Your turn to write on the board

"Try not to do what I was doing.  My daughter has fibromyalgia and I've got similar symptoms.  When she would tell me of her aches and pains I would echo them and say I knew what she was going through because I felt the same way.  I figured that my sympathy would help her in that she'd have someone to talk to who really understood. I was wrong about that. I learned that on the contrary, what this did was to invalidate her feelings. She began to talk less and less about her problems.  My wife figured out what was happening before it was too late, and things are OK between us again. We're on the same wavelength, but when she talks, I focus on her, not on me, and I listen to her attentively. To what she's communicating through her words and through her actions. Hard to do, but well worth it! "