Misunderstandings based on your own perceptions. Long and rambling

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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I hope I can make this make sense. My whole life is full of misunderstandings, hurt feelings, ruminations and self-imposed isolation because interactions are too stressful. Something dawned on me yesterday and hit me like a ton of bricks.

The conversations that I am having with other people are not the conversations they are having with me. Here is an example of what I mean. This is a conversation I had with a nurse ( I am a nurse aide) yesterday at work. I’ll call that nurse Nimrod. We were very short staffed and so I got pulled from my bathing line and put on the floor in a different wing with a different nurse. I’ll call her Lovely.

The other NA and I worked our asses off and got everybody up, dressed and fed. We did an awesome job and felt great about it.

Later on the day I’m having my last break sitting in the staff room and Nurse Nimrod comes in for her break and asks “how are you guys doing over there?”.

I take this as “I know you guys are short and hope your day is going ok and it wasn’t too bad”. But that’s not what she means. She means “I’m pissed off that we’re short and, if you’ve got your work done I want you to come over to the other wing and do more work for me”.

I don’t know this though so I say “Good, thank you”. By saying that I mean “it was tough but we worked hard and we’re ok now, thanks for asking”. But that’s not how she takes it. To her I’m saying “Oh we’re totally fine, it was easy and now I have nothing else to do but sit here”.

So when she does say “We still have tons to do and I don’t mind helping but it’s not my job so one you needs to come over to our wing to help out” I’m confused and annoyed.

Then it dawned on me, we’re having two different conversations! I saw it as her being kind and checking in but she sees it as we’re not busy obviously because I’m sitting down.

After my break I told Nurse Lovely and she just laughed and said “Yeah Nimrod knows better than to ask me, that’s why she said it to you”.

I have to wonder if this is the cause of many, if not most of the misunderstandings in my life and with conversations in general. Are we all just having two different conversations with each other based on our own perception of things?

That same day I was off at 2:00 and at 1:57 I said to Nurse Lovely “well that’s close enough, I’m off!” and she said “oh, your leaving?”. I took that to mean “you still have three minutes so you can’t leave yet” and felt annoyed because she knows how hard we worked. But what she actually meant was “we’re still super short, would you like to stay and do overtime because I like working with you”.

Now I know that we all see things from our own perspectives and I can admit that I have issues with communication but this has to be a huge part of misunderstandings, right?

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tl;dr: It’s complicated, but IMO you’re barking up the right tree.

Long version:
All IMO & worth every penny you paid for it …

Most people do not think of the other person’s context when they speak. So they say what makes sense to them in their own mental context the listener is (at least initially) ignorant of.

Equally, most people do not think of the other person’s context when they listen. So they hear or understand what makes sense to them in their own mental context the other person is (at least initially) ignorant of.

The more you know your counterparty, the more you can, at least potentially, know “where they’re coming from” and speak or listen in the appropriate context. Most of us are pretty good at “reading” our spouse or frequent cow-orkers. And almost automatically adjust our communications to be partly in their context, while they do the same in reverse to at least a predictable degree, if not always the degree you’d hope for.

Most of us relatively suck at “reading” strangers. Especially across cultures, ages, sexes, etc.

Beyond how good or bad we are at reading others, there’s a huge difference in various folk’s motivation to even bother. How much people bother to try to consider / include the other’s context depends a lot on how much they are angry impatient people or gentle empathetic people. And also how smart they are. Assuming they’re using their smarts towards good communications, not just in service of bamboozling whoever they’re talking to. Status matters too; unskilled bosses / supervisors are much more likely to expect others to do all the contextualizing. After all, they’re in charge and you’re not! So suck it up and do what I mean, not what you thought I said!


Obviously I wasn’t there at your conversations with the nurses and the other NA. But it sure sounds to me like you read your counterparty’s contexts correctly. If a little belatedly.

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In some cases, constantly misunderstanding other people’s conversations comes as some form of hidden trauma where you suffered consequences for not reading someone right - so now you start to read everything as having some sort of hidden subtext, or malicious/negative meaning, as a protective tactic.

One thing that helped me was the concept of “1 and a thousand.” That is to say, that there’s only one of you in the world, but there are a thousand “yous” in the thousand people that know you - a thousand different versions of you that exist in the eyes of people who see/know you.

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So how the hell is anyone supposed to know what the other person means when they say something? The other day a coworker asked me “how do you like working here?”. She was asking me because there’s been issues with other NAs being bullied. So I have to then try to figure out “are you wanting me to say everything is great to confirm your own bias or are you actually wondering what it’s been like for me here”?

And it’s not like I won’t end up looking like some nutjob if I don’t answer but rather just sit there, looking at her trying to figure out what she’s actually asking.

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This is why we pay people to be diplomats and to speak to other foreign leaders so we don’t end up in a war every five minutes.

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My best advice is that you just take everything at face value. It you try to work out the subtext you may drive yourself insane. We can guess why some people are asking us certain things, and some people are very good at guessing, but if you’re not? Guess what? You don’t have to play the game.

Based on things you posted in the past here I do think a lot of this stems from trauma. Perhaps you think disaster might strike if you don’t understand everything perfectly well. It’s understandable, I had an abusive upbringing myself and “getting it right” had such high stakes back then. But it doesn’t any more. I have to remind myself of that all the time.

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Is that what’s going on here? I do have severe past trauma and it’s true I never knew when fists would start flying. Sometimes I feel like people are speaking a foreign language and I have no idea what they mean. I think the only thing I can do is take what people say at face value because I have no idea what else you can do.

I still think though, that many misunderstandings must come from two people thinking they’re talking about the same thing and never even realizing that they’re having two different conversations.

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Totally agree w this. Doesn’t happen in every conversaiton, but it happens in some. And there are some pairs of people who simply cannot communicate successfully, period. When you find one of those, avoidance is the only solution.

Instead of worrying, guessing, then answering your guess maybe a better idea is simply to ask them back very explicitly what they mean: “I can’t tell. Do you genuinely want to know or are you just asking to be polite or because the Boss asked you to ask me? Or something else altogether?” See what they say. Odds are they’ll be surprised enough to 99% answer with the truth and then you know what they really want and you can decide how to respond with none of the anxiety-producing uncertainty.


Here’s a completely different take on the problem.
If folks are mostly just conversing for non-functional reasons, you are under no obligation to answer the question they asked. So don’t.

They teach PR spokespeople to essentially ignore whatever question the news reporter asked and instead of answering their question, just deliver the pre-arranged comments they want to see published in the paper. Ideally pick out some hook in the question that links to one of the spokespersons’ desired points and deliver that one. But if not, just deliver your most important one.

This technique as applied to a question like on your quote looks like this: who cares what that person is thinking? Who cares if you answer the question they intended to ask? Or if you answer the one they did ask? Or say something completely different? If they’re just being (awkwardly) social, just treat the question as something to extemporize off of. Treat it merely as a signal from them meaning “Hi. I want a short conversation about anything because I’m bored. Please start talking to me.”

Wanting to literally answer the question exactly as asked just because it was asked as if this event was courtroom testimony or a police interrogation strikes me as odd behavior. More than that, it strikes me as unnecessary and unhelpful-to-you behavior. If my assessment is accurate, my advice would be: “So don’t to that.”

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I apologize if I’m misremembering, but haven’t you mentioned autism in the past? What you are describing is common “on the spectrum”.

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I have this one coworker who does a good job and every so often I’ll say as much to her. Her response is always “don’t give a shit”. She literally does not care what other people think or say. It’s so incredibly foreign to me! I don’t take offence when she says it. I actually admire her “whatever” attitude and wish I was like her.

I like your idea that this isn’t a courtroom so who cares what I say? Never in a million years would I ever get like “don’t give a shit” coworker but it would be nice to at least realize that this conversation doesn’t matter and I don’t owe anybody answers.

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Yes. I was never officially diagnosed as an adult but my doctor mentioned Aspergers as a child. I think this is probably playing a major roll in my communication challenges.

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Have you ever read An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks?

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I haven’t read her book but I did see the movie. The book looks like it would be an enlightening read.

Btw I went on a fossil hunting field trip with the local rock/fossil group today and it was great. One guy found an amazing ammonite the size of his fist. My friend found a clam and I found a section of a large crinoide. Also just a ton of nodules.

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See any of the big ones?

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That’s exactly where we were! One of the guys who led the group today helped with the removal of it and told us about it today.

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It crossed my mind too when I read your posts, but I currently have a child being evaluated for ASD and I think I see it everywhere now. But yes, if you suspect you may be on the spectrum that would explain a lot of why this is so difficult for you. It’s totally okay to just take things at face value.

If it helps, when someone asks me how I’m finding work, I don’t try to think about why they’re asking, I just tell them how I’m finding it. Usually the reason they’re asking will show up later in the conversation.

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This.

Are you familiar with Wiio’s Laws ? The most famous one is : communication usually fails, except by accident but I’m particularly partial to one of its corrollaries : if communication seems to succeed in the intended way, there’s a misunderstanding.

Case study :

Soon after our relationship started, my ex and I had The Talk.

We felt that what we had seemed absolutely wonderful and we wanted to make sure that we were on the same page as to how we viewed our relationship and how we wanted it to grow. We saw eye to eye. On. All. Counts. Perfect agreement.

We very quickly realised however that while we had agreed on the letter, we had widely divergent interpretation of the spirit of our future plans. And that, in short, is why she’s now my ex.

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So I actually put some of the opinions and advice here to work yesterday. I picked up a shift at a different facility (one where I did my clinical). One of the NA asked me “where do you like working better?” while we were sitting in the break room.

I thought to myself "I am not under oath, she’s just mindlessly chatting the same way you do when you say “how’s it going”. So as non-nonchalantly as I could I slightly shrugged my shoulders and said “oh you know, pros and cons to both”. She said “oh yeah for sure” and then went back to her dinner.

I still feel like I wonder what she actually is asking but at least I can give a noncommittal reply and appear like I know what the hell is going on :laughing:

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No one is a mind reader. If someone needs you to stay late, the words coming out of their mouth need to be “hey, I know it’s a big ask, but we need you to stay late.” If they don’t say that, they didn’t ask you a thing and you should leave when you’re shift is iver.

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But see Darren_Garrison’s link above on “theory of mind.” Neurotypical people are “mind readers” in a sense: they have some understanding of, or ability to infer, what’s going on in other people’s minds. (Which in no way contradicts the rest of what you said.)