How right can we be?
Psychological Dimensions of Communication

By Susan Scharwiess


Please don’t worry: This paper is not going to be about right-wing and left-wing policies. It also won’t discuss being right and being wrong. On the contrary: a dedication to truth is essential for authentic communication. We all owe a great deal to discoveries made by a free press.

What I want to discuss is ‘being right’ in the sense the Germans describe as ‘Recht haben’ or owning The Truth (which of course implies that there only is or can be one truth). In this sense, I will be talking about Political Correctness.

More specifically, I want to discuss the part of the pragmatics of communication which describes the relationship between the speaker and the recipient of the message. This relationship-aspect of communication pragmatics means that every message of any kind implies a virtual community. What I want to say today is that we need to be aware of the quality of that implied relationship. We need to speak to our listeners with care because our relationship with them is one of the most important resources in a democracy. We will only be able to have a peaceful world together.

It is like carrying paprika to Hungary or returning owls to Athens for a family therapist to discuss these issues with you all. We certainly have borrowed extensively from the communication sciences to try to understand the families with whom we work. Maybe, though, we have processed what we borrowed in ways that can offer you all some enrichment. In that sense, it is a privilege to repay our debt by sharing our views with you today.

One thing we may have to offer is the simplicity and intensity of a base-level approach. For instance, if I ask you to open the window, that has a factual referent which includes the question of whether we have a window or not and whether it is warm or cold here inside or also outside.

At the same time, the question has a relationship aspect. Part of this is context: are you my servant? My boss? My grandmother? My son? It gets closer to relationship when we consider: are you my husband? Or is the speaker a man asking his wife? Is one of the participants in a wheel-chair? Have I just threatened suicide?

....all of these issues go into determining the emotional atmosphere and what we might call the ‘relationship meaning’ of my request that you open the window. Is it friendly? Arrogant? Something to be ashamed of? A joke -? As we all know, the meanings are endless.

Neurologists have recently emphasized the existential importance of this dimension. It turns out that every single incoming message is processed by the amygdala, a kind of an early-warning system in the brain, which asks only one question: Friend or foe? If the message is determined to be dangerous, all hell breaks loose from adrenalin to tears. Any married person can tell you about difficulties caused by inadvertently activating their partner’s amygdala!

Another thing that would interest me is the question of ‘relationship meanings’ in the socialist system. Maybe you can tell me more about that in the discussions later. Looked at from the outside, it seemed that the scheme was quite invariant: the Party was ‘right’ and was informing the others. In East Germany, they even had a song: "Die Partei, die Partei, die hat immer recht!"

But since I obviously can’t tell you all about that, I want to tell you about some patterns that Virginia Satir, a very famous family therapist who worked with Gregory Bateson and Paul Watzlawick at the MRI (Mental Research Institute) in Palo Alto, observed in the communication of the families with whom she worked. A large majority of families could be divided into

Blamers
Placaters
Computers, and
Irrelevant Communicators.

The easiest way to describe these various systems is to ask you all to experiment with the way they work. Although they are derived from observation, they develop a life of their own when they are functioning. They seem to operate according to implied ‘rules’ even though these are neither conscious nor enforced. But they allow us to get into the spirit of the real thing.

For that reason, I’m going to ask you to turn to a neighbor, either on the right side or on the left, and spontaneously invent a short role-play. Maybe you could pretend to discuss whether or not you want to have a coffee together after the session.

The first system we’re going to role-play is the Placater because that may feel very natural in this situation. A Placater absolutely needs to do what the other one wants and probably doesn’t even know whether he or she actually wants to have coffee! Placaters have great eye-contact, because they have to watch to see what the other might expect, or what they think the other wants. They smile. They are very nice and polite. They are extremely good at avoiding disagreement.

So now I would like to ask all of you to ‘be’ placaters for a moment and discuss whether or not to have coffee after the session.

....

And now I’d like to ask you to notice for a moment how you feel. Are there any physical reactions? Did you enjoy this style of communication? How was the atmosphere in your small role-play? In the room as a whole -?

Usually, energy gets quite reduced in this kind of a situation, intensity is restricted, people often feel a block in their throats and may grind their teeth at night. Below the friendly mask, there is often the feeling of a tiger locked in a cage, and getting to the rage is a big part of the therapeutic work with Placaters.

If you have felt like that, you are probably now ready to play at being Blamers. The key rule here is to use words like ‘you’, ‘never,’ ‘always’ and ‘you!’ Pointing your finger is very useful to make the other one realize that it’s all his or her fault. "I would have gone for a coffee in a flash, but YOU ALWAYS MAKE EVERYTHING IMPOSSIBLE!!!" Use lots of capital letter and exclamation-marks in your voice.

This is, of course not as socially acceptable here in the conference situation as being placaters, but it really is essential to clarify what I mean to say to ask you to play this by these rules. So please have another discussion with your neighbor about having a coffee, and both of you ‘be’ Blamers, just for now!

.....

And now, again, please check your feelings, your experience, and the atmosphere. Isn’t the difference amazing? The same discussion, the same people – and just different ways of going about it. I hope that you are beginning to sense the reality of these different communication styles.

The real test of whether this has become clear will come now when we play at having the communication style of a Computer. Computers are very much alive from the neck up. Their goal is to be reasonable! No emotional mess, please! They can always tell you why they want what they do, often quoting an authority which can be a fashion-magazine or a newspaper. Of course, many of them are intellectuals but as you know, there are also lots of intellectuals who are Blamers and Placaters, and on the other hand, there are Computers in all parts of society. They are usually quite successful in large organizations such as armies and hospitals.

The key here is to see that this communication-style has its own rules and inner logic, just like the two we have tried before. Computers talk a lot, they ask rhetorical questions and tend to intimidate. This is not primarily because they’re smart – but rather, because they are so busy controlling their own feelings in order to be so reasonable. Their Faustean bargain is that they can do that and control themselves perfectly as long as they are right. If you were to prove them wrong in any point, they would be completely lost.

So now I want to ask you all to do one last role-play. You are now very ‘reasonable’, so you will be discussing whether it really is a good idea to have a coffee. Just remember: whatever you do: be right!

...

How did that feel? Did you get any closer to a decision than you did before?

I want to thank you all for doing this little experiment with me, because I think that now you know what I want to say:

Truth is important beyond words. But who owns it? Is this whole life-long striving of the Computer-Type to ‘have’ the ‘one-and-only’ truth useful? Is it even possible? And if it were possible: What kind of a society can be produced by such a search? (My guess is that it would be pretty close to what you have had in the recent past).

Let’s look at these three styles from the point of view of the amygdala, that early-warning system in the brain I had mentioned earlier. Placaters are obviously friends. Blamers can feel like foes (probably they feel like victims, just trying to defend themselves). But what effect do Computers have?

To be more specific: What is the relationship between a Computer-Style-Communicator and the recipient of his truths? Of course, he needs recipients, followers, and disciples. Maybe he will even allow some small bits of mutuality within the limits of the sect he has created this way. – But a real discussion? Forget it!

In other words, such a person gets through the amygdala’s early defenses easily, but later can be experienced as oppressive because a real exchange doesn’t develop with him or her.

People get this relationship-level message along with whatever else is being discussed. In other words, if you happen to have The Truth and just wanted to let everyone know that fact, they will – up to a point – be smart enough not to question you. They will become extremely passive. If they have some other ideas, they may speak among themselves – but they sure won’t tell you! They may get angry, they may cut themselves off from you, but it is very unlikely that they will join you and contribute to your project.

In other words, if you are not only an intellectual but also operating with the communication style of a Computer, a particular kind of relationship between you and your reader or hearer will be implied by everything you do or say. This is why the political effects of Political Correctness are so devastatingly counterproductive! If you want peace, or democracy, it is essential to reflect not only on the truth of what you say but also on how you are saying it.

So that is the theoretical level of what I want to say.

Now I want to give a practical example, which will show some of the complications involved in attempting this kind of communication. Let’s look at what the ‘Kosovo-War’ or the NATO-Bombing of Serbia did to communication in the intellectual community.

You notice that even figuring out what to call the event is an extremely loaded question.

This is, in my opinion, because there is a victim of war that is even more basic than the famous statement that "The first casualty of war is truth." Truth is of course definitely a victim, if only because everyone is increasingly expected to ‘put their differences aside’ and contribute to the war-effort within their respective countries. In other words, truth becomes a victim due to the death of discussion.

This was very apparent in Germany last year. While the Foreign Minister and the Government shared the NATO view that Milosevic had to be stopped, the majority of intellectuals were absolutely desperate, particularly because of their deep dedication to ensuring that there should never again be any war emanating from Germany. This dedication was so strong that it created almost complete intolerance. If I so much as mentioned that the Allies felt obliged to act out of their own understanding of the same history, that they should have stopped Hitler sooner, I was almost ostracized.

There could only be One Truth.

(I understand that you all in Hungary had a more differentiated approach with the slogan ‘Stop Nato, Stop Milo’. This would not have been possible in Germany at that time.)

The situation was even more complex at an international meeting of mental health professionals in the Systems in Transition group. Since we include Serbian and American members, Germans, Czechs, Bulgarians, Croatians, Romanians, Russians and many others, we had many official and inofficial truths with us right there with us in the room. How in the world can it be possible to talk with people whose army is killing your people? - or whom your army is killing? Either way, the pressure to become a Computer – to see just one truth – is immense. Our whole meeting was dedicated to the proposition that it can be possible to communicate anyway. This meant that we were doing advanced research into the relationship side of communication pragmatics.

Of course we didn’t start such a difficult project right in the middle of the war. We had been working together since 1992 to understand the psychological aspects of social transition, a project which had involved attention to relationship aspects from the beginning. 28 of our 38 participants had attended at least one previous meeting; 21 had participated at least twice earlier. This meant that we had an array of implied traditions which allowed everyone present to take some measure of responsibility for the process.

While this was definitely our most difficult meeting to date, we had already begun our three-year focus, Overcoming Violence: Persons, Families, & Societies, the year before. We had been aware of the danger of war and had planned to meet in Macedonia for that very reason, to learn from such a situation and to focus attention that could have a preventive effect. But we were too late. By May, Macedonia was completely filled with refugees and the noise of bombers coming and going.

At this point, a surge of dedication set in. We didn’t want to be beaten completely by the war, forced into giving up our group and our project! We decided to change the locale and meet anyway. Which country could still be entered by all our participants? You know: Hungary. So the Hungarian group became very active and found a way for us to meet in Dobogókö.

Of course, the meeting was very carefully constructed with mixing exercises at the beginning, attention to feelings and a focus on values. Dobogókö was chosen partly for the peace and beauty of the natural surroundings. Long lunch-breaks and two parties had been built into the 4-day schedule because of our awareness that it wouldn’t be easy. We wanted to surround whatever might happen with a multi-faceted positive context.

As it turned out, the easier part was the session designed to discuss the war. For instance, some wanted to split into smaller groups right away (as planned) while others wanted to stay together. Here, a salomonic vote was held: half stayed together while the other half went into two smaller groups. As we came back together, we discovered that we agreed about many things:

  • Everyone felt powerless. (Our participant from Belgrade reported that those who otherwise had felt ‘in control’ were the first to break down in a crisis).
  • Autonomy of each participant was seen as the basis of our own ability to discuss these topics.
  • We agreed that we trust each other more than our leaders. Human rights are more important than they are, because without basic rights, the people will give up their responsibility.

    • So we felt we had done quite well. We relaxed, had a party, and started the next morning with work on economic reforms and family resilience in Russia, violence on tv, and psychotherapy with traumatized patients. We should have known, of course, particularly with our emphasis on process, that talking about the war was not going to be enough; it was going to have to materialize in our midst as an example of what we call ‘parallel process.’

    When it happened, it took us by surprise. There was a presentation by a group that had been trying to do post-war rehabilition in South Baranya in Croatia, encouraging reconciliation between those ethnic Hungarians who had left during the occupation and those who had stayed. Everything was fine until one of the colleagues in that group started filling us in on the background of what was happening in that area.

    Suddenly, our participant from Belgrade exploded. We all knew that she was a very strong person who had been modeling autonomy, balance and patience for us. But now she was obviously very upset. (Still, she had the presence of mind to ask us to hear her ’from the inside’ and ‘not as opposite.’) It took us a while to figure out what the problem was. She protested ethnic orientation (working with the ethnic Hungarians) since she had been fighting that throughout the breakup of Yugoslavia, and she protested militaristic language. Do you know what was the example of that? (It was ‘occupation,’ since the Yugoslavian army had originally come to that area as its rightful army as long as Yugoslavia had existed.)

    It was the person who was speaking at that moment who let us know what the word had been, later in his report. At the time of the explosion, our first concern was to deal with it. A person sitting at another corner of the circle asked for a change of moderator, away from the group which had been presenting, so a person sitting near the participant from Belgrade helped her to express her feelings and know that she was heard. Real processing was beyond us at that moment.

    Looking back, I think that two things had been going on:

  • We had found a perpetrator within the group. We hadn’t known that we ‘needed’ one, but in retrospect it becomes clear. Terrible things were going on in the world. SOMEONE must be to blame! (Another example of parallel process).

    • Possibly, our ‘Computer’-aspects were frustrated by the incompatability of information we were getting from various sources and thus became ‘Blamers.’
  • The tricky part is discussing ‘the Obvious.’ When he started filling us in on the background, the person who was then ‘chosen’ as perpetrator was articulating a class of information which is pragmatically between factual referents and relationship aspects. These are the things that ‘everyone’ knows and takes for granted, but which may seem odd in the light of rational discourse. While we were trying to unravel what had happened in the explosion that afternoon, we were also told (by a Romanian) that there is such a thing as a ‘Slavic Brotherhood’ and that people in those countries generally believe that the Americans had only started bombing because the Hungarians had forced them to (‘in order to restore the double monarchy’).

    • Now please don’t think that I’m bringing this up to start a discussion about whether or not this was the case. (Many people in our group, especially the Americans, were completely astounded to hear this statement). What I want to do is to give examples of the kinds of things that may be ‘Obvious’ to someone or other and to suggest that we consider this category as a special category in international or intercultural interaction. Everyone who has lived in a culture other than his or her own knows about discovering such ‘facts’ which are simply ‘Obvious’ to the ‘natives’ and cannot be explained, discussed or reduced to any other truth.

    A special kind of ‘The Obvious’ which also came into play here is Vamik Volkan’s idea of ‘ethnic tents.’ He says that just as each of us wears the clothes of our own identity, we also as a group are within ethnic tents which express aspects of our identity which are very important to all of us. These ‘tents’ are invisible until someone or something shakes the tent. Then it becomes ‘Obvious’ to us and we are ready to fight for it.

    In our own process that day, we went on to participate in experiential workshops and were pleasantly surprised that the hotel had engaged a band, so we danced out our accumulated tension in a way that let us express our wish for the group to be healed.

    This went rather easily. We could see that everyone involved in the debate had had an essentially positive interpersonal orientation. The presenter had been trying to fill us in on ‘the Obvious’ out of a friendly spirit of sharing with those who had come from further away. And the Belgrade participant had managed, even in her moment of horror, to ask us to hear her ‘from the inside.’ So there had been a lot of pain, and a few people were very stressed, but most of the amygdalas in the room were still quiet.

    In retrospect, our process felt like one of the themes mentioned by the Belgrade participant, the destruction of the old bridge in Novi Sad. We were all sadly sitting in the rubble of our previous beliefs that it might still be easy to understand each other, while both of the protagonists were softly calling out that they wanted to have a bridge.

    The next morning, however, we were to learn how great the difficulties still were. Our participant from Belgrade had become a ‘victim’ as the other speaker had ‘become’ a ‘perpetrator’. While the majority of us saw so-called ‘helping’ as a trap which could have cemented the distribution of victim and perpetrator roles, one participant from another Slavic country rushed to the ‘defense’ of the Belgrade-participant in a monologue which continued for about an hour. She told us that someone had deeply insulted that person, but she wouldn’t tell us who it was. She also demanded an apology for a regrettable aspect of the conference organization, and she demanded an apology from all the Westerners for Yalta.

    It would be an understatement to say that the group had no consensus as to the meaning of this presentation. Even at the factual level, it was confusing (for instance, Hungary was suddenly treated as a Western country, in spite of having suffered just as much under Yalta as any of the others.) The relationship-aspects were more important than the factual referents, but they were also quite unclear. Most of us were in a state of shock. No one would have dared to define the point of what had been said.

    Our present context may help to clarify the relationship-aspect of the presentation. It was actually more in a Blamer than in a Computer mode. It was black-and-white, and the speaker felt herself a victim. At the same time, it had quite a lot of the Computer’s assurance there can only be one right answer. This was very tricky for us, since it was largely ambiguous what this right answer actually was. (Several of us from the West felt afterwards that it felt like our imagination of the most oppressive aspects of Communism. The contents had changed, but the form was still the same.)

    A few people including that speaker found the presentation liberating in the sense of being emotionally genuine. They felt somewhat exhilarated and freed from the carefulness which had characterized the meeting up to now. This presentation felt like war. Its style was so intense that it was clear the speaker’s amygdala was highly stimulated. She had declared us to be enemies. This in turn triggered explosive alarm signals throughout the group and had lasting effects on several participants. It felt as if we had verbal bombs in the room. As a matter of fact, if the happening of the day before had been ‘about’ bridges and bridging, this one was clearly ‘about’ bombs. Maybe, metaphorically speaking, if the general level of violence reaches a certain level, there is a kind of satisfaction in ‘becoming a bomb.’

    At that moment, in any case, the situation was beyond anything we knew how to deal with, so we took a break and then continued with our planned program, most of which was an outing to Budapest and an evening ‘party’.

    Our boatride on the Danube may have been just what was needed. As we passed under bridges (all of which were comfortingly intact), we were contained by the boat. This may have illustrated our wish to find a way, somehow, to continue with our project, in spite of the inner and the outer wars. Gradually, it became possible for some people to discuss the problem with each other. Anyone who could say anything at all to anyone else was doing it. Some people used diagnostic or therapeutic categories (locating personal problems in the speaker or saying that a therapeutic group should have a level of intensity equal to the pain); others defined the problem sociologically and economically (as a result of the great income divide and sense of injustice created by Yalta, resulting in what the great Hungarian family-therapist Boszormenyi-Nagy has called destructive entitlement). Many people sat alone, lost in thought. Individual members began to develop strategies for dealing with each other based on inner pain and personal or shared resources. Various discussions continued all the way through the so-called ‘party’, which never heated up the way the spontaneous dancing and singing the night before had done.

    The next morning, it seemed that we had made it. We could once again sit in a circle with each other. Some apologies were made. We could continue our work as a group.

    At this point, you may say ‘why bother?’ ‘Wouldn’t a nice factual discussion be preferable?’ That’s a good question. Is there an advantage of working in the way we did?

    As we began to reflect on our experience together, writing a report to which 34 of 38 participants contributed their perspectives, we discovered that sadness and exhaustion were not the only reactions. People felt that they had learned something of immense value about how it is to understand other people, about democracy and about peace. The group was finally strengthened by having been able to survive the experience. Individuals felt a clearer focus on more genuine values. We could understand something about responsibility.

    What does that mean concretely? Many of the specifics were contained in Steps to a Communication of Peace as formulated by a small group discussion before our boat-ride. These were:

  • Awareness of our group-dynamics; creation of structures to maintain the safety of all members;
  • Not to isolate those with minority opinions; both the majority and the minority need to accept the fact that another opinion exists;
  • The autonomy of each person is a resource for the safety of the group. Therefore, everyone can intervene to defuse ‘hot’ confrontations;
  • Be aware of where the other person is coming from. Don’t trip ethnic tents!
  • Someone may view your country as a Great Power. Almost all European countries have occupied another in the last 1000 years, even Denmark.

    • (At some time, all Great Powers become Former Great Powers).
    The reason I wanted to share these with you is that I think they – and our process in Dobogókö – can give you an idea of what it could mean to be aware of the relationship aspect of communication. Whereas the typical Computer style and Political Correctness in general aim to find the one right answer (and may end up bombing those who disagree), a Communication of Peace aims to find ways of dealing with truth which will enable all of us to continue living on this planet.

    The reason for this may become clear in the light of what has been said if we focus more on truth than on rightness. Being right may seem to be a commodity which a person (or even more probably a group) could own. Truth, on the other hand, is infinitely complex. Chaos theory and the butterfly effect have shown us that we can hardly guess the final effects of any action. Communication is an action. Therefore, the truth or ‘relative rightness’ of our positions includes their effects. The most immediate effect of communication is on the listener. It is part of our responsibility as a person of truth to be aware of such effects. If we do that, we can ‘participate in truth’ or, as Vaclav Havel said, walk in the light. You can’t own it; you can only join it.

    Trying to ‘have’ truth is just as hopeless as bombing for peace or fucking for virginity: the harder you try, the more you end up destroying what you want to save.

    If you should want to experiment with ‘participating in truth’ in your context, you may discover that it is easier than expected. Relationship aspects have built-in intrinsic rewards, as you could tell from the whole story of our meeting. The very act of choosing them reconnects us with context in many ways including food, nature, and music. We discover more authenticity and connection, more respect and awareness, more professional identity and more sense of belonging. All of us grow.

    In a way, this project really is like peace in our part of the world or life on our planet: We have to value it and focus on finding out how to keep it if we don’t want to get carried away by secondary values and end up losing it. This is what I find more important than being right. If you all should choose to make these values an essential aspect of how you communicate, you could make an enormous contribution to peace and to continuing life.
     
     

    References

    Atkinson, Brent: "The Emotional Imperative: Psychotherapists Cannot Afford to Ignore the Primacy of the Limbic Brain" Family Therapy Networker, July/August 1999, pp. 22-33.

    Boszormenyi-Nagy, Ivan: "Commentary: Transgenerational solidarity – Therapy’s Mandate and Ethics" Family Process, 1985, Vol. 24, pp. 454-456

    (HOW) CAN WE SPEAK IN TIMES OF WAR? Report on the 8th International Working Meeting of Systems in Transition, Displaced by War from Ohrid, Macedonia to Dobogokö, Hungary, May 19-23, 1999. See www.sit.itgo.com/SIT.html

    Satir, Virginia: Peoplemaking. Palo Alto, CA, 1972.

    Volkan, Vamik D., Joseph V. Montville, and Demetrios A. Julius: The Psychodynamics of International Relationships, 1991, Lexington and Toronto.

    See also: http://hsc.virginia.edu/csmhi/

    Watzlawick, Paul, J.H. Beavin and D.D. Jackson: The Pragmatics of Human Communication, New York, 1967.