I Only Say This Because I Love You: How the Way We Talk Can Make or Break Family Relationships Throughout Our Lives

"Everything we say to each other echoes with meanings left over from our past experience--both our history talking to the person before us at this moment and our history talking to others," says Deborah Tannen, one of the world's most famous linguists. We react not only to the message, but to the "metamessage": our interpretation of the unstated meaning, based on tone, relationship, and our past associations. Add in the connections and control issues among family members, and it's no wonder families have so much trouble understanding each other!

I Only Say This Because I Love You is aimed mostly at adult family interactions. Professor Deborah Tannen, the popular author of You Just Don't Understand, uses anecdotes filled with dialogues to illustrate why we hear criticism when the other person meant to convey caring, how family members create alignments with secrets and broken confidences, the dynamics of arguments, the power of apologies, gender patterns in family talk, and communication with teens. You're bound to recognize your family members--and yourself!--in Tannen's examples.

You won't find quick, easy answers for improving communication in your family, but you will discover another dimension of understanding what's really going on. Now if you could just get your mother to read the book! --Joan Price