Understanding and connection can transcend conflict.

Expressing our vulnerability can help resolve conflicts.

I don't think you can have an authentic connection when one person is diagnosing the other.

This language is from the head. It is a way of mentally classifying people into varying shades of good and bad, right and wrong. Ultimately, it provokes defensiveness, resistance, and counterattack. It is a language of demands.

We can't win at somebody else's expense. We can only fully be satisfied when the other person's needs are fulfilled as well as our own.

If you have an image of someone cutting off a relationship, it's the cutting off that will lead to your suffering. If you see the action as their need being expressed, then the message is within them, not you. Any interpretation you put onto another person's message (such as passive-aggressive, withholding, etc.), you will pay for because of how you took it.

Postpone result/solution thinking until later; it's through connection that solutions materialize - empathy before education.