Joanne is jealous and suspects her new boyfriend is seeing another girl.
Paul feels used; morning and evening, he checks his wife’s speedometer to see how far she’s driven.
Anne often "forgets" to punch out on the time clock, and calls a colleague to run her card through.
“I’d better get back to the house,” sighs Frank. “My wife is gonna chew me out as it is.”
All these folks are either being controlled or trying to control. Each has different reasons for NOT putting both their hands (“all their cards”) on the table in order to begin negotiating. These relationships enjoy no intimacy: each person feels as isolated from the other as the other feels from them.
To negotiate, you must:
1) Tell the whole truth about what you want.
2) Make it clear that “Yes” and “No” are equally acceptable. (Yeah, that's the hard part.)
3) Request that they take your feelings into account within their response.
Negotiation is so gentle, so respectful, so healing. It works miracles.
But at first, it feels like the loneliest thing we’ve ever done. We’re scared to death the other person will tell us something we can’t bear, look at us like we’re crazy, or flip out into some intensity we can’t handle.
It almost never happens! Jesus was covering a lot of ground when he insisted that “the truth will set you free.” When I tell the whole truth about what I want, the clouds usually part, a fresh breeze sways the curtains in my darkened rooms. If I mean it when I tell them, “Either way is okay,” it is one of my finest hours! (And other folks often incorporate some of the maturity into their own lives as well.)
What makes humility so desirable is the marvelous thing it does to us: it creates in us a capacity for the closest possible intimacy.
Monica Baldwin
I Leap Over The Wall - Contrasts And Impressions After Twenty-Eight Years In A Convent
