Comfort with Relational Dialectics

                I really liked the topic of “Comfort with Relational Dialectics” (pg. 199). Relational dialectics are naturally occurring tensions in relationships. The first relational dialectic, autonomy/connection, refers to the fact that while we all long to feel a connection with another person, we also need to feel independent or “autonomous”. The book mentions that this is the most common tension that occurs in relationships. The second relational dialectic is novelty/predictability, which is when we experience opposing needs for both familiarity/routine and novel/new experiences. The third and last relational dialectic is openness/closedness. This is when we have a desire to openly communicate with others but at the same time require some degree of privacy. Even when we are truly intimate with a significant other and share openly with them we always need privacy in some aspect of our lives or in the relationship.

                I chose this topic because I encounter it often in my life. My relationship with my boyfriend is a constant balancing act: doing things together, but also having our own individual interests; going out to places we’ve never been, but also have routines to provide stability; openly communicating with each other as much as possible, but also preserving some amount of privacy for ourselves. This section of chapter 9 really hit home with me because I knew these tensions existed in our relationship but our book gave me some clarity on what these tensions were, exactly, and helped me understand that they are natural and it’s okay to experience them.

Disconfirmation

One recent situation where I felt disconfirmed was last weekend when I was at my boyfriend's house. He lives with four other roommates, and as you might expect, some of them aren't exactly the cleanest guys when it comes to the house.
We were trying to cook some food in the kitchen but there was either no clean surface to use, or no clean utensils to use. I was trying to express to my boyfriend that I'd like to clean up a little so that we'd be able to cook, which he seemed fine with...until I started to try to wash the giant pile of dishes in the sink so that we'd have dishes to use. He immediately told me, "You're not doing that," and made me stop. He told me that he wasn't going to have me cleaning up after his "irresponsible roommates" and that they needed to do it themselves.
I was just trying to help and make it possible for us to cook but in his mind I wasn't handling the situation like he thought it should be handled. Instead, he picked out a select few dishes that were his and cleaned them for us to use. While this accomplished the goal I was aiming for, it still left me feeling disconfirmed because he had used controlling communication with me: his idea of a solution was right and mine was immediately wrong. My intentions were good since I was only trying to help, but my boyfriend had already decided for the both of us what was the right course of action.

Recognition, Acknowledgment, & Endorsement

I think that sometimes it is difficult to confirm someone we disagree with. The most challenging part for me is to realize that I'm probably not being totally fair with them and then to adjust my responses accordingly. Most of the time people think that by acknowledging someone's point of view as valid means that you have to agree with them, which is not the case.
I think this chapter has helped me a lot in realizing the different ways we confirm and disconfirm each other and the various levels of confirmation and disconfirmation. Before reading, I thought that recognition and acknowledgment were one and the same. But now I know that recognition is the most basic confirmation (recognizing another's existence), and acknowledgment is the next level up (acknowledging that person's feelings, thoughts, and what they have to say). One level of confirmation that I've known about but never had a clear definition of until now is endorsement. Endorsement is the strongest confirmation and is when you not only acknowledge somebody's thoughts and feelings, but you also accept them.
I think the main difference between confirming others as people and endorsing particular ideas is that you have to confirm others in order to endorse them but you do not have to endorse others in order to confirm them. What I mean is that because endorsement is the strongest confirmation, you must first recognize and acknowledge the person before you can reach endorsement. However the same is not true for confirming others as people, because you can confirm someone as a person just by recognizing their existence; endorsement is not required.

Ineffective Expression of Emotions

One concept I found interesting in this chapter was "The Ineffective Expression of Emotions". There are three main types of ineffective ways to express emotions: speaking in generalities, not owning feelings, and counterfeit emotional language.
Speaking in generalities is when we describe how we're feeling with overly broad or general terms such as "I'm sad," or "I'm angry." This is an ineffective way of communicating how we feel because it expresses an emotional state but it remains so broad that it prevents others from getting a clear understanding of what exactly we mean. Sometimes we do this because we don't know how to describe how we feel more thoroughly, and sometimes it is because we lack the vocabulary to express our feelings more clearly.
Not owning our feelings refers to when we state our feelings "in a way that disowns personal responsibility for the feeling" (pg. 181). In other words not owning our feelings is when we, in a sense, blame others for the way we are feeling. Saying "You make me so mad!" relies on you language, implying that they are the one responsible for your feelings, not you. While it is true that others impact how we feel, we are the ones interpreting what their actions mean to us and we are the ones responsible for our feelings.
The third ineffective way of expressing emotion is using counterfeit emotional language, which means that we appear to be expressing our emotions but we don't actually convey the emotion accurately. The book gives the example of the phrase "Why can't you leave me alone?" which can mean many things and therefore doesn't accurately express the emotion(s) the person is feeling. Sometimes we also say, "That's just how I feel," which isn't helpful because then the person you're communicating with doesn't know how you're feeling or what you want them to do about it. Often times we just don't know how to describe what we're feeling in these types of situations, but it's up to us to know how to convey our feelings if we're going to choose to try to express them.
I found this topic particularly interesting because my boyfriend often uses the phrase "That's just how I feel," or if I ask him why he feels a certain way he just says, "I don't know." This used to frustrate me a lot until I read this section of the text and realized that it's common to not know how to clearly express why we feel a certain way, especially since in American culture men aren't expected to show a lot of their emotions, much less know how to describe them.

Fallacies

There are six different fallacies listed in our book. First is perfectionism, then there's the obsession with shoulds, next is overgeneralization, followed by taking responsibility for others, helplessness, and finally, fear of catastrophic failure.
I personally find that the fallacy that I encounter most often is perfectionism. I often set unrealistically high goals for myself and am constantly dissatisfied with myself. Sometimes it's my appearance that I obsess about, other times it's school, or it's even when I'm doing extracurricular things like sports, creative writing, drawing, etc.
I also catch myself obsessing with shoulds, which I think ties in with the perfectionism. "I should be getting all A's," "I should have worked out harder," "I should be able to do better than this," and so on and so forth.
More often that not, these fallacies lead to me feeling pretty low and majorly lacking in self esteem. But the book says the best way to deal with this is to "identify and challenge debilitating ways of thinking about our emotions, and, by extension, ourselves" (pg. 186). The text explains that we can turn around this negativity and challenge it by using self-talk to counter our fallacies.

Influences on Emotions

Our book describes three different influences on emotions: physiological, perceptual, and social influences. While I do agree to a certain extent with all of these influences, I agree most strongly with the idea of perceptual influences. The book describes the perceptual view of emotions as a view that "asserts that subjective perceptions shape what external phenomena mean to us." This basically means that the way we perceive an event or act shapes what that event or act means to us. For example, if I see a clown running towards me I'll probably perceive it one of two ways: I'd feel threatened if I perceive clowns as scary, or I'd feel joyful if I perceive clowns as friendly.
I agree the most with this perceptual view of emotions because it suggests that we have some control over how we feel about different things. But because it is more accurate, I agree even more with the "cognitive labeling view of emotions". The best example I have of this is a personal experience of mine. A few years ago I was dating this guy who I perceived to be very cool, laid back, and smooth. He always seemed to say the right things at exactly the right time and made me feel like he really cared about me. But then as time passed I got to know more of his friends and I eventually found out from them that he had been talking to multiple girls the same way he had been talking to me and had even hooked up with some of them behind my back. This completely changed my perception of him. Instead of labeling him as a smooth, sweet guy I now labeled him as a player and a liar.
The cognitive labeling view of emotions gives me more insight into emotions than the other views because it helps explain that what we feel can be shaped by how we label external phenomena and our responses, which is something I've thought about before but had never really been able to put into words that clearly.