Stay in touch with your deeper feelings and wants. The mind is like a giant parfait, with softer, child-like, and more essential layers under harder, adult-like, and more superficial ones. Based on this inner mindfulness, keep clarifying your aims in the interaction. For example, do you just want to be listened to? Is there something in particular you want to be sure will never happen again?
Take responsibility for getting your needs met in the relationship. Stay focused on the prize, whatever it is for you, and keep coming back to it. If the other person has important topics of his own, often it works best to take turns, focusing on one topic at a time, rather than mixing them together.
Communicate primarily for yourself, not to produce a particular response from the other person. Sure, it’s reasonable to hope for some good results over there. But if you communicate in order to fix, change, or convince another person, the success of your communications will depend on how she reacts to you, and then it’s out of your hands. Plus, the other person is likely to be more open to you if she doesn’t feel pressed to change in some way.
Stay guided by your personal code. At the end of the day, what you and the other person will mainly remember is not what you said but how you said it. Be careful about your tone, and avoid language that is fault-finding, exaggerated, or inflammatory.
When you speak, keep coming back to your own experience—notably, your emotions, body sensations, and underlying hopes and wishes—rather than talking about events, such as the other person’s actions, and your opinions about them. No one can argue with your experience; it is what it is, and you are the world’s expert on it. When you share your experience, take responsibility for it, and don’t blame the other person for it. As appropriate, convey its deeper layers, such as the longings for love that lie beneath jealousy. Even though this openness is often scary, the deeper layers contain what’s most vital to get at for both you and the other person. The universality of these layers and their relatively unthreatening nature also increase the chance that the other person will lower his guard and hear what you have to say.
Try to experience your truth as you speak it. This will increase your inner mindfulness, and probably also help the other person empathize with you. Notice any tightness in the eyes, throat, chest, belly, or floor of the pelvis, and see if you can relax it to allow your experience to flow more freely.
Use the power of embodied emotion: take the physical stance of a feeling or attitude—which might not be your usual posture—to aid the expression of it. For example, if you typically hold back, try talking while leaning slightly forward; if you tend to push away sadness, soften your eyes; if you find it hard to be assertive, shift your shoulders to open your chest.
If you think you might get triggered by the interaction and lose your way, help your prefrontal cortex to help you—an interesting circularity!—by sorting out your key points in advance, even writing them down. To keep your words and tone clean, imagine a video recording being made of your interaction: act so that you wouldn’t wince if you saw it.
If you are solving a problem with someone, establish the facts (if you can). This usually narrows the disagreement and brings in useful information. But mainly focus on the future, not the past. Most quarrels are about the past: what happened, how bad it was, who said what, how it was said, extenuating circumstances, and so on. Instead, try to agree about how things will be from now on. Be as clear as possible. If it helps, write it down. Tacitly or explicitly, you are making agreements with each other that should be taken as seriously as commitments at work.
Take maximum reasonable responsibility for the other person’s issues with you. Identify what there is to correct on your part, and correct it unilaterally—even if that person keeps blowing it with you. One by one, keep crossing off her legitimate complaints. It’s fine to put some attention on trying to influence her behavior, but focus mainly on being honorable, benevolent, and increasingly skillful yourself. This is definitely the road less traveled, but it’s the one that’s both kind and smart. You can’t control how she treats you, but you can control how you treat her: these are the causes you can actually tend to. And doing what’s right regardless of her behavior is a good way to encourage her to treat you well.
Give it time. As time passes—weeks and months, not years—the truth about the other person will become clearer. For example: Does he respect your boundaries? Will he keep agreements? Can he repair misunderstandings? What is his learning curve for self-understanding and interpersonal skills (appropriate to the type of relationship)? What are his true intentions (revealed over time by his actions)?
When you see another person clearly, sometimes you realize that the relationship needs to change to match what you can actually count on.
This goes two ways: a relationship that’s bigger than its real foundation is a set-up for disappointment and hurt, while a relationship that’s smaller than its foundation is a lost opportunity. In both cases, focus on your own initiative, especially after you’ve made reasonable efforts to encourage changes in the other person.
For example, you usually can’t make a coworker stop being dismissive of you, but you can “shrink” the relationship—so it’s closer to the size of its true foundation—by minimizing your contacts with him, doing an excellent job on your own, building up alliances with other people, and arranging for the quality of your work to be seen widely. Conversely, if there is a large foundation of love in your marriage but your mate is not that emotionally nurturing, you can try to “grow” the relationship on your own by paying particular attention to when he expresses caring through his actions and soaking that into your heart, by drawing him into situations with a culture of warmth (eg, dinner with friends, certain kinds of live music, meditation group), and perhaps by being more emotionally nurturing yourself.
Throughout all of this, keep in mind the big picture, the 1.000-foot view. See the impermanence of whatever is at issue, and the many causes and conditions that led to it. See the collateral damage—the suffering-that results when you cling to your desires and opinions or take things personally. Over the long haul, most of what we argue about with others really doesn’t matter that much.
Above all, try to preserve your fundamental orientation of compassion and kindness. You can differ vigorously with people while simultaneously holding them in your heart. For example, bearing in mind all that has happened in Tibet since it was invaded in 1950, consider how the Dalai Lama has spoken of the Chinese government as: my friend, the enemy (Brehony 2001, 217). Or consider Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for twenty-seven years—much of that time doing hard labor in a quarry—often receiving mail just once every six months. It’s said that he despaired of losing contact with people he loved, so he decided to bring love to his guards while continuing to stand firm in his opposition to apartheid. It was hard for the guards to mistreat him when he was being loving, so the authorities had to keep replacing them, but Mandela would just love the new ones, too. In fact, at his inauguration as president of South Africa, one of his former guards was seated in the front row.
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From Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson
