Submitted by uuuuuummmmm_actually t3_z6o5hi in books
You’re Wearing That? by Deborah Tannen gave some solid insight into the complicated communication dynamics of intimate familial relationships. It focuses mainly on the mother-daughter dynamic giving insight into why communication can be so emotionally charged between mothers and daughters.
What really stuck with me was how the author addressed meta messages or meta meanings. I’d seen this topic addressed in a viral thread about “ask culture” versus “guess culture”. Tannen explains how exclaiming that “guess culture” is wrong and that the more direct “ask culture” makes more sense ignores the fact that there really are two forms of communication happening in any given conversation. And that the longer the relationship of the two people speaking the more likely there are messages that belie what’s explicitly said (meta messages/meanings).
The closeness and length of a relationship make any conversation automatically more of a “minefield” due to intimate knowledge and shared experiences.
It was really interesting reading about the reasons why conversations with my parents can trigger such an emotional response even though to an outsider nothing deserving of such a reaction was said.
I really recommend this book if you find that your communication with your mother in particular tends to be more frustrating and upsetting than enjoyable and intimate.
[deleted] t1_iy2ihlc wrote
That sounds pretty interesting — I recently noticed in a conversation between a friend of mine and her mother that despite the seemingly harmless contents of the conversation as I heard it, the emotional toll it took on my friend made it apparent that there was an absurdly complex mess of a situation going on just below the surface. When the conversation was brought up after the fact, my friend assumed the aforementioned chaos was self-evident to everyone other than herself and her mother, when on the surface it just appeared as though a normal conversation was making her uncomfortable.
I feel that especially in close relationships, we'll sort of dig each other into a "language pit" which makes it absurdly difficult for either party to leverage external input, because everything is coded, and then externally established resolutions only make sense in the context of what amount of code has been translated in the presentation of the problem, which is never 100% otherwise there'd be no communication issues to begin with — so what's brought back into the pit as a cherry pie for peace gets received as a maggot-infested something-else, and on goes the cycle of miscommunication.