Pandora Parrot (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pandora_parrot) wrote2009-12-21 01:00 pm
pandora_parrot) wrote2009-12-21 01:00 pm
Off-script
I'm not sure if this is unusual, normal, rare, or whatever, but this is an experience I have.
The way that I experience interpersonal communication seems somewhat different from the way that the people around me tend to describe their experiences. Whereas their descriptions tend to lend themselves towards a deeply intuitive and subconscious experience of interpersonal communication, mine is much more conscious and intellectual, at least when dealing with emotional content.
I'm great at dealing with purely semantic content in communication. Responding to the literal words of what someone is saying is very easy for me and doesn't present any difficulties or anything that seems dramatically different from what other people experience. At least as long as people stick with literal speech. Non-literal speech such as humor, sarcasm, etc. can confuse me a lot and often requires a smaller version of the process I'm going to describe below.
But when things get emotional, I seem to differ from other people, at least inasmuch as I can compare my experience to their described experiences.
Example: Suppose a person starts crying around me, apparently shaken up by something that took place. I immediately begin to consciously evaluate the cause and source of their grief, determine whether this person fits into the category of "person that needs comfort when grieving" or "person that wants space while grieving," and determine the best way to express an experience of comfort to them while executing the actions appropriate to one of those categories. My analysis of whether or not a person wants space or comfort when grieving is based on a statistical analysis correlating their past behaviors and personality attributes with an internal database of people that I've observed over the years and what I observed them to desire in the many times that I gave the incorrect response to their experience.
If my analysis indicates that they will likely want space, I determine the best way to express comfort while backing off. I try to maintain a balance of "I'm here if you need me" while not getting in their face about their experience. It can be quite challenging to do this with some individuals, as it is not clear where that boundary lies. I consciously choose to alter my body language and tone of voice so as to appear non-threatening and docile while simultaneously providing verbal cues to indicate that I am here for the individual, should they wish to reach out.
If my analysis indicates the opposite: that they want comfort, I then attempt to determine, through a similar process, what sort of comfort they might want. Observing other humans in this state and providing comfort to people, I've noticed that starting with rubbing someone's arms or back seems to be a common way of expressing comfort to an individual while still checking on their space and interest in being comforted in such a way. Body language is selected so as to appear open and welcoming should the person need an embrace or need to bury their head into me to weep or something.
As for what to talk about while this grief is going on, I've determined that it is most appropriate to engage in a person and ask questions about their grief. This is something that I've learned from observing the way therapists react to my grief, as well as my own trial and error in responding to someone's grief. It is absolutely inappropriate to talk about anything unrelated to the person's grief, such as the weather, current hobbies, personal interests, etc. In reading about how people respond to grief and how people interact with one another, I've learned that describing experiences relating one's own emotional grief to the other person's can provide an experience of not being alone in one's experience and provide a heightened sense of companionship and comfort in the grieving individual. However, one has to be careful with this, as overcomparing can have the opposite effect of causing the person to feel more isolated and bad if they believe that your comparison is invalid. The "I know exactly what you're going through. " "No you don't! no one does!" It creates a sense of presumption and can damage the attempt to provide comfort to an individual.
As the grief runs its course, I've noticed that people tend to like to move onto humor and other happy topics as a way to alter their emotional state and move back to a less grief filled state. When helping people with their grief, it is a good idea to encourage this and engage in it, as it provides relief from the painful emotional experience. However, some people may use this to back away from their grief in what appears to be an unhealthy way, avoiding dealing with a particular topic, etc. When this occurs, it may be good to steer the conversation back to their grief and see how they take to that. A positive response may indicate that the person wants to go deeper, but needs help in doing so. A negative response may indicate that they are emotionally exhausted and don't have the energy to continue down that path for now.
For terminating these interactions, I usually select some other activity to engage in rather immediately after the grieving as a way to completely bring the person out of their experience and focus them on something else.
This is a typical description of what runs through my head when dealing with an emotional person. Many similar things run through my head whether someone is happy, angry, bitter, etc. I consciously and intellectually analyze the person's behavior, compare it against past examples of behavior to determine what their emotional experience is likely to be, and attempt to communicate statistically determined appropriate responses via body language, tone of voice, word selection, and topic of conversation.
I've spent my life basically making an intense study of human behavior. I gobble up books, movies, websites, etc. that provide interesting examples of how humans interact with one another. Whenever someone would tell a story about people interacting with one another, I wanted to hear every detail. I want to know *precisely* what people said. How did they respond to one another? What was the entire text of the conversation? Can you get me a transcript of it for analysis?
Whenever I see people talking, hugging, or otherwise sharing emotion, I try to discretely observe their behaviors and take notes on how they're acting and how they're responding to one another. It provides me with a great deal of information on the range of human experiences, as well as giving me further data points from which to draw possible responses to emotional behavior.
I actually kind of enjoy the experience of learning about interpersonal communication. It's such a rich and fascinating dance of social rules, complex emotional responses, and sometimes unexpected outputs.
However, when I'm involved in the situation, I find those unexpected outputs to be quite distressing. So long as someone stays "on-script" it's possible for me to respond to their emotional experiences in appropriate ways. But once they go "off-script," I get really freaked out. In those situations, a person is behaving in a way that I don't have a prior set of analyses completed for evaluating their behavior and how to respond. These happen fairly frequently for me, and in those situations, I resort to my "default behavior" algorithms. Basically, reduce my threat-level through modifications of body language and tone of voice, and then, if I feel safe to do so, ask the person to explain their emotional experience to me and how they want me to respond. Back in high school, this was the behavioral algorithm I used for almost all of my interactions, since my internal database was still insufficiently small to handle the complex behaviors I ran into on a regular basis.
Sometimes, I feel self-conscious about this process of mine. Based on descriptions that other people provide, it sometimes sounds like people would describe my behavior as being manipulative or disingenuous. When I'm in a state where I'm considering that possibility, I get quite frustrated. Past experiences where I would simply speak entirely semantically and ignore my body language and tone of voice would result in people getting upset with me fairly frequently. It suggests that people do not want to have a purely semantic conversation with me, but also require me to respond to their nonverbal communication elements as well. They want me to respond to their emotional state as well as their literal words. Yet without my heuristic processes for analyzing and evaluating their emotional state, I don't see any way to respond and produce appropriate responses, except for doing what I do. So my choices seem to be either do this thing that could be called manipulation or disingenuity by some, or completely ignore people's emotions, which seems to have an even more adverse effect.
At this point, I've intensely studied human beings and their behavior patterns for many years, and my ability to rapidly evaluate emotional states and produce correct response patterns seems to have become quite good. People tell me that I am quite comforting, empathic, etc. This suggests to me that my algorithms, database, and heuristics have reached a sufficient level to participate in normal society to a greater degree.
So... does this sound familiar? Am I simply more consciously aware of something that most people do unconsciously? Do most people interact with other people this way? What do you think about all of this?
The way that I experience interpersonal communication seems somewhat different from the way that the people around me tend to describe their experiences. Whereas their descriptions tend to lend themselves towards a deeply intuitive and subconscious experience of interpersonal communication, mine is much more conscious and intellectual, at least when dealing with emotional content.
I'm great at dealing with purely semantic content in communication. Responding to the literal words of what someone is saying is very easy for me and doesn't present any difficulties or anything that seems dramatically different from what other people experience. At least as long as people stick with literal speech. Non-literal speech such as humor, sarcasm, etc. can confuse me a lot and often requires a smaller version of the process I'm going to describe below.
But when things get emotional, I seem to differ from other people, at least inasmuch as I can compare my experience to their described experiences.
Example: Suppose a person starts crying around me, apparently shaken up by something that took place. I immediately begin to consciously evaluate the cause and source of their grief, determine whether this person fits into the category of "person that needs comfort when grieving" or "person that wants space while grieving," and determine the best way to express an experience of comfort to them while executing the actions appropriate to one of those categories. My analysis of whether or not a person wants space or comfort when grieving is based on a statistical analysis correlating their past behaviors and personality attributes with an internal database of people that I've observed over the years and what I observed them to desire in the many times that I gave the incorrect response to their experience.
If my analysis indicates that they will likely want space, I determine the best way to express comfort while backing off. I try to maintain a balance of "I'm here if you need me" while not getting in their face about their experience. It can be quite challenging to do this with some individuals, as it is not clear where that boundary lies. I consciously choose to alter my body language and tone of voice so as to appear non-threatening and docile while simultaneously providing verbal cues to indicate that I am here for the individual, should they wish to reach out.
If my analysis indicates the opposite: that they want comfort, I then attempt to determine, through a similar process, what sort of comfort they might want. Observing other humans in this state and providing comfort to people, I've noticed that starting with rubbing someone's arms or back seems to be a common way of expressing comfort to an individual while still checking on their space and interest in being comforted in such a way. Body language is selected so as to appear open and welcoming should the person need an embrace or need to bury their head into me to weep or something.
As for what to talk about while this grief is going on, I've determined that it is most appropriate to engage in a person and ask questions about their grief. This is something that I've learned from observing the way therapists react to my grief, as well as my own trial and error in responding to someone's grief. It is absolutely inappropriate to talk about anything unrelated to the person's grief, such as the weather, current hobbies, personal interests, etc. In reading about how people respond to grief and how people interact with one another, I've learned that describing experiences relating one's own emotional grief to the other person's can provide an experience of not being alone in one's experience and provide a heightened sense of companionship and comfort in the grieving individual. However, one has to be careful with this, as overcomparing can have the opposite effect of causing the person to feel more isolated and bad if they believe that your comparison is invalid. The "I know exactly what you're going through. " "No you don't! no one does!" It creates a sense of presumption and can damage the attempt to provide comfort to an individual.
As the grief runs its course, I've noticed that people tend to like to move onto humor and other happy topics as a way to alter their emotional state and move back to a less grief filled state. When helping people with their grief, it is a good idea to encourage this and engage in it, as it provides relief from the painful emotional experience. However, some people may use this to back away from their grief in what appears to be an unhealthy way, avoiding dealing with a particular topic, etc. When this occurs, it may be good to steer the conversation back to their grief and see how they take to that. A positive response may indicate that the person wants to go deeper, but needs help in doing so. A negative response may indicate that they are emotionally exhausted and don't have the energy to continue down that path for now.
For terminating these interactions, I usually select some other activity to engage in rather immediately after the grieving as a way to completely bring the person out of their experience and focus them on something else.
This is a typical description of what runs through my head when dealing with an emotional person. Many similar things run through my head whether someone is happy, angry, bitter, etc. I consciously and intellectually analyze the person's behavior, compare it against past examples of behavior to determine what their emotional experience is likely to be, and attempt to communicate statistically determined appropriate responses via body language, tone of voice, word selection, and topic of conversation.
I've spent my life basically making an intense study of human behavior. I gobble up books, movies, websites, etc. that provide interesting examples of how humans interact with one another. Whenever someone would tell a story about people interacting with one another, I wanted to hear every detail. I want to know *precisely* what people said. How did they respond to one another? What was the entire text of the conversation? Can you get me a transcript of it for analysis?
Whenever I see people talking, hugging, or otherwise sharing emotion, I try to discretely observe their behaviors and take notes on how they're acting and how they're responding to one another. It provides me with a great deal of information on the range of human experiences, as well as giving me further data points from which to draw possible responses to emotional behavior.
I actually kind of enjoy the experience of learning about interpersonal communication. It's such a rich and fascinating dance of social rules, complex emotional responses, and sometimes unexpected outputs.
However, when I'm involved in the situation, I find those unexpected outputs to be quite distressing. So long as someone stays "on-script" it's possible for me to respond to their emotional experiences in appropriate ways. But once they go "off-script," I get really freaked out. In those situations, a person is behaving in a way that I don't have a prior set of analyses completed for evaluating their behavior and how to respond. These happen fairly frequently for me, and in those situations, I resort to my "default behavior" algorithms. Basically, reduce my threat-level through modifications of body language and tone of voice, and then, if I feel safe to do so, ask the person to explain their emotional experience to me and how they want me to respond. Back in high school, this was the behavioral algorithm I used for almost all of my interactions, since my internal database was still insufficiently small to handle the complex behaviors I ran into on a regular basis.
Sometimes, I feel self-conscious about this process of mine. Based on descriptions that other people provide, it sometimes sounds like people would describe my behavior as being manipulative or disingenuous. When I'm in a state where I'm considering that possibility, I get quite frustrated. Past experiences where I would simply speak entirely semantically and ignore my body language and tone of voice would result in people getting upset with me fairly frequently. It suggests that people do not want to have a purely semantic conversation with me, but also require me to respond to their nonverbal communication elements as well. They want me to respond to their emotional state as well as their literal words. Yet without my heuristic processes for analyzing and evaluating their emotional state, I don't see any way to respond and produce appropriate responses, except for doing what I do. So my choices seem to be either do this thing that could be called manipulation or disingenuity by some, or completely ignore people's emotions, which seems to have an even more adverse effect.
At this point, I've intensely studied human beings and their behavior patterns for many years, and my ability to rapidly evaluate emotional states and produce correct response patterns seems to have become quite good. People tell me that I am quite comforting, empathic, etc. This suggests to me that my algorithms, database, and heuristics have reached a sufficient level to participate in normal society to a greater degree.
So... does this sound familiar? Am I simply more consciously aware of something that most people do unconsciously? Do most people interact with other people this way? What do you think about all of this?
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Your description of your experience registers as similar to my experience of myself in communicating. I'm told most people don't interact in this way with each other; that seems plausible on consideration of observed differences of outcome - most don't appear to experience the difficulties expressed from communicating in the ways you described and where those ways fail in implementation or where the process may be observable, at least as a major component of their communication. To say so is a large part of why I would normally refrain from answering, in that I don't know how my own observations are representative or unrepresentative, or how they are biased, nor do I have to-hand access to more rigorously collected data.
My current opinion is most people do learn to communicate in similar ways, unconsciously and more easily. I suppose an alternative would be that people are inborn with understanding of appropriate interactions; that seems unlikely, especially as I am under the impressions these appropriatenesses are culturally variable, so I am more inclined to think that what most people have is a more automatic facility for acquiring and implementing these tools, which work well enough they can generally do so without conscious awareness.
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