Conversational Navigation
Keep an even keel
At the beginning of the 1995 film Crimson Tide, Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington ride atop a submarine, savoring the sunset and the fresh air one more time before they submerge for the next sixty-five days. Once they get down there, it’s going to be tense and cramped and (spoilers) there’s going to be a mutiny.
So they pause and take in the present moment at the surface.
Then they go below, they close the hatch and give the order: “Make your depth one five zero feet. Dive! Dive!”
A lot of couples I work with are not intentional about how and when they talk about hard things. The helmsman of the submarine of their conversation is asleep, so the submarine dives randomly and unexpectedly, and it stays submerged way too long without enough oxygen and supplies to sustain the dive.
Sometimes they never come up for air at all – they just circle the globe hundreds of meters under the surface for years at a time, becoming increasingly radioactive.
This isn’t about how to have difficult conversations without getting radioactive, that’s a very large subject unto itself. This is about being aware of where you are under the sea, and that you have the option of moving your submarine somewhere else.
A Nautical Map
Let’s start by mapping the conversational sea in a generic way.
The shallowest water is the meta-conversation. Instead of talking about the subject itself, you discuss:
whether now is a good time to talk, or if not, when would be
how long to spend on the conversation
what you hope to get out of the conversation
whose turn it is to talk and whose to listen, and when to switch
Diving a little deeper, it may take work to carve a complicated conversation into subparts. Often there are multiple facets of the problem; almost certainly there are multiple points of view. There may be phases to the conversation, such as understanding each point of view and then later trying to solve the problem or make a decision. While all of these concepts are still meta-conversation, you can’t really sort them out without at least alluding to the content.
Diving deeper still, you start having the actual subpieces of the conversation. And within any give subtopic you can go really deep:
lots of detail (“the weeds,” or I guess it’s kelp in this metaphor)1
the heavy emotions that the topic brings up for you
the story you’re telling yourself about what the situation means
patterns, history, and sometimes trauma
So we’re navigating in multiple dimensions: moving laterally for subtopics and going deeper as we get into trickier subjects in more detail and discovering how emotionally laden they may be.
What Lurks Below
Near the surface of your conversation, you might feel easy, relaxed, like it’s no big deal. But as you go deeper, you might begin to feel that the conversation is complex and requires your skill and focus. And then, if things go poorly, you may begin to feel upset, threatened, misunderstood, and finally dysregulated, like your submarine has sprung a leak and you might drown.
Once you become dysregulated, you are probably no good at piloting that submarine! For example, it’s common for people to try to clarify or give more explanatory detail, thinking this will stabilize the conversation, but in fact it has the opposite effect. The extra detail tends to make the submarine go deeper, making the conversation harder to tolerate. It’s hard to navigate in those dark, murky waters.
The Value of Charting a Course
I mentioned above that meta-conversation – the conversation about the conversation – happens in the shallowest water and is easiest to tolerate. That’s because meta-conversation is lower stakes and less inflammatory. It’s more like trying to schedule and set an agenda for a business meeting than it is about anything personal.
When you’re up at the meta level, you can set yourself up for success – but you can’t actually succeed. You’re talking around the subject, not really diving into it.
When you’re down at the object level, both the potential risk and the potential reward are much higher. Whatever your goal is, this is where you might find it: feeling understood, solving a problem, making a decision, getting the other person to agree to do it differently next time, learning something you didn’t know before.
But this is also where you run the most risk of hurt, conflict, pain, and disappointment. The trickier the topic, the more skill and care it might take to have a successful conversation about it.
You can learn how to tolerate conversational depth. There’s a whole suite of skills for how you speak and how you listen when you’re really getting into the heart of an issue. When you use these skills you’ll be able to stay down there for a while without getting crushed by the pressure of the sea.
But even for people with a lot of skill, these conversations require intention and focus. It’s work. You should limit your stay so you don’t exhaust yourself.
Spending some time in the shallow water of the meta-conversation lets you choose how deep you dive, in what part of the conversational sea, and for how long. When you’re ready, you should go ahead and dive – that’s where the work gets done. If you realize you’re in too deep, you have the option of coming up to the meta level to reorient yourself, or coming all the way to the surface to take a break and get some air. You’ll have a more successful voyage if you try again when you’re better equipped.
Overall, simply knowing where in the sea you are and where you want to be will greatly increase how well your conversations go. Do better than Gene Hackman, avoid military tribunal, and live to voyage another day!
Well actually no weeds grow in the deepest part of the ocean because there’s not enough light down there! No metaphor is perfect.