Two people repeat the same arguments, raise the precision of explanations and understand each other less and less. It can happen because disagreement is now about another level: who can interrupt, what tone is acceptable, whether a question is heard as an interest or as an attack. Words discuss a content; the report simultaneously decides how those words should be received.
A tradition with a place and a history
The name Palo Alto is often used as indicating a unique doctrine or a generic university of communication. The story is more precise. The Brief Therapy Center It traces its origins back to the Mental Research Institute, founded by Don Jackson in 1959, and the short therapy project started in 1966 with Richard Fisch, John Weakland and Paul Watzlawick. It is a context of clinical research and practice, crossed by different contributions.
La Pragmatics of Human Communication, by Watzlawick, Janet Beavin Bavelas and Jackson, studies interactions in relation to their context. Among the themes of the work is metacommunication: communication on communication.
Taking this perspective out of the clinical realm requires measurement. It may offer questions about daily conversations; it does not provide a license to diagnose friends, colleagues, or readers. Its cultural utility lies in making observable rules that habitually remain in the background.
An invented example helps: during a meeting, a person asks to receive sincere remarks and interrupts any criticism to explain why it is unfounded. Content invites you to talk; the sequence of responses makes it expensive to do so.
Content and report in the same sentence
To say that someone's text is unclear can be a collaboration, a humiliation or a preemptive defense. The context includes the relationship, the place, the possibility of replication and what happened before. An exclusively lexical explanation would leave out much of the event.
Silence also changes meaning. It can accompany attention, signal withdrawal, leave room or make a sanction perceptible. To observe it does not mean to guess with certainty its intention. It means recognizing that conversation continues to produce effects even when no one adds a sentence.
To get out of a repetition may need a different move: to describe the interaction without turning it into an accusation about the personality. We can say we're interrupting and we can't finish our reasoning. It is a questionable description, on which to verify an agreement, instead of a definitive definition of the other.
The same is true for a warhead. Inviting dissent and responding to any criticism with sarcasm communicates an effective rule different from the one stated. Credibility also lives on in the treatment reserved for those who put our position in difficulty.
Giving a Workable Form to Comparison
Metacommunicating does not mean continually suspending discussion to comment on every gesture. An excess of analysis can make the exchange impractical. The useful question is what really prevents you from dealing with the content: word shifts, ambiguous terms, different expectations, fear of consequences.
Before we come to an agreement on the conclusions, we can verify what kind of exchange we are making. Are we exploring a possibility, making a decision or asking for help? A provisional proposal received as a final commitment produces conflicts other than a truly disregarded commitment.
Making the level of conversation explicit also protects the freedom to change your mind. If a question is recorded as adherence, thought contracts; if every position remains eternally provisional, no one can rely on words. You must state when you explore and when you decide.
Metacommunication thus has a very concrete outcome: giving people a chance to intervene on the rules of exchange. The comparison can start from the initial problem, but with a decisive difference. Now we can also discuss how we are trying to understand it.
