I-You Conversations
The other day, my daughter Eleanor was wobbling across the living room toward the entryway where she had left one of her toys. At one year, her mobility is impressive but still clumsy, often resulting in a harmless fall. When these tumbles aren’t so harmless, she has a knack for falling onto the nearest and least padded object in a room. On this day, she was almost to the tile floor of our home’s entryway when she tripped over her walker, pitched forward, and crashed face-first onto the cold, hard tile. Blood erupted from her nose and I reflexively had her in my arms before she was able to utter her first frightened wail. I whisked her to the kitchen to grab a handful of paper towels: Mr. Fixit to the rescue.
I tilted her body backward at a slight angle to control the blood flow. I didn’t dare pinch the bridge of her nose because I wasn’t sure if it was damaged. I pinned her arms to her sides so that she couldn’t flail her tiny hands, grab at her tiny nose, and use those tiny parts to smear blood everywhere. I stayed calm, saying to her softly, methodically, and repeatedly, “It’s okay. You’re alright. Daddy’s here.” I think the repetition of my words confounded their meaning, like they were scripted, a tool, applied like a strip of duct tape to a leaky pipe. She screamed and squirmed, writhing in agony, while I did my best to hold the paper towel in place under her nose. This went on for what was probably the longest five minutes of my entire life. I was trying to solve a problem, but my approach was more systematic than calming, probably better suited for a broken lawnmower.
My wife wasn’t there, but two of our friends, Sara and Andy, were staying with us at the time. Sara found one of Eleanor’s toys: a colorful, plush butterfly with a squeaker in one wing and a small mirror in the other. Sara held the toy out to Eleanor and began shaking it back and forth, giggling and smiling at her. Eleanor stopped squirming. She stopped screaming. Her teary eye-lids unclenched, her eyes brightened, her face relaxed, the corners of her mouth turned up, and she started to laugh. I immediately saw what Sara was doing and followed her lead.
In a very short time, I went from interacting with my daughter in an “I-It” kind of way and began interacting with her in an “I-You” way. Many social exchanges can become scripted, maybe to solve a problem, or simply adhere to an unfeeling social norm. This has been called an “I-It” type of interaction. “I-You” is quite the opposite: Your interaction with another becomes oriented toward connecting with that person as an emotional equal, with attitudes and feelings that are both relevant and important. “I-You” cannot be scripted.
In the “I-It” sense, my daughter was wriggling, screaming, and bleeding, and she needed to be restrained and cleaned. I neglected to adequately account for her distress, which was relieved by appealing to her emotionally rather than trying to systematically pacify her. I might as well have been speaking softly to a lawnmower, trying to fix a piece of machinery that wasn’t working right. I was more focused on getting the bleeding to stop, so I wasn’t really connecting with her. When I realized what my friend was doing, I immediately transitioned to interacting with my daughter in the “I-You” sense. I still held her, but I focused more on being playful and distracting her from the pain and fear of the event. “I-You” was empathizing and tending to her problem warmly. Within minutes of altering my approach, Eleanor was laughing and wobbling across the living room again. Why was it so easy to tend to Eleanor, who I love dearly, so dispassionately?
As I reflected on the systematic problem-solving behavior I had initially displayed with Eleanor, it got me thinking. “I-It” requires a degree of disconnection from the people around you. Those that share your space might present problems you feel need solving. Those problems could be barriers to your sense of calm. Maybe your daily interactions become framed around finding quick solutions to those problems, or quick exchanges that satisfy your social obligations. What if this type of detached, selfish exchange pervades even the most basic social interactions?
We may be socialized to unwittingly interact with people in an “I-It” kind of way. A few years ago, my German pal, Sven, asked me why so many Americans seemed to ask people, “How are you?” without expecting much more than a, “What’s up?” in return. While many might see this exchange as a relatively normal and polite social script in the United States, Sven felt that it was horribly superficial. At the time, I failed to realize just how insightful his question was; I didn’t have an answer for him. How many people, friends, and loved ones simply respond with, “Good,” a canned response to an equally canned question? Sven observed that Americans seemed to feel awkward and impatient when he began to explain, in detail, how his day was going, even when he’d known some of those people for months. Maybe it’s just easier to keep your distance.
The social world we live in is rife with problems. We use caution as we engage with others, lest we make ourselves vulnerable to problems that aren’t our own. In an academic or work setting, we assign roles, designate tasks, and agree on deadlines. We do this to hold others accountable, to increase productivity, but also to cordon off our own obligations. Each team member is easily equated with a cog in the wheel. The wheel turns as a function of its parts: deliberately, efficiently, and impersonally. This action is achieved at the expense of the individual, the “It”. But a team is more than just the sum of its parts. The more we isolate ourselves, detach, follow the script, the less we can nurture those relationships that add real value to our lives.
I’m not saying that before every meeting we need to “hug it out,” gaze deeply into the eyes of our team-members, and tell them how much we appreciate them. We simply need to put our shields down and invest in the well-being of another, for the other’s sake. “I-You” might very well be the adhesive that holds people, teams, and organizations together even in the toughest of times. Like Eleanor, we all need to feel understood, appreciated for our unique feelings, and that we are more than just a pending inconvenience.
Carl Langley has been a lab member in the Interactive Measurement Group for two semesters. He began his first semester as a TA for PSY 210 and finished up that semester by drafting an original conference poster and presenting his work at the Nevada Psychological Conference. He is a psychology major and plans to graduate in Spring 2018. His future plans involve graduate work in the social sciences.