Bottles and wells

[mrissa]

Every once in awhile I make a post about communication with Minnesotans, because I know how frustrating we can be to well-meaning outsiders. I've been thinking about it after seeing a couple of friends from the south (the real south this time, not my usual value of south, which is Iowa, or Albert Lea, or on a really bad day Farmington) expressing frustrations up here. And I wanted to try to get something across:

When you are an introverted person from a subculture that encourages introverts, the low-energy state is not talking to other people about your feelings. That is the default -- not just as culturally imposed but as internally experienced. That is what you can do when you can't manage to do anything else. Extroverted people from cultures that encourage extroverts will often encourage us not to "keep it all bottled up," to "let our feelings out." So will extroverts who were raised in an introvert culture and have found other options. This is using the wrong metaphor. For a naturally extroverted person whose subculture has encouraged them to be an extrovert -- say, for an extroverted woman from the south -- it takes energy not to go, "Aaaaagh, this is driving me crazy, I am so frustrated, here are the things bothering me right now, aaaaagh!"

But that's not what's going on when you have an introvert from an introverted culture. If you treat us like we are really like you deep down and are inexplicably forcing ourselves not to be for weird cultural reasons, you will become confused, and your feelings will probably be hurt. "I thought we were really good friends," you will say to yourself. "Why didn't she know she could come cry on my shoulder? Why didn't she feel she could tell me how she's feeling about these things that were bothering her about her life right now? They're big things! They're upsetting things! Why would she bottle it up like that?"

Sometimes the answer is that you are really good friends, and she does know she can come cry on your shoulder, but she just didn't feel like doing that. Sometimes it's that she didn't feel like she had enough energy to do that. And that because you are such good friends she figured you would understand, once you knew the basic facts themselves, how she must be feeling. When someone's -- oh, gosh, I'm having trouble coming up with an example that's obviously close and yet not true of anyone specific on the friendslist at the moment -- anyway, when someone close to you dies, the other people close to you know that you are sad and upset. Or when there is a bad medical problem. Or a big relationship problem, or a big job problem. Or etc. Telling you about her feelings takes more energy than not telling you, and that may not be energy she has at that time.

This is all sounding like the Minnesotan way of saying, "Hey, I'm really not doing well," and I have to say that the last week has not gone well where the vertigo is concerned. Things have not been good. I have, for example, discovered that among mothers' least-favorite sentences over the phone is, "It really hardly counts as a burn; it's barely even there today." my habit of focusing on the good news is apparently not as reassuring as I'd hoped: "Neither the picture nor the vacuum cleaner was broken," in bright and cheerful tones, does not turn out to result in people going, "Oh, good! Glad to hear it! How nice for you then!" Sentences like, "Oh, I meant to tell you: both the gibbon and my uncle survived!" seem to strike me as more appropriate for leading into stories than they do other people. (People who have not conversed with me live and in person: be forewarned. I do this all the time.)

But mostly I've been thinking about this for other people, as a general idea. Not universally true of all introverts or all Minnesotans or at all times. Just -- something to consider. That when an introvert from an introvert-encouraging culture or subculture takes the time to talk about feelings with you, it may be because they are making an effort for your sake, because they know it's important to you, and not because letting it all out is what they really truly need. You may be letting it all out of the pressurized bottle. They are pulling it up from a well, bucket by bucket. And sometimes it's okay to sit down with them next to the well and just let them rest, put your hand on their shoulder and point out a funny-shaped cloud if you see one.

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

And the winch is broken.

*loff*

S'okay. Some of us are happy just to breathe at you.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But that was in another country, and besides, the winch is broken. Yah.

It's a companionable sort of breathing.

[aedifica]

All this is good to read. Most of it I know intellectually, but haven't really internalized (despite the fact that over the last few years I've been becoming somewhat more introverted). But there have been at least one or two times, particularly early in college, that I met an introvert and really liked him or her and would have liked to become friends, but we spoke such different languages (metaphorically) that it just didn't happen.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think that putting words on how we do things sometimes helps in negotiating what we can expect of each other, what we can do differently, what not to take wrong.

One of the problems I have is that I present gregariously to the outside world, and that can very easily be mistaken for extroversion by people who don't know the difference -- or even people who do know the difference but haven't spotted the signs that in another 20 minutes I am going to go collapse from all these monkeys.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Glad to be of service.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Can't we work pitchers and wells in here somehow, too?

Yeah, the key point to learn is that some people *spend* energy on being social, and especially on talking about emotional things. It doesn't *take* energy to keep quiet, it *saves* energy. (Isn't there some stereotype going around that most men are like this? I mean, it may not be *true*, but it ought to be a *familiar* concept!)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, but I think that the stereotype that most men are like this goes along with and they shouldn't be. Women's magazines are constantly giving advice on getting "him" to open up and let his feelings out.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Yeah, what you said.

Also, there is: "Don’t speak unless you can improve the silence."

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

*Smiles lopsidedly, sits down*

Not sure if that translated. A lot of this sort of thing seems to be done by tone of voice and body language and pauses in conversation. Thanks for articulating it, anyway.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

One tries.

[pameladean]

Yes yes yes. I was not raised in Minnesota, but there is a weird strain of some Welsh subculture (sometimes we just call it "the Welsh" if people are Not Talking or Taking Gigantic Steps Without Telling You) in my family. My mother does not have it. It was my dad. Boy howdy, was it my dad, and his dad. Man. All of her kids drive her nuts because it's like pulling teeth to get out of us what she thinks of as very basic information. She tells us stuff all the time. We have to remember to do that, and yes, if things are strained, then that is An Effort; it's not the default.

P.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

That is a good way of putting it. I often have to remember that.

I especially have to remember it about myself, because I'm sometimes about the bottles (especially when things are going mostly okay and I want to vent about little things). But I am sometimes about the wells (like when things are going really, really badly...except on LJ because there it might be more like a geyser! But in person I can still be a well because a> I already wrote about it, and b> I am bored of my problems and c> I do not want to geyser all over you in the middle of Starbucks.) When things have gotten bad in recent years there were friends who have seen me be a bottle person for years in the past, who knew what was up, who may indeed have been hurt because I didn't say anything to them or get together with them or anything.

And the catch is, I don't always know which way I'm going to be until I am in the middle of it. Sometimes I have been a well for weeks and then suddenly I find myself under So Much Pressure, especially if Mirth is just not up to hearing about it (or if he's part of the precipitate) and I need to find someone else.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think just having more people thinking about multiple modes of handling this sort of thing might help.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

Well, people are people. No matter where you go, they pretty much work the same. What your excellent point may highlight, though, is the fact that people are not bottles. Our feelings don't build up and then explode. There are different ways of coping with life experiences, and the demonstrative, expressive way that pop psychology tells us that we need to do it may not always be the best. I'm not even sure that it's sometimes the best. I've heard some reports that there are studies showing that midwestern style coping, "bottling up" feelings, and forced cheerfulness are better than psychotherapy.

So, I say, bottle it up all you want. It's those that are letting it out who should be making excuses. :-) I mean, what if I don't want "it" all over me?

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Hah. I am a bottler and I do feel guilty about it all the time! Like, good lord, am I the only person who can't bravely and politely suffer in silence?

[zwol.livejournal.com]

This speaks to my own difficulty with expressing sympathies, especially online; for instance I rarely throw in sympathetic comments when people do vent about their problems on LJ, despite feeling that this is expected of me.

It's not quite the same thing, though; my inner reaction is along the lines of "I shouldn't just say the same thing that anyone could say, I should think of something meaningful and actually helpful to say, and that's really hard and why can't I just hand the person a cup of tea and/or rub knots out of their neck for a while?" and then I give up.

I could come up with some pop-psych nonsense about this being my family's fault but meh.

[aedifica]

I have the same difficulty figuring out meaningful ways to reply when others post about their problems. But then I remember the times I've posted about problems, and how sometimes I just wanted to vent (and then I didn't care what responses I got) and other times it meant so much just to know that there were other people out there pulling for me, regardless of what words they used to express it--and so I usually go ahead and write my supportive comment no matter how inane the comment seems.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I need a metaphor that will account for me mostly being on the well side of things except when I spring a leak.

I don't bottle stuff up. But I do occasionally fall apart. Maybe that's me falling into my own well?

Metaphors. Bah. Tricksy little things.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Maybe you sometimes draw up a bucket and discover that it's got a leak? or has more in it than you can comfortably carry? but it's already up here and must be dealt with? Maybe?

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I am kind of proud of myself for realizing that going ice skating with friends next Thursday is a bad idea because I will be socialed out. It doesn't happen often-- it's only in the last two years that I've been in demand-- but when it does... goodbye tact, goodbye conversation, hellooo wishing I could stop snarking.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have started marking days on the calendar, "NOTHING AND NOBODY," so that I will respect my own need for rest time and introvert time. The theory is that I can maybe take as many days as I did for sick days, except that I won't have to be sick for them. As much. Maybe.

I don't go tactless and unconversational; I just get very sad and tired and feel obligated not to let that get on other people, so it all stays on me. So that's no good.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

I know it feels cultural when you're there, but not everyone from the south is extroverted.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's why I specified extroverts from an extrovert culture and introverts from an introvert culture: extroverts from an introvert culture and introverts from an extrovert culture tend to react somewhat differently. But when your own tendencies and the dominant tendencies of the culture around you mesh, it can seem a lot more "natural" and "how things are" -- and can cause a lot more culture shock if you move.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I'm insanely extroverted and usually highly talkative, but I do not "let it out." Subject-skirting babbling is easy and comforting for me; talking about my feelings is a lot of work.

The most difficult thing for me to explain to people is that the times I do get all talked out are the times I want to be around other people the most. It gets read as anti-social, when it's the exact opposite.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

I wonder if that's anything like the desire I get sometimes, which is to sit at a sidewalk cafe and watch crowds go by and not say a word to anyone.

Being able to do this is one of the things I miss most about New York City.

[fredcritter.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I just read an extreme example of this (in a locked post). Basically the person talked a SO into breaking up; the Extroverted Person thought of it as digging gently to get at the SO's real feelings which the SO was not communicating out of a desire not to hurt the EP but I suspect the SO experienced it as "Get OFF my back already, I don't KNOW how I feel, I just TOLD you I'm overextended right now so don't make me make deicisions, well fine then maybe it's easier if we just break up!"

I think it's a continuum rather than a binary divide. I'm very extroverted compared with my husband but not at all compared to my mom. The result is that I don't tell her how I feel about anything because my reaction to prodding is to curl up in a hedgehog ball. I think anyone around me can generally tell what my feelings are fairly easily, but expressing them somehow seems like a different thing from talking about them. I don't know if this translates to borderline raised in an extrovert environment, extrovert with a sense of privacy or what. I never can quite figure out why anyone would want to talk about their own feelings or their sex life though: express feelings, yes, have sex, of course. But talking about them only makes sense to me if it will get results - I can understand "It hurts my feelings when you --- so could you please not do that?" but not "How do you *really* feel?" I feel less like a bottle or a well than like a sheet of paper. If the feelings are there you can probably see them, unless I want to wrap them up (in which case you can probably still see there's a bundle there). But digging for them won't help.

[careswen.livejournal.com]

Some of this makes sense and is helpful. Thank you.

The well is a really good analogy. Having been married to a somewhat-Midwestern introvert for 11 years, and having had long-term personal or intimate relationships with other introverts, I get how hard it is for introverts to draw up from the well.

I think the part that I still don't understand about what you say about Minnesotans is the passive-aggressive speech patterns, when they bother to speak up, but still don't say what they mean. If it's so hard to draw up from the well, wouldn't it be more worth the effort if the water (and the meaning) were clear?

Also, how are non-natives supposed to express themselves honestly to a culture of people who prefer this mode of communication? I have been told that the very act of gently and carefully saying precisely what I mean will mislead such folks into believing I mean the exact opposite. This strikes me as unfair.

It's especially difficult when these rules do not apply to all Minnesotans -- seems like I may be better off doing what I was doing before, which was dealing with people as individuals, as well as I can from how I know them. But I need to not be the only one willing to adapt.

Part of why this is such a fascinating topic for me right now is because I am learning to open up and express my feelings to others. One might think this would come easily to a southern introvert, but it does not necessarily -- some of the most important things have been terribly hard to say. And my inability to express my feelings has had an enormously negative impact on some relationships. So I'm trying to learn more positive, honest, constructive modes of communication, for the sake of saving my dearest friendships (and my own sanity).

So my frustration comes from feeling like no matter how hard I try, I'm doomed to get it wrong, because the rules of doublespeak don't make sense to me, and seem completely contrary to the honest form of communication I'm trying so desperately to learn. I'm hoping you can help me make sense of it, so I don't have to feel so helplessly doomed.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

The people who use Minnesotanism as an excuse for dishonesty are assholes who are ruining it for the rest of us. We don't like them either.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

i feel that i am really quite especially emotionally expressive for a minnesotan. like, i worry sometimes about leaking onto the rest of you all.

on the other hand, when i got divorced, everyone was surprised because there were only about six people who knew we were having problems; four of whom are related to me by blood and two of whom found out a week before i told the ex it was over.

it's weird.

i'm glad the vacuum cleaner isn't broken. them things are expensive.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah well; we don't like this one particularly but hadn't planned to buy a new one this week, so I'm glad, too.

Anyway, I've run into lots of Minnesotans who think that they're way more expressive than the average...until they come out with something that is so totally so typically Minnesotan that everyone kind of chuckles and goes, "Yeah," real quiet-like. Like with your divorce.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Yeah. That.

A few years ago, something awful happened to a friend of mine - which she kept a secret until several months later when it sort of blew up all over her. She had been talking about it for way too long, talking about it to the point of exhaustion.

And I felt, I don't know, a little avoidant and guilty for saying, "Do you want to play Katamari Damacy?" instead of Talking About It (I think large chunks of Canada have that Minnesotan introvert-culture thing; certainly my family does), but - there was something right about that, too.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh yah. Oh, video games instead of talking about it: yes. I don't even play video games, and I know this one.

[capnflynn.livejournal.com]

Hullo, came here via rj_anderson's LJ, and wanted to say thank you for writing this. I'm from Kansas, which I suspect is v. similar vis a vis introversion to Minnesota, and although I'm okay with not talking about stuff (even amongst the family), this helps me understand why my friends from, say, New Orleans or Florida, are always wanting to talk about everything!

So thank you. :D

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your kind words.

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

I love your incredibly kind, articulate, and helpful introvert/extrovert posts.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thanks, haddayr.

Hey! I dreamed you had a picnic in a tornado (not on the ground next to, in), and nobody was bothered but me. (Well, timprov was symbolically bothered rather than physically bothered.) I think my subconscious needs to stop coming up with creative ways to explain why it feels like I'm going round and round while I'm sleeping. Other than the tornado and the venomous aliens, it was a good picnic.

[ex-kaz-maho.livejournal.com]

Telling you about her feelings takes more energy than not telling you, and that may not be energy she has at that time.

I wish I could think of something deep or clever to say, but I just wanted to thank you for putting these thoughts out there. The whole post - and especially the above line - speak to me personally. So, thank you!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Glad to do it, thanks!

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

This was an interesting post - I enjoy learning more about different people's communication patterns, as I find it helps me improve my own. My personal flaw is an excess of directness in communication, to the point that what seems to me to be "straightforward communication" often comes across to others as "obnoxious bluntness."

For example, back when I was a QA supervisor at the transcription agency, part of my job was calling the transcriptionists whenever I noticed they were doing something wrong. My natural script for this conversation would follow this pattern: Greeting/identification -> statement of problem -> statement of desired correction -> Good-bye. To me, this seemed like a perfect conversation, as I told them what needed to be told while minimizing the interruption in their routine. Then one of the transcriptionists complained about me to my supervisor and he demonstrated to me what they considered to be a more ideal script: Greeting/identification -> Social nicety (ask about weather/health/etc.) -> General observation about work -> statement of problem (framed as general observation) -> statement of desired correction -> request for feedback ("Is there anything else about this dictator or this account that you're having questions about?") -> Good-bye. This just seemed a ridiculously roundabout way of doing things, but I seemed to get better results, so apparently I'm just an oddball and in this case the shortest distance between two points really isn't a straight line.

That was one nice thing about learning Japanese - exactly what social niceties are needed, and when, and to what degree, was more explicitly spelled out in the process of learning the language, because you'd be interacting with a foreign culture. It's just assumed that one will automatically learn the proper way of interacting with one's own culture, and it doesn't necessary work that way.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And even if you've successfully learned the proper way of interacting with your own culture, shifting types of work or regions of the country will knock that all out of alignment, and you'll have to relearn but with less of the patience people give young children. It's all very complicated.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

I have a friend whose grown son frequently starts phone conversations with, "I'm fine now" which is generally a lead in to "I'm in the hospital and they've reattached the finger/replaced the lost blood/ surgically removed my handlebars from my forehead."

She's become accustomed to it but, like your mother, she's not especially fond of the phenomenon.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't think my mom can complain, since I did learn it from her.

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

This is something I've had trouble with for a long time, especially since I've been married: I'm a native Virginian but my Mom and grandparents are/were Midwesterners, and when it comes to talking about feelings I picked up that way to talking about things (or not talking about them) that you describe. My wife, on the other hand, is a talkative Southerner who also has Italian in her near-ancestry, so our conversations about feelings clash as often as not.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And that can be hard, even both knowing that neither of you is wrong, you're just different. I wish you both patience in that sort of situation.