So I think I originally had “leave” and I changed it to “disengage” to try to encompass situations where you can’t physically leave and I was referring to checking out mentally from the conversation. I’m not sure how many situations this covers (work?), but you could keep repeating “I’m not going to talk about this anymore,” and force your brain to space out. A handy epistemic perspective here says to think of what they’re saying as “meaningless chunks of wordmeat,” which I’ve personally found to be helpful.
As someone that doesn’t get offended in the typical way, I had a huge breakthrough when I realized that there exist people that don’t mean what they say. (Whaaa?!) From what it looks like to me, some people get mad and then grasp at the closest words in their cache to verbalize their madness feelings and then spout them out at other people. But once they’ve done that, their madness feelings go away! So they can’t really model them anymore and so they don’t even remember what they said, just that they yelled at you. So what would happen to me is that they’d apologize for yelling at me, and I’d say “We have to talk about that thing you accused me of because I have this detailed argument about why it’s wrong,” and they’d be like “I said that? Whatever, I’m sorry.” Even when there are chat logs! (Whaa?!)
So now I’ve gotten better at recognizing that in people, and once I can sorta tell that they’ve checked out, then I can expect to get no closure on the event by continuing to listen to more of what they’re saying because they don’t mean it and won’t remember most of it anyway.
Otherwise, if they’re malevolently trying to hurt you in a systematic way, I think it helps to distinguish between what hurts more: is it the fact that they’re trying to hurt you at all or is it the method by which they go about it? Because if it’s the latter, then you could feed them ammunition that makes them model you wrong. Tell them you really care about stuff that you actually don’t care about?
I had a huge breakthrough when I realized that there exist people that don’t mean what they say.
I know exactly what you mean, and can add a point: The people who don’t mean what they say assume that you don’t mean it, either. It is a personal policy of mine to say exactly what I mean, and only what I mean, whenever possible. Yet I routinely run into people who will take something I said, extrapolate or delete from it until it resembles what they “thought I meant,” and then answer that. Then judge me on it.
Needless to say, the mismatch is both harmful to communication and incredibly frustrating. I have a suspicion they’re making heuristic guesses that are acceptably correct when dealing with other verbally-inaccurate people, but fail when dealing with someone going out of their way to be precise.
I admit I don’t really have evidence for that hypothesis.
When I’m feeling snarky, I will sometimes respond to this sort of thing with some variant of “That response only makes sense to me if I assume what I actually said was something more like X. Is that what you heard?” The sorts of people who skew my output on input frequently respond to that in entertaining ways.
I’ve occasionally done that in text, now that you mention it. My in-person verbal comprehension has such a high latency that I can’t really do it there. (by the time I’ve worked it out the conversation has moved on) Pre-caching expected misinterpretations may help, if I can anticipate them accurately enough.
The people who don’t mean what they say assume that you don’t mean it, either.
When it isn’t incredibly frustrating like you described, this works to my advantage because I generally mean it whenever I say something awful. And they assume I was just venting or whatever. =P
So I think I originally had “leave” and I changed it to “disengage” to try to encompass situations where you can’t physically leave and I was referring to checking out mentally from the conversation. I’m not sure how many situations this covers (work?), but you could keep repeating “I’m not going to talk about this anymore,” and force your brain to space out. A handy epistemic perspective here says to think of what they’re saying as “meaningless chunks of wordmeat,” which I’ve personally found to be helpful.
As someone that doesn’t get offended in the typical way, I had a huge breakthrough when I realized that there exist people that don’t mean what they say. (Whaaa?!) From what it looks like to me, some people get mad and then grasp at the closest words in their cache to verbalize their madness feelings and then spout them out at other people. But once they’ve done that, their madness feelings go away! So they can’t really model them anymore and so they don’t even remember what they said, just that they yelled at you. So what would happen to me is that they’d apologize for yelling at me, and I’d say “We have to talk about that thing you accused me of because I have this detailed argument about why it’s wrong,” and they’d be like “I said that? Whatever, I’m sorry.” Even when there are chat logs! (Whaa?!)
So now I’ve gotten better at recognizing that in people, and once I can sorta tell that they’ve checked out, then I can expect to get no closure on the event by continuing to listen to more of what they’re saying because they don’t mean it and won’t remember most of it anyway.
Otherwise, if they’re malevolently trying to hurt you in a systematic way, I think it helps to distinguish between what hurts more: is it the fact that they’re trying to hurt you at all or is it the method by which they go about it? Because if it’s the latter, then you could feed them ammunition that makes them model you wrong. Tell them you really care about stuff that you actually don’t care about?
I know exactly what you mean, and can add a point: The people who don’t mean what they say assume that you don’t mean it, either. It is a personal policy of mine to say exactly what I mean, and only what I mean, whenever possible. Yet I routinely run into people who will take something I said, extrapolate or delete from it until it resembles what they “thought I meant,” and then answer that. Then judge me on it.
Needless to say, the mismatch is both harmful to communication and incredibly frustrating. I have a suspicion they’re making heuristic guesses that are acceptably correct when dealing with other verbally-inaccurate people, but fail when dealing with someone going out of their way to be precise.
I admit I don’t really have evidence for that hypothesis.
When I’m feeling snarky, I will sometimes respond to this sort of thing with some variant of “That response only makes sense to me if I assume what I actually said was something more like X. Is that what you heard?” The sorts of people who skew my output on input frequently respond to that in entertaining ways.
I’ve occasionally done that in text, now that you mention it. My in-person verbal comprehension has such a high latency that I can’t really do it there. (by the time I’ve worked it out the conversation has moved on) Pre-caching expected misinterpretations may help, if I can anticipate them accurately enough.
When it isn’t incredibly frustrating like you described, this works to my advantage because I generally mean it whenever I say something awful. And they assume I was just venting or whatever. =P
I am reminded of the following exchange between two housemates in my youth:
X (to Y): “Don’t take this the wrong way, but: fuck you.”
Y: (laughs)
X: “No, y’see, you’re taking it the wrong way.”