This is the first of a two-part blog.
Do you Snipe? Do you Zing? Maybe you do both.
"Well, before I answer that," you may be saying, "what are you talking about?" Okay, fair enough. Sniping and zinging are two nasty verbal relationship assault tactics we have all likely engaged in at one time or another. Some of us have reached the Master level, the Black Belt, the Ninja status in sniping and zinging "skills."
Do you Snipe? Do you Zing? Maybe you do both.
"Well, before I answer that," you may be saying, "what are you talking about?" Okay, fair enough. Sniping and zinging are two nasty verbal relationship assault tactics we have all likely engaged in at one time or another. Some of us have reached the Master level, the Black Belt, the Ninja status in sniping and zinging "skills."
THE SNIPER:
You know what a sniper is, right? An assassin. In the World War II movie he's the specially trained marksman who hides in the bell tower of some nearly demolished church and picks off incoming enemy troops one at a time using his high caliber, scoped rifle (and usually gets blown up by a bazooka blast shortly thereafter). He is first, however, able to kill some hapless incoming soldiers and because bullets travel faster than the sound, they are shot through before they even hear the crack of his rifle. By the time the other troops hear the shot their comrade is down and the sniper has ducked for cover, leaving only a drifting puff of gunsmoke to betray his position. Very sneaky, very deadly.
So, you can probably see where I'm going with this. We snipe...with words. We snipe our partners, we snipe our kids, we snipe our parents, we snipe our co-workers. We snipe. We hide, we scope the target, we fire, and we duck for cover.
The primary characteristic of the snipe, as opposed to the zing (which I will get to in part II of this blog), is that a snipe moves beyond mere complaint or criticism to contempt--character assault. That's what makes it deadly. Contempt is not an expression of anger or disappointment at something the other person did or failed to do; it is an expression of disgust with and disdain for who they are. "Nag, nag, nag! You're just like my mother, only ugly." "Yeah, well if you weren't so stubborn and lazy I wouldn't have to nag, Mr. muffin-top!" (f-bombs omitted.)
Snipers hide. One favorite hide for the word-sniper is the public setting. You know, you're out for dinner with friends and Jen takes a nasty shot at her partner where she knows he probably won't engage her in a public battle. "Well, maybe if you were a real man you'd get a real job we could go Hawaii too." OOOH, let's not go out with Jen and Jim again. How about the phone comment--just before the hang-up, or better yet the duel to get the "last word" in a text message war. Of course you can always hit-and-run before you rush out slamming the door. "Well, you do whatever you want, that's what you always do anyway!" Clients share the pain of these deadly word bullets with me, sometimes just a debilitating phrase, a piece of verbal shrapnel, that has remained lodged in the soft flesh of their self worth since childhood. Very nasty, very deadly.
Marriage expert and researcher John Gottman in his book Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work has identified contempt as a late stage sign of relationship deterioration and the deadliest of what he has labeled "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" that herald looming marital collapse. If you are engaging in contemptuous, character assaulting sniping in your marriage, look out. Seek help today, not tomorrow, if you hope to save your relationship from the skids of dissolution.
Sniping is a no-win situation because when we lacerate another's character--their sense of who they are--we send them into defense mode, further rupture the relationship, and make sensitive healing dialogue nearly impossible. To complicate things further, we are sometimes sniping not just at the person we are currently hurt or angry with but at unseen ghosts from past. This unfinished business or "offline content" as one of my professors liked to call it shows up in our relationships like a personal plague that knows our address. If past wounds and resentments lurk outside our awareness we will tend to think the problem is everyone else even though we are the common denominator in our wake of relationship wrecks.
Perhaps it's time to lay down the rifle and get serious about your own healing and liberation from destructive relationship patterns.
In Part II we will look at "zingers," a less destructive effective form of verbal assault.
Copyright 2011 John D. Deyo, M.A., MFT
