Reading Notes

Interpersonal Effectiveness: Introduction

  • Interpersonal effectiveness:
    • Relationships
      • Asking for what you want
      • Set boundaries
      • Making new relationships
      • Fixing relationships
      • Changing relationships
      • Ending relationships
    • All kinds of relationships are included, not just romantic relationships
  • People often have interpersonal effectiveness in some areas but not others
  • What interferes with being interpersonally effective
    • Not having the right skills
    • Lack of knowledge of one’s own wants and needs
    • Being overwhelmed by emotion
    • Forgetting long-term goals/values
    • Environmental blocks - other people have autonomy and there is no magic sequence of words you can say to make them do what you want
    • Believing myths about human interaction
  • If you catch yourself believing one of the myths, don’t judge yourself. Instead ask yourself what evidence led you to believe that myth.

Interpersonal Effectiveness: Obtaining Objectives Skillfully

  • Everyone has needs that can be met by other people
  • 3 goals in any interaction
    • Objective - get the thing that you want to get
    • Maintain the relationship
    • Maintain self-respect
  • Know what your priorities are with regards to the above before going into any particular conversation
  • “Assertiveness” is shorthand for knowing your priorities and acting in accordance with them
  • DEAR MAN GIVE FAST - set of strategies to get objectives, maintain relationships and self-respect
  • DEAR
    • Describe the current situation, leaving out emotion
    • Express your feelings and emotions about the situation
    • Assert your request or refusal
    • Reinforce - describe rewards or consequences for the other person if they give you what you want
      • Make sure negative consequences are proportional
  • MAN
    • Mindful - keep focused on your goals and don’t get sidetracked
    • Appear confident - pretend that you are an effective competent adult
    • Negotiate - know what you are and are not willing to compromise on
  • GIVE
    • Gentle - don’t be deliberately mean or insulting
    • Interested - pay attention to what the other person is saying
    • Validate - show that you understand the other person’s needs or concerns
    • Easy manner - don’t be unnecessarily serious
  • FAST
    • Fair - be fair to yourself; it’s okay to want things
    • Apologies - don’t apologize unless you’ve done something to apologize for
    • Stick to your own values
    • Truthful - in general, lying doesn’t help
  • Intensity
    • Figure out what level of intensity is most appropriate for the request
    • Not necessarily the same level of intensity as your emotions
    • Dime game - way to figure out if you’re being too intense or not intense enough
  • Troubleshooting (if you’re in a fight)
    • Don’t use the word “obvious” or anything like it (if it were really obvious, you wouldn’t be in this situation)
    • Start by describing the current interaction without motives
    • After that, you can describe your desire for the interaction to end
    • If you’re asking for something, suggest that you’ll come up with a better offer later
  • Checklist of common obstacles to interpersonal effectiveness
    • Emotions getting in the way of skills
    • Not knowing which skills to use
    • Not knowing or remembering your objective
    • Worrying too much about short term concerns and neglecting long-term needs
    • Unexamined assumptions and myths about interactions and about the other person
    • Environmental factors - maybe it’s not actually possible to get what you want and you need to radically accept that

Interpersonal Effectiveness: Building and Ending Relationships

  • Building relationships
    • To a first approximation, all people are worthy of friendship
    • Mere exposure effect - more likely to make friends with people you’re around a lot
    • Try to find people who are similar to you, but make sure they’re actually similar
    • Talk to people even if you’re worried that you’ll come off as weird or creepy
    • Ask questions and respond to questions with just a bit more information than the person asked for (but only a bit)
    • Small talk isn’t evil
    • Compliment people, and try to be non-obvious in your compliments
    • How to join a group at a social gathering
      • Find a group that looks “open”
      • Approach person you know or the most friendly looking person
      • Greet them and ask if you can join
    • Reciprocity
      • A good guideline for building and maintaining a relationship is to mirror the other person’s invitations at a delay
    • Be mindful
      • Observe - pay attention purposefully
      • Describe - separate fact and interpretation
      • Participate - be engaged; avoid self-hate
      • One-mindfully - do one thing at a time
      • Effectively - remember your values and your goals
  • Ending relationships
    • First try to fix the relationship with DEAR MAN GIVE FAST
    • Never end a relationship when you’re overcome with emotion
    • Be direct and don’t blow up when you’re ending a relationship
    • Avoid reminders of the relationship that you’ve ended

DBT: Walking the Middle Path

  • DBT is all about balancing opposites
  • More than one side to any given situation
    • People have reasons for doing things
    • People can disagree and still be correct
    • Ask yourself why the other person is behaving in the way that they’re behaving
  • I am human and nothing human is alien to me
    • Humans are far more similar to each other than they are different
    • Try to understand other people even if you don’t agree with them
  • The only thing that doesn’t change is change
    • Nothing is constant
    • Plan for change
    • Change is transactional - we influence our environments and our environments influence us
  • Validation
    • Find the grain of truth in other people’s experiences
    • People are more reasonable when they’ve been validated
    • Acknowledgement does not imply agreement
    • Can validate facts, experiences or difficulties
    • How to validate:
      • Pay attention
      • Reflect back - restate the other person’s argument
      • Try to figure out what they’re thinking, keeping in mind that this is just a guess on your part
      • Try to understand why the other person is thinking what they’re thinking
      • Given the above, try to reason out why the other person’s response is logical
      • Don’t try to one-up the other person
    • You don’t always have to validate; invalidation can be important too
      • Correct or not, invalidation is painful
      • Do five validating things for every invalidating thing
      • Sometimes you have to radically accept that you’ve been invalidated and move on
    • Validating yourself can be as important as validating others
  • Behavioral Change
    • To acheive behavioral change, reward behavior in stages
    • Start by rewarding behaviors all the time, then back of to intermittent reinforcement
    • If someone is doing something that you don’t want them to do, ask yourself if you’re inadvertently reinforcing that behavior
    • Punishment can be used as a last resort
      • Should be or appear to be a natural consequence of the behavior
      • Should be proportionate

Avoid vs. Accept

  • When there’s something scary, you can avoid it, or you can face it
  • The latter is usually better
  • Courage is acknowledging when you’re afraid and then proceeding anyway

With Borderlines, Validate, Don’t Reassure

  • When interacting with someone who has BPD, validate their emotions rather than trying to respond to those emotions
  • Try to find the grain of truth behind what they’re doing
  • Reassure them that feeling the emotion that they’re feeling is okay