First off, three seemingly unrelated anecdotes:
1) When I was a teenager, my mom started telling me that she wished I had sisters-not because she wanted to have more children, but because she had 3 sisters and felt I was missing something she had with them. Then I'd see a sister fight and think "Why would she wish this upon me?"
2) When I was about 23, my mother and I were shopping together for Christmas decorations. We were being generally jovial, as we normally are, and I'm fairly certain fellow shoppers (a mother with her son) assumed we were girlfriends chatting with each other. While on separate aisles, we're still chatting, when Mom sees something she wanted to show me and says "Kaeli?" To which I immediately reply, "Ma'am?"-showing right away that I was definatly the daughter. The other shopper (the mother) started laughing.
3) At my annual performance review, my boss told me that I do great work, but she wishes I'd treat her less like a friend and more like a boss because I'm younger than her children. I was taken aback because I felt she was treating me like she treats her two sons (in conversations), so I was treating her how I treat my mother.

Reading Tannen's book on family communication helped me see some of the things Mom was hoping for when saying she wished I had sisters: a confidant, someone to share secrets with, someone to "trust talk" with, and--perhaps most importantly--someone to learn the rules of communication from. It also helped me realize that the way my mother and I communicate is very different from how a mother and sons communicate or even from how other mother/daughter sets communicate.

Deborah Tannen has examined the traits of communication common between men and women and mothers and daughters. In I Only Say This Because I Love You, she broadens her view to examine how families communicate with each other-siblings, children, parents, in laws, adult children, and step-parents. Not only do difference in gender have to be taken into account, but age differences, status differences, and life experience differences all shade how conversations proceed.

She presents several communication theories in explaining how to properly communicate within a family. These include metamessages vs. messages (what we mean vs what we say), the connection continuum and control continuum (who's in charge of the relationship and conversation), and complementary schismogenesis. The last is a term she borrowed from an anthropologist and changed up a bit to fit her needs. It's essentially what happens when you aren't getting your way in a conversation, so you keep saying the same thing over and over again.
By giving concrete examples, Tannen shows the different relationships in families (almost exclusively multichildren, middle class American homes) and how communication varies between these relationships.

While reading through the communication styles included, I realized that I have essentially one communication style (learned from my mother), which is essentially intellectual discourse with humor, but still respectful. In most situations, this style has worked well. It's gotten me into a little hot water (apparently, my boss doesn't care for this) or into misunderstandings (mine and the other person's), though, because I haven't had the various communication lessons brought up in this book, such as having to frame a conversation differently if I'm talking to Dad or a younger sister. I haven't learned to navigate between "trust talk" and "troubles talk" or learned the importance of "one up/one down" on the control continuum in conversations. I mistakenly assume people have the same frame of reference I do, the same love of intellectual discourse, and the same dry sense of humor. But knowing about these allows me to understand other ways to frame personal and professional conversations.

This book can be very useful to someone trying to make adult relationships with siblings and parents work, or to parents trying to improve communication with a spouse and younger children. It is also very handy for only children who've had their parents for conversation buddies. The lessons we learn when talking to our siblings don't end when we move out of the house. Learning how to talk with your little brother versus your big sister can help when it's time to talk to teammates at work. Recognizing when joviality has hurt someone's feelings and making amends quickly is always a useful skill. ( )

Rehashes her other books too much - not much new. ( )

I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/11382101