Over the last few weeks a number of interactions with other people have triggered a number of things that resulted in me coming back to a subject that I have explored in many posts within this blog under the Friends tag. It has also widened my view of this subject thereby proving the truth in the tagline from Albert Einstein that appears in this blog.
The reality is that whilst what I wrote about a year ago about friendships in this technological age certainly still holds true, what perhaps was missing was a realisation that (as is the case with so many things in this world) it is necessary to broaden the consideration to include the way that we each interact with others – and so often that is driven not just by what we as individuals consider the way to do it, but also our (possibly quite wrong) expectations of the thoughts and feelings of the other person.
One reason why these expectations are tricky to deal with is the simple fact that it is human nature to assume that one’s own worldview is correct – for many people it is hard to “see through someone else’s eyes”. Quite a few years ago I wrote about how you don’t know me. Like much of my writing here there is much that can be added on the subject of knowing each other – but the central thing is that I would posit that there is no pair of people who know absolutely everything about each other.
We therefore put all these rules in place when it comes to communicating – many of which are manipulative to some extent, many of which perhaps cause more trouble than expected.
My leukaemia has over the years sent me to many websites looking for information and one in particular I find extremely helpful. It is a forum where you can post questions about the disease, point people to good websites, get updates on particular treatments and – perhaps most importantly get real people who have gone through the same as you are going through to describe what its all about.
A question that comes up often is “when should I tell people about my diagnosis” (and the related one “who should I tell). The answers that come back are certainly not a collection of views all in agreement – rather there are a whole range of reasons to tell or not to tell. From my point of view there is no “right” answer. Some people will keep it a secret; others will broadcast the news; most will be somewhere between these extremes. What makes it even more complicated is that behind the decision about what to share will be a lot of different reasons why that path should be taken – and we are all very bad at reconciling incompatible options 😉.
Often there will be changes in circumstances that demand a change of approach to the sharing. The nature of leukaemia is that things change – treatment is required or severity is changed or many other things. Then the “who should I tell” comes back and needs an answer again. Of course, it isn’t just who should I tell but also what should I tell them. Tell them too little and they worry that your are hiding things or think that it isn’t serious – tell them to much and they “assume the worst” about you or they simply get lost in the deluge of data that you are sending their way 😂.
You can see from the last couple of paragraphs that even relatively straightforward things can result in real difficulties in terms of how to ‘share’ with others. Personally, my usual method is to tell all the details to very few partly because it is much easier to add more – and impossible to take it back 😉 so if you tell someone too much that cannot be recovered. However, anyone who is sufficiently interested can ask me for greater depth or greater clarity or whatever. I don’t have any problems with talking about the problems that come along.
This is just one – of many – ways in which being less geographically close to our ‘friendship circle’ had put extra hurdles to clear. I have no intention of listing them all here and now, but one thing I do want to explore a little is the fact that it is actually many orders of magnitude to “properly” maintain a friendship when much of the context within which that friendship happens is unknown.
If I am “talking” to someone else online – whether by some chat like Messenger/WhatsApp, or by email, or whatever the immediacy of actually talking to them has been lost and all the non-verbal stuff that we perhaps rely on too much at times is just gone completely. Is the other person focused on our ‘conversation’; Is what they are saying the same as what they are thinking; Have I, perhaps, hit a raw nerve in some way; Are they actually interested in what I am saying – and I could go on.
Now, can I just add here that although I could be rightly accused of over-thinking at times 😂 I don’t think that I go through any sort of checklist when involved in a conversation to determine what the value of the conversation is 😂 – far from it. Something I learned about how the military prepares for ‘action’ situations is that they train extremely hard so that when it comes to the actual action they pretty much subconsciously follow the “Operating Procedures” for the situation they are in – and they do that because often there isn’t enough time to actually think it through. The same, I think, occurs when two people start a conversation – reacting to clues and responding automatically (or at least in an pre-programmed fashion).
In many ways (to draw in another thing from my ‘professional’ training) we all play games. That is not a bad thing. Rather it is one way of viewing all our relationships. I don’t see games in this context as manipulative in any sense – although there are, of course, times when we will try to be manipulative – hopefully with the goal of being helpful by leading the other person to adopt behaviours that will help them.
There are many aspects of this that need further exploration – coincidentally I have started reading a book that goes down a very similar route albeit with much greater awareness of the current research into this. For now I will just put a brief summarising paragraph here to conclude this post.
We cannot know accurately what another person is thinking – what other things are affecting their own ‘state’. We will, inevitably, interpret their actions through the lens of our own experiences with all those biases. That interpretation may be very wrong! Now, when you consider that the other is also having the same difficulties judging you it becomes abundantly clear that any interaction is going to be full of complexities and uncertainties. Perhaps the bottom line is that we should be wary of trusting our judgement about way in which we are communicating.