It sounds like you did a good job of handling the situation. Good work!
I think that when giving advice to others in emotional situations, it’s often a good idea to spend a while letting the other person talk about how and why they’re frustrated, and ask at least a couple clarifying questions as they speak, to help them feel better. It’s best to start giving advice only after the other party has spent a while talking. The fact that your friend acknowledged that he was talking at you, rather than with you, is a good sign that you let him talk enough before starting to offer advice.
So, both the part of the conversation you focused on in your post, and the part of the conversation that came before (where you let your friend explain his feelings) were very important.
Thanks. IAWYC, and would even make some additional claims.
I think that you should listen because it’s the only way for your brains to become entangled. I think one problem with people trying to play therapist is an inability to consider that an outburst is warranted. If you started out trying to give advice, you might never find out that you never need to give any, that they really are self-regulating affect precisely as they should be.
And to elaborate on what you say about giving them the impression that you’re listening, I think this fits well into my more general view of how rational persuasion works. It is true that you probably will have done something that looks like listening if you succeed at persuasion, but too often this is interpreted as, “If I do whatever I think ‘listening’ is, then I will succeed at persuasion.” Ultimately, like other forms of persuasion, rational persuasion is a series of stimuli that you produce in order to sequentially alter someone’s attentional biases in precise ways. To describe the effect of what you describe as ‘listening’, when my friend entered the room, he felt justified in his anger and considered it doubtful that others could provide arguments that would lead him to believe otherwise. You could call this low ‘trust of others’ and high ‘self-trust’. Eventually, I had a lot more information about his mental and emotional state, and initially demonstrated, on my part, low ‘self-trust’, but after some time, I still wasn’t explicitly endorsing his reaction. Because of this, his self-trust lowered and his trust of others rose, and my self-trust rose and my trust of others lowered. Another example is pointing out contradictions caused by fast thinking, like saying that there were two different factors that were responsible for a majority of his negative affect, or that he didn’t want to reflect on himself, or that he didn’t doubt himself at all. I took him from being focused on a comb, and a low-fidelity model of how other people do inconsiderate things, and how angry he was, and eventually took him to a place where he focused on how people actually think, and what the actual consequences of not having a comb were, and the cost of replacing it, and how other people judged the proportionality of his reaction from the outside.
So, I think ‘not listening’ is sort of the equivalent of trying to secretly draw someone’s attention towards a certain direction, and trying to do this by snapping your fingers out of their hearing range. If you don’t ‘listen’ then you will never be close enough to their current attentional framing to gradually put them in the frame that you want them to be in, where you can just explain things as you understand them in your terms and be done with the whole thing. The concept of inferential distance is also somewhat related to this.
It sounds like you did a good job of handling the situation. Good work!
I think that when giving advice to others in emotional situations, it’s often a good idea to spend a while letting the other person talk about how and why they’re frustrated, and ask at least a couple clarifying questions as they speak, to help them feel better. It’s best to start giving advice only after the other party has spent a while talking. The fact that your friend acknowledged that he was talking at you, rather than with you, is a good sign that you let him talk enough before starting to offer advice.
So, both the part of the conversation you focused on in your post, and the part of the conversation that came before (where you let your friend explain his feelings) were very important.
Thanks. IAWYC, and would even make some additional claims.
I think that you should listen because it’s the only way for your brains to become entangled. I think one problem with people trying to play therapist is an inability to consider that an outburst is warranted. If you started out trying to give advice, you might never find out that you never need to give any, that they really are self-regulating affect precisely as they should be.
And to elaborate on what you say about giving them the impression that you’re listening, I think this fits well into my more general view of how rational persuasion works. It is true that you probably will have done something that looks like listening if you succeed at persuasion, but too often this is interpreted as, “If I do whatever I think ‘listening’ is, then I will succeed at persuasion.” Ultimately, like other forms of persuasion, rational persuasion is a series of stimuli that you produce in order to sequentially alter someone’s attentional biases in precise ways. To describe the effect of what you describe as ‘listening’, when my friend entered the room, he felt justified in his anger and considered it doubtful that others could provide arguments that would lead him to believe otherwise. You could call this low ‘trust of others’ and high ‘self-trust’. Eventually, I had a lot more information about his mental and emotional state, and initially demonstrated, on my part, low ‘self-trust’, but after some time, I still wasn’t explicitly endorsing his reaction. Because of this, his self-trust lowered and his trust of others rose, and my self-trust rose and my trust of others lowered. Another example is pointing out contradictions caused by fast thinking, like saying that there were two different factors that were responsible for a majority of his negative affect, or that he didn’t want to reflect on himself, or that he didn’t doubt himself at all. I took him from being focused on a comb, and a low-fidelity model of how other people do inconsiderate things, and how angry he was, and eventually took him to a place where he focused on how people actually think, and what the actual consequences of not having a comb were, and the cost of replacing it, and how other people judged the proportionality of his reaction from the outside.
So, I think ‘not listening’ is sort of the equivalent of trying to secretly draw someone’s attention towards a certain direction, and trying to do this by snapping your fingers out of their hearing range. If you don’t ‘listen’ then you will never be close enough to their current attentional framing to gradually put them in the frame that you want them to be in, where you can just explain things as you understand them in your terms and be done with the whole thing. The concept of inferential distance is also somewhat related to this.