Brains and conversations

[valis2]

So I've been brooding rather intensely for a few days, and it's brought some focus about my interpersonal conversational skills. Or rather, lack thereof.

I don't think I have ever had a clearer picture of just how much effort it takes for me to converse with people. Depending on who I'm having the conversation with, I engage layers, sometimes multiple layers, of modifiers in my brain to prevent the wrong thing from being said.

By layers I refer to processes meant to take certain things about my conversational partners into account. You could also term them as "filters," but I'm not certain that the word correctly conveys the meaning. I once took a quiz on LJ that claimed my conversational style was called "the Changeling." It was an incredibly accurate result. I am a different person with different people. With bookwench2096 I am sarcastic and absolutely raunchy. With my friends in WI I am less sarcastic and absolutely not raunchy at all.

A few examples of layers:


• Age. Am I speaking to someone young, or old? If so, I'll temper my conversation accordingly. I won't bother with references that either is not likely to get.


• Position. Is this person somehow my superior, or could impact my job or do they know one of my bosses? This layer is so horribly intense that sometimes I end up stammering like an idiot.


• OMG THEY ARE SO COOL. This is another layer that just kills me. It's particularly horrible at a con, for example, when I'm talking to someone really amazing like alchemia, someone I really admire, someone who is super talented. Sometimes I manage to get out something that resembles speech; most of the time I just manage to say something really stupid.


• Customer. Is this person thinking about buying something from me now, or maybe in the future? Another tough layer. I have to weed out anything that might possibly offend.


• Friend of a friend. I'm out to lunch with my sister, let's say, and her boyfriend's best friend. I have to somehow not embarrass both myself, and my sister. A unique kind of pressure.


• I want to say something clever now. Oh, this is the worst, this is the one that just destroys me. It means that I just about completely stop processing just so that I can desperately think of something clever to say. And sadly enough, if I weren't trying to think of something clever, I probably would have thought of something clever.


• Am I interrupting too much? Am I doing something weird with my hands? Am I smiling strangely? Internal questions often push me right over the edge and stop processing dead in its tracks. Especially when I immediately start obsessing over the last hundred conversations and whether I've interrupted too much or done something weird with my hands.

These layers engage to form a barrier to prevent me from hurting someone else's feelings, and they are based upon the person. The more layers that are engaged, the more I start thinking about them, and the more I have to put in intense effort to figure out what I can say, and the less I am actually able to get out that's intelligent and relevant.

So where did these layers come from? Well, my father is definitely where I eventually learned a lot of logic and analysis from. I am not logical by nature, you see. My "logic" is actually just a huge repository of remembered situations (or even remembered stories by other people). If something occurs, I look through my logic bag, and try to see if anything similar has happened to me, or if I've ever heard a story like that. Based on that, I'm sometimes able to formulate the best course. This "logic" also fuels the layers, in a way. I am very thoughtless in my conversations, and my father would often take me aside later and explain which things I'd said that were "wrong" and might have hurt the other person's feelings.

My mother, for example, likes to use self-deprecation to make other people feel better. "Oh, I can't draw at all! I'm the worst artist in the world! I can't even draw a smiley face!" she'll say. I picked this trait up early, and used it quite a bit. However, it backfires, and often. People get really sick of hearing you put yourself down (an ex-fiancée once went into a rage about it), and the worst is when you insult yourself in some way and the other person gets insulted by it indirectly. For example, one time I heard my mother talking about how fat she was and she went on and on about it, and her best friend just sat there with an uncomfortable look on her face, and then I suddenly realized that her best friend outweighs her by at least a hundred pounds. So this is something I've worked very hard to stamp out of my speech. I've also tried to get rid of another thing I picked up from my mother, which is the tendency to say, "I like it," and "oh, I hate that" about absolutely everything that anyone brings up. Hey, it's no problem to say it occasionally, but when you are just making every conversation a litany of your likes and dislikes, you are not really talking to someone. Especially if you're not explaining why you like it or don't like it. Especially if you're simply interrupting throughout the whole thing to say whether you like it or not. I think about conversations I had in my early twenties and I just cringe.

The emphasis on "right" and "wrong" words can be really difficult to get around. I often tailspin into paranoia, certain that someone is avoiding me because of something I've said, or implied, or that I wasn't interesting enough. This is exacerbated by society, in some ways. We are expected to not point out stupidity or insults in our conversations; most people will simply "be polite" and continue talking, and then later laugh about the gaffes to other people. I've done it myself. The problem with this is that I have to then rely on my faulty logic system and my elaborate layers system to prevent these gaffes, and sometimes it's just not possible. And because no one will tell you when you've really made a gaffe, I am left to imagine gaffes where there are none.

Of course, when I am certain about a real gaffe, it makes me cringe in a way that is pretty extreme, and I can beat myself up like nobody's business about it. I go back over old conversations, and I pull out flaws and magnify the stupid things I've said until I cannot understand why anyone would want to be friends with me, much less even talk to me. It's rather extreme, and usually I'm able to take a deep breath and slip off to the side of it. Sometimes, though, I sit and stew for a day or two, and this entry is the result of that. Just trying to understand the issues involved with this is helpful.

For me, online communication is a huge relief in some ways, and a new kind of fail in others. The layers are a little confused, especially at first, by this situation; I have no visual cues to set the proper layers in place, for example. I have no idea if I'm talking to rich, poor, young, old, the Pope, whatever. But I have the advantage of having time to think things through before I post them. I can check my words for double meanings that I didn't notice when I first thought of them. This eliminates a bunch of gaffes. Honestly, I'm terrible at subtext most of the time. The unsaid and unseen can flummox me. Nonverbal cues are not as obvious to me as they are to most, though I do still see them sometimes. So being online and having a little extra time, and not having the layers all pressing down at once screaming "DO NOT OFFEND HER! SAY SOMETHING CLEVER NOW NOW NOW!" is helpful, but then again, I still have to work very hard to avoid saying the Wrong Thing.

Please don't look at this as "Now I have to reassure Valis that she is not an evil bitch from another galaxy and that I like her" situation. I'm serious. This is me trying to know myself, and sharing the process, and hoping to hear of your own conversational styles and experiences.

Comments

[seraphina_snape]

Yeah, most people do it automatically. I don't consciously determine what approach to use when talking to different people, I do that without thinking about it. Like a learned skript that you rattle off with people you've just met or people you know but aren't really close to, more freestyle with family and friends.

~ sera

[valis2.livejournal.com]

And when I have to deal with lots of people I don't know, I tend to put together a "safe subject of the day," something funny and innocuous that happened that I can tell if it seems like the customer is the chatty sort. But I'm still always worried in the back of my skull that it might offend, lol!