Tough Conversations

Solutions Through Compassionate Communication.

What Do You Really Want?

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Carolyn Parr, http://toughconversations.net/, shares communication tips.A character in the movie, How Do You Know? declares that what he’s learned in 20 years boils down to this: “Life is about finding out what you want and how to ask for it.”

That about sums up what most people learn in mediation. They are trying to discover what they [really] want and how to ask for it [so they can get it and move on].

For instance, an out-of-town daughter, Janna, is furious at her Uncle Peter, who lives near her mom. When she visits every two or three months she sees Mom deteriorating, and she holds her uncle accountable. Janna wants to replace Peter as holder of her mother’s medical power of attorney. [Read more…]

A Book to Make You Laugh, Cry and Ponder

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Sig Cohen, http://toughconversations.net/, shares his opinion of a book by Roz Chast.The New Yorker magazine cartoonist Roz Chast’s Can’t we talk about something more PLEASANT? evoked a range of emotions as I absorbed her insightful, witty – but essentially sad – chronicle of her parents’ final years.

What Chast reveals is more than a description of her tortured web of (mostly negative) feelings for her mother; her sympathy for her dad; and more than a step-by-step dissection of her parents’ slide from independence…to assisted living…to nursing care…to hospice. In essence, she details her parents’ decline from a unique ‘only-child’ perspective.

Chast’s intensely graphic depiction of her parents’ agonizingly slow, and at times emotionally draining, transition is both touching and exasperating. [Read more…]