Now we can launch into the "I could fix this in ten seconds if you'd stop lamenting it for ten seconds" discussion ;)
Never did understand why that Cimmerian would hang around listening to the lamenting for hour after hour... barbarians are strange.
There are problems which are never meant to be solved. Like living with a mad dependent relative or something like that, which makes "me" want to take out a metaphysical knife and wound the listener's very soul for not having been there.
(I personally am very lucky in life.)
...so I kinda have a special mind unit to slash at inside my own head. Whining at my husband does happen, but he has this great "yeah, and here we are, gosling" hug thing which makes most everything bearable.
I'd like to add here (not in defense of the woman or whatever the video implies in a negative tone) that removing the nail itself might have more problems than if you just left it in for the time being. And in an realistic scenario, why exactly would you remove a nail from your forehead without proper medical attention or professionals around? That's just stupid. I myself was the recipient of several negative sources of attention some years ago from former friends (keyword: former) regarding some issues I had in the moment with living with some bad roommates. The cons outweighed the pros of living with them but I wasn't remotely in a good enough spot to move out or even find new roommates due to a lack of decent income, savings, and depression issues. They would pitch to me a slew of ideas for extra income, all of which required considerable investment of time and money with no real guarantee it would give back in due time.
I did make this known many times and they elected to say that I was being an idiot, lazy, and just trying to fish around for attention. I knew exactly what I had to do at the time, but at the moment I just didn't have the opportunity to do so and thus I was only looking to vent.
In short, that time in my life was my own nail in my head and I didn't want to start working on removing it without proper support from people who were willing to understand my situation as well as overcoming my other problems first. And I think that's just what a lot of people may not consider when looking at that video first, especially judging by some of the comments I've seen down there...
But it also has secondary effects on your model of the world. Your mind (consciously or subconsciously) now has new information that the world is slightly less safe or slightly less predictable than it thought before.
Are you saying that there's a bias to over-update in favor of the world being bad? And that talking it out helps correct for that?
I would guess:
Talking about a problem to somebody you have a close relationship with addresses these second-order effects in a pretty concrete way: it reaffirms the reliability of your relationship in a way that makes the world feel more safe and predictable,
Is it reaffirming something that already should/could be known (so perhaps helping mitigate a bias)? Or is it really gathering important new information?
Gathering new information can make sense: even long-established partnerships can go sour, so it totally makes sense to gather information on how strong your partnerships are. And it also might especially make sense when you've discovered a new problem or updated toward the world being a bit harder to deal with in general.
And it also makes sense that this would end up being a weird indirect kind of conversation to have, since just asking "is our partnership strong?" is not a very good signalling equilibrium -- too easy to just say "yes".
(Not saying that's the actual answer, though. I think perhaps there are yet more complexities here.)
I’ve been aware and working on this dynamic for many years now, but I haven’t thought about it from this perspective. It feels pretty helpful! I think the underlying assumption is “of course I can deal with the first-order problem myself. But it would be helpful to not worry about the second-order effects while I do it.”
Admittedly the first time I read this I was confused because you went "When a bad thing happens to you, that has direct, obvious bad effects on you. But it also has secondary effects on your model of the world." This gave the sense that the issue was with the model of the world and not the world itself. This isn't what you meant but I made a list of reasons talking is a thing people do anyway:
[This is hardly original; I’m documenting for my own sake since it took so long for me to understand. Cross-posted from Grand, Unified, Crazy.]
There’s an old saw, that when a women complains she wants sympathy, but when a man hears a complaint, he tries to solve the problem. This viral YouTube video captures it perfectly.
Of course it’s not strictly limited by gender, that’s just the stereotype. And the underlying psychological details are fairly meaty; this article captures a lot of it pretty well for me.
I’ve known about all this for a long time now, and it’s always made sense at a sort of descriptive level of how people behave and what people need. But despite reading that article (and a good reddit thread) I’ve never really understood the “why”. What is the actual value of listening and “emotional support” in these kind of scenarios? Why do people need that? Well I finally had it happen to me recently when I was aware enough to notice the meta, and thus write this post.
I now find it easiest to think about in terms of the second-order psychological effects of bad things happening. When a bad thing happens to you, that has direct, obvious bad effects on you. But it also has secondary effects on your model of the world. Your mind (consciously or subconsciously) now has new information that the world is slightly less safe or slightly less predictable than it thought before. And of course the direct, obvious bad effects make you vulnerable (not just “feel” vulnerable, although normally that too – they make you actually vulnerable because you’ve just taken damage, so further damage becomes increasingly dangerous).
Obviously sometimes, and depending on the scenario, the first-order effect dominates and you really should just solve that problem directly. This is what makes the video so absurd – having a nail in your head is hard to beat in terms of the first-order effects dominating. But in real versions of these cases, sometimes the second-order effects are more significant, or more urgent, or at the least more easily addressable. In these cases it’s natural to want to address the second-order effects first. And the best way to do that is talking about it.
Talking about a problem to somebody you have a close relationship with addresses these second-order effects in a pretty concrete way: it reaffirms the reliability of your relationship in a way that makes the world feel more safe and predictable, and it informs an ally of your damage so that they can protect you while you’re vulnerable and healing. But of course you don’t accomplish this by talking directly about the second-order problem. The conversation is still, at the object level, about the first-order problem, which is why it’s so easy to misinterpret. To make it worse, the second-order problems are largely internal, and thus invisible, so it’s easy for whoever you’re talking to to assume they’re “not that bad” and that the first-order problem dominates, even when it doesn’t.
Working through this has given me some ideas to try the next time this happens to me. At a guess, the best way to handle it is to open the conversation with something like “I need you to make me feel safe” before you get into the actual first-order problem, but I guess we’ll see.