Mental Health Break “It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on it” Part 1 An effective technique to prevent communication from breaking down is to identify the areas of our disagreement. March 2007

by writer

Robert Fulghum wrote an essay with the title of this month’s column. He told of reading a newspaper article that included an interview with a man who had been involved in a fire.

It was determined that the conflagration had started in the man’s mattress. When they asked the man how it had happened, he responded that he didn’t know how the mattress caught fire. And then added, “It was on fire when I lay down on it.”

The fact that the man’s sentence made sense to him illustrates the difficulties of communication.

President Richard Nixon supposedly once made the comment:

“I know that you think that you understood what I said but I am not yet fully convinced that what you heard is what I meant.”

The quote makes us smile because we know that very often our communication with each other fails just in the way that this quote illustrates.

Many of the things we say come across as nonsense to our listeners because the messages are loaded with context that listeners might not be aware of and with history that they haven’t shared.

Imagine two people talking about a beach ball, which is painted green on one side and orange on the other. Each of the communicators can only see one side or the other.

There are many things about the ball that they can agree on, but their different experiences ensure that they will never be able to agree on the color.

Communication topics are much more complicated than two-toned beach balls, and our discussion about them is often clouded by the fact that we don’t conduct most of our lives in a rational fashion.

Einstein once observed:

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment.”

Einstein’s insights into human nature were as profound as his understanding of the cosmos. The “prejudices” of the “social environment” he spoke about often make it impossible for us to say clearly what we actually mean and to hear what other people are actually saying.

Added to these prejudices, discussions about such topics as politics, religion, family values, discipline, abortion, evolution, etcetera are so burdened with the weight of previous history, personal context, and emotional attachments that communication often sinks to a level of mere rant and tirade making impossible any real exchange of information or even opinions.

An effective technique to prevent communication from breaking down is to identify the areas of our disagreement. And the best way to do this is to begin to find things that we do agree on.

“The beach ball is about two feet in diameter.”

“The ball is apparently made of rubber.”

In this process I can tell you what I see; you tell me what you see. After establishing a base of agreement, I can tell you that I see the ball as orange; you tell me it’s green. When we realize that at this point we can’t change each other’s perception to match our own, we just accept the fact that we disagree.

We always say that there are two sides to every story. But in the real world there are sometimes a lot more than two sides. The “ball” is much more liable to be hundreds or thousands of colors and each person can only see a microscopic part of it — like a blind man who thinks an elephant is like a snake because all he can touch is the animal’s trunk.

We only communicate with each other by subconsciously making interpretations and assumptions about what other people actually mean by what they say. We make guesses about where the other person is coming from.

Varying levels of personal involvement also affect my communication. If my brother says, “The dog is running in the street,” my reception of the message will be impacted if I’m the one who left the door ajar.

We can get into communication events with lopsided emotional content. The “dog is running in the street” is a message that might be energy-laden for me but perfectly neutral for my brother.

Another factor we have to deal with are the assumptions we make coming from a history of previous communications. If Joe once told me, “You’re a dumb person,” the memory of the comment will color my future conversations with him. Joe might not be thinking of the comment that he had once made, but I can’t forget it, and the memory affects how I understand the things that Joe is telling me now.

More about that when I do Part 2 next month.

Eileen Norton, Psy.D
925-354-7526
eileen@110mag.com