The trickiest thing about the double bind is that it operates imperceptibly, like shots from a gun with a silencer.
Interpretation
The double bind is a subtle but powerful communication dilemma that can trap individuals without them realizing it.
In this quote, Deborah Tannen highlights the complexity of the double bind, a situation where a person receives contradictory messages or demands, leading to confusion and distress. The comparison to a silenced gun emphasizes how these traps can be insidious and difficult to detect, causing harm without obvious signs.
In practice
In a workshop on communication, this quote could illustrate the complexities of interpersonal relationships.
Women as mothers grapple with corresponding contradictions. The adoration they feel for their grown daughters, mixed with the sense of responsibility for their well-being, can be overwhelming, matched only by the hurt they feel when their attempts to help or just stay connected are rebuffed or even excoriated as criticism or devilish interference.
Sister relationships span a huge range, from best friends to worst enemies. From 'I adore her; I talk to her five times a day' to 'I decided to cut her out of my life.' For most women, it's in between.
For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.
Mothers and daughters find in each other the source of great comfort but also of great pain. We talk to each other in better and worse ways than we talk to anyone else.
Our spirits are corroded by living in an atmosphere of unrelenting contention - an argument culture.
Treating people the same is not equal treatment if they are not the same.
Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
The childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day.
We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.
The endless, useless urge to look on life comprehensively, to take a bird's-eye view of ourselves and judge the dimensions of what we have or have not done: this is life as landscape, or life as rΓ©sumΓ©. But life is incremental, and though a worthwhile life is a gathering together of all that one is, good and bad, successful and not, the paradox is that we can never really see this one thing that all of our increments (and decrements, I suppose) add up to.
Reverie is commonly classified among the phenomena of psychic detente. It is lived out in a relaxed time which has no linking force. Since it functions with inattention, it is often without memory. It is a flight from out of the real that does not always find a consistent unreal world.
Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living.
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