NNTD can help with he said she said dynamics
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August 21st, 2022
- first of all there's a need to clarify if you're talking about something objective, that a video camera could have captured, eg "did the trash get taken out before 10am", and if you've got a difference there then either:
- someone is flat-out lying
- in which case you have a whole different kind of problem
- perhaps a compulsive liar or a sociopath, in which case you'd expect to see some a pattern of chaos in someone's past
- or perhaps someone is afraid of being punished if they tell the truth
- perhaps this is a realistic fear
- perhaps it's totally projection
- perhaps it's somewhat true, in the sense that they'd experience unbearable shame if the truth came out, even tho nobody externally would intend to punish them
- someone has a memory problem
- not particularly common in my experience, and usually in this case one of both people have enough uncertainty to be able to say "well I was pretty sure xyz, but maybe I missed something idk"
- the people involved are somehow confused which trash is being referred to or something
- standard rationalist operationalization of terms can basically solve this
- ie just get more specific until you find the confusion or you become confident there isn't a confusion
- But more commonly the gap is somewhere in frames
- like
- "did A shout at B"
- "was C disrespectful to D"
- "was E just trying to win status points over F in front of G"
- And so then you can find compatible worlds
- by reframing something like
- > F says > "from my perspective, I can't trust that you weren't just trying to win status points"
- +
- > E says > "from my perspective, I can't trust that you're not just projecting past coworkers onto me"
- This is not a great state of affairs, but if it's in fact the state of affairs you're in, this is at least a description of the situation that both parties can acknowledge!
- Like both parties can now go "okay, F can't trust there wasn't statusy stuff, and E can't trust there wasn't projectiony stuff. that's where we're at. what now?"
- and then there are moves available like
- respecting that each other can't trust that
- and expressing that they wouldn't want the other person to naively trust that
- and once each person feels sufficiently secure in their own perspectives (internally and in the social space) it becomes a lot easier to explore what truth their might be to the other person's
- like to explore whether there was some status move being attempted, or some projection occurring
- and of course, on the way, the participants can explore whether eg