An Antidote to Mean Girls and Other Crazymaking People

Communication takes place on many levels. What someone says is not always what they mean, and in certain cases, it can overwhelm us with stress and paralysis. In other cases it’s just annoying. Really annoying. Luckily, there’s an antidote.

Here’s the classic, psych-101 example of what I’m talking about: a mother, in a moment of feeling resentful and repulsed by her 4-year-old, says, “Come give mommy a hug.” Her words say that she wants closeness, but her tone and body language say, “don’t touch me,” and the shot clock is on. The child must formulate a response, and quickly.

This is called a double bind, and it’s one of the most stressful states we humans experience. It’s crazymaking, literally. You know that feeling when your brain just can’t compute something, and you feel like you’re short-circuiting? Like that. When it happens when you’re a kid, it can throw a wrench in your emotional development.

The child in this example will usually (albeit reluctantly) hug the mother, and thus begins a lifelong habit of ignoring the non-verbal communication.

Unfortunately, double binds are common in normal families. An easy example is the absurd but still operational dictum of “do as I say, not as I do.” Then there are the times when they say something is good for you, when really it’s just good for them.

As I’ve mentioned before, parenting is the staggering and thankless task of socialization, and it often involves enforcing rules and structure on kids that the parents don’t buy into 100% themselves. So mixed messages are part of the territory, part of the family's secret code. Sometimes it’s mild but trips us up anyway, and sometimes it’s severe but we don’t get tripped up by it. We’re individuals. There’s no accounting for it.

Either way, some of us grow up and get out into the world, and we’ve been programmed to ignore the non-verbal communication. It becomes unconscious. So even if someone says, “I’m not making fun of you,” when clearly they are, we can feel inexplicably obligated to behave as though they are telling the truth. We bow out and let them off the hook, grumbling to ourselves, when really we want to say, “Yes, you are, you hateful harpy, and you’re not fooling anyone with this airheaded damsel crap!”

That’s what we really want to say, but our brain is busy rebooting and we can’t speak, and the snappy retort doesn’t come to us until ten minutes or an hour or a day later, at which point we replay the situation over and over in our minds (but this time, we win).

Some of us are lucky enough to have an aptitude for spotting inconsistencies among the levels of communication, a.k.a. indirect communication, and some of us (like most therapists) have had specific training in it. It takes practice, but once you can spot it, it’s extremely helpful in navigating human interactions.

Between my aptitude and training, I’m exceptional at it, but I’m not normal. Perhaps I can help you be less normal in this area, too.

The first step is spotting it. It takes some time to develop your radar. At first, it happens in hindsight. You remember something about an interaction that just didn’t quite make sense, and you realize there were mixed messages. Oh, what a relief it is. You’re not crazy! After a while, you start to notice when it’s actually happening. Be patient, it's a process.

The second step is assessing whether a response from you is expected or appropriate. When your drinking buddy asserts incessantly that he wants a girlfriend, but he overcriticizes and pushes away every woman he meets, well… there’s no shot clock. You’re not on the hook to call him out on it, unless he asks, or unless you have that kind of relationship. Or unless you’re fed up. You’re allowed, but you’re not under pressure to respond. This is important.

Finally, when you’ve spotted it in the moment and a response is expected from you imminently, the shot clock is running. It’s time to administer the antidote.

The antidote to indirect communication is direct communication, i.e. when words and tone and body language all say the same thing, and nothing is left under the radar.

For example, with that mean-girl co-worker, you address both the words and the non-verbal messages in your response to her: “You say you’re not making fun of me, but it’s obvious from your energy and tone that you are, and I don’t appreciate it.”

In a perfect world, that 4-year-old would be able to say, “You know, Mom, I hear you say you want me to hug you, but you also seem repulsed by me, so I’m not sure what to do.”

(Can you feel a sense of wholeness and completion when you read these responses? It's a beautiful thing, direct communication.)

It isn’t easy to be this direct. It feels risky and confrontational. It takes courage, and it also takes vulnerability. It means showing your cards when the other person isn’t showing theirs.

And, there are consequences. This kind of integrated response will often send an indirect communicator scrambling to justify their non-verbal communication.

“No, I’m not making fun of you, it’s just that I think it’s funny, that thing you do – I like it!”

“Of course I want you to hug me, I’m just tired and fed up with grown up stuff you don’t understand.”

Whatever. Don’t buy it. Sometimes they’re earnest – truly unaware of the mixed messages – and sometimes they’re just manipulative little pills. It can be infuriating when they believe their own rationalizations, but as long as you aren’t snowed by it, that’s what matters. You did your part and communicated with integrity, and you get to walk away clean.

This isn’t about being right – this is about saving your own sanity. So that when your drinking buddy says, for the thirtieth time, “I just want to meet a woman who’s normal and sane; is that so much to ask,” you’re not annoyed. You can just smile into your pint and continue watching the game, unruffled.