safety – Real Social Skills

The dangers of making people feel safe

December 11, 2015June 9, 2021 Real Social Skills

There are skills you can learn, that fairly reliably cause a large percentage of people to feel safe around you. These skills are important in a lot of roles, and they’re also dangerous.

The skills a lot have to do with affect, body language, tone of voice, and putting pauses in the right places. And a whole lot of other things.

I’m not going to describe these skills in detail in this post, except to say that they’re explicitly taught to therapists, social workers, chaplains, most clergy in non-fundamentalist seminaries, and others in counseling roles. Making people feel safe is a core professional skill. You can’t do your job without it.

The problem is, learning to make people feel safe and being trustworthy are different skills. Knowing how to make people feel safe gives you a lot of power over them; it does not in and of itself make you someone who can be trusted with that kind of people. It makes people more likely to trust you, whether or not you are trustworthy. It makes people more likely to believe you, whether or not you are right. It makes people more likely to tell you private information, whether or not you can be trusted to respond appropriately or to maintain confidentiality.

Making people feel safe makes them vulnerable. If you are going to learn how to make people vulnerable, then you have a responsibility to learn how to trustworthy.

Trustworthiness skills do not happen automatically. No one is born with them. It takes more than being a good person with good intentions, and it takes more than caring about others. Learning how to make people feel safe does not automatically teach you the skills you need to be trustworthy. If you want to develop ethical practice, you have to actively work on both skillsets.

Learning to be trustworthy is at least as hard as learning how to get people to trust you. In some ways, it’s harder. If your affective skills aren’t effective at getting people to trust you, that tends to be obvious. When you’re not good at making people feel safe with you, it’s harder to get people to cooperate, and it gets easier as you get better at it. It’s much harder to tell whether people *are* safe with you.

If people feel safe with you when they shouldn’t, they’re much more likely to be cooperative. They’re much more likely to do things that are validating and feel really good. They may listen more attentively, follow your advice, say that your insights are really helpful to them, or any number of things. It can be hard to tell from the outside whether or not someone’s trust in you is warranted. (Although it does help to remember that immediate unbounded trust is never a good thing.)

Short version: If you learn to make people feel safe, then you also have to learn how to be trustworthy. This is particularly true if you have high-level professional skill at making people feel safe. If you can reliably make people feel safe, then you also have to work on making sure that people actually *are* safe with you. Trustworthiness is a complicated skill set, and it doesn’t happen automatically. Being trustworthy takes ongoing education, creativity, and effort.

Safety vs making people feel safe

April 23, 2015June 10, 2021 Real Social Skills

There are all kinds of affective things and cognitive tricks you can learn that make it more likely that people will trust you and feel safe.

It is possible to get really, really good at that without actually learning how to be trustworthy. You can be really, really good at making people feel safe, and still be a danger to people who trust you.

Sometimes it’s not a good idea to focusing on trying to make people feel safe.

Often, it’s much better to focus on learning how to be trustworthy. Two major components of being trustworthy are paying close attention to practical safety; and listening to the people whose safety might be impacted.

For example:

Ramps are often poorly-constructed in a way that makes them dangerous for wheelchair users
It’s often possible, through affective and cognitive tricks, to persuade people to feel safe using them
Making people feel safe in this situation actually puts them in more danger
The most important thing in that situation is fixing the ramp; not getting people to feel safe

If you want to know what’s dangerous, it’s important to seek out the perspectives of people you’re trying to create safety for. This isn’t something you can do completely on your own.

Part of this is seeking out writing about danger and safety by members of the affected group, or advocacy organizations run by members of the affected group. Another part of this is listening to the individual people who you are actually interacting with about their needs.

It’s important to communicate effectively about the things you are doing that might make trusting you a good idea.

It’s important to talk about safety improvements to make sure people know about them. (Eg: if you fixed a dangerous ramp, people need to know that it has been fixed). It’s also important to communicate your willingness to listen to people about their needs and fix things that are endangering them. It has to be true, and you have to do things to communicate that it’s true. It does not go without saying; willingness to listen and address safety issues in practical terms is actually fairly uncommon.

If you focus on practical safety through proactive research and listening to affected members of your community, you can get very far in building safe and welcoming community even if people do not feel safe.

Some people who do not feel safe still care very much about being there, and are willing to take risks in order to participate. It’s important to honor and accept that.

Some people aren’t ever going to feel safe. (And some of them will be right.) It’s important to accept them as they are, and not make feeling safe a prerequisite for participating.

Short version: “Making people feel safe” is often the wrong approach. Focusing on being safe often matters a lot more. Some people don’t believe that they are safe, and are willing to take risks in order to participate. They should be allowed to have that perception. They should not be pressured into feeling safe as a prerequisite for participation.

Clueless creepiness vs skillful creepiness

March 15, 2014June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

There are two kinds of problems that get conflated a lot but aren’t actually that similar:

People who do creepy things because they have trouble understanding boundaries
People who do creepy things because they understand boundaries well and have highly developed skills at violating them with impunity

People who are good at violating boundaries and getting away with being creepy sometimes seem socially awkward, and sometimes don’t. Sometimes they get away with it by getting people to think things like “Oh, that’s Bill. He’s just awkward like that. He doesn’t mean anything by it,” and sometimes it’s more like, “I can’t believe James would do that! He’s like the nicest guy ever, and he does so much for this community. Don’t you remember the awesome party last month?”, and sometimes it’s more like, “Steve is really sensitive right now. Did you really have to turn him down like that? Couldn’t you have given him a chance? Don’t you understand how much courage it takes to approach a girl? What harm could giving him your number have done?”.

People who are inadvertently creepy *care* when they’ve violated boundaries, and try to fix it. Saying, “oh, they’re just awkward” isn’t doing them any favors, because people who are inadvertently creepy don’t *want* to trample all over other people’s boundaries. They want to know, so that they can stop doing it. This doesn’t mean it’s the job of victims of their creepy actions to explain it to them – it isn’t, particularly since most creepy people are doing it on purpose, and calling skillfully creepy people on things tends to go badly. I am mentioning this because skillfully creepy people often convince others that being “just awkward” means that everyone else is obligated to refrain from objecting to their creepy actions.

Skillfully creepy people who boundaries boundaries on purpose come up with excuses about why it was ok, and try to make you feel horrible for objecting. (Eg: “I was just being friendly! Learn to take a compliment!”, or “I know that if you were in your right mind, you wouldn’t have said that you didn’t want to spend time with me. I forgive you. We can still spend time together.”, or “Wow. Harsh. I guess girls really don’t go for nice guys. Have fun dating assholes.” or just getting a lot of people to laugh at you, or any number of other things.)

As a culture, we shouldn’t tolerate creepy behavior from anyone. Part of not tolerating it means assessing when people are being cluelessly creepy, and when people are being skillfully creepy.

If you are a supervisor/teacher/community leader, or otherwise someone responsible for intervening and keeping things safe, it’s important to respond appropriately. Communities need to help cluelessly creepy people understand how to act, and to expel skillfully creepy people so that they can’t keep preventing the people they hurt from being part of the community.

On “feeling unsafe”

February 28, 2014June 14, 2021 Real Social Skills

Sometimes, people in power use “feeling safe” in a manipulative way. They shift the conversation away from whether or not you actually are safe, and into a conversation about your feelings. Sometimes people in power who do this have a kind affect and seem to really care about helping you to feel better. This can make it hard to know in your own mind what the problem actually is, and hard to keep hold of your understanding that something is wrong and needs to be addressed.

It helps to keep in mind that these things are different:

Feeling unsafe in reaction to something even though you actually are safe
Seeing something as evidence that you are actually unsafe
People in power will often try to confuse you about which thing you are experiencing, but it’s important to stay mindful of the difference.

It’s also possible to have a feeling that you are unsafe, and not be sure whether it’s reasonable or not:

It’s important to take that feeling seriously
And to think through what it means, and whether there might be a real danger
Sometimes when you feel unsafe it will be an irrational reaction, but don’t be quick to dismiss it as one
If you think it’s an irrational reaction, make sure you have a concrete reason for thinking that it’s irrational and that things are actually ok

People can feel unsafe around someone for all kinds of reasons other than being unsafe:

Being bigoted against another group (eg: racist fear of black people)
Being triggered by something (eg: feeling afraid because seeing men wear hats is triggering)
Forgetting to take medication and having strange reactions to things as a result
Taking a new medication with unexpected side effects that complicate your ability to perceive things accurately
Misunderstanding something someone did or said (eg: taking something literally that was not intended literally)
Hallucinations
Being exhausted
When it’s this kind of thing, sometimes the external situation still needs to be addressed, but often it can be dealt with by processing things yourself

But sometimes the problem is that you’re *actually not safe*, and sometimes this is in ways that it’s hard for other people to see, eg:

If you are being pressured to share private information with people who can’t be trusted to keep things confidential
If you are being pressured to use a ramp that is too steep to be safe, or allow people to carry you into an inaccessible building
If people around you are bigoted against you in subtle, but constantly corrosive ways
If people are intentionally triggering you in order to confuse and disorient you into doing what they want
If you’re being triggered in a way that makes it impossible for you to understand what is going on well enough to keep yourself safe, even if no one is doing it on purpose
If there is no food available that you can safely eat for an extended period
If you are experiencing executive functioning problems in ways that make it hard or impossible for you to do things that are necessary for survival, and no one is willing to help you
If you’re spending a lot of time in a environment is physically overloading in painful ways
If you have medical problems and doctors refuse to communicate in a way you can understand, or if you only have access to them in an environment that prevents you from communicating
and any number of other things

All of these things are the kind of thing that apparently well-meaning people will often try to address by trying to get you to process your feelings so that you will feel safe. That’s a dangerous reaction, and it’s important to notice when people are doing it, and to learn how to insist that they address the actual safety issue.

Sometimes the feeling is the problem.

Sometimes the problem is that you’re *actually not safe*.

If someone’s trying to manage your feelings rather than the actual threat to your safety, it’s important to remember that they’re doing a bad thing. And that it’s ok to want to actually *be* safe, even if all they want to do is make you *feel* safe.

Cooperation with feelings derails is one of the hardest anti-skills to unlearn. But it’s also really, really important.

Some indications that a facebook profile might be fake

October 15, 2013June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

Some people use fake facebook profiles to stalk or harass other people.

Here are some things that are red flags for a fake profile:

Having very few friends:

Most Facebook users friend mostly people they know in person, or friends of friends
If someone doesn’t friend anyone they know, it’s suspicious – it’s possible that they don’t know anyone because they aren’t actually a real person.
That’s not an absolute indicator. While it is unusual, some people create Facebook profiles in order to interact with strangers. (Some of those people use pseudonyms in order to maintain their privacy. That’s not the same as a fake account).
It’s also fairly common for people to friend people they know and people they don’t know. People who do this usually have a lot of Facebook friends.
People who friend strangers generally friend a lot of strangers. If they’re only friending you and a couple of other people, that’s suspicious. It suggests that the account is about getting access to you, rather than finding people to talk to.
This is particularly the case if they still have very few friends weeks after friending you.

Having suspicious clusters of friends:

If there are six people who are all friends with each other and each profile has hardly any other friends, they may all be fake profiles created to make the primary fake profile look more realistic
Being a person who friends strangers but has few friends is suspicious in itself. A cluster of people who have hardly any friends is *extremely* suspicious.
This is particularly the case if the accounts were all created at around the same time
(Again, especially if some of the accounts are claiming to be college alumni in their 20s – it’s very unusual for people who really are in that group to create a profile *after* college. If a whole cluster does that, it’s suspicious).

Undue interest in you:

If someone is showing way more interest in you than would be expected between strangers, it’s suspicious
It’s an indication that the person talking to you might be someone you know who you don’t want to talk to. (Especially if they’re using unusual idioms you associate with that person).
Also if they seem to share *all* of your interests and have very few interests that you don’t share.
Especially if they’ve joined hard-to-find groups that you created.
It’s a red flag for other things too; people who decide that you are emotionally close before you’ve actually established a relationship are dangerous.

Claims about college that don’t match their profile

People who went to college almost always have friends from that college.
This is particularly the case for people in their 20s.
If someone claims to have gone to a school and has no or very few friends from that school, it’s suspicious.
(It’s not an absolute indicator).
If you call the alumni office, you can ask if a person with that name ever went to that school, and they are generally willing to tell you.
If the alumni office tells you that no one by that name went there, it’s a very strong indicator that the account is fake, especially in combination with other factors.

Pictures:

People usually post pictures of themselves on facebook.
It’s suspicious if they don’t.
Particularly if they post pictures of other things
(But not an absolute indicator – some people do this for innocent reasons, or to protect their privacy)
If their pictures seem unduly familiar, or have unusual objects you recognize, take that seriously. Even if you’re not sure why it feels that way.

Communication problems vs boundary indifference

June 13, 2013June 20, 2021 Real Social Skills

These things are different:

Difficulty reading social cues
Indifference to other people’s boundaries

These get conflated all over the place, in part because they both lead to breaking certain social expectations. But they’re actually fundamentally different (although it’s possible for someone to have both problems)

Both of these things get called social awkwardness. This causes a lot of problems, in particular:

People are pressured to accept boundary-violating behavior as innocuous awkwardness
People who are more innocently awkward are read as threats because people can’t tell the difference

People who don’t care about other people’s boundaries often actually have exceptionally *good* abilities to read social cues, for instance:

Creepy guys in geek space tend to know exactly how much they can harass women without being expelled from the space
And they’re really good at staying just shy of that line
And these dudes often get referred to as just awkward, and women get pressured to accommodate their boundary violations

So, if you want to create spaces that are safe for good people who have trouble reading social cues:

Stop tolerating boundary violations
Start making your spaces more accessible
Use interaction badges as a way to help people understand who welcomes interaction and who doesn’t
Wait a few extra seconds in conversations to give people who process language slowly a chance to speak
Don’t insist that people make eye contact
When you’re organizing loud events, create quiet space people can retreat to
Create multiple ways of contacting event or space organizers (phone, email, etc.) Some forms of communication are very difficult for some people, and spaces are more inclusive if there are more options