Home for the Holidays

How to talk to people you love when they say the things you don’t

I am no expert in what I’m about to tell you. In fact, if anything, I am an expert in failing at it. But I believe the old adage, “You learn more from your failures than you do from your successes.”

So consider me the canary in your conversational coal mine.

Many of us are about to go home for the holidays. For some, it’ll be just another of our bi-monthly treks across the bay. For others, family resides two airplanes, 2000 miles, and an entire worldview away. But in our geographically (and therefore culturally) fragmented world, many people are heading home to folks who feel, for all of their familiarity, a little foreign.

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Maybe you think differently about religion than your kids do. Maybe you live on different political planets from your parents. Maybe you’re a third culture kid, and your family’s way of relating feels unnatural to you even though you grew up with it.

The moment of tension arises in a thousand subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Your kid comes home, and they bring up that cause they’re supporting that you think is naive.

You’re sitting at the table, and your sibling makes a comment that makes it feel like they don’t even know you anymore.

You’re having a good time opening Christmas presents when your uncle says something you find deeply offensive.

In a million ways, millions of people are going to be spending time in the next couple of weeks with people they deeply cherish who deeply challenge them.

How can we navigate these moments in ways that don’t diminish ourselves or diminish our loved ones?

I want to invite you into a practice that, I believe does just that. It’s a practice that will draw you closer to your loved ones instead of hardening you in your differences. It’s a practice that has a far greater capacity to change their minds.

But here’s the danger— It has a far greater likelihood of changing your mind as well.

This practice is called “Curiosity.”

Our Default Responses

Curiosity is rarely our default response to tension with people we care about. Tension with a stranger is one thing. I can be dispassionate when divisions arise between me and someone I barely know.

But tension in our family is harder. It’s harder because we care. Because we love. Because we’re afraid that the relationship will be irreparably harmed if the deep differences persist.

In an effort to reduce, mitigate, or obliterate this strain, most of us have one of two default modes when family members say or do things we find objectionable.

The first is Debate Mode.

“Wait,” you might say, “Doesn’t debate often increase the tension?” Yes, in the short term. But the goal of the debate, in the long term, is almost always to eliminate conflict.

How does that work? The purpose of debate is to convince someone of your point of view. And if you can just manage to convince them of your point of view, you can eliminate the contentiousness of the conversation because…well…you agree.

In the way I have practiced it in the past, debate is the conversational equivalent of waging war in order to create peace by bringing the other country into submission. We’re hoping their hands go up in surrender. The only difference is we use words instead of bombs. It rarely works. And, if it does “work,” it usually only represses the conflict. It doesn’t eliminate the tension because the agreement is rarely whole-hearted. The other person rarely feels fully understood.

But more frequently, our debates end in deeper disagreement than we started with. Our tactics meant to convince—unassailable reasoning, subtle intimations of cultural or intellectual or moral superiority—actually convict the other person more deeply of their own beliefs.

Maybe you have learned this the hard way over years of heated conversations. And so, in self-defense, you opt for the second approach: Escape Mode.

You pretend you didn’t hear that comment that was made. Or when things get real, you just leave and take a walk until you calm down…but you never come back to the conversation.

Escape mode aims at eliminating tension by simply avoiding it, pretending it doesn’t exist. We often attach a kind of relational fatalism to it: “Neither of us are going to change, so we might as well not talk about it.”

Escape mode works better than debate mode at reducing tension initially. But in the end, it usually leaves us unsatisfied with the relationship, always aware of the nearest exits in case some verbal bullets start flying.

These two modes, debate and escape (fight or flight), may look radically different on the surface. However, they foment from the same relational principle: differences between us create distance and tension. Therefore, to have a relationship we must either ignore or eliminate those differences.

But what if that’s not true?

What if the differences don’t inherently separate us, but actually offer us an opportunity to see and to know our loved ones in a deeper way?

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Practicing Curiosity

In his deeply insightful book, How to Know a Person, David Brooks (no relation…but, David, if you want to be friends, please comment below) makes this profound observation:

“Each person is a mystery. And when you are surrounded by mysteries, as the saying goes, it’s best to live life in the form of a question.”

The problem with family is that we are convinced that we know them. We know their story. We know their views. We know why they think the way they do. And if we know them so well, what is there to be curious about?

He made that comment because he reads those kinds of books, or watches that channel, or hangs out with those kinds of people, or has always been that way.

The problem: We don’t know them. Not really.

I’m not saying you don’t know a lot about your family. I’m not saying you don’t know them better than you know a lot of other people.

I’m saying that my family and yours, just like every person in the known universe, are so infinitely complex that we can’t possibly know everything important there is to know about them. Social sciences have shown us over and over again that we consistently undervalue the complexity of other people’s motives and reasoning. I would be willing to bet we do that more with the people we know best.

A Curious God?

I have heard God described in a lot of ways. “Curious” is not one of them. It seems, on the face of it, like curiosity would be opposed to another quality of God’s—omniscience.

That might be true if curiosity is simply a desire to know something you don’t know already. An all-knowing God couldn’t be curious like that.

But I think curiosity is deeper than that. Curiosity about another person is less about learning new information and more about a deep attentiveness. Curiosity is not mild interest. it is a deep commitment to seeing the world from someone else’s point of view.

I believe God, from that point of view, is the most curious being in the universe.

On Christmas, Christian’s celebrate and bear witness to the miracle of the incarnation – that moment when God became human. The omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent Creator got inside of a human body, a human brain, a human perspective. There is not one example in the history of the world of such profound curiosity—such profound and generous attentiveness to the human condition.

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He knew the data. He understood intellectually what human beings are like, how we think, how we feel, how we relate. But God still took the time to see the world through human eyes.

Now, I’m not God. So if the all-knowing God could give that kind of attentiveness to me, how can I possibly not give that to my loved ones?

Why Not Be Curious?

Well, I have my reasons. So do you.

In the face of the overwhelming value of curiosity over debate/escape mode, I still choose to speak before I listen. I still choose to ignore instead of digging in. Why?

Perhaps everyone has a slightly different answer, but I expect that for many of us it comes down to this:

We are more afraid of changing than we are of our loved ones not changing.

In other words, as much as we would prefer our aunt’s political views to change, we want ours to stay the same even more.

Curiosity is a dangerous game for someone who is afraid to change. When we really attend to the depth of another human’s soul, it’s usually harder to be outraged by them. It’s usually harder to paint them as the villain and ourselves as the hero. When we ask questions like—

• What experiences have led you to believe that?

• What does thinking that do for you? How does it help you?

• How does it make you feel when people believe what I do? Why do you think that is?

— we learn a little bit more not just about them, but about ourselves. Our own biases. Our own preconceived picture of people like them. And we shift, ever so slightly, from our stable stance on the hot topic. It’s risky.

But it’s worth risking curiosity. It’s worth risking change for the people that we love.