That’s how I feel in some conversations. Let me explain a bit.
I worked for a while at the Peace Corps, an American government organization that supported developing countries in sectors like education, small and medium-sized businesses, and NGOs.
When we first started teaching Romanian to American volunteers, I remember using one of those puppets that we put on each hand to exemplify a dialogue. We didn’t use an intermediary language, we played a bit of theatre so that the learners could understand what it was all about. The method worked very well with them.
I thought back to those times when I found that it happens in real life to try to have a conversation and the interlocutor doesn’t respond. Then I step into the role of the puppeteer and I respond too, imagining two little hands playing. I make fun to reposition myself to the situation, not to react negatively.
When I was little, my dad would talk to my brother and me and we would often be silent, especially when we knew we had done something and didn’t want to admit it, when we felt like we were in over our heads. Dad used to say then that if he would talk to the walls, maybe they would respond faster than us. Oh, he’d also add an; ‘you’ll see, when you grow up, what it’s like to be a parent’.
I didn’t get to experience that role, unfortunately. But I do notice that the kind of behaviour of 5 year olds is still present in some adults now. We regress to 5-year-old behaviour rather than being assertive, affirming. Instead of discussing, responding, we are carefully digging our fingernails in, as if we discovered them then.
Perhaps in such situations we hear in others parents, grandparents, teachers, normative people from the past, we behave just as we did in interactions of yesteryear. But the avoidant, passive, innocent behaviour is not so interesting in adulthood.
If we put ourselves in the other person’s shoes, through a simple exercise in empathy, or if we look from the outside at the scene where the other person is attempting a dialogue, chances are we don’t like ourselves. So perhaps it’s healthier to leave our fingernails alone and look at the other person, to discuss assertively.