Making Mistakes and it being OK
Sep. 9th, 2018 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackSomeone who often says worthwhile things on tumblr reposted a post that had a lot to say about people's tendency to respond to criticism with exaggerated self-hatred, and why that can be such a problem.
http://jenroses.tumblr.com/post/156829502321/auntbutch-redeyestakewxrning-auntbutch-if
Hopefully I'm not AS horrible as the people described, but this has often been a problem for me :(
But the post went on to describe how you SHOULD respond to criticism. Which I *sort of* knew, but I'd not actually seen written out like that, and realised I'd been missing... many parts.
(It's a sort of amazing freelance therapy judo to criticise people for refusing to hear criticism, and having them listen.)
In particular, that even if someone makes a serious criticism, it's ok, or often helpful, to ask for or take time to fully process it.
Which seems... like usually a very good idea?
But in the quest for exaggerated self-criticism, I think my brain had latched on to the idea of immediate self-flagellation, and appropriate several otherwise-wise exhortations to support it. Something like, "if you hurt someone, it's up to THEM to know how much harm is inflicted, not you, and up to them what reparation or apology would or would not be accepted, and don't try to deflect that with apology or self-justificaiton"
Which is all necessary, but I think, is possibly intended to be filtered through a common sense filter. Like, consider the likelihood that if you've hurt someone, there's a large reservoir of harm which you didn't notice or didn't want to acknowledge, based on what they say and your knowledge of the situation. But you don't ALWAYS have to come to the conclusion 'yes', if all the indications are that the other person is being a bully, or mistaken, or is cross about something else unrelated to you.
(Does that sound right?)
Whereas I always felt obliged to rapidly scramble to accept all blame, which when I don't actually understand what someone is hurt by, can be catastrophically counterproducive, as I get things even wronger, or resent that I need to take all the blame onto myself when I don't feel like that's right and end up letting my resentment show :(
My brain keeps saying, "but if it's a serious criticism, it's really unacceptable to just say 'i'll think about it', that sounds like you're dismissing it." But apparently, not usually?
And in fact, if I allow myself a more measured response, that's almost certain to be much much better for other people, both in my ACTUALLY GENUINELY accepting VALID criticism, and also in my accepting mistakes when maybe it wasn't really anyone's fault, or is mostly due to the other person's appropriate but not-really-due-to-me anger without going into a self-hatred-spiral.
And it seems like, that's what most people do in practice, and the right answer about how you SHOULD respond is just to do that, even as I have lingering fear of "not taking people's criticism seriously enough".
(Right?)
After all, when I'm actually in the wrong, I don't always hate myself that much, only when it's an unexpected accident :(
My intellectual brain tells me that's the only way to run social interaction, and I should do the less-harmful thing, even as my emotional brain is screaming at me that I'm not following the "rules" I described earlier and will eventually cause harm to people by reacting insufficiently seriously to criticism some time I don't expect it.
I've tried to talk about how other people react to criticism and if I should react the same way before, and generally got blank faces. But I'm now thinking that might have been more "I don't understand, this is too much about feelings you have and most people don't" or "I don't understand, that's so obvious I don't know how to describe it" and not "don't do that."
But now I'm thinking, it's sufficiently obvious, I need to do it, whether I can explain it to other people and have them agree or not. Even if I wish "asking everyone else what they do and doing that" worked as easily as I always feel it should.
Mistakes and apologies
I find a lot of confusion about what's a "mistake" and what's an "apology".
My brain tends to generalise too much.
I see a spectrum of mistakes and apology, something like:
1. I had nothing to do with this but I'm sorry it happened to you, e.g. "sorry your relative died"
2. I had no way of preventing it but inadvertently precipitated it, e.g. "oops, sorry" when someone wasn't looking where they were going and walks into you
3. I couldn't *reasonably* have prevented it, e.g. "oops, sorry" when both people were a normal appropriate amount of careful but bump into each other (assuming people accept that that occasionally happens and being more careful isn't a worthwhile trade off)
4. I didn't do anything unusual, but I really should be more careful, e.g. "oops, sorry", when you walked into someone not looking where *you* were going
5. I did that deliberately, but I didn't realise how bad the consequences were going to be.
6. I did that on purpose, if I'm going to apologise I need to damn well not do it in future.
I tend to describe all of those as a mistake or apology, but think of a "real" mistake as somewhere in the middle and a "real" apology as what's appropriate to the bottom half. But I know other people use the words in different ways.
In particular, if someone hurts you in a fairly small way, it's reasonable and sensible to display an amount of upset proportional to the harm done *to you*, and ignore whether for them it's a habit or an aberration. You don't really have any way of knowing different, and it's not your responsibility to figure it out by yourself. (Whereas for big things, like if it goes to court or something, the intention can matter.)
But that if you do inadvertently hurt someone, it's reasonable to apologise and intend to avoid THAT PARTICULAR COMBINATION OF CIRCUMSTANCES. Like, if you usually sit in a normal way, but you accidentally kick someone because they were hiding under your desk, you might make a mental note "IT like to come fix the cables without warning, don't be careless sitting down". But, DESPITE all the advice about what makes a sincere apology, you might apologise, but carry on the rest of your life without significantly increasing the amount of caution you display when you sit, even if EVENTUALLY you may find some other circumstance where it also hurts someone.
Even though, advice about a sincere apology says to change behaviour and, to me, a promise to change your behaviour mean to change the behaviour that led to the accident, which since you didn't know whether that would come from sitting at work, or home, or on a bus, or in the cinema, would have meant a massive increase in caution EVERYWHERE. But it's ok not to do that?? (Is that right??)
http://jenroses.tumblr.com/post/156829502321/auntbutch-redeyestakewxrning-auntbutch-if
Hopefully I'm not AS horrible as the people described, but this has often been a problem for me :(
But the post went on to describe how you SHOULD respond to criticism. Which I *sort of* knew, but I'd not actually seen written out like that, and realised I'd been missing... many parts.
(It's a sort of amazing freelance therapy judo to criticise people for refusing to hear criticism, and having them listen.)
In particular, that even if someone makes a serious criticism, it's ok, or often helpful, to ask for or take time to fully process it.
Which seems... like usually a very good idea?
But in the quest for exaggerated self-criticism, I think my brain had latched on to the idea of immediate self-flagellation, and appropriate several otherwise-wise exhortations to support it. Something like, "if you hurt someone, it's up to THEM to know how much harm is inflicted, not you, and up to them what reparation or apology would or would not be accepted, and don't try to deflect that with apology or self-justificaiton"
Which is all necessary, but I think, is possibly intended to be filtered through a common sense filter. Like, consider the likelihood that if you've hurt someone, there's a large reservoir of harm which you didn't notice or didn't want to acknowledge, based on what they say and your knowledge of the situation. But you don't ALWAYS have to come to the conclusion 'yes', if all the indications are that the other person is being a bully, or mistaken, or is cross about something else unrelated to you.
(Does that sound right?)
Whereas I always felt obliged to rapidly scramble to accept all blame, which when I don't actually understand what someone is hurt by, can be catastrophically counterproducive, as I get things even wronger, or resent that I need to take all the blame onto myself when I don't feel like that's right and end up letting my resentment show :(
My brain keeps saying, "but if it's a serious criticism, it's really unacceptable to just say 'i'll think about it', that sounds like you're dismissing it." But apparently, not usually?
And in fact, if I allow myself a more measured response, that's almost certain to be much much better for other people, both in my ACTUALLY GENUINELY accepting VALID criticism, and also in my accepting mistakes when maybe it wasn't really anyone's fault, or is mostly due to the other person's appropriate but not-really-due-to-me anger without going into a self-hatred-spiral.
And it seems like, that's what most people do in practice, and the right answer about how you SHOULD respond is just to do that, even as I have lingering fear of "not taking people's criticism seriously enough".
(Right?)
After all, when I'm actually in the wrong, I don't always hate myself that much, only when it's an unexpected accident :(
My intellectual brain tells me that's the only way to run social interaction, and I should do the less-harmful thing, even as my emotional brain is screaming at me that I'm not following the "rules" I described earlier and will eventually cause harm to people by reacting insufficiently seriously to criticism some time I don't expect it.
I've tried to talk about how other people react to criticism and if I should react the same way before, and generally got blank faces. But I'm now thinking that might have been more "I don't understand, this is too much about feelings you have and most people don't" or "I don't understand, that's so obvious I don't know how to describe it" and not "don't do that."
But now I'm thinking, it's sufficiently obvious, I need to do it, whether I can explain it to other people and have them agree or not. Even if I wish "asking everyone else what they do and doing that" worked as easily as I always feel it should.
Mistakes and apologies
I find a lot of confusion about what's a "mistake" and what's an "apology".
My brain tends to generalise too much.
I see a spectrum of mistakes and apology, something like:
1. I had nothing to do with this but I'm sorry it happened to you, e.g. "sorry your relative died"
2. I had no way of preventing it but inadvertently precipitated it, e.g. "oops, sorry" when someone wasn't looking where they were going and walks into you
3. I couldn't *reasonably* have prevented it, e.g. "oops, sorry" when both people were a normal appropriate amount of careful but bump into each other (assuming people accept that that occasionally happens and being more careful isn't a worthwhile trade off)
4. I didn't do anything unusual, but I really should be more careful, e.g. "oops, sorry", when you walked into someone not looking where *you* were going
5. I did that deliberately, but I didn't realise how bad the consequences were going to be.
6. I did that on purpose, if I'm going to apologise I need to damn well not do it in future.
I tend to describe all of those as a mistake or apology, but think of a "real" mistake as somewhere in the middle and a "real" apology as what's appropriate to the bottom half. But I know other people use the words in different ways.
In particular, if someone hurts you in a fairly small way, it's reasonable and sensible to display an amount of upset proportional to the harm done *to you*, and ignore whether for them it's a habit or an aberration. You don't really have any way of knowing different, and it's not your responsibility to figure it out by yourself. (Whereas for big things, like if it goes to court or something, the intention can matter.)
But that if you do inadvertently hurt someone, it's reasonable to apologise and intend to avoid THAT PARTICULAR COMBINATION OF CIRCUMSTANCES. Like, if you usually sit in a normal way, but you accidentally kick someone because they were hiding under your desk, you might make a mental note "IT like to come fix the cables without warning, don't be careless sitting down". But, DESPITE all the advice about what makes a sincere apology, you might apologise, but carry on the rest of your life without significantly increasing the amount of caution you display when you sit, even if EVENTUALLY you may find some other circumstance where it also hurts someone.
Even though, advice about a sincere apology says to change behaviour and, to me, a promise to change your behaviour mean to change the behaviour that led to the accident, which since you didn't know whether that would come from sitting at work, or home, or on a bus, or in the cinema, would have meant a massive increase in caution EVERYWHERE. But it's ok not to do that?? (Is that right??)
no subject
Date: 2018-09-10 08:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-09-10 11:11 am (UTC)I thought you were good at talking to people, but maybe you're just good at talking to me.
I'm not sure I have anything useful to say, but I find it a lot easier giving compassionate advise to other people than myself, so based on what you'd say, I've various thoughts.
Even if you do everything right, this happens *sometimes*. And the best thing to do is apologise as best as possible in the moment, with an awareness that sometimes it may be completely bad luck and not specifically your fault.
If asking what was wrong doesn't work, it may be better to leave it alone and avoid "things generally like that even though you don't really understand it" than try to reach an understand of it -- even though that's really frustrating -- because explaining what's wrong is something that many people find difficult in itself. Possibly discretely asking another friend if it's obvious to them may help.
And, some people are just more prone to this, either because their life has much more bad things in it's almost impossible to avoid tripping over one, or because their life is just different to yours enough you don't know what's sensitive, or because their brain makes them prone to see the most negative possible interpretation of any comment. In which case it's important NOT to blame yourself, but just accept that this is a cost of talking to them, and you need to decide if it's worth it, for them, and for you, or if it's kinder to interact less.
Finally, I don't know if this is relevant, but I often find it hard to avoid topics I suspect will be fraught, if I don't know for sure -- my brain somehow wants to settle the uncertainty. Whereas it's usually more prudent to keep a short list of topics that MIGHT be upsetting if you talk about them secretly inside yourself (both generalities like "don't talk dismissively of a religion if you don't know if someone is that religion", guesses like "might this person be sensitive about X? not sure, but maybe be careful bringing it up", and specifics like "X got upset when I talked about Y, maybe safer to avoid the whole topic to avoid making more mistakes").
That's a pain, but I think is reasonably possible to summarise into an algorithm which isn't perfect, but works most of the time. In particular, it's usually ok to make SOME mistakes, and if you're talking to someone who's interesting but you don't know well, you can follow something like, "talk about something likely to be interesting and non-offensive, if it seems ok, keep talking, if you find them reacting badly, retreat to safer topics."
no subject
Date: 2018-09-10 11:12 am (UTC)Examples
Date: 2018-09-10 12:05 pm (UTC)Re: Examples
Date: 2018-09-11 02:35 pm (UTC)I think topics like that where you have different opinions, it is just really hard to talk about without a risk of someone feeling attacked, I think it usually is better to talk about something else instead -- that doesn't mean not asking them anything at all, but knowing which topics are often sensitive, and talking about probably non sensitive topics instead, or saying "I'm really curious but I don't want to press if you don't want to talk about it, can you tell me about X.
I'm not good at this either. I'm always interested in "serious" conversations about politics, religion, etc (even if there might be as much intellectual challenge in learning about someone's hobby or similar), and have only slowly learned to avoid putting my foot in it. Some people are better at it. Trying to get myself away from thinking of it as a debate (even if it's something like politics where you might think there was a fair amount of one side being better than the other), and instead asking what they were *for*, asking about the interesting/good/strong parts of their views helped a little bit.