I used to have arguments with my mother sometimes when I really didn’t mean to. It would start because she would complain about someone or something, and I would defend them. For example, she might be irritated that she’d had to queue for ‘hours’ in the post office. I might think this was unfair because the people ahead of her in the queue could be elderly and need time and support. And I’d say so in what I thought was a chatty fashion. However, she would then argue with me in some way (they should have more staff, they should have a quick-service queue, she’d gone at what shouldn’t have been a busy time, everyone in front of her had been young), and before I knew it, we’d be squabbling. I never quite knew how I’d got into an argument I didn’t want, and getting back out of it always seemed tricky.

My mother was not the only person this ever happened with, of course, and I should have grasped what was going on much sooner. My attempt to put the opposite perspective always seemed fair and balanced to me, but to my mother it sounded like a criticism of her view. So it’s really no surprise that she took issue with me when I did it.

Eventually I clicked that there was no way to present the opposite view without starting an argument. I just had to agree that 15 minutes was a tedious wait in the post office. Which I suppose it is. And in the case of the post office queue it was fairly simple just to shut up. But what about those times when I really disagreed with her? For example, she might moan about one of her neighbours behaving in a way I honestly thought was entirely reasonable.¹⁷ I wasn’t going to lie and say the neighbour was being difficult when I didn’t think so.

This was my problem – how to avoid being a hypocrite while simultaneously avoiding a row? I felt I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to join in criticising an innocent neighbour, so how did I get out of that one?

I’ll tell you how. And it goes back to the Rule about validating people’s feelings. When called on to express an opinion, I didn’t comment on the neighbour at all. I confined myself to commenting on my mother’s emotional reaction: ‘Yes, that would make you angry.’ Well, being my mother it would anyway – obviously, because here she was, angry about it. Suddenly this meant I could agree with her with integrity, and avoid an argument. It didn’t matter that it wouldn’t make me angry, because we weren’t talking about me.

I use this approach frequently now – whenever someone is upset about something and I don’t share their viewpoint. Interestingly I’ve never been asked in one of these conversations – by my mother or anyone else – what my personal view is. They’re always wrapped up in their own emotions at these moments, and it doesn’t cross their minds. They assume I’m agreeing with them. And I feel comfortable because actually I’m not.