WTF Is an "I-Statement" and How It Can Change Our Lives?
Join Us this Wednesday, May 3, 12:30-2:00 p.m. At Antioch University Library to explore this life-affirming question as part of Dr. Doug’s Monthly Talks, “Community Psychology In-Depth.” Light Lunch Will Be Served FREE. RSVP Here for Zoom or Live
I was sharing with some friends in this group of people celebrating my turning 64 in April that I had recently had a heated conversation with a young man Fortuna tossed into my path almost five years ago and is about to turn 24.
I am of that gay revolutionary generation sandwiched between the people who stood up against the police at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 and those people who grew up already aware of AIDS in the 2000s. So when I lived with a gay activist performance artist in the 1990s, we were not inclined to have children. We followed the age-old idea advanced by those homosexuals who read Plato's Symposium as if the dialogue were a gay Bible, that there exists another form of creativity besides having literal children. And we did create art, institutions, communities, and books!
Anyway, to make a long story short, I told them I had been delighted and challenged to see what it feels like to be present for another human being on a day-to-day basis, as any parent would. The more challenging part is that this person I parent is of a different culture, race, and sexual orientation than I am. The dynamic presented feels so complicated but infinitely rich! I am doing okay; I give myself a B+. But more than I'd like to admit, I regress. I have become a kind of parent surrogate (unconditional positive regard meets firm limits) to a wisely maturing individual who can also trigger me in the touchy areas where I can feel "used" or "unseen" —or, get this canard, parents, "taken for granted." And just like the childish parents I see in my private practice, I can lose my shit. I can say, "You are such and such," and "You never do such and such." I become shaming. I become critical. I put him down. I feel terrible about my lousy behavior even writing this. But then he, as the one grown up in the room, makes an "I-Statement." "I feel like you don't see me; all you do is put me down." And, BAM—my whole Aries fire-ball-of flame dies into a pool of remorse. I could have expressed myself in a much more honest way.
I told them I forgive myself, though, as I am learning psychic stuff I have never known in another relationship, not with clients or lovers.
It is too easy, playing the "parent game," to act out just as our parents did: To make YOU-statements rather than I-statement. No bueno.
A cardinal rule in therapy is that a person should be invited to develop self-focus and, instead of BLAMING and SHAMING, make a more measured comment about how "I" feel or what "I" feel about the situation is such-and-such. In therapy school, where we study the work of Systems Theory and the Family, the heralded pioneers of the field are Murray Bowen (1913-1990) and Virginia Satir (1916-1998).
We Love Virginia:
“What lingers from the parent’s individual past, unresolved or incomplete, often becomes part of her or his irrational parenting.”
Each promotes the idea that families organize themselves into a GROUP MIND or a tribe and that symptoms and toxic triangles are the system's way of creating an alarm that the "homeostasis" or "tendency to resist change" is in trouble.
The difference between an I-Statement versus a You-Statement goes something like this:
"You didn't take out the garbage and are a lazy bum."
"You never meet my needs."
"You don't love me."
An I-statement would require a person to know that criticism is usually retaliatory and not humanistic or humane. It means that a person would have to notice that they are SPLITTING off their emotion into an IDEA (e.g., "You never meet my needs") and have lost touch with the sentiment. The emotion is usually something closer to a painful feeling, such as "hurt," "rage," or "shame." Most of us have a hard time digging deep into those feelings because American society and toxic masculinity deny the presence of the heart as a subtle organ. And what many people don't know is that one can make an I-Statement to oneself. An immense or electrical or moody feeling can be had privately before the sentiment is even shared! So an I-Statement is a personal statement about the profundity of one's emotions.
It might help us to understand why we find it so challenging to make I-Statements and why a whole school of family therapy has arisen to address this problem if we apply a historical perspective. For most of human history, spanning hundreds of thousands of years, human society was group-oriented and group-minded as a means of survival. The cortical part of our brains that organizes logical thought and reflective processes is only 75,000 years old.
One of the oldest known figurative paintings, a depiction of an unknown bovine, was discovered in the Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave and dated to be more than 40,000 (perhaps as old as 52,000) years old.
So it's only recently that people thought of themselves as individuals with a SELF, an EGO, an agency, and intentionality—a being separate from what C.G. Jung called "participation mystique" and what Bowen called "undifferentiated ego mass."
In the West, we can see the emergence of a special kind of reason celebrated in a modern sense only relatively recently, first in the Renaissance, then with the Protestant Reformation, where divine providence could be said to be located more in the individual than in the Pope than the European Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, epitomized by the statement of Rene Descartes, "I think, therefore I am." By the time Romanticism produces the work of Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, and then their offspring in the field of family systems, Murray Bowen and Virginia Satir, we have moved quickly from the tribe to the sovereign individual. And while the Cartesian revolution has its critics in less Euro-centric cultures, it is also possible to develop a strong sense of self while strengthening one's relationship with one's family and culture. Most, if not all, therapists argue that improved communal relations and improved self-focus form a positive feedback loop.
But we should also learn how this revolution, called the "I-Statement," works for diverse cultures and LGBTQIAA+ people within those cultures where the contradiction of coming out versus being for the family still causes existential distress.
Please join us on Wednesday. You can listen in or participate. We'd love to have you as part of our growing family engaging "Community Psychology In-Depth." RSVP Here for Zoom or Live