Why I-statements are divisive: Time is Short Version.

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 will, I predict, in their slightly different ways show the yawning abyss that awaits the distressed couple that starts relying on "I statements".

Since no empirical evidence is available on the specific topic, the knowledge bases can provide 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. The potential is activated in talk.

• Some meaning potentials are more likely to be activated than others given a couple's particular history of interaction.

• Under stress, we often 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 can be heard to be dividing by communicating that they occupy a relatively more privileged place (more right, more moral, more of anything the couple believes is good) 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 and often dread 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 and to attribute routine (and possibly dreaded) meanings to those.

• The speaker of therapese risks being heard to align with 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 who are now being invoked, perhaps subtly, 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 therapist's name during a fight, even a couple therapist's name.

• As decontextualized interactional strategies, these invocations of third parties offer little refuge if things go poorly. What would someone following this advice do next? 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 would quickly work to close any division that the use of "I" or any other specific strategy might inadvertently open 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 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.

• I statements as a conflict-reducing strategy for distressed couples are therefore likely to be self-defeating. The couple will be in deeper and stay longer unless they learn to find the a "we" and to speak from it in ways their partner can recognize as unifying rather than dividing.

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.