And I am going to go out on a limb and say that libertarians and contrarians are vastly overrepresented in the target of this article.
I shall control the sidebar no one will stop me.
I will control the sidebar no one shall stop me.
3 s/b JP Stormcrow Bored on a Tuesday in January
First off, the word "gaslighting" has run its course, and then jumped on a shark and ran that course, and then finally jumped off that, too. It is especially meaningless in this article. I'll get back to that word, though, when I get to my point. It turns out the one weird trick is this:
And I thought I was the only person to whom "gaslighting" was wildly overused/misused. Solidarity.
You are the only person to see "gaslighting" as overly or misused. Everyone else sees it used judiciously and correctly.
Nobody uses the term "gaslighting" correctly. It describes a phenomenon that doesn't exist.
I mean, it only exists in that one Hitchcock movie.
And it is also correctly described in the linked article.
Heebie is right that the article is doing good work in reaching out to people who don't think about relationships.
But there are times when people's emotional and processing needs are not helpful. (I'm here thinking of a close relative who finds most maintenance or planning activity deeply taxing, prefers to lurch from minor crisis to minor crisis. Discussion is a blend of immediate practical issues and tragic landscape descriptions. The tragic landscape doesn't change much; it can be and has been a topic of sustained discussion [that is, I listen with genuine sympathy] ). I'd be interested in a complementary article explaining how to recognize when your feelings are not your friends.
Outing myself as basically avoidant I guess-- beyond compassion and sometimes ambition, I rarely see my own feelings as helpful. Wherever possible, understanding externally describable desired outcomes is IMO very useful in interpersonal relations. Understanding what other people want, ideally because they tell me after some self-insight, helps me considerably. Kids obviously don't work this way.
Wow, can we dispense with the overly intellectual pedantic nitpicking and get back to the warm and heartfelt reassurances that have been the hallmark of this blog over the years?
8, 11: I conclude the article is about the movie.
LW, you're being gaslit. Gassedlight?
What if Attorneys general are gassinglight you?
9: pf is gaslighting us with the assertion any of the film versions was Hitchcock.
Lots of my interpersonal relations are like this-- IME using feelings as a shield to avoid undesired practical outcomes is pretty common. Probably unnecessary to say in so self-aware and successfully actualized a group that there's a balance to be struck in every life between emotional realities and external ones when those aren't in harmony.
Okay, fine, I will take the bait: does "gaslighting" have an actual, correct definition? I've seen the movie, thanks to a philosophy class for which I had insufficient respect. But I'm not sure which pieces of the character's behavior in that film are part of the definition:
- deliberately making the lights flicker
- making the lights flicker as part of his secret, destructive behavior
- knowing that the lights are flickering
- lying about his knowledge of the flickering lights, i.e. denying that they are flickering
- in order to persuade his wife that she's crazy
- or in order to actually drive her crazy (either way!)
- so that she doesn't discover, and reveal, the secret behavior for which the flickering lights act as evidence.
It's quite specific. I have never been sure if "gaslighting" is only the "denying reality to a person to make them epistemically helpless" part, or the "creating a bad situation and THEN trying to mislead observers" part, or necessarily both. It's kind of unsurprising to me that it causes so much confusion.
17.
Life is demanding without understanding
I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes I saw the sign
No one's gonna drag you up to get into the light where you belong
But where do you belong
19: It's bullet points 4 and 5 and the rest are just along for the ride.
16: Minivet is gaslighting us by posting here what belongs on Standpipe's blog.
|| Is there an article anyone can recommend on how to tell whether you are being gaslit. Narcissistic sister-in-law, for sure. Unclear with hyper-competitive coworker who outranks me and is trying to act like my boss while our boss is out cause her Dad just died. She's actually going to be out for a while, because she plans on taking FMLA for Anxiety.
Certainly had stuff hidden from me and think that I've been lied to.
Next 6 weeks to 3 months are going to be hell. Wonder if my boss will decide not to come back.
I applied for a job w/ my same boss where I should be away from my current co-worker but have no idea when a decision on that will be made. I'm going to start looking for new jobs, because this is hell. She's also trying to take over my area of expertise and dominate my coworker at my level...conveniently hiding other information from us. Pretty sure she covered up something and lied to me about it.
ATM: Any suggestions for how to protect myself in the interim with out picking g the wrong battles?
22: Okay. So for an accusation of gaslighting to be justified, you need to have reason to think that both parties agree about (some aspect of) reality, but one party is lying in order to undermine the other party's psychological integrity. Is there no requirement that this be happening for a reason -- e.g., so the liar gets away with something? There's presumably a reason.
I take it this gets slippery quickly in situations where two parties openly disagree, but it's not totally clear that there is an underlying agreement and one party is lying about it. Two people can argue about whether the lights are flickering, and person A might be pretty motivated to get person B to question or revise their belief, because person A doesn't think (or at least isn't sure) that the lights really are flickering. That's much more common! It's also common for person B to think person A cannot possibly really doubt that the lights are flickering, so person A must be lying to fuck with person B. So is this the problem with the word?
is this the problem with the word? -- that is, there are definitely shitty, even abusive ways to deal with disagreements within unequal power relationships, and they have serious implications for how consensus forms in social groups, but there needs to be a vocabulary for those epistemic conflicts that doesn't falsely imply that one person is straight-out lying?
25.2: Here's a real common one.
Person A: Why are you yelling?
Person B: I'm not yelling! Why do you say I'm yelling?
A is gaslighting B, who is not yelling, but just being emphatic.
The penultimate sentence of 25 is exactly the problem. Accusations of gaslighting inherently exclude the possibility of good faith disagreement, which is of course an extremely bad faith thing to do.
Obviously it's a thing that really happens--27 is a good example--but the reason so many have latched onto and abused it into meaninglessness is precisely its argumentative power play aspect. Once I accuse you of gaslighting, your only options are acquiescence or doubling down. It may or may not convince actually neutral bystanders, but it certainly rallies everyone who might be sympathetic to your side.
'Narcissistic' is also overused these days. Not every unpleasant person is unpleasant in a narcissistic way. There are other yucky character traits!
I enjoyed 13.
Gaslighting - Tim's SIL did not speak a word to me when we went up after his Dad's death. I sent an e-mail to her before we returned for the funeral saying things had been difficult and I thought it would be good to agree on some ground rules for when we were together in advance of the funeral.
She freaked out, allegedly, and didn't answe PCR Tim and his brother said hold off. Tim's brother thought we should all be supportive and have a meeting after the funeral. We did not push. She tried to initiate one the morning after the funeral in front of her daughter, but Tim was sick as a dog.
After we left, she sent me an e-mail saying, she thought that, despite the sad circumstances of our previous visit, she thought the previous weekend after the death but before se came back for the funeral with her kids) had gone quite well.
Not sure if her intention was to undermine my sense of reality, but she was certainly saying things. That were invalidating what I know to be true. We did not get along, and it was pretty awful, not just for me but for our MIL. I think that qualifies, No?
Gaslighting - Tim's SIL did not speak a word to me when we went up after his Dad's death. I sent an e-mail to her before we returned for the funeral saying things had been difficult and I thought it would be good to agree on some ground rules for when we were together in advance of the funeral.
She freaked out, allegedly, and didn't answe PCR Tim and his brother said hold off. Tim's brother thought we should all be supportive and have a meeting after the funeral. We did not push. She tried to initiate one the morning after the funeral in front of her daughter, but Tim was sick as a dog.
After we left, she sent me an e-mail saying, she thought that, despite the sad circumstances of our previous visit, she thought the previous weekend after the death but before se came back for the funeral with her kids) had gone quite well.
Not sure if her intention was to undermine my sense of reality, but she was certainly saying things. That were invalidating what I know to be true. We did not get along, and it was pretty awful, not just for me but for our MIL. I think that qualifies, No?
Thanks, JRoth, that's helpful, and thank you all for indulging my need to type all this out. The "yelling" example will form a part of my intolerable future paper "Gaslighting the Heap: Sorites Paradox and Consensus Formation."
BG, I'm not sure it's possible to know... I'd be inclined to see it the way you do, but IM(horrible)E people can have really different experiences of things like social awkwardness. Regardless of whether she's trying to manipulate you, it sounds like she's not interested in listening to your perspective and taking it into account in any constructive way, which seems like the more immediate problem. If someone tells me my behavior caused pain and suffering to other people, I tend, you know, to adjust my perspective on it accordingly. The odds that anyone else cares that "I thought it was fine" are always around 0.
She probably just hates you because you got the better brother.
That is to say: even if she is telling the truth about her own experience, and I agree that she may not be, it's totally socially inappropriate to say so as a response to your concerns.
My wife used the term for years, well before it a) went viral, and b) became meaningless. (One of the many fucking things I hate about the internet is how quickly it renders words meaningless.) She used it for intentional "Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes" deceit.
A is gaslighting B, who is not yelling, but just being emphatic Cantonese.
Some ethnicities trend toward being loud.
Accusations of gaslighting inherently exclude the possibility of good faith disagreement, which is of course an extremely bad faith thing to do.
Not just bad faith. It's also gaslighting.
From the OP link:
As relationships therapist Elizabeth Earnshaw points out in an insightful post on the topic (above), gaslighting is something "most people don't consciously choose to use" in relationships: rather it's a learned response.
This actually gets at an issue that I've been kind of obsessed with lately: How much responsibility do we have for the things we don't consciously choose? I'm thinking: A lot.
Not sure if her intention was to undermine my sense of reality, but she was certainly saying things. That were invalidating what I know to be true. We did not get along, and it was pretty awful, not just for me but for our MIL. I think that qualifies, No?
I'm probably misreading this, but if I understand SIL's offense here, it's that she claimed things went well when they did not. To my ear, that sounds like someone trying to avoid making a bad situation worse. But anything of this sort is context-dependent.
41: Also, I get that there's relevant history here, but you generally can't make much sense of people's behavior/intents in the wake of a death. People often aren't themselves and everything is a big, indistinct blur.
40 seems like a pragmatic question. Can you affect the thing in a positive way if you try? I suppose meditating on your responsibility is a useful spiritual practice, for some.
I also read the OP and I think its author would unequivocally call Tim's SIL a gaslighter. This did stand out for me, though:
She suggests validating the other person's feelings by acknowledging where they come from, even if you don't agree with them. For example, "X, I understand you're upset because you have to move your night out in order to have dinner with my family. However, It's very important to me and I appreciate you doing it."
It's basically saying, "you did something costly for me, and now I'm happy, and I want you to know that I'm happy." How is this constructive? Maybe if you slip X a few bills? (It's possible that I need this advice more than I realize.)
(One of the many fucking things I hate about the internet is how quickly it renders words meaningless.)
36: Megan in 30 wants to add "narcissistic" to that list of words, and I think that's correct.
Everybody thinks that they know people who are textbook narcissists, but I think the term should only apply to people like my brother.
40 and 41:
She hates me.
I mean the last time I saw her before that she told me (1.) she was concerned about my visiting my in-laws over Christmas, because my being sad about the death of my godmother might ruin her childrens' Christmas, because I asked her not to text me pictures of her kids at the Christmas pageant incessantly right before a funeral.
And (2.) My late FIL was pretty exasperated when she told me I was rude and inconsiderate (while holding her so ) for slamming doors on the day we were leaving that Christmas. Her son woke up early and he was the one who was playing with the doors. She then sat down and turned her back on me, and my BIL brought the kids to us so that we could say goodbye.
She definitely controls situations by cancelling things at the last minute and not negotiating on plans and is very smug and superior and generally lies about things like Her professional qualifications or the NIH grants she's working on when actually she's taking photos at a wedding (nothing to be ashamed about!)
She also told me that e-mailing her was inappropriate and the four of us needed to sit down in person as a family to hash things out. It's been toxic for a long time. I would never say that I did not contribute to it. But man, I've never seen someone so totally lacking in empathy or even just the capacity intellectually to understand someone else's perspective.
Life is unfair to her and the world is out to get her if anything is inconvenient, but there's no need to think about anyone else ever. I mean, the context is that I hate her, but there is nothing more important to my MIL than having family get along.
Anyway, she has strong narcissistic tendencies. Whether she was gaslighting me is probably debatable, but I should stop thinking about it, because there is no possibility for negotiation at this point.
I feel like the tumblr-descended portion of the internet is really into discussing technical-sounding labels for human behavior, rather than the actual behavior itself. That is, I very often see questions (ok mostly on reddit relationships so maybe not real people) that are like "my SO did X, is that gaslighting" instead of "my SO did X, should I break up with them, and if not what can I do to improve the situation?"
46: In that vein, I might be lacking precision when I refer to my brother as a narcissist, but when I was dealing with him, coming across the term as a clinical description was very helpful.
That "diagnosis" led me to The Grey Rock Method, which was spectacularly effective for me and my sister. (And maybe could be useful to BG?)
(Bonus: the link above includes an extensive discussion of "gaslighting.")
47: Yes, I am kind of trying to do that.
There was a book I read on toxic people describing people who did not have various personality disorders but who were very like certain disorders (histrionic etc.). She was very much like what some people call a vulnerable narcissist.
I feel like this would be harder to explain to a geologist.
Early in our relationship I convinced my wife that Kermit was voiced by Neil Young. I don't know if that's gaslighting but it was pretty funny.
50, 51: Alan Wilson of Canned Heat is a much more uncanny similarity. (But he died in 1970.)
if at all possible i strive to be unoffendanble by unpleasant people bc they are not worth the aggravation. just skate through the most minimal interactions possible in the most superficial way that is socially acceptable & disengage disengage disengage.
I'm very wary of these personality diagnoses, in that I think they can often describe bad strategies that anyone could fall into in bad relationships. It's much rarer for someone to behave like that with everyone in their life, at which point you might label them.
There is a slightly comic footnote to this, in that the very wonderful Scots journalist Deborah Orr wrote about her parents and her upbringing in a book called Motherwell, which was marred only by the constant references to narcissism and the awfulness of narcissists. This only made sense when you realise that she wrote it coming out of a long marriage to Will Self.
In the same book, she explained her own personality quirks as the result of "Delayed ptsd", or "an unhappy childhood" as we used to call it.
So the most recent issue of Harper's magazine has a huge essay by Will Self attacking the concept of "trauma" and especially the diagnostic use of it. Deborah died in 2019 but don't let that stop you getting the last word, Will.
"If your partner, friend, or colleague expresses a desire to talk about what happened, do you brush them off or redefine the fight as 'a little tiff,' refusing to acknowledge that, to the other person at least, it was a significant event which needs to be dealt with?" she says.
"Disregarding someone else's emotional and processing needs in this way, over time, has the effect of silencing them. What point is there in discussing things with you if you deny the significance of what happened before?"
This only works one way, though. Your partner, friend or colleague is equally refusing to acknowledge your perception that the disagreement was not in fact a fight or anything serious, but apparently your perception is not as worthy of respect as his.
It's not gaslighting, for example, for him to say "No! You are wrong! Forgetting to buy milk is not just a minor inconvenience, it is a huge betrayal of trust of relationship-ending proportions!"
What this essentially means is "in the event of a disagreement, the drama queen is always correct". And this is a terrible rule.
See, for example, 54. Which sounds like perfectly good advice to me, but apparently makes dq some sort of hideous lamplighter.
re: 57
Indeed. I've been lucky enough, mostly, to not have been in any long term serious/romantic relationship with someone who creates drama in that way, but I do have a close relative who is like that, and it's utterly draining. There is no minor inconvenience in their life that can't be recast as some relationship-ending crisis, and then endlessly discussed and picked over until everyone involved in the conversation is exhausted and beaten down by it.
Similarly, I have a long-term problem with the notion, often gendered, that offering solutions or practical advice is always wrong when someone is discussing their problems, and that instead the only correct strategy is to listen and allow someone to share how they feel and then validate those feelings, whether or not those feelings are proportional or appropriate in the circumstances. Of course, no-one should be some emotionless Vulcan dispensing tone-deaf "advice" when what someone needs is emotional support or to feel that they are being listened to. But there are also times when practical advice is what they need (even if it's not what they think they want), and times when the endless discussion of some issue or other--purely from the point of view of one party's emotional needs--is basically scab-picking that helps no-one and actively hurts the people involved.
Completely agree with 59.2; I know that people offering practical advice when I have been overthrown by by my feelings in some crisis can be extremely useful. If nothing else, it reminds me that the problem has a practical as well as an emotional dimension.
a thought: how much is the American tendency to medicalise all aspects of human nature driven by insurance companies operating within a really dreadful health care system?
If the only way to get a treatment paid for is to have it listed in the DSM there will naturally be a tendency to inflate the number of diagnoses for conditions essentially invented to justify doctors and therapists getting paid for exercising common sense and professional judgement -- both of which will often lead to fuzzy and imprecise diagnoses because our mental and emotional lives are in fact fuzzy and imprecise.
61: For sure that happens but usually it goes against diagnosing personality disorders. Borderline personality disorder might be an exception. So, for a while there was coverage for "biologically-based" mental illnesses which were basically limited to schizophrenia, manic -depression, and major depression. Someone with severe emotional dysregulation related to borderline personality disorder who tried to commit suicide would always get a diagnosis of major depression to cover the needed hospitalization, but that probably was not what the treating clinicians were thinking about when they formulating a treatment plan.
I have a long-term problem with the notion, often gendered, that offering solutions or practical advice is always wrong when someone is discussing their problems, and that instead the only correct strategy is to listen and allow someone to share how they feel and then validate those feelings, whether or not those feelings are proportional or appropriate in the circumstances.
This was a joke by the Strange Planet guy:
"Remember, when people tell you their problems, they aren't looking for a practical solution. What they want is for you to be sympathetic and understanding."
"Hiring you to work on our IT helpdesk was a terrible mistake."
"Wow, you must feel really bad about it, I'm so sorry to hear that."
The advice thing loops back around to something pretty close to gaslighting again (that is, I think it's driven by disagreement about the underlying state of facts). I mostly don't believe in the existence of people who for emotional reasons related to their gender want supportive platitudes rather than advice that will actually solve their problems -- that dynamic seems to me to be largely driven by a belief that the offered advice isn't going to be practically useful, and that the advisor will be unpleasant to deal with if they're told it's no use.
I mean, think about it. Someone with a problem that was really significant to them, who if given a choice between headpatting and being soothed on the one hand, and a functional solution that would genuinely solve the problem on the other, who preferred the first would be really messed up. There are people like that, but it'd be very strange if women in general were like that: normally most of us manage to function okay in day-to-day life. For anyone who isn't deliberately creating their own misery to wallow in, if they're waving off advice and problem-solving and asking for support, I'm pretty sure it's because they're convinced the problem solving and advice aren't going to be any practical help. At which point the real choice on offer is between two interactions, neither of which do any good, in one of which you're at least being treated kindly and in the other of which you're being blamed for failing to use the useless advice to resolve your problems.
(This diatribe courtesy of my memory of a couple of the most unpleasant conflicts in my medium-term past. People (in my case, both women, this isn't always gendered) really dislike it when you tell them their advice isn't going to fix anything.)
64: There are people who are not interested in doing anything to solve a problem and want you to agree with them that other people are treating them badly and the world is unfair. I mean, the world is unfair, but some people want to be told that they aren't in any way responsible for their problems. And sometimes, the advice is - you can't fix this issue with your boss; if you want things to change you need to find another job. It might be true, but people might not want to hear it.
it'd be very strange if women in general were like that: normally most of us manage to function okay in day-to-day life.
I think the assumption that most women, and indeed most men, are functioning OK in day-to-day life could do with a bit more inspection.
That's what the sticker on my car says.
To both 65 and 66: yes, intentionally wallowing in self-created misery is a thing that some people do, both women and men. Talking about the gendered dynamic where women are presumed to prefer support to advice generally, though, seems to oversimplify the situation where it doesn't recognize that most advice is pretty useless.
Like, BG's example: you can't fix this issue with your boss; if you want things to change you need to find another job. Might be true (although almost certainly not news to the person hearing it). Very unlikely to be much immediate help -- that is, changing jobs isn't a trivial matter, it can take years depending on the circumstances. I, personally, have had bosses that made me miserable, I did change jobs to fix the problem, but it did take years. Delivered as an alternative to emotional support, that sort of thing can come across as "shut up and stop bothering me with your problems; I told you what you need to do; if you're finding that difficult, sucks to be you."
58: there's to my mind a big old ass difference between the depth of engagement due a romantic or life partner or a very close friend and that due a reportedly very unpleasant in law or coworker. if i were tempted to adopt this strategy with the former category i'd take it as a strong indication that i needed to get out of the relationship. with the latter - eh. i take it bostonienne's mil wants everyone to "get along". her sil sounds highly unpleasant. i would assiduously avoid as far as possible any attempt to rope me into anything more than the most superficial of interactions with sil as far more likely to downgrade my own peace of mind and enjoyment of life than improve it, while keeping up a steady flow of social niceties to satisfy mil. how is this gaslighting??? by deceiving sil and mil as to ... politeness? seems pretty underwhelming as a horror plot outcome, but okay!
in more intimate relationships in my exp its perfectly possible to just tell your partner when you are going to vent, then do so colorfully and entertainingly if at all possible bc you may well cheer yourself up in the effort, vs when you need to work through options/solutions/etc. also telling the other person that what they are doing is not helping and to please cease and desist should have the desired effect if the relationship is at all functioning, and in doing so you sometimes discover that actually your own expectations from the interaction are susceptible to evolution and you could indeed use some practical thinking through.
69.1 is it exactly. If you are absolutely stuck in a relationship with someone malignant, and that person annoys you by pretending that there is no problem, that's a huge win. The strategy you pursue should be designed to produce that result.
there's to my mind a big old ass difference between the depth of engagement due a romantic or life partner or a very close friend and that due a reportedly very unpleasant in law or coworker.
Agree entirely (except surely it should be a big-ass difference, a big-ass old difference or a big old difference. Talking about a big old ass difference sounds as though you may have taken too much LDS in the Sixties).
But the article talks about "partner, friend or colleague" - all in the same category, all to be treated the same, unless you want to be a big old-ass gaslighter. I think the article's talking rubbish.
The original gaslighting was, really, "who are you going to believe - me, or your lying eyes?" Using what I suppose you could call emotional leverage to deceive someone into doubting their own beliefs about the world. Extending this idea to cover disagreeing with someone else's emotional reaction is a big old ass-lunge.
I think you're right that in most decent relationships it's not hard at all to negotiate a good balance between emotional support and problem-solving. I just hate hearing it talked about as if people were rejecting 'problem-solving' from a position of 'I prefer emotional support to having my problems solved' rather than from a belief (correct or incorrect) that 'your attempt at 'problem solving' isn't going to be any practical use but it will be unpleasant.'
The usual framing makes people who feel that way sound irrationally self-destructive. The latter framing, while the person who feels that way might be right or wrong in any specific instance, their thinking about it is perfectly reasonable.
I would say that I have less confidence than LB that my friends' practical advice on how to solve my problems would be annoying, unpleasant, or simply reiterating things I had already tried or rejected. I'd be fairly hopeful that they would actually come up with something useful that I hadn't thought of. Maybe I'm just very lucky in my friends (or not very bright).
69: My MIL had a not good relationship with her husband's sister-in-law who I'll call Andover. Andover said that she did not want their kids to exchange Christmas presents, because her kids got too many presents already. My MIL wanted us all to be supportive and close and is heartbroken that that is not how things are. Polite "getting along" is what she'll settle for but she really wanted everyone to be tight. But my SIL told MIL that we just needed to talk everything through.
Or both.
I hadn't even thought of that! Thanks Moby you're THE BEST.
74.last: Hey, if the shoe fits. But I'm not trying to explain all interactions here, just the ones where the potential advice-recipient is rejecting advice or is expressing a preference for support over advice. It seems worth understanding that that's not necessarily an irrationally self-destructive preference.
I don't like to give advice because people blame you if it goes wrong and don't usually credit you if it goes right (because good advice usually seems obvious in retrospect). At least that's what the elves said to Frodo while he was still in the Shire.
I mean, I enjoy giving deliberately bad advice but that's different.
I actually adore giving people advice, and do it constantly. I believe I generally manage not to piss people off by explicitly recognizing that they have a thick understanding of their own problems that I don't and being extremely willing to back off and drop it if I'm getting the impression that I'm not being helpful.
The order of adjectives for English-language asses is size, age, shape, color, origin.
82: Origin? Can you use that in a sentence, please?
81: That sounds like too much work.
84: Have you considered the possibility that you might have more friends, if you were willing to make the slightest effort?
(example of helpful, non-obnoxious advice-giving)
But I might also have fewer if I'm grumpy from all the effort.
83: Kiss my big old round white American ass.
I really really miss having friends with dumb relationship drama that I can give them advice on. Some combination of being older and not meeting all my friends through theater.
I'm generally happy with the decision to not have kids, and I didn't miss having little kids, but to some extent I think I am missing having teenaged kids now.
That sounds right to me -- while there are all sorts of good things about my now-post-teenagers, one of the things I enjoy most is them as a source of gossip: their own problems, their friends' problems, their teachers/professors -- everything.
I feel like I spend my whole life trying to make a teenager wake up, but really it's only a hour every morning.
I really really miss having friends with dumb relationship drama that I can give them advice on. Some combination of being older and not meeting all my friends through theater.
Hahahaha this rings very true. I think that about 10% of my friends at present are theatrical types, broadly speaking, and they generate at least 90% of all the relationship drama that comes my way.
The dynamic in my household growing up is that if I expressed a problem, everyone would bombard me with solutions, but they all involved asserting myself in ways I found socially awkward or embarrassing. Then I would be questioned relentlessly about whether I'd implemented the solution yet, until I found some cover story that allowed us all to drop the issue. I learned to not express problems to them.
76 is just a challenge to out polite them all through this immensely ill advised soul baring exercise. i mean honestly has mil noticed that she's dealing with humans? how could this possibly end well?
completely agree re entertainment potential of teenagers, truly a precious resource!
95: It will never happen. I'm also unlikely to visit for a while because if COVID, their refusal to do Covid tests when Tim went for Canadian Thanksgiving, and the fact that his mother downsized into an apt without a bedroom or den. Tom slept on the couch in the living room. We close on a house tomorrow and don't want money on hotels right now.
When she upgrades to the apartment with the den, then I might be willing to stay on the sofa bed, but I need a little privacy.
(I don't know what I typed initially, but Autocorrect thought initially it should be "hot wet La").
87: Thanks! Maybe, it's because of the super hero nonsense everywhere, but I was wondering if the idea was that every ass needed an origin story.
71: too much LDS
Landkreis Dahme-Spreewald, or Latter-Day Saints?
she's dealing with humans? how could this possibly end well?
It can't, but we try not too think about that too much.
This is not quite the same thing as 92, but the dynamic in my family that this reminds me of is that if you express a desire my mother is going to move heaven and earth to make it happen, but because she fails to understand desire at a pretty fundamental level what she makes happen may not actually in the end be something you want. Like there's no way to say "this is something I kinda want but not if it's a big pain" because she'll just not believe the latter part, and there's no way to get across to her what the thing about it is that you want and so you might get something similar but which isn't something you want at all. And also no way to be like "I want this, but I don't want you to martyr yourself to get it." Again the upshot is learning to just not express desires.
79: My takeaway from that was to be careful not to contradict Gandalf when his guidance is unclear. I live by that rule.
87: I keep finding that it's best to avoid reading these threads in reverse order.
||
Kai is in remote school with technical problems. AB is trying to help him, and he's responding by being a perfect little shit, explaining to her that in school he has to answer questions from the teacher.
I'm turning up Camper van Beethoven so I don't have to hear him and go in there and slap him.
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It's basically saying, "you did something costly for me, and now I'm happy, and I want you to know that I'm happy." How is this constructive?
Seriously? IME two of the most destructive dynamics in relationships is when A feels B either doesn't appreciate what A does for B or doesn't notice that A has done anything at all. Furthermore, I think it's implicit in the quoted statement that B promises to repay that generosity in the future.
Letterman's formulation, in the words of his mom, was "I do and I do and I do for you kids, and what do I get? Nothing!" And of course Mom doesn't actually want the kids to pay her back; she just wants them to respect her sacrifices by becoming the sort of person she's trying to raise (thoughtful, kind, competent).
that offering solutions or practical advice is always wrong when someone is discussing their problems
Steady's dad is the gentle empath of the two of us and I am the relentlessly practical one. My sister called with a sudden problem and we immediately got to problem solving. Steady's dad overheard the conversation and said something like "take a breath and offer her some sympathy". My sister heard that through the phone and wailed "NOOOoooooOOOOO" loud enough for him to hear. And then we went back to problem solving.
Letterman's formulation, in the words of his mom, was "I do and I do and I do for you kids, and what do I get? Nothing!" And of course Mom doesn't actually want the kids to pay her back; she just wants them to respect her sacrifices by becoming the sort of person she's trying to raise (thoughtful, kind, competent).
This is so naive. Mom doesn't want to be paid back, because she wants to always have this guilt card to play.
Did your mom get to interview Nancy Kerrigan?
Anyone have any advice how to deal with someone who immediately jumps on someone trying to raise issues with "You're obviously giving me attitude and don't tell me you're not" in a smiley but serious way? Not to me, but to a third party, and it was uncomfortable as it was a Zoom of three people total. The third party handled it pretty well, focusing on the concrete things he was trying to say (he went calm and slow, perhaps greyrocking a bit), and she got more productive after that, but I have to work closely with the person at issue, and I'd like to figure out how to help her to be less defensive without starting out "You're being too sensitive" all male-like, although I think she is.
It's basically saying, "you did something costly for me, and now I'm happy, and I want you to know that I'm happy." How is this constructive?
Wait, you're arguing that saying thank you for things isn't constructive?
re: 64
For clarity, when I said that the depiction was "gendered" I didn't mean that women _are_ always stereotypically like this and men are stereotypically like that, but rather that when people are explicitly talking about conversational styles around dealing with emotional issues, the cliché is that:
1. men offer practical advice but are often failing to heed or pay attention to emotional needs, and may well be providing advice that the person they are talking to has long since considered (because they aren't a dumbass) and dismissed for good reasons
2. women want to talk through the emotional side of some problem or other, and are interested in the giving and receiving of emotional support and in actively listening to the other person over practical advice
I don't actually think that that gendered cliché really applies like that, and it's not been my experience that the women I have been in intimate relationships with are only interested in 2, nor is it the case that I'm only interested in dispensing practical advice at the expense of emotional support. Most people are somewhere on the 1 to 2 continuum, and probably mostly in the middle, most of the time, although probably the extreme insensitive advice-givers tend to be men.
But ... I have been in in a relationship where that cliché was probably more true than not, and in that case, it drove me crazy. Not because I wasn't capable of listening to the other person, or providing emotional support, but because their need for that was basically bottomless and where BGs description in 65 is pretty much correct. They were capable of talking about the same problems and issues, literally endlessly. In retrospect, it's probably not the fact that there was good advice being ignored--although that was definitely sometimes the case--but that the need for emotional validation was selfish to the point of being hurtful to the other person.
In that situation my "have you thought about trying X?" actively was about shutting the conversation down.
"We've talked about this for 2 hours, each of the past 4 evenings, and we aren't getting any closer to working out why you aren't able to successfully do X at work, so, I'm trying to find a non-confrontational way of telling you I can't handle it anymore."
Yeah, I think that can be a completely legitimate reaction -- that what's going on is a bid for emotional support that's unreasonable or burdensome or exorbitant in the full context of the relationship, and so evading the request or straightforwardly refusing to come through with it doesn't make you the bad guy. I just have a hot-button reaction to the cliche, so you got the canned diatribe about it.
109: I am completely unsure this is a good idea, not knowing the people or the relative job titles, but maybe it might be a starting place. Could you ask her what was going on, and specifically if the guy raising the issue had been a problem for her in the past? "In the meeting on Tuesday, you shut Jim down pretty hard at first, and I couldn't quite see why. Does he have a pattern of (wasting time with non-issues/challenging your authority/wanting to get into problems outside the scope of the meeting/I dunno, whatever makes sense)". And so if she was reacting that way for some specific reason, she might tell you about it, and if she says "shut him down pretty hard? I don't know what you're talking about" at least you've conveyed that the interaction struck you funny.
105, 110: for whatever reason, the example struck me as really weird. "X, I understand you're upset because you have to move your night out in order to have dinner with my family" -- somehow this gave me the impression that X is not going to enjoy the dinner with the family, because who would get upset about moving a night out for something they actually wanted to do? Then the wooden "it's really important to me" (that you have dinner with "my family"?) "and I appreciate it" -- it just gave off this weird vibe to me of low emotional connection.
TBH, saying thank you for an inconvenience or a major favor often feels inadequate to me. I feel much better about showing gratitude by reciprocating. I have in fact been stressed for a while over a situation where I feel I owe a big debt of reciprocity, and maybe it's enough that I always say thank you, but I don't think so. Maybe I have too transactional a view of human relationships, for real?
There's nothing especially wrong with the interaction as written, but it definitely didn't seem like genius-level interpersonal advice for solving hard problems between people and smoothing over conflicts. I think a lot of it was context.
I bet some of the gendered frame laid out in 111, etc., is because pop culture looooooves Men Are Like/Women Are Like/Never the Twain articles and headlines and bottle episodes. And some of it will be natural in any pairing in which the man has more freedom and power than the woman, because someone used to more options is going to have to be really unusually insightful to give advice that's both useful and not painful. And if, on average....
There's the same in white-to-black advice and rich-to-poor, yes?
I've been a gender counterexample and given terrible "just do X" advice and surprised the guys getting it, though since they were bewilderingly expecting me to do the soothing noises despite knowing me entirely through aggressive We-Are-All-Vulcans activities, points lost both sides.
The toad beneath the harrow knows
Where every separate toothpoint goes;
The butterfly, safe in the road,
Preaches contentment to the toad.
64, 111: I stated dating BOGF just a couple years after "You Just Don't Understand" came out, and it really was useful to me when BOGF handed it to me and demanded I read it. I was, as a combo of temperament and upbringing, pretty far over on the "let me offer helpful suggestions" end of the spectrum, while she was, if not at the opposite end, firmly in the middle of that side--she was venting/sharing far more often than she was asking for suggestions. Indeed, for all of her problems, she really wasn't BG's 65*. So that book made the relationship materially better and taught me valuable lessons. TBH, I think that sort of thing is useful/helpful at precisely that stage of life, where you're starting to deal with more different people at deeper levels than previously, and if you haven't been raised with that framing, it's just a mystery.
*with the exception of tedious, repetitive family drama, but it's not as if she was unaware that her family was a toxic stew she couldn't escape. Her one brother was so awful she cut him out, and the rest was just ebb and flow that I didn't blame her too much for engaging with.
116: I'm not sure I buy the power dynamics of this explanation as being the primary aspect. It's a highly socialized behavior--part of why it's gendered--and while the underlying origin of the socialization may go back to power dynamics (DTMFA isn't useful advice to 95% of women pre-1960, so calming noises are better), I don't think that's remotely as important today compared with how one is raised.
I remember one female writer suggesting explicitly asking if someone telling you their problems is looking more for advice or more for sympathy at that moment. (This was in the context of female friendships.)
but it definitely didn't seem like genius-level interpersonal advice for solving hard problems between people and smoothing over conflicts
Sure, but a lot of people are nowhere near genius-level interpersonal behavior. I mean, there's a reason that advice columns tend to repeat (and demand either exceptional qualities of the writer or a willingness to publish bogus advice-seekers for novelty): people often fail at the basics.
And, to be clear, if all person B ever does is thank A for giving in, without ever reciprocating, then the relationship is doomed. But the explicit acknowledgment both of what A gave up and that B valued & appreciated it is the grease that keeps things lubed between the reciprocities. Like, this isn't a sitcom, where the opposite situation can arise in 3 nights and so B can prove that he learned his lesson. A has to take B's word for awhile until the opportunity does arise, then B can show that he meant it.
119: Surely some sort of flag system would be more efficient? Perhaps colored hankies?
The other reason "women x, men y" stuff is so compelling to a lot of people is that in a lot of settings it's just true, because people who don't go along with traditional gender stereotypes leave. In settings I'm in these kind of differences are usually small correlations that are barely meaningful at best, but if you're in an adult in an evangelical church in red America all those stereotypes are just true.
The thing that strikes me, reading the thread is that:
1) It's not very useful to try to make context-independent rules about how to behave in a conversation or respond to requests from a partner, because so much depends on context.
2) For that reason it's helpful to think of various styles of interactions as a variety of possible tactics which have different strengths and weaknesses and can be used in different contexts.
However
3) The problem with that framing, however, is that it's very little help when communication or a relationship is breaking down. When things are going well it's easy and useful to be able to switch between different styles and tactics of communication on the fly but, when you run into a wall that's way less likely to work.
Which leads to a desire to have clear rules about, "if you do X you're creating problems Y" but that means presenting something that is context sensitive as a general rule.
I end up going around in circles on that.
123: See, I feel like it's almost the opposite: in a basically functional relationship, you should be able to operate day-to-day according to your own lights--that is, to put it simplistically, if you never, ever want to engage with emotional problem-listening, don't date someone who only ever wants that and hates practical advice.
But if/when the relationship hits a wall because your day-to-day modes are conflicting, that's when it's useful to be aware of other approaches that don't come naturally. You may not get there quickly, but if we're talking about several days of conflict, silence, repeat, then you should be able to think of alternative approaches that you've read about and try to apply them.
Obviously, that can be emotionally difficult, but the premise is that you can't get out of this dead end using your normal modes, so you either take emotional risks or the relationship dies.
I have no idea if this framework applies to non-romantic relationships; I think it does, on a less fraught level, but could be wrong.
Concrete examples of the "sympathy vs. advice" thing:
1. Cassandane has complained about her job for most of the last year. She got a new boss in the winter or spring of 2021 and he's horrible. But HR can't help, and if she hangs on where she is for about another year then she gets non-competitive eligibility, which would make it much easier to get basically any job in the Federal government. So until then she's just trying to document everything, stick it out until she gets to whatever the magic date is, and otherwise not let him get to her. When she complains I try pay attention to signs that it rises to the level where there's an emergency, and otherwise just make sympathetic noises.
2. Politics is depressing and horrifying. I'm sure most people around here would agree. The problem is, she follows the news closely and vents about it. Literally just 5 minutes ago, she yelled "Democracy is now dead! Thanks for clarifying!" about an NPR story about the filibuster. (Or something like that. I'm in another room and wasn't listening until her outburst.) I've mildly advised her to pull back from it a bit but it doesn't seem to have helped.
You Just Don't Understand I liked this book a lot, for similar reasons. I also found the ask/guess backgrounders helpful.
The real test for any of these "explainers" or whatever they are is whether they can solve extended cohabitation with uncertain and varied behavioral ideals during COVID between a public school teacher, a bartender, an NFT bro, and their kids. I'm going to pitch the idea as a reality show, maybe with lethal physical games or something, also set as a LOTR prequel.
But if/when the relationship hits a wall because your day-to-day modes are conflicting, that's when it's useful to be aware of other approaches that don't come naturally
This seems reasonable. Perhaps the difference is whether one imagines hitting a wall because the day-to-day modes are conflicting or because you have an actual serious problem that you are trying to negotiate (either external or simply wanting very different things in a situation). That can still be a prompt for taking emotional risks (as you put it), but it's a different context.
Semi-OT, thinking about this, an old Squeeze song popped into my head, and that lead me to this column talking about their creative partnership, and it just makes me happy. It's such a loving, idealized, description -- I bet these people write really good pop songs.
Once the band got going, we shared a house. Chris would leave lyrics for me on a silver breakfast tray, and I'd go off and put tunes to all this wonderful stuff. "Up the Junction" was groundbreaking in many ways. Chris had been writing narrative lyrics since we'd met, but this was the first time they'd made it to a record. I was proud of Chris, being able to tell that story - a couple have a baby, but she leaves him because of his drinking - in the space of a pop song. It was a privilege; putting music to such an amazing lyric like that was a privilege, inspirational.
127 continued . . .
And, from the other perspective
After school I was lost, looking for friends really, somebody to team up with. I'd written a few songs and had this idea that I could be the David Bowie of Deptford. Then I met Glenn. We were like two barges on a river banging into each other. It was - and is - a very intense relationship, like a marriage. I'm emotional and a fantasist. Glenn is more thought out, and a much more fluid guitarist. So we decided that I would write the words. And I knew I could trust him to come up with wonderful music.
So charming.
109: For what it's worth, I have interactions that look this this all the time. Maybe they are like that. My boss keeps telling me to be nicer to people. But, when things like this happen, it's usually (1) the stuff I'm dismissing is stuff that isn't critical to what we need to accomplish in the meeting (2) that person's hobbyhorse that I've played along with over and over and just have run out of patience for (3) something the person is simply misinformed about that I've already corrected or explained and there is no solution (4) something I've already sent detailed notes on, with follow up, and they haven't done the work on their end and expect me to keep doing something more and different which will clearly become an insane time sink (5) someone who's gonna be a dick because I'm a woman.
I think maybe just asking nicely how long she's been working with this person and how she finds him as a collaborator/vendor/contractor will probably get you to a sane next step. (The sane next step might reasonably be that you become main point of contact for a while so she can calm down and build back a reserve of patience.) You can certainly address tone, but I'd be really, really careful that she's not actually justified, particularly if this is out of character.
127/8 is great.
I think I actually have "Up the Junction" from a mix from here.
I think I actually have "Up the Junction" from a mix from here.
There are so many good lines in that song. The one that pops into my head from time to time is, "The devil came and took me / From bar to street to bookie" because the rhythm of the words (and the rhyme) is so catchy.
But my favorite might be, "She gave birth to a daughter / Within a year a walker / She looked just like her mother / If there could be another" they way they end that verse on "another" is so lovely.
132: Purely out of nosiness, can you explain the situation a little more? I reacted like ydnew, but I was making a bunch of assumptions that you didn't actually say: that is, I got the impression that (1) the woman is the man's supervisor, or at least significantly senior to him (2) they have a history of working together (3) you're either a peer or a superior of the woman, and (4) you're new in the situation. If I'm wrong about any of that, and I could be wrong about all of it, it'd look different.
The sympathy/advice dynamic is extremely hard for me to navigate with one of my sisters, who wants neither advice, especially on issues where I might have advice, nor correction, especially on issues where she's wrong on the facts and giving advice to other family. This has led to some spectacular blow-ups in the past year (should our elderly mother take the booster? does it indeed scrub your immune system and change your DNA? what the hell am I supposed to do except say 'she's wrong about that and here's why' -- let's not even get into the merits of interventions in a post-dates pregnancy... ) and it's a very unpleasant dynamic. My fault in this is that advice is my love language, other sisters are worried but won't speak up, and I'm used to her being angry with me so it doesn't have the emotional impact it might otherwise.
134: In those circumstances, saying anything nicer to your sister than "Shut the fuck up, you fucking fuck" makes you a saint.
Kind of, I'd say. It's not so much disagreeing about support versus advice as trying to keep her from talking people into hurting themselves. Or, to put it in childish sibling terms, if the question is whether advice-giving is obnoxious, sounds like she started it.
133: My assumptions were that the coworker is roughly a peer to Minivet (hence his questioning whether to say something), not senior to the person she's being rude to, or at least very senior (because she'd have more reasonable tools at her disposal - if she's his supervisor and he's a problem, she can do something substantive about it!), but yes to prior history and Minivet is encountering it for the first time.
So, for example, I needed someone from IT to do the second half of a task he had started. I put in a request through normal channels weeks early. I am technically senior to the person fulfilling these types of requests. I emailed a week later, then another week later. After three weeks, I emailed that we had a critical deadline in two more weeks. No response. One week before the deadline, I cced my boss and his. I was polite every single time. Three days before it had to be done, I asked my boss for help since it had been well over a month. Finally, somehow, the IT guy responded. He had been out of the office (for a variety of reasons). I said (still with my boss cced) that if he'd been out for a month, it would have been courteous to set up an auto-reply with an alternate contact since I'd been trying to reach him with for so long with no reply. Boss told me that was a rude thing to say and that if I expected IT to be helpful going forward, I needed to watch my tone.
At the end, he's probably right, but it really depends how much of the conversation you are following and your assumptions about what I've already tried.
And I was projecting from a guy I supervise, who has many good points (incredibly energetic and hardworking, an incredibly fertile source of good ideas, actually much pleasanter and easier to get along with than I'm about to make him sound) but some unusual bad points (also an incredibly fertile source of bad ideas, not a lot of judgment telling his own good ideas from his bad ideas, and mindboggling tenacity at fighting for his bad ideas.) If he comes up with some loony idea, you can't, even as his supervisor, just say "I have some concerns about how that's going to work, let's do B instead" unless you want to find that he's set up a meeting with a whole bunch of other people including clients and people way up the hierarchy to discuss the merits of his wacky idea as if it were the plan, supported by a several page memo that doesn't resolve any of the real problems. (We're a hierarchically pretty relaxed office -- the assumption is that someone setting up a meeting, even for people above him on the org chart, is doing it for a sensible reason. That works for most people, but not this guy.)
One of his strong points, though, is that he has a hide like a rhino for being disagreed with -- it's part of where the tenacity comes from -- and so you can be much more direct with him than you would with most people without hurting his feelings. Now that I've gotten used to him, I manage him by telling him when he gets the bit in his teeth over one of his wacky ideas "This won't work because of X, Y, and Z. I don't want to hear about this again unless you have a solution for those specific problems." I would be pretty taken aback to hear a supervisor being that bluntly and abruptly negative with a subordinate if I didn't know the people involved, but with this guy it really seems to be the only way to make your whole work life not about an endless wrestling match (another manager described him as "like fighting a bull. Just keeps coming back from a different angle. Never goes down.") over his more out-there ideas.
This dude really kind of fascinates me. If he ever manages to get better at directing himself, he'll be unstoppable. And really a very decent kid. But someone reacting to the way l talk to him without knowing the dynamic would be confused.
138 makes sense, and I've also known people who are completely fine with being managed that way - they plan out loud by saying "I think we should do A, B, or maybe C" and wait patiently to be told "A is too expensive, B is illegal, go and do some more research on C and come back" on which they cheerfully say "OK then!" and go and do it - but it's quite a bit different from "You're obviously giving me attitude and don't tell me you're not".
If I did think that was true of someone, I might well say it to their face - but not in front of a third party. That's unprofessional.
Might look the same to someone who doesn't know the dynamic. That is, I am brusquer with my guy about his bad ideas than I would be with someone else about an equivalently bad idea: the difference is that anyone else (a) has a lot fewer bad ideas and (b) doesn't fight back when you wave them off politely. But someone looking at one interaction would see me slapping down a subordinate for just having an idea, even if I didn't agree with it, in a way that would look like an overreaction to someone who didn't have the background.
I doubt what Minivet was looking at was exactly my situation -- my guy is genuinely unusual. But looking at a "smiley but serious" interaction without knowing the history of prior interactions, I figure there are a lot of things that could look like overreactions that do make sense in context.
And "not in front of a third party" specifically does apply to my guy. Part of his technique for defending his cunning plans is to (as I described above) get them on the agenda in meetings with enough people in them that it does look embarrassing to tell him "no, this idea can't possibly work for obvious reasons you should have seen before". To keep from slapping him down in front of other people I'd have to either make special rules for who he's allowed to talk to at all, which aren't necessary for anyone else, or let him run wild and waste an exorbitant amount of time.
I try to stay as far away from the whole concept of "attitude" as I can. I don't police how people feel about things, and as long as they are doing the job.
This works well for me personally, in the sense that I am subject to a certain amount of bad behavior from subordinates, but so what? The job gets done. Where I get tripped up is when people start abusing each other. And even then, I counsel people on overt acts rather than attitude. This works well in the age of e-mail, when I often can point to something concrete and say, "This sort of thing will get you fired."
Just yesterday, I told a subordinate that she had every right to require me to discipline someone for his treatment of her. She told me that she wasn't looking for that -- that she forwarded me the email just to have it on the record. I already knew that was her point. She's like me that way, and is a pleasure to work with for that reason.
This won't work because of X, Y, and Z
This is a dream environment. A lot of what I care about is blocked from "above" (galling as it is to write that about the new people making the choices) because of "priorities" and a work style that tends to all-or-nothing direction of effort. No there is no discussion of criteria used to set priorities, or why obvious evidence that something is useful and would be popular is not discussed or mentioned. Our previous director, praise be unto his name, was sometimes loose but had real vision and would talk to people (OK to me but others also), left a few years back and every subsequent change has been harmful. New people have no vision, and I'd give up something valuable if I left before August.
WEll, coming here as an odd confessional, I did a terrible job of providing comfort to a friend who's having a much worse year than I am. She felt bullied, I felt set up. Fortunately we recognized how badly it was going and cut the walk short, but still, I feel shitty about it.
And still annoyed at the conversational bids I failed to return properly! Would reading the actual OP article help any?