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silveradept[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#18: "I can take criticism well."
No, no I can't.
It's taken me a long time to realize what's going on there, and to work on undoing the things that happen when I get criticized, but there's still plenty of situations where criticism is going to result in Big Feelings. And, as best as I have been able to ascertain, there's no way I have right now of shortcutting the need for Big Feelings. The best I have been able to do so far is to put them on a delay, which will hopefully be long enough of a delay that I can somewhere safe to have my Big Feelings and then be able to grapple with what's being said as a criticism and incorporate it.
So, it's worth mentioning that while it's not part of the official diagnosis for many a neurodivergence, there's what I think they'd call a "comorbidity" that comes with many of them called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) that does what it says on the tin. Because being neurodivergent usually comes with a fair amount of teasing from peers and exasperation from grownups in the early stage of life, and a fair amount of exasperation from peers and from bosses, managers, and supervisors in the working stages of life, the neurodivergent person can develop strong reactions to things that seem like criticisms. Especially criticisms that are in the family of "why can't you just be normal?" even if they're never officially phrased that way, or of the type that are "This should be obvious to you, since you were theoretically socialized in the same way that I was." (These kinds of sensitivities and reactions can be exacerbated strongly if the prevailing culture of the space is guess culture rather than ask culture, because guess culture often relies on being able to read subtle clues according to unwritten rules and tacit understanding of their interpretation, and where asking for clarification in the presence of others is at least as large a faux pas as directly asking for what you want.) RSD is responsible for a lot of Big Feelings situations, especially when those Big Feelings are related to the entire sequence of your own failures being replayed for you before your eyes and the newest one being added on to the chain. It makes it difficult to take corrections and criticisms at the volume and the level of seriousness they are intended to be delivered, because, well, even if things start small and you say this is small, the last time things started "small" and I thought they were small and forgivable, they were neither small nor forgivable, and the whole situation ended up with me on disciplinary probation, so yes, I am sensitive to even the slightest of complaints about me from others. Including both the easily fixable ones and the ones that are not fixable without causing serious issues with the digestive system. Or the ones that turned out to need diagnoses and durable medical equipment or other remediations.
Another one of those things that happens when you're neurodivergent is that you start trying to get ahead of others for things. Whether that's trying to anticipate their needs so smoothly they get what they were thinking about either right before they say it or so swiftly afterward that it could not have been started when the request was made, or whether you're faster to self-deprecate and make fun of yourself than someone else might be, even in situations where it isn't warranted, or you're already halfway back to the bunker at the first sign that something might not be going smoothly, there are a lot of ways that trying to get out in front of something can manifest. Why? Because when you're in front of things, then you can at least try to control them, and control how others see them and react to them. Most people, after all, aren't likely to pile on if you're already being hard on yourself (and many of them might express some confusion as to why you're being harsh to yourself or try to pull you out of the deprecation spiral), and if they're kind and considerate people, they'll try not to put you in situations where you're showing that you're terrified. If you can anticipate them, they'll think of you as kind and helpful and otherwise fantastic to be around. It's all in service of avoiding the possibility of rejection by trying to mold yourself to the expectations of others and to try and control the space where they might reject you so that it's unlikely to happen. Because rejection always hurts, and there's always at least one weasel ready to pile on and to tell you that the rejection is because of you, and you're unfixably broken, and everyone is going to end up rejecting you anyway once they get to see who you really, truly, neurodivergently are, so you may as well get used to this feeling, it's going to be your constant companion. (And your options are either to mask so hard anyone who gets to know you will be able to spot the instant it cracks, or to basically resign yourself that everyone hates you, will hate you, and you should never hope to make friends or otherwise be anything other than the person who gets the jobs nobody else wants, because that's what you're there for, is for everyone else to compare themselves favorably to you and be glad they're not you. And so that when you have Big Feelings, or the "wrong" feelings, or when the mask comes off sufficiently that people start getting a taste of what you're actually like, they can say they always knew there was something wrong about you and how glad they are that you're being punished for it.)
Places that operate primarily on gossip networks are really, really bad for people with RSD. Not only does someone not get to know who the person is that had a problem with them, they don't know who else is feeding the gossip network (usually, anyway.) And if the supervisor doesn't stomp hard on the gossips, but encourages the employees to spy on each other and report back to the manager, it creates an atmosphere where there's nobody who is trustworthy in the organization, and where you have to look at other people and evaluate how likely they are to be a threat, or how likely they are to feed what you're doing into the gossip network, and what kinds of behaviors you are going to be allowed to have around others that won't contribute to the damaging narrative that's being formed about you. With nobody to confide in, with nobody trustworthy to bring your complaints to, with nobody who is doing their best to squash the environment that is saying bad things about you, that place becomes incredibly stressful, and masking in those places becomes both essential and exhausting, driven by paranoia and the need to self-police because someone else is going to be watching you at all times, looking for something to report on you, or something that can be spun into bad things about you to a manager.
This is one of those statements that I'm not sure would have been helped any if I had gotten an earlier diagnosis, or if the people who were making the assessments had a wider toolbox of things to test for and might have been able to give a heads-up for possible issues down the line. Their assessments were unlikely to turn up anything that was an issue, other than a bright young child who has a fairly strong set of emotions, and that it doesn't take all that much to bring those emotions out. So, y'know, being a "sensitive child" is probably as far as they were going to get, which is as far as they got anyway. And then from there, it was just a matter of trying to manage the dance between "why can't you just be normal?" and "You being exactly the person you are is the way to go, and anyone who makes fun of you for it is just jealous / you will be able to escape this small provincial space and be fine when you are around people who you haven't had to go to school with for years upon end and who have some significant amount of being smart sensitive kids themselves." And thus, the cycle repeated itself. I got made fun of for those times where I was not the smart kid doing things perfectly, so I hardened myself in ways to try and avoid situations where I would be anything other than imperfect, and so that developed a distance between me and others, which itself caused more making fun of, because now I was just "different," which caused more retreating and calcifying my attitude and my niche, which prevented me from being my genuine self around others because I was worried they would make fun of me for doing so, and I was definitely just waiting to get out of there so I could start over with people who I hadn't already fallen into this loop with. I would find with time and perspective that a lot of my fears were in my head, and several of the other people at the school who I had hung out with had thought I was cool or fine. If they were signaling this while I was there, it was not hard enough and obvious enough that I was able to pick up on it.
And the cycle continued, anyway. That Berzerker nickname wasn't for nothing, after all, and so I had to bend my brain toward finding ways to make the frustration not boil over, not come out, and I tried, but it didn't really work all that well, because it turns out that "just use your willpower more and better" isn't actually a solution to things. And things were going well in my academic studies and in the marching band things, and a significant portion of my instrument section (and, I think, across sections) developed a distaste for what we saw as politics interfering with the process of selecting who was in the performance block for games. Which I really had some issues with when it came to my senior year and I spent a few weeks not in the performance block. There was definitely a "really? You're sure about that?" attitude in there, but dutifully, I went in to get feedback about what wasn't working for me during the audition process, and tended to get back a "Well, what do you think you need work on?" in response to the inquiry. Which was not helpful. I did not say to the person "If I knew what was going wrong, I would be working on that and not asking you about what's going wrong, now would I?" because that would not have gone over well. After a few weeks of this, I went to one of the leaders and asked for help in figuring out what's going wrong. They told me about one small thing that needed fixing. Once that happened, I was fine and in the performance block for the rest of the year. Given how small the thing was, I can either conclude that everyone was auditioning at a similar skill level, newbies to seniors, and something small like that was really the difference between in the performance and not in the performance, or I can conclude that what the actual problem was that someone wanted me to ask for help about a thing, that the problem was complacency or otherwise assuming that I would be able to perform adequately because I was an experienced hand at this, and as soon as it had been communicated that I had humbled myself appropriately and asked for help, then things were fine. Because of the obscured nature of the scoring system and the generally unhelpful commentary I was getting about what needed improvement, I would never know which of those conclusions were true, and to what degree. But I definitely was having some Big Feelings about the whole thing, while I wasn't in the performance block, and about the smallness of the thing that was keeping my experienced ass out of the block that I had supposedly fixed enough to get back into it.
And the cycle continued, even after I left university days, and entered the working world, and then had to deal with all of the uncertainties that come with working with other people. And with a place that did regularly run on a gossip network, and indirect methods of communications of concerns or criticisms, and a manager who didn't have the first clue about what to do with a worker who needed some extra supports to help them be their best and who hadn't figured out what those supports were themselves. (Or who had, and was asking for them and not getting them.) And into a relationship where criticism was frequent and a revenge tactic against suggestions for improvement, or necessary things that needed to happen to keep the relationship moving smoothly. It's been a lifelong process, trying to figure out how to deal with criticism in a way that actually works and is productive and that doesn't provoke a whole lot of messy emotional spillage around anyone who might be able to hear about it or who might take it as an inability to "toughen up" and not be so sensitive about everything.
Which has led to a pair of systems that go to work with regard to possible criticism. The first is the anticipatory system, where I tell people that I want to know if my behavior is bothering them, where I want to know from my supervisors and managers if there are complaints or issues with my behavior. This is the "head off at the pass the situation where things that I might believe are less serious explode in my face" adaptation, and it feeds into fawn as being one of my primacy reactions to stress when in a situation where a person being upset with me might have consequences for my job or relationship status. And it couches my language to conditionals and "I think" rather than "I know," unless I'm very sure and I'm around someone who I can give more definite statements to and they will not react with escalation and belittlement.
It also, however, means that I'm more reluctant to try new things or take on situations where failure might be present, because even though I've been out of school for decades at this point, and my terrible relationship is behind me for a few years, I still anticipate that if I don't do perfectly at something, there's going to be someone there to make fun of me or to criticize what I've done, to make themselves feel better, or as a scold to me that I'm not handling the situation like a normal person would. It makes me defensive about my actions and ready to see strong criticism where none is warranted or intended, and it often means that I need sulking time away from the person giving correction or criticism so that I can process all of the emotional content and the self-flagellation and the fears and the weasels and get those things out of the way and handled before I can then address the substance of the criticism and see that it is warranted and I really am glad that this is something someone brought to my attention because they think I can change it, and I would rather have someone tell me something so I can fix it rather than avoid telling me because they think I won't. It's a process, and it will take time, and I know that's not very helpful in any situation where the correction needs to happen immediately, or if this information is being told in a space where the idea is to avoid having to take time out of the session to deal with something in the general space of "white women's tears," even if it's not being intentionally weaponized as a derailing tactic. It's one of those things that I would like to be more "normal" about, but failing that, it's one of those things that I would like to find whatever the right reframing is so that I can slide around my own brain in the moment and then take the time to keep working on examining and contextualizing the defensive structures and systems I've already built so that they're not hyper-sensitive and only fire off when the situation is right.
If the frame of "I take criticism well" stays at a very wide distance and concerns itself with whether or not there's a behavioral change when the criticism is warranted, then it does look like I take criticism well. But as soon as you zoom in even a little bit on the process of how I get there, you'll see that no, I don't actually take criticism well at all, and there's a lot of time, energy, and feelings burnt in the service of getting me to the point where I can determine that it's a warranted criticism and change accordingly, because of the way that my life has gone so far, and some of the wonderful aspects of my own brain chemistry that pull things far out of whack in terms of their impact and how serious they really are, versus how serious the person said they were. There's not really a cure for this other than having situations happen where nothing explodes and where the level of seriousness really was what was said, rather than what I built it up into. Or situations where things do explode because they really needed to. (This is difficult, especially when other people are dealing with their own weasels and pasts and touchpoints where they might react more strongly than they want to or intend to.) So if you offer me a correction or a criticism and I have a lot of emotions about it, or ask for some time to sulk before addressing it, or other such things, I'm sorry, it's almost certainly not you. I'm accepting that what you have to say is legitimate and I'll work on it, but first I have to fight my own weaselbrain to get there.
#18: "I can take criticism well."
No, no I can't.
It's taken me a long time to realize what's going on there, and to work on undoing the things that happen when I get criticized, but there's still plenty of situations where criticism is going to result in Big Feelings. And, as best as I have been able to ascertain, there's no way I have right now of shortcutting the need for Big Feelings. The best I have been able to do so far is to put them on a delay, which will hopefully be long enough of a delay that I can somewhere safe to have my Big Feelings and then be able to grapple with what's being said as a criticism and incorporate it.
So, it's worth mentioning that while it's not part of the official diagnosis for many a neurodivergence, there's what I think they'd call a "comorbidity" that comes with many of them called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) that does what it says on the tin. Because being neurodivergent usually comes with a fair amount of teasing from peers and exasperation from grownups in the early stage of life, and a fair amount of exasperation from peers and from bosses, managers, and supervisors in the working stages of life, the neurodivergent person can develop strong reactions to things that seem like criticisms. Especially criticisms that are in the family of "why can't you just be normal?" even if they're never officially phrased that way, or of the type that are "This should be obvious to you, since you were theoretically socialized in the same way that I was." (These kinds of sensitivities and reactions can be exacerbated strongly if the prevailing culture of the space is guess culture rather than ask culture, because guess culture often relies on being able to read subtle clues according to unwritten rules and tacit understanding of their interpretation, and where asking for clarification in the presence of others is at least as large a faux pas as directly asking for what you want.) RSD is responsible for a lot of Big Feelings situations, especially when those Big Feelings are related to the entire sequence of your own failures being replayed for you before your eyes and the newest one being added on to the chain. It makes it difficult to take corrections and criticisms at the volume and the level of seriousness they are intended to be delivered, because, well, even if things start small and you say this is small, the last time things started "small" and I thought they were small and forgivable, they were neither small nor forgivable, and the whole situation ended up with me on disciplinary probation, so yes, I am sensitive to even the slightest of complaints about me from others. Including both the easily fixable ones and the ones that are not fixable without causing serious issues with the digestive system. Or the ones that turned out to need diagnoses and durable medical equipment or other remediations.
Another one of those things that happens when you're neurodivergent is that you start trying to get ahead of others for things. Whether that's trying to anticipate their needs so smoothly they get what they were thinking about either right before they say it or so swiftly afterward that it could not have been started when the request was made, or whether you're faster to self-deprecate and make fun of yourself than someone else might be, even in situations where it isn't warranted, or you're already halfway back to the bunker at the first sign that something might not be going smoothly, there are a lot of ways that trying to get out in front of something can manifest. Why? Because when you're in front of things, then you can at least try to control them, and control how others see them and react to them. Most people, after all, aren't likely to pile on if you're already being hard on yourself (and many of them might express some confusion as to why you're being harsh to yourself or try to pull you out of the deprecation spiral), and if they're kind and considerate people, they'll try not to put you in situations where you're showing that you're terrified. If you can anticipate them, they'll think of you as kind and helpful and otherwise fantastic to be around. It's all in service of avoiding the possibility of rejection by trying to mold yourself to the expectations of others and to try and control the space where they might reject you so that it's unlikely to happen. Because rejection always hurts, and there's always at least one weasel ready to pile on and to tell you that the rejection is because of you, and you're unfixably broken, and everyone is going to end up rejecting you anyway once they get to see who you really, truly, neurodivergently are, so you may as well get used to this feeling, it's going to be your constant companion. (And your options are either to mask so hard anyone who gets to know you will be able to spot the instant it cracks, or to basically resign yourself that everyone hates you, will hate you, and you should never hope to make friends or otherwise be anything other than the person who gets the jobs nobody else wants, because that's what you're there for, is for everyone else to compare themselves favorably to you and be glad they're not you. And so that when you have Big Feelings, or the "wrong" feelings, or when the mask comes off sufficiently that people start getting a taste of what you're actually like, they can say they always knew there was something wrong about you and how glad they are that you're being punished for it.)
Places that operate primarily on gossip networks are really, really bad for people with RSD. Not only does someone not get to know who the person is that had a problem with them, they don't know who else is feeding the gossip network (usually, anyway.) And if the supervisor doesn't stomp hard on the gossips, but encourages the employees to spy on each other and report back to the manager, it creates an atmosphere where there's nobody who is trustworthy in the organization, and where you have to look at other people and evaluate how likely they are to be a threat, or how likely they are to feed what you're doing into the gossip network, and what kinds of behaviors you are going to be allowed to have around others that won't contribute to the damaging narrative that's being formed about you. With nobody to confide in, with nobody trustworthy to bring your complaints to, with nobody who is doing their best to squash the environment that is saying bad things about you, that place becomes incredibly stressful, and masking in those places becomes both essential and exhausting, driven by paranoia and the need to self-police because someone else is going to be watching you at all times, looking for something to report on you, or something that can be spun into bad things about you to a manager.
This is one of those statements that I'm not sure would have been helped any if I had gotten an earlier diagnosis, or if the people who were making the assessments had a wider toolbox of things to test for and might have been able to give a heads-up for possible issues down the line. Their assessments were unlikely to turn up anything that was an issue, other than a bright young child who has a fairly strong set of emotions, and that it doesn't take all that much to bring those emotions out. So, y'know, being a "sensitive child" is probably as far as they were going to get, which is as far as they got anyway. And then from there, it was just a matter of trying to manage the dance between "why can't you just be normal?" and "You being exactly the person you are is the way to go, and anyone who makes fun of you for it is just jealous / you will be able to escape this small provincial space and be fine when you are around people who you haven't had to go to school with for years upon end and who have some significant amount of being smart sensitive kids themselves." And thus, the cycle repeated itself. I got made fun of for those times where I was not the smart kid doing things perfectly, so I hardened myself in ways to try and avoid situations where I would be anything other than imperfect, and so that developed a distance between me and others, which itself caused more making fun of, because now I was just "different," which caused more retreating and calcifying my attitude and my niche, which prevented me from being my genuine self around others because I was worried they would make fun of me for doing so, and I was definitely just waiting to get out of there so I could start over with people who I hadn't already fallen into this loop with. I would find with time and perspective that a lot of my fears were in my head, and several of the other people at the school who I had hung out with had thought I was cool or fine. If they were signaling this while I was there, it was not hard enough and obvious enough that I was able to pick up on it.
And the cycle continued, anyway. That Berzerker nickname wasn't for nothing, after all, and so I had to bend my brain toward finding ways to make the frustration not boil over, not come out, and I tried, but it didn't really work all that well, because it turns out that "just use your willpower more and better" isn't actually a solution to things. And things were going well in my academic studies and in the marching band things, and a significant portion of my instrument section (and, I think, across sections) developed a distaste for what we saw as politics interfering with the process of selecting who was in the performance block for games. Which I really had some issues with when it came to my senior year and I spent a few weeks not in the performance block. There was definitely a "really? You're sure about that?" attitude in there, but dutifully, I went in to get feedback about what wasn't working for me during the audition process, and tended to get back a "Well, what do you think you need work on?" in response to the inquiry. Which was not helpful. I did not say to the person "If I knew what was going wrong, I would be working on that and not asking you about what's going wrong, now would I?" because that would not have gone over well. After a few weeks of this, I went to one of the leaders and asked for help in figuring out what's going wrong. They told me about one small thing that needed fixing. Once that happened, I was fine and in the performance block for the rest of the year. Given how small the thing was, I can either conclude that everyone was auditioning at a similar skill level, newbies to seniors, and something small like that was really the difference between in the performance and not in the performance, or I can conclude that what the actual problem was that someone wanted me to ask for help about a thing, that the problem was complacency or otherwise assuming that I would be able to perform adequately because I was an experienced hand at this, and as soon as it had been communicated that I had humbled myself appropriately and asked for help, then things were fine. Because of the obscured nature of the scoring system and the generally unhelpful commentary I was getting about what needed improvement, I would never know which of those conclusions were true, and to what degree. But I definitely was having some Big Feelings about the whole thing, while I wasn't in the performance block, and about the smallness of the thing that was keeping my experienced ass out of the block that I had supposedly fixed enough to get back into it.
And the cycle continued, even after I left university days, and entered the working world, and then had to deal with all of the uncertainties that come with working with other people. And with a place that did regularly run on a gossip network, and indirect methods of communications of concerns or criticisms, and a manager who didn't have the first clue about what to do with a worker who needed some extra supports to help them be their best and who hadn't figured out what those supports were themselves. (Or who had, and was asking for them and not getting them.) And into a relationship where criticism was frequent and a revenge tactic against suggestions for improvement, or necessary things that needed to happen to keep the relationship moving smoothly. It's been a lifelong process, trying to figure out how to deal with criticism in a way that actually works and is productive and that doesn't provoke a whole lot of messy emotional spillage around anyone who might be able to hear about it or who might take it as an inability to "toughen up" and not be so sensitive about everything.
Which has led to a pair of systems that go to work with regard to possible criticism. The first is the anticipatory system, where I tell people that I want to know if my behavior is bothering them, where I want to know from my supervisors and managers if there are complaints or issues with my behavior. This is the "head off at the pass the situation where things that I might believe are less serious explode in my face" adaptation, and it feeds into fawn as being one of my primacy reactions to stress when in a situation where a person being upset with me might have consequences for my job or relationship status. And it couches my language to conditionals and "I think" rather than "I know," unless I'm very sure and I'm around someone who I can give more definite statements to and they will not react with escalation and belittlement.
It also, however, means that I'm more reluctant to try new things or take on situations where failure might be present, because even though I've been out of school for decades at this point, and my terrible relationship is behind me for a few years, I still anticipate that if I don't do perfectly at something, there's going to be someone there to make fun of me or to criticize what I've done, to make themselves feel better, or as a scold to me that I'm not handling the situation like a normal person would. It makes me defensive about my actions and ready to see strong criticism where none is warranted or intended, and it often means that I need sulking time away from the person giving correction or criticism so that I can process all of the emotional content and the self-flagellation and the fears and the weasels and get those things out of the way and handled before I can then address the substance of the criticism and see that it is warranted and I really am glad that this is something someone brought to my attention because they think I can change it, and I would rather have someone tell me something so I can fix it rather than avoid telling me because they think I won't. It's a process, and it will take time, and I know that's not very helpful in any situation where the correction needs to happen immediately, or if this information is being told in a space where the idea is to avoid having to take time out of the session to deal with something in the general space of "white women's tears," even if it's not being intentionally weaponized as a derailing tactic. It's one of those things that I would like to be more "normal" about, but failing that, it's one of those things that I would like to find whatever the right reframing is so that I can slide around my own brain in the moment and then take the time to keep working on examining and contextualizing the defensive structures and systems I've already built so that they're not hyper-sensitive and only fire off when the situation is right.
If the frame of "I take criticism well" stays at a very wide distance and concerns itself with whether or not there's a behavioral change when the criticism is warranted, then it does look like I take criticism well. But as soon as you zoom in even a little bit on the process of how I get there, you'll see that no, I don't actually take criticism well at all, and there's a lot of time, energy, and feelings burnt in the service of getting me to the point where I can determine that it's a warranted criticism and change accordingly, because of the way that my life has gone so far, and some of the wonderful aspects of my own brain chemistry that pull things far out of whack in terms of their impact and how serious they really are, versus how serious the person said they were. There's not really a cure for this other than having situations happen where nothing explodes and where the level of seriousness really was what was said, rather than what I built it up into. Or situations where things do explode because they really needed to. (This is difficult, especially when other people are dealing with their own weasels and pasts and touchpoints where they might react more strongly than they want to or intend to.) So if you offer me a correction or a criticism and I have a lot of emotions about it, or ask for some time to sulk before addressing it, or other such things, I'm sorry, it's almost certainly not you. I'm accepting that what you have to say is legitimate and I'll work on it, but first I have to fight my own weaselbrain to get there.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-19 06:08 am (UTC)