The Story Lived and Told: Abbie VanMeter on her Journey to CMM

Thanks, Abby.

I'm wondering if now would be like a good time like for you to sort of give like a brief explanation in like a podcast layperson kind of way of like how would you explain CMM to someone?

Yeah, I, I do still like to, again, because this is how I was introduced to it in that textbook from M. Griffin, the kind of quote at the core of CMM is persons in conversation co-construct their social realities and are simultaneously shaped by those realities.

So that does feel like a mouthful, but I think it's, you know, if you can break it down, there's elements there that I think anybody can get and recognize as real in their lives.

And so see, again, that's that seeing yourself as a person in conversation, seeing yourself as an active participant and you're creating meaning in your communication and your communication is everything.

It's storytelling.

It's, you know, all of these processes that are involved in communication.

And so I can picture, again, this textbook that was just so fundamental to me, that each chapter had a little kind of bar on the first page that described where the theory was on the scale of interpretive to, I'm actually forgetting the other end of the scale because that was really not for me, [laughs] those kind of theories that were a lot more like prescriptive and CMM fell really far on the interpretive side.

And so that's a lens I still, you know, understand CMM of as it's basically the, the, in the context of the book, it was saying it's the difference between is there one capital T truth out there for us to find, wh- which are the theories that kind of follow that logic and then interpretive, which are the theories that say it's pluralistic truths.

It's multiple little T truths that coexist that we make.

And so that distinction really sticks with me as a framework for what CMM's about.

And so to me, the complexity of the theory does serve the purpose of meeting the complexity of our relationships and social worlds.

Communicating is so hard, relationships so complex.

There is so much going on.

And I just think we do ourselves a disservice when we try to ignore that and use simpler ways of understanding this kind of like what's going on in communication.

So I just see CMM as an attempt to bring all of these elements together, these different puzzle pieces maybe.

Like I think maybe you encounter this too with there's a lot of people that are already using many of these puzzle pieces.

We're talking about dialogue.

We're, we're, we're talking about collaboration.

We're talking about relationships.

We're talking about storytelling.

But CMM, I think, is like the picture on the box.

It, it, it's the whole of how those pieces actually fit together and what they mean in the context of each other.

Because in terms of CMM, if you're thinking about your communication, you're thinking about your relationships, you're talking about the turns, the individual, like, you know, the moment to moment, I said what I said because of what you said and beyond what you said because of, mm, the face you're making at me right now and the day I've already had before I showed up here, it, that's making me feel defensive.

And so that's why I'm gonna react this way.