Book Review-Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

It’s spooky stuff.  Rewind the clock to a time before you have conscious memories and watch your interactions with your mom and dad.  Mary Ainsworth did this and refined the work of John Bowlby on attachment.  They collectively discovered that the way we form relationships as an infant is relatively stable over time and can shape how we’ll behave in intimate relationships decades later.  Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How it Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love is the exposition of their work and the work of others that seeks to help us understand why we act the way we do – and how we can change it.

Evolution

To understand the genius of Bowlby’s work – and Mary Ainsworth’s extension – we must recognize the evolutionary advantage of attachments.  If we take a step back, we can acknowledge that humans aren’t the fastest or the fiercest animals on the planet.  However, our capacity to be social and select strategies of cooperation are an essential part of our ability to be the dominant biomass on the planet.  (See SuperCooperators, Does Altruism Exist?, The Evolution of Cooperation, and The Righteous Mind.)

From there, we can see there can be special relationships we make – primary bonds – with those who are the most important to us and the most likely to support us.  In childhood, these are often our parents; in adulthood, our spouse.  Bowlby theorized, based on Harlow’s work on rhesus monkeys, that social comforting and perceived protection can be more important than food.  In Harlow’s experiments, he fashioned two mother monkey replicas in wireframe.  In one, he fashioned a place to hold a bottle for food, and the other he covered with terrycloth (to simulate the mother’s fur).  The monkeys would get food when they were hungry but would routinely spend time with the terrycloth replica, who offered nothing else tangible.

Mary Ainsworth, who worked with Bowlby, would go on to develop a protocol for the “strange situation” that could clarify Bowlby’s hypothesis.  She discovered, first in Uganda and then back in the US, that there were three basic ways that most babies would become attached.  They are secure, avoidant, and anxious.  She recorded several other variants that can be lumped together as “anxious-avoidant,” which is a mixture of the two non-safe attachment styles.  Today, it is more commonly called “disordered attachment” because of the unpredictability.

Robin Dunbar later postulated the number of stable social relationships as a function of the size of the primate brain.  Most frequently, this is quoted as 150 people for humans, but Dunbar’s work is much more nuanced.  First, the overall number is a range that might be up to 250 people; more importantly, Dunbar proposed that there are rings of intensity of relationships that allow for the primary relationships Bowlby earlier believed in.

The Styles

What Ainsworth saw in her test exposed a paradox.  Those babies who were attached in a way that Ainsworth would call “stable” were more likely to explore and experience the “strange situation.”  Like the rat pups who received more licking and grooming who explored their environment, children explored more when they believed that they had a safe person to return to.  (See How Children Succeed for more on rat licking and grooming.)

A summary of the styles is:

• Secure – They are aware that they have a safe person to return to and thus are less fearful and more open to experiences.
• Anxious – When their safe person isn’t available, they experience anxiety with the apparent concern they’ll never return. This is believed to be associated with neglect (intentional or unintentional).
• Avoidant – When their safe person is available, they often push the safe person away or ignore them. This is believed to be associated with perceived (but not necessarily real) abuse.
• Disordered – Alternating styles of avoidance and anxiety believed to be related to unpredictable experiences. Children of alcoholics can fall into this category or the anxious category depending on the predictability of their needs failing to be met.

Attachment in Plastic

The continued research into attachment has led to the awareness that, while attachment styles are generally stable over a lifetime, they can be changed.  It’s described as the styles being plastic.  They can be flexed and changed, but not without some degree of effort.

Cults sometimes intentionally try to pull people to a disordered attachment style, so they are more easily controlled and manipulated.  (See Terror, Love, and Brainwashing for more.)  Without intentionality, trauma can move people from more secure attachment styles to less secure attachment styles.  This is often disorienting for both the person and those around them.

However, with work, the opposite is true.  Even those who grew up in chaotic environments can develop secure attachments and approach close relationships in healthier ways.

Unmet Needs Continue

Sometimes the dynamics of the situation have one person calling the other “needy” or “clingy.”  This pejorative assessment unfairly characterizes the gap between one person’s capacity to give and the other person’s need.  The person with the need is characterized as excessively needy rather than the giver being seen as insufficiently capable of giving.  No matter what you call it, the gap exists – and it may grow over time.

Consider a family that earns $50,000 per year but for whom their expenses are $55,000 per year.  Are they needy?  Certainly, their needs exceed their earnings, but needy may – or may not – be a fair characterization.  In financial terms, we increase our debts to cover the difference, which further increases the gap between income and expenses.  In emotional terms, we may choose to defer our needs temporarily with the expectation that the deficit will be addressed later.

The issue is the fundamental gap between need and capacity, and it stays the same even if our tolerance of the issue doesn’t stay the same.

Intimacy Anorexia

Over a decade ago, in a previous marriage, I encountered the work of Douglas Weiss and Intimacy Anorexia.  While I’d seen the work of Bowlby and Ainsworth when I encountered Weiss’ work, I hadn’t quite put the pieces together.  “Intimacy anorexia,” as Weiss defines it, is a caricature of the avoidant attachment style.  They use a variety of strategies to avoid the person whom they’re married to or in a committed relationship with.  With every pursuit of intimacy that the secure or anxiously attached person makes, the anorexic is putting up walls.  John Gottman in The Science of Trust explains how important these bids for attention (and intimacy) are.

The net result is that the person bidding for intimacy questions whether they’re normal or needy, as their partner claims.

The Anxious-Avoidant Pairing

The unfortunate outcome of attachment styles and the dating process is that people with anxious attachment styles quite frequently end up with people who have an avoidant attachment style.  This set of attachment styles is often dysfunctional, with one partner constantly pursuing and the other partner constantly fleeing the threat of intimacy.  The best bet for these parings is for both partners to work towards changing their attachment styles to be more stable – which is substantially harder than it sounds when your partner is human and fallible.

The Stable Connection

One might assume, rightly, that a couple consisting of two adults with stable attachment would offer the best chances for intimacy.  Both partners would allow for the appropriate space for the other.  They’d accept their partner as an independent person with their own needs – and recognize that they’ll be there to support their needs.  An unexpected finding in the research is that having one stable person in the relationship is nearly as effective as having two.  It seems that someone with a stable attachment style can calm the fears of the other partner.

It’s as if they’re able to provide the degree of closeness that the other person needs – even if that degree of intimacy needs changes.  From a personal perspective, I can remember counseling sessions where I shared that I didn’t have the right to a bad day, because if I did have a bad day, my now ex-wife couldn’t rise to the occasion to meet me in the middle.  In a plane, there’s a flight attitude you can get that requires the engine to run at 100% capacity.  It’s called “hanging on the prop,” and it’s risky when close to the ground.  When you’re operating with one securely attached person in a relationship, there may or may not be much room for weakness.

Protest Behaviors

In fact, some “protest” behaviors can drive even the securely attached partner beyond their coping capacity.  Levine and Heller’s list includes:

• Withdrawing
• Keeping score
• Acting hostile
• Threating to leave
• Manipulations
• Making them feel jealous

I take issue with the last one, since you can’t make anyone else feel something – but you can encourage it.  That being said, the list shows similarities to the ones from Intimacy Anorexia.

Elevated Attachment Isn’t Love

One of the traps people sometimes stumble into is that they mistake an activated attachment system for love.  In How Emotions are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett explains how she might have mistaken illness for interest in a date.  Luckily, she sorted it out.  Others aren’t so lucky.  They err on the side of interest when there’s something triggered in their attachment system trying to warn them, inadvertently bringing them like a moth to a flame.

The opposite is also true, where people fail to feel a “spark” with someone else and they assume that it’s because they’re not interested.  Romance novels lead some to believe that there has to be this spark instead of creating space for a relationship first.

Conflict Resolution Leads to Intimacy

Even relationships between secure attachment types include fighting.  Sure, they fight differently, but they still fight.  When one of the partners is avoidant, they may seek to keep the conflict operating, because resolving the conflict creates too much intimacy.  I can remember this experience.  I’d try to eliminate the disagreement only to find a new one or a new dimension emerges.  If you’re using your best conflict resolution skills, and the conflict seems to constantly rekindle, you may be working with someone who needs to keep the fight alive.

Responding to Effective Communication

Another clue to a person’s attachment style is how they respond to effective communication.  The securely attached respond very positively; other attachment styles reveal their nature by changing the subject or creating a distraction.  Securely attached people don’t have any interest in or any time for games.  They expect effective communication – and they give it.

Growing Up

At some level, we grow up, but we don’t always learn How to Be an Adult in Relationships.  We carry around the attachment styles we learned as a child, and we don’t even know that we should adjust it for a happier life.  In the end, to find the best happiness in life, we need to learn how to be securely Attached.

Book Review-Wonder Drug: 7 Scientifically Proven Ways That Serving Others Is the Best Medicine for Yourself

It’s a fair question to ask why I’d read Wonder Drug: 7 Scientifically Proven Ways That Serving Others Is the Best Medicine for Yourself given the mixed review of the authors’ prior work, Compassionomics.  The short answer is that someone in a position to be helpful suggested it.  The longer answer is that, despite Compassionomics’ limitations, there were still good points being made.  Unsurprisingly, the “Wonder Drug” title is hyperbole.  It’s also no surprise that this work is an extension of Compassionomics in that they’re proposing you actually do something about the compassion you’re feeling.

Live to Give

Though I’d argue that altruism is a level of compassion that involves personal cost or risk, many don’t draw that distinction.  The concept of living to give – or live to give – is that you’ll be the happiest if you worry about other people more and yourself less.  It’s no surprise that the Dalai Lama would agree.  (See The Dalai Lama’s Big Book of Happiness.)  Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson concur in Altered Traits, basing their perspective on neurologically verifiable details about firing patterns.  Neurological and psychological research is practically paved with studies verifying that the more concerned we are with others, the happier we’ll be.

The authors cite Adam Grant’s Give and Take.  On Grant’s suggestion, I read SuperCooperators and Does Altruism Exist?, which further the argument for concern for others.  Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation even provides computer models for how cooperation might have evolved – and what strategies are best.

Clearly, there’s no question about what the best approach is.  However, the important question is how to make the transition.  Even the Dalai Lama and Paul Eckman pondered whether we’re fundamentally compassionate or selfish people.  (See Destructive Emotions.)  They wrestled with the challenge of flipping the switch from selfish to serving.  They didn’t reach an answer.  Of course, the Dalai Lama could point to Buddhist monks, who meditate on compassion (loving kindness), but then one could argue that they were already on the side of compassion.

While the authors leave the question largely unanswered, I believe that before we can have compassion for others, our needs need to be satiated.  We need to believe that we have enough and that we are enough.  (See Brene Brown’s work in I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t) and Daring Greatly for more about enough.)

Passion, Purpose, and Wisdom

Sometimes, we confuse the idea that we’re passionate about something for our purpose.  Consider a professional athlete.  They’re clearly passionate about their sport.  However, eventually, they’ll have to give it up.  Many athletes identify passion projects during their career or after their careers are over.  Scholarships, sports equipment, and programming for underserved youth are just the tip of the iceberg.  The difference between their passion for the game and their purpose is in how it serves others.  Purpose is why we’re here.  (See Start with Why for more.)

The problem is, whether you’re talking to college graduates at a commencement or whether you’re in your second decade of working, the purpose may not have revealed itself yet.  Finding the thing that is your purpose isn’t easy or straightforward.  As Extreme Productivity points out, life has twists and turns that are not predictable.  Many people find that their purpose isn’t discovered until late in life.  While they’re waiting, they’re trying out lots of causes to see one might be the one that moves them.

The Overreaches

There are places where Wonder Drug overreaches.  That is, the book makes bold claims that aren’t supported by research.  For instance, “Seventy percent of your ability to give (emotion, time, money) is the result of nurturance.”  The research doesn’t come close to supporting this assertion.  In fact, the more consistent research supports that it’s a combination of disposition and resources.  Those who believe they can spare some resources are substantially more likely to do so.  Of course, we all know people who have plenty who are disinterested in helping others and giving back.  However, that self-centered attitude is much rarer than it may first appear.

Another instance where there’s an overreach is in pain management.  “Just to be clear: if you are compassionate, your brain is more resilient.  It can block out the empathetic pain of witnessing the suffering of others to allow you to give meaningful help to people in need.”  There are two overreaches placed side by side.  First, a resilient brain isn’t necessarily more compassionate.  Though there may be some correlation, that doesn’t mean causation.  You’re resilient if you can weather the storms of life.

Second, there is nothing that says you can block out the pain of witnessing the suffering of others.  “Blocking out” implies hiding it from your consciousness, which would be the opposite of empathy and – because empathy is required before compassion – compassion as well.  Those people who are the most able to give are able to accept and process the emotions and pains of others and convert that into action – they are by no means blocking them out.

Get Started

Wonder Drug weighs that purpose is in being something larger than yourself – I disagreed above.  However, there is a barrier, a discouragement that can happen if you focus on the magnitude of the problem that your purpose puts in front of you.  You can see the scope and scale of the literacy problem for grade school children and do nothing.  However, that accomplishes nothing.  Instead, you can, like Dolly Pardon, set up library and book programs that make the maximum impact possible with the resources that you can spare.  No doubt that Dolly Pardon has more resources than the average person, but her example shows that no matter what you can do, you should do it.

No doubt that if your purpose is of large scale and importance, you’ll not be able to do it alone or in your lifetime.  That’s why it’s important to find others who can share your purpose – and become passionate about ways to address it.  Some projects may not be completed in your lifetime.  It may be that what you start won’t see fruit in your life.  The truth is that the results are nice but the real reason for doing it is the process – knowing that you’ll be making the world just a little bit better.

While compassion and living a life of philanthropy and service may be good for you, it’s not as easy as it may seem.  If we abandon the “me” culture for the culture of “we,” we become interdependent upon one another, and that’s far harder in today’s world than being independent.

That isn’t to say we shouldn’t be givers.  We should.  We have to recognize that the path isn’t easy.  It is saying that, in the end, there may be no Wonder Drug.

Book Review-The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging

The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging is more like a sketch of where to go than the kinds of GPS-enabled maps that we’re used to today, but that’s not a criticism.  Community and belonging are necessarily context dependent, and as a result, there’s no one map that can lead us to the places of belonging that we long for.  Robert Putnam’s work in Bowling Alone more than 20 years ago made it clear that the foundations of our social capital are eroding.  He revisits these dynamics in Our Kids, explaining how we’ve become more insular in the way that we raise our kids – and less community-based.

Putnam is not alone.  Sherry Turkle in Alone Together shares her perspectives on how technology is exaggerating the problem.  The Great Evangelical Recession explains the loss of connection from a church perspective.  In short, the problem is everywhere.  The Art of Community is designed to give people a map they can use to navigate back to places of community even if that means having to take a greater responsibility in creating them.

Loneliness

Loneliness can be a powerful if not overwhelming experience that far too many people encounter during their lives.  Persistent loneliness can have substantial negative health effects more than smoking or alcohol consumption.  (See the book Loneliness for more.)  The move away from relationships, social capital, and community means more loneliness and that the loneliness will last longer.

Communities and Tribes

Seth Godin’s book, Tribes, suggests that we need to find our group – and lead them.  While tribes are sometimes used synonymously with communities, there’s an essential difference.  In communities, members care about other members because they’re a member of the community.  We’ve always had mechanisms where we cared about others and would make sacrifices for them.  In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins explains a kinship mechanism that makes this work, despite the fact no one is making a statistical analysis of the probability of matching genes when deciding to rush into a burning building to save a person – family or not.  While many question the kinship hypothesis put forth by Dawkins, there is no question that we’ve evolved with a degree of concern and even self-sacrifice.

The primary problem with communities is the concern for those who would take advantage of the community by not doing their share.  Adam Grant in Give and Take speaks of the takers who take more than they give.  SuperCooperators and Does Altruism Exist? express a similar sentiment but back it up with mechanisms that keep it in balance.  Collaboration and The Evolution of Cooperation call it “social loafing,” but it is the same thing.  Cooperation leverages the best outcome for everyone over the best output for one person – the Nash equilibrium instead of the von Neumann-Morgenstern equilibrium.  (See The Outward Mindset for more.)

We can see the influences today by playing the ultimatum game as explained in Drive.  The short version is that we’ll punish another party if they’re not being fair – even if it has a cost to us.

Four Features, Three Questions, and Seven Principles

The core of the book is understanding how there are four features that you must be able to understand and articulate to drive the community.  There are three questions that the community must help the members answer.  And there are seven principles to creating community.

The four features are:

• Shared values
• Membership identity
• Moral proscriptions
• Insider understanding

The three questions that the community must help the members answer are:

• Who am I?
• How should I act?
• What do I believe?

Finally, the seven principles are:

• Boundary: The line between members and outsiders.
• Initiation: The activities that mark a new member.
• Rituals: The things we do that have meaning.
• Temple: A place set aside to find our community.
• Stories: What we share that allows others and ourselves to know our values.
• Symbols: The things that represent ideas that are important to us.
• Inner Rings: A path to growth as we participate.

Boundaries

Boundaries aren’t about keeping others out.  They’re about creating safe spaces for the members.  In The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch lays out a pattern for how to structure cities with six components: maps and signs (directions), landmarks (ever-present reference points), paths (channels of movement), edges (barriers), districts (major areas), and nodes (intersections).  Boundaries align with the edges that keep people in their lanes.

In Collaborative Intelligence, Richard Hackman explains the importance of boundaries – and the ease of crossing into and out of the group.  He describes over- and under-bounded groups and their problems.  In the case of community, we often have gatekeepers.  These people are designed to help people move into and out of the group.  Gatekeepers are those who welcome people in – and sometimes move people outside the group.

Initiation

An aspect from Influence that didn’t make my review is that the more we put into becoming a part of a group, the more we’ll defend that group.  In the rationale of justifying our decision to subject ourselves to a difficult initiation process, we necessarily increase the value of membership.  The greater the cost of the initiation that we’ve gone through, the greater the value of the group.  (See The Deep Water of Affinity Groups for more about association with groups.)

The balance to be struck is to make it easy enough that people will want to become a part of the community while simultaneously making it hard enough to drive further commitment to the group.

Rituals

Rituals have been burned into our culture since the very beginning.  As van Gennep notes in The Rites of Passage, rituals are an important part of signaling transitions between different phases of life and of community.  Robert Lewis in Raising a Modern-Day Knight encourages parents to develop their own ritual for the transition to manhood for boys.

Rituals are particularly powerful when they involve rhythm and synchronization across the group of people.  The combination of synchronicity and rhythm seem to have been a part of our evolution and hold a strong primal power over us.  (See Pre-Suasion, Team Genius, and Split-Second Persuasion.)

Temple

Sometimes the place that members come together are easy.  If you’re a member of any of the dozens of Disney-focused groups, there are two temples in the form of Disney Land in Anaheim, CA and Disney World in Orlando, FL.  Walt Disney (and his brother Roy) made sure that the experience inside the gates was a consistent story that people could walk into and ignore the outside world.  (See The Wisdom of Walt and Beyond the Wisdom of Walt.)

For most of us, the place that our community meets will be less specific.  Whether it’s online or it’s a gathering at a local community space, we need to consider how we create that sense of space.  (See Digital Habitats for creating online spaces.)

If you’re in physical spaces, The Art of Community suggests that special places can be created by:

• Boundary: Something indicates the space boundary.
• Invitation: People important to the ritual are specifically invited into the space.
• Clothing: Participants wear special clothes to the space when it’s sacred.
• Lighting: The lighting is shaped for the ritual.
• Sound: The sound is different when the space is sacred.
• Height: Objects important for the ceremony are raised up, including people.

Stories

Since the time before written language, we’ve been telling stories.  Cave paintings and oral tradition predate our writing of stories.  These stories truly define us.  The stories that we share and the stories that we believe bind us together and define our values.  (See The Power of Myth, Story Genius, and Wired for Story for more.)  The question for every community is what are the stories that every member should know?  What stories should we tell to new members?  Is the formation story necessary and relevant today?  Is there a reawakening story that shares the new vision and values for the organization?

Symbols

There’s a tradition in the military of challenge coins.  These coins are given to signify that you were a part of something – or that you were respected by someone of rank.  The original story goes that if you were in a bar and said you were a part of something, someone could challenge you.  If you couldn’t produce the coin as proof, you’d buy them a drink.  If you did produce the coin, they’d buy you one.  Since those beginnings, they’ve become a thing of pride for many military members and other groups.

Many communities have symbols.  Some, like Alcoholics Anonymous, use coins as well, but your symbol can be anything that the members find value in.  In Green Bay, WI, it might even be a foam, cheese-shaped wedge to wear on your head.

Inner Rings

Once a group grows to a larger size, there must be a division that separates the “inner rings” from the outer rings.  That is, those who are the most committed to the community and those who are less committed.  It can be an official designation.  It can be an invitation to participate in a group that is helping to shape or design some aspects of the community.  It’s an invitation to participate more deeply that signifies that people have made it.

Convening

Throughout my reading of The Art of Community, I was struck about how this was the temporal and relational extension of the work in The Art of Gathering.  Beyond simply the similarity in names, the art of gathering – or convening – precedes the creation of community.  We bring people together to allow them to form relationships and then to develop concern for one another.  If you’re building community, the art of bringing people together is a prerequisite.

Binding the Group Together

Binding people together can have negative connotations.  The idea that people would be prevented from leaving is quite obviously not appropriate.  As we move to more restrictive forms of binding to the group, we move closer and closer to being a cult.  (See Terror, Love, and Brainwashing.)  However, we also need to create a sense of belonging, togetherness, and concern that binds folks so that they’ll be committed to one another to work through tough problems.

Disagreements occur in every community.  Building the commitment to one another to work through hard problems and disagreements is a important part of building The Art of Community.

Book Review-Parental Alienation: An Evidence-Based Approach

Kids should be first.  When parents get a divorce or separate, the primary concern should be that of the wellbeing of the children.  However, too frequently, parents are more interested in “winning” the popularity contest and ensuring that their ex doesn’t have a better relationship with the kids than they do, so much so that they’re willing to sabotage the relationship.  Parental Alienation: An Evidence-Based Approach reviews the psychological and legal research on the topic and creates a framework for evaluating the presence of parental alienation as well as informing responses.

Progression

Parents don’t typically set out to alienate their children from the other parent.  There’s a conversion of their hurt and disappointment with the other parent that led them to overt and covert behaviors that create alienation.  In my post, The Progression of Parental Alienation, I explained how parents can alienate children through a normal progression and in ways that may not be completely transparent.

DSM-V and ICD

One of the criticisms leveled against parental alienation’s legitimacy is that the APA refused to include it explicitly in DSM-V.  The DSM-V is the diagnostic manual used to code patient concerns for billing.  There are two issues with this.  First, is that DSM does not primarily include relational diagnoses.  It’s focused almost exclusively on individual diagnoses.  The few relational diagnoses that exist are correlated to individual diagnoses.

Second, “parental alienation” as a name isn’t called out, but there are the codes V995.51 for “Child Psychological Abuse” and V61.29 for “Child Affected by Parental Relationship Distress.”  Both of these are applicable.  Given that we know children are better off with relationships with both parents, depriving the child of the relationship of the other parent is abuse.

In short, a surface look at the DSM-V would lead someone to believe that parental alienation should be called out but isn’t – but a deeper look reveals why it doesn’t meet the criteria for inclusion.

Frequently, the ICD codes published by the World Health Organization correspond to the DSM for behavioral health issues.  ICD codes are for all medical issues, including both physical and mental health issues.  However, there are some differences.  ICD includes a code for burnout where DSM-V does not.  ICD calls it an “occupational issue” to avoid it being something related to a person that should be included in DSM-V.

An argument could be made that ICD should include a separate code for parental alienation.  There is a precedent for including codes not listed in the DSM-V.  So why not in this case?  While there’s no clear answer, having appropriate codes that can be used, the lack of explicit call out in DSM-V (despite a petition), and the relational nature of parental alienation may all play into it.  Given that there is a code QE52.0, “Caregiver Relationship Problem,” which covers many of the associated problems with parental alienation, it may also be that the World Health Organization believes they have it appropriately covered.

Would it be ideal for parental alienation to have codes in both DSM-VI and ICD 12?  Yes.  However, the lack of inclusion hasn’t stopped parental alienation from being used and accepted in progressively more court cases over the past several decades.  It seems that the courts are accepting the premise without an explicit mention – because there’s sufficient research to demonstrate validity.

Digging Deeper

McCartan makes the point in Parental Alienation that it seemed impossible to write about the topic without checking every detail.  Numerous accounts were distorted to fit the narrative that authors wanted to portray – that there’s no such thing.  Her comment and the discrepancies that she discovered had a striking resemblance to the denial that occurred when Sigmund Freud first identified childhood sexual abuse and then recanted to save his career.  (See The Assault on Truth.)

Even in the previous section while discussing DSM-VI and ICD-12, it’s easy to search for “parental alienation” and not find it, then decide it’s not addressed.  It’s only by looking deeper into what is available can you recognize that searching for “silver maple” won’t tell you if a book contains knowledge about trees.  (See Pervasive Information Architecture for more about specificity of terms and why experts use more specific terms.)

Enmeshment

One of the factors that pushes towards parental alienation is when one of the parents becomes enmeshed with the child.  This enmeshment creates a challenge in the beliefs about the other parent.  If the parent in the enmeshment doesn’t like the other parent, then the child shouldn’t either.  This can cause the enmeshed parent to try to shape the child’s perception to match their own.

Enmeshment isn’t healthy, particularly in a parent-child relationship because of the long-term relational damage it can do to the child and the way that they express their relationships.  (See The Gift of Failure for more on enmeshment.)

Parents Are Parents Not Friends

“Fish are friends, not food” is the famous refrain from the shark, Bruce, in Finding Nemo.  There’s not a similar refrain about parents being parents, not friends – but there should be.  In today’s world, we find that parents crave friendship and often place their children into the role of a friend.  This necessarily breaks the power dynamics of a parent-child relationship and deprives the child of the discipline and correction they need to grow.

Parents have a responsibility to shape and correct their children towards societal norms.  That is an entirely different relationship than two friends who should support and accept each other rather than shape them.

Parentification

Worse are the cases where the parent isn’t capable of being a parent and requires that the child be the parent in the relationship.  While this is obviously not literally true, the roles and responsibilities are reversed to a substantial degree.  The child may be responsible for remembering important things, like paying the bills, or doing the tasks that are normally the responsibility of the parent, like cooking dinner.  In these cases, children are adapting to unstable environments and using their personal agency – no matter how small – to increase the degree of predictability in their environment.

Adult Information

Sometimes, alienation comes in the form of information that is shared – that shouldn’t be.  It can be information about court cases or other issues that aren’t something the child should need to be concerned about.  Often, the intent of sharing this information is to manipulate the perceptions of the child.  “Your father is taking me back to court” seems innocuous enough, but it leaves the perception that the father is “attacking” the mother.  What’s worse is when the reality is that the father is not the petitioner – both parents are just responding to another round of court appearances.

False Memories

An evaluator enters into the home and begins the work of assessing the situation.  Before long, the child asks if they can go ask the parent what they were supposed to say.  It’s a clear indication that the child has been coached into what they should say to make the parent appear in the way that they desire the evaluator to see them.

Other times, the clues are more subtle.  The child claims to remember events that happened to them before memories are reliable.  (Generally, memories before about age 2 aren’t reliable because of the neural pruning that happens around this time.)  Perhaps the child describes the situation using adult language – language they shouldn’t know.  Other times, they may describe the situation from a perspective that they couldn’t have possibly had.

It’s a tricky thing to determine the truth of the situation.  Research indicates that adults are only capable of identifying children lying 54% of the time – with professionals only doing slightly better.  On the one hand, we don’t want to discount a child who is telling the truth, and on the other hand, we don’t want to propagate false accusations against innocent parents.

The Blurring of Facts and Feelings

There’s plenty of research and work to support the understanding that our memories aren’t infallible.  However, we continue to believe that what we remember is the “truth.”  Without an irrefutable record of the event – like video recordings from multiple angles – we’re forced to accept what we remember as truth.  (For more on the fallibility of memory, see Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me).)

The distortion of memory is particularly prevalent when strong emotions are in place.  People believe what they believe because it justifies their beliefs or behaviors.  There have been cases in my life where it was necessary to share video evidence to shift people’s beliefs.  They believed one thing because it made them look good, yet the reality of the situation was quite different.

Perceived Abandonment

One of the outcomes of distorted memories is that the child can believe the other parent abandoned them.  This may be amplified by the alienating parent failing to deliver presents or messages to the child or fabricating appointments – but never telling the targeted parent.  The strategy of controlling communications can be quite effective at manipulating the perception of the impressionable child.

Luckily, with the advent of child phones and court requirements to allow contact, some of the strategies are less effective – however, they’re not completely out of the question, even in today’s world.

Ten Fallacies

The book lays out ten fallacies about parental alienation:

• A child will not unreasonably reject a parent with whom they spend most of their time.
• A child will not unreasonably reject their mother.
• Parents contribute equally to alienation.
• Alienation is a temporary response to parental separation.
• Parental rejection can be a healthy coping strategy after separation.
• A young child living with an alienating parent does not require intervention.
• Alienated adolescents should be permitted to make decisions about their contact.
• An alienated child who is functioning well in other areas of life does not require intervention.
• Therapeutic intervention will be successful even if the child lives with their alienating parent.
• Separating the child from the alienating parent is traumatic.

Reunification

The question is, once alienation has been identified, what is to be done?  The answer depends on the situation, the willingness, and the patience.  The unfortunate truth is that by the time that alienation is discovered, it may be too far gone.  It may not be possible to repair the relationship in the short term.  Perhaps the issue will resolve itself over time – but it may not.

In an ideal world, the alienating parent would acknowledge their behavior and work towards reunification.  Unfortunately, even after court orders, many alienating parents continue their bad behaviors – perhaps unconsciously.

With the right cooperation between all of the parties, reunification is possible – and it is in the best interests of the child.  Tragically, too few situations end this way.

Truth or Lies

With parental alienation, it’s hard to tell what is and isn’t alienation.  It’s hard to separate the fact from the fiction.  Even well-meaning people are unaware of how their children are impacted by their responses.  I hope that neither you nor any of the people you know have to experience Parental Alienation.

Book Review-Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence that Caring Makes a Difference

Sometimes while reading a book, you can be in such agreement with the concept and so frustrated by the experience of reading.  It’s hard reading.  The research support is sometimes weak, but it’s so important, it’s worth looking past these limitations.  Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence that Caring Makes a Difference seeks to explain how being compassionate isn’t just the morally better approach but leads to better financial outcomes as well.

The Research

I soundly criticized The Burnout Challenge for addressing research with a waving of hands that there was “ample” evidence.  There’s a reason.  I’m in the habit of looking at the underlying research to ensure that it’s quality research – and that it says what the author purports it to say.  I want to find instances like Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit, where the research doesn’t say exactly what he wants it to say.  (Daniel Pink’s Drive is in a similar category.)

That’s why I was concerned when I routinely saw the research being referred to.  The studies I sampled all had fewer than 25 people in them.  That’s so small that you really can’t reach any sound conclusions.  Those types of studies are really designed to identify a reason to do a larger study.  They’re great for what they are – but they’re not compelling evidence, just an indication that a larger study is warranted.  (Which was their conclusion.)

The Writing

Before I start with the long list of good things about the book, I’ve got to share one more challenge.  The writing is repetitive.  It’s hard to read simply because the authors are saying the same thing over and over.  The book could probably be a booklet if it weren’t for the repetition.  The good news is that it’s not as hard of a read as Servant Leadership – which is also a good book.

Be prepared to focus when you’re reading, so you can extract the value.

Compassion

Before we can get into the economic impact of compassion, we’ve got to get clear about what it is.  Simply, empathy is “I understand this about you.”  (See Sympathy, Empathy, Compassion, and Altruism and Against Empathy for more.)  Compassion extends this to say that “I understand your suffering, and I want to do something about it.”  (See Emotional Awareness for more on compassion.)

Understanding what compassion is, we also need to understand how it came to be that we are – generally – compassionate creatures.  Adam Grant in Give and Take explains that givers are at both the top and bottom of the performance curve.  Sometimes givers end up on top, and sometimes they end up on the bottom.  To understand how this can happen, we start with Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, which basically says that our genes do the things that allow them to replicate.  That makes sense.  Those that don’t replicate don’t get passed on.  However, the “how” they are most effective at replicating is more complicated than it appears.

It’s more of a discussion than is appropriate here, but Robert Axelrod uses computer simulations to understand the best strategies in The Evolution of Cooperation.  Does Altruism Exist? and SuperCooperators more fully expose the mechanisms that allow cooperators to come out ahead and how they protect themselves from takers who threaten to destroy them.

The language shifts from compassion to “give and take” or “cooperation,” but fundamentally the concepts are the same.  Are we better off caring for others?  The answer across evolution and even Jonathan Haidt’s work in The Righteous Mind seems to say yes.

Mechanical Precision

Medicine, in its search for efficiency, has turned to shorter and more tactical appointments.  Doctors have, unfortunately, responded by interrupting their patients more quickly as they describe their primary complaint and their environment.  In short, they’ve made the decision that there’s not enough time to listen to the patient.  In the process, they’re alienating the patient, making poor diagnoses, and driving higher levels of healthcare access than are needed.

How quickly are they interrupting?  It varies over time – but within a minute.  In the standard 15-minute appointment, it’s a non-zero percentage – but if you believe Einstein, understanding the problem is the key thing in any problem-solving activity.

More challenging is that doctors are rarely listening to the broader context of the person, problem, or environment.  As a result, they’re often prescribing things that just don’t work.  They may not be solving the real problem – but more frequently, they’re proposing things that patients just won’t do.  It will get labeled as patient non-compliance, and that’s not their fault – or is it?

Patient Non-Compliance

It’s a big problem in healthcare.  The failure to follow the prescribed protocol for medication, exercise, or diet leads to a substantial amount of medical costs.  (Change or Die informs us that five behaviors drive 80% of the healthcare system cost.)  When the doctor prescribes a medication that is too expensive for the patient’s means, isn’t covered by insurance, or there’s no way to get it at a price the patient can afford to pay, the patient won’t take the medication.  It seems obvious, but if you’re not listening to the patient – and their entire situation – it isn’t.

Emotional Factors

When a doctor asks you how you’re feeling, you expect that they’re asking about your perception of pain – not your emotional state.  Despite better standardized screening, most of the time, doctors don’t ask about your psychological or emotional state.  They don’t believe that it’s any of their concern – or business.  It’s like the brain is the passenger in the vehicle called the body and that the passenger doesn’t have any control.

We know that the way we think, what we perceive, and our emotional state has a huge impact on physical health, but it remains undiscussable in most visits.  Those are the sorts of things that behavioral health is supposed to handle, not the doctor – or so they think.  Loneliness explains that being lonely can have a more significant health impact than smoking or abusing alcohol combined.  It matters, and it’s something doctors should be doing something about – but aren’t.

The Curriculum

Though, today, the need for compassion is seen as more essential than any other time in our history, it’s still common to hear of programs that explicitly or implicitly teach that nurses listen to patients, not doctors.  Doctors are the expert – and the patient would do well to listen to them.  Carl Rogers, a prominent psychologist, would likely disagree.  He believed that the client (or patient) is the expert on their life.  The practitioner knows their field, but they don’t know the person’s details.  This recognition that the client/patient is the expert is at the heart of Motivational Interviewing – which is effective at resolving substance use disorder (SUD) in ways that neither medicine or traditional counseling can be.

Sometimes the message sent in the curriculum is that the science of medicine – knowing the right values, drugs, and systems – is the only part of medicine that matters.  However, without patients, none of that information will matter.  Another explicit or implicit message may be that you must remain distant and detached from your patients.  However, compassion requires that you understand their pain – and want to resolve it.  You can’t do that if you’re detached.  You won’t have any patients if you don’t demonstrate the “art” of medicine through compassion.

Burnout

Unfortunately, the authors head off into places where they don’t fully understand the space, including burnout.  They insist that personal connections protect people from burnout – despite limited evidence that relationships alone are sufficient.  In fact, it’s special relationships that seem to have protective effects, not just any relationship.  While depersonalization of patients will reduce compassion, it’s not a one-to-one relationship.  It’s the depersonalization that matters – not the degree to which they’re burned out.  Sure, it has a negative impact on care, but it’s tangential to the compassion problem.

Part of the confusion is equating burnout with compassion fatigue; though they’re similar, they are still distinct.  (See Is It Compassion Fatigue or Burnout?)

PTSD

Similarly, the authors speak as if they are authorities on PTSD, but they fail to understand it at more than a cursory level – and don’t understand the factors that drive it.  (See Trauma and Recovery, Posttraumatic Growth, and Trauma and Memory for more about how trauma functions.)

Concealing Major Errors

The final error that is worthy of mention is that they equate anonymous surveys as being able to generate honest responses.  First, the providers need to believe they’re anonymous – and they’re often skeptical.  Second, they must overall feel psychologically safe enough to admit a problem even anonymously.  (See The Fearless Organization.)  Finally, they must believe that there was a “major error.”  What constitutes a major error anyway?  Maybe everything short of a mortality event isn’t major.  Even if they define major error more conservatively, they may not believe it’s their fault.  (See Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) and How We Know What Isn’t So.)

In the end, the authors made some major errors – and some valid points – in Compassionomics.

Book Review-A Grief Observed

Loss and grief spare no one.  When loss cast a long shadow across the literary giant C.S. Lewis’ door, he wrote about it.  A Grief Observed is the collection of thoughts after the loss of his wife.  It’s an unfiltered account of his feelings, and the thoughts that troubled him are cataloged while he was working his way through the grief.

Isolated

C.S. Lewis was – because of his great intellect – very isolated.  Sure, he had his Inklings literary group with J. R. R. Tolkien, but according to his stepson, he struggled to relate to much of mankind.  His comments were not a criticism but rather a recognition of the struggles of the man he called “Jack” (for no reason made clear by the introduction).

However, Lewis’ isolation is only one aspect of the isolation that permeates the book.  The other form of isolation is the expectation that “British boys don’t cry,” separating them from their emotions.  While Lewis was more in touch with his feelings than most, there’s still this eerie sense that the struggle to find, name, accept, and process emotions was difficult for Lewis and the others with whom he associated.

Thinking About Endless Grief

“I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”  This sad statement encompasses hopelessness.  Grief may remain for a lifetime, but it will change and, in some ways, get better.  However, in the depths of despair, when hope has gone away to a far away land, it’s hard to believe that the pain of today will be any less tomorrow, or the day after.  Instead of seeing the natural ebb and flow of life, we become fixated on our momentary pain and sit mourning without sense of recovery.

Like anything gradual, it’s hard to see change.  It’s hard to see moments that happiness peeks through the pain like flowers emerging in the spring.  Slowly, not all at once, grief is transformed.  When you are able to look at grief across a period of time, you begin to see and understand that it’s not the same grief you initially felt.  Lewis’ writing allowed him and now allows us the opportunity to see the gradual turning of grief as it becomes less painful and more reverent to those we’ve lost.

An Embarrassment

“An odd byproduct of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet.”  The man Lewis was couldn’t escape the boy he had been nor the cultural expectations of the time.  No man could possibly hide the excruciating pain of the loss of a spouse, and he saw his failure to hide his emotions as an embarrassment.

We know today that the loss of a significant person in our life requires our brain to literally rewire itself.  Over time, we begin to separate aspects of our total experience so that one person does some functions and other people do other functions.  Everyone needs to do things like eat and take care of themselves, but they often reduce their capacity for cooking or other duties as the other person picks them up.  We naturally allow people to become experts in areas, while we mostly ignore them as a part of our optimization.

However, the death of a spouse means that we are severed from those parts of our shared thinking that, though external to us, we’ve come to depend upon.  It’s as if we’ve lost a part of ourselves – and we have.  We wouldn’t admonish someone whose physical pain involuntarily caused tears in their eyes as we do with those who grieve at an emotional loss.

Loss of Past

One of the odd things that happens is that people become severed from their past as well as their present and future.  It makes no sense that the loss of someone would create a tear in the past, but it does.  Suddenly, the places that you loved to visit together lose their luster.  There’s the twinge of pain as you feel the loss more prominently.  It makes you doubt that you were ever happy there.  How could this be a place of joy when I feel so bad now?

This doubt is even more pervasive as it challenges you about the very nature of reality.  Was what you believed was your history even real or was it a fantasy that you conjured up in your mind.  How is someone to know?

Links

Navigating through the waters of grief, it’s important to hold on to the memories and not let the waves of doubt erase them in a blind attempt to ease the pain.  We must cherish the times that we had with those we’ve lost as a testimony to their life and to our commitment to continue their light in the world.  If you’re navigating through grief, the pictures, recordings, and creations of the loved one are precious.  In the end, it allows A Grief Observed to be a grief shared – and that makes it lighter.

Book Review-The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

Humans have gathered since our first dawn as a species.  We did so to share our resources and to protect one another.  We’re better together than we are alone, and it’s this togetherness that has allowed us to become successful.  However, because we’re so used to being together, we hardly give gathering a thought.  Occasionally, when we think about gathering a few more people than normal or people who don’t know each other, we’ll ponder it a bit, but it’s more accidental than intentional.  In The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, Priya Parker explains that if we want to have successful gatherings, we need to put a bit of thought into it.

Go Further

There’s an old African proverb (the specific source of which can’t be traced) that says, “If you want to go faster, go alone.  If you want to go further, go together.”  It’s at the heart of why we gather.  It’s not faster.  It allows us to reach further heights.  Of course, there are a number of enabling conditions that must be just right for this to take place – but without the initial “together,” we can’t get there.

Conditions might include those that Kantor proposes in Reading the Room, those from William Isaacs’ work Dialogue, or the psychological safety proposed by Amy Edmondson in The Fearless Organization.  Efficacy may be found best using Scott Page’s approach in The Difference or Richard Hackman’s guidance in Collaborative Intelligence.

One of the most striking ways that people were brought together was in Florence, Italy, when the Medici family gathered people with different skills and interests and allowed them to work and interact with one another.  (See The Medici Effect for more.)  Their efforts to bring people together kicked off the Renaissance period.  We discovered that there were ways of teaming up and sharing that were effective at driving creativity and productivity.  (See Team Genius for more.)

Finding Purpose

Organizations which were once plagued by ineffective meetings and who have now encountered an enlightened leader require that meetings have agendas.  The agenda spells out why people are gathering, what the desired outcome is, and which items will lead to the desired outcome – at least, good agendas do this.  “Wasteful meetings” is a common disdain that comes from both internal and external large corporate surveys.  Too much time is wasted in meetings where there is no objective or agenda.  People meet because they believe they’re supposed to meet rather than to get something specific done – or to coordinate on a specific project.

Simon Sinek in Start with Why encourages us to find the purpose before everything else.  Steven Covey describes it as “first things first” in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

The Law of Numbers

The size of the group matters.  Small groups of around six offer intimacy.  Groups of 12 can build trust – and some intimacy.  Groups of 30 start to create buzz and electricity.  Groups of 150 are about the limit to the number of people that can feel like a single group.  These numbers are consistent with Robin Dunbar’s research.  (See High Orbit – Respecting Grieving.)

When planning a gathering, planning for the number of people is key to designing for the purpose of the gathering.  While you may want to invite more people, sometimes those additional people can disturb the goal.

Venue Vectors

Venues come with scripts, patterns that tend to play out over and over.  They’re expected, and that expectation drives more of the same.  Sometimes, the patterns are so ingrained that we don’t even see they’re happening.  Meet at a college, and people will expect to be lectured to – rather than engaging in a discussion.  Meet in a library, and people will expect to stay quiet.  (See The Public Library for more on library culture.)  The coffee shop implies a casual meeting rather than one with a drive through an aggressive agenda.

When you pick the venue, you’re necessarily shaping how the interactions will happen.  More than just the traffic flows and the catering options, venues veer us towards or away from our purpose.

Don’t Leave Me Alone

As the host of the gathering, there’s a tension between over-controlling the event and failing to let things spontaneously emerge and under controlling the event and leaving the participants to fend for themselves.  (See On Dialogue for emergence.)  There’s the idea that, if you don’t structure the time, people will be left to themselves.  The truer response is that they’ll be left to the mercy of the other participants – and that can have some embarrassing results.

Parker recounts an event where too much freedom was given to participants, and despite the small talk, they had managed to not get introduced to one another – and, as a result, the conversation was strained.

Social Contracts

All gatherings are social contracts.  People give up something – most notably, their precious time – and they want to know what they’ll get for it.  Sometimes, it’s the opportunity to meet someone new, hold interesting discussions, or have a new experience.  However, there’s always some implicit contract about what they’re giving and what they’ll be getting – or, at least, what they might get.  After all, in most situations when we attend a gathering, we don’t know for sure what we will get.  We get a raffle ticket and hope that our number is picked for a prize.

Failure to articulate the value proposition – or potential value proposition – for the group is a surefire way to have people fail to accept the invitation and fail to show.  With group dynamics being what they are, there’s no telling what not having the right – or enough – people may do to your gathering.

Strange Confessions

Sometimes, the groups that come together can share honestly because they don’t know each other – not despite their lack of relationship.  Sometimes, the things that people must share are too heavy to be borne inside of a long-term, caring relationship.  They must first be tested in the waters with relative strangers to provide comfort that they may be shared with closer relationships without fear of recrimination.  The strange thing about the group in which these things are shared is that they invariably end up feeling like sacred spaces.  People bond and connect quickly – even if those bonds turn out to be fleeting.

Hot or Cold

For most people, the conflict in a new group is anxiety producing.  Most people are conflict avoidant, and the sometimes candid and direct feedback that evolves between two or more participants in a meeting can make others duck and cover.  Clearly, this doesn’t allow everyone to bring their best selves.  On the other extreme, there’s the problem of groups who are too conflict avoidant, and the conflicts that the group needs to have never happen.  As a result, the group gets stuck being nice and getting nothing done.  Even in gatherings, we need to consider how the group dynamics are playing out, which conflicts need to happen to get out in the open, and which conflicts can be safely avoided because they can’t serve any purpose.  (See Radical Candor for more.)

Turning an End into a Closing

Kahneman explains how the Peak-End rule guides what we think of events.  (See Thinking, Fast and Slow.)  His research showed that the ending of any experience mattered more than it should.  While endings are often left to chance, they need to be an integral part of your planning.  Parker suggests that you not end with thank yous – those can be second to last.  Instead, end with the thing that you want people to most remember or experience.  If you do it just right, you may find that everyone has a powerful and moving experience in The Art of Gathering.

Book Review-Why Won’t You Apologize?: Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts

Everyone finds places where they’ve made a mistake, done wrong, or inadvertently harmed someone else, and an apology is called for.  At some level, everyone needs to learn how to better apologize, to heal the hurts that they have caused.  Why Won’t You Apologize? Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts is a way to learn more about how to do that – and what prevents us from doing it.  Harriet Lerner’s work is familiar to me: having been referred to by Brené Brown, I’ve previously read The Dance of Connection.  When I was doing my post, Anatomy of an Apology, I didn’t know that she had written about apologies.

I’m happy to say that she didn’t disagree with anything I said – but she did add more than a few enhancements that make sense for anyone struggling with apologies.

Why Apologize?

Perhaps the best place to start is to understand why we care about apologies in the first place.  It’s simple: we want to maintain relationships.  Whether it’s the damage that permeates families when there’s an argument that splits the family, like discussed in Fault Lines, or simply friendships or community relationships that are blocked by hurt feelings, we need to find ways to rebuild relationships after a harm has been done.

Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace explains one of the reasons that we want to apologize to others: to address a betrayal.  However, that’s far from the only reason.  Anything that causes the other person pain or frustration is a reason to apologize.

Apology Math

As humans, we have a tendency to want to apologize for precisely the amount of the pain of a disagreement – as we calculate it.  However, as a comedian once said, “Anyone that believes that relationships are a 50/50 arrangement doesn’t understand women or math.”  When we try to calculate the amount of the situation that we’re responsible for, we’ll invariably calculate it differently than the other party.  As Gilovich explains in How We Know What Isn’t So, we all believe we’re better than we really are.  It’s a better strategy to work on an apology that allows for the concept that the other person may believe more of the situation is ours to own than we believe.

Ifs and Buts

“I’m sorry if…” and “I’m sorry, but…” are both non-apologies.  I called out “but” but not “if” in my post.  There’s a nuance to “if” as a part of an apology.  It indicates that the person issuing the apology either doesn’t know what they’re apologizing for – or they’re unable to accept that it’s your truth and thereby validate it.

No Golden Ticket

Another challenge with apologies is when the party issuing it expects that it’s an instant ticket for forgiveness, like it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card that they can pull out and use at any time.  This confuses both forgiveness and how it differs from forgetting.  Forgiveness cannot be demanded; it can only be offered.  The person issuing an apology cannot expect forgiveness – though sometimes that is the implicit ask when an apology is offered.

Lerner is careful about forgiveness.  She shares that forgiveness need not be binary yes or no but rather a continuum between yes and no – or zero and 100.  Her perspective on the reason for forgiveness and how it works is nuanced, and in all candor, I’m not entirely sure that I understand the distinction that she’s trying to make.  I’ve always looked at forgiveness as a willingness to let go of the transgression and move forward.

There are several versions of a story of Buddhist monks, who were traveling and came upon a woman who asked to be carried across a river.  One monk did; the other monk, after some time, confronted the first about having broken his vows to never touch a woman.  He replied that he had only carried the woman across the river, and the second monk had carried her for much longer.  Inherent in this is acceptance or completion.

The assumption that things will be the way they were before – which is another common expectation – also confuses forgiveness with forgetting.  Forgiveness doesn’t require that we trust the other person again.  We need not trust them in the same way or to the same degree.  It only means that we need to move forward.  Ultimately, the desire for forgiveness is to return to the same level of trust that happened prior to the incident.  While this may happen, it doesn’t have to if the situation warrants a change in trust.  (For a comprehensive understanding of trust, see Trust=>Vulnerability=>Intimacy, Revisited.)

Responsibility, Remorse, Restitution, and Reassurance

Lerner quotes John Kador from Effective Apology with, “We apologize when we accept responsibility for an offence or grievance and express remorse in a direct, personal and unambiguous manner, offering restitution and promising not to do it again.”

While this may be the most effective apology, I rarely see it in real life.  Often, the reassurance that the person will avoid doing it again is missing.  You’ll notice that I weakened Kador’s word “promising,” because I don’t believe it’s right to make promises that people can’t keep.  In some cases, a promise is too strong a commitment, particularly when the offense is minor.

Otherwise, it’s important to take direct responsibility.  In Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), we see the impact of half-hearted acceptance of responsibility.  Remorse is carried by the words “I’m sorry.”  Restitution is also missing from most apologies, as there’s very little can be done when we’re speaking about hurt feelings.  Obviously, if there’s a tangible loss for which restitution can be offered, it should be.

Criticism

Sometimes, we’ll receive a criticism for which the person may desire an apology through our actions but in ways that would be unanticipated and unfair.  I volunteered for years with a twelve-step program where there were different types of addicts and hurting people.  Once of the things we were constantly monitoring were the complaints from people about triggering comments and media.  With regularity, we’d trigger someone in the audience with a song or a media clip or the presenter for the week.  (See The Coddling of the American Mind for what triggering is.)  It became a very complicated dance.

In some cases, the offending element was clearly over the line.  For instance, I was at an event that was honoring fallen heroes, some of whom died by suicide, and a song that was promoting suicide was played.  (The good news is that I was apparently the only person in the audience who caught it, having been conditioned to look for it.)  More frequently, we weren’t sure whether the element could reasonably be considered triggering.  We ultimately learned to walk the line together to share content that we needed for the rest of the audience knowing that we would get some complaints, and we’d talk to them individually to work through them having been triggered.

The tricky part from the apology perspective is to acknowledge the feeling, say we’re sorry we caused it, and offer restitution in the form of conversations to help them become less triggered – which is good for them.  Missing would be reassurance we won’t do it again – because, in some cases, we knew the media was on the schedule in the future.

When others offer criticism, we can honestly share, “I’m sorry I didn’t see it that way.  I’m sorry it was offensive to you.  Thank you for the feedback, it’s the only way I can try and prevent this in the future.”

The Attack

Sometimes, the criticism rises above the simple and moves into a character attack.  These are obviously more challenging.  Instead of saying that we’ve done wrong, they’re saying that we are wrong.  They’ve crossed the land of guilt and moved on into shame.  (See I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t) for more about the differences between shame and guilt.)  Here, Lerner shares wisdom and stories that affirm that an apology need not be immediate.  A simple response that conveys that you want to understand the feedback and process it before responding is sufficient.

The problem is that we can apologize for what we did but not who we are.  It will take time and processing to separate the characterizations from the events that caused people to make those characterizations.

The Listening

Lerner explains that even the most heartfelt apology may fall flat if the person receiving the apology doesn’t feel heard or believes their concerns were not understood.  Having been on the receiving end of someone trying to apologize but refusing to take the time to understand what it was that they did that was hurtful, it intensified the hurt and moved us further apart rather than closer together.  Instead of bringing us closer together, the failed apology moved us further apart.

It moved us further apart, because it was a strong signal that my relationship wasn’t even worth understanding my pain.

The Deception Box

The capacity of the human mind to deceive itself is impressive.  It never ceases to amaze me the extent to which one can warp their perceptions to allow them to accept their actions and maintain the personas they have for other people.  In Leadership and Self Deception, the situations that lead to self-deception are called “boxes.”  Once someone enters a space where they’re not honest with themselves, they’ll often continue the distortions and attacks on others.  Lerner explains that once we become defensive, it’s hard to get back to a place of openness where we can hear others and can respond more wholly.

When inside the boxes, it’s also hard to know yourself.  When you “believe your own press,” you can’t hear your faults or opportunities for improvement.  You can’t express yourself to others at a level that exceeds your own understanding of yourself – and that can be seriously limiting.

Accepting Inevitability

Sometimes, there isn’t an apology to be offered.  The person who was harmed may have cut off communication to protect themselves from further harm or may simply be unable to hear an apology at this time.  The person who is willing to apologize must realize that there are times when the apology could be harmful – and times when we’ll be prevented from offering it.

Ultimately, the decision to make an apology where we’ve wronged someone – or where there is a rift – is the decision about whether we want to continue to be right or whether we want to be in a relationship.  This is at the heart of Lerner’s other book, The Dance of Connection.

No matter what the circumstances, we can all find useful information in the question Why Won’t You Apologize?

Book Review-Effective Apology: Mending Fences, Building Bridges, and Restoring Trust

I’ve learned that, in legal encounters, apologies are often avoided.  Over the years, I’ve occasionally encountered situations where I’ve got contracts that are materially breached by larger entities.  The degree to which the breach caused me harm could be questioned, but the fact that they violated the terms of the agreement couldn’t.  In truth, when I confronted them on the issue, I didn’t want any restitution, I wanted them to agree to not repeat the transgression.  However, instead of an apology, I got stonewalled, and it was frustrating.

In Effective Apology: Mending Fences, Building Bridges, and Restoring Trust, John Kador explains how to do an effective apology and, more importantly, why we don’t always do them.  Stonewalling may be a very bad thing to do to a relationship, but it’s something that lawyers have been taught to do.  (See The Science of Trust for more on stonewalling.)

Legal Apologies

There’s a funny thing about apologies when it comes to legal conflicts.  Attorneys are taught not to show their hands to their opponents and certainly not to give them things they can use in court to their client’s detriment.  Apologies are treated as acts of admission and therefore reduce the burden of proof for the opposing counsel.  However, the research is emerging that apologies are often much less costly than arguing it out.  We’re finding that not only are the plaintiffs – or wronged parties – much less aggressive in their demands, juries are more compassionate to those who seem contrite.

Despite the fact that 34 states have laws prohibiting the use of doctors’ statements of regret against them, malpractice attorneys still often recommend that their clients not apologize – and, more frequently, route all communications through the attorneys.

Perfect Truth

Apologies are both a perfect solution to imperfection and a signal that we’re more interested in relationships and truth than our ego.  Apologies aren’t easy, but they’re an essential ingredient to a life that is aligned with finding truth instead of accepting our perceptions as if they’re fact.  It’s a critical resuscitation of relationships that are struggling under the weight of hurt.  As imperfect humans, we must accept that we are going to make mistakes.  What matters is how we handle them.

Compassion for the Victim

The center of an effective apology is the compassion for the victim.  That is, we must first recognize the harm caused to the victim, and then we have to have a desire to provide some form of restoration for them.  Too often, we view apologies as a ticket to instant forgiveness.  It isn’t.  We twist the apology to support feeling good about ourselves.  We take the focus away from the important issue that someone has been harmed – and, as someone we’re in a relationship with, we care.

Outcomes Not Intent

Explanations – in general – complicate apologies.  The reason for that is simple.  The victim was hurt, and that’s what matters.  They’ll have to heal, but they want to believe that they won’t be hurt again.  (See Hurtful, Hurt, Hurting for more about the pathway of hurt.)  In general, explanations don’t matter, especially if the intent was hurtful – to hurt the person intentionally, that’s worse, because it implies that it’s the character of the person and therefore it may happen again.  It gets harder as we move away from intentional hurt and towards unintentional hurt.

The next level of evaluation is whether the outcome was reasonably foreseeable.  Could or should you have foreseen the harm you might cause when you took – or failed to take – the action?  This is often where things break down.  We live in a random, probabilistic world where outcomes are never truly certain.  (See The Halo Effect for more on the probabilistic nature of our world.)  We also live in a world with diverse experiences, where it’s not possible to know what everyone who we will interact with will have been through.

Shared Experience

Decades ago, if you wanted to have something to talk about, you could talk about what was on television last night or what the community concert was like.  These helped to synchronize us by giving us all one relatively common experience that we could build from.  NBC had “must-see TV.”  Before that, the world of three television channels (if you were lucky) meant that everyone basically saw one of three things.  Today, we have time-delayed viewing of television, so we don’t know what someone has or has not seen – except for major sporting events.  That doesn’t even address the fact that people are watching YouTube and TikTok, and the variety and reservoir of content is vast.

It’s becoming harder and harder to find shared experiences and therefore a shared understanding of what might cause someone harm.  In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff tackle trigger warnings and the relative absurdity that happens when we try to prevent people from ever being unsettled by content.  Apologies are the way we get around that.  We simply say, “I’m sorry.  I didn’t realize that would be upsetting to you.  What can I do next time?”

Prediction Engines

We are, at our core, prediction engines.  We use our massively expensive brains to predict a future that we expect to see.  Our brains, in fact, use somewhere between 20-30% of our body’s glucose (energy) while amounting for only 2-3% of our body mass.  Our brains’ abilities are keenly focused on not just basic pattern-matching type prediction, which we share with other animals, but also the ability to forecast the future and, importantly, predict the behavior of others.

We’ve emerged as the dominant life form on the planet by our ability to work together.  Our cooperation and our predictive capacity are twin benefits of our brain.  (See The Righteous Mind for more.)  That has allowed humans without extensive fur, thick skin, powerful claws, or sharp teeth to thrive.  It turns out that the ability to work together is more evolutionarily important than any of those attributes.  (See The Selfish Gene, The Evolution of Collaboration, and Does Altruism Exist? for more on evolution and the forces.)

Prediction, while being a fundamental aspect of consciousness, is far from perfect.  The Signal and the Noise and Superforecasting both lay out the challenges with predicting the future – and offer some help with what can be done to improve it.  However, neither of these really reach the depths of exploring the problem of prediction as Noise does, which lays out how our judgement is flawed.  Of course, Noise isn’t alone in this – How We Know What Isn’t So, Predictably Irrational, Incognito, The Tell-Tale Brain, and many more illuminate these problems.

Working Together

Working together is a complicated process.  It turns out that we can read people’s minds – something we call “theory of mind.”  (See Mindreading for more.)  However, we can’t read people’s minds with absolute certainty.  Instead, we can only approximate what we believe that the other person is thinking.  Our predictive capacity is based on our shared experience.  As we move to less and less shared experience, we’re increasingly less likely to be able to predict what is in someone else’s mind.

“You Should Have Known”

It’s one of those phrases that sets my hair on end.  Someone says, “Well, you just should have known.”  I wonder, exactly how?  The answer is rarely forthcoming, and the reality is that we can’t expect others to know what’s inside our heads.  In fact, when we do, it’s like we’re setting a trap for them.  If they miss the cue, or they guess incorrectly, then it means they don’t care about us or love us.  John Gottman in The Science of Trust explains how we have sliding door moments, where we can turn towards someone, away from them, or against them.  Turning away is to ignore the other person – not necessarily intentionally – and against them is to snap back.

What’s interesting is that, by saying that the other person should have known, we’re positioning a conflict on unreasonable grounds – and that’s just not fair.

Judgement – Understanding vs. Agreement

Topping the list of things that separate us from relationships and each other is judgement.  When we judge that someone is doing something bad, we shun them and separate.  However, if want to get through an argument or apologize, we need to avoid judgement.  Instead of looking for agreement with the other person – judging them positively – we need to stop and focus on understanding.  To achieve an effective apology, we need to understand how the other person felt – even if we don’t agree that those feelings are reasonable.  We can accept that their understanding of the situation is their understanding – even when it doesn’t match reality.

We do, of course, need to make the decision about whether we try to bring reality into the situation if their perception doesn’t match reality – but often times, this makes things worse.  Tom Gilovich explains in How We Know What Isn’t So that they don’t attempt to openly accept disconfirming evidence.  Instead, they move to “must they” accept it.  That’s a very high bar that’s hard to meet.

The Five Dimensions

Kador proposes that every effective apology has the following five dimensions:

• Recognition – Acknowledgement of what hurt the other party.
• Responsibility – The actions (or inactions) that led to the other party’s harm.
• Remorse – The acknowledgment that the other party’s harm wasn’t right.
• Restitution – An offer to compensate the other party for the harm they felt.
• Repetition – A commitment to prevent or avoid future harm.

The lack of any of these dimensions puts the apology effectiveness at risk.

Regret

One of the questions that comes up when someone apologizes is whether they have remorse – or whether they simply regret getting caught.  This doubt comes from the lack of trust in the repetition.  When someone doesn’t express any intent to stop the behavior – or the expression isn’t believed – then we’re faced with the idea that the person doesn’t regret the action or the harm that it caused but rather that it was discovered.  This often occurs when there’s a breach of trust such as infidelity.

Repetition

The expression that the behavior won’t happen again is often a stumbling block to the apology.  There are some places where it’s impossible to say that you won’t make a mistake again.  Consider, for a moment, that you have friend who is transitioning gender, and you use the wrong pronouns in your conversation with them.  You can certainly commit to continued efforts to prevent using the wrong pronoun – but providing a guarantee that you’ll never use the wrong pronouns again is unrealistic.

Conversely, if there’s a behavior that clearly violated moral boundaries, it is expected that one would commit to preventing another offense.  In the extreme, if someone murders another person, it’s reasonable to ask that they commit to not murder anyone else.

Reasonable Expectations

Whether directly stated or simply implied, the apology creates an expectation that the person apologizing will not repeat the behavior.  In the interest of the relationship, whatever the expectation set by the apology is, it should be met.  Failure further erodes trust, even trust in apologies.  We have a saying “Sorry, not sorry” that describes this condition.  Someone speaks an apology without any intention of changing (or even monitoring) their behavior.

Ultimately, an apology is an attempt to recover a relationship.  Sometimes this means that we have to give up the sense that we’re right – but it always means that we need to consider the impact of the act and the apology on trust.  (See The Titleless Leader for more on “right or in relationship” and Trust => Vulnerability => Intimacy, Revisited for more on trust.)

Timing

The timing of an apology should be set by the person who was harmed.  They should be able to find conditions that makes them the most comfortable.  Twelve-step groups believe the person who has been harmed should control the conditions of an apology (amends) and when it should be made – including the possibility that “never” is a valid answer.  (See Why and How 12-Step Groups Work for more.)

Ain’t No Thing

If someone makes the effort to do an honest apology, the recipient shouldn’t dismiss the apology.  Telling the apologizer that it’s “no big deal” or “don’t worry about it” dismisses their commitment to the relationship.  Certainly, letting them know the apology is accepted is good.  However, dismissing the apology may be dismissing their honest attempt at improving their own behaviors.

Forgiveness

It’s important to note two things about forgiveness.  First, forgiveness isn’t a given.  Second, forgiveness isn’t forgetting.  A good apology, Kador explains, shouldn’t ask for forgiveness.  It should be entirely focused on the harm that was inflicted.  When you ask for forgiveness, you necessarily shift the focus from the victim to you.  That’s not how it’s supposed to work.

Forgiveness isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card.  It doesn’t mean that the other person won’t be suspicious or observant in the future.  It’s just the release of the relational poison.

That’s the best hope.  If you can remove the relational poisons, then you’re doing an Effective Apology.