I write this blog-essay after seeing that the New York Times has amplified some very cliched and unsupported advice for couples in conflict: they highly recommend using "I statements". The armchair opinions of therapists is used to support the advice, instead of evidence of the usefuleness of I statements in interaction. This might be because there is none. Such evidence, when it eventually comes on line, would have to include study of the trajectory of I statements in sequences of interaction, recorded and transcribed to track and account for what happens in situ, linking structure and details to the voluminous current knowledge of the study of interaction organized under the umbrella of applied linguistics, including findings from sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, anthropological linguistics, micro-ethnography, and interactional social psychology. Each of these can in their slightly different ways show the yawning abyss that awaits the distressed couple that starts relying on "I statements".
Drawing on these knowledge bases there are good arguments for why so-called "I-statements" are a bad idea for for couples in distressed conflict:
Words don't have fixed meaning or impacts in interaction, rather, they have meaning potential.
Some meaning potentials are more likely to be activated than others given a couple's particular history of interaction.
Under stress, we amplify negative meaning potential. Distressed couples do so more than others.
One negative meaning potential of I is to divide us, ie, "I" may be heard as I vs. "You".
Division in two enables a hierarchy, where one of the two is privileged.
The speaker of the I statement thus divides by communicating that they occupy a relatively more privileged place in a hierarchy of "I" over "you".
Speaking this way, with a prominent or repeated "I" is furthermore a feature of therapese--a professional dialect we have learned to expect from therapists and advice columns.
Listeners are capable of recognizing therapese instantly, it's a part of our interactional competence to discern social languages of different kinds.
The speaker of therapese aligns the third party sources of those languages at the expense of their partner.
Thus: "I statements" are pernicious for couples under repeated distress because the division they can sow appears to be licensed by third parties, now being invoked by their partner to bolster their position.
Third parties are recognizably intrusive to the couple when invoked by a partner. This by the way, applies to other invocations of third parties, like, mentioning a couple therapist's name during a fight. Or a friend's, and so on.
As decontextualized interactional strategies, these invocations of third parties offer little refuge if things go poorly. where I-statements are concerned, the follow-up is presumably more I-statements, compounding the divide.
Alternatively: When a couple's interactional repertoire is flexible, with multiple strategies to reach the same goal, opening with an I-statement can be a useful to the couple system.
The flexible, interactionally skilled, interactively regulating couple will quickly work to close any division that the use of "I" or any other specific strategy opens up.
Successful use of I statements in conflict is thus an indicator of an interactional system already resilient to challenges and capable of flexbily shifting to privilege union over division, rather than a way for a struggling couple to pull themselves out of a divisive conflict.
Couples should therefore focus on developing a resilient interactional system that flows from their purposes and principles, building from a repertoire of interactional strategies that afford multiple routes to the same goals.
Relying instead on decontextualized interactional strategies is a sign of a system unready to deploy them and handle their immediate and downstream effects.
In such contexts, I statements as a conflict-reducing strategy are likely to be self-defeating.
Though this may be enough, an expanded version is available in the fuller version (previous entry). For those impatient for empirical evidence for the idea that I statements can easily pose a challenge that require interactional virtuosity to handle, here is a reference to follow up; look specifically at the last section on strange vs. charmed loops in talk: W. Barnett Pearce & Kimberly A. Pearce (2000) Combining passions and abilities: Toward dialogic virtuosity, Southern Communication Journal, 65:2-3, 161-175, DOI: 10.1080/10417940009373165.
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