Like many (or almost all!) ideas, models, and concepts, Cooperative Communication is built on many previous ideas, models, and concepts. Although we created this website and wrote much of the material for it, other people developed the concept before we did. Here is an overview of where we believe this idea comes from.
Cooper first learned about Cooperative Communication in 1990 during a workshop led by Josephine (Jo) Bowens Lewis. She called it “the Cooperative Contract.” Her husband, Mark Wise, wrote a 2 page handout that Cooper received at the workshop. You can read the original here.
Mark and Jo gave credit for developing the Cooperative Contract to Claude Steiner and Hogie Wycoff. Claude Steiner was a friend and colleague of Eric Berne, the founder of Transactional Analysis (TA). Claude died in 2017, so we can’t ask him about his development of the Cooperative Contract. But he did write extensively, and according to Felipe Garcia – who knew Claude, Jo, and Mark – Claude first wrote what he called “the Cooperative Process” in the 1970’s in a newsletter for a group in California called Radical Psychiatry. They used the Cooperative Process to resolve interpersonal conflicts in their group.
Over the next decades, Claude wrote extensively, for example, Achieving Emotional Literacy. In our Cooperative Communication group, we created a handout “Responding Cooperatively to a Power Play” based on material Claude wrote about the use of power in relationships. In Germany, Claude was the inspiration for the founding of an organization to teach about Emotional Literacy, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Emotionale Kompetenz (www.dgek.de)
Like Jo and Mark, Felipe also developed his version of what Claude called the Cooperative Process. Felipe called it "The Responsive Process". It includes the internal responsive process – how we can understand and deal with our emotional response in a situation -- and the external responsive process – how we can act instead of being passive. (www.winningtogether.org/publications)
Finally, there are several concepts from TA in Cooperative Communication, for example, the concept of “contracting”: creating a clearly stated agreement between two or more people about how they will communicate with each other. There is also a concept called “discounting:” ignoring or devaluing some aspect of our experience or a situation which is essential for resolving a conflict.
We are very grateful to all of these friends and colleagues, some of whom we know or knew personally, for their work to develop the concept that we are calling Cooperative Communication.