"Gee, all this whizz-bang technology for communication! Does anybody have anything to say?"

Well, years later, captured myself on the fringe of the internet, I see there are some people out there saying things. Now I'm wondering:

" Is anybody listening?"

During these same years of the computer-modem-email-internet-world-wide-web growing-up, I've been in my own adolescence, so to speak. I've been learning how to work with people in conflict, even how to train others to work with people in conflict. I call it an 'adolescence' because these years of mediating disputes have had their zits and hormonal reactions, boredoms and growth-spurts like any other adolescence.

I've read a lot of books, attended a lot of trainings. The most valuable learning, however, comes from looking and learning about myself. Here, then, for all the world, at least the Synapse readers, are Tom Shea's late-life adolescent learnings about communication. In a sentence, learning how to listen is the most critical skill.

Corollaries:
(1) People's messages come coded in a scramble of combined emotion and meaning.
(2) Peoples' feelings are their own, separate from mine, as in: 'No one else can make me angry. I anger myself.'

The reason I'm sharing my own story is to encourage readers interested in enhancing communication skills to write, dictate, or talk out their own stories, day-to-day. Tell yourself about your communication ups and downs. Record them. Then rewrite your script, edit your tape, for better results next time.

My first learning about messages as a mix of emotion and meaning rises from my work in conflict management begun in the early 80's. By that time, I'd been a manager of a variety of enterprises: high school athletic department, history department, inner-city programs for youth, a school-without-walls, a volunteer corps, a job placement program, a social work agency. These jobs carried a high level of emotional voltage.

My own communication style was wired along the line of analytic and logical with a coating of participatory involvement. Tension between my mind and my emotions caused me a lot of personal pain. It eventually shocked me into a major life change. I jumped from twenty-two years of work in the inner city of Cleveland to what's become seventeen years of work in northern Michigan. "Work," meaning work on myself as well as with others.

Here in the early 80's, the mind-emotion mix churned up conflicts, both personal and professional. My search began for information about conflict resolution. I designed a college course to enlist others in the search. This led to training as a mediator and training others to be mediators. The search, the trainings all have elements of self-reflection. It's clear to me the most critical skill for communication is not talking, it's listening. Good listeners hear, decode, and reflect the mix of meaning and emotion in the speaker's message.

I liken communication to the process of metabolism. I must open myself to taking in the total nourishment of another person's communication: subject matter, nuance of feeling, body language and context. Then digest, metabolize, make it all my own and try to say it back as I feel and hear it. There's an instant nutritional index telling me whether I got the message. The communicator usually confirms with "exactly" "yes, that's it" "right". The communicator also lets me know if "You just don't get it." With luck, I can try again.

My second learning about feelings, corollary (2), came through my partnership with Darylene. She is very clear about anger, guilt, fear. She can express it, confront it, and knows the boundary between her own emotions and those that belong to other people. My intellectual preparation for this schooling came when I managed a counseling agency in which some key people studied and practiced Bowen Family Systems Theory, a therapy that emphasizes the differentiation of the individual within the family system.

Differentiation comes down to personal responsibility for my own actions and emotions, unencumbered by entanglement with the anxieties of other family, organizational, or societal members. The undifferentiated individual gets bound up into another person's feelings. The two become one in an unhealthy way. Such that, "I can't hear what you're saying 'cause I've become too much a part of your guilt, fear, anger, or frustration." The differentiated person can hear, respect, and allow the other person's emotional state, because the differentiated individual has a good grasp of her or his own mental state and emotional boundaries.

Two learnings: how to listen, how to honor another's feelings. Growing up amid the megabytes.