(4–5 minute read)
In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice meets Humpty Dumpty.
He tells her, in effect, that a word means what he chooses it to mean.
Alice is left trying to work out the rules of the conversation.
It is a surprisingly familiar feeling.
Someone says something to you.
A few minutes later, you are explaining yourself.
You are defending a decision. Giving background information. Clarifying what you meant. Reassuring the other person. Perhaps you are even apologising.
And somewhere along the way, something else has happened.
You have started to feel as though you are the one in the wrong.
How did you get there?
It can happen face-to-face, in a text message, an email or a conversation at work. And although people often describe this experience in relationships involving narcissistic traits, the communication mechanism itself is not exclusive to narcissism.
Sometimes the important part of a message isn’t simply the words.
It is what you have to accept as true in order to answer them.
That is where the work begins.
Words → Assumption → Task → Work
Consider a work email:
“Can you explain why this still hasn’t been dealt with?”
It looks like a straightforward request for information.
But before answering, slow it down.
Words: What was actually said?
First, stay with the communication that actually arrived.
Not what you fear it means.
Not what you think may be coming next.
Not the argument you are already preparing yourself to have.
What was actually said?
We often start answering what we think is implied. We anticipate criticism. We fill in the gaps. We respond to the next sentence before it has even been spoken.
So start with the words.
What is actually there?
Assumption: What am I being asked to accept as true?
Before you answer, look at what is already built into the question.
What has been presented as fact?
What has already been decided for you?
What would you have to accept as true in order to respond?
Take the email again:
“Can you explain why this still hasn’t been dealt with?”
To answer it as framed, you may first have to accept several assumptions:
That the matter should already have been dealt with.
That it was your responsibility to deal with it.
That something has gone wrong.
That you owe the sender an explanation.
All of those things might be true.
But they might not be.
And if you begin explaining before checking the assumption, you can find yourself defending a position you never actually occupied.
Humpty would be quite comfortable here.
The terms have been set. The meaning has been decided.
And now you are being asked to work inside it.
Task: What am I now being recruited to do?
Once you accept the assumption, what job appears?
Explain yourself?
Defend your decision?
Reassure somebody?
Justify what you did?
Repair something?
Take responsibility?
Provide more information?
This is the important move:
Somebody else’s understanding of a situation can quietly become your task.
You may not notice the shift. You may simply feel uncomfortable and start doing something about it.
But discomfort does not automatically mean a task belongs to you.
Work: Does that task actually belong to me?
This is where things can become surprisingly expensive.
You may spend ten minutes writing a careful reply.
You may disclose personal information to explain why you made a decision.
You may spend an evening replaying the conversation and constructing better answers in your head.
You may explain the same thing several different ways because the first explanation did not seem to settle it.
The amount of work generated by a communication is not necessarily proportional to the amount of information it contains.
A very short message can create an extraordinary amount of work.
But only some of that work may actually belong to you.
So ask yourself:
Do I need to reply?
Do I need to explain?
Do I need to disclose?
Do I need to repair?
Do I need to keep thinking about this after the conversation has ended?
And most importantly:
Is that work actually mine?
Don’t complete the message for them
Written communication creates another trap.
When information is missing, we tend to supply it.
A brief reply arrives and we wonder:
Are they annoyed?
Was that sarcastic?
Do they want an explanation?
Am I supposed to say something else?
Before long, we can find ourselves answering a question the other person never actually asked.
Like Alice, we can end up trying to make sense of a conversation whose rules we did not create.
A useful rule is:
Respond to the information actually supplied, not to the communication you fear may be implied.
If somebody has not expressed a question clearly, you do not necessarily have to construct the question for them and then answer your own construction.
That is double work.
The same thing happens in conversation
Face-to-face communication moves faster, which can make the process harder to notice.
Someone asks a loaded question and we answer automatically.
Consider:
“When are you going to apologise to your sister?”
Answering:
“I’m not apologising because…”
has already accepted something important:
That an apology is owed.
Perhaps it is.
Perhaps it isn’t.
But there is another possible place to begin:
“What makes you think I owe her an apology?”
That doesn’t attack the other person.
It simply returns to the assumption before accepting the task.
Slow it down
A feeling of discomfort does not necessarily mean that something needs doing.
Sometimes discomfort is useful information:
Something about this interaction deserves another look.
So slow the conversation down.
Ask yourself:
What was actually said?
What am I being asked to accept as true?
What task does accepting that create for me?
What work would that task require?
Is that work actually mine?
You may discover that there is something you genuinely need to address.
You may have misunderstood something. You may have made a mistake. You may owe somebody information, an explanation or an apology.
But you may also discover something rather liberating:
There is nothing for you to do.
You don’t have to disclose everything to hold a boundary
There is another form of work that can creep in here: explaining why your boundary matters.
You may find yourself providing your history, describing an important relationship, explaining a vulnerability or revealing personal information so that the other person will understand why you have said no.
Sometimes we choose to explain because we want to be understood.
That is perfectly reasonable.
But it should remain a choice.
A boundary does not require the disclosure of the information that makes the boundary important to you.
You do not have to provide enough evidence to make another person agree that your boundary is justified.
This isn’t about diagnosing everybody
None of this means that every clumsy question contains calculated manipulation.
People make assumptions. They communicate badly. They misunderstand situations. They become defensive. They sometimes speak before they think.
And people without narcissistic personality disorder can communicate in exactly these ways.
The useful question is therefore not always:
“What kind of person would say this?”
Sometimes it is simply:
“What is happening in this communication, and what part of it actually belongs to me?”
That question moves us away from diagnosing another person and back towards something we can control:
our own participation.
Before you explain yourself, defend yourself or begin supplying information, slow the exchange down.
Go back through it.
Words.
What was actually said?
Assumption.
What am I being asked to accept as true?
Task.
What am I now being recruited to do?
Work.
Does that task actually belong to me?
You may have something to answer.
You may have something to repair.
Or you may discover that somebody else’s question never created a job for you in the first place.
You don’t always have to follow Humpty onto the wall.