The real skill is storytelling. Or, frame setting if you want. It absolutely can lead to safety and empowerment, but it’s an incredibly difficult set of skills for most people to learn. Essentially, instead of expressing content into a conversation, you express context. Instead of “stop spending so much of our money”, you say “You know, I keep thinking about what it’ll be like for us together when we retire. I have this nightmare where we’re poor…”. Or, someone says “You’re just not listening!” And you respond with “Oh, if youre not feeling listened to, let me try to express back to you what I’m hearing you say. And after you feel heard, then I’ll respond.”

Frame setting is a tool of power. It’s probably the single greatest tool that exists for manipulating people. (Well, aside from offering people giant sums of money). It’s the tool of good therapists and psychopaths the world over. And I think the only way to build resilience against it is to learn the skill yourself.

(It also comes with a paired skill - which is to become consciously aware of the frame someone is speaking from, and being able to name and debate the frame itself.)

Robert Kegan has a developmental model that bunches people into one of 5 progressive stages of cognitive development. The 5th stage is (very loosely) characterised by this sort of thinking. They did a broad assessment of the population and found only about 5% of people assessed are in this stage.

The sad truth is that most people spend their whole lives subject to the frames that other people set for them. Speech from outside the frames you know is usually incomprehensible.