I'm Bad at Talking to People
Failure modes as a counsellor and counselled, and some proposed solutions.
Imagine this scenario.
Your friend Adam stops by your place after work. He seems down, so you ask him what’s wrong. He starts describing a scenario at work that is stressing him out. He is clearly bothered by the situation. You feel the urge to help; you can see how stressed he is and feel an obligation to alleviate it however you can.
Luckily, it seems like the situation he’s describing is pretty similar to one that you’ve dealt with in the past. You offer a potential solution, the one that you found was most effective in your analogous troubles. Adam hesitates, then says that your proposed remedy won’t be effective. You don’t see why, but drop the matter as he continues.
As he keeps going, more techniques for resolving the issue become apparent to you. When good opportunities arise, you share them. With each solution you present, Adam has some reason why it just won’t work, or that he’s already tried them and they’ve failed. You’re becoming a bit incredulous at this point. There’s no way that none of these tips could help.
You start to ask more questions about the situation. Adam has to concede something, has to say that there’s at least one thing that he hasn’t tried or could possibly work. His answers get more evasive, his deflections more obvious. You are starting to get the impression that he’s not really that invested in solving his problem. Moreover, it seems like he’s changing the story now to make it seem more helpless.
The discussion is dying at this point. Adam seems like he’s no longer willing to explore the issue. Does he want to solve the problem? Maybe he is worried that it might be his fault and doesn’t want to have to deal with that. Maybe he is just being dramatic, and feels like this conversation has revealed that fact. Whatever the case, you feel like it would be difficult to turn this conversation into a productive one at this point.
Adam leaves a little while later. This conversation was kind of a waste of time. Why did he even come to talk to you about his problem if he was just going to ignore every piece of advice you offered? He knew that you had gone through something similar; you figured that was why he wanted to talk to you about it in the first place. This experience was pretty frustrating.
Now imagine this scenario.
You decide to stop by Bella’s place after work. You’ve had a rough day, the culmination of a series of rough days and weeks that have constituted a rather rough month. You’re frustrated and want to vent a little. Luckily, you know that Bella dealt with a somewhat similar issue in the past, albeit not one that is exactly analogous. She should understand how frustrating this kind of thing can be and will empathize pretty well.
You begin to describe the issue to Bella. You don’t provide every detail about every incident, since most of them aren’t necessary for understanding the general scope of the problem. There are simply too many moving pieces and bad actors to summarize shortly, but you feel like you’ve hit the points that Bella can relate to the most.
Bella offers some advice in the midst of your rant. It sounds familiar; you recall that this was what had eventually helped her solve her similar issue. It might have worked for her, but she was working with very different people than you do. Due to some elements of the situation that you didn’t really go into before, it’s really just not a feasible solution. You say as much, and Bella nods, though you don’t know if she’s convinced.
You continue. You think that by providing some more of the complicating factors, she will understand that your issue is at least as intractable as her own was. To your surprise, she continues to offer solutions, which to you seem increasingly facile. You are getting a bit more defensive with each proposal, increasing your already high levels of agitation. She doesn’t understand the situation as well as she thinks she does, so how can she believe that she knows how to solve it? You’re not an idiot; if there was a quick fix to the whole ordeal, you would have noticed it already. You start to wonder if you have radically misrepresented what’s really going on.
Bella seems like she’s getting frustrated, a feeling which mirrors your own. She starts asking pointed questions about the problem, making the conversation feel oddly like a police interrogation. You can’t really figure out which is worse at this point: answering or deflecting? The points she brings up are either unrelated or something you’ve already discussed, and they betray her fundamental misunderstanding of the scenario. You try to set the record straight, clarifying things about what’s going on—perhaps you misspoke earlier, or she misheard. This only serves to increase her growing incredulity.
At some point, you decide to stop talking about it. You grow quieter and offer less resistance, which eventually causes Bella to cease fire. As the awkwardness grows, you find an escape route and get out of the house. Bella seems to be some combination of frustrated and holier-than-thou, and this discussion has been less than useless. Instead of getting some support from a person who should understand just how difficult the situation is, you feel like you’re even more isolated and burdened by your problem than when you started. This problem now includes Bella, a twist you hadn’t seen coming when you left work today. This conversation was a mistake.
It shouldn’t be too surprising to learn that these two scenarios are, in fact, one and the same. Do either Adam’s or Bella’s experience here feel familiar to you? I’ve been in both spots enough times to feel embarrassment as I write this.
So what went wrong here? Both parties had a reasonable stance, I think. Adam just wants to get some stuff off his chest, and Bella wants to help her friend solve a problem that is giving him a lot of grief. Both of them sense their own feelings spiral out of control as the conversation goes in an unexpected direction, and neither feels like the other is playing ball. And when they try to correct the course of the discussion, the other person just doubles down on the thing that is making the conversation unfruitful.
The most obvious issue with this kind of conversation is that Adam and Bella have different ideas of what the ideal outcome of the discussion will be. Adam just wants to bounce some feelings off a friend who can relate, while Bella wants to help provide useful feedback so as to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Having failed to communicate their intent to each other, their conversation becomes one of conflict, as they continue to try to drag the other into the conversation they want to have.
This obvious failure mode has an obvious solution, which is to simply communicate up front what one wants out of a conversation. Had Adam opened with “Hey, I’m having a tough time with an issue and I really just want to vent; not looking for solutions, just someone to listen to me,” then the odds of success increase pretty drastically.
Or do they?
This is where understanding counseling comes into play. If you’re like me, you find yourself playing the role of impromptu therapist for a lot of people, irrespective of your utter lack of qualification. And if you’re like me, you still suck at just listening to people, even if they tell you that’s all they want. I’m a technical guy who thinks he knows everything, so my natural instinct is to provide solutions and assist with their implementation. And, somewhat unhelpfully for this exercise, that is usually what people want when they talk to me, so it’s a somewhat justifiable expectation that my solutions are what people want from me.
So, even if told that my friend just wants to vent, it’s somewhat unnatural for me to not pounce on any opportunity to resolve the issue. Perhaps my background in computer science has taught me poor methods for dealing with people problems. In most coding contexts, there is virtually no cost associated with nitpicking and brute-force troubleshooting. You can attack every single line of code in your project a hundred times, recompile and run it again. The only thing you lose is time. If carpenters measure twice and cut once, coders never measure and cut with reckless abandon.
This is obviously not a good approach when talking to people about a problem that causes them distress. An onslaught of questions can feel like a series of critiques, which will usually serve the purpose of making the other person feel worse. If we were all perfectly rational, this likely wouldn’t be the case; we could see the troubleshooting procedure as fruitfully helping to explore every facet of the problem. However, we aren’t perfectly rational, a fact that is doubly true when we are trying to discuss a problem that has us worked up.
I don’t mean to say that I am lamenting that everyone else isn’t as rational as me, as I recognize that I am generally no better than average. What I am lamenting is my general inability to achieve true empathy, which makes it difficult to provide meaningful assistance to those who seek therapy with me. And I don’t think that this makes me uniquely bad at listening to people (though I won’t discount the possibility); I think that this is a rather common problem.
When I first heard about active listening, which was probably in my high school psychology class, I thought that it was both stupid and condescending. I thought it was stupid because it seemed totally pointless; you’re basically just repeating back what they said, so why bother saying it? It seemed very transparently unproductive. I thought it was condescending because it reduced the conversation to a word game, where you listen to what the other says for the sole purpose of figuring out how to regurgitate it. It didn’t seem like the active listener was really listening to the other person at all.
I have since changed my mind about the value of this practice. Firstly, the summary of active listening that I received in high school failed to capture the more advanced techniques of the practice, most of which I have only discovered recently. Secondly, I think that (when done correctly) it really does help the person you’re talking to explore their own feelings, helping them to clarify what they think without too much work on your own part. Thirdly, and most importantly, active listening helps you to not say something stupid that feels helpful.
This third point is what’s going on with Bella. She starts with a good intention and a genuine sense of sympathy for Adam, which is why she wants to help resolve the situation. When she makes the mistakes of assuming that his situation is more analogous to her own experience and of providing solutions without knowing the full scope of the problem, she turns good intentions into destructive behavior. Her increasingly relentless approach as she digs deeper and deeper to find some way to resolve the issue cause the divide between her and Adam to grow, which leads to universally bad outcomes. Adam feels hurt by what feels like an attack and Bella feels like Adam is being a baby about the whole situation.
Our instinct to help people with problems they face can easily hurt them if we don’t understand their situation completely, which is a condition that we rarely meet outside of some specific contexts. If, for example, Adam and Bella are coworkers and they are both dealing with essentially the same problem, then this kind of troubleshooting is much more likely to be fruitful. Or if it really is just a technical problem and the two share expertise in the field.
But when it’s a problem involving relationships between people that you aren’t a part of, it’s very unlikely that you will fully grasp all the factors at play, even if it’s been explained to you. Human relationships are incredibly complex, and we often reduce what’s going on to words and sentences, but we make a mistake if we assume that those phrases really inform others on all of the complexities. Offering solutions in such a context is rarely likely to bear fruit.
I think of it like this: imagine talking to a layperson about the most technical problem you deal with in your life, be it at work or with some other pursuit. You only have two sentences to describe the problem, then you have to elicit solutions from them. Now imagine that they are very confident in the answers they give, and are incredulous when you attempt to explain why their uninformed opinions are pretty worthless. That, to me, is about the same as someone trying to solve the interpersonal problems of someone else.
I haven’t discussed it yet, but active listening does more than help you avoid providing facile solutions. One of the other major things it helps to prevent is effusive agreement with the person’s outlook. For the same reason given above, Bella doesn’t have enough information about the situation to say whether Adam is justified in feeling the way he does. Maybe his assessment is very accurate, and his feelings make perfect sense. At least as likely, though, is the scenario in which he holds some amount of blame in the situation. Trying to tease that out in this context is an exercise in futility most of the time, since Adam is stressed out and isn’t seeing the situation clearly. It’s better not to try, and to simply ignore the degree to which Adam is responsible for his circumstances for the time being. The fact is that he feels distressed, and it’s better to help him deal with that. Once he’s in a better state of mind, positing that he may have a role in his own demise could become more helpful, though that depends a lot on Adam.
The other side of this coin is using active listening to avoid conferring judgement. It’s pretty natural for us to rapidly assess a situation and want to assign blame, and often times in this kind of interaction, the person describing the problem can sound whiny or like they are dodging responsibility. And all of that could very easily be true, but, as we’ve discussed, you really don’t know enough about what’s going on to make that call. Just as immediately siding with Adam could be the wrong call, so too could be siding against him. So you should do neither.
Maybe this will sound very obvious to you, and I hope that it’s really the case that I am just uncommonly emotionally unintelligent. I have certainly met a few people who can execute this kind of thing flawlessly in all the ways that I cannot. However, I’ve also met plenty of people who seem even worse than me. Mostly, I think I know people who are basically like me; they want to help people, but confuse technical assistance with therapy session requests often enough to get it wrong. And even when they land on therapy, their sloppy techniques often do more harm than good.
So whose responsibility is it to get these things right? It would be easy to say that the power should be in the hands of the one seeking help, since they have the most compelling interest in the effective conduct of the discussion. But I think that it would be somewhat unfair to place the burden on them, since the nature of the relationship typically means that this person is at something of an emotional disadvantage—if Adam wasn’t feeling distressed and discombobulated, he wouldn’t be having this talk with Bella in the first place.
However, it’s also somewhat unfair to place the responsibility on Bella. She’s not a therapist, and Adam really has no right to expect that she will accurately intuit his desired outcome of the situation. And even if he says that he just wants to vent, it’s not really fair to say that Bella is at fault if she doesn’t know how to listen well enough not to cause further harm.
The situation is unfair overall, but that doesn’t stop it from happening every day. It’s difficult. You can make things better for yourself in either role, but there’s not much you can do about the other person. I suppose you can just choose not to talk about your issues, and that certainly works for the more stoic among us. For the rest of us, we can only do our best.
If you’re Adam, try to open with what you want out of the conversation. If you’re not getting it, don’t get defensive. The best thing to do when people offer facile solutions (given that they are going to keep doing it) is just agree that you’ll try it, even if you have no plan to do so. Try to end the conversation in a way that reduces conflict, and then consider avoiding similar conversations with Bella in the future.
If you’re Bella, try at the beginning of the conversation to determine what the other party wants. Assume that it’s a therapy session over a technical feedback request if they seem distressed. Once you figure out that it’s therapy, use active listening and try to avoid proposing solutions, blindly agreeing with them, or judging them without sufficient information. If they press you to do those things, try your best to say that you’re really not in a position to do so.
If you take nothing else away from reading this, please remember my thesis: our instinct to help people deal with their nontechnical problems can hurt both parties if we don’t do it correctly. While solving their problem would be great, we usually aren’t as equipped to do so as we think we are, and attempting to provide those solutions will usually end in frustration. It’s not weak or childish to just want to talk about your problems, so don’t make others feel bad for wanting to do so.
If you take two things away, the second should be this: talking to people about these kinds of things can be very hard, and it doesn’t make you a bad person if you get it wrong. It can feel really good to talk about your problems with the right people, and that can make us try to talk about them with less helpful people too. And for the Bellas of the world, I think a lot of the failures come from a genuine desire to help. So don’t beat yourself up, but try to understand how to get better so we can all help each other out a little more.