This week I decided to take advantage of our fleeting summer-like weather and brought my laptop outdoors to work on some paperwork. I figured that if I couldn’t avoid such tasks, perhaps a change in setting might make it at least tolerable. The weather was about as perfect as you could imagine: temperatures in the low 70’s, zero humidity, a wee bit of breeze and a sky filled with sunshine. Utter bliss.
I found a table with an oversized umbrella and settled in to work. As I started typing, I heard voices at a nearby table growing more agitated and distressed. I tried to press on, but the urgency in their voices left little room for continued concentration. As I sat there, the relationships between the people became clear: these were adult children talking with their mom about bringing in care for their father. I couldn’t hear their mom’s responses, but exasperated tone in her children’s voices left little room for doubt. Clearly, this intervention wasn’t going well.
I overheard these appeals from the adult children:
Tell us what you are thinking!
What’s wrong with you?
You have to talk to us! How can we help you if you won’t talk to us?
Mom, take off your glasses. We need to see your eyes!
As was thinking about this incident later in the day, I thought about the parallels between this conversation and communication between some of the parents and teens that I’ve known. If the roles above were reversed, I think the verbiage would sound awfully similar. Parents and guardians exhorting their teens to talk, pleading with them to share (either with no real discernible response or a screamed creative string of cuss words) and mounting frustration on both sides. Often, looking a lot like this:
I half-jokingly comment that in this line of work, I function a lot like an interpreter dispatched from the UN. My in artful (but incredibly concrete) metaphor to follow: it’s as if parents are speaking Spanish while their teens are speaking Swedish. By the time folks typically meet with me, parents and teens have fought the same battle over and over with no resolution. The trigger for the argument might change but the communication patterns remain solidly intact. My job is to translate, helping folks interpret the messages correctly without resorting to faulty assumptions and painful patterns mired in the past. Once that happens, folks can begin to make active choices about how they choose to respond to one another when the inevitable trigger points arise. They can decide to relate to one another differently. They begin to replicate their success outside the office and really hear each other differently.
Hopefully, over time, looking more like this than the picture above:
