In psychotherapy and couples therapy at Bastion Therapy, we can explore tools that can help with couples conflict and conflict in general.
Have you ever wondered if the way you and your partner communicate during conflict might not be ideal? One potential tool is changing your opening statement in a conflict discussion.
In a relatively recent study, Rogers et al. (2018) explored different formulations of the same statements, to see the impact on triggering a defensive reaction in the listener.
That study involved 253 university students, with a mean age of 28, and 77% of them were female. The study used hypothetical conflict scenarios (fictional disputes between two people, one being the offending party and the other being the offended party), which the subjects would read.
The subjects were given eight statements that the fictional offended party could use to start a discussion regarding the offending behaviour, after having read a conflict scenario. For each of the eight statements, the study’s subjects then recorded what they thought was the chance that the offending party would have a defensive reaction in response, on a gradated scale of from extremely unlikely to extremely likely. An average was taken from the subjects’ responses from the scenarios to determine the score of each statement.
The eight different statements were broken down into either having I-statements or you-statements, and different perspectives. That is, four statements had I-statements, four had you-statements, and the different variations of no perspective, self perspective and other perspective were included, totalling eight statements.
Here’s what the researchers found about I-statements:
Just by including I-statements, there was a lower chance of expecting a defensive reaction, relative to the alternative you-statements. For example: “Lucy, you should help with the cleaning” is a you-statement, while “Lucy, I think you should help with the cleaning” is an I-statement (p. 5).
But they found more: “the benefit of I-language compared to you-language was larger for statements that communicated one or more perspectives” (p. 7). That is, a defensive response was deemed less likely when perspective was included in the opening communication.
And the best result occurred when using an I-statement and including a self perspective and including an other perspective, like so, for example: “Lucy, I understand that you are very tired after work, but I feel it is unfair that I have to do all the cleaning by myself, and I think you should help with the cleaning.” (p. 5).
What does this mean in practice? The researchers concluded that it means that we might expect a lower chance of getting a defensive response if we use I-statements and both perspectives when we start a conflict discussion.
By comparison, among the statements studied in this study, the worst formulation (i.e., the one most likely to have a predicted defensive response) would be a you-statement with no perspective. For example, “Lucy, you should help with the cleaning.” (p. 5)
The above might look confusing, so let’s analyze the best type of statement from the above into its components, for example, “Lucy, I understand that you are very tired after work, but I feel it is unfair that I have to do all the cleaning by myself, and I think you should help with the cleaning.” (p. 5). It gets easier to understand if we chop it up into three easy pieces:
- “Lucy, I understand that you are very tired after work” = Other perspective piece
- “I feel it is unfair that I have to do all the cleaning by myself” = Self perspective piece
- “I think you should help with the cleaning” = I-statement piece
How might you use this tool in practice in your relationship conflict or elsewhere? Drawing from this study, and notwithstanding its limitations, it appears that just by using an I-statement rather than a you-statement as the first statement to start a conflict discussion, at least in some contexts, you may be better off.
If you want the full benefit, according to the results of the study, it appears that adding the other perspective pieces is necessary. When you use those three pieces together (the I-statement piece, the other perspective piece and the self perspective piece) in your first statement in a conflict, you might get the best result, according to this study.
If this resonates with you, I invite you to book an appointment or call 647-220-4709 / email matthewpittspsy@protonmail.com
References
Rogers, S. L., Howieson, J., & Neame, C. (2018). I understand you feel that way, but I feel this way: the benefits of I-language and communicating perspective during conflict. PeerJ, 6, Article e4831. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4831
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