My ex was a relationship therapist. She was absolutely allergic to letting scar tissue build up. She would tell me about every little negative thing that happened between us. And she would phrase it by talking about her feelings rather than about my actions. ("I felt hurt when I heard you say X," rather than "You shouldn't have said X.")
Suffice it to say, it freaked out. I wasn't used to people sharing their feelings with me. In normal relationships, by the time someone is telling you they feel <insert negative emotion>, a ton of scar tissue has already been built up, and they're at a breaking point. So I was conditioned to believing that sharing feelings = things have gotten really bad.
But early on she would calm me down, and say no, things aren't bad, she's fine, she's just into sharing feelings early and often to prevent the buildup of resentment. So I got used to it, and even started doing the same thing back.
Eventually our relationship ended, but I brought the practice to new relationships I entered afterwards. And, unsurprisingly, it kind of freaked people out! Almost nobody is used to it at first, just like I wasn't. It's incredibly easy to get defensive when someone lets you know that they felt bad in response to something you did. And it's usually vulnerable and risky to find the words to share feelings without arousing the other person's defenses.
Still, when I look back at how I've evolved as a person, I credit this "scar tissue" view of relationships with a lot of personal growth. It's given me a habit of confronting people problems head on, something past-me was unconsciously avoidant of. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and being willing to have uncomfortable conversations instead of kicking the can down the road is one of the hallmarks of adulthood and maturity.
As you said, If you can get the other person over the shock of talking about feelings it’s a very useful tool to keep a relationship running well or even repair a damaged one with scar tissue.
Yes, I learned about Imago dialogue through a book called "Getting the Love You Want" (which sounded gimmicky, but it was recommended by a therapist friend, and I've found it surprisingly practical, not just for intimate relationships but also just relationships with friends and coworkers). The book Nonviolent Communication also basically teaches a similar structured conversation technique. It's the stuff that most marriage therapists teach, but it was a revelation to me.
I'm a brutally direct communicator (and I justify myself by saying "I'm honest and expect honesty from people") but I also tend to damage relationships (surprise! communication is not about 1 person's preference but 2). After many relationships that didn't work out, I decided to take a step back and ask myself what I could be doing better, and one of the things was learning to communicate in a way that others found less alienating, without compromising my own style. I stumbled upon the Imago technique and it has worked really well.
One of the major takeaways for me that it is important to validate people and be curious, whether you agree with them or not. I used to think this was a contradiction, and that bad ideas need to be corrected immediately, but I've since learned that it's possible to validate people without agreeing with them. The point is to make them feel heard first, and then I can present my own view. Here's an example of how validation works (without agreeing): https://www.onsolidgroundcounseling.com/post/2015/08/31/crea...
Oddly I quite like these people -- provided they're internally and externally consistent. It's refreshing to say, "you're being an asshole" and have a friend go, "oh my bad, I do that sometimes."
Most young folks can't imagine having been an asshole and they call themselves emotionally intelligent without realizing their feelings are a tyranny. They've unsubscribed from anything that ever brought them even minor discomfort. Their social contract basically amounts to "lie to me and I'll lie to you." They are huge wusses.
If a friend asks you if their hair looks nice, it's kinder to say, "your hair looks like my nana's and she's been dead for 10 years" then it is to let dozens of folks think the same thing of them. I have a couple friends who would tell me the first thing -- they're whose opinion I trust. If they told me that, I'd piss my self laughing even if I just paid $70 for the haircut. Modern day stoics IMO. They're smart enough to know how to be like-able, they understand the fluff-each-other's-shared-delusions game, they just don't want to play. When they tell you something kind, you know it was real.
Most of my friends who are brutally honest try to say the things they're thinking as much as possible. They want that from others too. It can be super off putting, especially if you need to believe certain things about yourself.
> provided they're internally and externally consistent.
People claiming to be "brutally honest" is usually a red flag because they are almost never consistent about it. Its usually a phrase used to self-justify brutality with little regard for honesty.
Its sort of like the whole "if you dont accept me at my worse you dont deserve me at my best". There is nothing wrong in principle if it is taken literally - everyone has bad days and its unreasonable to expect perfection all the time; humans make mistakes, etc. But pretty much everyone using that phrase uses it as a self-justification to do what they want without regard for who they hurt.
Idk, im always wary of any phrase that can be twisted to justify behaving badly towards others. Some people hurt other people, and they'll take any turn of phrase, twist it, in order to self-justify to themselves that what they are doing is ok.
> It's refreshing to say, "you're being an asshole" and have a friend go, "oh my bad, I do that sometimes."
Would the apology not be more effective if it didn't include the attempt at excusing one's behavior?
> Most young folks [...]
Would your argument not be more effective if you made an attempt to avoid unnecessarily painting a broad, diverse demographic with one brushstroke, especially given that your argument doesn't actually hinge on the people being young specifically?
> If they told me that, I'd piss my self laughing even if I just paid $70 for the haircut.
What about the things you don't realize you're sensitive about? Is it possible your friends are merely the same brand of insensitive as you, and therefore insensitive in a way that is acceptable to you? Is it possible that you're demanding that everyone around you have precisely the same flavor of insensitivity as yourself?
> Most of my friends who are brutally honest try to say the things they're thinking as much as possible.
Isn't this a really ineffective and imprecise way to communicate? Won't this lead to a pile of followup questions from folks who don't understand the implicit social cues you share with those you're close with?
Being honest doesn't have to mean being unfiltered and brash. Being an effective communicator means taking into account how your message might be received and tailoring it so it's not easily misunderstood.
And calling people "wusses" for merely not subscribing to your brand of communication is itself an ironically cowardly act, a running away from the responsibility you might have for the words you say. It is exactly the kind of thing someone who needs to believe certain things about themselves might say instead of growing up and treating others with respect.
> it's kinder to say, "your hair looks like my nana's and she's been dead for 10 years" then it is to let dozens of folks think the same thing of them. I have a couple friends who would tell me the first thing -- they're whose opinion I trust.
Honestly, you seem extremely naive with a very basic take on this situation. Your friends can say this stuff to you, _because_ you trust them, not the other way around. If a stranger were to make that comment to you, it would be unbelievably silly to take it at face value and not assume they are trying to sabotage you or get one over you in some way. And what exactly is the point of the insult, do you just go around assuming that everyone has the same sense of humor as you, and everyone who doesn’t is wrong? Haha.
Just take my comment for example. Am I being constructive or simply being condescending to you to make me feel better? Hard to tell because you don’t know me, isn’t it?
Sorry, but a little bit of brutal honesty for you. If this is how you're living your life, you are leaving a trail of people behind you that think you're an absolute dick.
The people you responded to spoke about conversations where they didn't attack their friend/partner ("you're being an arsehole"), they spoke honestly about how they felt ("Whoa, that hurt"). Both are honest, but yours is defence through attack. Their's is laying themselves bare. It's very different.
You probably like people with thick skins because they are the only people that stick around you.
...and yes, I realise I'm attacking you, but hopefully you'll take it as a friendly gesture.
Like the “but I’m an asshole, so it’s ok” get out of jail free card. No dude you’re right, you are an asshole, but that doesn’t mean I’m ok with you being a dick.
Brutal honesty is just being an asshole. You can also be an asshole dishonestly. The part that makes you an asshole is the brutal bit.
I was introduced to Imago therapy many years ago, back when I was still just dating the woman who is now my wife. I've recommended the book "Getting the Love You Want" to several people.
I can tell you this much -- of all the things I've done in my life, and all the various types of pain I've suffered, the "active listening" part required of Imago is the very hardest thing I've ever done. And probably the most important.
Personally, in a past relationship, I found this to be incongruent to a functioning relationship where every single feeling felt by my partner were valid and I was responsible for managing all her triggers. Example was yelling followed by "you held my hand too firmly, and it made me feel trapped like I were in my childhood". I believe there should be a degree of moderation and assignment of responsibility and repair that is not only designated to the other person.
I mean, you halfway got there. Your partner's feelings definitely were valid, but the latter part of that sentence, where you were responsible for managing all her triggers, that's not fair to you, and that's not what anybody is advocating.
In fact, it would have been perfectly fair for you to respond and tell her that. It definitely sounds like not every time she brought these things up, it wasn't resolved mutually satisfactorily, and PLENTY of scar tissue built up instead.
You get to advocate for yourself just as much as she did for herself. And sometimes during these conversations, you uncover irreconcilable differences, sure. Some relationships just aren't meant to be. But boy is it ever nicer when you discover these differences earlier, after honest and reciprocal conversations, as opposed to years later when all the suppressed argument come bursting forth at once. (Speaking from personal experience.)
Some people aren't worth it. Some people are just miserable. Not depressed, just miserable. Some people are insecure, vindictive, manipulative, querulous, disagreeable. Having a relationship with them will be as much as 100x more difficult than another person. This is the hard lesson I learned after 4 years in a thoroughly depleting relationship where I tried everything to make it work. When I look at my friends in their 40s, some have great partners and some don't, and the ones that don't have a truly execrable life despite good health, jobs, income, cars, holidays etc. Choosing a good partner matters more than almost anything else.
Don't get me wrong - I am not advocating we put all the bad partners in a camp somewhere. They are fundamentally in a state of suffering, and benefit from help and support. But the way to deliver that support is not by being in a romantic relationship with them.
If you are good partner material, consider the following asymmetry: A good partner can be in a relationship with a poor partner, but two poor partners will almost never be in a relationship together. This means that being a good partner increases your chance of ending up with a poor partner.
Part of being a functioning, emotionally mature adult is being able to self-regulate. It sounds like your partner relied on you for regulation, which is exhausting.
Sometimes we have to help other people co-regulate, especially young children. It's a useful skill - basically table stakes any time you're talking to someone having a hard time.
But if you're spending a significant amount of energy co-regulating a partner, check out YouTube videos related to codependency and speak to a therapist about the situation if you're able.
[...] yelling followed by "you held my hand too firmly, and it made me feel trapped like I were in my childhood" [...]
That sounds a bit demanding and maybe even blaming. I think the point is to tell about your emotions, and just lay them on the table. Nothing needs to be done directly, first you both want a conversation. If anything would need to done or changed, you might agree on something. But demanding sounds wrong.
Yeah the first part was good, but he second part was dysfunctional.
They way my wife and I do this is we dig into the why’s of the feeling to understand where it's coming from and to work though past issues if needed. We do this by talking about how we reacted and using the other person to calibrate wether a reaction is useful or over/under-reacting. Then talking through what we think a healthy response would look like. As a simple example.
Otherwise this is avoidance and putting all the burden on you which turned into what you mentioned walking on eggshells.
While this might work for you, I caution others from taking this advice. Why’s tend to be accusatory and puts the responder on the defense. Try to re-word your Why question by using the other Ws (what where when and how).
Sure, I'm just describing the general approach, not the specifics on how to execute it. No matter how you word it you're trying to understand the whys.
You don’t get to decide whether someone else’s feelings are valid or not. Sounds like you were just in the wrong relationship. I would argue this type of communication helped you realise that sooner - imagine if your partner bottled that up without telling you.
> You don’t get to decide whether someone else’s feelings are valid or not.
This is a dangerous thing to tell people dealing with an abuser/a psychopath/BPD whatevertheyrecalled. I'm willing to state many people's feelings are not valid.
(Stronger statement: true selves don't exist and other people's opinion of you is often more correct than your self-identification.)
They’re not wrong though, they just left out that it’s two way street and just because you feel something doesn’t mean you aren’t responsible for your actions.
The feeling is valid, but the action could be inappropriate or damaging and that’s not okay.
“I feel Z so you need to stop X or do Y for me” is not okay.
I think the phrase "feelings are valid" have ended up being... less than ideal for communicating the backing idea. When I talk to mental health professionals they tend to say "your feelings are valid" relates to two fairly incontrovertible things
1. You feel what you feel
2. It is not a moral failing to have a particular emotional reaction in the moment since these are not within our control (acting on the emotion is)
The word "valid" ends up granting connotations that the rationale a person applies to why they're feeling their feelings is somehow reasonable or correct. Many emotional reactions are not reasonable or justifiable and the most reasonable course of action may be figuring out how to repress that emotional reaction in the future - phobias are an excellent example here.
I think you're seeing that exact miscommunication here, others are reading "valid" in the normal use of the word while you're using it in this more colloquial fashion.
> Do you have a phrase that works for this, but isn't prone to misunderstanding?
Not a single phrase because there's a decision matrix around the reaction:
1. Do I think I understand why the emotional reaction is happening?
2. Do I think the emotional reaction is healthy?
3. Do I think the emotional reaction is reasonable?
And how I respond depends on the answers to these questions. When the answers to the questions are "no" I fall back to building a space of emotional safety things like:
"Thank you for sharing your feelings with me", "it's ok that you're feeling that way", "feeling that way doesn't make you a bad person". These statements tend more conservative if I'm feeling it's important to remove misunderstanding.
Sure, that's in an interaction, but that kind of phrase is a good starting point when talking about the situations in the abstract. As in any conversation, you then adjust and clarify as needed.
> However, does this claim not fly in the face of "identifying as" a particular gender, race, tribe, etc?
Yes, but it also implies people identifying as cis might be wrong about it, so it's a pretty equal if unpopular standpoint. Nevertheless.
There are a lot of real life self identification situations that aren't accepted by society - mostly ethnic groups. Rachel Dolezal, Elizabeth Warren[0], Europeans who get mad when Americans claim to be sixth-generation Irish, are different cases here.
[0] her situation is not that unique btw - it's actually very common for white people in Oklahoma to believe they're part Cherokee. Since they believe this because their parents told them so, I don't think they're doing anything wrong, but it's the kind of unpleasant surprise you get when your 23andme results come back.
> She would tell me about every little negative thing that happened between us.
Without sounding callous, I have to say I prefer a relationship where we don't do this and let the little things go. I'm an extremely self conscious person and already rather hard on myself and this would drive me away from the relationship due to feeling like walking on eggshells or being controlled in detailed ways.
Depends what you mean by "little things". If it's "a little thing that happened", then absolutely. If it's "a little thing that happens regularly", then it's worth discussing it before it snowballs.
To me it felt like "every little thing," but that was due to a combination of me being defensive + not seeing the value in communication and preventing resentment. Today I'd consider many of those little things to be important.
> due to feeling like walking on eggshells or being controlled in detailed ways
Sure, this could be done badly and could backfire. But it could also be done in a once a week session where partners share what they feel to each other. This is what I'd like actually and I admit it is not easy. I personally get over the small things fast and tend to forget them till their next occurrence, and at some point of this repeating I end up just spitting it out on the spot. It doesn't help that my partner dismisses everything I say as a kind of being oversensitive. If it wasn't for us having a child together we'd most likely go our separate ways.
If you are unhappy in your relationship you shouldn't "stay together for the kid". It's a common misbelief that that is good for kids, when in actuality they absolutely pick up on what's going on and it's not healthy for the kid to be in a not-happy family. I speak from experience, I was a kid whose parents didn't separate when they absolutely should have. I'd encourage you to discuss this with a therapist if you haven't already.
Ok, it’s also financial too, but mostly I want to be in my child life daily. The current situation is not too bad, we aren’t fighting but not an ideal match either and there are some scars. I learned to ignore the ideal, the ideal doesn’t exist. It’s the best calculation to my life’s eqution I could come up with for the time being. I could find what I am longing for through other parts of my life. I actually know this too well from my own parents, they too had a loveless marriage. I think a big part in what decides how couples work is their attachment styles the two have. It’s a theory that I feel explains my predicament quite well.
Your child will have their own relationships one day, and for better or worse will model those on the relationships they've spent their lives watching others have. What sort of relationships do you want your child to have?
I see a lot of pushback to your comment so wanted to chime and offer support to your perspective. See my previous comment for an expansion of my limited personal experience echoing your thought
Talking about every little negative thing vs. using every little negative thing for control are very, very different things. But they look similar on the surface.
This has to be merged with inherited lineage trauma. I've seen many adults of the previous generations who were incapable of talking or listening normally, creating cycles of silence and rage. It took decades for me to snap out of it, and when I tried to get the point across, they kept repeating nodding but repeating the same things. Very disturbing.
I've had a chat with psychotherapist one and we both agreed, at least from our own limited experience - previous generations were/are very stiff when it comes to emotions, sharing them openly, talking about them.
I mean even within 1 generation, from my father to me, the difference is massive. Not sure on what to pinpoint it exactly, we saw and see massive transformations of our societes at neck-breaking speed. When my late grandma saw how I hold and hug my then-girlfriend, she just sighted 'why cant I have a bit of that', and said similar stuff about my father (aka her son just to be clear).
In fact, I used to be like you describe when young, quiet till explosion, rinse and repeat. Something when growing up changed in me, I was growing up slowly till my mid 30s, even redefined who I am by diving into mountain/extreme sports, handling one's fears ie of dying quite regurarly has quite an effect. Plus a lot of backpacking around the world in 3rd world countries, I cant be xenophobic or +-racist like many former peers even if I tried hard after that. My parents lived in communist eastern block, this kind of adventure stuff was unheard of, so I dont blame them.
My advice to anybody and everybody out there - expose yourself to intense experiences, cultures, understand how everything works (schools made me hate those topics, took a decade+ to find my own way back to them). Everything changes you, imprints on you, makes you richer and better person, the more intense experience the more profound effect. Just stay the fuck out of comfort zone for as long as you can.
This type of communication has actually a name, it called non-violent communication. There are books about it. It is one of the best way to communicate when things gets tough or are in a crisis. Since it avoids finger pointing, personal attacks (even when we don’t mean to), etc... and still being able to talk about the issue and how we feel (instead of how the other should do such and such or putting words in their mouths).
But I guess it can be weird to be used all the time and maybe without explicitly talking about.
Non-violent communication is orthogonal to addressing scar tissue. You can use non-violent communication and not address scar tissue and you can use “violent communication” to address scar tissue.
Your example really doesn't illustrate the distinction that you claim. Non-violent communication is not about “being nice” and not using “aggressive” words, whatever that means.
> Notable concepts include rejecting coercive forms of discourse, gathering facts through observing without evaluating, genuinely and concretely expressing feelings and needs, and formulating effective and empathetic requests.
Other than my wife saying “it pisses me off”, which is expressing a feeling, none of it is NVC. There are no needs or requests expressed. There is no fact gathering. Crucially, there is no empathy building.
In which case the name is awful and the concept should be referred to with a different label. The point of those is to communicate meaning, if the very first thing that happens is this kind of misunderstanding that we have failed before we even started.
Ya I agree. When I bring this label I go into details into explaining it’s a method with a template etc. Or else people will get a very different idea from the name itself.
“Non-violent communication” is referring to quite a specific communication technique, it doesn’t mean that all other communication styles are ‘violent’.
I'm still confused how there can be violence (behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something) in speech, where is the physical force ?
You mean like screaming demands, insults and threats at someone that might scar them if repeated over and over?
I think that could be considered violent but it really depends on metaphors here.
It's physical in the way that the body remembers trauma I suppose. Words might not break your bones but they sure could lead to auto-immune disorders, memory disorders, hormonal imbalance, stomach conditions, blood pressure conditions, thyroid conditions, not to mention mood regulation issues and other issues etc.
If your body is conditioned to be in a tortured/stressed/powerless state it won't understand how to regulate properly later leading to further issues. So you could say it is a physical force here in this way damaging and changing your body forever.
There are a fair amount of things out there on this topic.
I started getting autoimmune disorders in middle school due to stress in my home, unfortunately my family didn't actually realize I was sick then due to stress in my home lol. But that was just how it was and life got considerably worse because the yelling further escalated in other members to eventual violence. This lead to quite a lot of other issues in my early 20's compounding so when people are like it's just words, you don't know much and how fast words can escalate. Words have a lot of power, don't dismiss them too easily. My family always liked to and it sure left damage.
My current partner does this too. Communicates a lot and early so there's no build up of resentment. It took me a long time to adjust to this, it was jarring since it was so new to me. But I've grown to appreciate it so much, and I try to do the same.
Your comment and the OP have taken me a bit by surprise, in how closely they match my own experiences. It's kind of validating! Thank you :)
> She would tell me about every little negative thing that happened between us.
I would not want to be in such a relationship, to be honest. Just learn to accept each other's small flaws and try to be kind. Little things only build up if you let them. Verbalising everything and putting negativity into focus is actually one of those ways that scar tissue can build up. The best way for it to not build up is to let the little things go.
I thought I was this way before. I realized that it's not true, I am bothered by the little things and they do add up over time. I may not remember exactly how many times some little pet peeve has annoyed me, but you can bet by the fourth or fifth time my physical reaction to the peeve will be much stronger than the first time. It's feels like indigestion, a really unpleasant sensation in the gut. Once I notice I am having an unpleasant physical reaction to something I try to get it out immediately if it's something that I feel we should talk about.
The biggest step is being able to separate guilt from responsibility.
Yes, i felt bad, yes it was caused by your actions and you're responsible if it happens again.
But: You didn't know and didn't intent to hurt me, so you're not a bad person.
Love this, and it hits on one of the most important exercises in relationships building: validating the other person.
When we're defensive, it's easy to invalidate the other person's feelings. Validation is setting aside your own world-view to make someone else feel seen, heard, appreciated, and understood.
When you break open "scar tissue" early and often, you have a chance to practice validating someone else's feelings (and having your own feelings validated in return).
My life has improved immensely from practicing this form of communication. I had to learn to sit with a lot of discomfort going through this process. It eventually translated into me not putting up with other people’s shit in my professional career.
Most notably, my conversations with close ones are no longer irrelevant small talk or about details of the day which don’t matter. It feels like I can have conversation with true substance now.
The scar tissue model sounds convincing and there’s something to it. But when I reflect on my very long term relationships, it doesn’t seem to get at the core of why we’ve stayed together. Instead, for these relationships there is a deeper alignment of interests / alignment of values / alignment of outlooks (whatever you want to call it) that allows us to get past the annoying stuff. Put differently, a model that resonates more with my experience is that there are two baskets of conflicts: core stuff and peripheral stuff. As long as the peripheral conflicts don’t get too egregious, they don’t actually matter if the core stuff is still working.
Scar tissue is a reason the bank account goes negative, it's easy to forget that it also needs reasons to go positive. No credits mean the debits make the account go red very quickly.
Thank you for sharing your view, you put words when I couldn't. Shared values is precisely the best explanation to my relationships that wore out in the past, I don't think scar tissue was the reason.
The analogy of scar tissue could work for symptoms, though: the presence of scar tissues in a relationship may/could indicate that conflicts never get fully resolved because deep in the relationship, there is a fundamental misalignment of values, and that's what creates scar tissues when conflicts emerge.
For me, the real thing that tends to explain my long relationships is the authenticity of someone to her/his own values. Which is not to be confused with sharing the same opinions, I can easily be friends with people who vote differently than me, but what I can't stand is dishonesty (e.g., inventing theories or excuses to put the blame on the "others").
The reason I think it works that way is in part due to my own character: I don't hesitate getting into conflict with other people and more particularly with those dear to me when I disagree or when I feel disturbed by something. I can have intense arguments with some of my friends, my wife, my parents, my boss, but it never damaged our relationship because I think deep under, our values are aligned.
Now, what do I mean by "values"? Those are things I characterize as values:
- how you negotiate internal conflict
- how you respond to being wrong / corrected by someone else that presents a good argument to you
- how you treat people of lower socioeconomic level (e.g., disdain, disrespect,neglect vs. empathy/consideration, etc.)
- how you treat people of higher socioeconomic level (e.g., jealousy, envy, ass-licking vs. admiration, respect, inspiration, etc.)
- whether you behave differently with co-workers situated "below" you vs. "above" you vs. those who can affect your career advancement
- whether you are faithful to yourself and your opinions (aka, whether you can stand the cost or implications of your opinions, or if you change your mind and invent yourself another stance just to avoid any discomfort)
- whether your respect everyone's right to privacy or assume you can invade your spouse or child's personal space
- etc.
So, in summary, yes a very interesting article but I can only disagree with the premise: I don't think that scar tissues make relationships wear out, I think values misalignment does.
I don't think that scar tissues make relationships wear out, I think values misalignment does.
Sometimes it can also be a character flaw.
While I believe our values were aligned, my partner was very critical about almost everything I did. She was not supportive of my goals. She dismissed my interests, and she often criticized how I did things. We were from two different cultures, but we strongly agreed on many important points (including how to raise children). It was the little things that bothered her. This was bad enough that even friends who visited us noticed and admonished her for treating me like that. A therapist friend also noticed and tried to help her. Probably due to how I was raised, it took me years to realize myself that there was a problem, and it took a few more years for her to acknowledge the problem herself. It was when she realized that her mother treated her the same way. Unfortunately she felt that she was unable to change. I credit it to our shared values that I stayed with her as long as I did. This issue would have almost destroyed our relationship if it hadn't been ended by cancer instead.
> As long as the peripheral conflicts don’t get too egregious
From a scar model perspective this is like a papercut/superficial injury which isn’t leaving you with a scar (or at least a very minor one).
> they don’t actually matter if the core stuff is still working.
Being stabbed in the heart (literally and metaphorically) will leave bigger and deeper scars that can impair core function and your heart will never pump blood as effectively again.
I guess, but reflecting further, the scar tissue/injury model is a little odd in that it focuses only on the negative, not on what the two parties actually get out of the relationship.
People remember and hold onto negative things. This is about unblocking/unclogging the system regularly to maintain proper function. It builds up over time so it needs to be regularly flushed.
Ha, no, I'm old(ish) and long term means 30 years for me too :)
Notice, I did not use the phrase "common interests"; my use of "interests" is in the sense of exchange: you get something and I get something in return. Equivalently, this same exchange can be described as an "alignment of values" or "alignment of outlooks" since sharing a value or a lens on the world with someone is a special pleasure and is something you get out of a relationship.
I think two people committing to each other and valuing their commitment certainly qualifies as "alignment of values" contributing to the positive side of the relationship ledger.
One thing which is often missing or just left implicit in two-way communication is the self-referential aspect:
How are you talking to yourself?
Most people have a hard time tuning into this part because self-talk usually starts in early childhood and by the time one can be made fully "aware" of it, it has already faded into the normal background noise of being oneself, so it rarely gets openly interrogated. The self-talk doesn't have to be sophisticated, it can just be a constant pink noise of: "This is just dumb." ... "I'm miserable" ... "It's my fault" ... "I'm not worthy of love" ... "I'm disgusted by myself".
And, here, I'm still very polite with the wording.
Of course this inevitably bleeds in how you communicate with other people and especially the people in your life you really care about. If you never cultivated to encourage yourself, be kind, patient and forgiving toward yourself at some point you can't sustain the illusion (e.g. "nicest, loving ... person") and eventually it will leash out.
There is a solipsistic aspect in communication worth exploring: I often find that communicating with one another openly and freely is also making one aware of each other's (hurtful, embarrassing ...) self-talk and can make way for the kind of primordial empathy buried deep in oneself and by extension make it easier to fully connect with the feelings of other people.
As I understand it, scar tissue isn’t necessarily weaker, and can be stronger, but is mostly adapted to the injury and how it was able to heal. If the injury was well attended, scar tissue can be as good or better than what was there before. If the injury is neglected, or repeatedly re-injured before it could ever fully heal, then it will be tougher and less flexible and more painful even long after it has technically healed. It won’t move the same way as before, it won’t be as supple, it will need more attention over time.
An injury can take only a moment, but recovery and healing takes much longer. If you address it sooner rather than later, and if you take care to avoid similar injuries, it’s more likely to heal well. If it’s neglected, if you half-ass it, etc., it may never heal properly.
A nitpick, but only because other than that it’s not a bad metaphor.
Medically speaking, your understanding is bit off in that while there are several factors that affect the resulting strength of scar tissue, the underlying disorganization in scar tissue will always leave it biomechanically weaker than than uninjured skin.
It is true that with early attention, proper wound care, etc scar can approach normal skin but even in the best of circumstances it will still be “slightly weaker” rather than as good or better.
I agree. I've seen couples who've gone through a lot of turmoil in their younger years but have emerged stronger and have happily grown old together. Granted, they are the minority. So I too, feel the scar tissue analogy is imperfect. Perhaps in some cases, relationship issues are like fractures -- the mend is in fact stronger than the break.
> fractures -- the mend is in fact stronger than the break.
This is also a medically incorrect statement for similar reasons to scar tissue, the resultant trabecular disorganization always results in weaker bone, even for “perfectly” healed fractures.
I think the original metaphor (and even fractures) still holds but in a different way than you described.
I highly doubt any of those couples (and from personal experience myself) wanted the turmoil however one feels after the fact, “made us stronger” is often a combination of dissonance and a statement that other areas of the relationship strengthened to compensate (in the fracture analogy: if you break your left leg your right one will strengthen from increased mechanical load to compensate).
One would not break a bone in an attempt to make it stronger, but a broken bone can heal to near full strength and other bones in the body get stronger to compensate. If you break your bone repeatedly, it heals as a deformed structure that is considerably weaker than what you started and will break from a minor injury.
If you substitute bones for relationship I think this holds.
With effort it’s possible to recover from and compensate for relationship trauma and thrive as an organism/couple, but it’s still better to avoid emotional trauma to begin with (assuming it’s possible) as with physical trauma.
> So taekwondo people who train to hit concrete pillars don’t get stronger from the repeated hits, do you confirm?
Stress from repetitive microtrauma is not the same as a fracture (stress to failure). Increased mechanical loading (hitting a concrete pillar, exercise) can absolutely strengthen bone in a similar mechanism to decreased load weakening bones (little old lady, astronauts).
Breaking a bone completely disrupts the internal architecture and what is deposited is unequivocally weaker than what was there before.
> And “what doesn’t kill, makes you stronger” is false too
I have no professional opinion on this aphorism. I do have one on bone healing.
Loading your bones close to the breaking point does make them stronger. At least as long as you give them time to recover in between, otherwise you get a stress fracture. It's a balancing act. Do it well and you get stronger, overdo it everything spirals downwards. Same for most of the rest of your body. If something gets close enough to killing you, it will definitely make you weaker.
My claim was not that everything that hurts you must make you stronger, not weaker. I only made the much weaker claim that what fraction of things that hurt you make you weaker, not stronger, is highly variable from person to person. That does not imply that anyone would be made stronger by having each of their major bones broken--still less that doing so should be standard practice, just to see if it makes some people stronger. Having a major bone broken might not be in the set of things that makes anyone stronger by hurting them. There are lots of things that hurt besides having a major bone broken. Many of them do not do any physical damage to you at all.
Trying to get to root cause of what's actually wrong with my communication capability, I've come to the belief that transplanting a thought from my mind to my wife's mind intact is really hard. Fidelity can break down in several transformations: how clearly the thought is formed in my mind, the words I choose and arrange to express it, how fluidly I can speak them, whether there is impedence in the environment or emotional state, how accurately she hears the words, the precice meanings she applies to each word, the context she overlays and finally, any bias that modulates the meaning.
Even if all of that goes reasonably well, my expression of thought encounters the intent modulation. What does she believe I am trying to accomplish by communicating this thought?
To a large degree, having a positive outcome from any conversation relies on the trust between us, the value we place in the relationship and the willingness of each of us to monitor for and correct misunderstandings so that even when conflict develops, the understanding of the situation is the same for both parties.
What gets me down is knowing that for some (most?) people, the above is so intuitive, they've never had a problem with it. Alas.
In my experience, I would say most people have problems with exactly this.
They don't even think about the possibility of noise/interpretation in the communication.
and they never stopped to think about it the way you did.
If you (+above commenter +any other HN per users) want a good Wikipedia article, the metalanguange/metacommunication ones do a great job of explaining how this works in CS friendly terms - the connection to meta programming is a great aside.
Human relationships are like complex systems. And some of the principles of antifragile design can also be applied if we look at it from a systemic lens.
The build up of small cracks over a period of time can lead to any system getting brittle and fragile over a period of time. That said, resolution or letting go are both viable techniques to make it anti-fragile. Sometimes we have to realize, all of us have some shit we come along with and it's never perfectly matched to someone else. And it would be mad if it were too!
Much like you make the best of life and the world around you think of making the best in the relationship by investing into the right things. Sometimes it's ok to let go - at other times it's necessary to draw boundaries and expect resolutions.
To keep a complex system running, we also need to keep working at it.
I agree with his characterization of relationship breakdowns. I think the scar tissue is a bit of a tortured analogy.
At some point you just have to let shit go if you don’t want it to build up. These little things are what Dan Savage calls the “price of admission.” It’s important to have good communication skills, to be able to talk through conflict, to be able to give someone space. But if after talking about how your partner loads the dishwasher three times and nothing has changed? Or the umpteenth big fight where things were mostly patched over bit there’s still some underlying pattern that you know is going to come up again? Now you know the price of admission. Is it worth it to you to pay that price to stay in relationship, or not?
The speaker confesses their perfectionist tendencies. People like this, myself included, cannot let go of anything. I’ve spent years learning how and it still takes a conscious effort, but it’s better. My zen teacher used to hand students a stick and tell them to let go of it. So many could not - it’s going to drop, messily, onto the floor! The stick might break! You can’t just let go of it like that, it needs to be put down gently, in its proper place, etc.
High achieving individuals, especially in a field like academia which heavily rewards certain narcissistic and neurodivergent traits, are just hard to deal with in relationship. I look around me at the few successful long-term relationships I see and one or both people are usually pretty subdued/chill in every aspect of their life. This is not the norm.
Letting shit go is more or less what I hear from those 25+ year Indian couples with arranged marriages (from Netflix show, “Indian Matchmaking”), though they call it “tolerance”.
The thing is, how many people truly and honestly let shit go?
Continuing from above — in “Indian Matchmaking”, what pops up over and over again is that you will never have “100%” of what you are looking for in a partner.
Every young person she helps with always start a list of qualities of their ideal partner, some of them are really small things. Yet despite telling them, it is not “100%”, they can’t let that go even before dating starts. And then you see how it sets the tone for the dates and all the drama that comes of it, and they have not even married yet.
I remember watching that and thinking, yeah, that’s obvious. Glad I know better.
But thinking about all of this, I realize, it doesn’t end at the dating. Your partner wasn’t “100%”, and as people grow and change, they are not “100%” different ways, over the years. There are different things that comes up in which to let shit go.
It might be why arranged marriages and strong cultural values around it works. There is no illusion of an ideal partner to begin with. (And you get the shadow side too, like anything else when there are bad actors)
No doubt. The people I have known in an Indian arranged marriage actually understand relationships.
They aren't trying to live in a Disney movie or Goethe novel.
My understanding is that Goethe and romanticism really messed up our views in the West about romance. We have unrealistic beliefs from trying to live up to fiction.
Yes, and music and all other parts of culture too: the lone genius model of human achievement, suffering=greatness, the primacy of emotion, and many other tropes that are now our cultural “defaults”. It’s hard to see clearly because we’re still inside the romantic movement.
There's a juxtaposition I don't get - on one hand, the super high prevalence of arranged marriages in Indian culture, on the other hand is the super high prevalence of "finding romance" stories in Bollywood movies.
I’m not an Indian, though I don’t find that paradoxical, since I know how influential the story of Rama and Sita is to the Indian culture. That story is held as the ideal of relations between a husband and wife.
And then there is the story of Krishna and the cow maids.
When you watch the “Indian matchmaking”, you see the parents of the current generation letting their kids find their way, even though they themselves did not. But you also hear about how the older generation met — it’s an arranged marriage, but their parents typically let their kids choose from a small pool of their choosing.
This seems like quite an uncharitable reading of the situation. They talked about the manner of packing. If things are packed incorrectly then they may block other things from being cleaned or require another cycle of cleaning, which presumably moves to work onto the other partner or in extreme cases could be indicative of weaponised incompetence.
> At some point you just have to let shit go if you don’t want it to build up.
I think this is a very important point that is not addressed in the article. The article basically describes avoiding scar tissue as resolving conflicts so there is "zero lingering animosity". And sometimes (actually quite often, I think), only one person of the two in the relationship is prone to feeling any animosity about how a particular conflict got resolved. And in most (if not all) such cases, the best way to avoid the scar tissue is exactly what you say: let it go. Is it really worth feeling even a little smidgen of animosity towards this person, with whom you have a relationship lasting many years or decades, because of this one little thing? At the very least I think one needs to ask oneself that question, before embarking on the kinds of conflict resolution that the article describes.
Letting go is so important because it what lets you move on. Without letting go, I've seen people who anticipate the situation happening again every time the context is the same. They relive the stress/situation even though nothing bad is actually happening, and then resent their partner once more for it. It's a never-ending cycle of pain and anger. Please just make the decision to leave it!
The author sort of touches on this, although doesn't state it outright (but does refer to compromise) -
> And that's really hard to do; I don't have any perfect answers for that; it's communication and compromise.
But I generally agree with you. There's a big difference between compromise and letting things go. The author kind of implies that they can't do the latter, and that it's bad to do so ("Well, that seems generous, but it's a really bad idea."), and so to make up for that, they rely on communication instead.
Truly letting things go is harder than outright communication (at least, for me). How do you determine what's small enough to let go? I have to make a gamble every time I think "Well, I'll just let this little thing go", because I need to make sure I've actually totally gotten over it. If I don't, then it becomes another paper cut.
IME I've truly let go if something bothers me less over time. My SO and I were taught to bring things up immediately. Yet that led to (what seem to me) a torrent of complaints that felt very one-sided.
My guess is there is a balance. Where little things can be overlooked, yet if they accumulate then it's best to talk about them at the point it's clear they can't be "let go". Ideally before things have gone on too long.
Having a qualified, independent third party can also help provide some perspective. Of course all this assumes there isn't evidence folks are just petty and manipulative. Compromise does take two and ideally both will feel there is an equal amount being sacrificed or gained by all.
Also I would recommend avoiding faith based counseling. IME their faith often taints their objectivity and generally pollutes both their advice and critical thinking skills. Even for couples who are of the same faith it can be helpful to get help outside the bubble.
I had a relationship counselor tell me once “there are three secrets to a successful long-term relationship: forgive, forgive, forgive.” It’s kind of the antithesis of the scar tissue theory where you need to make sure every grievance is addressed.
> He would have been pretty worried if we sat down and I was like, “Jim, can we talk [Laughter] about my feelings? I mean you left the plastic open and dust got into the house, and sometimes I feel like you don't respect me as a person.”
This is one of those moments where someone is theory own worst enemy. The expectation for people to bottle up their feelings and sit there in annoyance is silly. There are only two basic scenarios here. The cause of the annoyance mainly sits with...
1. Jim.
2. John Ousterhout.
3. Some unidentified cause.
The proper approach is to think carefully about whether it is case 2. If it is, stop feeling annoyed - the annoyance is harming the self and the relationship for no reason. It is an illusion that can only cause trouble.
Most of the time that is the end of it. However, sometimes it is a case 1 or 3. Then it is perfectly fine to sit down with Jim and talk feelings. Just do it. Learn to make it sound natural and stilted and people only notice that you seem really easy to talk to. Figure out whether it is case 1 or 3 and whether it can just be resolved on the spot. Nobody is helped by bottling even minor things up. Learn to live a comfortable life.
It drives me crazy when I find out people just sit there and don't tell me when I'm upsetting them. Communication, my men! If you can't fix it in your own head, get other people involved and talk it through.
Plug for Marshall Rosenberg and Nonviolent Communication. This stuff really can be reduced to an algorithm as long as it accompanies a relentlessly nonjudgemental mindset and a tolerance for not getting your own way.
I don't know that NVC always works the way its proponents think it does.
I've been around a lot of NVC practitioners. Many have been active NVC educators.
Maybe they've all been Doing It Wrong, but...I find that when presented with the "NVC way" of discussing a problem, my brain always translates it to the emotional symbols I understand, which are nearly identical to the symbols generated by an overt criticism.
That said, I recognize that could simply be a "me problem." Which I won't dispute. I'm not entirely neurotypical. And generally if something I'm doing is bothering someone, I try to deal with it; I don't make everything into drama. I just don't parse the NVC words appreciably differently than a normal, polite request. (Overt hostility does push my buttons, but short of that, it doesn't seem to matter.)
Just saying that NVC isn't magic. If the person making the request has a reasonable point, I'll acknowledge and do what I can to adjust my behavior. If they seem to be asking something less reasonable, wrapping it with NVC language doesn't change the request materially for me at all.
> It drives me crazy when I find out people just sit there and don't tell me when I'm upsetting them. Communication, my men! If you can't fix it in your own head, get other people involved and talk it through.
Agree that people should generally be open about issues. But there's appropriate context for everything. I really don't want coworkers coming up to me and asking to work through an emotional issue for an hour because something I suggested was different than their suggestion, and my suggestion bruised their ego. Close friends? Sure. I probably have higher than average tolerance for such conversations among those I care about. But I choose my close friends, and largely don't get to choose specific coworkers, and so demanding that level of emotional work seems outside of the job description.
Also: Totally agree about telling the contractor that dust got everywhere and letting them know that's a problem. But for me, it wouldn't be at all about "my feelings." It would be about a request to a contractor to adjust their behavior or that of their subs based on reasonable expectations. I would personally feel foolish taking an NVC approach with a contractor in that situation, TBH. Not "It makes me feel disrespected when dust gets all over the place," but something more like, "Hey Jim, someone didn't seal the plastic around the construction area and we had a bunch of dust we needed to clean up. Can you be sure that everyone knows that it's important to keep the dust seal closed? Thanks." Heck, the latter is even less confrontational than the "you left the plastic open" in the OP's comment.
I like the analogy and think what he's describing is a big reason relationships fail, but I don't think he's right that you need to make sure scar tissue never occurs in long-term relationships, at least romantic ones. That's an almost impossible goal. I've seen a lot of good relationships, and the level of conflict that exists in them is all over the place. What actually seems to matter is that the people involved learn to repair whatever damage is done after the conflict. That can also happen months or years later. It also requires much less saintliness than avoiding scar-tissue in the first place does.
I agree. Like my physical scars, the ones in my relationships still serve as a useful reminder. Injury is a fact of life and one we should become good at responding to. A comfortable and hassle-free life is virtually impossible (and perhaps not even desirable), so it appears to me that the injuries should be attended to, healed, learned from, then used as a symbol of that process to reflect on.
I'm always excited to see psychology stuff discussed here, and I like Ousterhout a lot, but I don't think this analogy works very well.
Scar tissue really is permanent. Resentment in a relationship can be permanent, but doesn't have to be. The analogy that every unresolved grievance leads to a monotonically increasing amount of perpetual relationship weakness is, I think, wrong.
I think of resentment more like foreign bodies. When I was a kid, I got a chunk of pencil lead stuck in my hand without realizing it. The wound healed over it, but it was still in there. I could see it as a dark spot under my skin. Many years later, my body gradually migrated it to the surface and eventually it came out. (This was definitely a weird experience.)
When there's some sort of grievance or unresolved conflict in a relationship, I think of it as leaving a little chunk of foreign body or poison in the person's symptom. Some amount of this is natural, and you will just build up a little scar tissue and get by. But if you keep accumulating them, they'll make you less and less healthy.
Often, the best solution is to make sure the foreign body is removed before the wound heals over. When a hurt happens, take the time right then to work through it with the partner so that you aren't leaving anything in there and it can heal quickly and completely.
But, if that doesn't happen (and sometimes it won't), you can still dig it out later. It just requires re-opening the wound. The longer you wait, the more painful it is. When you re-open that wound, you will feel raw and vulnerable. It requires a lot of trust and care. Sometimes, this may happen years later, but it can be done.
If you find yourself doing this so frequently that you feel like you're never fully healed, that's a good sign that you aren't right for each other. Likewise, if you never feel that you're in an emotionally safe enough space to re-open those wounds and clean out the festering gunk in them, that's also a warning sign.
We will obviously have AGI before we figure out relationship therapy— and likely have AI value alignment before human value alignment.
Practically, though… try having a conversation with chatGPT asking it to translate what you each want to say into “nonviolent communication”. Wow. AI seems way better than humans at human relationship communication…
Honestly the worst thing about non confrontational communication is that someone named a very useful communication technique after something - violence - that is not the thing being avoided.
Yes, I have a colleague whose normal writing tone is confrontational. It’s something they’re aware of and work to remove during the editing process. ChatGPT has made this significantly easier for them:
1st draft
-> prompt “soften the language”
—-> review and revise output
———> prompt “soften again”
————> final draft
Enter more complex prompts or more iterations if you want editing for multiple things, e.g., prompt “suggest edits for clarity, brevity, grammar, and softer language”. You can iterate very quickly.
I'd be curious about what a normal short message from your colleague looks like unedited. I wonder if my writing style is confrontational. I think my client's is.
I used to work in construction, and his story about the contractor he worked with was almost triggering. Those types of people were the absolute worst to work for. The closest thing in software development is a client who has no expertise or understanding of the process but still wants to bikeshed every detail. It's exhausting.
After I took ownership of my home, I cataloged over 100 issues that needed to be attended to post-construction. I want a home without obvious in-your-face-faults. The construction crew wanted to finish and move onto the next project. Our incentives were not aligned, and that's the problem.
Next time, I'm specifically going to ensure another contractor is hired to ensure QC of the home during construction. No moving onto the next stage until the 1 foot hole in the subfloor caused by a falling drill from the 2nd story is fixed.
Spot on. Honestly that construction story was infuriating, he was the problem the entire time and probably shouldn’t be giving relationship advice. There’s no such thing as a “perfectionist” in the first place since what qualifies as “perfect” is a subjective point of view.
Anybody, and I mean anybody, can point out little things that are wrong in something. Especially in construction, by people that have never done it themselves but holds financial power. Also, I guarantee all the slight changes he thought were critical enough to warrant constant intervention actually weren’t, or could’ve been addressed later. The cost would have been significantly higher if the contractor factored in the time it took to satisfy him. He was getting what he paid for.
I appreciate the idea but I think it's trickier then described. There are multiple reasons to tell and not tell a person you're in a relationship with the problems they cause you. Some of them benefit the relationship and some don't.
It's a cliche to say that relationships are about compromise but that's because it's true. That compromise isn't always spoken; sometimes it's done without the other person even knowing. If you're clear eyed or empathetic or just love the other person you can know that they do the same thing for you. If you're none of those things you can make the compromise painfully clear and create a zero sum situation.
That’s why letting yourself/significant other sleep still angry after an argument is not such a great idea. Resolve it before sleeping or it gets swept under the rug, or as he said, adds one scar tissue, as nobody will bring it back up next morning. It will be remembered when it happens again next time
There are a lot of times when you need to let cooler heads prevail. You’re not going to get less cranky as the night progresses.
On the other hand, it took literally years to come to a compromise between my very devout wife whose had it drilled into head that you should give 10% to the church as a family or we will never have a good life and we will be damned to hell.
The argument would always come up after we made a big financial commitment and while I was still trying to dig myself out of some bad financial decisions that I made before we even met. She was fully aware of them.
But one thing it’s almost impossible to square is a disagreement between two people when it involves religion or cultural disagreements.
When someone believes their actions will lead to damnation and burning in hell for eternity, no amount of logical argument will ever dissuade them from this. Faith is by definition not based on physical reality - and that’s not meant to be demeaning.
The compromise we came to is that she does what she wants as long as she stays within the overall budget we agreed to and I give what really amounts toward a “this is the price I pay for never having to hear mention of giving again”.
While I will say that my wife has her belief system. She is what I would consider a “liberal Christian”. She isn’t judgmental about other people and we have friends across the divide.
You should go full accountant on her. 10% of profits or revenue? What about cash flow, massage the numbers a bit and present her a spread sheet to your liking. No accounting fraud needs to be involved
It’s not that easy. The church teaches that if you give your “first fruits” - ie gross before taxes - that no matter what or even if the numbers don’t add up, “God will provide”.
That means before getting out of debt, saving, paying your rent etc.
Dave Ramsey - a popular “financial guru” - is very opposed to debt of any kind except mortgage debt. But he’s also a fundamentalist Christian. He tells people that you should give 10% of your gross to your church (not his organization) even if you are struggling to get out of debt.
The church is very adamant about it.
I’m not here to debate theology. I’m just letting you know about the RFC for Christianity.
As foreign as it sounds logically and to someone who hasn’t come up in the Christian faith, tithing is about “the family” and the household income. We decide everything else based on “our” income so why wouldn’t giving be the same?
And tithing brings a blessing to the entire family and as supposedly the head of the family, I should follow those teachings.
Again, I’m just quoting from the “Christian protocol” or the “standard” and trying my best to argue from that basis. I’m not injecting my personal beliefs. Consider this an objective argument just like if you asked me why you shouldn’t have a body in a GET request.
> Giving money to the church (any church) would be a 1000% deal breaker for me.
It’s a minor nuisance in the grand scheme of things. I have my share of “deal breakers”. But that isn’t one of them.
It can also just be dangerous - before bed is usually when people have the least emotional regulation and are the most tired and cranky. It’s peak ‘domestic’ call time.
Well, outside of end of year holidays.
Ideally, being able to go ‘now is a shitty time, let’s laugh about it and check tomorrow if it’s still an issue’ would be better. But emotions don’t always work that way.
Only for fights that seem warranted, otherwise it could get too much. Most time small arguments gets “resolv-ish” right away, say small stuff like leaving a mess and being an ass about it, you know? You say sorry, next time I’ll be better and it’s usually done
Scar tissue needs to be massaged often to break it down. Perhaps the same is true of trouble areas in relationships: don't let things sit and seize up.
It’s relatively painless to massage scar tissue. Relationship rough spots are more like cavities that are constantly unpleasant and the require a really unpleasant day to address.
This is all great advice until you get stuck with "I don't give a fuck" "it's my way or the highway" people. There are more of them that may seem at a first glance, and it takes some time to figure that out, too. And sometimes it comes with age, so that's even worse, because there is no way to tell early on.
Ive found that the “my way or highway” attitrude is often a defense mechanism and they will meet you halfway if you simply ackowledge their point of view.
Accepting and acknowledging are not the same thing though so I dont mean to cave in if you disagree.
I speak as a toxic person myself. Years of systemaric abuse and I was pretty much a marcissistic asshole.
100% a defense mechanism to avoid abuse. I had never learned what validation was. Also I isually assumed everyone was out to get me.
Took me years of living without a relationship to learn to learn what an absolute dunderhead I could be.
Sometimes other peoples actions are simply a reflection of your own attitide.
I look at it this way, if everyone around me is an ahole, the only thing they have in common is me.
Maybe, just maybe, I myself may need to learn to communicate and validate those around me.
And I need to do that without selling myself short.
Every time you are a jerk to someone, criticise someone, belittle someone, disrespect someone or attack someone, they like you less.
Relationships have a "bank account of good will", and each incident/negative interaction withdraws from the account.
Positive interactions contribute goodwill to the account.
Negative interactions withdraw at many times the rate that positive interactions contribute.
It's very easy to destroy a relationship - you can do it in minutes or seconds. It's very hard to build something positive, very very hard to rebuild damage.
Compromises make relationships wear out. If you land on a compromise where it’s one person giving in rather than both changing their requirements, that one person will always feel like they have been wronged. You only need to a couple of such instances to burn out the strongest affection
> and it probably drove him crazy that every morning when he came in, I was there standing in the kitchen ready to tell him about all the mistakes he made yesterday
(Emphasis mine.)
His compulsion to start every morning by enumerating through a list of grievances undermined a relationship. He systematically alienated the person doing an important job for him, apparently fully aware of that person's shortcomings-- i.e., the contractor getting defensive and not owning up to problems. Yet allowing the job to continuing through these periodic grievances was a tacit acknowledgement in the story that Ousterhout thought the work was decent enough.
Then, he uses hyperbolic metaphors to describe what he apparently sees as the only possible outcome if he were ever to slip up:
> Because if there's anything at all when you're giving in that you can feel bad about later, you're nuking the relationship - you're creating scar tissue with yourself, and that will build up to the point where you wreck the relationship.
(Emphasis mine.)
(And he ended up wrecking the relationship, regardless!)
Yikes! Who in the world could live up to this model?
I think a much more workable and reasonable approach would be to reflect on what fuels our own compulsions and shortcomings. To just make up an example-- if I were arguing a point with a contractor every morning in an attempt to convince the five year-old version of myself that I'm important enough to not be abandoned, I should be aware of the fact that I'm doing this.
Armed with that knowledge I'd be able to skip at least one morning and go treat myself to some waffles.
No static picture or dynamic model actually works for relationships.
No "alignment" or polishing is guaranteed to work.
What works is commitment: deciding to do what's necessary to make it work. Not promise, or practice, or experience, or a wealth of emotional intelligence. Commitment.
If commitment translates to "avoiding scar tissue", fine. If "avoiding scar tissue" reinforces your commitment, even better.
But the main thing for your own identity and your relationships is the commitment.
And to realize: if it's not working, you're not committed. (And most likely, you have good reason not to be, and you're stuck half-in, half-out of something you can't stand but need, or with traits that both help and hurt you. Welcome to the real world of beings, which is... complicated.)
An anecdote about contractors, since that's Osterhout's example:
In my book, The Big Bucks I used some of my actual history with Jerry, my contractor, as the basis for Walt. I say "some" since Jerry was already married, and he never did an Eichler in Palo Alto. Plus we started in 1992, whereas in the book it was 1983. Jerry did about ten jobs on my house after that. I'm not giving a plot spoiler on what happens with Walt /s
I just found his traits endearing. He was just like an engineer in so many ways, and he'd even vacuum up rooms he hadn't been in. But basically it was consideration and respect for each other. A lot of homeowners treat contractors like lower-class servants.
I gave him a copy of the book and he loved it: he finished it in two days, and then gave it to a contractor friend, who also loved it.
Different ideologies make relationships wear out, all the time.
Some manager does not care too much about documenting some area of the product, some IC does not care enough to dig into the code to understand it, etc. Week by week these people's trust on each other will be eroded by the disagreements that stem from what they expect from each other.
I may be a cynic, but I don't believe in fixing most if not all of these relationships. Life is too short, and the industry is huge.
I think I would replace scar tissue with known limitations of the other person. You can learn in a long term relationship you can trust a person in certain ways and not in others. You learn you will be fulfilled in certain ways but not others.
Long term relationships work out of accepting limitations.
There’s also plenty of examples of long term collaborations in business, so I’m not sure the underlying premise is solid.
I can always tell a relationship is about to be over when one person uses the phrase "You always x" or "You never x" or "Why do you always x" or "he/she is always x". It shows long brewing resentment toward the other person. Very funny if you're listening in, very scary if it's directed at you :)
Happens all the time in my marriage and still going strong. Sometimes you just accept the way the other person is, doesn’t mean you don’t point it out to them in moments of anger. But not necessarily a relationship-ending signal.
Oftentimes people enter relationships since they’re too afraid to be alone, and so are willing to close their eyes and tolerate something in a partner (be it a friend or a lover) they would not otherwise. Of course, there comes a time when the accumulated annoyances with these incompatibilities become too much, and so it falls apart.
Some people have a natural talent to turn friction into lively repair tissue and not senescent scars. Whereas others (myself included) have two modes: suffer into submission or avoid forever (basically the point of this article).
It's an important topic, I'm surprised (but happily so) to find out about this in a gist from a CS teacher.
The word he is looking for is resentment. It's well understood in relationship psychology. But it's good to have someone outside of that field be able to untangle these topics and word them in ways that resonate with different people.
Talking about feelings is all good and healthy assuming the problem to solve is technical and due to a misunderstanding. But what if the root cause of the build up of resentment is when one of the couple is changing and his/her feeling about the relationship is changing. Someone like me with disorganized attachment style can sense subtle changes quickly and react to it
I see a lot of models here so let me add another common one: Parallel monologues. Couples discuss and perhaps consent but not realign the criteria. Why would they? The can just ignore the small stuff. But the small stuff is the practice sessions. Once big decisions come aka buying a house, how to grow a kid, move to a different country, finance they are mot prepared
Some relationships are important, others aren't. It's good to have a framework for keeping the ones that matter lasting. If you treat every relationship you ever have as disposable, eventually you'll just find yourself alone.
I disagree with this. Relationships with Cluster-B people can become very dangerous. This can even include parent-child relationships, for example, if the parent has NPD (narcisstic personality disorder). At the end you really need to look out for yourself and your mental health first (hence not at any cost).
"but _some_ are holy and must be salvaged at any cost"
My relationship with my mother is part of that "some" for me. For others it may be someone else, but I didn't say everyone needs to salvage relationships with their parents at all, I shared my personal experience.
Hopefully everyone has a relationship worth saving. Find that and fight for it, because a good relationship is worth any cost, up to including your life (eg. relationship with your child).
I'm not an expert but does your way of thinking about this not map to Cluster-B personality types?
Suffice it to say, it freaked out. I wasn't used to people sharing their feelings with me. In normal relationships, by the time someone is telling you they feel <insert negative emotion>, a ton of scar tissue has already been built up, and they're at a breaking point. So I was conditioned to believing that sharing feelings = things have gotten really bad.
But early on she would calm me down, and say no, things aren't bad, she's fine, she's just into sharing feelings early and often to prevent the buildup of resentment. So I got used to it, and even started doing the same thing back.
Eventually our relationship ended, but I brought the practice to new relationships I entered afterwards. And, unsurprisingly, it kind of freaked people out! Almost nobody is used to it at first, just like I wasn't. It's incredibly easy to get defensive when someone lets you know that they felt bad in response to something you did. And it's usually vulnerable and risky to find the words to share feelings without arousing the other person's defenses.
Still, when I look back at how I've evolved as a person, I credit this "scar tissue" view of relationships with a lot of personal growth. It's given me a habit of confronting people problems head on, something past-me was unconsciously avoidant of. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and being willing to have uncomfortable conversations instead of kicking the can down the road is one of the hallmarks of adulthood and maturity.