By Maria Popova

Two people meet, discover an uncommon electricity flowing between them, exhilarate each other into forgetting the abyss that always gapes between one consciousness and another, until one day they realize they are having profoundly different experiences of the same situation and find themselves suddenly hanging from the precipice of the abyss with one hand, sparring over the reality of the situation with the other.

What to do?

In 1951, as the Cold War was menacing the world with mutually assured destruction, the pioneering psychologist Carl R. Rogers (January 8, 1902–February 4, 1987) addressed the Centennial Conference on Communications at Northwestern University with a revelation of a talk plainly titled “Communication: Its Blocking and Its Facilitation,” later included in his classic On Becoming a Person (public library) — an inquiry into the crux of mutual misunderstanding and the remedy for it, as applicable to love as it is to war, revealing the same psychological forces coursing beneath the bloodiest conflict between groups and the subtlest discord in our intimate relationships.

Art by Paloma Valdivia for The Book of Questions by Pablo Neruda

Many people, Rogers observes, turn to therapy because communication within themselves has broken down and, consequently, their communication with others has suffered — parts of them have been evicted from awareness and padlocked in the attic of the unconscious, no longer able to communicate with “the managing part,” seeding a silent tension that bleeds into all close relationships. (There is a particularly damning flavor of self-righteousness in which we presume to see clearly the internal fissures of the other, flag them and indict them, all the while dissociating from the part of us that knows how awful it is to be on the receiving end of such judgments. These are the regrets we live with, the sharp-fanged shame that bites into the bone of 4 A.M.)

All the while, we cling to our own frames of reference as the banisters to secure our shaky cohesion. This, Rogers observes — this “tendency to react to any emotionally meaningful statement by forming an evaluation of it from our own point of view” — is the single most bruising barrier to communication. He writes:

The major barrier to mutual interpersonal communication is our very natural tendency to judge, to evaluate, to approve or disapprove, the statement of the other person, or the other group… Although the tendency to make evaluations is common in almost all interchange of language, it is very much heightened in those situations where feelings and emotions are deeply involved. So the stronger our feelings the more likely it is that there will be no mutual element in the communication… Each [is] making a judgment, an evaluation, from his* own frame of reference.

In consonance with the Buddhist strategy for repairing a relationship, he contours the alternative:

Real communication occurs, and this evaluative tendency is avoided, when we listen with understanding. What does this mean? It means to see the expressed idea and attitude from the other person’s point of view, to sense how it feels to him, to achieve his frame of reference in regard to the thing he is talking about.

Stated so briefly, this may sound absurdly simple, but it is not.

At the heart of the shift is what Rogers terms “empathic understanding — understanding with a person, not about him.”

To grasp the difference from the inside, he proposes a “little laboratory experiment”:

The next time you get into an argument with your wife, or your friend, or with a small group of friends, just stop the discussion for a moment and for an experiment, institute this rule. “Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker’s satisfaction” … This would mean… that before presenting your own point of view, it would be necessary for you to really achieve the other speaker’s frame of reference — to understand his thoughts and feelings so well that you could summarize them for him. Sounds simple… but if you try it you will discover it is one of the most difficult things you have ever tried to do. However, once you have been able to see the other’s point of view, your own comments will have to be drastically revised. You will also find the emotion going out of the discussion, the differences being reduced, and those differences which remain being of a rational and understandable sort.

Available as a print and stationery card. More bird divinations and the story behind them here.

Having ranked an undefensive attitude first among the three elements of the good life, Rogers adds:

This procedure can deal with the insincerities, the defensive exaggerations, the lies, the “false fronts” which characterize almost every failure in communication. These defensive distortions drop away with astonishing speed as people find that the only intent is to understand, not judge.

The most assuring part of his method is the insistence that “it can be initiated by one party, without waiting for the other to be ready” — a single hand held out from the edge may be enough to keep both from perishing in the abyss. And yet it takes tremendous courage to do that, because it demands tremendous vulnerability. Rogers writes:

If you really understand another person in this way, if you are willing to enter his private world and see the way life appears to him, without any attempt to make evaluative judgments, you run the risk of being changed yourself. You might see it his way, you might find yourself influenced in your attitudes or your personality. This risk of being changed is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face.

An abyss will always gape between us. But if we belay down the cliffs of judgment into understanding, we may indeed find ourselves transformed by the descent; we may find that at the bottom of it is simply love.

— Published November 11, 2025 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/11/11/carl-rogers-communication-breakdowns/ —

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