So HOW are YOU (Sorry)?

Very Social Creatures and Our Conversational Spottiness!

There are a lot of things communicated whenever two people interact. Humans are social animals with all kinds of bizarre and contradictory interests in communicating (and not communicating). All of this together allots us oh so many opportunity to get wires crossed. What I find fascinating about human interaction is that what we communicate has so little to do with our literal words and so much more to do with *how* and *when* and *where* they are presented. Obviously there's so much going on with body language, tone of voice, and other physical cues, but then there's also the context; context supremely shapes the actual contours of your naked phrasing.

Even when you're listening you're constantly sending signals to the other person. These signals communicate your receptivity to what you are hearing. Even the pacing at which you interject the expected auditory backflow (uh-huh... oh sure... wow), the mirroring (or lack thereof) that occurs when the other person is talking, where your eyes are going when they aren't in those rare moments of eye contact... they all say so much on level lingering between conscious and subconscious.

And then there's how you play your part in the conversation... We are inundated with social scripts, rituals, and cues. They all come with intricate implicit subtleties. The exact boundaries are notoriously challenging to map (like art, I just know it when I see it). But one thing is certain: If your interlocutor doesn't feel "heard" s/he will either check out of the conversation or continue restating the "unheard" over whatever you are trying to say. This isn't a novel concept and in fact is pretty much the basic tenet of every book on negotiations, being a highly successful person, or having difficult conversations with friends.

Still it's amazing how often people skip this one and just assume they know what the other would communicate if they were given to chance to communicate. I sometimes think nobody really wants to hear what anyone else is saying. They, instead, want to tell. And not just about themselves, little narcissists that they are. They also want to tell us about us. Sometimes, at least, I will begin the long journey of unwinding a personal experience and find my own story hijacked within the first sentence. If it's a problem, suddenly I have inapplicable advice. If it's an anecdote, suddenly the storytellers around me are telling me how it played it out.. I've become more assertive simply talking over people and correcting them, but it is odd that co-option can be mistaken for sympathy. If we really want to hear-to-listen, again, asking questions is the most effective path towards understanding. As soon as assumptions start seeping into the listener's version of my story, there is a chasm widening by the second between my story and the new version of my story that make the two irreconcilable.

 I have this theory that conversations are often like little scavenger hunts.  Your conversationalist may have very specific places they want to take you in order to feel satisfied, but you have to follow the clues and ask the right questions to get there. Sure it would be much easier if they would just "tell you" but few people function on so direct a level partially because things said upfront often are lost in communication; besides which, etiquette requires a certain display of interest before divulgance. To function in almost any human interaction, you need a sense (intuitive or outright) of what's going on under the surface. Nobody can rest on the assumption that others are going to supply the information necessary to understanding if steps are not taken to assure them that there is receptivity to that information.

Because this concept is engrained in our social norms, a few ritual interactions have developed around the idea of communication. These ironically have become so ritualized that they actually block communication instead of enhancing it. For instance:

1. "How are you?" One of the basic concepts of active listening is to start with open ended questions. These give your interlocutor free range to focus on what's actually important to him/her. After that, there's a chance for follow up on individual threads with increasingly specific questions. So, in theory "how are you" is one of the greatest questions to start with, because it's the Rorschach blot of questions.

 In practice, it is a conversational nicety with so much baggage attached that the only acceptable answers range from "ok" to "good" There are, of course, people who will take any opportunity to talk about themselves, but let's be honest, you could have said to them "banana?" and they'd give the same outpouring. The downside of "how are you" is that it sounds like you've already inquired into how that person is, so it feels a little awkward asking it again later in a "no, seriously this time" kind of way. And it is so incredibly broad that maybe it's too open of a question a lot of the time to answer properly. This is not to say that "how are you" isn't an incredibly useful social tool. It's absolutely imperative as a means of following out certain scripts that facilitate interaction, but it just isn't what it seems.

Somebody told me the story of a rabbi who asks "how are you" once, then again, and again until he finally gets to the real question with his interlocutor. That's one way to go about it, but I think you need the aura of a wise holy man to get away with what could otherwise come off as a touch condescending. On the other hand, more specific inquiries may well run afoul of the "specific questions" cage a person into what *you* want to talk about and might miss what's really important to them. At least it gets them talking.

My best guess on how to get around the "how are you" bar is to demonstrate that you have previously listened and continue to take an interest in your interlocutor's well-being, experience, and opinions. That means, (1) utilizing information from prior conversations to follow up on things that they have mentioned previously (e.g. how was that trip you took? Is your cold clearing up?) putting preference on the things that seemed important to them, and (2) reading their reactions to push gently further on any of your questions that seemed to strike a chord.

Often others hold back from sharing anything too positive or negative, because it stirs the waters of a polite neutral. People also hold back on these because there's nothing more alienating than sharing an emotion that is returned as undeliverable. This means, if you detect a flare of energy when somebody is talking about something that is quickly stepped by, there's probably a lot more going on there. One may tread lightly, but it is worth observing and gently following up on.


2. "I'm sorry." Apologies are the epoxy-resins of relationships, Without apology and forgiveness, the complicated tapestry of trust and companionship wouldn't be worth much considering the handfuls of miscommunication inherent to the human condition. It's been suggested that people overemphasize the importance of an apology when they don't receive one, but regardless, the apology is still an important ritual when done properly. I'll note that apology itself is an ambiguous word (since it may either mean an expression of regret/failure or a justification, but in this case I am treating it specifically as the former)

There's *a lot* of research into what makes an apology effective, so this gloss is really inadequate, but effective apologies accomplish certain basic things:

(1) They're a form of self-punishment. The person apologizing has tilted the power balance by her actions - putting the other person beneath her in some form, by showing disregard or disrespect (intentionally or not). The apology re-balances that by shaming the apologizer, putting her in a dependent and inferior position. If an apology doesn't make the apologizer feel uncomfortable and vulnerable, chances are it won't be entirely effective for the other person.

 (2) They're a means of emotional reconnection, by recognizing the effect that the act had on the other person. This is fairly crucial for many reasons, but on a basic level, if you break trust, you break ties. An action worth apologizing for almost always demonstrates either an indifference to or a complete misunderstanding of the other person's feelings/dignity/being/etc. There is nothing more alienating than feeling that somebody close to you truly does not understand or truly does not care. Demonstrating both caring and understanding through empathizing over the alienating action is crucial.

(3) Understanding what happened also allows you to show them that you will be able to avoid similar actions in the future. That means demonstrating both that you know *why* the action hurt the other person and that you know *how* to avoid making them feel similarly in the future.

So, a true apology is extremely communicative. It begins first and foremost with listening. Not passive listening, but deep and active listening. This is listening for your sake as well as for the apologee's sake. Without that step, the apology is dead in the water.

"I'm sorry" often completely ends the apology-dialog before it has begun. Perhaps "I'm sorry" is so prominent in social coinage, that it just simply doesn't have independent meaning any more. It can be used myriad ways with myriad motives.

"Sorry" need not even be associated with an apology. I can sympathize and even empathize with somebody by being sorry that they are facing challenges or sorrow. The word sorry comes from the old English sarig, which meant "full of distress or sorrow." Hence, one can be in a sorry state. If I am sorry for that state, it may be because I am momentarily blending my being with that of another's to feel their pain. It may also be my sorrow and regret for having caused that pain. The lines between these two connotations of "sorry" become deeply ambiguous in conversation.

The most common usage of sorry packages this ambiguity nicely. People like their personal space, generally speaking. People also live in environments that inevitably induce inadvertent invasions of such personal space. If you go to Costco (heaven forbid), walk on the street, or even attempt to use a kitchen at the same time somebody else is present, chances are high that you will have several encounters with other individuals that ever-so-slightly-inconvenience you. The inconvenience may merely require a change of path, or it might physically interfere. Sorry ranks up with the usual excuse me as the general social gloss that mends the potential rebound from unsolicited contact. In both cases, it may seem melodramatic that a minute inconvenience suffered by both evoke "SORROW" or that it may require one party to pardon another party... and certainly it would be a literal overstatement. But, unlike excuse me (which requests a forgiving action from the other party), sorry may require no apportionment of responsibility for the incident; sorry may simply recognize that the situation occurred and acknowledge the other individual may also have been inconvenienced. Used in this way, it can actual promote a momentary human connection with what had heretofore been abstracted "other in a crowd."

 On the far end of the scale "sorry" can communicate "this is not my problem." That version plays on the fact that one can be sorry for another's pains without recognizing any complicity for that state, to emphasize the lack of complicity. Tone easily conveys this separation, leaving a clear impression that the other person's state is entirely his own to handle (with some lip service to momentary commiseration).

 More often, it is seen as a magic bullet to those who feel distress in conflict. In this scenario, it can be an imprecation for those desperately trying to head off the weighty conversation that could lead to an effective apology. In those cases "I'm sorry" is sincerely intended as a conversation stopper - "I don't want to talk about this!!" - Such a usage is a slightly more socially acceptable analog to a child sticking fingers in his ears and singing "lalalalalala." In a sense, this reduplicates the alienation, because it puts the apologizer in the position of putting her potential discomfort ahead of the apologee's need for resolution.

It can also be kind of an interestingly self-absolving "whoops" with a shrug. In other words, the apology has forgiveness built into it... but the forgiver is also the apologizer. This one is interesting, because there are frequently times where such a response is appropriate, but we may not be in a great place to judge that at the time.  Often it's hard to bring up what really affects us at a core level, so people will begin with something smaller and less confrontational, because they feel safer there and hope that they can warm up from there to get to the hard things.  If somebody voices what seems like a small pecadillo of yours and you give this sort of apology, you may never discover that what it represented was something deeper and far more serious.

Again, questions that get you to the three big tenets of apologies would mend the rift, but either through apathy, assumptions, or fear of conflict, people often stymie that trajectory by refusing to ask questions and preemptively forgiving themselves. Communicating the opinion that something is/was "no big deal" may re-enforce a sense of alienation between conversationalists (if the person asking initially did think it was enough of a deal to raise it). A sense of alienation provides an unsafe environment for unpacking the depths of what's really roiling.

I won't address the obviously sarcastic "sorry" or the "sorry you feel that way" as they are intentionally confrontational and dismissive.

The underlying theme is that we can't rely on standard phrases to get to communication. Each conversation is essentially particularized and idiosyncratic. Questions and careful attention allow us to ski the slopes of an interchange that could otherwise wipe out in an instant. The underlying attitude necessary for the listening aspect of a conversation is that assumptions about another person's communicative intent need to be tested and clarified. This can be accomplished most readily by open questioning. When I say open, I also mean open-in-attitude towards letting a different story than what you'd imagined be told. There is a place for projecting: Restating how a person feels demonstrates your interest (plus we're vain creatures, so hearing about ourselves or hearing our words slightly differently put is oddly satisfying and we are drawn to people in whom we see ourselves reflected, even that superficially), and will help you remember the details about another person that will serve you in future interactions. But this should be expressed with the openness to have been wrong and perhaps is most effective when expressed with an implicit question mark.