12 Feb Help Us Improve the People We Love
Dear Developmentalist,
My friend Annette and I really enjoy talking together. When we meet up, both of us are eager to share about what is going on in our lives, but we also enjoy listening and learning from the other person. Whenever one of us shares something, the other is quick to ask a follow up question and express genuine interest. There is an easy balance in our conversations, with neither one of us doing all of the talking. We often comment that is what makes us seek out the others’ company.
Today at lunch, our conversation turned to other people in our lives — people that we genuinely love but that we find more difficult to spend time with. These people monopolize conversations, always turning the topic back to themselves and rarely asking questions of us. It strikes us as no coincidence that the people who display this tendency are often lonely and have trouble making other friends. Even having made this observation, however, we are too cowardly to raise it with our friends, because we are afraid of hurting their feelings. How might we become more courageous and ‘intervene’ to help our self-absorbed friends become better conversationalists?
Little chickens,
Marcus and Annette
Dear Marcus and Annette,
Thanks for writing me to share your situation. It’s so common to want to help friends or family but feeling afraid to. I can imagine most readers nodding when they read your letter and remember situations like this they’ve been in.
You see yourselves as cowards. But I don’t. Rather, I see you as in the horns of a dilemma of your own making. But not your own fault—it’s a classic; it’s how we’ve been shaped and socialized to see and understand making choices.
You’re seeing yourselves with two options, both of which could have bad outcomes. Do we tell our friends that we think they are self-absorbed and hard to be with, that they’re creating their own loneliness? The risk here is that we will hurt their feelings. Or do we hold our tongues and carry on with them in conversations that are all about them? The risk here is that we will feel more and more distant, maybe even come to dread spending time with them.
What if these aren’t the only choices? What if you see this situation as an opportunity to develop yourselves and your relationships with your friends? What if you imagine yourselves confronting a developmental dilemma? Where you leave ‘this way’ or ‘that way’ behind. Where you now have to stretch, where you now have to imagine other ways to see the situation that has you stuck in two choices, where you now can see and do other.
Maybe you can create ways to give the relationship you two have with each other as a gift rather than as “the right way” to have a conversation. (“I was talking with Annette yesterday and she asked me a question I never would have asked myself. Her curiosity made me curious too! We made it into a game. I’d love to play that with you. You wanna try?”)
I imagine that might be fun. And I can think of other non-threatening, perhaps silly, ways for you to invite new kinds of conversations. Maybe you initiate a “curiosity game” where you make up an invention (say, a banana skin vacuum cleaner). You’re the expert and your friend has to discover what it is and how it works through asking questions.
Use these suggestions to jump start your imaginations. Start playing.
The key thing, as I see it, is not to confront your friends with how you see them, but to invite them into environments where they and you are doing something different. The “problem” will vanish because you will see them differently. They will be performing “not self-absorbed.” Through you being courageous in this way,your friends have a shot at becoming better conversationalists.
Developmentally yours,
Lois
No Comments