Some people believe “Better to light a candle than curse the darkness”. Others, that I am married to, just want me to listen to them curse the darkness.
So, are you looking for a solution, or posting just to share your feelings? :dubious:
I’m looking for rationale (aka a solution) to why some folks do such things.
Frankly, I feel like I’m on the otherside of the looking glass
It is because most human beings like to have sympathy for their problems. If you want to ask why that is, that’s a question beyond my ability to answer. But I think that most people intuitively understand that when you are experiencing some problem, it’s often nice to know that someone else feels bad for you, even if they can’t do anything to help.
So sometimes people will talk about some problem they’re having, in hopes of eliciting sympathy from the listener. Getting a list of potential solutions to the problem instead isn’t exactly what they were hoping for. They might in fact be fully aware of the potential solutions to the problem. But right now they don’t want solutions; they want sympathy.
I will grant that it does seem like women are more likely than men to do this.
stpauler, are you asking why unsolicited advice is sometimes offensive, or are you asking why anyone talks about problems that don’t have a solution? Or both?
If you don’t understand the latter, you won’t understand the former.
I recommend marriage counselling.
Or were you just posting to vent?
Honestly, it seems to me, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that the teller of the problem is the one in control of the conversation. That a complaint about traffic is only said to solely illicit a requested response of empathy or sympathy. That the conversation becomes less of a two way street and an attempt at avoiding the conflicts in the future, but one where it’s simply a venting medium.
Here’s an example:
Person: “Today sucked, I was all excited for lunch and when I got to the refrigerator at work, someone swiped my tuna salad.”
Respondent 1: “Yeah that sucked.”
OR
Respondent 2: “Yeah that sucked, hey I’ve got a cooler you can use to keep your sandwich at the desk so you don’t have to have your lunch stolen again.”
Why is respondent 2 in the wrong here?
Marriage counseling hasn’t worked. If things don’t improve we’ll be lucky to stay married for another 33 years.
Obviously because your cooler would deny Person the opportunity to complain about missing sandwiches. How could you be so thoughtless?
It’s still a two way street. There’s a talker, and a listener. The listener is offering a valuable service.
Personally I would not say that in this example respondent 2 is in the wrong. It may not be exactly the response person 1 was looking for, but it expresses sympathy as well as a possible solution. What might be somewhat annoying is if respondent 2 goes straight to: “Why don’t you just use a cooler at your desk? Then nobody will steal your sandwich.”
I still wouldn’t go so far as to say that’s “wrong,” though. Just a bit socially clueless.
Hm. Do you get the idea that talking to people is a way of strengthening relationships in addition to merely conveying information?
In this case, Respondent 2 is just fine, IMHO, because they say, “Yeah that sucked” first. The problem is when Respondent 2 says something more like: “You should keep your lunch in a cooler at your desk. Then that won’t happen.”
This basically implies that Respondent 2:
- feels it’s the person’s own fault their lunch got stolen
- thinks they’re too dumb to figure out this obvious solution themselves, and most importantly
- doesn’t give a crap that the person is having a bad day
In other words, the real problem the person is having is not that their lunch got stolen, it’s that they’re unhappy about it, right now. It’s all well and good to try to prevent that from happening again in the future, but that doesn’t address what’s happening now.
If I fall down the stairs and break my leg, I want someone to take me to the hospital. Shopping around for the best price on railing installation is not helpful now. Later, once my leg is fixed, absolutely. But not now.
This is the same principle. If I’m unhappy about something, we can worry about solving/preventing the cause later. The first thing I need is to feel better. And what will make me feel better is sometimes just to know that you care about me, and therefore, you are unhappy that I’m unhappy, and you want to make me feel better, even if there’s nothing you can do.
If I were Respondent 2, I would ask “Has that ever happened before? Does it happen to other people?” If the first person had worked in that office for 10 years and it had never happened before to anyone, I would think that offering a suggestion like that is going overboard.
If it is a chronic problem and it’s the dozenth time the person’s sandwich had been swiped, asking questions like that help lead him or her to figure out the solution on his own instead of doing the “Here’s what you should do . . .” that so many people object to.
I’m not stpauler but I seem to have a similar perspective to his.
I do get that this can be seen as a way to strengthen a relationship. Yet when someone vents, I get the impression that the other person is merely being used as a bitching bag. Tdn talks about a valuable service, like the listener is an un-volunteer therapist. I’ve never seen a venter stop himself and think “Hey, does the other person want to hear me go on about negative stuff?”
Why bond by talking about the negative? If I have a bad day and I say something to the effect that I’ve had a bad day and you say “Yeah, that was really a bad day”, I don’t feel any closer to you and I don’t seem why you would.
I guess I’m strange in that if I’m having a bad time, I don’t feel any better knowing that someone feels badly for me. That’s just spreading the unhappiness around.
Sure, but I think that’s kind of missing the point. The first thing that the sandwich victim wants is to be heard and validated.
Lest people think that listening without comment only applies to someone who is complaining, it doesn’t. It’s independent of their emotional state. It’s just as important to listen when they’re happy. Or neutral.
I too am a solver and I’ve gotten those sorts of responses but, fortunately, I think I figured out what the fundamental disconnect was and I’ll see if I can explain it. The reason a solution can often be perceived badly is because it’s a solution to the wrong problem. It’s the same way that a relatively small slight in a relationship can quickly grow into an argument and one or both people are left wondering why the other person was so upset about something so minor. Sure, some people are serial complainers and they thrive on drama and dominating conversation, and I do advise staying away from those people, but I think most of the time it’s simply a misunderstanding of what the person is really upset about.
Take the traffic example from the OP. Yes, the person was complaining about traffic, but it wasn’t the traffic that was the real problem, it was likely more that the person had a stressful day. Sure, they sucked at really expressing what the real problem is, and being stressed didn’t help and doesn’t help their reaction, but when you provide a solution to a problem other than the one that the person is really uspet about, they feel unheard. The real solution to a stressful day really is just to listen and help to soothe that person. Chances are there were a little of minor annoyances and it focuses on the traffic just because that is the most recent one in that persons mind and seems worse because they were already stressed from everything else.
Or take the lunch example that stpauler gives. Yes, the person is upset about their lunch, but it’s problem as much or more about the fact that they feel betrayed and disrespected by whoever swipped their lunch. Sure, you can take a step to make it harder for people to do that, but it doesn’t fix the real underlying problem. Further, it makes that problem worse because now they have to go out of their way to handles someone else being an ass when they shouldn’t have to. So, again, the second person isn’t wrong, they just responded to the surface problem without addressing the underlying issue. And because the underlying one wasn’t acknowledged or addressed, they don’t feel heard or helped and may even feel worse off because of this additional burden of having to protect their lunch.
Or to use an example from my own life, as a solver myself, I remember in the days and weeks following a particularly bad break-up with my fiancee I had and a lot of the responses I got were along the lines of “well, at least you found out now rather than after you got married.” I never lashed out at anyone or anything because I knew they were just trying to help, but it really made me more upset. I didn’t need to hear that I dodged a bullet, I needed help addressing the hurt that had resulted from the situation.
The thing is, as a solver, I’ve found I can still generally give advice on the surface problem, I just need to make sure I acknowledge and address the real problem too. Like with the lunch example again, what if the response was more like “Yeah, that sucks that you can’t trust your coworkers.” THEN go on to give advice about how to minimize the impact of that trust which very well may include bringing a cooler to work.
So, yeah, it’s really just a break down in communication, they either suck at saying what’s really bothering them or aren’t sure what it is or aren’t aware it’s something deeper, and you don’t pick up on what’s really bothering them, and you end up talking past eachother.
I feel like the people in these situations frequently. Seriously - both sides. Sometimes I misjudge and sympathize when I should be solving, or vice versa. The other person gets irritated at me and I figure it out and switch tracks, but I feel resentful toward them for not giving me enough clues (I need lots of clues, certain people know me well enough that they always help me get it right, others not so much).
And sometimes I slip up and don’t give enough hints when I complain, and get the wrong response. I usually feel (and this is probably unusual) slightly guilty when this happens. That I wasn’t clear enough. Most of the time though, I probably annoy others by giving too many clues and making them feel I think they’re as lacking as me in ability to tell which one is going on! Because I start off with, “Wow, I feel terrible. I really could use some sympathy. I just had a horrible commute, the route is usually great, there weren’t any traffic warnings I saw, but apparently an accident was being cleared because I sat there for nearly an hour and yea, I should’ve filled my tank up but I was tired and just wanted to get home.” I try to - what can I say? head off the possible solutions I don’t want to hear about. Or alternatively I say “What a lousy drive, there has to be a better route, what do you think I should do? I checked Google Maps but didn’t see one jump out at me.” Which is clearly (to me at least) asking for help fixing and not sympathy.
with regard to the post that appeared between me starting to write this and posting it: great one. I think you are exactly right, the misunderstanding is the source of the tension. And yes, often what is being misunderstood is what the person is really trying to communicate, or really feeling. Very insightful.
Blaster Master, thank you for that lucid and understandable explanation.
That particular example isn’t so bad, especially because it’s prefaced with sympathy (“Yeah, that sucked”) and because the respondent can offer a solution that wasn’t available before (a cooler that the person didn’t have access to previously).
When I’m venting about something, it’s usually because it has no easy or obvious answer. If it had a simple answer I would already have done it and therefore wouldn’t need to vent. So if my husband starts out with “Well you should have…”, it implies that I was just too stupid to see the easy answer. It comes across as “oh, that’s not really a problem and you’re dumb to get all worked up about it, here, let me show you how much more intelligent I am by solving it easily.” Now I’ve got all this pent up frustration that I haven’t been able to vent, and a really convenient new target!
There are some people that like to complain for the sake of complaining, but in most situations if you start by hearing out the complainer and offering sympathy, they’ll then be willing to hear suggestions. You don’t need to choose between giving emotional support and solving problems, they can both be provided. It can be a delicate balance, though, and the sympathy HAS to come first!