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Conversation is an art form.

Contrarians have a poor choice of verbal tools.

It is possible to alter the negative trend of a conversation with simple language tricks.

If you have ever told your spouse or partner, “Y’know, it feels like you debate everything I say,” and they responded, “No, I don’t,” you may have felt as if you were trapped in a verbal Escher painting. Some people seem to take a tad too much pleasure in contradicting or at least qualifying whatever we say. These people are sometimes referred to as contrarians, and it can be challenging and even disagreeable to be committed to them in long-term relationships.

Most of us assume that there are infinite ways that people can respond during conversations; however, I believe that conversational dynamics tend to fall into patterns. During my 18 years of private practice as a psychotherapist and interacting with thousands of students, I’ve observed that people have default responses with clear motivations: to connect with, comfort, or contradict other people.

Firstly, the human mind has a negativity bias, and my personal philosophical belief is that people subconsciously search for supposed “truth” or accuracy by coming to a synthesis of disparate viewpoints. Attributed to 18th-century German philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, this is what is known as a dialectic: thesis plus........

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