Affect and Untruth

“When we want people to be ”nicer” and speak the way we want them too, it can actually be a form of domination and control.

I see this all over the place. It shows up a lot on the internet….

“I can’t receive your words because you aren’t speaking the way I want you too.”

“Altar your message”

“Who are you to say that, what is your level of education, or ability to back this up”

“Show me evidence, if not, you can’t say that”

“If only you’d say it this way, I wouldn’t be down here sounding self righteous in the comments”

Soft, nice, politically correct. Constant fawning, expecting others to fawn to us. And stay within the “framework”.

Years ago, they began master-bating over this stuff on Twitter.

A communication style I now see as rooted in trauma. Cloaked as civility and academic prowess. That sounds wholly self righteous.

It arrives in a variety of manifestations, and tones. But I want to speak to the one I found in myself.

Said I to myself, in a Dr Evil voice, when this style of policing everyday colloquial speech began… “this could be useful, everyone is doing it”.

At the time I was very indoctrinated in left leaning politics, and the current prospect for president seemed to be turning society nasty.

So I joined into this collective field of beating people over the head to serve me the speech and tones I preferred.

What I’ve learned since is that it is one of the more subtle forms of censorship.

It looks as though you are playing around in the realm of protecting other people’s feelings. But instead you are asking someone else to dilute their message.

Or avoiding the directness and potency of their communication because it feels uncomfortable to take in.

Or we are avoiding having our beliefs challenged.

Or we’ve decided the belief is “dangerous” when in essence it’s just not our preference.

This whole phenomenon bled into my personal life.

In my relationships I wouldn’t listen to someone if they didn’t take on my preferred tone and communication “style”. If they didn’t couch their words in flowery language, so I felt disarmed.

I’d stop them from making their point, and focus on their delivery.

Especially when things were higher stakes.

It was my way of controlling the playing field.

I wasn’t coming from a grounded boundaried place.

My M.O. was to belittle someone else for not being “nice enough” AKA “good enough”.

We can manipulate almost anyone who isn’t self sourced by suggesting that they aren’t “good”.

Or by hinting that they don’t meet society’s approved standards of surface level, watered down, communication. We are threatening to remove their belonging unless they conform. And it works a lot of the time.

This isn’t to say we should welcome disrespect or abuse.

Or that we shouldn’t make self-sourced choices about what we are exposed to in our own spaces.

Rather. It’s a certain thread if you can see it… I know I can feel this place where this micro-managing of speech and “how” others talk comes from a place of deep insecurity.

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I mention all of this to say we can learn a lot about how we are oriented, and our level of self sourcing, by how much we try and control our external world, and how the people around us choose to show up in it.

It can be a blind spot.

If we are trying to manage others speech and behavior chronically, we are likely not as regulated, grounded, and “enlightened” as we think we are.

We may need to look at how we using this as a manipulative technique to control our environment.

And how, in so doing, we have to enforce it all over the place in order for us to feel safe out in the world.

It actually comes from a place of deep insecurity, and a distrust in life.

If we find that this is us, and we are offended easily by “how” someone shares, (yet it isn’t abusive) we may want to look at our level of trust in the world. Our level of scarcity and control in our own lives. And how much we actually trust others to live their own path.