Difficult Dialogue Analysis

A few years ago I have a difficult dialogue with one of my best friends. I met him through a social network on the Internet. At that time he was living in Reno Nevada and our conversations were always about his marriage problems. In April 2011, he got divorced and in July of the same year my youngest daughter and I had the opportunity to travel to Reno and met him. During my visit there, I also met his ex-wife and their children. At first she looked me as her rival or her enemy, but when we had a chance to talk, she trusted me and told me how difficult her life was with my friend because of his alcoholism. My friend never told me that he has lost his family because he was an alcoholic. A few months later, two of his children, his ex wife and …show more content…
He gave me a call and invited me to have dinner to meet his new girlfriend. We met in a restaurant and his girlfriend looked disappointed because he was drunk. When he went outside to smoke, his girlfriend told me that they were having problems because of his drinking. When he came back we were talking for a while about his drinking problem but they became heated. At that time I applied the fifth of the eight ground rules for difficult dialogues, that says that we have to listen even we do not want to listen (Bucher, 2015). I listened to him while he was justifying his way of drinking. After he finished, I told him that there are many programs that could help him with his problem and I shared some of my experiences I had as child living with my alcoholic father. Now I know that it is the first of the eight ground rules for difficult dialogues. This rule refers to be open, honest and people have to try to move outside of our comfort zone (Bucher, 2015). After I shared my experience he said, “I do not have any problem, I can stop drinking any time I …show more content…
I shared to him the way my siblings, my mother and I suffered because of my father’s alcoholism. Nobody likes to be reminding about painful experiences, but I had to do it to let him know that this problem was affecting many people around him. Another thing that I did well was that I listened to him even thought I did not want to listen to the arguments he used to justify his aptitude and behave. And the last thing that I think I did well was that I did not judge him. It is the sixth of the eight ground rules for difficult dialogues (Bucher, 2015). I know that his father and his grandfather were alcoholic and he was just following the only pattern he learned during his early life. The first thing that I might have done was that I should step into his shoes and tried to analyze the problem before talk about it. The second thing that I might have done was I should find the better moment to talk about his problem. His girlfriend and I confronted him about his problem while he was drunk and in my opinion it was a bad time to try to encourage him to look for