S A D Technique

Hi, I was in the studio and I thought I'd make a quick videotape to follow up on my lecture workshop from last night, Healing Your Relationships. We had to speed through the last little bit, but these are some important points and I want you to make sure that you at least understand. And as usual, if they're useful to you, then go ahead and integrate them into your reality. I'd like to share with you that SAD approach. I sped through that a little bit in my recent talk. Here it is a little bit more slowly. The S in the SAD stands for the silent treatment, the cold shoulder, sullen silence, freezing someone out, not communicating. And as I said, that may be the most painful thing that you can do to a person. And of course, what we're talking about is if someone insults you, someone says something that hurts you, or does something that feels bad, what you want to not do is use the S, the A, or the D. The A stands for attack. Why'd you do that? 'You knew I was coming!' Whatever that way that you might have of attacking. You've seen what happens when someone attacks you, you draw a counterattack. It doesn't get you to the core of what's going on. It certainly doesn't improve the relationship. You get a defense or you get a counterattack or the person withdraws. Which means you really extend the pain and the disruption in the relationship. Thirdly, the There's denial, the Uncle Tom approach. Oh no, it's okay. That's okay if you smashed up the fender to my car. That's okay if you set my house on fire. That's okay that you completely missed out on our date last night. You have to express. You have to let the other person know that it happened. And they need to know that it hurt you. If that person cares about you, they're going to work with you to learn how to do things in a way that it doesn't hurt you anymore. If they don't care, then you should probably consider engaging in other relationships or maybe taking this one to therapy. At any rate, here's our formula for responding without using S, A, or D. Your basic perspective needs to be one of being in touch with your emotions, Being generous, being accepting, creating safety, affection, common purpose, and trust. And so that, that's the, the subtext for what you're doing here. First then, you become aware of what did you feel when you didn't show up. I felt alone, I felt lost, I felt confused, I felt worried. It was a very uncomfortable feeling. That is, when you— and then you described the action that the other person did, the behavior— when you said that you thought that I didn't understand the subject at all, I felt very sad, I felt hurt, I felt small. I felt as though somehow you were superior to me, and I was very embarrassed. I'm not saying you did something wrong. I'm saying that that's how I happened to respond. I'm taking responsibility for my feelings, and yet I'm letting you know what triggered them. So again, I'm offering you some information that I think you should be, or I suspect you might be interested in. So first of all, I want to know what I felt. And then comes my response, so to speak. So I need to take a moment. Sometimes you need to go in the other room for a few moments and come back in, and your statement begins, "When you said or did, I felt..." And that's when you reveal what you were feeling. And my suggestion is, in most relationships, Go beyond anger. When you said that, I felt really ticked off somehow. That doesn't invite the person into the conversation in the way that you want to. So go beyond the anger. There's always some hurt. There's always sadness. There's always feelings of loss. There's always a sense of disappointment. Go to those deeper feelings. When you said or did X, then I felt— I felt Y. I felt sad. I felt lonely. And then number 3, you're going to reveal your thinking. You're going to reveal your thought process. Now, how open, how generous, how trusting can you be to say, because I thought 'When you responded that way, I felt bad because it seemed to me that you really didn't care whether I was there or not.' 'I wondered if the reason you did that was because I was late to our appointment last week.' Or, 'I wonder if you were doing that because you didn't want to upset your sister-in-law.' 'Whatever it might be.' Or even, 'I wonder if you did that because you wanted to see me in pain.' Probably not. That's probably not. Again, you probably need therapy or something if it's at that point. So the fourth step then becomes, 'Is this correct? Is that line of thinking correct?' And I'm not saying that it's true. I don't know what you're thinking was, but it occurred to me that it might be this. It might be several other things too, but I'm just— just to give us something to begin to talk about, I choose the most likely one of the possibilities. I'm wondering if this is what it is. Is that correct? Or tell me what was going on for you at that point. And that gives the person an opportunity to go back to what they said and blblblbl rewind the tape a little bit and remember what they were thinking—what it was that they wanted to get across to you? Because they may have made a terrible blunder and chose totally the wrong words and totally the wrong presentation—and you're not holding them guilty for that! And they can say no... oh, oh... The response that you're looking for is a partner who'll say, 'Oh wow, oh yeah, I get it. That felt bad. Lo siento. I feel your feelings. I see that it hurt you and I care about that. Gosh, I'm sorry that you're in pain about all of that. I'm not saying that I'm a bad boy, but I care about this.' So you want that person to show some caring and then to be able to say, "No, I'm sorry you felt that way. No, and that's really not what I was thinking. And now I'll share with you what I was thinking." And then, so again, what we're doing is we're getting behind the presentation, behind the stance, the negotiating points that the person's coming forward with and saying, "Gee, yeah, I hear that was difficult, you know." What's behind that? That's what we always want to do. By the way you presented that to me, I'm not really sure what you were getting at, and in fact it was kind of painful. So I'm wondering what you were getting at. And so that's basically what we're trying to do. The more intimate the relationship is, then the more deeply it should be possible for you to share your feelings. To the degree that it's more of an acquaintance or just a loose friendship, then you probably don't want to say too much about your feelings because it's kind of weird. They'll say, "What are you, from California or something?" You don't want to share too much. You can say, "You know, I was feeling kind of confused when you didn't show up yesterday," or, "You know, I was like 'Kind of a difficult time for me yesterday. For that whole hour I was waiting for you, I was kind of tortured inside. I wasn't right sure what to do. It was really kind of uncomfortable.' So you don't have to say, you know, 'I felt, you know, deeply wounded and saddened and ashamed.' No, no, just you can use more of a business-like language in order to do that. So I hope these are useful to you. Keep, keep working at it. And if you run into a question you think I might be able to help you find an answer to, come on over to drmiller.com, D-R-MILLER dot com, and click on the contact button, send an email with your question, or better still, connect with me on Facebook. Go to facebook.com/askdrmiller Ask Dr. Miller. And who knows, your question might be the subject of the next video. Thanks for spending this time with me. Be well.

This has been a DrMiller.com production. Rate, comment, and subscribe at YouTube.com/DrMiller. Emmett Miller, MD. To find out more about Dr. Miller, his recent articles, his free self-help resources, his internet radio show, Conversations with Extraordinary People, and his free e-newsletter, visit drmiller.com. That's drmiller.com.