Perry Wood - Secrets Of The People Whisperer: Using the art of communication to enhance your own life, and the lives of others

I am in the car with my father. We are on our way to the coast to spend a couple of days together. I sense that he is seriously ill and that he may not last beyond Christmas: it is now the end of October. I am afraid about this, not because we are very close, but because we are not very close. We have not really communicated, except on a superficial level, for years.

I had asked him to come away with me so that we might talk. I wanted to make my peace with him, there were things I felt I needed to know from him before he was gone forever and time was running out. Normally it was my mother who did most of the talking while my father lived almost silently in his own reclusive world: reading a novel, watching TV or listening to music with his head phones on.

For the first couple of hours on the journey I was asking myself whether this was such a good idea. Our conversation was on the usual superficial level and I wondered if we were going to get on to anything meaningful that I wanted to hear from him.

Suddenly the conversation opened up: he began to talk and didn't stop talking for two whole days. He told me stuff I wanted to know, stuff I'd wondered about and stuff that had never even entered my head. He told me the reasons why he hadn't wanted children and the reasons he'd decided to have them anyway. He told me how it was for him as a child and how it was for him when he had small children of his own. He told me how money had been for him. He told me how much he loved my mother. He told me how much he loved my brother and me and how proud he was of us. He talked about sex. He told me what he was afraid of, what his fears were and what hurt him even after many decades had passed. He told me things that I hold in my heart and cannot share with you or anyone else.

By releasing all the things that he had kept locked up for so long, by communicating openly and honestly, I finally understood so much about him, and about myself, too. By what he communicated, he had freed me, and 1 hope that in some way he had freed himself.

Following the trip away with my father, I began to think about all of the significant relationships in my life, past and present, and the effects that communication had on them. I reflected on what adults had communicated to us as children, about how my parents had communicated with each other, how I had lost close touch with my brother. I reflected on how, despite there being a great deal of love, so much of my marriage had been nine years of anger, frustration, feeling unloved, lonely and misunderstood, and how this had finally led to divorce. How the business I had co-run for twelve years, although successful, had been an uphill struggle because of how my partner and I communicated with each other, our staff, suppliers and clients.

It seemed that I had been brilliant at saying the wrong thing, at hurting people's deepest feelings, at being misunderstood or misinterpreting what someone was telling me without ever intending to do so.