in getting my Ph.D. in psychology! There are two things that helped me to learn to be a more caring, patient listener who doesn't take responsibility for or try to fix how other people feel.

1. Being persistent in working through our conflicts. Close relationships can be a crucible for bring out the gold in your character. That's because the dross (that's the bad stuff, the impurities) rises to the surface and you can skim it off! Like everyone else, we'd have the same fights over and over until we worked through the underlying patterns. Part of what helped us was going to marriage counseling early in our marriage.

2. The other thing that helped me learn to listen and be more compassionate was learning to receive care when my wife and others listened to me. Throughout my adult life I've put high priority on have two or three soul friends who I regularly go to for support and prayer. In the past one of my soul friends was my own Psychotherapist who I saw for seven years. Currently, I meet with a Spiritual Director who cares for my soul. I also have my wife, a prayer partner-friend, and a spiritual growth group that I meet with regularly to give and receive care. You can't give what you don't have in your heart. We need to receive God's love through Christ's Ambassadors so that we can pass it on.

So the best thing you can do for your relationship is to give grace and empathy to your friend or partner. Listen, understand, care, and put words to your friend's experience. Then when you need to share a frustration there will be something on deposit for you to make a withdrawal!

Summary of "When You Do 'A' I Feel 'B'"

The idea of this approach is to invite the person you have a problem with to understand how his or her behavior affects you emotionally. What you do is you set the context for how you're feeling by describing what he or she did that is a problem for you.

Then get into sharing your experience. This is the part you want understood and considered so elaborate on this. Stay away from sharing your perceptions of the other person. In other words, use "I statements" instead of "you statements."

Use feeling words. Use word pictures. Use analogies. Use examples from past experiences. Use whatever you can to get the other person to step inside your shoes. You're asking him or her to L-I-S-T-E-N.

Examples

Here are some examples of what the strategy of "When you do 'A' I Feel 'B'" sounds like:

• "When you cancel our date just hours before we're to go out I feel discarded. At times like this I've been looking forward to being with you and then get so disappointed that I won't get to be with you because something else became more important." (Feeling words)
• "When you raise your voice at me I feel scared. I start shaking inside and I just want to go away and hide. I feel like a turtle that pulls its head inside it's shell." (Emotional word picture)
• "When you make critical comments like that I feel bad about myself, like I did when my father berated me when I was little." (Connection to painful memory)
• "When I'm trying to talk to you about something I need and you change the subject I feel rejected. I need you to listen to me and try to understand my feelings." (Present need)

As I told you already, I don't just help other people work through their relational conflicts I have to do it in my own life too! In fact, I'm going to think twice the next time I'm asked to give a talk on conflict resolution. The way it works when you're asked to speak in front of audience on a subject is that you start having problems in that area! It's been a rough week for me!

I have three children. Last week my wife Kristi and I caught one of our kids in a lie. This child was late getting home from a friend's house and made up an excuse about a flat tire. Kristi talked to the friend's mother and was able to figure out that they had ridden their bikes to the store and that's why they were late. So we sat down with this child. I used the "When you do 'A' I feel 'B'" approach.

"When you're dishonest it's hard for me to trust you. I feel unsure and confused about what's going on with you. I want us to have an open and honest relationship."

Wouldn't you know it, I also had a stressful conflict with Kristi, which is quite rare. You know she's a Psychotherapist too. Have you ever listened to two therapists argue?

When you do A I feel B. Hmm. Hmmm. Well, when you do B I feel C. Oh. I see. And when you do C I feel D. Yes, and when you do D I feel E!!! It's a merry-go-round of feelings!

It really does help though. When you put the time and effort into understanding someone's feelings and needs it goes a long ways toward resolving the conflict.

Well, let's go to the movies! Let's look at an example from the film, "Sense and Sensibility." How many of you have seen this movie? I imagine that many of you women here would say it's one of your favorite movies. Actually, I like it a lot too! Not a lot of men like emotional, romantic movies, but I do.

Sense and Sensibility tells the story of the Dashwood sisters, sensible Elinor and Passionate Marianne, whose chances at marriage seem doomed by their family's sudden loss of fortune. Both sisters are courted by attractive male suitors but respond in contrasting ways: Elinor guards her heart and loves practically while Marianne plunges into the delights of romance without much thought. They both are left by the men they love and through supporting one another they grow. Elinor learns to express her feelings and desires and Marianne learns to think things through and to be prudent.

The movie wonderfully plays out the conflict between living by feeling and desire (sense) versus living by reason and duty (sensibility). It shows the conflicts that emerge within and between persons when head and heart are not connected.

My favorite scene in the movie occurs after Marianne has learned that the man Elinor loved was getting married to another woman whom he had previously been engaged to. Elinor had known this for a few weeks, but had been sworn to secrecy.

[Clip]

Marianne is deeply hurt that her sister and best friend didn't confide in her even though she had asked her again and again about her feelings for Edward.

Elinor rationalizes that Edward should keep his earlier engagement: "He'll be happy in the knowledge that he did his duty and kept his word. It's bewitching, the idea of one's happiness depending entirely on one person."

Passionate Marianne is disgusted: "Always resignation and acceptance. Always prudence and honor and duty. Elinor where is your heart?"

Elinor: "What do you know of my heart? What do you know of anything but your own suffering? For weeks Marianne I've had this pressing in on me without being at liberty to speak of it to a single creature. It was forced upon me by the very person whose prior claims ruined all my hopes. I have endured her exaltation time and again while knowing myself to be divided by Edward forever. Believe me, I could've produced proof enough of a broken heart even for you!"

Marianne starts to cry and Elinor stops her grieving and dutifully goes to comfort her sister. Nonetheless, Elinor's tearful expression of deep sadness is a breakthrough for her.

In the grief and frustration of the moment Elinor says some hurtful things to her sister questioning her compassion and suggesting she's selfish. What if Elinor had used the "When do 'A' I feel 'B'" approach? What would that have sounded like?

Elinor could've said:

"Marianne when you keep asking me to share my feelings with you I feel pressured. I'm afraid to fall in love and be hurt so I close the door to my heart. Even when someone knocks on the door I keep it closed." (Feeling words and analogy)

Or: "Marianne when you tell me that I'm too accepting of things and dutiful I feel angry. I feel rejected. I'm not like you and I need you to accept me, cautious as I am." (Feeling words and expression of need)