Having a traumatic childhood means you cannot talk even objectively about your basic foundational experiences without it being “venting”, even if you’re not actually venting. You just straight up have a huge chunk of your life you can’t talk about, full stop, without it being trauma dumping.
And it not being socially acceptable to talk about your own childhood is super alienating. Sometimes people want to know why, and any answer you can give them is going to be off putting.
It’s to the point I get irritated when something I said is framed as venting when I’m literally just talking about my life experiences, doing my best to keep emotion out of it.
when I was in high school, I overheard two older students talking about a friend of theirs.
One of them said something like, “it doesn’t bother me that [Friend] was in residential mental health treatment, I just wish they wouldn’t talk about it ALL the time”.
The other replied, “Well, that was all of last year for them. So when they say ‘when I was in treatment,’ it’s like when you say 'last year’.”
I try to remember that any time someone says something that sounds Shocking to me. sometimes one person’s scary special crisis is another person’s last year.
You can see the video here where an asshole with a “My pronouns are find/Jesus” shirt asks if this guy supports LGBTQ rights or economic stability, and this king up here^ just keeps repeating, “Why can’t you have both? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I don’t have to pick one. I refuse the question.” Conservatives have absolutely nothing but whataboutism, and when people don’t play their game, they have no comeback. Good on this guy for refusing to go along with the bullshit question
I think people are just joking around, but the thing is that a lot of people will fall into the right’s “DEBATE ME BRO” trap and wind up in heated arguments, and people lose sight that sometimes it really is a lot more effective at shutting down their arguments to just not engage at all
.. I feel like another big reason this is a thing/joke/question at all is the implication that this guy doesn’t “”“look like”“” someone who would support queer rights or refuse to debate conservatives and like
We can agree that’s a shitty conclusion to leap to from appearances, right? Yeah? 😕
I mean, I just loved this guy absolutely refusing to entertain the bullshit question, and I would’ve gotten a kick out of this video regardless of his appearance because of how casual and amused he was about the whole thing. One of the people in the screenshots above said this:
So I don’t think everyone was making fun of his appearance
One of the classes psych nurses take while prepping for the art of conversation therapy deals in some detail with how to ensure that conversation is useful by (if necessary) demonstrating to the person you’re conversing with that some tactics are inherently invalid and will not be supported.
The splendidly noncooperative gent up there is demonstrating one such technique. One of our instructors said to us, “One weapon that toxically argumentative people like to use on you—usually to prevent any really fruitful conversation—is based in the idea that each time you refuse to accept their statement or argument, you have to do it in different words, or for different reasons. Who made that up? You don’t have to.”
I remember a lot of us in that class looking at each in shocked realization, as none of us had ever really taken that particular tactic apart before. “It’s perfectly legit to just give such a person the same answer over and over again,” our instructor said. “Or to flatly refuse their gambit without giving a reason. Their tactic is based around trying to force you to give them fresh material by which they can get their hooks into you—prove you wrong, or suck you in. But nothing says you have to give them what they want. So don’t. Also, just saying the same thing over and over will often get them to reveal where they’re vulnerable.”
…This approach is also part of some assertiveness-training courses. I seem to remember having run across it in Manuel Smith’s When I Say No, I Feel Guilty, which is about as close as you can get to an AT course in a single book. …There I think it’s referred to as “assertive persistence”, and there’s a specific technique called Broken Record that’s almost too enjoyable once you have an excuse to get into it with somebody. :)
ETA for @weareallfromearth : Just to clarify— My instructor in the above wasn’t talking specifically about psychiatric clients in the above class. She was talking about everybody. The “How You’re Supposed To Argue” rules are societally widespread, and only rarely dissected.
Naturally, in psych practice, the understanding is that a professional is going to give their clients all the room necessary to argue with them fruitfully about things—most especially including what’s going on in their heads. However, you also need to have some approach to fall back on when a client’s whole purpose is to keep you at a distance and never allow you to engage, when the entire purpose of engagement in the first place is to help them start learning how to successfully deal with what’s going on with them. Usually my clients would insist that that’s what they were in the clinic for. If they’re derailing that process, they need at the very least to be aware of it, so that together we can find some approach that works better, and switch to that.
I can confirm that in situations where someone refuses to accept or acknowledge your answer (or question!), simply repeating it can be extremely effective as a way to spotlight the conversational dodge. In addition to the “broken record” name, you will also sometimes see people referring to the “grey rock” technique for dealing with unreasonable people: repeating the same thing over and over again in as boring a tone as possible so the unreasonable person gets bored or frustrated and leaves.
For added aggression, repeat your words in precisely the same tone as the first utterance. I prefer cheerful firmness.
Helpful note about a different but related situation: if you are in a heated conversation with someone who normally treats you with respect but keeps repeating the same concept in different ways, consider the possibility that they don’t think a particular point has been heard and are repeating because they think you don’t understand. This is a pattern I often see from people who aren’t necessarily using a playbook but who find themselves upset for reasons they cannot articulate. If you want to bypass that, you can directly say “what do you think I’m not understanding?” and then clarify that you either disagree with the premises or the values of the statement, or were understanding something different.
Also, pffffft, queer rights or economic prosperity? That’s one hell of a false dichotomy. Silly one, too, because being respectful to different kinds of people is literally free. Look at the long haired gentleman smiling and performing amusement rather than the distress or hostility that Curly there is clearly expecting. Watch how distressed that makes Curly and how he gets more dismayed the more he realizes that Ponytail is not going to buy into his framework.
Sometimes calm amusement is the most powerful attitude to take in a confrontation because it sends a strong signal of confidence. Curly’s whole deal rests on startling and forcing people into stances they aren’t entirely comfortable with. Ponytail’s amusement and calm as he settles into his response directly communicates that this won’t be happening, and Curly didn’t prepare a playbook to that. You can really humiliate these people if you do it right, without necessarily upsetting or frightening someone who is trying to converse in good faith.
Increase your tolerance slowly. Five people is a large group when you haven’t talked to groups at all, then ten or twenty. Pretty soon you can talk to hundreds of people without terror, then thousands. It’s a matter of gradients and time.
Also I gotta say (as someone who doesn’t like public speaking), while it’s definitely better to start with small groups like mr Gaiman said, it can be easier talking to larger groups than small groups. It feels much less personal.
Also let me tell you about a recent experience. I gave a presentation to a couple of colleagues and I was super nervous. It was my first presentation to these people and I was intimidated by my colleagues who were so much more experienced and seemed comfortable with public speaking. I hate public speaking and I felt like it was extremely obvious that I was having a bad time. I constantly felt out of breath, I forgot to mention one of my most important points which I then had to recover several slides later making the whole thing feel messy. When I finished I wanted to go home and cry. Then half an hour later someone gave me a compliment on how well it all went. Then later another one, then another one. I initially thought they were just being nice but they were absolutely sincere. Next day I had a mutual feedback session with someone, and I mentioned that I really dislike public speaking. They were really surprised because the presentation went so smooth and I seemed like I was having fun?? They honestly couldn’t tell.
My point is that 1. not everyone you see speaking confidently is actually that confident. You’re not an aberration for having a bad time with it. and 2. literally fake it until you make it. All the things you notice about yourself when speaking really really aren’t that obvious to everyone else watching. If you’re confident that you know what you’re talking about, you’re gonna do great.
I remember once walking out onto a stage in front of an empty stadium that would hold 80,000 people that evening and being hit by waves of stage fright. I was amazed that my friends in the band who would be playing there were unphased by it. I talked one of them about stage fright and he told me he never felt stage fright.
His fiancee said “What about when you had to play Happy Birthday on an acoustic guitar at Charlie’s nursery school a few weeks ago,” and he went pale and admitted that that had been terrifying.
When you’re unsuccessfully looking for something and start gradually increasing your It Could Be There range. Like yeah sure maybe the rice cooker pot is in the freezer, idk
Today is a big day on the Spanish internet. Valentine’s day in Spanish is “día de San Valentín”, which sounds almost the same as “Sam va lentín”, which is how, in some parts of Spain , you would say “Sam goes slowly”.
Hence, since a few years ago, every February 14th, the Spanish internet is full of “wait for me mr. Frodo” style memes. One of our holiest days of the year.
oh and the post would probably make more sense if I actually shared any meme right?
You can’t even picture how many variations of the meme people post today. It’s all very silly and I love it.
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