The Thing It Landed OnChapter 10 of 145 min
Seeing it in somebody else
It happened to Theo in a meeting about nothing, in the second week of doing any of this.
Gavin did the thing Gavin does. Somebody made a suggestion, there was a short pause, and Gavin said it back in his own words with one small refinement attached, and from then on it was Gavin's suggestion and everybody in the room let it be, because it was easier.
Theo has been irritated by this for two years. What happened that afternoon is that he was irritated by it and he saw what it was for.
Gavin was not stealing anything. Gavin was making sure he had been in the room.
You will start doing this, and sooner than you expect. A fortnight is usual.
Once you have looked at your own four arguments and your own first thought in the morning, other people become suddenly, embarrassingly legible. The colleague. The neighbour who must tell you about the parking. The brother-in-law and his views.
They are all standing somewhere, visibly, and defending it in plain sight, and you cannot now unsee it.
What it actually gives you
Not forgiveness. I want to be careful here, because this gets oversold.
Theo does not like Gavin any better. Gavin is still difficult and the meetings are still irritating and nothing about the working relationship has improved, because none of this happened to Gavin — it happened to Theo, privately, in a chair.
What changed is the price.
Before, Gavin's move cost Theo the rest of the afternoon and sometimes a conversation in the car with nobody in the passenger seat. Now it costs about twenty minutes. The behaviour is identical; Theo has simply stopped experiencing it as a thing done to him, because he can see it is a thing done from somewhere — and from a fairly small and fairly old place, by somebody who has to do it and does not know he is doing it.
A person defending an address is not attacking you. They are holding on. It only ever looked like an attack from the inside of your own address.
The one that is not a colleague
You will do it to a parent, and that one does not feel clever at all.
One afternoon you will be having the conversation you have had four hundred times — about the heating, or your job, or why you have not visited — and you will see, with a clarity you did not ask for, exactly what your mother has been protecting since before you were born. And that it is small. And that she has been standing on it, alone, without anybody ever once noticing, for sixty years.
It is a horrible moment, and most people get nothing useful out of it for a while. What arrives first is usually grief, and the grief is specific: not that she is this way, but that nobody ever saw it, including you, including last Christmas.
There is nothing to be done with that, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But it is the place where this stops being a technique for managing difficult people and becomes something else, and almost everybody who sticks with any of this ends up there eventually.
And now the dangers, which are real
You cannot ever be sure. This is the first and the largest. With yourself there is a confirmation — the small drop in the stomach, the reluctance to say the phrase, and you know when you have the right one. With another person there is nothing. You are guessing, from outside, with no access, and you will often be wrong in ways you will never find out about.
So it is held as a possibility and never as a finding. He may be making sure he was in the room. Not that is what he is doing. The difference sounds small and it is the whole difference between understanding somebody and filing them.
It is not an explanation of their grievance. If somebody is angry with you, they may be angry with you because you were wrong. Seeing what their anger is standing on does not dissolve the thing they are angry about, and a person who uses this to avoid ever being in the wrong has acquired the most sophisticated defence in the book.
And it is not for saying. Not to them, not about them, not as a kindness. The next chapter is largely about why, because it is the commonest way everything in this book goes wrong, and it goes wrong most often in the hands of people who meant well.
This week
Take the person who annoys you most. Not the one who has harmed you — that is a different situation and chapter eleven says what to do about it. Just the most irritating one.
Ask: what would they have to stop being, in order to behave differently?
One phrase. The one who knows. The one who was there first. The one nobody listens to.
Then hold it loosely, as a guess, and say nothing to anybody. Not to them, and not to your partner, which is where it usually goes, and where it turns within about a week into a thing the two of you say about a third person.
And notice, over the next few weeks, what that person costs you. That number is the only result this chapter has, and it is the only one worth having.
The next chapter is about Paul, whose daughter stopped telling him things — and about the commonest way to get all of this wrong, which does not feel like a mistake from the inside and never does.