The Basic Dialogue

The couples interviewed had practiced primarily the ‘couple’s dialogue’, a basic tool that they learned in the workshop to help provide both communication and safety

In principle, the dialogue is a simple and somewhat artificial technique. You set a time for this dialogue, rather than constantly react and attack your partner every time a frustration occurs. Then you talk about the issue within the safety of a fixed structure. The technique seems basic, but is more difficult to do than it appears. The basic dialogue process is as follows:

• One person talks about his or her frustration.
• The other partner listens and mirrors what he has heard. The mirroring is repeating back the words of your partner without expanding, reducing, or analyzing. You repeat back precisely the words you heard, without paraphrasing.
• This prevents a distorted understanding of things and makes the person feel truly heard without the listener injecting his own thought and feelings about the issue. You have your partner’s full attention.
• If the listener makes mistakes in the mirroring, or leaves something out, the speaker corrects it until it is heard precisely.
• When the speaker finally answers “no” to the question, “Is there more about that?”, the couple proceeds to the next step of the process, the validation.
  This step lets your partner and you know that you have understood. Understanding and validation does not mean that you necessarily agree with what has been said. It simply makes sense to you from your partner’s perspective.
• You, the listener, tell your partner that what he or she is saying makes sense and you tell why.
• You then guess how your partner must have felt or must feel. The focus is on the original speaker, not on your own feelings and thoughts about the issue.

In the beginning, it sounds stupid to have a disagreement “by the book”, but you soon internalize the dialogue and other tools and it becomes more natural. Although they appear deceptively simple, the dialogue and the other processes work effectively.

Two weeks after the workshop, Dov and Oraniya said that the technique of the couple’s dialogue is simply ‘”overwhelming” in its effectiveness. It is structured, it feels artificial for awhile, and it seems dumb, but it works. “If we say, ‘Let’s have a couple’s dialogue right now while the sparks are flying,’ the results have always been satisfying,” said Dov. Oraniya added, “When you are very angry and you ask for a dialogue, preferably right away, you can say what you have to say. Your partner, because he has to mirror like a parrot, cannot be occupied with himself and he can’t ignore or hurt you at the same time! To ensure success he should mirror me accurately, and then he also has to validate and to move into empathy. Experience shows me that in the end, your issue is diffused, and you feel your partner has understood what you were trying to say. No doubt, this increases the sense of safety.”

The Naamans: Expressing Rage and Discovering Wounds Throug Rage

Chaya Naaman, a clinical social worker, and her husband, Meir, a medical and clinical psychologist, also came from the workshop with great hope. “It is true that the road is difficult, but as therapists, we know how much every change and improvement involves strenuous work and optimism. In this method too, we talk about hard work that is sometimes painful, but sure enough, we expect positive results fairly quickly. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel – and we know it is not an oncoming train!”

Dr. Naaman said, “In the book, Getting the Love You Want, the optimism and hope also emerge. The bad news is that each of us chooses our partner according to an unconscious road map that leads us to reconstruct childhood wounds. On the other hand, the good news is that our partner has the potential to become the best possible person to help heal those same wounds.”

As professionals, the Naamans stress that a workshop cannot take the place of therapy in many situations although your partner can contribute to your healing. “You have to remember,” said Dr. Naaman, “that your partner can’t have the emotional distance, the objectivity, the professional tools and motivation that a therapist has, all of which are important for real treatment. For a partner who is stuck in his or her childhood wounds, the mutual stimulus can be very difficult and express itself by remaining stuck in power struggles.” Chaya added, “The workshop doesn’t take the place of therapy, because according to the theory, the place of healing in this method is through those friction points between the partners. There are other areas that you need to discover. As a parallel to therapy this workshop can help alot. Hopefully, people will persevere using the understanding, vision, and tools that they learned in the workshop and will not need therapy.!”

The workshop deeply touched the Naamans personally. “I had a great experience in accessing my own wounds in a powerful and intense way and in meeting the child inside Meir,” said Chaya. “We are very close, and we know each other’s history inside out, but still, the way things were done and the new perspective was special and renewing. The depth was different than in other times.”

The Naamans volunteered to be a ‘demonstration couple’ during the workshop to enable the leader to teach the group a particular skill. Meir admits that despite the fact that they were doing the exercise in front of the group, they were able to get right into it. The skill that was being demonstrated was resolving rage. Meir was the one working on his rage and was encouraged to do it with full intensity, raising his voice to help him feel it viscerally. Chaya’s task was to create a safe ‘place’ for herself, and receive the anger, understanding that the one who was expressing his rage was the little child in Meir. In the second stage Meir could express the deep pain behind the stored up anger. He spoke of what it reminded him of in his childhood “and this was deep and serious,” he reported. “People in the group reacted strongly to seeing and hearing my pain. Even men came up after and hugged me, not only the therapists in the group, but even those who were not professionals.”

At the end of the workshop, on the way home, Chaya and Meir stopped in a coffee shop and made a commitment to themselves to continue the process. The support group they organized was an expression of that commitment. They thought that support would be very important in holding onto and continuing what they had obtained in the workshop. In the first two weeks after the workshop, and at the beginning of a new road, they took upon themselves small commitments to “do something different” in their relationship. The workshop stresses beginning with small steps to ensure success

They have kept those commitments and Meir says, “Although at first glance, these things we agreed to do seem small and simple, they contribute to the climate of our relationship and to the basic awareness that we are working together to improve, to deepen, and to enrich our partnership.” Chaya added, “It also gives me a feeling of satisfaction, like I am doing a good deed.”

At this stage of our conversation, something interesting happened. Chaya said that Meir’s request of her was to ask once a day for two weeks whether she had angered or annoyed him. Meir said that he had requested her to ask, on purpose, whether he had something to tell her or to share with her. Meir then went on to explain why, according to his version, why he had requested only that she ask if he had something to say. “Sometimes,” he said, “in the fog of arguments, your partner is not listening. So, when you want to tell them something painful, it is likely that the things will be dissolved if they are listening. So it was important to me that I would have a place and time in which I could express myself fully, and Chaya would be completely attentive.”

So what was it that she committed to ­­ to ask if he is angry with her, or to ask if he had something to share? One big advantage of this method is that as you make these small commitments to change, you write them in your manual. So when they looked, the disagreement was settled. What was written was, “Chaya commits herself to ask once a day for the next two weeks whether I want to express any anger.” “The special request,” Meir explained, “was actually about anger, but the goal was for Chaya to request that I share something. Today, the question itself, seems less important. In fact, the very feeling of mutuality contributed to the sense of listening and paying full attention to each other.”

Chaya also has the sense of a new level of listening. The very fact of using the partner’s dialogue, she says, makes a real difference in the quality of the listening. Now, even if she wants to tell Meir that she is angry with him about being late, or he makes a remark about keeping the house neat, using the dialogue works through the issue much more calmly. Because of the structure of the technique, the one with the frustration has a sense of safety that he or she will not be attacked by the other person. And the partner who is listening does so, not as one being attacked, but as a healing listener. And at the end, even the fuel that continuously feeds the fight becomes less flammable

“In order to listen to me, he needs to leave his ground and enter mine,” explained Chaya, “and then, any arrows I may shoot as I say something, do not reach his ground, but stay in mine. And the moment he repeats back what I have said, my anger diminishes because I know he was listening to me.”

The Kanfis: Nurturing Partnership

The third couple interviewed, Lily and Joshua Kanfi, married “happily” for 30 years, never had a problem in the sense of togetherness, sharing, or loving. They were optimistic even before the workshop. Lily manages the judicial chamber of WIZO (a government agency) in Ashdod and does some family counseling. Joshua works as a manager of a fuel company.

The Kanfis read Getting the Love You Want before they went to the workshop. Not only did they read it, they also took a day off from work to do all the exercises. Lily signed up for the workshop because she thought it would help her alot in her work. Joshua said that if it would help her, he would go along, even though he didn’t understand why they needed to go.

After the workshop, Joshua said that he felt better because it affirmed that they were on the right track. “This is truly exciting and enjoyable,” he reported. In his point of view, the best part of the workshop was that it seemed to tie together in a systematic way, things that had seemed natural for him before.

Joshua commented, “By nature, I am not an aggressive person. If obstacles appear above and beyond the usual, I give up. Throughout my life, I saw my friends succeeding far more than I was. I couldn’t understand why I was not more of a go-getter. Only at the workshop did I understand that my father was exactly the same way I am and that Lily is completely the opposite. She is very competitive.” “But,” interjected Lily, “as much as he is not competitive, he was always the one who told me all along the way, ‘Don’t give up, continue on!’ All the time he encouraged and pushed me.”

Both could easily find those points in which they complement each other and ask for those same things from their partner. Lily came from a large, warm, supportive family. Joshua came from a very small family in which it was not acceptable to touch one another. In Lily’s family people touched all the time. Joshua is an introvert, Lily the extrovert. And both are calling forth the ‘lost’ qualities in each other. Joshua is learning to show his feelings, and Lily is learning some restraint.

They had difficulty in one of the exercises exploring childhood wounds. Even though they tried to look for them, they could not find much. Later, when Joshua was doing an exercise in which you ask your partner for specific behaviors, Joshua asked Lily to stay next to him when he watched football on TV in the evenings. At the time of the request, it made no sense to Lily why he asked that. They often sit together to watch TV. It was true, that when football came on, she often found other things to do. But because she wanted to learn new ways to become a healer for Joshua, she agreed to that request. “As I started doing it,” Lily related, “I found first that because he loves football, he wants to share it with me. What I also discovered was that when Joshua was little and came home from school wanting to share exciting things with someone else, he had no one because his mother worked. His feeling of being so alone and isolated in front of the TV came from that experience.”

After the workshop, Lily and Joshua did not feel that they needed a support group. They continued doing the exercises and using new skills on their own. At the end of the workshop, both had a strong desire to see their parents and say “Thank you.” “I always thought I had wonderful parents,” said Lily, “but when we left the workshop I told Joshua I had the urge just to go and give my parents a kiss. When we arrived and my mother came out to greet us as usual, I started to cry. She didn’t understand, but she hugged me and I felt so grateful for the way she had raised me.”

“Love and partnership,” said Lily before we parted, “is like the beautiful plants I have in my living room window. You need to water and fertilize them so they can bloom. There are those who know how to do that by themselves. But most of us need to learn how to get the love that we want.”