Being shouted at

[jack]

If I'm sure someone is unreasonable, or just that I don't want to listen, I can withstand them very effectively. I'm not *great* at social interaction, but when it's blatantly clear someone else is ignoring normal-polite-convention, I don't feel a *moral* imperative to hold up end. Like, maybe you should never be deliberately hurtful to someone, but if you tell someone fifteen times that you're late for something important, and they keep saying, "oh, I just remembered", etiquette is clearly on YOUR side when you say you need to go and walk off, even if they keep shouting a conversation at you as you walk away. It may be HARD to do that, if society trains you not to, but it's *OK*.

But in many other situations, basically whenever anyone expresses something forcefully, with hurt or anger, I always feel obligated to agree with them immediately. And indeed, it feels hypocritical to exaggerate my agreement, so I feel like I need to agree -- and then make sure all the rest of my brain is updated accordingly, I can't go back to ignoring it afterwards. For a long time I rationalised that as caring about them, and not invalidating them (after all, trusting someone when they tell you about something they're really angry/upset/passionate about is usually a good thing).

But I have to admit, that rationalisation, even if it might be more flattering, is not exactly true. I feel obliged to agree a lot more urgently when someone is forceful about something, even when I'm *not* more sure they're right.

What made me realise was interacting with young children, old enough to talk clearly but young enough to occasionally have angry meltdowns where I could understand the cause even though I couldn't fix it. That just being shouted at gives me an intense urge to cave in, even though I know with complete confidence that (a) I couldn't have averted the problem in any way (b) the anger comes more from hunger, frustration, or general overwhelmedness, not the particular thing (c) being reassuring is more help than anything else. And indeed, if it happens, I do deal with it the right way and it is ok after, and it's not their fault, it's the fault of the situation.

But it made me realise, that it wasn't anything about other people, a bit of my brain is just programmed to stop standing up to people when they shout at me, and even though it performs a useful function, it's can often be a really bad thing and I shouldn't let it run rampant.

But I don't know what I SHOULD do with that bit of my brain. It's not exactly, "I will agree with people even though they're wrong if they shout". It's like, "if they shout, then my brains assumes they can't possibly be wrong". And often that's good -- if someone has a legitimate grievance, it should be on me, not on them, to make understanding happen, so blank-check agreement could be necessary. But I also know, many people may not play by the rules -- may simply have learned that making a fuss gets their way, and not necessarily be more right, and not standing up to them is more like cowardice than justice. But I don't want to stop in the moment to debate if someone's grievance is justified (unless I already know in advance).

Comments

[mtbc]

It can also be difficult to stand up effectively to shouty people if their behavior is so flustering that one can no longer think straight.

I'm noodling here, mostly

[redbird]

One possibility would be to try to calm the person down and maybe even give them what they want then and there, but work on not automatically updating the rest of your brain to believe that they must have been right. (That work in turn might be something you can do on your own, over time, or might benefit from working with a therapist.) This is where suggestions to tell people something like "yes, that sucks, what are you going to do about it?" come in. It's a way for the person being yelled at, or asked to sympathize with the same person for the same problem for the tenth time, to neither argue nor take responsibility for the problem.

Not updating your brain/beliefs that way might mean, not automatically ignoring the issue, but thinking about whether the person's anger was appropriate, and if so whether their anger was legitimately at you, or if their problem was for some other reason a thing it was reasonable to expect you to deal with.

Consider people who shout at low-level customer service staff: maybe the airline really has messed up, but the person at the counter didn't cause the problem and can't fix the policies, only at best help this one customer. Or maybe the shouter is unhappy because they got stuck in traffic, but the clerk isn't allowed to say "you should have left work sooner, not assumed you'd be able to get here in ten minutes at five o'clock." Also, some of those shouters have genuinely lost their tempers, while others have been told that yelling will get them what they want and calm politeness won't. But you can't tell Alice, who is angry at you, from Bob who is angry at his boss and yelling at you because it's safer, or Charlie who is yelling as a calculated tactic.

Also: trusting someone when they tell you about something they're really angry or passionate about is usually a good thing, but to some extent that depends on who it is. I'd trust liv further than I would trust a random neighbor I just met at the bus stop, and you'd probably trust her even more than I would.

Trusting someone in this context includes believing that they are honest (rather than pretending to be angry to manipulate me); believing that they're not mistaken about what they're saying; and believing that what they want me to do about the problem is a good idea.

Re: I'm noodling here, mostly

[redbird]

P.S. I'd like to drop this comment in my own journal. Is it okay to link back to this, or would you prefer something like "noodling in response to a post about being shouted at" without mentioning this post or your name?

Re: I'm noodling here, mostly

[jack]

Feel free. I'd have to think about it if it were somewhere a lot more public than that, but your journal is fine. Thank you.

[ptc24]

I have different beliefs about anger; I seem to be a lot more anti-anger than many people, that said I think I have a narrower definition of anger than some people do. Certainly I've had discussions with my psychologist where she seemed to have a lot broader notion of what constitutes anger than I did... and a lot of what she thought were cases of the good side of anger, I had difficulty as seeing as anger at all. Many people seem to have political commitments to seeing some sorts of anger as positive, I don't seem to.

I sometimes quip, "when someone is angry, they often have a good reason to be angry... and that good reason often isn't the reason they think they have".

Anger makes you stupid, the red mist descends upon nearly everyone from time to time. You can't[1] demand saintly conduct from others, you can't demand it from yourself, so you need to unilaterally decide for both of you upon some compromise, and avoid saying that you're doing so inside. Think, but do not say, "I will not accept your assertions, I will not admit wrongdoing, however, to restore and keep the peace, I will comply, for now, at least on those things where superficial compliance is possible, and any discussion or attempt to figure out the right of it will have to wait until we are both calm enough to think straight." Sometimes it will turn out later that the other person had had a bad day at work or something, it has been known for them to spontaneously apologise later when I've had to resort to this.

Yeah, it's a fudge, it's a subterfuge, it's a miserable little compromise, it's a sticking plaster, it's kicking the can down the road, it's less than maximally respectful either to yourself or the other person. But it's simple enough for my poor addled brain and it can help to get me through the day.

The trouble with all this; it works OK for specific incidents, like those that come up with small children. For long-standing grievances, possibly it's easy to end up with a stock of the sort of low-level brooding anger which eats uselessly at you in spare moments, although this may vary from person to person.

[1] Well, in a literal sense you can, but you can't do so and expect to get what you demand, in at least two senses of "expect".

[kaberett]

How much have you read about validation (as the specific mental-health term)? It's something that's helped me (& folk close to me...) a lot: I don't actually want people to agree that Everything I Say Is Right, because I recognise that a lot of it is distortion, but what does help is people going "yep, I can see that you're very distressed right now, that sounds like a really distressing set of thoughts and I can completely see why you're distressed, it all sounds kind of grim, would you like a hug". Trying to argue with the truth-value of what I'm thinking, though, rather than just going "yep that's pretty miserable", tends to entrench or increase distress. I'm using myself as an example because I'm not wordsing terribly well right now, but this is a well-attested strategy with an enormous evidence base, and it sounds to me like the problem you're having is the other half of what I frequently experience -- so I wonder if reframing away from "I have to believe the things they are saying" to "I believe they are feeling strongly and can evaluate ~~objective~~ truthiness of their feelings later, right now what matters is how they feel" would address some of what you're getting stuck on?

[jack]

Huh. Thank you, that could be very helpful.

[kaberett]

<3