Family Skills: How to Change the Subject

The longer I think about it, the more I think we're dealing with two, maybe three distinctive skills.

There's the cluster of having good, meaningful, satisfying conversations, which includes an awareness of the people who'll talk until someone interrupts them and those who wait for a pause in the conversation to speak up. On their own, each strategy works perfectly fine, mixed company can be catastrophic.

The other cluster deals with verbal agression - how to recognise it, how to notice you are doing it, how to stop or deflect it. Yesterday I was in a position where the person I was talking to found my weaknesses and dug in, and I reacted over-emotional and felt completely unable to deal with it. Changing the topic or walking away were not options, and I had no way of turning it into a productive conversation.

The half - because I don't know whether it's a seperate thing or whether you could even use the same skills for both - is the ability to agree to disagree, walk away from conversations, or change the nature of the conversation (away from a hot topic, turning a controversy into bonding etc).