Tag: Functional Interpersonal Meta Linguistics (FIML)

The Noble Eightfold Path and Functional Interpersonal Meta Linguistics (FIML): Part 5

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Right Speech: Once couples, partners, or close friends learn how to successfully do FIML practice, they will have enormous freedom of speech.

They will be able to speak to each other without fear of being misunderstood or wrongly judged. This is so because each person will know that if they say something that causes a jangle in the other, it will be brought up and resolved quickly. Who wants to be married to someone with whom we are afraid to speak our mind? Who wants to have to monitor their speech when they are at home with their partner? With successful FIML practice couples can enjoy a free-flowing, creative style of speaking whenever they are together.

Right Action: In Buddhism Right Action indicates harmless conduct or ethically sound conduct.

Just as our speech can be misunderstood and just as we may misunderstand words spoken to us, so our actions may be misinterpreted by our friends and loved ones. Misunderstandings based on actions can and should be addressed in FIML practice in a way that is similar to, but not exactly the same, as the ways we deal with speech misunderstandings.

Some of what we do is unconscious. Much of what is in our unconscious mind has been conditioned by the culture or subculture within which we were raised. It is not likely that any two people in this complex, modern world will have the same cultural responses to everything. Even two people raised in the same town will have some cultural differences. These might include family traditions (the family is a subculture), religious training, the kinds of friends they had or have, and so on. Some of these cultural influences are easily changed or adapted, but some are more stubborn. Cultural influences condition our actions.

Here is an example of a stubborn cultural difference I share with my SO. I come from a subculture that requires “multiple-offering”. This subculture uses multiple offering as a way of communicating feelings or negotiating what to do next, among other things. My SO was formed in a subculture that does “single-offerings.” In her subculture, if she wants to communicate her feelings or negotiate what to do next, she can just say it.

Put very simply, multiple-offering means when you invite someone or offer them food or something else, you usually have to do it several times. And if food or something else is being offered to you, you can’t just say, yes, give me some. You have to be a little demure or even refuse until it is offered a time or two more. Supposedly, in Kyoto, Japan, you must refuse an offer three times before accepting it. In my subculture, there is not such a specific requirement, but you do have to wobble a little and be reoffered at least once or twice in many/most cases. If you don’t, it seems cold or even rude.

In the single offering subculture within which my SO was raised, there is nothing as confusing as this. If someone offers you some food, you take it and say thanks if you want it. If you don’t want it, you say no thanks. It’s a great system, but one in which someone like me will go hungry.

Anyway, what we have noticed about these cultural differences is they are really deeply entrenched in us. I do multiple-offering quite subconsciously with great regularity in a wide variety of situations. I do it so often, my SO can even become mildly irritated with me, or at least she used to; now she understands how it looks from my point of view. On the flip side, she almost never does multiple-offering with me. You get one chance to jump at something and if you pass it up, you won’t get any. I used to feel that her system was pretty cold, but now I understand that it is very rational and direct, two qualities I admire. In her subculture, people negotiate feelings differently and probably more efficiently and effectively than in mine.

These ingrained cultural sensibilities that affect speech and behavior are actions. To be Right about these Actions, we don’t have to change them since neither system is harmful or unethical. All we have to do is understand that we each feel differently about them. Once we understand that, these culturally ingrained actions can play themselves out while we can find them amusing, even fascinating sometimes.

Some of our actions we can change, but some we cannot change easily. With FIML practice we should be able to figure out when cultural differences are causing misunderstandings and how to deal with them. What we have noticed about ours is some of them can and should change to be more ethically sound or more based on wisdom, but others of them can be left alone to be enjoyed as harmless artifacts of the conditioning (karma) we received in the past.

The Noble Eightfold Path and Functional Interpersonal Meta Linguistics (FIML): Part 4

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Right Speech: A great deal of Buddhist literature emphasizes the importance of Right Speech. In this post, I want to emphasize that for FIML practice right listening (or right hearing) is every bit as important. If we only pay attention to Right Speech, especially within an intimate relationship, we will very likely become sort of formal, wimpy, even dishonest, in what we say to each other.

When we do FIML practice we want be mindful both of what we say and what we hear.

Right Speech and right listening are based on Right View and Right Thought. The basic way that the Noble Eightfold Path is understood is that if our views are right, our thoughts will be right, and then Right Speech will follow from that. The problem with such a general statement, though, is that it does not take into account the many errors that can and do occur when people speak, gesture, make expressions, or listen to one another. A basic premise of FIML practice is that we frequently make errors when we speak and when we hear.

In this post, I am going to emphasize listening in relation to FIML practice because it is usually the listener who initiates a FIML query or discussion. And it is usually within the listener that a neurosis is stimulated.

To add a little background, in general terms, we can make a distinction between the limbic system of the human brain and the neocortex. The limbic system is associated with emotion, while the neocortex is associated with reasoning, conscious thought, and language. The day may come when neither of these two terms is considered useful by scientists, but they can serve us well enough for this discussion. When we have a limbic response, our heart rate often increases, we may experience a surge of adreniline, we will surely feel some sort of emotion rising within us.

In contrast to the limbic system, the neocortex is capable of observing our behavior objectively and without emotion. It is the neocortex that allows us to be mindful, to reflect on what we are doing or have done, and to make changes for the better. In FIML practice, we want to use our neocortex to help us quickly dissociate from our negative limbic responses. This means that the moment you hear your partner say something that causes a negative limbic response in you, you call on your neocortex to stop or slow that response while at the same time indicating to your partner that you want to begin a FIML query.

This may sound hard to do, and it can be difficult at first, but with a bit of practice both partners will get good at it. The main thing to understand is that we want to prevent our limbic repsonse from running away from us. If we call on the neocortex the moment we notice a limbic response rising in us, we will very likely succeed in halting that response and halting the customary neurotic thoughts and views that are associated with it.

Remember, in FIML practice, especially at first, we want to deal with very brief periods of time–just a few seconds. If your partner says something that causes you to have a limbic response and if you can identify that response immediately, there is not enough time for you to go into all the complaints and explanations you are used to. Your habitual neurotic thoughts, feelings, and stories will not have time within a few seconds to dominate your mind.

For example, if you hear what you think is derision in your partner’s voice and you feel an emotional jangle due to that tone of voice. Stop. Ask your partner without accusing them, without assuming anything else, what they just said. If their tone of voice was what caused a jangle in you, just ask them what were they thinking, why did they use that tone of voice. If you listen carefully to their answer and accept their explanation, you will almost always find that there was no derision at all in their mind. Maybe they were tired, maybe the subject (not you) seemed irritating, maybe you completely misheard them.

Once you succeed in doing this practice a few times with the same neurosis, you will discover that that neurosis will begin to lose its power. When you don’t feed it with yet another mistaken interpretation, it will begin to wither and die. The human mind is very efficient. If you can show it that there is a better way to think or do something and if your mind is convinced of that, it will change. So, when you show your mind through repeated FIML queries that one or more of its habitual interpretations (one or more of its neuroses) is clearly mistaken, your mind will abandon that wrong interpretation.

The Noble Eightfold Path and Functional Interpersonal Meta Linguistics (FIML): Part 3

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Right Thought: Just as Right Views lead to Right Thoughts, so wrong views lead to wrong thoughts.

In Functional Interpersonal Meta Linguistics (FIML), a wrong view occurs when one partner misunderstands what the other partner is saying to them. If the misunderstanding has no emotional content, it will be unlikely to cause serious problems. If I ask for a pencil and you hand me a pen because I turned my head as I said “pencil”, it is unlikely that any difficulties will result. This is so because I have asked for a particular physical object. When you hand the wrong object to me, I should know immediately that you misheard what I said. I will correct the mistake and ask you again for a pen, which you will now hand to me.

Seems so simple.

But if we are honest with ourselves, isn’t it true that we have at some time in the past formed wrong thoughts during an exchange as simple as that one? Maybe there was a bit of extra pressure, like doing taxes. In times like that who has never become irritated at having to ask twice for something? Who has never blamed the person who misheard the word you mispronounced? Or if you were the one doing the handing, who has never become irritated and said, “Make up your mind already!” And what couple has never gotten into a fight over an incident as small as that?

Once the fighting starts, who knows where it will end? We can be sure that throughout history many human beings have lost their lives over less than that.

I hope the example above illustrates several points: 1) that the start of the misunderstanding is nothing more than a mistake; 2) that if the mistake is discovered and corrected immediately, no wrong view or wrong thoughts will be formed; 3) but if the mistake is not discovered and corrected, there is a significant chance that an emotional scene will follow.

Even if there is no emotional scene, this situation may well result in one or both partners harboring wrong thoughts. I may not say anything, but I may think that you never listen because you don’t respect me. Or you may stay quiet but think that I am disrespecting you by making so many requests. Unfortunately, there are far too many ways in which even very affectionate couples or close friends can misunderstand each other.

If a misunderstanding does develop from an incident like this, isn’t it clear that that misunderstanding will be likely to grow stronger when similar incidents occur? Once we have formed a wrong view and bolstered it with wrong thoughts, we will have a great tendency to find even more evidence for our wrong thoughts.

In previous posts we have called wrong thoughts of this type neuroses or, to use the Buddhist term, kleshas.

FIML practice is designed to help us focus on very small incidents of wrong view or wrong thought. Doing this helps us discover exactly how and why our neuroses are formed and maintained. By focusing on very small, even trivial, incidents like the one described above, FIML practitioners will learn how to disentangle themselves from the wrong thoughts and neuroses that cause so much trouble in their interpersonal relationships.

If you can catch yourself forming a wrong view and the wrong thoughts that must necessarily follow, you will probably discover one of your neuroses (kleshas) as it is happening. If you can discuss this objectively with your partner and see the matter from their point of view, you will very likely succeed in disentangling, at least for the moment, from that habitual neurotic reaction. And if you can do this three, four, or five times with incidents involving the same neurosis, you will very likely cause that neurosis to be eliminated from your mind like smoke in the wind.

The Noble Eightfold Path and Functional Interpersonal Meta Linguistics (FIML): Part 2

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Right View: The opposite of a Right View is a wrong view or a delusion. In Buddhist teachings almost all people are considered to be deluded almost all of the time. Another way of saying that is everyone is crazy.

In Functional Interpersonal Meta Linguistics (FIML) wrong views (or neuroses or craziness) arise when we form an erroneous interpretation of what someone is saying or has said. When we are not certain about what someone means, we are all but forced to fill in the blanks with an interpretation that arises in our own mind. Generally, those kinds of interpretations will have a long history in us. If we are insecure, for example, we will tend to interpret what people are saying to us in a negative or self-abnegating way.

With most people in most situations, we cannot do much to correct this problem. In most situations, if someone says, “you look nice today,” we cannot ask them if they really mean it. If we are insecure about our looks, we may be powerless to avoid drawing the conclusion that the person is patronizing us by trying to make us feel good. If we are really insecure, we might even decide they are insulting us and walk away feeling offended.

In FIML practice, this kind of very common problem can be corrected by working with your partner. In a secure setting if your partner says, “you look good today”, if you feel a jangle of insecurity or discomfort at hearing those words, you can stop the conversation right there and ask: “Why did you say that? What was in your mind when you said that?” Chances are your partner, especially if they are your spouse, really does think you look good. If that’s the case, you can talk about that for a while and explain how compliments like that usually make you feel, how you both understand what looking good means, etc..

If your partner really was just trying to cheer you up with their compliment, from now on they will know that this is not a good way to do that. Once you both understand each other’s states of mind when that compliment was given, you will then have the opportunity to have a long conversation about compliments, how they feel, why you like or dislike them, when you give them and why, and so on. The important thing to understand is that in doing a FIML exercise, at the very moment that a jangle of neurosis begins to arise within you, you will disentangle yourself from the usual cascade of bad feelings that normally follow. Your partner will also benefit from understanding you better, and in many cases, they will benefit because they have similar feelings themselves.

If conditions allow, FIML practice can and should be done whenever either partner feels a jangle of discomfort, anxiety, fear, sadness, etc. while interacting with each other. If we are mindful, we should with practice be able to immediately stop our conversation and fully explain our states of mind to each other. What we want to do is explain the few seconds just before and during the jangle of discomfort as it arises. If both partners can remember their states of mind and if they can explain them in an objective fashion (no emotion here), both will greatly benefit from the increase in mutual understanding. And both will have taken another step toward basing their relationship on a Right View of each other.

FIML practice emphasizes language because when we work with language, we have good objective data. We want to avoid, especially in the beginning, going into long explanations about our psychology. Instead, we want to focus very clearly on what the words just spoken were and how we may have interpreted them. We can also focus on tone of voice, expression, gesture, or demeanor, but keeping a clear memory of what the words were will almost always make FIML exercises run more smoothly. In many cases, the speaker may simply have chosen a vague word, or a wrong one, and by explaining that remove the need to go any further.

FIML exercises can also be done with excessive or misplaced positive feelings, but negative ones tend to be more common and are easier to deal with at first.

The Noble Eightfold Path and Functional Interpersonal Meta Linguistics (FIML): Part 1

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The first four parts of the Noble Eightfold Path are Right View, Right Thought, Right Speech, and Right Action. In the sections below, we will discuss Functional Interpersonal Meta Linguistics (FIML) in relation to these four parts.

Right View: An important aspect of having Right View is knowing that our minds are deluded in many ways. In Buddhist terminology, we say that our minds contain many kleshas. The word klesha is translated as “defilement”, “hindrance” (to enlightenment), “toxic fixation”, etc. A klesha is a delusion. It is an error or a mistake in consciousness. It is a wrong view.

It is very difficult to overcome or eradicate kleshas because much of what they obstruct is Right View. When we add the practice of FIML to Buddhist practice, because we are including an intimate partner, we make it much easier to identify our kleshas and correct them.

Right Speech: In the practice of FIML, we focus on the dynamics of our speech and our partner’s speech as it is happening in the moment. For our purposes, a moment is defined as 3-10 seconds. It cannot be longer than what both partners are able to remember with great clarity. Spoken language is a linear series of sounds whose basic unit of meaning is generally a phrase or a word. By focusing on only small bits of language–usually no more than a phrase or two–we provide both partners with real data that they both can agree on. If I say, “I want to go to the store” and you agree that you just heard me say “I want to go to the store”, we can do FIML with that phrase because we both agree on it. If you think you heard me say “I want to go to the floor”, we can also do FIML, as long as you accept my correction when I say that what I really said was “store” not “floor”.

Right Thought: Once two partners (for discussion we will use only two partners in our examples) have fully agreed on exactly what was said, a discussion of the thoughts and feelings behind what was said and heard can take place. To be very crude, if I said “I want to go to the store” and you thought you heard me say “I think you are a whore” much pain and misunderstanding would result if this mistake were not corrected immediately. A good FIML exercise often begins at this point–when one partner believes they have heard something disturbing, something that makes their nerves jangle or that causes unpleasant feelings to arise. At this point, the hearer should immediately begin a FIML exercise by signalling that that is what they are doing and then proceeding in a neutral state of mind to open a FIML query. In this case, the hearer would say something like, “Stop: What did you just say?” The speaker, ideally, would stop and recall what they had just said and then repeat it: “I said ‘I want to go to the store.'” At this, the hearer will probably laugh and say, “I thought you said ‘I think you are a whore.'”

In this example, the FIML exercise might end there. It might also continue with a discussion of why the hearer misheard in that way. Partners might also want to discuss what might have happened had the mistake not been corrected.

Right Action: In FIML exercises Right Action entails observing and/or controlling our emotional reactions the moment they arise. We want to be mindful enough to catch them the moment they arise and trusting enough to discuss them with our partner right away. If the two partners in the example above start arguing about what the speaker really said (“You did too call me a whore, you stupid drunk.”), obviously no progress will be made and basic kleshas will be strengthened.

Good practice of Right Action requires partners, to the best of their abilities, to be mindful of what was said and heard, to observe and control their emotional reactions, to listen to each other, and to be honest with each other. If emotions get out of control, it is best to agree to drop the subject and return to it the next time something like it comes up. If a real klesha is involved, you can be certain a similar or closely related misunderstanding will arise again. Both partners will be better equipped to deal with it when that next happens if they are capable of realizing that they might not have handled themselves as well as they could have during the exercise that just got derailed.

Right Action also comes into play in FIML in that during FIML exercises we must also be aware of our tone of voice, our expression, our gestures, demeanor, and so on. All of these are “actions”. We will get Right about them when we are clear about what they are and how they appear to our partner.

FIML exercises can get heated and go wrong, but once you get the hang of it, that is a very rare occurrence. Over time, a strong foundation of mutual trust and understanding will help partners achieve a Right View of almost all situations that arise between them.

Communication Errors and Neurosis: Part 1

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Human communication requires us to fill in many blanks. When we speak with others, we are forced to make guesses about their intentions, choice of words, tone of voice, and more.

In most of our dealings with other people, there is not much we can do to change this. If we are in a store, we normally accept the context of being a customer buying something and expect little more from the salesperson than a pleasant demeanor and basic good manners. If we are the salesperson, we know that we have to offer those qualities and can only hope that our customers will reciprocate. If they are rude, there is little we can do.

No matter where we are, our speech and interactions with others are determined by the context. The context may be a doctor’s office, a bus stop, a hunting camp, a school, a store, or a floor of cubicles in a large corporation. When the context is public, professional, or otherwise well-defined, most of us do not have too much trouble conforming to expectations and playing our predetermined roles in a suitable manner.

When the context of our speech and behavior is more private, however, it also becomes less well-defined. Private interpersonal communications cannot rely on the public norms that support us in stores and offices. Our private lives require a different sort of communication from our public and professional lives.

During private or intimate communications, our need to make guesses about our companions’ intentions, choice of words, or tone of voice becomes both more significant and more difficult to do.

When we blindly fill in the blanks while communicating with a close companion or friend, we inevitably make mistakes. Moreover, the mistakes we make will tend to compound or snowball causing us to build up a consistent and mistaken understanding of our friend. Generally, these compounded mistakes will snowball along the same courses of mistakes we have made in the past. If we are insecure, we will tend to fill in the blanks with interpretations that confirm our insecurities.

What makes all of this even more problematical is our friend is forced to do the same thing with us. If you are insecure and start mistakenly withdrawing from them, they may start to believe you are being arrogant or cold due to their mistaken interpretation of you.

I want to emphasize that we are talking about mistakes here. In Functional Interpersonal Meta Linguistics (FIML), a neurosis is defined as an “ongoing mistaken interpretation.” Mistaken interpretations keep going on within us (and becoming neuroses) because we keep reconfirming them again and again by our mistaken interpretations of what our friends are saying to us. FIML is a method of correcting these kinds of mistakes and thereby of eliminating neuroses.

How many mistakes does it take to form a neurosis? I believe we can and often do start forming neuroses from as little as a single mistaken interpretation. Once the ball starts rolling down the hill in one direction, it will keep going in that direction.

How many mistaken interpretations do we form in a day? I believe we form many mistaken interpretations during any day that we interact with friends. Some of these mistaken interpretations will be positive and some negative. Most of them will seem normal to us or even pass by unnoticed.

Why we need Functional Interpersonal Meta Linguistics (FIML)

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We need Functional Interpersonal Meta Linguistics (FIML) because human communication is fraught with error. Communication errors are unavoidable. They happen very often.

At the most basic level, errors occur because the speaker misspoke or the listener misheard. Basic errors may involve words, expressions, gestures, or tone of voice.

More complex errors may involve misunderstandings concerning context, intention, or interpretation.

In normal communication, most people do not correct these sorts of errors. Instead, they react to them not as if they were errors but rather the real intention of the speaker. Sometimes, of course, people do attempt to understand and correct communication errors, but most do not do this often enough or with sufficient appreciation for the potential significance of even small errors. Even very basic communication errors can lead people into a mutual spiral of deep misunderstanding.

Functional Interpersonal Meta Linguistics (FIML) is a practice designed to help couples or close friends quickly understand and deal with the errors that inevitably occur in their communications with each other.