Bonus Post #1 – It’s All About Relationships (5-Part Mini-Series)
PART 1 – Introduction
I recall an early insight in my graduate studies in interpersonal and small group communication from a textbook by John Stewart and Gary D’Angelo, Together: Communicating Interpersonally. They say, “the quality of our interpersonal relationships determines who we are becoming as persons. Although our individuality is tremendously important, we don’t become fully human all by ourselves; our humanity develops in relationships with others.”[1]
Jesuit psychologist John Powell puts it this way: “What I am, at any given moment in the process of my becoming a person, will be determined by my relationships with those who love me or refuse to love me, with those I love or refuse to love.”[2] It reminds me of the African tribal philosophy of ubuntu: I am, because we are.
Moreover, as Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca observes, “One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.” In fact, the communication process involves more than either a one-way speaker-centered bow-and-arrow type action of shooting our ideas to another person, or a two-way message-centered ping-pong type interaction of batting our ideas back and forth. Rather, it pays to approach communication as a dynamic, meaning-centered transaction in which a relationship emerges between people.
Here is how Mennonite theologian and counselor David Augsburger puts it: “’Experiencing the other side’ is, in Martin Buber’s words, ‘the heart of dialogue.’ Feeling any experience from the side of the other person as well as from one’s own side can make the experience twice as rich. Seeing any event through the other’s eyes in addition to one’s own makes the scene truly three-dimensional.”[3]
Augsburger continues:
The art of dialogue is openness to the other side, a willingness to enter the other’s turf and to explore it until it is familiar territory. The heart of dialogue is coming to value a place near the center, on the boundary, where the other person’s perspective is valued alongside my own. At this point of meeting, I become as concerned for the clarity of the other’s stance as for my own; as willing to contribute an argumentative point to the other side as to assert one on my own; as committed to supporting the other’s right to be at his or her position as I am to claim my own.[4]
I find that I am most alive, most human, when I meet another person at the real, genuine, authentic gut-level wherein a deep, intimate relationship is created between us. Reaching beyond phoniness or superficiality, this kind of relationship is deeper than that of acquaintances or even friends. It is marked by the quality of sharing that good friends with a close personal relationship enjoy––love for one another. We’re made for relationships with one another. In fact, it’s all about relationships!
So, how do we create healthy ways of relating with one another? Think about this question over the next month, and see what answers percolate for you? We’ll explore this question in next month’s Bonus Post, PART 2 – The Magic Called Real.
[504 Words]
[1] Stewart and D’Angelo, Together: Communicating Interpersonally (Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1976), 23.
[2] Powell, Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am? (Chicago: Argus Communications, 1969), 43
[3] Augsburger, Caring Enough to Hear and Be Heard (Ventura, CA: Regal, 1982), 6.
[4] Augsburger, Caring Enough to Hear and Be Heard, 6–7.
