Grammar for a Full Life: How the Ways We Shape a Sentence Can Limit or Enlarge Us by Lawrence Weinstein

Author:Lawrence Weinstein
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Grammar, English language, Expression (Philosophy), Language Arts, Psychological Aspects, Writing, Memoir
ISBN: 9781734692723
Publisher: Lexigraphic Publishing
Published: 2020-11-15T20:00:00+00:00

Man Being Strangled by a Giant Paragraph,

by George Grosz (courtesy, the Estate of George Grosz)

Distinguishing How

You’re Perceived from

Who You Are

Modeling the I-Statement

Decades ago, psychologists who led therapy groups introduced what still seems to me a powerful linguistic means to keep people from confusing their reactions to each other with the truth about one another. That means was I-statements. Rather than letting one group participant say to a second one, “You’re a threatening woman,” they required all participants to refrain from definitional character assassination and to confine themselves, instead, to reports of their own feelings. “You’re threatening” became “I feel threatened by you.”

Generally speaking, we don’t know enough about each other to sum each other up. In general, we do better saying how the other person affects us. With I-statements,

You like putting people down, Bob.

gives way to

In that meeting we just had, I felt belittled by you, Bob.

and the you-statement

Sandra, you are one obsessive micromanager.

is supplanted by

Sandra, I feel I need more discretion in this project than you’ve given me so far.

Books on raising children, such as Thomas Gordon’s P.E.T. [Parent Effectiveness Training] in Action, contain many good examples. There, in the mouth of a man whose four-year-old daughter doesn’t understand how their play together has exhausted him, the exasperated you-line (slightly tweaked by me)

You stop being a pest now, Iris.

becomes the infinitely kinder I-line

Hey, kid, I’m just too wiped out to play more with you now, okay?

I can tell you this much: Whenever I have found myself on the receiving end of a reductive you-statement, it’s triggered my defenses and transformed me into someone quite unpleasant, concealing the authentic, more complex me for a while. To that extent at least, my self-appointed critic succeeds in making me and his portrayal of me into one and the same thing—which, of course, rankles.

Unfortunately, though, we can’t simply dictate what types of expression get addressed to us. The undemeaning I-statements that, ideally, would come our way are not ours to make.

What we can do is:

model the alternative ourselves

diminish (if not ever quite eliminate) the ill effects of others pigeonholing us by noticing what they are doing

every now and then, take opportunities to call our accusers’ attention to their definitional habits of speech, and let them know we don’t believe they do us justice.

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