Sandra:
I remember one Saturday morning when Stephen was working at the office. I called him and said, “Stephen, come home fast. I’m going to be late for my appointment downtown, and I need help.”
“Why don’t you get Cynthia to help you?” he suggested. “She can take over, and you can be on your way.”
I replied, “She won’t help me at all. She’s totally uncooperative. I need you to come home.
“Something must have happened in your relationship with Cynthia,” Stephen said. “Cure that relationship, and everything will work out.”
“Look, Stephen,” I said impatiently, “I don’t have time. I’ve got to go. I’m going to be late. Will you please just come home?”
“Sandra, it will take me fifteen minutes to get home,” he replied. “You can solve this thing in a matter of five or ten minutes if you’ll just sit down with her. Try to identify anything you’ve done that has in any way offended her. Then apologize. If you don’t find anything you’ve done, just say, ‘Honey, I’ve been rushing around so fast that I haven’t really paid attention to your concern. I can tell something is bothering you. What is it?’ ”
“I can’t think of a thing I’ve done to offend her,” I said.
“Well,” Stephen replied, “then just sit there and listen.”
So I went to Cynthia. At first she refused to cooperate. She was just kind of numb and stolid. She wouldn’t respond. So I said, “Honey, I’ve been rushing around and haven’t listened to you, and I sense something really important is bothering you. Would you like to talk about it?”
For a couple of minutes Cynthia refused to open up, but finally she blurted out, “It’s not fair! It’s not fair!” Then she talked about how she had been told she could have a sleep-over with her friends like her sister had had, and it never happened.
I just sat and listened. At that point I didn’t even attempt to solve the problem. But as she got out all her feelings, the air began to clear.
Suddenly she said, “Go on, Mom. Take off. I’ll take over.” She knew the challenge I had been going through—trying to handle all kinds of issues with the children when no one was being cooperative. But until she got that emotional air, nothing else mattered. Once she got that air, she was able to focus on the problem at hand and do what she knew she needed to do to help out.
Remember the phrase “I don’t care how much you know until I know how much you care.” People do not care about anything you have to say when they’re gasping for psychological air—to be understood, the first evidence of caring.
Think about it: Why do people shout and yell at each other? They want to be understood. They’re basically yelling, “Understand me! Listen to me! Respect me!” The problem is that the yelling is so emotionally charged and so disrespectful toward the other person that it creates defensiveness and more anger—even vindictiveness—and the cycle feeds on itself. As the interaction continues, the anger deepens and increases, and people end up not getting their point across at all. The relationship is wounded, and it takes far more time and effort to deal with the problems created by yelling at each other than simply practicing Habit 5 in the first place: exercising enough patience and self-control to listen first.
Next to physical survival, our strongest need is psychological survival. The deepest hunger of the human heart is to be understood, for understanding implicitly affirms, validates, recognizes, and appreciates the intrinsic worth of another. When you really listen to another person, you acknowledge and respond to that most insistent need.
Knowing What Constitutes a “Deposit” in Someone’s Account
I have a friend who is happily married. For years her husband constantly said, “I love you,” and every so often he would bring her a single beautiful rose. She was delighted with this special communication of affection. It was a deposit in her Emotional Bank Account.
But she sometimes felt frustrated when he didn’t get to projects that she felt needed to be done around the home: hanging curtains, painting a room, building a cupboard. When he finally did get to these things, she responded as though he had suddenly made a hundred-dollar deposit into the account, compared to the ten-dollar deposits he was making whenever he gave her a rose.
This went on for years. Neither one of them really understood what was happening. And then one night as they were talking, she began to reminisce about her father, about how he was always working on projects around the house, repairing things that were broken, painting, or building something that would add to the value of their home. As she shared these things, she suddenly realized that to her, the things her father did represented a deep communication of his love for her mother. He was always doing things for her, helping her, making their home more beautiful to please her. Instead of bringing her roses, he planted rosebushes. Service was his language of love.
Without realizing it, our friend had transferred the importance of this form of communication to her own marriage. When her husband didn’t respond immediately to household needs, it became a huge but unrecognized withdrawal. And the “I love you’s” and the roses—though they were important to her—didn’t balance the account.
When they made this discovery, she was able to use her gift of self-awareness to understand the impact the culture in her own home had had on her. She used her conscience and creative imagination to look at her current situation with a new perspective. She used her independent will to begin to place greater value on her husband’s expressions.
In turn, her husband also engaged his four human gifts. He realized that what he had thought would be great deposits over the years were not as important to her as these little acts of service. He began communicating to her more often in this different language of love.
This story demonstrates another reason that seeking to understand is the first and foremost deposit you can make: Until you understand another person, you are never going to know what constitutes a deposit in his or her account.
Maria (daughter):
One time I planned an elaborate surprise birthday party for my husband, expecting him to be thrilled about it. He wasn’t! In fact, he hated it. He didn’t like a surprise party. He didn’t like a fuss being made over him. What he really would have liked was a nice, quiet dinner with me and a movie after. I have learned the hard way that it’s best to find out what’s really important to someone before trying to make a deposit.
It’s a common tendency to project our own feelings and motives on other people’s behavior. “If this means something to me, it must mean something to them.” But you never know what constitutes a deposit to others until you understand what is important to them. People live in their own private worlds. Your mission may be their minutia. It may not matter to them at all.
Because everyone is unique, each person needs to be loved in his or her own special way. The key to making deposits, therefore, is to understand—and to speak—that person’s language of love.
One father shared this experience of how understanding—rather than trying to “fix” things—worked in his family:
I have a ten-year-old daughter, Amber, who loves horses more than anything else in the world. Recently, her grandfather invited her to go on a daylong cattle drive. She was so excited. She was thrilled about the cattle drive and also about the fact that she would get to be with her grandfather, who also loves horses, all day long.
The night before the drive I came home from a trip to find Amber in bed with the flu. I said, “How are you doing, Amber?”
She looked at me and said, “I’m so sick!” And she started crying.
I said, “Boy, you must really feel bad.”
“It’s not that,” she said, sniffling. “I won’t be able to go on the cattle drive.” And she started crying again.
Through my mind went all of those things I thought a dad should say: “Oh, it will be fine. You can do it again. We’ll do something else instead.” But instead I just sat there and held her and didn’t say anything. I thought of times when I’d been bitterly disappointed. I just hugged her and felt her pain.
Well, the dam broke loose. She just bawled. She was shaking all over as I held her for a couple of minutes. And then it passed. She gave me a kiss on the cheek and said, “Thanks, Dad.” And that was it.
I thought again of all those wonderful things I could have said, all that advice I could have given. But she didn’t need that. She just needed someone to say, “It’s okay to be hurt, to cry when you’re disappointed.”