The Trouble with Conversation:

A non-fiction book by Fletcher Kovich

 

Introduction—My struggle to understand

An introduction to this book and also a personal and frank account of the childhood experiences that eventually compelled me to write the book.

What is the trouble with conversation? When you are using it merely to pass the time of day, it probably seems to serve its purpose. But when you try to communicate about personal matters, or on any topic that matters to you, then you may have noticed that communication can sometimes rapidly break down. When people can not understand what you are trying to say, or when they do understand but seem to have misinterpreted you, what is going on here? I have wrestled with these types of questions for most of my life.

When we experience communication problems with certain people, it is tempting to imagine that the problems must be due to some flaw in the other person. But even as a child, I found myself suspecting that a part of this problem may have been due to something about the words themselves. In later years, I found this to be true, but I also found that there is a similar problem with the way we form our impressions of other people. When we see an unpleasant personality trait in someone and we even start to dislike or hate the person because of this, usually our impression of the person is entirely wrong. They do not have this trait that we have imagined in them and there is a much simpler explanation for their behaviour. Realizing all these things has not only made communication much less frustrating for me, but it has also enabled me to avoid wrongly imagining unpleasant personality traits in many people. This has meant that where my world was previously populated by unpleasant people whom I disliked or even loathed, I now find that most of the people I know are perfectly normal and likeable.

The conspiracy of silence in my childhood home

I think I have always been preoccupied with communication. Some of my earliest memories are of my awareness of the lack of communication between people. At the age of about eight, I remember sitting in the family home with the other family members, who were all watching the television in the corner of the room. I recall myself looking round at them and thinking how bizarre it seemed that they were not talking to one another. They were each ignoring the people around them and staring at that box in the corner of the room. This may have been my first conscious awareness that there was a lack of communication between people, and this issue was set to become a major preoccupation of mine that would last until I had completed this book, some forty years later.

In my family home, there was never any meaningful communication from the adults. My father hardly ever spoke. His only efforts to make contact would be when he was irritated in some way by someone’s behaviour. He would then aggressively order people to shut up, or to perform some task that he wanted performing, or to change the way they were doing something, and he would usually embellish his barked order with body language that threatened the use of physical violence if his commands were not obeyed.

At other times, he might make some incompetent attempt at giving advice. His comment would always be delivered with, what seemed like, a feeling of panic, and as he was speaking he would be poised to walk away, and would usually quickly make an exit as soon as he had delivered his “pearl of wisdom”. From various stages of my childhood, I can clearly recall these few panic-delivered pearls of his. I found his comments striking because they seemed so child-like to me. As an adult, imagine that you are having a discussion with another adult, when a nearby child then makes an observation. To you, the child’s comment may seem so naïve that it simply does not apply in the adult world and all you can do is to disregard it, after smiling at the charming simplicity of the child. To me, in my own childhood, that was exactly how my father’s comments, and his personality, seemed. He was like a child, but a child who had found himself in charge of a family.

My hatred of my father was an illusion

Whenever my father was present, there seemed to be an atmosphere of nervous silence that would descend like a black mist as he entered the room. At the time, it seemed to me that this nervous silence had been created by his behaviour, by his personality, and I hated him for all his brutal behaviour (as it seemed to me) and for what he had done to that family. Many years later, during the process of writing this book, I realized that none of this was as it had seemed. There was a much simpler explanation for all his behaviour. None of it had been intended as aggression and I had misinterpreted most of his words and actions.

For example, during my childhood, one of the things that caused me to hate my father was the way he spoke to my mother (which to me seemed brutal, intolerant, insensitive). But much later in life, I would come to see these situations from his point of view. At that stage, whenever I found myself attempting to have a one-to-one conversation with my mother, I found myself quickly giving up. She would misinterpret even the simplest of comments, would not understand the point of what you were saying, would assume you were talking about a different subject, and her replies often bore no relation to your comment. You might ask a question and she would answer a completely different question. Or her reply would assume that you had made some observation which was wrong and she was correcting it, but you had made no such observation, nor any even remotely like it. It was truly as though see were living in some sort of parallel universe that only had a tenuous connection with ours; her body was present, but her mind was elsewhere, and uncontactable. All these things were so irritating that I found myself avoiding making even the simplest of comments to her because I knew that there would be no point. And if I had been an aggressive person, I would often have found myself shouting at her to correct her, as I recalled my father frequently doing. When, in my thirties, I first started to notice just how bad this problem with my mother was, I would recall my father and I would realize that he had given up attempting to talk to her. Also (having now experienced the situation myself), I realized what he had been thinking and feeling on the occasions when he would shout at her simply because she had misunderstood what he had said. During childhood, I found his conduct brutal and inhuman and this had reinforced my hatred of him. But now I could see the situation from his point of view, and this did begin to dispel my hatred.

Loneliness was my father’s chosen method of suicide

As far as attempting to communicate with my mother, it became clear to me that my father had given up. And as for attempting to communicate with his children, he had never really had anything to say to us anyway. It seemed that he had given up completely and withdrawn into silence.

When I was about twelve, I remember that the family were sat at the kitchen table and my father walked into the kitchen, shouted, “You’re all bastards!—that’s what I think of you,” then he walked out into the garden. I think that that was the longest speech he had ever made.

At the time, I remember feeling a sort of satisfaction about his distress. I was pleased that he seemed to have noticed how much we hated him. Previously, I had always imagined that he would have not noticed this. He was a tyrant. He had destroyed the family by terrorising us into silence and preventing any attempts at communication. He had nothing to say, so he was determined that no-one else would speak, perhaps because it might make him aware of his own shortcomings. At least, that was how it had seemed to me at the time. Later, while writing this book, I realized that all these types of ideas that we form about other people’s motives are usually wrong and that there is usually a much simpler explanation for the person’s behaviour, as there was in this case. But at the time, my impression of my father was that he was a brutal tyrant who had destroyed the family by stamping out any sort of normal human behaviour and replacing it with a constant atmosphere of fear. To make his crimes worse, at the time I had imagined that he was perfectly happy. That emotionally barren household had been fashioned to his exact design, therefore it seemed reasonable to assume that he was happy with his design, even though everyone else was suffering. But in the months before his above outburst, a few events had happened that must have caused him to question his position in the family. One of those was when he had gone into hospital for an operation and on his return home, no-one enquired about his health nor barely even greeted him. At the time, there was no outward sign that he had noticed this, but some months later, he did utter a few words that hinted that his “welcome home” might not have been to his liking. When he said that, I realized that he did have some feelings (which I had seen no signs of before; indeed, no signs of any humanity whatsoever) and that perhaps he was beginning the long slow process of realizing that if you starve children of affection and feed them instead with fear and intimidation, then they do not automatically love you in return. And some months later again, when he shouted at us: “You’re all bastards!—that’s what I think of you,” it was clear that even he had finally realized that there was something not quite right in his household. He must have noticed that the relationships were not “normal”. Perhaps the biggest thing he had noticed, for the first time, was that we felt no affection for him. And he may even have noticed that some of us actively hated him.

At the time, I remember simply feeling a smug pleasure that he was suffering also, that he had not ruined the life of everyone around him and remained perfectly happy himself.

Some years later, at the age of fifty-six, my father died of a sudden heart attack. I am now working as a healer and at some stage in my training I realized why my father had died. Heart attacks are much more common among men than they are with women. This is because women tend to talk amongst themselves about their feelings, but men do not have that same outlet. In our society, men are actively discouraged from talking about, or showing, their feelings. In most men, this creates a feeling of loneliness, and this very much weakens the heart. This is why heart attacks are much more common amongst men. So, it became clear to me that my father had died of loneliness. That seemed appropriate. His existence must indeed have been a lonely one. He would certainly have been aware that it was not possible to communicate with my mother, and in the end he would have noticed that he had been living an illusion. He would have realized that his family felt no affection for him and possibly even hated him. Doubtless, when you look at this from his point of view, he would have seen this as a great injustice. He would have only been aware of all the things he had “done for us” and he would not have been aware of any flaws in his own conduct. He would not have been aware of the flaws because it just does not work like that; people are not capable of seeing themselves in the same way that we see them. So, he was unable to communicate and unable to understand the apparently strange behaviour of his family and he had withdrawn into silence and died of loneliness.

After leaving the family home, I was left with a strong desire to communicate and also a desire to understand what was going on when people behaved in an apparently hostile way towards other people. It seemed that, once I was away from the family home, I was left with a need to put right all the wrongs that I had grown up with.

If my mother was insane, then perhaps we all are

But what of the other custodian of my childhood: my mother? What was she doing while my father was busy stamping out all humanity in his brutal household? She stood by and did nothing. She acquiesced just to “keep the peace”, sometimes even muttering to us: “Anything to keep to peace.” The problem was that she was as much a “child” as my father was and she knew no better. She perhaps did not have enough imagination to be able to see how such an inhuman atmosphere would affect young children. She could see no further than her own timidity and she perhaps imagined that her only role was to keep her head down, so that she was not in the firing line. She possibly even saw this as a positive trait in herself—the fact that she kept “the pig” happy (as I used to affectionately refer to my father in my own mind). She would not have been aware that she was supposed to police his conduct around her children and maintain a nurturing environment—if only by loving them, which also did not happen.

At the time, I would have said that my mother did not have the capacity to love. She showed no affection towards us, verbally or physically. And on top of this absence of affection, and her other neglect in allowing my father’s brutality to go unchallenged, her behaviour towards us was often as actively brutal as his was. She would seem to be constantly harbouring hostile thoughts towards us. At the time her personality seemed to me like that of a vicious snake lying curled up on a stone. And at random moments her venom would boil over and she would strike out at us physically or verbally, or both. From our point of view, she would be making no sense at all; her attacks just seemed like random violence.

Many years later, while working on this book, I did manage to work out a more sympathetic interpretation of her behaviour. I could now see that she had seemed to possess the mentality that a troubled teenager might possess. All her perceptions of us were warped in the same way that a teenager’s perceptions of adults are warped. She would imagine faults in us that did not exist. For example, she would sometimes decide that we had insulted her in some way, but she was incapable of communicating such things (as many people are), so the only way open to her to express her thoughts was with physical violence. Her “adolescent” mind interpreted our behaviour or words as hostility towards herself, so it would have seemed just and appropriate for her to respond by striking back with physical violence. And that would have somehow resolved her injury; she had inflicted a physical injury on us, so the matter was resolved—even though our crime had been imaginary in the first place. At other times, her punishment would be to simply shun us, because she felt offended due to these imaginary slights. She had the mentality of a sulky, troubled teenager who saw nobody as they really were. Hence she imagined herself to be living in a world that was populated by undesirable people who deserved only scorn—even her own children. It was this limitation of her own mind (her “lack of maturity”, you could say) that dictated the way that she behaved towards us.

At other times, her “childlike” mind would make wounding, insensitive comments to us, and also make naïve, embarrassing comments to outsiders. Of course, most teenagers are embarrassed by their parents (they imagine scornful conduct in their parents, in the same way that my mother imagined scornful conduct in her own children—and also in everyone else), so this is a common experience. But in our case, the problem was amplified by the fact that our mother and father did genuinely conduct themselves in an embarrassing, naïve, insensitive manner—as will happen when two “children” find themselves in charge of a family.

At one point, my mother did seem to work out that there was a problem in her relationship with my father (at around the midlife crisis stage). This period seemed to last for several years, and throughout this time she would yell at him in a demented fashion, her words seeming to be chosen at random, and incomprehensible. Throughout this period, her favourite mantra became: “I’ll be packing my bags at the end of the week and then I’ll be off!” She would usually recite this at the end of one of her verbal thunder storms. At the time, though I was only about nine or ten, I can recall thinking that it was obvious what she was trying to achieve (since all the flaws in my father’s behaviour were so clear to me) but that it was also easy to see why my father did not have a clue what she was “ranting” about. He probably simply thought that she had gone mental. My mother’s wild screaming and constant threats to leave served only one purpose. That was to further alienate my father from her and to increase her children’s feelings of insecurity.

Later in life, I spent many years analysing the type of situation that my mother was in and that we are all frequently in. When we want to express the sorts of thoughts that we have in relationship problems, how do we go about it; how do we choose the words; and how does the other person go about interpreting them? A large part of this book explores issues such as these and also the related issues, such as how we form our impressions of a person’s personality.

The monsters we see are the monsters our own mind has invented

When we are truly able to see a situation from the other person’s point of view, I have found that it tends to transform our perception of people. We find that they are not inhuman monsters, but are perfectly likeable, normal people. So, my father was not a brutal, inhuman tyrant who had stamped out all humanity in his household and painted the walls with fear. And my mother was not a timid collaborator who was incapable of love and who dished out random acts of violence to her children. They were both normal people who were doing their best to cope with the people around them using the limited abilities that they had (due to their “childlike minds”). And their childlike minds also invented all sorts of faults in each other and in us, which they would then punish each other, and also us, for.

To some extent we all behave in this same way. Most of the negative qualities that we see in other people, we have invented ourselves. It is a trick that our mind plays on us when we try to work out why a person has behaved towards us in a certain way. Later in the book, this theme is explored in detail.

A constant parade of peculiar behaviour

As a child, another thing that I found striking about my mother and father’s behaviour was that, to the outside world, they would both pretend that everything was ok. While in other people’s company, they would be friendly, overly nice, and would even speak to each other in a normal way. Yet when no-one else was around, this charade would be dropped and they would both return to their usual inhuman behaviour towards one another and towards us. In my own troubled way, I was always offended by this; I felt that it was wrong and when other people were around I would refuse to play along; I would not play the part of a happy person within a happy family. To outsiders, this must have made me seem like a troublesome child whom his poor, perfectly pleasant parents had to endure.

Thinking back to my childhood now, it seemed that there was a constant parade of peculiar behaviour from both my parents, such as the above example, but also in every situation when there was the smallest amount of interaction between them. To me, nothing about their conduct seemed normal. I was always a thoughtful and sensitive person, and if my parents provided me with any education at all it was to give me this wonderful opportunity to begin to develop all my own theories on psychology and everyday communication. I watched the peculiar, and obviously wrong, behaviour in that household and my young mind began formulating all sorts of explanations for what was going on.

Looking back on it, my family was like a psychological laboratory. If at some point a man in a white coat had lifted the roof of our house and peered in at his experiment, I suspect that I would not have been too surprised. In fact, I probably would have been relieved to discover that it all was a deliberate experiment and was not representative of life in the outside world. Sadly, that did not turn out to be the case.

But if it were an experiment, this would have been the criteria:

We will set up a family home. In it there will never be any affection or love displayed by the parents, and there will often be hostility and even physical violence, all usually with no just cause. And on the father’s side, there will be mostly complete silence, accompanied by an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, and at other times, whenever he does speak, it will be to express his cruelty, in one form or another. Naturally, there will never be any love or affection from him either, nor any normal human emotion. And whenever either of the parents do attempt to make any kind of “parental” comment to their children, then the parents will themselves appear to have the personalities of naïve children. Thus, our experiment is set.

I grew up within that experiment, which gave me plenty to think about from an early age, and if I was not already set to be a sensitive and thoughtful person, perhaps these circumstances would ensure that that was exactly what I would become. And obediently, I developed a lifelong fascination with personality and communication. But it seemed that the experiment so far had not gone far enough; it was not rigorous enough. The men in white coats, it seemed, had decided that I would need to learn more, so they threw in some extra factors that would increase my sense of isolation even more.

My disease was called “isolation”, and it took on a physical form

When I was around the age of five, the family relocated to another part of the country. A year later I came down with chickenpox, and when those blisters disappeared, each of the blisters transformed into a patch of psoriasis and the psoriasis lesions grew to about one inch diameter. So, my entire body was covered in these red, flaky skin lesions. This situation remained until my late teenage years when I had started sunbathing, which usually cleared the lesions for several weeks at a time. Before this period, I was too embarrassed to remove any of my clothes before other people. I remember in my later school years, I wanted to start swimming with the school, and in order to enable me to do this, I remember that I had to make a mental change within myself. I had to pretend that people could not see me, that I was invisible. I do not know how I was able to do this, but I managed to. And that psychology seemed to stick. It was as though I did not have a body and people could not see me. And even two decades later, in my thirties, I can clearly remember that that was the way I still thought about myself. When I met people socially, if I met them a second time, I was always surprised that they recognised me. It was as though I did not have an outward body, so I felt anonymous. I did not expect people to be able to make out any features in my face.

While progressing through life, this disease tended to isolate me even further. When you do not have a body, there are many important aspects of life that you can not take part in, such as sporting activities, wearing summer clothes, or any aspect of romance or sex. These factors are a significant aspect of childhood. At the time, I remember that my father, in his usual economical manner, only ever made one comment concerning my skin disease (this “plague” that had emotionally destroyed me). One day he briefly lowered his newspaper and said, in his usual brutal, harsh tone, “There’s something wrong with him!” and then he raised his newspaper again and withdrew into his usual silence within that atmosphere of fear that seemed to surrounded him. His comment seemed to me like one further rejection of me as a human being. I was a worthless non-human. I was this disease; it was me; at least, that was how it felt to me. And it was now official because “the pig” had confirmed it. And since I was not a human being, was not taking part in life, this seemed to define my role. I would sit on the sidelines, observing the behaviour of people, like some anthropologist from another species. I was a skin disease, looking at the behaviour of the humans around me.

Later in life, while training in Chinese medicine, I would discover the explanation for my skin problem and sensitivity. My main constitutional weakness lies in my “Lung energy”. Amongst other functions, the Lungs provide the barrier between us and the outside world, physically and emotionally. This makes me more sensitive than usual to attack from malicious personalities (whether they intend their behaviour as an attack or not). Further, when I was five years of age and the family moved home, this produced a “separation trauma” within me (the trauma of being separated from friends, home, from my life as I knew it), and one year later, this trauma was expressed on my skin, as psoriasis—my skin being my weakness, since it is “governed” by the Lungs. (Skin cancers are also produced by this same type of trauma.) So, in the emotional sense, I have a “thin skin”, which is why I notice every nuance of personal interaction and why I am also so affected by such things. (After all, there would be no point setting up an experiment such as that household if you did not place within it someone who could record the experiment. So, my role was set.)

Working out the riddle of everyday conversation

From the age of about nine onwards, I started to notice the strange behaviour of people, not only my own family members, but also friends at school and some adults that I met. I noticed that their words often did not match what they were thinking. It seemed that there was a much more complex, more interesting life that existed beneath the surface which was never directly expressed. It was as though there were two strands of existence. There was a person’s words and actions, which were often strange, but beneath this there was their real intentions and thoughts, which would be quite separate and often have no resemblance to what they had outwardly said or done. It seemed that to work out a person’s real intention, you had to ignore their words and rely on some magical insight into human nature that told you what they were really thinking, but this magical insight was not given to you by anyone, nor even referred to; each person had to work all this out for themselves.

You could say that my “upbringing” stood me in good stead for life in the real world. Having the parents I did, meant that there was always plenty to puzzle over, even for an eight year old boy. My father never said much, except to occasionally bark his commands, so there was his inner thoughts to puzzle over—what was the working beneath this monster’s exterior?—and with my mother, there was both her words and personality to puzzle over. I remember that she often seemed to me like a transparent child. In her apparently strange behaviour or comments, I could see what she was trying to achieve, and why. For instance, when we asked questions which she did not know the answer to, she would usually pretend that she did know the answer, simply because she was not mature enough to realize that it was okay for her to not know something. And when she found her ploy disintegrating around her, due to her children asking further questions out of pure curiosity, which she could not answer nor pretend to answer, she would then violently lash out at us, like a cornered animal striking out through fear.

My parents were not role models; they were supreme examples of how not to be a human being, which, in itself, was a valuable lesson. I found this “teaching” fascinating and I learnt a lot.     Naturally, though, I had assumed that it was only my own family that was so peculiar. But when meeting more and more people in the outside world, I started to realize, to my alarm, that most people were struggling to cope with everyday society just as much as my parents had been.

My family did not seem so strange after all

It was not until I had moved away from the family home that I found myself involved in normal relationships (at first, at least). It seemed that once I was away from that stifling home environment, I could begin to grow, as a person. I started trying to communicate with my newfound friends. Because they were all new relationships, there were no personality issues to get in the way. We were all neutral to one another. There was no hatred, loathing, nor any of the other factors that had stifled any normal human behaviour in my family home. In the beginning, there was just the words. We talked and talked and I started to notice that whenever I spoke, other people would often not understand my words as I had meant them. That puzzled me and I began to wonder why this was happening, what the problem was. Perhaps I was more aware than most people were of these issues because of my family background. In that household, there had been no communication, so, naturally, now that I was away from that environment, I was keen to attempt to communicate. But the more I tried, the more I found that true communication just did not seem possible.

“Opinions” can not usually be communicated

In the decades that followed, while developing the ideas in this book, I would make a distinction here. I noticed that there are two different areas, that there are two main types of comments. Comments could either be about the physical world, or they could be stating an “opinion” (I defined an “opinion” as any idea that is not directly describing physical acts or objects—such as ideas about relationship problems, politics, philosophy, religion, and so on). With comments about the physical world, communication is usually straightforward, but in any other areas, communication rapidly breaks down. In general, when we state an “opinion”, it is rare that true communication takes place. This only happens when the person we are talking to has had the same experience that we are attempting to communicate (and has made the same reflections about that experience). In any other situation, communication of an “opinion” is not possible and this will either be obvious, or there may be the illusion that communication is taking place.

The reason that I only started to notice this communication problem after I had left home, was probably because children only usually attempt to communicate about the physical world, which is usually straightforward. But once I had left home and I started conversing with friends, in real relationships, I would often have been attempting to communicate “opinions”. And it was then that I started to notice that there was a problem with the very fabric of conversation, that there were faults built into the system somewhere, though at that time I did not know quite what was wrong. It would take me another two decades to get to the bottom of the matter.

Communication is our lifeline, but we need to know its flaws

Many people have commented that life is a lonely experience, that ultimately we are all alone. It seems to me that communication is our lifeline; it is the connection between us and other people. From the early years of my childhood, I had become an expert at being alone, so I had a deep need to explore this lifeline. But once I had left home and I started trying to use this lifeline, I noticed that it seemed to be faulty; something was wrong with it; the lifeline did not work, but just seemed to cause further problems. But this is not a story of no hope. Having explored all these areas and clearly understood all the limitations in conversation—what it is and is not possible to communicate about, and to whom it will never be possible to communicate certain things—having a clear understanding of all these things, seems to make life easier. It takes away a lot of the frustrations from everyday relationships and can even dispel a lot of the bad feelings that can end up driving people apart. The message of this book is not: doom and gloom. It is one of acknowledging all the many difficulties in everyday conversation and finding ways to avoid all the usual pitfalls, so as to make life easier.

People do not behave well towards one another

The other thing that struck me once I had left home and started to develop some real relationships, was just how brutal most people could be. At times, these relationships seemed almost as bad as the ones had been in my own family—and these people were supposed to be my friends. I began to realize that perhaps I was just hypersensitive and that the relationships in my own family had not been that much out of the ordinary. Now, much later in life, I am certain that all the things that I write about in this book are common to us all. People in general do not behave well towards one another. This is something that we are all guilty of and that we all suffer at the hands of. Usually the bad behaviour is not intentional but is an unfortunate side effect of our attempts to cope with everyday communication and relationship problems. Some people notice these issues more than others. But, to some degree, and sooner or later, we will all suffer greatly as a result of misinterpreting other people’s words or their intentions, and having our own words and intentions misinterpreted.

One other clandestine advantage that my childhood bestowed on me was that, in effect, I had no parents and I therefore had to educate myself. I found that I was on my own in life and I had to somehow work out my own solutions to any problems that I faced. I became a deep thinker. But the agenda was always up to me to set, since I did not receive any proper education (I was just as failed by the state school system, as I was by my education at home), so by the time I left home, I was like a blank canvas in many areas. But instead of filling that canvas with other people’s ideas, I continued to fill it with my own. I seemed to instinctively know that other people’s ideas could not be properly communicated with words; there seemed to be something faulty about the process, since when I read other people’s ideas, the information often seemed wrong, or suspect, so I knew that something was not right somewhere—if not with the ideas, then with the mechanism of communication itself. I realized that the only reliable information came from your own firsthand experience. Consequently, all the content in this book has been worked out in that way. I have not relied on any previous ideas from psychology or any other discipline, but have worked out my own explanations based on firsthand experience.

The content of the book

The book begins with a short conversation between two friends, Paul and Susan. These characters are fictional, but their conversation is based on a real one that took place between myself and a friend. The conversation starts with a harmless comment by Paul and then quickly descends into them both trading insults. At the end of their short conversation, these two friends feel loathing for each other, all due to a few simple, but common, misunderstandings.

The book looks in detail at each of their comments. It describes the ideas that they were intending to express and then looks at how and why each comment was misunderstood. It also describes their past experiences in detail to demonstrate how they managed to eventually feel loathing for each other, based on misunderstanding just a few words. These sections demonstrate what it is and is not possible to communicate about and the circumstances that make communication less likely.

As well as describing how we interpret other people’s words, the book goes on to demonstrate how we also interpret their personality. In the same way that we often misinterpret a person’s words, we also misinterpret their personality. Our mind uses a particular process to puzzle over a person’s behaviour, and it is this very process that usually causes us to invent negative traits in the person, which often then causes us to wrongly dislike or even hate them. When looked at from our point of view, these negative traits often seem to explain the person’s strange behaviour. But the book demonstrates that when we look at any of these situations from the other person’s point of view, we usually find that the person does not have any of these invented traits and is a perfectly normal, likeable person.

The book ends with a summary of twenty four maxims for better communication. These are coined throughout the book and serve as a quick reminder of the whole of the book’s content.