Honestly, it’s amazing we can even communicate at all when you think about it.
We are all essentially ‘aliens’ to each other.
And we try to use language and definitions in common to bridge the gap between our unique and individual experiences, to be able to share ourselves with each other, and build together.
There is a reason that when you call a crisis line, the crisis listeners are trained to summarize your words back to you, to intuit and identify your specific feelings.
We call it ‘active listening’ and we use it so that the other person feels heard, feels seen, feels that someone is truly with them as they are experiencing and talking about their pain and trauma. It does – incredibly – help. Because if you think about it, there is really only so much someone can technically do on the phone with you, e.g. give you resources for you to contact to get yourself help.
But people call to talk to another human being because they feel alone in their suffering.
It’s the secular version of going to a pastor or a priest, it’s what we wish we could do with an unconditionally loving parent: bring them our problems and our pain, be met in our suffering, and not be shamed for our feelings.
The process of ‘active listening’ is intended to reproduce what happens when someone can perspective-take for you.
So someone can be ‘trained’ as an active listener and not necessarily be able to perspective-take for another person, but the effect is the same (or closely enough) for the caller. If the training works, the caller feels seen and heard and understood, and that they are not alone, even if the listener doesn’t actually understand their perspective or their pain.
To perspective-take for another person is to understand how they see the world and how they think.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently as I have been (unsuccessfully) navigating communication in my most recent relationship. When I expressed, for example, that we are struggling to communicate because he doesn’t understand me, he interpreted that to mean that I was saying he wasn’t smart enough to understand.
Of course, it’s not a matter of intellect at all but of a kind of cognitive flexibility.
That’s why the most stubborn people are the ones who adamantly insist that ‘this is the way X is’ and will not deviate from that, and even become angry if you try to explain otherwise. Because, from their perspective, you are unraveling reality.
If you are the kind of person who desires safety and security, then you have low tolerance for ambiguity.
The foundation of the world is solid.
Reality is completely understood.
They know the answers to the important questions of life.
I truly envy that certainty.
I miss when I felt that way, and I was so sure about everything. The flaw, however, in that approach to modeling reality and life is that you we can’t know everything and so what you don’t know will inevitably undo the fabric of your life somehow 😂
The level of shock that engenders cannot be understated.
There’s a reason that people who read and have higher levels of education often have more cognitive flexibility in general.
Reading allows you to ‘inhabit’ the interior life of a character in a way that is still unparalleled by movies and other media. When you’re a reader, you learn so many different ways that people think, how they approach the world, even if it is reprehensible.
I accidentally got a crash course in perspective-taking when I was a kid.
My father used to take me and my brother with him to AA meetings when we were little. We’d sit in the back, coloring quietly, while (usually) man after man after man would talk about the worse things they’d done in life and why.
It reminds me of Alia’s character in “Dune”, who absorbed the memories of generations while still in the womb, and therefore was born with understanding beyond what she could have experienced in her years.
Which itself – side note – reminds me of that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation I hate
…where Picard and the alien captain basically repeat “Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra” at each other the entire episode.
But that’s why shared media (along with shared experiences) allows people to understand each other better.
Not only will you have shared references that you both understand but it also shapes your worldview and your beliefs and experiences.
For some people, being in a relationship is simply about having someone to ‘do life with’.
For others, it’s about feeling seen and understood, and sharing your essential selves with each other.
Still others view it almost as a business where the purpose of the relationship is to maximize material resources.
I don’t think any one is ‘better’ than the other as long as everyone is on the same page. (I absolutely love that the metaphor for “understanding” is related to reading: ‘being on the same page’.)
I personally think that the ability to perspective-take for others is a indicator of how maturely self-aware someone is
…in addition to their level of life experience, or what they have learned of others’ life experiences. As well as the ability to recognize the same patterns and cross-apply them to other concepts.
If you are dealing with someone who does not have empathy for others, it means they are likely not able to perspective-take for them, and your ability to communicate with them is intrinsically limited.
It’s often still worth trying anyway.