Especially the first one! I have a really hard time knowing if somebody actually wants me to do something unless they are specific about the task and direct it towards me completely.
This is some adhd/autism solidarity Mood™️
Passive vs direct communication.
Some people are capable of having entire conversations in passive tone through subtext. I’m one of them (it’s not healthy), but this completely falls apart when you encounter someone only used to dealing with direct communication.
It’s one of the things ETD and I actually struggle with. I was conditioned never to make direct statements or requests of someone, because it was considered “rude”. The end result of this of course is that people don’t actually understand what you’re saying, and then spend a good portion of their lives feeling upset and hurt that no one seems to deem you worthy enough to listen to, and you just end up wiping the table clean yourself in frustration because why fucking bother to ask, no one listens.
Except you didn’t ask, did you. You made a statement. And some people won’t view that statement as anything other than a passing comment about the table needing to be cleaned.
(You could argue that on seeing the table needs cleaned, it should be done anyway, but that’s another topic for discussion.)
Life gets so much easier when you stop speaking in subtext, and actually say what you mean, both for those who require direct communication to navigate the rollercoaster that is social schema, but also for yourself in general.
For people who would struggle to move to a direct form of speech in one go, what do you think about a halfway house e.g. “That table needs to be cleared when you have a minute please.”
Oh it’s absolutely not something you can adjust to in one fell swoop. This is something I’ve been working on for years, but still slip into, particularly if I’m not certain of the people I’m talking to.
With that more directish kind of request, you still have to account for the fact that the person might think “it’s not an issue right at this second, so I’ll get to it in a while” rather than dealing with it as a direct request that needs dealt with sooner if not immediately.
If you’re fine with that, cool, but also don’t be surprised if you still get annoyed if the person doesn’t react immediately or how you want/expect them to. They’re not intentionally hurting/ignoring you (generally speaking, there is always an exception to any situation), though it’s easy to feel that way when you have a life time of passive communication and passive aggression to process.
But whatever you can do to make your meaning more direct and better understood is helpful and beneficial, and something you can keep working on, both for your benefit and the benefit of others :)
The one thing I object to: But what about people who are saying the first one to see if anybody takes them up on the offer? It could be you; it could be your father or brother. But if none of you do the thing, it will be me, who went shopping for the ingredients, and who cooked the thing, and who would really like somebody to roll for initiative, but who is not about to assign the task to anybody, because I’m not your manager and this is not a job. But it would be nice if I didn’t have to and if someone could offer. I might even help, but offering to do a good thing goes a long way towards lowering household labor on that one person who ends up doing most of it.
That gets into the really murky depths of emotional labor and social conditioning/expectation, which also stems, largely in part from teaching a large portion of the population to communicate passively.
For example, the women in my family all speak passively, and spend a large portion of time being angry that they are either ignored, or frustrated that they even have to be direct and tell people to do things at all, because why should they be the Only ones doing all the upkeep of a house which everyone resides in.
(Etd and I clash on this sometimes. Things which drive me insane don’t bother him, but he gets upset when I snap and try to do too much at once and eventually I throw in the rag (literally or otherwise) and complain that well if maybe he thought to do something in advance I wouldn’t have to do xyz and drive him crazy with zyx.)
Which is a worthy topic, but not what this post itself is trying to address. And I’d rather not derail from that :)
Well it’s as much that as it is, “why was I the only one who learned to do chores without being asked?” and it is relevant because it is competing needs. If one person needs direct instruction that they need to do the thing and the other needs someone to offer to clear the table/do the dishes and will thank whoever does afterwards, what do? Is there a halfway point between “I need someone else to offer to do the dishes” and “I need someone to tell me to do the dishes” because when eating is done, if one person cooks most of the time, particularly most workdays, this will generally come up every time the person cooks.
Hm yea, I see where you’re coming from with that. For me, and this is just personal mind you, I’m in a house where both of us have executive dysfunction, but we’re both coming from wildly different perspectives on expectation and communication.
In order to tackle what you’re describing, what we have done is sit down in situations where we are not currently engaged in the thing, and tried to establish set needs and goals. So things like “why do I always have to do x” has been turned into “there is a giant chart on the fridge which everyone is responsible for maintaining the list of. Everyone.”
We don’t designate specific chores and roles, and it has made the act of asking for help much more noticeable because it’s not happening all the time.
It doesn’t work 100% of the time, which is why we often have to revisit those conversations in constructive ways that don’t entail one (or all of us) being at the end of our rope. But maintenance and reestablishment are important in any relationship, whether it’s romantic, parental or otherwise.
A one off pep talk that leads nowhere, is not necessarily a failure to communicate, but rather a failure to continue communicating and being mindful of others. It’s an on going thing that acknowledges everyone, and hopefully meets their needs both as individuals and as a group.
Which of course is ridiculously difficult if no one else wants to participate. Story of the majority of my formative years right there. But it is possible provided you can get the other person on board.
And I’m no expert on any of this, just someone who has trouble dealing with how to communicate, and has spent a lot of time working to improve that for personal reasons. Merely sharing in the hope it might help someone else :)
I agree with most of this, but I’m balking at the idea that “stop doing that” is indirect or passive-aggressive. Can we agree that that one is context-dependent? (And that when “doing that” is, for example, “touching me,” it’s rarely context dependent and almost always a complete sentence? Some boundaries don’t need to be justified before they’re respected.)
I think I might have touched on this in another version of the thread where I am attempting to discuss this conversation on multiple threads at once (heh, send help) but there is always nuance and detail that will get left out in talking about these types of things, especially when trying to cover things more broadly as an attempt to introduce a new idea for the first time.
Many people who have been @ing me over this had no idea there was such a difference between passive communication (and passive does not automatically = to passive aggressive) vs direct communication in the first place, let alone that they had names. (I believe in some circles it also gets called “Guess vs Ask” communication) I certainly didn’t until I started looking into why I was always one word particular word or tone away from total meltdown. Finding out about it was revolutionary tbh.
And you are absolutely right, some boundaries do not need justification to be respected, things like “don’t touch me” should be respected outright, but—and this is a big and largely circumstantial but—there will still be some people who don’t understand whythat is and it’s nothing to do with passive aggression or being aggressive themselves.
My brother, due to some learning difficulties and a lot of other issues, has no concept of boundaries, excepting his own. If he does not wish to be touched, he will let you know, and loudly. If I don’t want to be touched, but he wants to touch me, me simply saying “don’t touch me” doesn’t work.
It used to frustrate the absolute living hell out of me as a kid (still does somewhat as an adult) and eventually one day he had a complete meltdown, and asked me why I didn’t love him. This was not manipulative on his part, it was not the same as my shitty ex saying “if you love me you’ll do X”, this was someone who genuinely could not understand the social schema that was in place, and thought that every time I said “don’t do x” I was not just setting boundaries, but also rejecting him outright.
Once I explained to him “hey, you know when someone doing X makes you uncomfortable? well what you are doing makes me feel the same way, it’s not because I don’t love you, I just need you to express it in another way”.
I think he was about…15 at the time, and it was the first time anyone had every actually explained why not to do something in terms of their own comfort that he could relate to. And it drastically changed that aspect of our relationship, because suddenly he had a reference he otherwise did not have. (He’s still a little shit but w/e I love him lol)
And it’s something I’ve encountered as an adult too, though not quite so often or to that same extreme extent, and it makes me mindful of being a little more open.
That said, there will be people who you absolutely do not need to justify yourself to. There are some people who do things just to get a reaction or to rile you or hurt you, and fuck those people. They are not worthy of your time.
But sometimes a little comment like “please don’t touch me, it makes me uncomfortable” can be a lot more beneficial in the long term toward helping others to understand you, if of course, they are interested in understanding you. If they ask why, you can either choose to explain or not, that’s up to you. Personally, I choose to explain a little to some people, usually after I’ve taken a moment to take stock of the situation, and assess what might actually be going on, vs what my knee-jerk reaction would be. It really depends on the individual, and me being willing to put as much effort into the interaction, as I hope to get.
And sometimes you don’t have the spoons/mental capacity to deal with that, and that’s fine too. No one is attempting to throw guilt at anyone over not being 100% on their communication game 100% of the time, we’re all just human at the end of the day, and there’s no way I, or anyone else can cover every single aspect of such a nuanced thing while it evolves in real time through a string of reblogs.
There will always be exceptions in this kind of thing, which is why open communication is so danged important from the start, whether it’s a flat out “no” or a “no, and here’s why”.
This here is me homunculus flesh puppet that me soul will transfer to in
the event of me death. It’s got no soul insider it right now, so we
keep it in a constant state a euphoria ter keep it from massacrin’ me
customers.
no1 cares if ur vegan or a vegetarian what we’re annoyed with is that you insist that ur better than us and that we’re satan or something because we eat meat omfg
You’re supporting an industry that condones the murder and abuse of billions of lives. You’re not Satan, you’re God. Satan kills far fewer people.
