I wrote this as a module for a personal handbook I adapted for myself from a dialectical behavior therapy group I attended for a year. It ended up being more of an essay than a module, so I’m moving it out into its own page.
This essay contains at least one lie, which is there to preserve another person’s privacy.
I once knew someone who –
Aw, hey no, fuck it.
Once my boyfriend told me – rather clumsily and harshly, but without ill intent – that my actions were making it hard to be attracted to me. He said he didn’t viscerally respect me, and this was affecting e.g. his ease and enthusiasm during sex.
I immediately took it as an opportunity to tell him about behaviors he did that I thought were just as bad. I didn’t think he was significantly more mature or responsible or effective in his life, and I was angry that he was trying to get one over me when his hand was so weak. The frame I immediately had was that he was attacking me, in which case the reasonable thing to do was attack back.
This is interesting, right? He was trying to tell me about an existential threat to the relationship. He was telling me this because he wanted to keep dating me, and he needed to deliver information about how my actions impacted the relationship in order to fix it. And I, despite my fear of the relationship dissolving, did the opposite of what I needed to do to save it.
Months later, I was talking to a third party about a tense text interaction I’d had with the same boyfriend. I said, “My usual mental motion of looking at criticism is to, like, sidle grudgingly into steelmanning it. But what if I turned the receptiveness dial all the way to max? Can I do that? He definitely is telling me stuff I need to hear, so what if I tried to think of it as a super valuable gift?…”
“Yeah, Critical Boyfriend is saying the stuff that your husband and I don’t say.”
“In large part because I have a better relationship with you guys than I do with CB… so, CB is taking on the role of, like, the first guy to be executed by Mao.”
After that, I went and reread the tense interaction and extracted 15 points of criticism (implicit or explicit) that CB had made into a notebook, rephrasing it into neutral language. I entered a meditative state while doing this, watching waves of defensiveness come and go.
I went in with a kind of cool, data-collecting intent – I wasn’t rereading this to have thoughts and feelings about it, but rather to do a job of summarizing the logs from the sensor closest to carbon monoxide or radiation. And I certainly wasn’t rereading this to gather information to attack the sensor. That would be a strange thing to do. I was grateful. Being the first guy to be executed by Mao isn’t an easy task.
Weirdly, while I never vibed much with the slogan “feedback is a gift” (yeah yeah sure), I vibed much harder with the statement “the hardest feedback to hear is a great gift”. If it’s hard for you to hear, and you’re an asshole (or even just a nice person who just so happens to respond to feedback with five paragraphs on why your behavior makes sense given your circumstances and history), people aren’t going to give it to you often.
They often aren’t saying it nicely, or with your best interest at heart. But that doesn’t particularly matter. They’ve just delivered an info packet with a high ratio of “how much you need to hear it” to “how much you actually hear it”. Even if the delivery person hates your guts, when they give you a hundred thousand dollars, say thanks and take the cash.
Consider the most defensive guy you know, and imagine bluntly saying to him the thing he fucks up at. And imagine your amazement if he responded, fairly politely, “That’s hard to hear, but I know that’s something that makes me unpleasant to be around, and I’d like to work on it.” Or, even, “I know people don’t like that about me, and I regret that, but it’s pretty ingrained and realistically I’m going to be slow to change, if at all.”
You want to say that.
What is the feedback others have implicitly or explicitly given you?
What is your ideal verbal response to it?
If the response contained the promise you’ll work on it: What’s something you can do in 15 minutes?