Developing Hearing and Compassionate Communication
This post explores the idea of assumptions about perception and comprehension in interpersonal communication.
What would my life be like if I really understood people I talked to? I often catch myself making assumptions about other people’s thoughts and intentions when talking with them. How could I ever possibly know such things? The answer, I know, is that I cannot. But it’s a difficult tendency to overcome.
Oddly, I don’t act this way when confronted with a person who has some obvious deficiency of perception or comprehension. Because the fact they see things differently from me is so obvious, I make an effort to understand their views. For everyone else I assume they see things the same.
Yet how often can we say our mental processes are exactly the same as another’s? I imagine what a plot of comparative abilities would look like, a scale on which each aspect of my peculiar world view were compared with those I come in contact with. I know there would be people on every side of me, both near and far.
It is a difficult thing to take all those variables into consideration however, and impossible to try to mentally compare one person with another except in a very limited scope. It reminds me of trying to compare movies. While I can easily say whether I liked a movie or not, I have a hard time comparing one with another.
I conceal this fact by giving people what I think they want to hear, as in so many areas of my life. My entire career has been an effort to find the intersection between expectations and reality. And when it comes to hearing clearly, I’m at something of a disadvantage owing to an experience on my grandfather’s farm.
Is My Masculinity Too Loud?
My grandfather had a farm in Michigan, on the placid flatlands just south of Mackinac Island. It was the kind of place you could look out across acres and acres of gently undulating fields with a lone tree the only thing breaking the blue horizon. The kind of place depression era farm equipment was still employed because why should you replace it if it still did the job?
As a teenager I would help him during the summer–bringing in the hay or doing other farm chores. Once the hay was in we’d drive along the fence lines in his weathered Dodge pickup and fix the tangled barbed wire or replace damaged fence posts.
Wooden rails would have been more aesthetically pleasing but my grandfather was at times overcome with practicality and had opted for narrow metal posts instead. We hammered in the new ones with a post driver–a weighted metal cylinder with handles on either side.
Once the post was spotted he or I would pull forcefully down on the driver pounding it into the reluctant soil. In harsh contrast with the tranquility around us, the noise of our work traveled for miles. As we slammed the weighted driver onto the metal post the sound was explosive; an earsplitting metal on metal clang that clawed its way across the fields again and again.
The sound was cruel, intrusive, prolonged and unavoidable. Gripping the driver firmly I stood inches away from the post, the rusted metal of the driver close enough to kiss–or to despise. With every painful beat of the driver the concussion reverberated through my chest, quivering like a frightened field mouse.
It was not one of those times where proper hearing protection is an afterthought; an edit made much later in life when the damage done inspires a selfish grieving and propels a begrudging rewrite of history. It was something I longed for in the moment. A desire arrested twofold by my grandfather’s stoic presence.
In the first place I knew he had nothing in the truck. If he did have any hearing protection back at the house he surely wouldn’t waste the time driving back to get it. Second, his antiquated belief that any painful endurance was a desirable attribute of manliness made such a request tantamount to confessing my love of figure skating.
“You want what, Nancy?” I could hear him say, his voice painfully serious, “earplugs?”
“Yeah, I got a pair in the truck. Right next to the sunbonnet and the parasol.”
I kept my girly mouth shut and buckled down to the task at hand driving post after post throughout that afternoon. I went to bed exhausted, arms aching. My face and neck were sunburned and my ears rang long after the pounding in my head had stopped.
Deceptive and Conflicted
When I later joined the Navy my grandfather was momentarily proud of me having been a sailor in the Second World War himself, but his enthusiasm evaporated when he heard I was going to fly jets.
“I thought you were going to join the Navy,” he said.
Being an aviator subjects you to an annual flight physical. Consequently, every year I have to lie about my hearing. In the soundproof booth I sit with a cord in my right hand and listen for the tones coming through the headphones I’m wearing. When I hear a tone I depress the button then quickly release the button.
What I should be doing is listening intently, instead I’m counting heartbeats. One, two, press the button. Beat, beat, press. Sometimes I hear a tone, sometimes just a ringing in my ears at the same frequency as the tone I’m supposed to be hearing.
“Prefect hearing as usual,” says the technician when I’m done.
I cup my hand behind my ear. “What?”
She laughs.
Humor is a lie that brings us nearer to the truth. I think Pablo Picasso said that. Sometimes humor is our way of saying what we want to say without having to own it.
I feel guilty about lying but I don’t want them to tell me I can’t fly anymore. To be Grounded. NPQ as we say; not physically qualified. It’s a pride thing too, a masculine refusal to admit weakness even when I clearly should. I’m becoming my grandfather.
But my hearing is not the only thing I lie about. I lie about my favorite movie too. I’ll sometimes say “Top Gun” (which is a great film) but I also love The Sound of Music. It’s hard to say which is the better movie. I really wanted to like the Lord of the Rings movies because I enjoyed the books so much but I’ve only seen the first one and part of the second so it’s hard to convince myself I enjoyed them.
The truth is, I don’t lie about movies to be deceptive. I just don’t know what my favorite movie is. I don’t think anyone really does.
We like movies for different reasons at different times. It could be the people we saw a movie with or the mood we were in when we saw it. Trying to compare a mental movie library accumulated over a lifetime is literally an impossible task. There are too many factors and our memories are imperfect and biased receptacles of data.
It would take too much effort to think about every movie I’ve seen and analyze what was good and bad about each one. I can’t even compare every positive or negative emotion I felt about one movie with those I felt about another. The best I can do is qualitatively assess whether I liked a movie or not, I can’t provide a quantitative ranking capable of comparing it with other movies.
In the end I just classify movies into two broad categories: “movies I liked” and “movies I didn’t.” When someone asks me my favorite movie, I simply pull a movie from the list of good ones irrespective of how it compares objectively with others in the “good” category.
Dealing with Fellow Humans
In the same way we can’t hold all aspects and attributes of a movie in our mind at once, people are too complex, and relationships too subjective, to keep a detailed understanding of individuals in our heads. We consequently look for ways to quickly categorize people we meet and then only record the broad characteristics in our memories.
This mental shorthand is a huge timesaver and a necessary survival technique. The mental calculations necessary to understand each person we meet as an individual are energy sapping and time consuming. But what we lose in the process is the ability to see the nuances of a person’s unique personality characteristics.
The reality of human interaction is that it’s based on the assumption people fit neatly into specific categories. In the short term we can keep these categories separated; people we like/people we don’t, good people/bad people, intelligent people/ignorant people, etc. But in the long term, and as the number of people we meet grows, the tendency is to pile everyone into two categories and imbue them with generic traits.
The people we like tend to be thought of as also being good and intelligent and in general possessing positive characteristics. People we don’t like are bad and ignorant and in other ways inferior to our friends. When a good person does something uncharacteristically negative we make allowances, if a bad person does something nice we gloss over it or assign a selfish motive.
It keeps our interactions simpler but deprives our lives of the richness, the full spectrum and complexity a vibrant ambiguity provides. It limits our dealings with others and causes us to see the world too narrowly.
It is always the sign of a good author when a story contains characters who defy these boundaries. When the hero does something unjustifiably wrong or a villain behaves kindly and selflessly it challenges our assumptions about them.
Recognizing the Arbitrary Nature of Compassion
When I listen closely to silence there is a faint, high-pitched tone that never goes away. It doesn’t bother me but I know it’s there. I know there are some things I don’t hear. I think many people experience the same thing. I can never know for sure that the person I’m talking to is hearing exactly the same things I am. In fact I’d be surprised if they were.
But these hearing differences are slight and usually don’t significantly affect our communication. People with substantial hearing loss are in a different category however. Not necessarily in functionality–I believe the hearing impaired are just as capable as anyone with full hearing–but in how they experience life.
And when I interact with people who have a hearing disability I am aware they are experiencing a reality different from my own. This makes me hesitate before making assumptions about what they are thinking, feeling or understanding. I’m more open to their feedback and to examining where our perceptions converge and diverge. In short, I make more of an effort to understand them and help them understand me.
This is true whether the perceived differences are with respect to hearing, sight or any of the other senses. It is even truer when it concerns comprehension or mental abilities. If I’m interacting with someone who has been through a traumatic experience, someone with diminished mental capacity or even someone from a radically different background, I will give them substantial regard.
I find I’m most often upset with others when I think I know their motives and that I make inferences about other people’s intentions based on my assumptions about their perceptions. When I assume people see, hear and comprehend the same things I do I’m much more likely to believe the motives I ascribe to their behavior are accurate with little confirmation they are actually experiencing those things.
The end result is that people who have no obvious differences in perception or comprehension get lumped into the same category as everyone else because it’s easier to deal with a lot of people who are similar than to consider a myriad of subtle individual differences. But the people who do have notable deviations from the norm get the kind of attention and care I should be giving everyone.
A Category of One
Can this position be extended? What if we included not just deficiencies in comprehension but differences in emotional perception and social backgrounds? If we truly considered all the ways in which our mental models differed from those around us I’m sure we’d recognize no one is seeing the same world we are.
I’ve wondered how it is we all start out so similar and yet grow up to act so differently. While we are all genetically different, the experiences which help form our personalities and develop our character are what brings out the physiological differences in our genes. And while every parent hopes to mold their child through conscientious nurturing, not one in a million of these innumerable life events are controllable.
Every child grows up perceiving people differently from each other, empathizing inaccurately, projecting their own world view on others. Some of these children figure out how to bring out the best in the people they meet, some inspire fear or disdain, some simply learn to cope with loneliness and find happiness in spite of their social failings.
But when I meet people I rarely think about whether or not they are acting in socially unacceptable ways because they intend to be disruptive. I act as though they perceived the world the way I do, that they have the same way of expressing themselves, and that the emotion I feel when talking with them is what they intend for me to feel.
I know this is not rational, but it is natural. I believe other people behave the same way. I’ve been called a jerk before for doing things I thought were perfectly acceptable. Consequently, unless someone is so socially inept I can’t help but give them some allowance, I treat them as “normal” and give them no consideration at all.
And that’s a tragedy because people speak in many different ways and I can only hear certain things clearly. Maybe I’m deaf to their particular struggle, perhaps they’re simply speaking in a tone I can no longer hear; their voices running after me like the echo of a metal fence post being driven into the ground across a distant summer field.
[photo by Rob Ireton]
