*sympathy* oh dear :( I'm my talkings were relevant to someone else.
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 11:11 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."