Chap 8: The Power of Communication Climates

Communication climates are definitely interesting aspects of our everyday communication that we have to deal with but often don't consciously take in its presence.  I really liked how this chapter linked specific communication climates and confirming/disconfirming communication styles with the general elements that are essential to having a healthy interpersonal relationship in any context- whether it be between you and your friends, you and your family, or you and your significant other. The three basic levels of building a positive, confirming relationship with others (recognition, acknowledgement, and finally acceptance) are truly key to any relationship and can be applied to any situation I believe because we all want to be recognized, acknowledged, accepted and just overall valued by the people that matter the most to us.  But if we don't respect them with the same three confirming levels of communication then the interaction cannot be improved as neither is willing to support the other by changing their communication styles.  I feel like I actually saw this a lot in the interactions two of my best friends had during our last summer in middle school.  In looking at the situation now and how their argument escalated and their friendship eventually waned quickly after at the end of the summer, I can really see how dialectical tensions and their unconscious preference for disconfirming communication played a key part in their inability to effectively communicate with each other.  Both girls had strong opinions and were unwilling to back down on any of their views whenever they got into heated debates- that sometimes they even drew the whole lunch table in on! Because of their individual strong opinions, each girl kept using the certainty method of disconfirming communication to claim that their side was the correct, better option and to refuse to even hear out the other side (in contrast to the confirming communication method provisionalism, where one communicates openness to all points of view).  Eventually because both of them were using such disconfirming attitudes to communicate with each other, they had a full out blown up conflict at the end of the summer that was mostly a build up based on their inability to listen to each other effectively and really move past the initial recognition and acknowledgment stages of relationships.