Your story, my story, our story

Yvonne’s story

It is really not that hard. Just about everyone in the world manages it hundreds of times a day. I am talking to you so I am looking into your eyes.

It is only polite. It shows I am paying you a courtesy by engaging completely with you.

But as I speak in this way to you, where are you looking? Well, you are not paying me the same courtesy by looking into my eyes. Doing that makes you uncomfortable. You find it a very hard thing to do but it is important to me that you make some kind of effort. It is important for you to try for other people, too, because it is the one thing that everyone notices and the one thing that makes you very noticeable.

I want you to make an effort to get better at looking people in the face when they are speaking to you so that they can get to know you for the good person you are.

Mike’s story

I can see you and you can see me. We know each other is there. We can both hear each other and communicate perfectly well. I do not understand why it is so important to you that I look right into your face, right into your eyes.

You are very good at letting me know what you want and how you feel. You are able to use your words and how you say those words to make it clear what you expect of me. Why do I need to look into your eyes when you say those words? Why do you feel I need to look into your eyes when I am talking to you? You get my meaning wherever I am looking.

I don’t understand why this is so important to you and it will make me feel very stressed if you try to force me. But I feel stressed because you are upset about it so it would be good to find a way to make us both feel happy.

Yvonne and Mike’s story

Let’s think of some ideas that might work.

We can try them one at a time and see which ones we can do and which ones we’ll forget about.

We can agree to have eye contact for a very short time - perhaps only one sentence to begin with. This will make us both happy.

We can agree to look at another part of my face. This means we will both feel comfortable.

We can agree eye contact is not so important as long as we both feel we are giving each other our full attention. We can tell each other this or make contact another way – a high five, perhaps?

We can practise so you get more used to doing it and you get better at it. We can take turns at talking about something each of us likes for one minute and time it on our phones.

We can accept that you listen better when you do not have to work so hard at looking at me. We can make something or do something we enjoy together – make a snack or play a game. We can work this out together.