Tag: social skills

A reason it can be dangerous to compliment people on weight loss

Real Social Skills

Some people struggle very unpleasantly to get enough to eat.

Some of these people are fat. 

Sometimes, being mostly unable to eat makes people lose tons of weight quickly.

This is not a good thing. It’s awful.

And dangerous.

And it can make things worse for people. Talking that way can make it harder for fat people to understand that something is actually wrong when they don’t eat.

And even if they do know, it can send the message that you’re not a safe person to discuss this with, or that it’s not safe to eat substantial food in front of you.

Journalists

Real Social Skills

Journalists are not your friends or advocates when they interview you.

They might maintain a really friendly affect. They might sound really sympathetic. They might be really good at making you feel heard. This is often a way of manipulating you into saying things that are useful to them. Sounding friendly doesn’t mean that they are on your side.

Journalists write the article that they want to write. It is for their benefit, not yours.

If you keep that in mind, it’s a lot easier to avoid getting into trouble when talking with them.

Don’t take the accessible seats if you don’t need them

Real Social Skills

A lot of places have a few designated accessible seats, for instance:

  • Movie theaters will often have some seats next to wheelchair seating areas.
  • Bathrooms often have one accessible stall and several more inaccessible stalls
  • Busses usually have designated seating near the front for folks with disabilities

If you don’t need the accessibility features of the designated seats, it’s important not to sit in them. 

Because even if you’re willing to move, people don’t know that. A lot of people who sit in those seats are not willing to move, and become belligerent when people ask them to, particularly if they are not using mobility equipment. People who need the seats have no way of knowing how you will react. By sitting there, you are putting people in the position of having to decide whether risking asking you to move is more dangerous than risking going without the seat.

Do not do this to people.

Rhetorical might doesn’t make right

Real Social Skills

Not knowing how to articulate something doesn’t mean you are wrong.

Being elequoent doesn’t mean you are right.

Making someone look stupid doesn’t mean you are right.

Words are tools. They aren’t everything. They aren’t all of knowledge either.

So if someone tells you something that sounds plausible, and they’ve articulated it well, you still might know they are wrong even if you have no words for it.

They might try to intimidate you into agreeing by insisting that if you can’t give a clear explicit answer, then you must just be too irrational to accept a valid argument. But, it doesn’t work that way. Knowing something is not the same as knowing how to use words to describe that thing.

Words are very useful tools for communication. But being good at words just means being good at words. Don’t conflate it with being right, being insightful, or being exceptionally rational. Those are separate issues.

“Just pretend I’m purple”

Real Social Skills

If you want to talk about racism, you have to acknowledge that racism exists.

And that people of different races are affected by it differently.

Everyone is equal, and that’s an important starting point. But not everyone is treated equally, and that affects everything.

Including what it’s like for people to listen to you talk about racism. When you talk about racism, it matters what race you are. If you want to say worthwhile things, it’s important to acknowledge that. Don’t try to pretend that you can just decide that it doesn’t matter for the purposes of the conversation you want to have.

In particular, if you say “just pretend I’m purple,” that will usually be understood to mean “I’m white and I’m not interested in thinking about how my white privilege affects other people.”

Intrusive questions when you work with the public

Real Social Skills
A reader asked:
 
I was wondering if you or your readers might have some advice. I have very poor balance and a pronounced limp due to a life-threatening illness and I work with the public. They comment on it, often asking what happened. It’s motivated by concern, but it’s embarrassing(I literally make people sad just by leaving the house) and I don’t know how to respond (do they think it’s going to be a funny story?). I think I’m bad for business and could quit if I really wanted. How do I deal with this issue?
 
Realsocialskills answered:
 
I don’t know. I have a couple of guesses based on things I and friends have experienced. I think many readers of this blog are more qualified to answer this than I am.
 
Here are my guesses:
 
Keep in mind that working with the public doesn’t mean you anyone an explanation of your health issues:
  • Just because someone asks doesn’t mean you have to explain
  • If you give an answer, it doesn’t have to be accurate
  • It’s your business and not theirs

Sometimes people aren’t actually looking for information. Sometimes they just want reassurance that they’re not supposed to be rescuing you.

  • For people like that, it might help to say something like “Don’t worry; I’m used to it.”

Some people are obnoxious nosy jerks, and I don’t know of any good approaches to them. The best I’ve seen is pretending they haven’t said what they’ve said, or else telling them in plain language to knock it off.

  • It might be better to say something like “Don’t worry, I’m used to it.” Sometimes what people want isn’t information; they sometimes really just want reassurance that there isn’t anything they should be doing to fix it.
  • Or something obviously absurd like “I’m recovering from a zombie attack.”
  • It’s also ok to say “That’s a rather personal question.” That probably works better with colleagues or in social situations than when working with the public, though.

It also might help to change the subject to something that’s actually on topic for your job. It’s possible that what they really want is reassurance that it’s ok for them to be asking you to help them even though you look sick. Eg:

  • “You look like you’re falling over. Are you ok? What’s wrong?”
  • “I’m fine. Can I help you select some sunglasses? There’s a sale on women’s styles this week.”

Anyway, those are my guesses. Any of y’all have more informed advice?

When is it ok not to tell people things?

Real Social Skills
A reader asked:
Is it okay not to tell someone something because you think they’ll disapprove? Assume it’s something that doesn’t affect their life, only yours, but you know they like hearing about your life and you know their feelings will be hurt if you don’t tell them. Do you have an obligation to tell them?
realsocialskills said:
There are very few things you have an obligation to tell other people about when they’re not personally affected. In fact, off hand, I can’t think of any. (Although, it’s not always 100% straightforward what does and doesn’t directly affect someone. Some things that seem like they don’t actually do.)
That said, outright lying about something the other person is likely to find out about tends to backfire, because it can have a corrosive effect on you. It can make you feel like you must be doing something wrong if you have to lie about it, and it can make you anxious about what will happen when they inevitably find out about it. Sometimes it’s a good idea anyway, but often it is not.
If someone is personally offended that you keep some parts of your life private, that’s a major red flag. It’s a sign that this relationship has bad boundaries.
No friends tell each other everything; no one approves of everything their friend does. There are always at least a few things that it’s better not to discuss.
In mutually respectful friendships, both people understand this and respect one another’s privacy. If someone expect you to tell them everything and gets upset when you don’t, they’re being controlling. They’re not treating you as an equal.
And it usually gets worse over time. If someone can convince you that you’re not allowed to have any boundaries or privacy, they usually keep pushing.
Some people who do this start acting right if you assert boundaries and refuse to tolerate it when they’re breached. That doesn’t always work, though. Sometimes you can assert boundaries enough to make the relationship work even if they never really respect them willingly. Sometimes that doesn’t work and the friendship can’t be safe even if you really, really like them in other ways.

What it means when kids aren’t allowed to know about bad things

Real Social Skills

There are a lot of things kids are often considered too young to know about. For instance:

  • Rape
  • Violence
  • Racism
  • Sexism

The problem is, almost every bad thing kids are considered too young to know about happens to some kids.

The rule that kids should be shielded from these things has some really negative effects on the kids who are most vulnerable.

It hurts kids who have been abused, because they’re considered dangerous to other kids if they ever talk about it. Their peers aren’t supposed to know about it, so they’re supposed to just never talk about it ever. That creates a lot of shame, and living with that kind of shame hurts people.

It also hurts kids who are currently being abused. They get the overwhelming message from everyone that kids are not allowed to talk about these things. That makes it hard to tell adults what’s going on, especially if they don’t quite know the right words. If they try to tell indirectly, they might even be hushed and told that they’re too young to be thinking about that kind of thing.

It hurts kids of color, because they’re often required to put up with racist things rather than have the white kids find out about racism. Because they’re old enough to have to deal with racism, but their white peers aren’t considered old enough to be told about it.

There’s also parents who don’t want their kids to play with disabled kids, because they think their kids are too young to know about disability or serious illness or injury. Or even, to the point that a kids’ show hosted by an amputee actor got a lot of complaints that her missing arm was upsetting to children. This kind of attitude is all over the place.

Preventing kids from thinking about bad things hurts all kinds of kids, all kinds of particularly vulnerable kids. And I don’t see how it does much to protect the safer kids, either.

I’m not sure what the solution is. But I think it is a problem.

Getting real about physical accessibility

Real Social Skills

Something I’ve noticed:

There are a lot of ramps, seating areas, lifts, and other such things that aren’t available to wheelchair users because they are constantly full of people pushing children in strollers.

Sometimes, this is because people are astonishingly inconsiderate, but often it’s the result of terrible design.

People assume that accessibility features are only useful for chair users. Then they design them to only have enough capacity for the (small) number of chair users they expect to be there. Then, everyone with a stroller uses them, and the building remains almost as inaccessible to wheelchair users as it was before.

When you are creating an accessibility feature, do not fall into this trap! Design it to have the capacity for all of the things it will be used for.

Some concrete examples:

  • If your building has multiple high-traffic entrances, it needs to have multiple ramps
  • Elevators need to have enough capacity to accommodate the number of kids in strollers, chair users, and people with luggage who will come through on a regular basis.
  • Family restrooms should be accessible. So should some of the stalls in the regular men’s/women’s/unisex bathrooms.

Just, generally speaking, keep in mind that in order to make an access feature usable, there has to either be enough to go around, or enforcement preventing unauthorized use. Unless you want to chase mothers and infants away from your ramp, make it big enough to accommodate traffic from both wheelchair users and strollers.

Being dependent on vs being limited by

Real Social Skills

This isn’t quite the right concept but… these things are different:

  • being dependent on something
  • being unpleasantly or destructively limited by something

Being dependent on something can be really good. It can make things possible that weren’t before it. We’re all dependent on technology in one way or another (for instance, heating and air conditioning. Shoes. Large-scale agriculture.).

Sometimes people object to dependence because they think it will impose an unpleasant limitation. Even when it would actually make more things possible. 

Like, someone thinks they (or someone in their care) shouldn’t use a wheelchair because then they’ll only be able to go where a wheelchair can go. They won’t be able to use stairs and such anymore. And sometimes this is true.

But often, this can mean that someone can only go as far as they can walk, and can only stay out for as long as they can stand. So they have trouble leaving the house, or going places for long periods of time. And are much more limited than they otherwise would be. Dependence isn’t bad, if it makes you able to do more things. 

AAC can be like this, too. Verbal speech is more flexible, in principle, all things being equal. But all things aren’t equal, even for people who have some verbal speech. The important thing is for someone to have as much communication as possible. For people who get more communication from relying on things other than speech, dependence isn’t a bad thing. It’s good. It makes life better.

Getting more ability to do stuff you care about should be the goal. Not a particular way of doing it. Not judged against a theoretical ideal. Judged against what actually works best for you (or your child).