Sadly, the dominator model meaning perspectives that propel us into everyday speech very often if not always work at odds with the compassionate. As it says in the handout, there are three kinds of communication that interfere with compassionate communication: demands, language that obscures choice, and diagnoses and interpretations. In the dominator model, every exchange is a demand. Demands always obscure choice. The dominator constantly diagnoses and interprets. Gosh—
When I remember the first time I heard three interferences, I felt absolutely flummoxed. As a teacher of English, what I did as a major part of my practice, as radical as I saw myself at the time, came in the form of all three. I made demands of students by controlling the syllabus and the assignments. I eliminated choice by making all this class structure incorrigible and the assignments unchangeable. I interpreted and diagnosed when I graded their work and their attitudes. Not only did these three horsemen of the dominator ride over compassionate communication, they trampled the ends principle and did damage to the moral sphere as well.
When we make demands, we tell the recipient of those demands that her/his ends don't count, only the one embedded in my demand counts. Even if we make that demand in the spirit of doing good for the other, we still violate the ends of the other. In fact, it often happens that when someone tells some else, "I did it for your own good," as with parental figures to children, the speaker is explaining to the other why the speaker has done something to the other that the other would not have agreed to in the first place—something that the recipient feels has done harm.[133] We touched on this idea when we reflected on the use of "please" and "thank you."