Reviewed April 24, 2006.
Random House, New York, 2006. 272 pages.
Available at Sembach Library
(MCN 306.874 TAN).
Even though I
don’t have any
daughters, I am, of course, a daughter myself. I
liked Deborah Tannen’s book You
Just Don’t Understand enough that I
wanted to see what she had to say about mothers and daughters in
conversation.
Much of the
book is more
about describing mother-daughter conversations than about helping
improve
them. Like the academic she is, Deborah
Tannen describes the different types of communication that exist. However, by showing the many situations that
exist, she is able to draw conclusions that can help you improve your
own
relationships.
Much of what
she discusses
involves metamessages—the meaning behind the exact words spoken. “When someone cries literal meaning, it is
hard to resolve disputes, because you end up talking about the meaning
of the
message when it was the meaning of the metamessage that got your goat. It’s not that some utterances have
metamessages, or hidden meanings, while others don’t.
Everything we say has metamessages indicating
how our words are to be interpreted: Is
this a serious statement or a joke? Does
it show annoyance or good will? Most of
the time, metamessages are communicated and interpreted without notice
because,
as far as anyone can tell, the speaker and the hearer agree on their
meaning. It’s only when the metamessage
the speaker intends—or acknowledges—doesn’t match the one the hearer
perceives
that we notice and pay attention to them.”
“And therein
lies another
reason that anything said between mothers and daughters can either warm
our
hearts or raise our hackles: Their
conversations have a long history, going back literally to the start of
the
daughter’s life. So anything either one
says at a given moment takes meaning not only from the words spoken at
that
moment but from all the conversations they have had in the past. This works in both positive and negative
ways. We come to expect certain kinds of
comments from each other, and are primed to interpret what we hear in
that
familiar spirit.”
Even without
daughters, the
discussion on giving advice is applicable to all female relationships,
even
those with husbands or sons. (This
echoes what I read in Love and Respect.)
Many women, myself included, show their concern and caring
by giving
advice or asking if the other person has taken care of all the little
details. But that is often heard as
criticism, as if you don’t think they are grown-ups who can take care
of
themselves.
“The
complaint I heard most
often when I talked to women about their mothers was ‘She’s always
criticizing
me.’ The complaint I heard most often
when I talked to women about their grown daughters was ‘I can’t open my
mouth. She takes everything as
criticism.’ Each of these complaints is
the flip side of the other. Daughters
and mothers agree on what the troublesome conversations are; they
disagree on
who introduced the note of contention, because they have different
views of the
metamessages their words imply. Where
the daughter sees criticism, the mother sees caring:
she was only making a suggestion, trying to
help, offering insight or advice. Most
of the time, both are right.”
“To the
daughter, the
criticism causes her outburst. But to
her mother, the outburst comes out of the blue, because she believes in
her
heart that her intention was not to criticize, much less to wound. So she feels wounded by what she perceives to
be her daughter’s surprise attack.”
Later, the
author mentions,
“I was amused when, more than once, a mother told me of something she
disapproved of about her daughter but assured me that she never said
anything,
yet the daughter told me in a separate interview that her mother
frequently
mentioned that very point. It is likely
the mother never ‘said’ anything on the message level, but the daughter
‘heard’
it loud and clear on the metamessage level.”
“Protection
is a two-edged
sword, and this accounts for many mismatches between daughters’ and
mothers’
perspectives. Where a mother sees
protection and connection, a daughter may see a limit to her freedom
and invasion
of her privacy. It is hard for daughters
to understand the depth of their mothers’ desire to protect them, and
it is
hard for mothers to understand that their expressions of concern can
undermine
their daughters’ confidence and seem like criticism rather than caring.”
More
succinctly: “The message of protection may
carry a
metamessage of lack of confidence.”
Another topic
she brings up
reminds me of Harriet Lerner’s book The Dance of Intimacy. “The term I use for this mutually aggravating
spiral is ‘complementary schismogenesis.’ A
schism is a split, and genesis is creation, so
‘complementary
schismogenesis’ means creating a split in a mutually aggravating way….
“Symmetrical
schismogenesis
could refer to a situation where one person becomes annoyed and raises
her
voice, and the other raises hers in response. In
the end they are both shouting, each reacting to the
other by
intensifying the same behavior: raising
voices. In contrast, complementary
schismogenesis would describe a situation in which the first person
becomes
annoyed and raises her voice, and the other lowers hers in order to
communicate
that a raised voice is unacceptable. This
makes the first one angry, because the lowered voice
seems to imply
a lack of emotional engagement. So she
speaks even more loudly, which makes the other speak even more softly. In the end one is shouting and the other is
whispering, or has even retreated into silence. That’s
complementary schismogenesis, because each one’s
reaction to the
other results in increasingly exaggerated forms of the opposing
behavior.
“When
symmetrical
schismogenesis occurs in conversation, speakers usually know perfectly
well
what is happening. Both are talking in
ways they recognize and understand, although they may be doing more of
it than
usual. But complementary schismogenesis
can be baffling. The other person’s ways
of speaking make little sense to you, and your own ways of speaking
aren’t
having the effect you intend, yet you can’t think of any other way to
deal with
the situation…. These are the
conversations that can be maddening, especially when they occur over
and over,
like a perennially playing tape loop.”
Here’s one of
the examples
she gives of complementary schismogenesis: “Consider
again the situation in which a mother seeks more
closeness and
the daughter feels her mother is too intrusive, too needy.
The solution may be paradoxical: if
the mother did not seem to be desperately
seeking connection, her daughter might seek more. If
the daughter expressed more concern for
her mother’s health, her mother might dwell on it less.
Conversely, if the mother never volunteered
information about her health, her daughter might inquire about it. If the daughter volunteered more information
about her own life or asked more about her mother’s, her mother might
ask fewer
questions, and so on.”
She talks
about strategies
for keeping complementary schismogenesis from taking over a
conversation. “Simply understanding how it
works…is the
first step off the merry-go-round (or should we say misery-go-round)
that can
turn pleasant talk into familiar arguments between mothers and grown
daughters. If you don’t understand
what’s driving the conversations that are causing you grief, it’s hard
to know
how to turn them in a different direction. It’s
easy to blame the other person, and to feel you are
reacting in a
justified if not inevitable way to an obvious provocation.
But I am continually impressed by women who
tell me that once they understand the processes, they begin to see the
conversation
from the other’s point of view and to realize they have the power to
respond
differently. A small change in the way
they respond can avoid conflagrations and improve conversations—and
consequently relationships—with their daughters or their mothers.”
Many of the
relationship
books I’ve read lately have stressed that if one person changes
something, the
relationship will have to change. Deborah
Tannen makes the same point here. “When we
find ourselves having one of our
least favorite conversations and feel trapped in it, seeing no way out,
it is
helpful to remember that if we speak differently than we usually do,
the other
person will have to react differently, too. I
can’t guarantee that the outcome will always be as
satisfying as it
was in these examples, but at the very least it will remind us that we
have it
in our power to change the paths that conversations take.”
She sums up,
“I have tried in
this book to explain why conversations between mothers and grown
daughters can
be among the most comforting but also the most hurtful we’ll ever have. I have tried, too, to show how understanding
why this is so, and seeing conversations from the other’s point of
view, can
minimize the hurt and maximize the healing. Although
what works for one mother-daughter pair may not
work for
another, there are principles that can provide guidance for all.”
Deborah
Tannen has succeeded
admirably in this interesting and helpful book.
Copyright © 2006 Sondra Eklund. All
rights reserved.
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Book Reviews by Sondra Eklund
