Compassionate Communication

As a small disclaimer – I have probably gathered concepts from countless articles online and books I have read. This is my take on the subject, sourced as best I can remember.

The video directly below contains the entirety of the service, including the YouTube videos played during it. Alternatively, below that is my prepared written text that I am reading from. At various points I interject extra words in the moment, but mostly stick to script. At the end are various sources that I refer to.

Today’s service is broadly about the concept of compassionate communication. I feel that now more than ever, it’s important to put extra effort into both understanding others and being understood ourselves.

Throughout this service I am going to be exploring what the act of communication is and how it has evolved up to this point.

What I plan to say today is the result of many thought experiments, my observations of communities across the political spectrum, my experience working in marketing, and my experience of being largely isolated in my youth and exploring society for the first time in adulthood.

The act of communication is fascinating to me. With the right message you can inform others, find empathy in them, show empathy to others – or you can influence them, outright control them, and even convince them to fight against their own self-interest. 

I’m pretty sure most of the people I know have little desire to do the latter half of those things. Because they have no desire, they usually aren’t interested in mingling with those who do have the desire to control others or those being manipulated.

I have little interest in doing the controlling or manipulating, but I am very interested in learning the communication methods underlying that control. Rarely can those being manipulated be let loose from it with arguments or conversations rooted in aggression or logic. Humans don’t tend to respond well to being told they’re wrong. By learning why they are acting how they are, I hope I can better act and communicate in ways that allow us to better understand each other. Then, hopefully, we can both come away with less aggression towards the mythical ‘They’ that we’re always being told about and see each other as complex individuals.

Today, I’m going to lead this service in a breakdown of the act of communication. Before we get into that, I have to clarify a few things for the sake of this discussion.

What Is Information?

Information is the basis of communication. Information is everything we use to describe everything else. 

Here’s a video from Khan Academy that explains it so much better than I can

I believe that language as a whole is an emergent property of social creatures, like humans, that exchange information.

Tidbits

For the sake of my own sanity, I will be introducing my own definition for a common term – a Tidbit

Within the context of this service, a Tidbit is any small act of communication between two or more individual organisms that conveys a specific piece of information between them. This can be vocal, written, signal, chemical, or other. 

I feel this is an important term to have and define, as most acts of communication contain many layers of information. Misunderstanding information on one layer of a message can completely alter the meaning of the message as a whole. Breaking communication into small individual units allows me to better see the filters through which I perceive reality. 

An important aspect of Tidbits is that they are acts of communication between two or more organisms. As tidbits are strung together, they become messages capable of conveying more complex information. 

As an example, a knowing glance between old friends could count as a tidbit. Because of their pre-existing relationship, that one glance can be loaded with history and specific information that nobody else would know. 

A single conversation between two humans could involve the exchange of multitudes of tidbits, though most wouldn’t necessarily be on the conscious level. As they talk, each person is subconsciously sending and receiving tiny signals in body language, facial expressions, and vocal tone that indicate how they might feel about the various topics being discussed or activities underway.

Which brings me to my next point – language itself. 

But first we have the collection and a perfectly relevant music video.

<This is just a silly relevant video added to play while my congregation did our collection for donations>

Language, The Longest Running Game

Language is a social construct in a similar way to games like Hide & Seek. It only works if everyone involved knows at least the basic rules. It’s not as exclusive to humans as we once thought, though.

Prairie dogs will have one member of their group stay on guard and send out an alert signal if they spot danger. That alert signal contains many small individual tidbits that can inform the colony of the physical characteristics of any approaching creatures. The colony, which teaches young prairie pups the meaning behind the alerts, will respond as a group appropriately.

What seems to differentiate humans from other animals is that we can write, an ability that lets us express our inner thoughts externally without another person, pass information through generations, and communicate over long distances. 

It allowed humans to begin recording things – and record things we did.

Organized Religion

But mostly just one thing. 

The bible has an estimated total sales of over five billion copies, making it the best-selling publication of all time. [B]

While organized religion’s role in society may be fading, I feel it is important to bring attention to it in order to foster a more compassionate attitude in myself when talking both about and to those who are religious. Sometimes it feels like organized religion is everywhere and fighting progress at every turn. It makes it easy to forget that, in western culture at least, organized religion has played a major role in civilization up to this point.

The role I am referring to is Information & Social Hubs. Until just under 600 years ago, historical literacy rates were around 20% in Western cultures – in part because books were hard to produce and thus reserved for those who could afford them. While the church is well known for suppressing information, what isn’t as often discussed is how many schools throughout history were either religious in nature or supported by religions. [M]

In times before most people could read, the church was a center for information and a very reliable way to connect with people on a regular basis. It served other purposes too – if you had a child too many and it was a bad harvest season, you might have them join the clergy or a convent to help the whole family survive. Or if you had a child with potential, you might try to send them to a university supported by the church.

Those who are still religious today have often formed deep connections to their religion. It likely serves a valuable role in their life and their family’s life. With the invention of electronic communication and especially the internet, communicating and socialization are no longer limited by physical bounds – pushing organized religion even further out of the center it once occupied.

Since the invention of the printing press around 1450, literacy has trended upwards [L] and organized the church’s role as an information hub in western society has trended downwards. It still has parts to play – churches still serve a valuable role to many as a social hub and a source of commonality. A place for people to come together with others that they consider ‘like them’ on a regular basis and celebrate, mourn, gossip, and connect.

But even that is fading, according to 2022 polls. Nearly half of those born after 1996 have no religious affiliation whatsoever. [R] As organized religion’s role in society weakens, as churches lose members and dwindle, it feels to me like many of these people are more afraid than anything else. Afraid of losing what little they have in service of things they don’t understand. 

I am very familiar with feelings along those lines, so I can’t help but want to feel compassion for others who feel them.

Throughout that history, organized religion has taken advantage of language and information access to shape society. Whether the shape it gave us is good or bad, we are the results.

If we as a society want to grow instead of fracturing, I believe we have to accept that organized religion was and will continue to be a fundamental part of that fabric. At the same time I believe that we, as humanists, regardless of any other religious belief, must refuse to allow it to have significant control of humanity’s future. 

The first step towards doing that is looking within ourselves and exploring the roots of our individual communications.

How Our Upbringings Shape Us

The next aspect of compassionate communication I want to explore comes back to childhood development.

We have explored what information, communication, and language are, and the role organized religion has had on developing society. Now it is time to explore human communication on the individual level.

Humans are creatures of information. We start out as blank slates and take decades to develop to full maturity. Our survival to adulthood and capacity to thrive is entirely dependent on other humans caring for our physical needs while figuratively spoon-feeding us the right information during the right stages of development.

The earliest years of our development are often the most vital and least remembered. It’s during these years that we learn language through observation of those closest to us. While we’re learning, we’re taking the emotions and associations we felt at the time to create ‘filters’ that last us throughout life.

As adults, most new information we take in goes through sets of filters before it reaches our conscious level. Whether a childhood was good or bad, whether the child grew up well adjusted or maladjusted – it all goes towards building these filters. 

If, when you were first learning language, your mother warned you the candle flame was hot but didn’t stop you from touching it, on some level your body likely remembers being burned and associates it with the word ‘hot.’ When you see a candle as an adult, you automatically know that the flame is hot because your brain has the previous experience to rely on.

The early years of development form a foundation for the rest of our lives. It shapes the language we actively use in daily life, as well as shaping how we receive the information that others are conveying. Even if you had the perfect childhood, it’s likely that your vocabulary is riddled with associations both positive and negative that you aren’t consciously aware of. These associations make up the filters through which we hear the words that others say.

It doesn’t end with spoken vocabulary either. Body language and tone can send all kinds of messages that can agree with or contradict the messages we’re saying out loud. If someone grows up in a household where the only time they hear they are loved for the first five years of life is when they’re being beaten with a paddle, they may form mal-adjusted filters. If that person makes it to adulthood without receiving help, they may feel only rage, pain, and emptiness when anyone else tries to give them genuine love – in any form. These associations can last throughout the person’s lifetime, triggering internal feelings every time they hear or use the word ‘love.’

It seems likely that person would go on to have unhealthy relationships, but that is far from a guarantee. Many people do go on to reshape the filters they assembled in their youth, breaking the cycle of abuse that may have spanned their family for generations. In this specific example, the person may undergo therapy to rewrite those associations. The paths and filters set in place in our youth are not set in stone, but they do require much introspection to alter.

Shaping Reality through Compassionate Communication

Which comes to the meat of this service. Given the things talked about, how can we make an effort to communicate compassionately with so many potential differences between us?

By appreciating that, like most things in life, compassionate communication is going to be highly dependent on each individual situation and each individual person. It means entering a conversation with the intent to hear the underlying message another person is attempting to communicate, while simultaneously attempting to communicate your own message (if you have one) in a fashion that person will understand.

Again, this is multi-layered. 

If someone you are close to is angry at something completely unrelated to you, stomping around the room, speaking in an angry tone, and screams ‘Thank you!’ when you hand them their coat, what would you do? Their words are clearly sending one message, while tone and body language are sending another.

Compassionate communication doesn’t simply mean allowing this person to treat you like this if it makes you uncomfortable. It means understanding that in that moment, they are only capable of that behavior. You can’t change that, only they can. Responding in kind is likely to just make it worse. Sometimes the only thing you can do is respond to the vocal message with ‘You’re welcome,’ and leave the situation. 

If you want to keep this person in your life, the next step would be communicating with them during a time of calm by telling them that you understand the anger wasn’t directed at you – but that it is unacceptable to be shouted at, and that it needs to be worked on for the relationship to continue. 

That’s all we can do – we can’t force this person to change, no matter we might want to. I don’t believe compassionate communication ever plays a part in the manipulation of others. In fact, I think it is what enables us to free others from manipulation.

You can see this in the work of Daryl Davis – a black musician famous for befriending members of the KKK.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pESEJNy_gYQ

To put a long story in much shorter words: Language is more complicated than we think and communicating with compassion is really freaking hard. But still worth the effort.

For me, communicating with compassion means accepting that some people will be religious and standing for their ability to do so, while standing steadfast against those that will try to push their religion on me or others. More specifically, it means trying to be less aggressive or condescending in my language when referring to beliefs that I don’t hold. 

I don’t believe in a higher power myself, nor do I see myself ever believing – but I don’t want to be seen as seeing others as any less for believing. I can’t know exactly what it feels like for them to have that religious belief, I can only respect it and request my lack of belief be respected in turn.

Wrapping Up

We have a tendency to assume that the spoken or written language is the start and stop of communicating with each other. The truth is that communication is a multi-layered act that reflects what we’re saying, our current moods, associations from our past both remembered and forgotten, and contextual factors that we aren’t always aware of. 

As an example, going back to the ‘Tidbit’ term from earlier – right now I am speaking one message with the words that are coming out of my mouth. 

The tone that I am speaking in for each individual word is a ‘Tidbit’ conveying how I feel about that word and the full sentence.

My posture is a ‘Tidbit’ conveying how comfortable I am in this situation as a whole.

And the words I chose are reflective of my many thought experiments, my experience exploring communities across the political spectrum, working in marketing, and my experience of being largely isolated in my youth and exploring society for the first time in adulthood.

By knowing about these things beforehand, I can make an effort to influence them – to try and convey confidence in posture when I feel super nervous inside, or to try and sound strong in tone when I feel weak in the knees, or to choose specific words that I think might impact my audience in a particular way.

The point of this service is to highlight two things:

  1. Despite being something we do every day, basic communication is a multi-layered act that can be influenced by a multitude of factors and can be easily misunderstood. Compassionate communication is simply accepting that fact while striving to both understand others and be understood.
  1. Despite how fast technology seems to be advancing, language itself is only 60,000 to 100,000 years old. The oldest writing we know of is only around 6,000 years old, give or take a few thousand years. Until the invention of the printing press around 575 years ago, the church was the most efficient method of distributing culture and information. Until the invention of the internet, the church was still one of the better structured methods of socializing that could be relied upon even upon moving to a new town – in theory.

In short, it means I’m going to work to find commonalities instead of differences.

Thank you for listening <or reading> to my service.

Sources

https://religioninpublic.blog/2023/04/03/gen-z-and-religion-in-2022/  [R]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible [B]

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/estimated-historical-literacy-rates [L]

https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/culture-magazines/medieval-education-and-role-church [M]

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