Home > Media > Books > Harriet Lerner - The Dance of Connection: How to Talk to Someone When You're Mad, Hurt, Scared, Frustrated, Insulted, Betrayed, or Desperate
Harriet Lerner - The Dance of Connection: How to Talk to Someone When You're Mad, Hurt, Scared, Frustrated, Insulted, Betrayed, or Desperate
jankp's Full Review: Harriet Lerner - The Dance of Connection: How to T...
Author's Note-Sorry, fans of Dr. Freudine! I need to take over for her due to an unfortunate malaise that's gripped her. Could it be from nerves, confusion or boredom with her profession? Maybe Irish would know. Actually, she's just left the office with him doing The Dance of Intimacy (and left it unlocked!) and I'm pretending to be a psychiatrist; please don't be too upset.
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I sink into her plush chair and switch on the lamp in the corner of the desk. Her notebook lays open to a page entitled "The Dance of Connection by Harriet Lerner, Ph.D." It appears to be an outline of the book, published in 2001, with notations of how her client David should attend to something in it. I remember reading it back then and wonder what insights Dr. Freudine has.
Subtitle, Why Read TDOC: How To Talk to Someone When You're Mad, Hurt, Scared, Frustrated, Insulted, Betrayed or Desperate
Challenge of Book: "The challenge of conversation is not just in being our self, but in choosing our self, since what we call the self is constantly reinvented through others. The self is always under construction...
"Our conversations invent us. Through our speech and our silence, we become smaller or larger selves...diminish or enhance the other person..., narrow or expand the possibilities between us. How we use our voice determines the quality of our relationships (that is double underlined)..." pp 238-9
Comment: Indeed challenging! Should encourage you, David, to more confidently express yourself in conversations as well as to listen to others.
CONTENTS
Prologue: Back to the Sandbox, where children fight and leave sandbox, but come back to play within minutes. Point is that adults refuse to play again until the other apologizes.
Sometimes they won't and we need to express ourselves positively to strengthen connections.
Chapter 1: Finding Your Voice, where assertiveness training and communication skills aren't doing the job. Still feel unheard. We can only maximize the chance of being heard with her advice and real cases described. How to clarify what's important to us. Learn to edit, think, plan and pretend in our conversations so we'll get out of negativity and move towards authenticity. (get out of shyness, David)
Chapter 2: Voice Lessons From My Father, where Lerner discusses her family life growing up. Mother controlled, Father let her. He loved company and telling stories, but closed down on emotional subjects and had no intimate relationships. How her parents grew up. Point is we learn how to "navigate relationships" from our families.
Chapter 3: Our First Family: Where We Learned (Not) To Speak, where Lerner notes that her family didn't help her find her voice. What is an ideal family and the reality. How family's heritage affects our voices for good or bad.
Chapter 4: Should You Share Vulnerability?, where Lerner shares a bit from her sixth grade diary and isn't too embarrassed at fifty because she knows that everyone's life is embarrassing. Discusses how much to reveal and when for intimate relationships.
Chapter 5: In Praise of Pretending, where we don't say everything we think or feel, but restrain ourselves and maybe pretend with new behaviors to learn new ways of being. Lerner describes going whitewater rafting and being terrified, but pretending competence after instruction helped her relax and have a great time. Another story of a client who pretends to not pursue a relationship, which allows him to see the situation clearly.
Chapter 6: Putting Our Parents In The Hot Seat, where Lerner calls her father on a rude remark and expresses how it made her feel, because if you can find your voice with your family, it will strongly influence your ability to do so in other relationships.
Chapter 7: Love Can Make You Stupid (circled in red), where the emotional consequences of not sharing ourselves will be greater the longer and more intimate the relationship. Intense feelings block objectivity. Suppressing differences for the urge to merge, problems develop. Hearing the voice of the body or instinct. Don't insulate your relationship from family and friends.
Chapter 8: Marriage: Where's Your Bottom Line?, where Lerner talks about her 30-year marriage and how they resolve differences. Establishing a bottom line, not an ultimatum. It sustains our dignity, integrity and well-being; helps keep relationships moving forward. Describes a friend who allows her husband to walk all over her and shares a conversation.
Chapter 9: "I Can't Live With This!"; Voicing The Ultimate in Marriage, where we meet Clara who had left and returned to her husband Sam five times before seeing Lerner to help her stay away from him. She knew her bottom line and how to express it.
Chapter 10: Warming Things Up, where having an authentic voice means speaking to the positive while taking positions and expressing dissatisfaction. Praise and appreciate as well as criticize to be fully heard. Model behavior you want to be shown before giving up on a marriage (or relationship, David!). Focus on your core beliefs and values to break up habitual behavior. Try nonverbal ways to relate interest, generosity and love.
Chapter 11: Silent Men/Angry Women, where Lerner says that men can't fathom the idea of male dominance when they don't feel dominant at all in intimate conversations. They lose their voice the most in triangles, relationships with two women usually. We meet Bill, caught in the midst of his new and ex-wife and daughter. He needs to set limits.
Chapter 12: Criticism Is Hard To Take (circled in blue), where we read how a mother criticized and abandoned by her daughter is able with Lerner to slowly regain her daughter's trust.
(I skip the last few chapters about more dysfunctional relationships.)
Epilogue: To Thine Self Be True, where we're reminded that no matter how authentic our voice, we still may not get the response we want. Lerner shares a complaint from a friend who didn't appreciate her unasked-for criticism. Be true to yourself, but use restraint!
Suddenly the door opens and I gasp. Dr. Freudine with her dark hair in becoming disarray jolts to a stop. "What are you doing here? How dare you!" She charges forward, snatches her notebook and I jump up. "Oh, you're pretending to be me now? First you were the architect of the building, then a mutant slan..."
"B...b...but it was unlocked...," I sputter, then realize I need to find my voice. "Well, this is a good summary of the book, but it's not that good of an analysis. How will this help David, Doc?"
She curtly nods to a spiffed-up David waiting in the doorway, shifting weight and touching his short hair nervously. "Because it's only a guide for him and not meant to tell him what he should get out of it. How can he learn if he's spoonfed all his life? Lerner speaks from her own experience or from clients? experiences all through the book, from both sex's perspectives, so it will open his mind to what his own experience can be if he finds his voice."
I open my mouth, but she goes on. "The Dance of Connection is more engaging and developed than The Dance of Intimacy that she wrote much earlier, since she's more mature and comfortable sharing herself, but both will help David understand what intimacy is, why it's vital for a healthy relationship and how finding your voice allows you to experience it."
"Okay, I can see that it could open his mind, but couldn't it also terrify him to see how difficult, sensitive and unpredictable relationships can be? Isn't there a need for naïve idealism so we can cope with life or feel like getting involved?"
Doc laughs. "What do you say, David? Do you dare read these challenging books?"
"Um, ah, I don't want to be shy anymore, Dr. Freudine," he mumbles. "Being unprepared for...the unknown is more terrifying, I...I think."
That puts a wide smile on Doc's face. "Idealism worked in the old days, but not today, Jan, when intimacy is more of a risk and elusive. Lerner shows us how to take that risk and to fight for our relationships instead of killing them with emotion. You might want to check the books out, at least The Dance of Connection. I rest my case." She tears out her guidelines, pulls the books off the shelf and hands them to David and me.
With remarkable clarity, a renowned psychologist shows both men and women how to talk to someone when they are angry, hurt, frustrated, insulted, betr...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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