At the 2 minute and 8 seconds, Walter was asked a question by the father and the family shifted their attention to him to hear his response, after Walter responded, no one commented back and totally ignored him.

At the 2 minute and 8 seconds, Walter was asked a question by the father and the family shifted their attention to him to hear his response, after Walter responded, no one commented back and totally ignored him. The family switched subjects and did not look back at Walter. He was not able to tell if they were listening to him or they didn’t like his response and ignored him. This type of action resonates with the term “Responding: Providing feedback, which is when the speaker looks for a response from the people who are listening and watches if their message was delivered or ignored. In this case, Walter did not get a response, perhaps because the family shifted to another subject because his statement did not interest them or they simply ignored him. This has occured to Walter in scene 4.6, when the family is talking and responding to Walter, and then they just decide to stop listening and ignoring his response.

“Verbal and Nonverbal abuse: Expressing contempt is intended to insult and emotionally abuse a person. When people argue as adversaries trying to win a verbal exchange, contempt can easily become a verbal weapon” (Rothwell, p.181, 2016). In the video, between 6:40 – 7:30 we see variances of verbal and nonverbal abuse occurring between the brother and sister, when they started to say things in order to put one another down. The sister called him a bad name, and out of anger she told his biggest secret of him liking other men, which you can see by his body language and face expression that he was really hurt and upset by that accusation.

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At 8:06, when a destructive communication climate was occurring, Tommy decided to withdraw from the conversation, so he can avoid further attacks. A destructive communication climate occurs in two elements, either a pattern of closeness or a pattern of defensiveness and the three ways to avoid this is by denying the accuracy of the attack, counterattack the person by responding to them, or withdrawing by removing yourself from the situation. When Tommys’ sister told everyone his secret, he took himself out of the situation because he knew it would cause more drama and it will affect everyone around him and not just himself.

In my first initial response, I thought Tommy did a well job of communicating with the family and he tried to keep a good conversation going. After learning about communication, I believe that Tommy was a major contributor to the problems that were occuring, and the for the arguments that were starting. Tommy had secrets that were being exposed, and people that were getting hurt because he was interrupting others, making jokes at the wrong time, and he was not the active-listener that I thought he was. He also ignored all of the other families feelings, facial expressions, and dominated the floor.