Toward Better Communications on the BBS

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From https://outofthefog.website/top-100-trait-blog/2015/10/21/always-never-statements

On 'Always' & 'Never' Statements

Definition:

“Always” and “Never” Statements are declarations containing the words “always” or “never”. They are commonly used but rarely true.

Description:

“Always” and “Never” statements are frequently used by people when they are arguing in order to emphasize or illustrate the merits of their position. “Always” and “Never” statements are usually exaggerations, which serve an illustrative purpose and are understood by both parties to be hyperbole and not literal. As the self-contradicting adage says, “Always and Never statements are always false and never true.”

“Always” and “Never” statements are also very frequently used by individuals who suffer from personality disorders, because they fit neatly into the split, black and white world of their thinking. They are most often used in an accusatory, argumentative or self-pitying way.
Examples:

You never listen to me.
I always give you what you want.
My mother never loved me.
You always have to have the last word.
I never get any attention.
You are always shouting and screaming at the children.

None of the above statements are true, yet they probably sound familiar.

While many people who use these statements rarely expect them to be taken as literal, factual truth, they may actually be a true expression of the person’s feelings.

For example, imagine a person says: “You never listen to me!”

You could respond directly to the statement and reply, “Yes, I do!” You may even venture into hyperbole-land yourself and claim to “always” listen to them, or say you have listened to them “millions of times”. You may even list all the occasions of listening that you can bring to mind. In doing so though, you may be missing the real message.

If you go to the next level and listen to the underlying feeling being expressed, “I want to be listened to”, you will have gone beyond the hyperbole and heard something honest. If you go one step further, perhaps you will hear: “I’m afraid that you may not consider me worth listening to.” Now you are approaching the heart of the matter.

Most of us use “Always” and “Never” statements rhetorically - it’s also wise to use them sparingly, lest our own credibility be called into question.
What it feels like:

“Always” and “Never” statements are popular delivery vehicles of FOG - Fear, Obligation and Guilt. The intention is often to:

Put the recipient in a defensive posture. (Fear)
Make the recipient feel responsible for the problem. (Obligation)
Make the recipient feel sorry for the other person. (Guilt)

“Always” and “Never” statements can leave you feeling invalidated, unappreciated, disoriented and guilty, or have you scrambling to justify your own behavior.
What NOT to do:

If you find yourself on the receiving end of “Always” and “Never” statements:

  • Don’t believe everything that is said in an “Always” and “Never” statement.
  • It rarely helps to get defensive and start arguing your case. This can lead directly to a Circular Conversation. When a person uses “Always” and “Never” statements, they are rarely interested in establishing objective truth. Generally, they are trying to provoke an emotional response.
  • Don’t reciprocate with “Always"and"Never” statements of your own.

What TO do:

  • Try to see past the questionable “facts” to understand the feeling that is being communicated.
  • Objectively weigh the validity of any accusations you receive off-line when you are in a safe place with time to think.
  • Share your experiences with a trusted confidant or a therapist who can help you to see the gray between the black and the white.
  • Remove yourself and any children from any conversation which becomes verbally abusive or if a person refuses to stop talking after you have asked them.
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We’ve had a lot of information for people who struggle with understanding emotions; this woman is an empath and she does a wonderful job of discussing how to read emotions and how to handle it. I am so impressed with her. I just bought her book to listen to.

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Needs more like! Those words and others which seem similarly polarized are klaxons which get me to do some self analysis and re-think what is on my mind. Same goes for “all” and “none”.

As much as people have told me that I obsess over language, my experience has been it’s a complex feedback loop. Thinking informs language, and language informs thinking. I suspect that many of the same people who might complain that these issues of word choice aren’t important enough to bother about, are also those who wonder why US society is so polarized, how it got that way, and what to do about it.

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Here’s a good conversation that I had on Sunday with my Nonviolent Communications coach about what NVC is and how to get started with it.

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From:

How You Invalidate

You probably send very strong signals that you don’t value the perspectives of the person you disagree with.

Think about a recent disagreement. Did you do any of the following:

¡ After the person spoke, you made no reference to what he said and instead jumped straight in to your opinion

¡ You got louder and more polarized with each volley

· You questioned the person’s motives

¡ You challenged his relevance, competence, or preparation

¡ (Most insidious) You turned your body away from the person and toward all the other people in the room

That’s why you had an argument. Invalidating people makes them cranky.

Not only does it make for cranky, adversarial participants - it encourages people to hew to ideological “camps” rather than articulating their actual views. To exclude others whom one might disagree with, and to self-censor so that awkward ideas don’t invite opprobrium. It does not further issues, and creates a conservative space which relies upon there (somehow) already being an impression of consensus, rather than trying to interrogate or reach a consensus with the other participants. But who has time for that?

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https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/you-should-never-ever-argue-with-anyone-on-facebook-according-to-science.html

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I kind of despair about this sort of thing. Text seems like such an efficient way to communicate! And if we don’t use it for that, then what’s it for?

For example, one of my kids had an infatuation with dinosaur documentaries. And I pointed out that this 45-minute long video had maybe five minutes of interesting talk with paleontologists, lots of sparse slow repetitive narration - over lots of CGI reenactments, graphs, etc. I showed them that if we wrote down what we could actually learn from that video, it was only a few short paragraphs of information that we could read in a couple of minutes. Whereas in the 45-minute timespan we could read several articles and learn much more. The visual medium was using sensory pokes to keep people watching, but was miserly in how it strung out info to pad its running time.

When I communicate via audio it works well. But in person or video, suddenly they start using like 80% of their brain trying to parse visual cues and not able to listen as well.

That people approach social issues as being “hotbuttons” in the first place seems like the real problem. Why the reactionary knee-jerk outrage to anything that you might not agree with? Not all of us have people we can phone or talk to in person about social issues. So it’s unfortunate to find so many smart people online but have the discourse nearly always be so adversarial in nature. It feels like people are more interested in status games, forming ingroups/outgroups than discussing the very issues they claim are important to them. My family is the same way! What is the difficulty with calmly discussing anything of any deep substance?

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I also wondered about the research and think writing can be effective. I wonder about the quality of the writing and how the ideas are being communicated. Just to say all writing could not be effective at moving politically discourse flies in the face of historical facts.

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I adore your optimism.
But that is not what I am seeing here.
I am seeing the shifting of goal posts, the twisting of the meaning of words, and condescension and insults. All as a means to an ends to make the conversation, again, all about one person instead of the actual topic of thread.
And it makes me sad.

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That sounds like a great case for engaging with (or ignoring) the topical content of people’s posts, rather than instantly resorting to personal confrontation. I agree, and that’s why I try to approach social issues more from general principles instead of getting personal. I care about how the participants feel, but we also risk how we feel coloring our perceptions of what people actually say.

That’s why I also prefer steelperson over strawperson (as per @ChickieD) . If one must have a judgemental attitude about people, it allows one to at least do so definitively, based upon the specifics of their worldview. Yielding, you know, an actual discussion. Whereas straw basically just says that one is content to start from personal bias, and so has no respect for The Other based upon what they represent. It is a political effort to designate an outgroup. If so, why not own it?

tl;dr Then why not discuss the issues and not make it about one person?

That would mean everyone muting certain people who take all the oxygen out of the room.

Which might actually work :thinking: from a communication and effective discussion standpoint.

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What does “taking all of the oxygen” involve? Muting the person who has made the most posts? Is there a limited supply of letters to type with, where one person’s participation precludes others’?

How do you decide what the basis for exclusion should be?

IMO everybody needing to mute one participant is precisely making it “all about them”, rather than them being just another participant. That would be actively making this into a personal problem, the very thing it is ostensibly done to avoid.

Thanks @ChickieD, for splitting the thread.
I shall leave those that are interested in continuing this conversation to it! Ta!

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I think this is a good place to try out the curiosity thing. You can’t argue someone out of their emotional concern about feeling uncomfortable talking to you. I think it’d be a good idea to try to listen to @gadgetgirl because they are willing to explain what their concerns are.

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I was doing the curiosity thing by asking @gadgetgirl about what they said, rather than assuming that they meant something else. That seems the respectful and honest way to go about this. Just like I asked @MissyPants about their above remarks that you forked here. The half of my posts which aren’t positing an observation of my own, are posts asking people to expand upon their posts or replies. Yet hardly anybody ever answers, except with snark or deliberately talking past me with completely different questions - which they also decline to engage with. I doubt that I can encourage people whose resolve is to stonewall and avoid discussion.

I accept my emotional concerns and discomforts, and I hope that others can accept theirs. We feel what we feel, that is real and should be respected rather than changed. I go out of my way to not influence people emotionally, from respect and a principle to not interfere. But even feeling as we each do, we still are dealing with social issues which don’t go away because we are uncomfortable about them. I am marginal enough to experience a lot of discomfort myself. But that doesn’t mean that I personally blame the other participants in discussions about these issues for the way things are. That might feel cathartic, but I don’t know them that well, and chances are that they aren’t the party responsible, so I would not be justified.

But, yes, if @gadgetgirl has concerns beyond what they stated above, I am interested in them discussing those. And am willing to help, to what extent I can,

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I agree. To expand, I would like to offer this suggestion: if you try to have a conversation with people and it doesn’t work, and your only concern is what everyone else should be doing differently to speak with you…then you aren’t actually trying to have a conversation with them.

Working toward better communication should mean first considering what you can do to better accommodate the people you would like to communicate with. Everything else is asking their indulgence; which we all do to some extent, but it only goes so far before they get fed up with you.

“Anyone who says they’re great at communicating but ‘people are bad at listening’ doesn’t understand how communications works.” - Randall Munroe

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All I know is that in 3D space, if someone won’t respect my clearly stated personal boundaries, the consequences for violating those boundaries are likely to be very unpleasant.

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By consider, do you mean “guess” or “ask”, or is there another option you are thinking of? I never said that anybody should be doing anything differently to accommodate anyone. Even formulating the problem as “one person” versus “everyone else” seems like a recipe for othering people. Another perspective is that membership involves both rights as well as responsibilities, and that none of us have any right to speak on behalf of the others, to claim their authority in isolating one member from the whole. That we create a responsibility when we accuse a person of anything to articulate what the problem is. Not to simply cast some vague unfavorable judgement upon them as if they are unaccountably responsible for your feelings and actions.

All communication between equals is actively negotiated, Treating it as a matter of accommodation/indulgence indicates that it is not intended to be between equals, that one party has decided from the outset that they are entitled to a certain outcome. If so, what right do they have to claim it is an open discussion? Open to People I Like? Open to Those Whose Opinions I Have Decided Have Value?

Each member of the group has the same rights and responsibilities as you do, and the same potential to participate. If that is not acceptable, why not have a private discussion, or terminate their membership to the group? But it seems that people are conflicted and want to have it both ways - to feel inclusive, to say they are open, while preferring to curate discussions through informal means, by bullying people they don’t like into not participating.

On the one hand, I am interested in why people do so. And what they hope to achieve by this. But also I need to make clear that I think that it is in no way justified, considering the values the community seems to claim to be operating from. The fundamental reason why justice is fair is because it is based upon codified and agreed principles, not upon who one might be, or whether they are subject to others’ capricious likes or dislikes.

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