Exercises for Interpersonal Communication 

Here are a few exercises that might prove useful in discussions of the self and interpersonal communication.

Satisfying Your Needs

According to FIRO (Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation) we each have needs for inclusion, control, and openness.

1.     What one thing have you done this week to satisfy your need for inclusion to the point where you’re comfortable?

2.     What one thing have you done this week to satisfy your need for control to the point where you’re comfortable?

3.     What one thing have you done this week to satisfy your need for openness to the point where you’re comfortable?

4.     Can you identify any obstacles that you encountered along the way of satisfying these basic needs?

 

Going from Idealism to Realism

Like many people, college students often have unrealistic expectations and goals that will likely not be met but are likely to cause stress and depression. How would you rework the following goals so that they are more realistic and attainable?

1.     I have to get an A in this course.

2.     I have to maintain a perfect GPA.

3.     I have to get into Professor Smith’s sociology class; it’s an easy A.

4.     I have to win the election for class president.

5.     I have to be engaged before I graduate.

 

Giving a Compliment

 

While you’re securing self-affirmation, consider the advantages of affirming another person. One way to do this is to compliment another. For each of the following situations, craft a compliment that is genuine, honest, and totally complimentary:

1.  A fellow student helped you research information you used in your report.

2.  Your blind date shows up and is a lot more attractive than you ever expected.

3.  You had a great dinner at a colleague’s home.

4.  Your friend just lost weight and looks great.

5.  Your friend just got accepted into law school.

 

Disclosing Topics

The remaining discussion of this important concept will be more meaningful if you first consider your own willingness to self-disclose. Consider the following disclosures and think about whether you’d disclose, to whom you’d disclose, and under what circumstances you might disclose?

• Your happiest moments in life

• Your unhappiest moments in life

• Your personality characteristics that you do not like

• Your most embarrassing moment

• Your major weaknesses

• Your prejudices

• Your net worth

• Your sexual fantasies

• Your greatest fears

• Your ideal relationship partner

 

Dealing with Difficult Disclosures

Here are a few examples of difficult disclosures. How would you respond?

1.     A friend confides a desire to commit suicide. What do you say?

2.     You just found out you have an STD and you need to tell a few people you’ve been intimate with. What do you say?

3.     Your friend is a Female-to-Male Trans and is dating a cisgender female who knows nothing about the transition. Your friend wants to disclose this and asks you for advice. What do you say?

4.     You’ve kittenfished in writing your profile; you’re older, less attractive than the photo would indicate, and are less financially well-off than implied. All was going well until you both decided to meet for coffee. You need to prepare this person for the real you. What do you say?

5.     You’re gay and you have decided to come out to your parents. You have no idea how they’ll react. What do you say? 

6.     You’re engaged to Pat, but over the past few months, you’ve fallen in love with someone else. You now have to break your engagement and disclose your new relationship. What do you say?

Factors Influencing Self-Disclosure

Many factors influence whether or not you disclose, what you disclose, and to whom you disclose. Among the most important factors are who you are, your culture, your gender, who your listeners are, and your topic and channel.

Communication Strategies: Guidelines for Facilitating and Responding to Self-Disclosures

When someone discloses to you, it’s usually a sign of trust and affection. In carrying out this most important receiver function, keep the following five guidelines in mind.

Practice the skills of effective and active listening.
Listen actively, listen politely, listen for different levels of meaning, listen with empathy, and listen with an open mind. Express an understanding of the speaker’s feelings in order to give the speaker the opportunity to see his or her feelings more objectively and through the eyes of another. Ask questions to ensure your own understanding and to signal your interest and attention.

Support and reinforce the discloser.
Try to refrain from evaluation, concentrating on understanding and empathizing. Make your supportiveness clear to the discloser through your verbal and nonverbal responses; for example, maintain eye contact, lean toward the speaker, ask relevant questions, and echo the speaker’s thoughts and feelings.

Be willing to reciprocate.
Your own disclosures (made in response to the other person’s disclosures), demonstrate your understanding of the other’s meanings and your willingness to communicate on a meaningful level.

Keep the disclosures confidential.
If you reveal disclosures to others, negative effects are inevitable. It’s interesting to note that one of the netiquette rules of e-mail is that you shouldn’t forward mail to third parties without the writer’s permission. This rule is useful for self-disclosure generally: Maintain confidentiality; don’t pass on disclosures made to you to others without the person’s permission.

Don’t use the disclosures against the person.
Many self-disclosures expose vulnerability or weakness. If you later turn around and use a disclosure against the person, you betray the confidence and trust invested in you. Regardless of how angry you may get, resist the temptation to use the disclosures of others as weapons.

Communication Strategies: Guidelines for Making Self-Disclosures

In addition to weighing the potential rewards and dangers of self-disclosure, consider the following factors as well. These hints will help you raise the right questions before you make what must be your decision.
n Consider the motivation for the self-disclosure. Self-disclosure should be motivated by a concern for the relationship, for the others involved, and for yourself.
n Consider the appropriateness of the self-disclosure. Self-disclosure should be appropriate to the context and to the relationship between you and your listener. Before making any significant self-disclosure, ask whether this is the right time (Do you both have the time to discuss this in the length it requires?) and place (Is the place private enough?). Ask, too, whether this self-disclosure is appropriate to the relationship. Generally, the more intimate the disclosure, the closer the relationship should be.
n Consider the disclosures of the other person. During your disclosures, give the other person a chance to reciprocate with his or her own disclosures. If the other person does not reciprocate, reassess your own self-disclosures. It may be that for this person at this time and in this context, your disclosures are not welcome or appropriate.
n Consider the possible burdens self-disclosure might entail. Carefully weigh the potential problems that you may incur as a result of your disclosure. Can you afford to lose your job if you disclose your prison record? Are you willing to risk relational difficulties if you disclose your infidelities (on the Jerry Springer Show, for example)? Also, ask yourself whether you’re placing burdens on the listener. For example, consider the person who swears his or her mother-in-law to secrecy and then discloses having an affair with a neighbor. This disclosure clearly places an unfair burden on the mother-in-law.

Self-disclosure?

Here's a really different take on self-disclosure. Here you mail in your secrets anonymously and they're posted for all to see. Because it's anonymous, this wouldn't be called self-disclosure, as we normally think of it. And yet it is a form of self-disclosure and probably serves many of the same purposes (at least intrapersonally) that interpersonal self-disclosure serves. According to its counter there have been over 277 million visitors to the site.

Outing

In the discussion of self-disclosure, we often mention the process of outing which essentially is disclosure by some third person. Originally the term was used to refer to disclosing someone’s homosexuality as a way of preventing him or her from discriminating against the gay community. So, if a politician advocates homophobic policies, outing him or her, effectively strips the person of influence.
A somewhat different form of outing occurred in an article, “Beirut, the Provincetown of the Middle East” (New York Times, August 2, 2009). Author Patrick Healy wrote in detail about gay life in Lebanon. Unfortunately, homosexuality is illegal in Lebanon and the article, as a writer from Beirut noted, “effectively outed the entire underground gay scene in a country relatively hostile to homosexuality”. I’m not sure what the motivations of the writer or of the NYTimes were in publishing such an article, but it seems the article can have enormous negative consequences for gay people and for gay establishments in Lebanon. Did the author and the NYTimes want to cause problems for the gay community? Did they want to encourage the Lebanon police to crack down on gay meeting places? Did they just want to sell newspapers? This is a good example of how revealing private information about others can have serious consequences and raises important issues about the responsibilities of the media.

Revealing Secrets

In the latest issue of Communication Monographs (June 2009)Tamara Afifi and Keli Steuber have an article on the strategies that people use to reveal their secrets. What I like best about this article is the extensive list (25 items) of these strategies and the great idea this suggests for a class discussion/exercise: how do you reveal your secrets? Or create scenarios and ask students to explain how they'd reveal the secret. Self-disclosure is always one of the great classroom topics. The main categories identified in the Afifi-Steuber study are:
1. Preparation and rehearsal (e.g., testing out the secret with other people)
2. Directness (e.g., telling the person)
3. Third party revelations (e.g., telling one person who would likely tell the target person)
4. Incremental disclosures (e.g., revealing the secrets in small parts)
5. Entrapment (e.g., revealing the secret in anger or in an argument)
6. Indirect mediums (e.g., disclosing the secret in email)