Journaling project, Day 20

[drwex]

When someone upsets us, this is often because they aren’t behaving according to our fantasy of how they “should” behave. The frustration, then, stems not from their behavior but from how their behavior differs from our fantasy. Let’s not get carried away. Remember, calmness is a superpower.

How can you let calmness be your superpower today, instead?

Since it was pointed out that I kind of failed to answer yesterday's prompt question (true, and I will get to it... someday) I'll start off by answering this one: calmness is my superpower when I know it'll piss off the other party. I can be infuriating in all kinds of ways, one of which is by not getting upset when people think they're upsetting me. It's kind of fun to watch other people blow a gasket, sometimes.

The other way is by doing what I call "going meta". When my mother used to go off on me (late in her life, when I was an adult and had a lot more skills, distance, and cope) I would say, "Why are we having this argument?" Usually the correct answer was because she was having a bad day, or mad at my father or brother and taking it out on me, but those weren't answers she was capable of generating herself so the question tended to stop her in her tracks. Or she'd just ignore it and keep on going at me.

This question has some other uses in more productive relationships, too. I've always said that I'm willing to argue, if it's worthwhile. Part of knowing whether it's worthwhile I knowing why you're having the argument in the first place. It's quite often the case that people argue about things that they aren't actually arguing about. I used to say that my first wife and I only ever had one argument - it was about money and it took a myriad of forms.(*)

I still find the phrasing of these prompts frustrating. Calling my model of how someone will behave a "fantasy" is insulting. Never mind the notion that my belief people should act in moral and kind ways. I realize not everyone else (no one else) has my morality, but if I believe people should not be racist shitbags and they act in ways that don't accord with that, please don't call my beliefs "fantasy". Furthermore, if peoples' behavior deviates from my expectation in certain ways, I think I'm completely justified in saying that my frustration comes from their behavior. Again with these questions there's an unaddressed question of boundary-drawing - how do I know if I'm being unreasonable? To take one example, there's a whole segment of people who think it's unreasonable to punch Nazis; there's another segment who think it's unreasonable to allow fascists to go unchallenged in shouting "Jew will not replace us" in peoples' faces. Calmness doesn't seem like much of a superpower these days.

Or maybe less dramatically: I have endless examples of people saying "I believe X" and then acting to bring about not(X). Who's the fantasist in this scenario? And don't patronize me by saying "let's not get carried away". In response to an earlier prompt someone hypothesized that a major target of these prompts are women who've been socialized not to express things outwardly that might be controversial or confrontational. How do my women readers feel about being told that calmness is a superpower?

(*) Hypothesis: it wasn't about money, it was about something else, which money stood in for. Security or respect, I'd bet. Ain't hind-insight a bitch. I can't imagine my 20-something self being mature or sophisticated enough to penetrate two layers of indirection but it sure would have been nice. That alone might make this the most useful prompt of the series, so far.

Comments

[flexagon]

How do my women readers feel about being told that calmness is a superpower?

I'm a woman and it feels fine. I've often said in the last year that I think I earn most of my salary by remaining calm, thus stabilizing my team. Calmness buys time for thinking, can defuse anxiousness and anger (when not done in the "make the other person blow a gasket" way you describe), and is usually healthier physically.

(Given human history, it makes perfect sense to expect racism and violence, not to mention irrational behavior. It also makes perfect sense to work to decrease those things. I'm not sure why we can't do both these things calmly.)

[flexagon]

P.S. I know I run kind of cold

P.P.S. Props for "hind-insight". That's a good one.

[redbird]

I'm starting to think that the main message of this series of prompts is "when all else fails, lower your expectations."

In this case: the difference between a judgmental "should" and a predictive "should" is important and sometimes valuable. "I should call my mother" and "it should rain tonight" are saying rather different things, and I think there's some of that confusion in this prompt. Or maybe they're poking at the things that are part expectation based on past experience (like the statement about rain) and part an ethical claim. "The train should be here soon" feels like an example there—it can be "this usually happens" because the 3:10 to Neverland is a reliable train, or a statement about other people's proper behavior, because we paid good money for those T passes, and people need to get somewhere.


Something like "so-and-so is always early to things, it's half an hour late, where are they?" is looking for a different sort of answer than "that guy is always late, where is he this time, damn it?" "People should be on time" is a belief about proper behavior; "redbird tends to get places early" and "redbird is always late" are both factual claims/beliefs about one bit of the world, and cannot both be true. If I am late for an event, someone who believes the second claim is more likely to be angry with me than someone who believes the first, and the shape of the anger and any subsequent argument would be different.

The other connection here is "you can't get an 'is' from an 'ought,'" especially when the "ought" is something like "I should be able to walk five miles without pain." I wonder how many of those "fantasies" the prompt-writer is talking about are that the other person should be both willing and able to do things that they aren't, or that they haven't been asked for.

[elusiveat]

(Given human history, it makes perfect sense to expect racism and violence, not to mention irrational behavior. It also makes perfect sense to work to decrease those things. I'm not sure why we can't do both these things calmly.)

I like this a lot.

[elusiveat]

I'm a woman and I feel fine about describing calmness as a superpower.

I'm also not particularly good at staying calm. Sometimes I can manage to maintain some emotional distance but my default is to be pretty emotionally expressive.

[elusiveat]

More generally, when I read the prompt, I immediately jumped to thinking of the kinds of things that tend to apply to housemate and familial dynamics.

Stuff like, I expect my mother to know that it's extremely invasive to make someone else's bed without their permission, while one time she expected me to feel happy and pleased at having my bed made as a surprise while she was visiting.

When I cook a meal for someone, I expect for them to at least taste it before applying condiments to it.

I expect housemates to prioritize minimizing food waste over never having anything in the refrigerator that they might not want to eat. Many of my housemates have felt the opposite.

I expect for other people to assume that things are in their current locations for a reason and that they should check before moving them. A lot of people expect gratitude when they tidy up or reorganize a shared space.

[drwex]

What do you mean "run kind of cold"?

You're welcome - I'm sure there's a better neologism for this but I couldn't find it in the time I had to compose the post.

Thanks for the response as a female person. I appreciate the perspective.

Given human history, it makes perfect sense to expect racism and violence, not to mention irrational behavior.

Maybe I'm too optimistic to believe that we are better than our histories. I also still firmly believe that the arc of history does bend, however slowly.

[drwex]

Thanks for the commentary.

when all else fails, lower your expectations

Oy. Maybe that's true, but I hope not.

the difference between a judgmental "should" and a predictive "should" is important and sometimes valuable

True and something I often forget.

[drwex]

Thanks for the responses and for sharing your perspective.

[drwex]

My thought in response to this is to ask whether you consider your expectations as articulated here to be "fantasies" about how other people will behave? Were you frustrated at your mother's behavior or because her behavior deviated from your expectation?

[flexagon]

By "run kind of cold" I mean I tend to react to things more logically and less emotionally than most people. This dynamic is sometimes referred to as "cold" or "cold-blooded", usually by people who react very emotionally to life events and who appreciate that about themselves.

Among ourselves, we snake people refer to it as "keeping a level head" or sometimes "NOT being an emotional dumpster fire" ;-)

I don't actually know what it means to think "we are better than our histories". Our histories provide the only lens we have on our nature, AFAICT.

[gale_storm]

Absolutely. This is a 'me too' that I'll happily take on board.

[elusiveat]

Were you frustrated at your mother's behavior or because her behavior deviated from your expectation?

I would definitely say yes to this one.

[redbird]

"Lower your expectations" isn't my advice, but it seems to be subtext for some of these specific "look for what's good here and now" prompts.

[drwex]

I tend to react to things more logically and less emotionally than most people

Yeah, that's my default mode as well. Are you on the spectrum, perchance?

Our histories provide the only lens we have on our nature, AFAICT

Our histories included blood sacrifices, generations-long village warfare, slavery, quackery done as medicine done without sterile conditions or anesthetics, epic plagues spread on purpose, and various other horrors. That our world today contains shitty people doing shitty things and shitty systems reinforcing marginalization and victimization does not change that life, and the social condition, are in every way vastly better now than in the past. Structural perpetuated sexism and other forms of inequality do not erase a history in which women could not vote, hold property, dissolve marriages, etc.

If you say that certain things are "our nature" then I want to know how we managed to get past the vast deliberately perpetuated social ills of previous centuries. Surely our nature hasn't changed century by century, has it?

[drwex]

See my responses above.

[drwex]

Mmm, I'm not sure what to make of a "yes" to an "or" question. Are you saying that both things are true? Do you accept the premise of the prompt that your frustration does not stem from your mother's behavior?

[elusiveat]

Er... the "or" got lost. Sorry. I meant to say that it was because the behavior deviated from expectation.

Not that expecting the behavior would have made it better per se, but I think the whole context might have been different if I'd expected the behavior. I probably would have said something about what types of cleaning assistance would be helpful and specifically asked her not to do any more. I imagine her behavior might have been different in response.

Certainly in the cases with cleaning standards and more general housemate dynamics, I think all parties might have been more presumptuous and asked each other more questions if we'd each had a better model of the fact that not everybody shares our individual values.

[flexagon]

I'm not on the spectrum at diagnosis-worthy levels, I'm just a geek. :)

I didn't say anything in particular was "our nature", I just said that our histories are the only lens I think we can have on such a thing. I think we've learned a lot lately on what happens to humans who grow up with wealth, social support, education, etc, and those things are part of our history too... heck, I'm not even against trying to extrapolate from them, and guess that even better environments (for some definition of "better") can probably produce even better people. That's still a guess based on observation, though.

[drwex]

Ah, sorry. Then I don't understand what you mean. If you say that history is our lens on our nature, but nothing in particular is our nature I don't know how to parse that.

[flexagon]

And a few comments up I said "I don't actually know what it means to think "we are better than our histories"", which is still true.

I think we'll have to accept that we can't parse each other on this one.