Feeling Good Together

And when I said, “I have tremendous respect for you and feel badly that I've let you down,” it was music to his ears because I sounded human and vulnerable, instead of arrogant and defensive. Even though we were both feeling frustrated and annoyed, I conveyed the spirit of respect. Chris had been feeling demoralized and was hoping to connect with someone who cared about him.

When I responded to Chris, I was using the Five Secrets of Effective Communication:

As you can see, they build on the same listening and self-expression skills we've been using to distinguish good versus bad communication. Learning to use these techniques effectively will require hard work and practice because they're radically different from the ways most of us react to the people we're not getting along with.

And when I said, “I have tremendous respect for you and feel badly that I've let you down,” it was music to his ears because I sounded human and vulnerable, instead of arrogant and defensive.

But if Hannah accepts the fact that she can't change Hal, and focuses instead on changing herself, he will change. He'll change at the exact moment that she changes. This is a paradox. We change other people every time we interact with them—but we're just not aware of it.

In fact, she acted like Hal didn't even exist. Her silence conveyed the message, “You're not even worthy of a response.”

Self-blame is not the antidote to blaming your partner. As you can see in the table on page 62, self-blame triggers guilt, anxiety, depression, and giving up. It won't lead to love or to meaningful solutions to the problems in your relationships with other people. Personal responsibility, without any blame at all, is the mind-set that leads to intimacy.

Blame is too powerful an adversary for me. It's the atom bomb of intimacy. It destroys everything that gets in its way. I'm not aware of any techniques that are powerful enough to help people who blame others for the problems in their relationships.

We all provoke and maintain the exact relationship problems that we complain about.

However, this choice is common. In fact, of the three options I described—leaving the relationship, working to make the relationship better, or making sure that nothing changes—the third option is by far the most popular.