Nourishing Our Relationships with Active Constructive Responding

Being in relationship with anyone – friend, family, or lover – means attuning ourselves to them: paying attention to their moods and emotions, to what’s going on in the ebb and flow of their lives. And, hopefully, they do the same. A healthy relationship entails emotional reciprocity.

It also requires dramatically more positive input than negative (or even neutral). According to decades of research by Dr. John Gottman (of the Gottman Institute), in order for a relationship to thrive, couples need to have five positive interactions to counterbalance every single negative one. When this five-to-one ratio gets out of balance, it can spell disaster for the relationship.

Listen to me read this post (and get some color commentary) on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts! (Episode #44)

Additionally, a key predictor of relationship success over the long term isn’t how people respond when things are bad, it’s actually how they respond when things are good. So it’s not just a matter of being able to comfort our loved ones when they’re down (adding positive to the negative), it’s about ensuring that we also offer encouragement and support when they’re up (adding positive to the positive). 

While it’s tremendously important for each of us to have support when things are rough, we also need support when things are awesome. We need people in our lives who we can call to share our exciting news and know that they are going to celebrate the shit out of it. 

Even if it’s not necessarily something big and amazing we’re excited about, we still need our loved ones to share our enthusiasm – to respond in ways that tell us they care. 

And sometimes, it helps to have a model to follow! So, I want to share a tool for what it can look like to amplify positivity in our communications.

Active constructive responding (ACR) is a framework for how we can actively communicate encouragement and support. It’s a useful tool/concept to help all of us show up as better friends, lovers, and general cheerleaders. It provides a clear pathway for nourishing our relationships through our everyday communications.

Active Constructive Responding (ACR)

ACR is a concept that comes out of the field of positive psychology – the study of human thriving (rather than disorder). The basic premise of the active constructive response framework is that we communicate in ways that are either active or passive, constructive or destructive. You can think of it like a chart with four quadrants – passive on the left, active on the right; constructive on top, destructive on the bottom. (See image below).

In any given exchange, we can be actively or passively engaged. We can be leaning in or sitting back. We can be intentionally contributing to a conversation or simply receiving, letting it flow over and into us. 

Similarly, we can show up in ways that are constructive or destructive. Are we building things up or tearing them down? And are we being intentional about the direction we take things? 

I’d like to think most of us aren’t showing up in destructive ways on purpose, but what the ACR framework reveals is that sometimes negative, unsupportive communication can show up in sneaky, unintentional ways. (I touched on this a bit in my post about cheerleading our loved ones.)

While we may intend to be supportive, there are a number of ways we can accidentally shit on people’s parades (i.e. bring negativity to their positive bids for connection). Looking at this through the ACR framework, we can see that some form of parade shitting happens in three of the quadrants – just in different, sometimes subtle ways.

What ACR Looks Like in Conversation 

Let’s walk through a scenario to help illustrate how easily we can fall into patterns of negative communication. It happens to all of us, and there’s so much social conditioning to blame. The point here isn’t to make any of us feel bad for how we’ve failed our loved ones in the past. It’s just to highlight how we can do better. (And I am super including myself in this, y’all! I still don’t have this down perfectly).

So! To keep it light and support all of us in being kind to ourselves around this, let’s make you the protagonist here and a coworker the potential parade shitter. I invite us all to mentally swap out details and find places of identification. 

In this little communication fable, let’s imagine you just got approval to work on a side project that you are super excited about. It’s a bit experimental and something you haven’t done before (i.e. something potentially vulnerable), but you are jazzed about the possibilities it opens up.

Fresh off the meeting with your boss, you run into your coworker Jordan at the water cooler. Or, more likely, you hop directly into your next zoom meeting and Jordan is already logged in.

Riding the high of your enthusiasm around the new opportunity, you share with Jordan, “I just got approval to work on the rainbow sprocket project! This is going to be so cool!”

Now, Jordan can respond in ways that are active or passive, constructive or destructive…

Passive destructive (withdrawal):

“Huh. Do you have those TPS reports finished? I need them by tomorrow.” 

Jordan doesn’t engage with your enthusiasm (passive), and they shift the focus to something else/themself (destructive). 

This is subtle parade shitting in action. It’s a withdrawal from your offer of conversational content, a redirection away from what you brought to the table and onto something else. It communicates that they don’t want to talk about your topic, and you’re left guessing as to why. Usually, our brains will fill in all sorts of stories about why – Jordan is judging me, Jordan doesn’t believe in me, Jordan doesn’t like me, etc. This does not feel good.

Active destructive (attack):

“I can’t believe they’re actually going to let you do that. It’s a total long shot in terms of getting an actual return on investment, and I’ll have to pick up your slack. Do you have any idea how much harder this is going to make things for me?” 

Yikes! Jordan hears you and responds (active), but they overtly shit on your parade and make it entirely about them (destructive). 

While in this case they acknowledge they heard you, they use your content against you – attacking your enthusiasm and undermining your confidence. It feels fucking awful. This time you didn’t have to make up any stories because Jordan outright told you all the icky things they were thinking! 

Passive constructive (apathy):

“Oh, cool. Good for you.” [Long pause while they look at paperwork or fiddle with something.] 

Now this, this is the subtly demoralizing response. Jordan sort of engages with what you said but only at a bare minimum (passive), and they offer at least a superficially positive response (constructive). However, the low energy and lack of active engagement can come across as apathy – which ultimately has a negative impact rather than a positive one.

While Jordan did, on some level, hear you, they failed to participate. You made an offer, and they sniffed it, then turned up their nose. There may be all sorts of reasons for this – apathy often shows up in our daily communications when we let our own preoccupations overshadow what’s going on around us. Jordan might be worried about the presentation they are about to give, they may have a stomach ache, they could have just gotten some bad news they are processing. Nevertheless, regardless of the reasons for it, this kind of response communicates a lack of interest, and it can be soul-crushing in closer relationships. 

Active constructive (engagement):

“Hell yeah! That’s awesome. I know you’ve been wanting to work on that for a while. What’s your first step?” 

Yay! Jordan gives a shit! They acknowledge your enthusiasm (active), and both mirror it and ask questions to further engage (constructive). This is the magic sauce, y’all. This is cheerleading in action.

Jordan both hears you and adds something to what you brought to the table through affirmation and curiosity. This is a conversational “yes, and!” in action. Not only did Jordan hear you, they remembered that this is something you’ve talked about before and acknowledged its importance to you. Then they leaned in by asking a question, signaling that they care about your enthusiasm. 

This curiosity helps to amplify your positive energy by creating space for it to expand into. It becomes an active conversation about your enthusiasm, which feels great! You get to keep riding your excitement, which, in turn, amplifies your creative thinking and self-belief! YAY!

Gathering Your Cheerleaders

Again, I feel like in some ways this should all seem incredibly obvious – and maybe it does. But we can all use reminders of this shit from time to time. 

It’s really easy to fall into patterns and our own tunnel vision when it comes to our day-to-day interactions. We get distracted and preoccupied. We forget to listen deeply. So, when someone we love does it to us, it’s important to offer some grace and assume they mean well. 

But we can also get really intentional about practicing active constructive responding ourselves. We can be the change we want to see in the world and in our interpersonal relationships. And we can pay better attention to who does it for us in return. 

Not everybody is a great cheerleader. So when we want and need support, we need to think about who we’re turning to. Ideally, we only reach out to the list of folks we know will actively engage – and sometimes that may not be a very long list. But having even one person we know will cheerlead the shit out of our enthusiasm can make a tremendous impact.

Let’s gather our cheerleaders, my loves. Make a literal list and stick it on your wall or your mirror or your altar. (And whether you have my phone number or not, put me on it! I believe in you.)

Think about the people in your life who will lift you up not just when you’re feeling down, but also when you’re feeling good.

Who shows up for you and believes in you when you can’t muster it for yourself? 

Who always knows how to make you smile?

Who can hold space for your feelings? Who feels like a safe harbor with a lighthouse to bring you home? 

Who are the friends and loved ones who will help toss you into that triple backflip of bad-assery? Who will form the base of the pyramid of your dreams?

Those are your cheerleaders. And when things are rough or things are awesome, they are the people to turn to. It’s not the size of the list that matters, but the sincerity of the people on it. 

Life is a team effort, and the cool thing is that we do, actually, get to pick our teams.