> You have to put what seems like a *colossal* amount of unsubtle effort into saying “I like you and I think you’re good” in order to keep discussions from becoming about “I’m good and not terrible! See, I’ll prove it!”
https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/05/playing-politics/
(wanders through a lot of different topics; seems relevant to me & worth reading for the "The Incredibles has a moral and it's a weird one" segment)
I *like* to think I'm particularly open to criticism, and I think I am but maybe only to certain specific styles of criticism? In practice I have so little social interaction & even less frequent criticism that whenever it actually happens I'm often thrown off balance, or worse don't recognize it as criticism but as an invitation do debate the merits of "thing I just did"
okay maybe I actually kinda suck at criticism
it might be more correct to say I think people *ought* to be very open/transparent/reflective about giving & receiving appropriate criticisma ("teammate made error" type, not @'ing random artists to give unsolicited "constructive ccriticism")
but in practice I think people are often very bad at it (giving and receiving) and I resent that
* I have to do a great deal of mentally taxing emotional labor to protect the self-image of people who haven't learned the skill of "just detach your ego for two damn seconds so we can solve the problem" (and then the effort goes to waste anyway because I haven't learned this skill of "go two seconds without fucking up [unknown social skill]" )
* other people will go to a lot of effort to do the polite/gentle/ego-protecting thing for *me*, esp. dancing around the issue and hoping I infer their criticism b/c saying telling me what I need to know would be rude
the useful link for me is to the "experts forget what it's like to not be an expert" thing from expertise research — I'm thinking "I have learned not to be offended, so I can't see how or why you might be offended"
(relevant personal history: I was bullied a lot in grade school, and when I sought help, was told by many that they were just playing, feeling hurt was my own fault, and that I needed to learn "social skills". So now it feels like I'm being chastised for doing exactly the thing I was chastised for not doing, except unlike the bullies I'm genuinely trying to *not* to be hurtful)
a related frustration I've had recently is that I have enough vague knowledge on the idea of "I statements" ("Sometimes I feel…" vs. "You always…") in working out interpersonal problems without putting people on the defensive
(which I don't think is an unreasonable amount of effort to put into keeping things civil, the previous frustration bullet point is when that isn't *enough*)
but not everyone does, and so sometimes it feels like I'm trying to skate up a muddy hill as I very carefully avoid presuming to know anything other than my own perspective while being pelted with mud from someone who refuses to extend the same courtesy to me
[when ofc it's far more likely that they just haven't learned about that conversational pitfall & the standard strategy to avoid it]
abusive education practices (autism related)
@octopus Tri:
I have a comment here that is not critique, or assuming this is the case for the situations you find yourself in but is related and may be useful information, if you are not already aware of it;-
There is a toxic package of New Age ideology & anti-skills called "Nonviolent Communication" which came into fashion in the late 20th century, and is often pushed upon children who are identified in education as having communication problems (or general 'difficult behaviour' kids).
It includes heavy emphasis on pressuring the child into speaking like this as a default mode of communication - anything else is actively discouraged and/or outright punished as 'bad' communication.
You may encounter people who have had NVC inflicted on them in the past, and avoid engaging in that speech style for that reason.
(We are among that number, which is part of why I mention it, to avoid potential for future misunderstanding)
abusive education practices (autism related)
@kitsch @pastelbat I was actually just looking at the NVC home page & thinking it might be worth studying in more depth, as a lot of its ideals seem relevant to me
while also noting that it rooted its ethics in drawing on innate compassion, and I've just read a pretty comprehensive takedown on why "compassion" is not a complete ethical system
in my own case, I think I found it on my own reading books or advice blogs, unsure if how much I was exposed to it as a kid
and yet it takes a *lot* of deliberate effort for me to self-edit so every sentence doesn't start with the word "I", to the point where I worry that I'm coming across as self-centered (tho in my case I think it has to do more with not wanting to make statements more confident/objective/certain sounding than justified)
re: abusive education practices (autism related)
This post is a very good writeup of the harmful dynamics in NVC: https://www.realsocialskills.org/blog/nonviolent-communication-can-be-emotionally
When we had it pushed on us (13-15), we recognised there was something very manipulative & unfair, but we did not have the words/context/framework to grasp exactly how/why.
So finding this was very "Oh, wow, that's exactly it" for us. I hope it is helpful. (there's some further discussion in the NVC tag)
Do you have a link to the compassion piece you mentioned? I would be curious to read it.
re: abusive education practices (autism related)
@pastelbat in https://vividness.live/2015/09/25/traditional-buddhism-has-no-ethical-system/ , admittedly fairly far in. The compassion section specifically draws on https://vividness.live/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence/ to an extent, with "compassion" by itself being a "stage 3" ethic under that system (interpersonal/communal, but lacking the structure & systematicity of a stage 4 ethic)
re: abusive education practices (autism related)
@pastelbat read the realsocialskills post and that all checks out. kegan stage 3 is (?) concerned with maintaining relationships — "what would a good friend do it this situation?" = "what will maintain and build community bonds?" — and the basic failure cases are when you need to choose between two relationships in conflict, or when the relationship itself is the problem & deepening it is wrong.
Compassion can still a virtue in more systematized stages, but you need something *else* to say that it's more important to act on your compassionate impulse to protect the victim than your compassionate impulse to protect the abuser.
abusive education practices (autism related)
@pastelbat @octopus bat words seem good here ^^
have not had that exact experience but. am aware of the potential for abuse of this stuff [e.g. someone telling you that 'i statements' as the only 'acceptable' way to communicate feelings]