Yesterday I published hostility is a sign of too-closeness, which featured my response to a friend from my former community, about his desires for the logistics and culture of a co-living house he was creating. In that post, I talked about how blame can be downstream of people pretending they are a good fit for living together (or working together, or whatever) when they actually have some real conflict or incompatibility that they’re trying to convince themselves they have to put up with, but on some level they know they don’t have to… which turns to hostility.
In this post, I continue my response, reflecting on a more specific phenomenon central to the puzzle of living together: how do you talk about the dishes? …and have it work out. And not just the dishes but the dozens of other places where your patterns of life will need to interface smoothly for living together to feel good. Even for people who are very compatible, there will still be points of tension and friction, and you’ll need to figure out how to talk about those.
So. One of my friend’s desires for the shared purpose / culture of the space was:
impacts can be shared freely, and can be received as impacts rather than hearing impacts as being judgement or blame
And below is my response:
First of all I want to name how vital this is for sane living—how crazymaking it is to be living with someone and unable to acknowledge simple impacts without it either turning into “so you hate me” or getting rounded to “nbd whatever”. And largely we all know this in the extended upstart scene, but since I’m a bit of an apostate these days it feels worth making explicit that YES, THIS MATTERS, and I see that it matters, and am speaking from there.
So then given that this bullet as described is clearly ideal, how do you handle situations where that isn’t working? What does the pathway look like to get from not-flowing to flowing? Merely intending this doesn’t necessarily make it happen.
It seems to me that the situations where blame comes up can be described in a few different ways, both as distinct situations and as distinct understandings/framings of those situations, where the language used to understand them has an effect.
So: a few ways impacts can be received:
Breaking these down a bit, with their implications:
This is the easeful one: with no sense of blame or shame showing up anywhere whatsoever. The person hearing it knows why the person saying it is saying it, and feels no need to cringe or apologize but simply says “oh, oof, thanks for letting me know, I’ll factor that in next time” or whatever, and the person sharing the impact feels received. This is ideal! Or maybe it’s a bigger deal than that and there is something more like a (post-shame) apology: “wow, you were counting on me in a way I had encouraged you to do, and then I totally let you down there. I bet that sucked [in this way]? …yeah, ouch.” and the dialogue continues until both parties feel clarity and reconciliation, and a sense of how to avoid this problem in the future.
The person hearing the impact gets triggered about some self-blame/shame that they have about the situation, basically independently of what the impact-sharer intends or how they spoke or whatever. The mere indication/awareness of the impact generates stress in the person’s system, much like would have happened if they were on their own and remembered doing something that caused them problems. So it’s not so much that they feel shamed by the other person, but they are shaming themselves.
Insofar as they’re aware that this is happening for them, this situation does result in it being hard for the feedback to land, but there can still be a kind of meta-level samesidedness where the person can be like “wow I’m super triggered about this” or whatever. And then the other person can respond with compassion or give them space or whatever.
Insofar as they’re not aware, but more caught up in the loops, they might offer a shameful apology as a way to try to discharge their pain, or they might offer defensiveness as a way to try to discount the source of the pain. In either case, my current take is that basically once again this will go best if the impact-sharer responds with active compassion—to embrace the pain and say “ow, it sounds like it really hurts for you to try to be with this.” Because the perception of shame here really isn’t about the feedback-sharer, so it’s actually not that relevant to say eg “I don’t want you to feel bad”. That’s missing the point! This person has their own reasons, due to their compost/trauma from earlier in life, to think that the mere reality of the impact means they should apply extra pain in order to learn, and while from the outside you can tell that’s a distraction, pointing that out tends to cause further extra pain, whereas loving the pain that’s present tends to allow for healing of the shame.
The person receiving the impact does not trust that the impact-sharer is not attempting to shame/blame/judge/punish in their sharing. Note that this is a separate question from whether the impact-sharer thinks “I’m not trying to judge/blame/shame you”. If the person doesn’t trust they’re not being shamed, they don’t trust that! And they need to guard accordingly.
In some cases, the recipient may themselves nonetheless be able to hold internal clarity that keeps them from even being tempted to apply extra pain to their situation.
Ideally, the recipient can still take in the impact information that the person is trying to share, and reflect it back to that person in such a way that that person feels heard. Perhaps, sometimes, if the person really is trying to blame/shame/judge then the person might not feel heard until they get an admission of guilt or visible shame, but in my experience this is actually fairly rare not just with liminauts but even with ordinary people who’ve never heard of this whole “new cultural platform” or whatever. If they feel their perspective has been thoroughly taken on all levels that aren’t about blame or whatever, then they tend to relax the sense of blame and become open to dialogue and quite able to listen. By contrast, whether the context is a mindset learning community or not, attempting to defuse someone’s apparent judgment before helping them feel heard can sometimes (in my experience) result in the content of their concern getting compartmentalized away and not able to be properly revealed.
At this point, there might be a conversation to have about the impact of the blaming/judging. This will tend to go well if at least one of the people involved can differentiate their own perspective from the other person’s, and thus say something like “I don’t trust you’re not judging“, not an objective claim of “you’re judging”. If they can’t, it might be more of a mess, especially if the other person’s sense of themselves is that they’re not judging. “You’re judging”/”no I’m not” is not gonna work. But “I don’t trust you’re not judging”/”my sense is that I’m not judging, but I respect that you can’t trust that” is a viable starting point. And of course this is another instance of impact sharing, so any of these possibilities I’ve written about here may again apply afresh: maybe the person receives the “you’re judging” as judgment; maybe they don’t, but the idea that they might be judging is itself something they feel shame about. Etc.
In other cases, the recipient might be subject to the judgment they’re perceiving, and find themselves either:
…and again, the impact-revealer here has the opportunity to help the other person hold the pain/shame that’s arising. Sometimes merely doing this will make it clear that they are not in fact judging (assuming they aren’t). Other times perhaps not.
But if the recipient can’t even engage with the impact-sharer trying to be kind here because of the distrust about the judgment, you might have to deal with that first. And the starting point here is respecting that the impact-receiver doesn’t trust that the other isn’t judging them. To allow that to be the case, without necessarily needing to doubt one’s own intention, as the foundation of dialogue. To recognize that to some extent their guardedness is their best attempt at defending themselves from what they perceive as a psychic attack, and is thus appropriate even though frustrating to the clarity of communication. And thus to honour that guardedness.
I’ve attempted to highlight various moves that each party might have available to make to handle situations where there isn’t able to be easeful natural fluid obvious samesidedness. Something key to note about this off-the-cuff writeup is that even if for a given scenario I only wrote a move for one of the roles, doesn’t mean the other person doesn’t also have a move. There’s always a move. That’s part of what gets outside the powerlessness/victimhood. As I navigate the world, it’s impossible to be simply subject to someone else’s “being stuck in blame” or whatever.
There’s always a move.
See Dream Mashups for more on how to get out of being stuck in someone else’s projection.
Constantly consciously expanding the boundaries of thoughtspace and actionspace. Creator of Intend, a system for improvisationally & creatively staying in touch with what's most important to you, and taking action towards it.
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