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Speak only in facts and feelings
Why labels fail
Labels and generalizations are the usual mistake. "You always leave the dishes in the sink" is false unless Ted has literally never washed a dish, so Ted answers "What about yesterday?" and the argument is on. Calling a friend a dick who is always putting you down fails the same way.
The alternative is two things no one can dispute. "I saw your dishes in the sink, and that makes me a little aggravated, because now I have to clean up after you or we have a messy house." Nothing in that sentence invites a fight.
A vacation example
On a vacation with ten friends, a man named Tom turned rude when he was drunk, making jokes at everyone's expense to lift himself up. Sober, he was perfectly fine. Instead of insulting him back, the man told him that a couple of his jokes that day hadn't felt good and that if they kept coming, he wouldn't want to hang out.
That was a true statement of what he found acceptable, and it left Tom a way out. Tom told him he hadn't realized it and stopped making the jokes.
Assuming the worst
People tend to assume the worst about why someone behaves badly. Dishes pile up in the sink because the mess doesn't bother the roommate, not because he is thinking about how much it will annoy you.
Why does "you always" trigger defensiveness?
Psychologist John Gottman's research on couples identified criticism, which attacks a person's character instead of a single behavior, as one of four patterns that predict relationship trouble. He called these patterns the Four Horsemen, and defensiveness is another of them. His work also found that how a conversation begins strongly predicts how it ends. Sweeping words like always and never are a common way a harsh start gets built.
Where does the facts and feelings approach come from?
Psychologist Marshall Rosenberg developed Nonviolent Communication in the 1960s and 1970s. His model breaks a difficult message into four parts: an observation, a feeling, a need, and a request. The observation is meant to be what a video camera would record, free of evaluation. Rosenberg's 2003 book on the method has sold millions of copies worldwide.
Why do people assume the worst about others?
Social psychologist Lee Ross named the fundamental attribution error in 1977. It describes the tendency to explain other people's behavior by their character while explaining our own by circumstances. Someone who leaves a mess is judged as careless, while the same person would blame being rushed. The error appears across many experiments in social psychology.
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