We Need To Talk….

Welcome to Format Free Fridays at AskDrDarcy.com, the one day a week when I break the format of answering your questions and I dispense that which we rarely welcome in life: Unsolicited advice.

Few phrases in the English language provoke a universal wave of negativity as hearing the phrase We Need To Talk does. You’d think that as a shrink I’d be desensitized to that sort of negative reaction, but when I hear those words in my personal life, I want to run for the hills (or work until midnight to avoid said discussion).

The thing is, our trepidation is usually grounded in a fear that the conversation is going to go south and that we have no control over the speed at which it plummets.  Generally speaking, this is inaccurate, and here’s why:  The person imposing the conversation on us, the speaker, has two (2) universal needs, neither of which involves us fixing anything or changing our behaviors.  The two needs are:  “Do you hear me?” and “Does what I’m saying make sense?”  That’s all.  Give someone an affirmative to those two (usually unspoken) questions and you can deescalate almost any situation.

Most of us get caught up in trying to fix what the speaker has expressed.  We typically do this in one of two ways:  We either try to convince the speaker that what they are expressing isn’t as bad as they think it is (called invalidating) or we jump right to ‘fix it’ mode and tell them why we don’t want to make the behavioral change that they may not have even requested.

The next time someone hurls the We Need To Talk phrase on you, try answering those two universal questions that the speaker likely will never express:

Answer to Question One:

So you’re upset because I don’t call you often, and even though we text throughout the day, it’s not the same thing as having a personal conversation.

Answer to Question Two:

That makes sense to me.

You don’t even need to offer to change a behavior to deescalate the speaker, but if you do, that’s icing on the cake.