Why we get emotional/subjective in communication

[Dean Leysen]

There are a thousand and one reasons why we get overly subjective and emotional in our communication with others, but I just want to go over a few very common, usually unnoticed ones here.

1) Projecting ourselves onto other people
The way we experience our lives is always the reference point for us to understand how others do. This is logical, but it's also probably the most common reason I know for why we misunderstand and misinterpret people's behavior towards us. Unless we consciously make an effort not to, we almost always see people more as we are than as they are. Crystal clear examples of this are for instance the boyfriend who cheats on his partner and will as a result be extremely distrusting and controlling over her because he feels she will cheat on him; even if there is no indication of this. The reason he does this is because it's often hard for us to understand that people tick differently than we do. We project our own flaws and ways of thinking onto them. Someone who never believes we tell the truth even if we always do is most commonly a liar himself, projecting. Someone who feels offended by the slightest prank might be someone who would only prank other people with malicious intent and cannot imagine you did without that intended cruelty, etc.
The way we try to understand others is by imagining what we would be thinking or feeling if we behaved as they did, often without considering that our characters and our motivations for that type of behavior might be very different.

2) Projecting a past script onto a current person or situation
Much like the first reason for being subjective, this is simply how our subconscious brain chooses to warn us for what's (likely) to come. When we are in a situation that is potentially harmful to our welfare (particularly in an emotional way) we tend to automatically compare this situation to similar ones from our past to look for clues on how to deal with it. This usually happens completely subconsciously, but we notice it through our emotions. Let's say a father tells his wife one morning that he cannot pick the kids up from school because his boss just called and needed him there today. If the wife had in the past had relationships where her partner was inconsiderate towards her; particularly if this happened often or early in life and left an imprint, she might automatically feel betrayed or hurt by this because her subconscious brain assumes her husband is being inconsiderate. Even if he gives the argumentation that his boss just called and there is nothing he could do, she might argue saying "You should have told me sooner," or "This is unfair." She is projecting the script from a past situation onto her current one because her brain recognizes enough similarities.

3) Justifying our own emotions under the assumption that they are right
Our emotions enrich our lives and they can in many cases truly help us, but they can also be complete retards. Each strong (particularly negative) emotion usually wants to preserve itself by what Paul Ekman has dubbed a refractory period; this is the moment following the initial emotion in which we will feel the strong urge to justify and maintain it.
Consider the previous example in which the wife assumes her husband is being inconsiderate. Despite the evidence that he is not, the feeling will not simply go away. Instead of accepting the information that clears him of the charges, she will discard it and look for anything incriminating that confirms her emotion. She might look to the past and say "You always do this, remember the time when..." or simply sulk in silence if she can't find anything, but in this moment she will almost inevitably feel the strong urge to justify the fact that she feels he is being inconsiderate. We make the subconscious assumption that the emotion is right, and then try to find out why; never even considering that we may just be wrong.

4) Being unable to accept people's thoughts or feelings about us
This is ridiculously common. This is one of those basic laws of emotional intelligence and self esteem. It's a natural law that you simply cannot on a fundamental level believe that someone has a positive emotion for you that you do not have for yourself; and that if they do, they simply don't know you well enough. You cannot possibly believe that someone truly loves you if you don't love yourself (after all, you wouldn't understand what there is to love in this case.) You cannot believe someone respects you if you find yourself unworthy of respect. Our own feelings for ourselves determine the basis of our self esteem and determine which feelings we can accept from others.
If we have low self esteem and thus negative feelings about ourselves, it is impossible to accept that others have very positive feelings about us provided they know us as well as we know ourselves. This is a major cause of communication errors. We might feel that people are lying to us, just trying to make us feel better, or even being sarcastic, simply because the feelings they have for us don't make sense to us.

On top of that most if not all of these often present in combination with "hot triggers" for our emotions that inevitably make us subjective. For instance the husband who cannot pick up the kids is essentially "forcing" onto his wife that she picks them up despite her potential plans for that day; this is a very primitive hot trigger for anger in our brains because it is simply registered as someone or something obstructing us from reaching our goals. This anger is comparable to when someone slips in front of you in a traffic lane or bumps into you on the street; in which case it can even be stronger ironically because there is a physical obstruction, which triggers a very primitive anger response.
How well and how fast we can make our brains believe that the emotion is unnecessary determines how fast we get over it and stop being overly subjective. In the traffic lane or with the man bumping into us we might be able to do this faster than the wife with her husband; because there the situation isn't as black and white; maybe he did enjoy telling her because it gave him a sense of power; there is a possibility our emotion is still justified; so it's more difficult to convince ourselves not to feel it.

There's definitely a thousand more reasons, and I honestly enjoy writing this so I can go on forever but these are the most common ones I can think of right now and I think it's wise to keep this in a reader's digest version.

[Kartan]

nice writing

[Null]

Dude, THANK YOU! This really explained a lot to me about myself. I've been trying to figure out this stuff for a while but I never had such a clear and objective confirmation of some of the things I was theorizing about.

[john]

thx

[Zequr]

I like this post, I understand and agree to what you say. I'm grateful you posted it, it will help me greatly. *Copy and save it in a text file on her computer*. Thank you Dean.

[Dean Leysen]

We might make a video out of this topic soon, but it'll definitely be discussed (a bit more in detail) in SDA.

[Lee Tratnyek]

Thanks Dean, this was a great read, and personally I feel it's very important that you presented this list in a manner that indicates these behaviors are so often unnoticed. As a long-time student of self-development, it can't be stressed enough how incredibly powerful the awareness of these behaviors can be. Even if your goal isn't to correct them, the simple observation and acknowledgement that "this is why" can make one almost infinitely more empathetic towards others, and a greater master of one's self; not to mention greatly more influential when you recognize these behaviors in others and tweak your methods of communication to individuals who present these blocks.

While I particularly enjoyed the line, "Our emotions enrich our lives and they can in many cases truly help us, but they can also be complete retards," since I am not by nature a person to react strongly on emotion, I found the most relevance to myself in #4.

I don't particularly lack self-esteem, in fact I'm at times exceedingly arrogant and totally in love with myself; however, my entire life I have been told that I am "gifted," that I can do anything I want because my IQ and EQ are both so incredibly high. With this sort of "praise" lauded on me, expectations are very high and perfectionism takes over. So I either become very lazy to hide in the background, or else try to do so perfect a job (work, love, play, etc...) that while others compliment me I see myself falling fall short of what I expected to accomplish, and sincerely have trouble accepting even a small thanks, let alone grand praise when I happen to receive it.

Interestingly though, perhaps because of my lofty expectations, I am often told that I do an incredible job of accepting feedback and critique of myself and my actions, and immediately applying it.

Cheers!

[Krydox]

Very interesting, a little hard to understand yet also recognizable.

[Mr. White]

Bump.

[vasqo, made in portugal]

loved this, thanks.

[Jeremy]

It's interesting Dean.

But in the same time, we share to other people our own impression of ourselves. So I don't think that someone can really compliment us, tell us we're very nice, If we do not think we are. It may happen some times, when we think « Oh, that guy see me that way, but I don't exactly do » but I think it's impossible that someone thinks something about us that is wayyyy different than what we think about us, the image of us we share.

[Amoira]

Generally I think when we communicate we interact in a way which we find acceptable due to conditioning, not necessarily due to our own belief, but by some shared thought by those who've lived around us. When people think of others, they don't generally think of how the other might feel, and rather they just project themselves into the situation of which that person is talking. We tend to reserve actual empathy for those that are close to us. Only sometimes do we try to sympathize if it's a situation that has some parallel meaning to us. I'm not going to go into my detailed opinion on this topic, but thanks for the insight Dean.

[Sherlock Rojas]

This is actually very accurate and It might help us to try and be more flexible and consciouss when communicating with others, I've been in all 4 situations before lol