I feel like one of the conversational skill failures itās really easy to fall into is assigning the other person an opinion, rather than asking what their opinion is. This kind of inherently puts them on the back foot, which is uncomfortable, so people donāt like it.
Starting a conversation by informing the other person that you KNOW their feelings, and you are acting based on the feelings you assume they have, without giving them a chance to tell you what feelings they ACTUALLY have⦠No one likes this!
You may have learned it from your parents doing it to you, in which case I can only imagine you didnāt like it either, but you still internalized it as an acceptable mode of communication because we are always internalizing stuff from our parents even though we donāt like it. Itās kind of a quintessential passive-aggressive parent move: āwell, you never want to help me, you donāt appreciate everything I do for youā etc. It puts the addressee in the position of defending themselves and their actual feelings instead of inviting them to SHARE those feelings.
People generally find it easier and more pleasant to converse with you if you go into it with an attitude of curiosity rather than what is essentially a power-play. Assigning your interlocutor an opinion based on your assumptions about their internal experience expresses an unconscious sense that you believe you are and should remain in control of the conversation. But friendly conversations arenāt really supposed to be about control.
something it took me so. fucking. many. years. to learn. is that being terrified of someone else having the upperhand in an interaction was causing me to preemptively "defensively" try to take the upper hand before the other person could. the reasons for this are sympathetic and I think it is a really common thing to do. but omg my interactions with people have gotten so much less unpleasant since I started trying to internalize that no one needs to have the upper hand in an interaction
i was letting my past experiences of being treated poorly in this specific way influence my own behavior such that *I* was the one bringing the idea of "someone having the upper hand" to the interaction to begin with!!! it was miserable.

















