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Scar tissues make relationships wear out (2013)

706 points by ColinWright 3y ago

HPsquared 3y ago
Scar tissue needs to be massaged often to break it down. Perhaps the same is true of trouble areas in relationships: don't let things sit and seize up.
- brookst 3y ago
  It’s relatively painless to massage scar tissue. Relationship rough spots are more like cavities that are constantly unpleasant and the require a really unpleasant day to address.
jmbwell 3y ago
As I understand it, scar tissue isn’t necessarily weaker, and can be stronger, but is mostly adapted to the injury and how it was able to heal. If the injury was well attended, scar tissue can be as good or better than what was there before. If the injury is neglected, or repeatedly re-injured before it could ever fully heal, then it will be tougher and less flexible and more painful even long after it has technically healed. It won’t move the same way as before, it won’t be as supple, it will need more attention over time. An injury can take only a moment, but recovery and healing takes much longer. If you address it sooner rather than later, and if you take care to avoid similar injuries, it’s more likely to heal well. If it’s neglected, if you half-ass it, etc., it may never heal properly. A nitpick, but only because other than that it’s not a bad metaphor.
- hliyan 3y ago
  I agree. I've seen couples who've gone through a lot of turmoil in their younger years but have emerged stronger and have happily grown old together. Granted, they are the minority. So I too, feel the scar tissue analogy is imperfect. Perhaps in some cases, relationship issues are like fractures -- the mend is in fact stronger than the break.
  - throwaway173738 3y ago
    That is, if you take the time to mend it.
  - haldujai 3y ago
    > fractures -- the mend is in fact stronger than the break. This is also a medically incorrect statement for similar reasons to scar tissue, the resultant trabecular disorganization always results in weaker bone, even for “perfectly” healed fractures. I think the original metaphor (and even fractures) still holds but in a different way than you described. I highly doubt any of those couples (and from personal experience myself) wanted the turmoil however one feels after the fact, “made us stronger” is often a combination of dissonance and a statement that other areas of the relationship strengthened to compensate (in the fracture analogy: if you break your left leg your right one will strengthen from increased mechanical load to compensate). One would not break a bone in an attempt to make it stronger, but a broken bone can heal to near full strength and other bones in the body get stronger to compensate. If you break your bone repeatedly, it heals as a deformed structure that is considerably weaker than what you started and will break from a minor injury. If you substitute bones for relationship I think this holds. With effort it’s possible to recover from and compensate for relationship trauma and thrive as an organism/couple, but it’s still better to avoid emotional trauma to begin with (assuming it’s possible) as with physical trauma.
    - eastbound 3y ago
      > If you break your bone repeatedly, it heals as a deformed structure that is considerably weaker So taekwondo people who train to hit concrete pillars don’t get stronger from the repeated hits, do you confirm? And “what doesn’t kill, makes you stronger” is false too?
      - haldujai 3y ago
        > So taekwondo people who train to hit concrete pillars don’t get stronger from the repeated hits, do you confirm? Stress from repetitive microtrauma is not the same as a fracture (stress to failure). Increased mechanical loading (hitting a concrete pillar, exercise) can absolutely strengthen bone in a similar mechanism to decreased load weakening bones (little old lady, astronauts). Breaking a bone completely disrupts the internal architecture and what is deposited is unequivocally weaker than what was there before. > And “what doesn’t kill, makes you stronger” is false too I have no professional opinion on this aphorism. I do have one on bone healing.
- haldujai 3y ago
  Medically speaking, your understanding is bit off in that while there are several factors that affect the resulting strength of scar tissue, the underlying disorganization in scar tissue will always leave it biomechanically weaker than than uninjured skin. It is true that with early attention, proper wound care, etc scar can approach normal skin but even in the best of circumstances it will still be “slightly weaker” rather than as good or better. [0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840475/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840475/
dr_dshiv 3y ago
We will obviously have AGI before we figure out relationship therapy— and likely have AI value alignment before human value alignment. Practically, though… try having a conversation with chatGPT asking it to translate what you each want to say into “nonviolent communication”. Wow. AI seems way better than humans at human relationship communication…
- nailer 3y ago
  Honestly the worst thing about non confrontational communication is that someone named a very useful communication technique after something - violence - that is not the thing being avoided.
- ryder9 3y ago
  [dead]
- ineedasername 3y ago
  Yes, I have a colleague whose normal writing tone is confrontational. It’s something they’re aware of and work to remove during the editing process. ChatGPT has made this significantly easier for them: 1st draft -> prompt “soften the language” —-> review and revise output ———> prompt “soften again” ————> final draft Enter more complex prompts or more iterations if you want editing for multiple things, e.g., prompt “suggest edits for clarity, brevity, grammar, and softer language”. You can iterate very quickly.
  - unsupp0rted 3y ago
    I'd be curious about what a normal short message from your colleague looks like unedited. I wonder if my writing style is confrontational. I think my client's is.
- ada1981 3y ago
  We’ve had researcher access to openAI for a couples years to build something that does precisely this.
  - 3y ago
gabrielsroka 3y ago
I call it death by a thousand papercuts instead of scars.
flatline 3y ago
I agree with his characterization of relationship breakdowns. I think the scar tissue is a bit of a tortured analogy. At some point you just have to let shit go if you don’t want it to build up. These little things are what Dan Savage calls the “price of admission.” It’s important to have good communication skills, to be able to talk through conflict, to be able to give someone space. But if after talking about how your partner loads the dishwasher three times and nothing has changed? Or the umpteenth big fight where things were mostly patched over bit there’s still some underlying pattern that you know is going to come up again? Now you know the price of admission. Is it worth it to you to pay that price to stay in relationship, or not? The speaker confesses their perfectionist tendencies. People like this, myself included, cannot let go of anything. I’ve spent years learning how and it still takes a conscious effort, but it’s better. My zen teacher used to hand students a stick and tell them to let go of it. So many could not - it’s going to drop, messily, onto the floor! The stick might break! You can’t just let go of it like that, it needs to be put down gently, in its proper place, etc. High achieving individuals, especially in a field like academia which heavily rewards certain narcissistic and neurodivergent traits, are just hard to deal with in relationship. I look around me at the few successful long-term relationships I see and one or both people are usually pretty subdued/chill in every aspect of their life. This is not the norm.
- ryanjshaw 3y ago
  > But if after talking about how your partner loads the dishwasher three times and nothing has changed? Use it as motivation to become wealthy enough to afford a cleaner who packs the dishes the way you need them to be packed! Joking aside, I'm not sure if you can meaningfully let go of these kinds of things if you don't address the control issues underlying them.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    This seems like quite an uncharitable reading of the situation. They talked about the manner of packing. If things are packed incorrectly then they may block other things from being cleaned or require another cycle of cleaning, which presumably moves to work onto the other partner or in extreme cases could be indicative of weaponised incompetence.
Trasmatta 3y ago
I used to work in construction, and his story about the contractor he worked with was almost triggering. Those types of people were the absolute worst to work for. The closest thing in software development is a client who has no expertise or understanding of the process but still wants to bikeshed every detail. It's exhausting.
- zenonu 3y ago
  After I took ownership of my home, I cataloged over 100 issues that needed to be attended to post-construction. I want a home without obvious in-your-face-faults. The construction crew wanted to finish and move onto the next project. Our incentives were not aligned, and that's the problem. Next time, I'm specifically going to ensure another contractor is hired to ensure QC of the home during construction. No moving onto the next stage until the 1 foot hole in the subfloor caused by a falling drill from the 2nd story is fixed.
- ilovepuppies 3y ago
  Spot on. Honestly that construction story was infuriating, he was the problem the entire time and probably shouldn’t be giving relationship advice. There’s no such thing as a “perfectionist” in the first place since what qualifies as “perfect” is a subjective point of view. Anybody, and I mean anybody, can point out little things that are wrong in something. Especially in construction, by people that have never done it themselves but holds financial power. Also, I guarantee all the slight changes he thought were critical enough to warrant constant intervention actually weren’t, or could’ve been addressed later. The cost would have been significantly higher if the contractor factored in the time it took to satisfy him. He was getting what he paid for.
mercurialsolo 3y ago
Human relationships are like complex systems. And some of the principles of antifragile design can also be applied if we look at it from a systemic lens. The build up of small cracks over a period of time can lead to any system getting brittle and fragile over a period of time. That said, resolution or letting go are both viable techniques to make it anti-fragile. Sometimes we have to realize, all of us have some shit we come along with and it's never perfectly matched to someone else. And it would be mad if it were too! Much like you make the best of life and the world around you think of making the best in the relationship by investing into the right things. Sometimes it's ok to let go - at other times it's necessary to draw boundaries and expect resolutions. To keep a complex system running, we also need to keep working at it.
- zerbinxx 3y ago
  I like this a lot. “Error handling in relationships” is a great concept for a blog post
toxik 3y ago
Would have been nice to have the actual audio. Nice essay though.
personalityson 3y ago
Why are relationships holy and have to be salvaged at any cost? Just let go and move along
- dymk 3y ago
  Some relationships are important, others aren't. It's good to have a framework for keeping the ones that matter lasting. If you treat every relationship you ever have as disposable, eventually you'll just find yourself alone.
- newsclues 3y ago
  I only have one Mom. If I didn't put in the effort to fix the relationship I ruined, myself and my mother would suffer. I'm happy to let go and move on from most relationships, but some are holy and must be salvaged at any cost.
  - k8sToGo 3y ago
    > must be salvaged at any cost I disagree with this. Relationships with Cluster-B people can become very dangerous. This can even include parent-child relationships, for example, if the parent has NPD (narcisstic personality disorder). At the end you really need to look out for yourself and your mental health first (hence not at any cost).
    - newsclues 3y ago
      You missed the important part in that quote. "but _some_ are holy and must be salvaged at any cost" My relationship with my mother is part of that "some" for me. For others it may be someone else, but I didn't say everyone needs to salvage relationships with their parents at all, I shared my personal experience. Hopefully everyone has a relationship worth saving. Find that and fight for it, because a good relationship is worth any cost, up to including your life (eg. relationship with your child). I'm not an expert but does your way of thinking about this not map to Cluster-B personality types?
      - 3y ago
superposeur 3y ago
The scar tissue model sounds convincing and there’s something to it. But when I reflect on my very long term relationships, it doesn’t seem to get at the core of why we’ve stayed together. Instead, for these relationships there is a deeper alignment of interests / alignment of values / alignment of outlooks (whatever you want to call it) that allows us to get past the annoying stuff. Put differently, a model that resonates more with my experience is that there are two baskets of conflicts: core stuff and peripheral stuff. As long as the peripheral conflicts don’t get too egregious, they don’t actually matter if the core stuff is still working.
- haldujai 3y ago
  > As long as the peripheral conflicts don’t get too egregious From a scar model perspective this is like a papercut/superficial injury which isn’t leaving you with a scar (or at least a very minor one). > they don’t actually matter if the core stuff is still working. Being stabbed in the heart (literally and metaphorically) will leave bigger and deeper scars that can impair core function and your heart will never pump blood as effectively again.
  - superposeur 3y ago
    I guess, but reflecting further, the scar tissue/injury model is a little odd in that it focuses only on the negative, not on what the two parties actually get out of the relationship.
    - solarmist 3y ago
      People remember and hold onto negative things. This is about unblocking/unclogging the system regularly to maintain proper function. It builds up over time so it needs to be regularly flushed.
- nokya 3y ago
  Thank you for sharing your view, you put words when I couldn't. Shared values is precisely the best explanation to my relationships that wore out in the past, I don't think scar tissue was the reason. The analogy of scar tissue could work for symptoms, though: the presence of scar tissues in a relationship may/could indicate that conflicts never get fully resolved because deep in the relationship, there is a fundamental misalignment of values, and that's what creates scar tissues when conflicts emerge. For me, the real thing that tends to explain my long relationships is the authenticity of someone to her/his own values. Which is not to be confused with sharing the same opinions, I can easily be friends with people who vote differently than me, but what I can't stand is dishonesty (e.g., inventing theories or excuses to put the blame on the "others"). The reason I think it works that way is in part due to my own character: I don't hesitate getting into conflict with other people and more particularly with those dear to me when I disagree or when I feel disturbed by something. I can have intense arguments with some of my friends, my wife, my parents, my boss, but it never damaged our relationship because I think deep under, our values are aligned. Now, what do I mean by "values"? Those are things I characterize as values: - how you negotiate internal conflict - how you respond to being wrong / corrected by someone else that presents a good argument to you - how you treat people of lower socioeconomic level (e.g., disdain, disrespect,neglect vs. empathy/consideration, etc.) - how you treat people of higher socioeconomic level (e.g., jealousy, envy, ass-licking vs. admiration, respect, inspiration, etc.) - whether you behave differently with co-workers situated "below" you vs. "above" you vs. those who can affect your career advancement - whether you are faithful to yourself and your opinions (aka, whether you can stand the cost or implications of your opinions, or if you change your mind and invent yourself another stance just to avoid any discomfort) - whether your respect everyone's right to privacy or assume you can invade your spouse or child's personal space - etc. So, in summary, yes a very interesting article but I can only disagree with the premise: I don't think that scar tissues make relationships wear out, I think values misalignment does.
CPLX 3y ago
This concept is pretty well developed in the context of 12-step programs. What he’s calling “scar tissue” they call resentment.
roenxi 3y ago
> He would have been pretty worried if we sat down and I was like, “Jim, can we talk [Laughter] about my feelings? I mean you left the plastic open and dust got into the house, and sometimes I feel like you don't respect me as a person.” This is one of those moments where someone is theory own worst enemy. The expectation for people to bottle up their feelings and sit there in annoyance is silly. There are only two basic scenarios here. The cause of the annoyance mainly sits with... 1. Jim. 2. John Ousterhout. 3. Some unidentified cause. The proper approach is to think carefully about whether it is case 2. If it is, stop feeling annoyed - the annoyance is harming the self and the relationship for no reason. It is an illusion that can only cause trouble. Most of the time that is the end of it. However, sometimes it is a case 1 or 3. Then it is perfectly fine to sit down with Jim and talk feelings. Just do it. Learn to make it sound natural and stilted and people only notice that you seem really easy to talk to. Figure out whether it is case 1 or 3 and whether it can just be resolved on the spot. Nobody is helped by bottling even minor things up. Learn to live a comfortable life. It drives me crazy when I find out people just sit there and don't tell me when I'm upsetting them. Communication, my men! If you can't fix it in your own head, get other people involved and talk it through. Plug for Marshall Rosenberg and Nonviolent Communication. This stuff really can be reduced to an algorithm as long as it accompanies a relentlessly nonjudgemental mindset and a tolerance for not getting your own way.
- SomeCallMeTim 3y ago
  I don't know that NVC always works the way its proponents think it does. I've been around a lot of NVC practitioners. Many have been active NVC educators. Maybe they've all been Doing It Wrong, but...I find that when presented with the "NVC way" of discussing a problem, my brain always translates it to the emotional symbols I understand, which are nearly identical to the symbols generated by an overt criticism. That said, I recognize that could simply be a "me problem." Which I won't dispute. I'm not entirely neurotypical. And generally if something I'm doing is bothering someone, I try to deal with it; I don't make everything into drama. I just don't parse the NVC words appreciably differently than a normal, polite request. (Overt hostility does push my buttons, but short of that, it doesn't seem to matter.) Just saying that NVC isn't magic. If the person making the request has a reasonable point, I'll acknowledge and do what I can to adjust my behavior. If they seem to be asking something less reasonable, wrapping it with NVC language doesn't change the request materially for me at all. > It drives me crazy when I find out people just sit there and don't tell me when I'm upsetting them. Communication, my men! If you can't fix it in your own head, get other people involved and talk it through. Agree that people should generally be open about issues. But there's appropriate context for everything. I really don't want coworkers coming up to me and asking to work through an emotional issue for an hour because something I suggested was different than their suggestion, and my suggestion bruised their ego. Close friends? Sure. I probably have higher than average tolerance for such conversations among those I care about. But I choose my close friends, and largely don't get to choose specific coworkers, and so demanding that level of emotional work seems outside of the job description. Also: Totally agree about telling the contractor that dust got everywhere and letting them know that's a problem. But for me, it wouldn't be at all about "my feelings." It would be about a request to a contractor to adjust their behavior or that of their subs based on reasonable expectations. I would personally feel foolish taking an NVC approach with a contractor in that situation, TBH. Not "It makes me feel disrespected when dust gets all over the place," but something more like, "Hey Jim, someone didn't seal the plastic around the construction area and we had a bunch of dust we needed to clean up. Can you be sure that everyone knows that it's important to keep the dust seal closed? Thanks." Heck, the latter is even less confrontational than the "you left the plastic open" in the OP's comment.
softwaredoug 3y ago
I think I would replace scar tissue with known limitations of the other person. You can learn in a long term relationship you can trust a person in certain ways and not in others. You learn you will be fulfilled in certain ways but not others. Long term relationships work out of accepting limitations. There’s also plenty of examples of long term collaborations in business, so I’m not sure the underlying premise is solid.
wellthisisgreat 3y ago
Compromises make relationships wear out. If you land on a compromise where it’s one person giving in rather than both changing their requirements, that one person will always feel like they have been wronged. You only need to a couple of such instances to burn out the strongest affection
m3kw9 3y ago
That’s why letting yourself/significant other sleep still angry after an argument is not such a great idea. Resolve it before sleeping or it gets swept under the rug, or as he said, adds one scar tissue, as nobody will bring it back up next morning. It will be remembered when it happens again next time
- for_i_in_range 3y ago
  On the flip side, when you have a partner that brings up issues almost every night before going to bed, that gets old too.
  - lazide 3y ago
    It can also just be dangerous - before bed is usually when people have the least emotional regulation and are the most tired and cranky. It’s peak ‘domestic’ call time. Well, outside of end of year holidays. Ideally, being able to go ‘now is a shitty time, let’s laugh about it and check tomorrow if it’s still an issue’ would be better. But emotions don’t always work that way.
  - m3kw9 3y ago
    Only for fights that seem warranted, otherwise it could get too much. Most time small arguments gets “resolv-ish” right away, say small stuff like leaving a mess and being an ass about it, you know? You say sorry, next time I’ll be better and it’s usually done
- scarface_74 3y ago
  There are a lot of times when you need to let cooler heads prevail. You’re not going to get less cranky as the night progresses. On the other hand, it took literally years to come to a compromise between my very devout wife whose had it drilled into head that you should give 10% to the church as a family or we will never have a good life and we will be damned to hell. The argument would always come up after we made a big financial commitment and while I was still trying to dig myself out of some bad financial decisions that I made before we even met. She was fully aware of them. But one thing it’s almost impossible to square is a disagreement between two people when it involves religion or cultural disagreements. When someone believes their actions will lead to damnation and burning in hell for eternity, no amount of logical argument will ever dissuade them from this. Faith is by definition not based on physical reality - and that’s not meant to be demeaning. The compromise we came to is that she does what she wants as long as she stays within the overall budget we agreed to and I give what really amounts toward a “this is the price I pay for never having to hear mention of giving again”. While I will say that my wife has her belief system. She is what I would consider a “liberal Christian”. She isn’t judgmental about other people and we have friends across the divide.
agumonkey 3y ago
Some people have a natural talent to turn friction into lively repair tissue and not senescent scars. Whereas others (myself included) have two modes: suffer into submission or avoid forever (basically the point of this article). It's an important topic, I'm surprised (but happily so) to find out about this in a gist from a CS teacher.
jeffreyrogers 3y ago
I like the analogy and think what he's describing is a big reason relationships fail, but I don't think he's right that you need to make sure scar tissue never occurs in long-term relationships, at least romantic ones. That's an almost impossible goal. I've seen a lot of good relationships, and the level of conflict that exists in them is all over the place. What actually seems to matter is that the people involved learn to repair whatever damage is done after the conflict. That can also happen months or years later. It also requires much less saintliness than avoiding scar-tissue in the first place does.
- steve_adams_86 3y ago
  I agree. Like my physical scars, the ones in my relationships still serve as a useful reminder. Injury is a fact of life and one we should become good at responding to. A comfortable and hassle-free life is virtually impossible (and perhaps not even desirable), so it appears to me that the injuries should be attended to, healed, learned from, then used as a symbol of that process to reflect on.
mkl95 3y ago
Different ideologies make relationships wear out, all the time. Some manager does not care too much about documenting some area of the product, some IC does not care enough to dig into the code to understand it, etc. Week by week these people's trust on each other will be eroded by the disagreements that stem from what they expect from each other. I may be a cynic, but I don't believe in fixing most if not all of these relationships. Life is too short, and the industry is huge.
pstuart 3y ago
That's HN. I come for the tech and leave with the advice...
csallen 3y ago
My ex was a relationship therapist. She was absolutely allergic to letting scar tissue build up. She would tell me about every little negative thing that happened between us. And she would phrase it by talking about her feelings rather than about my actions. ("I felt hurt when I heard you say X," rather than "You shouldn't have said X.") Suffice it to say, it freaked out. I wasn't used to people sharing their feelings with me. In normal relationships, by the time someone is telling you they feel <insert negative emotion>, a ton of scar tissue has already been built up, and they're at a breaking point. So I was conditioned to believing that sharing feelings = things have gotten really bad. But early on she would calm me down, and say no, things aren't bad, she's fine, she's just into sharing feelings early and often to prevent the buildup of resentment. So I got used to it, and even started doing the same thing back. Eventually our relationship ended, but I brought the practice to new relationships I entered afterwards. And, unsurprisingly, it kind of freaked people out! Almost nobody is used to it at first, just like I wasn't. It's incredibly easy to get defensive when someone lets you know that they felt bad in response to something you did. And it's usually vulnerable and risky to find the words to share feelings without arousing the other person's defenses. Still, when I look back at how I've evolved as a person, I credit this "scar tissue" view of relationships with a lot of personal growth. It's given me a habit of confronting people problems head on, something past-me was unconsciously avoidant of. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and being willing to have uncomfortable conversations instead of kicking the can down the road is one of the hallmarks of adulthood and maturity.
- nazka 3y ago
  This type of communication has actually a name, it called non-violent communication. There are books about it. It is one of the best way to communicate when things gets tough or are in a crisis. Since it avoids finger pointing, personal attacks (even when we don’t mean to), etc... and still being able to talk about the issue and how we feel (instead of how the other should do such and such or putting words in their mouths). But I guess it can be weird to be used all the time and maybe without explicitly talking about.
  - kortilla 3y ago
AlbertCory 3y ago
An anecdote about contractors, since that's Osterhout's example: In my book, The Big Bucks I used some of my actual history with Jerry, my contractor, as the basis for Walt. I say "some" since Jerry was already married, and he never did an Eichler in Palo Alto. Plus we started in 1992, whereas in the book it was 1983. Jerry did about ten jobs on my house after that. I'm not giving a plot spoiler on what happens with Walt /s I just found his traits endearing. He was just like an engineer in so many ways, and he'd even vacuum up rooms he hadn't been in. But basically it was consideration and respect for each other. A lot of homeowners treat contractors like lower-class servants. I gave him a copy of the book and he loved it: he finished it in two days, and then gave it to a contractor friend, who also loved it.
piloto_ciego 3y ago
The key to long lasting relationships is pretty simple to be perfectly honest. Forgive people, have empathy, and don’t sweat the small stuff.
dinvlad 3y ago
Oftentimes people enter relationships since they’re too afraid to be alone, and so are willing to close their eyes and tolerate something in a partner (be it a friend or a lover) they would not otherwise. Of course, there comes a time when the accumulated annoyances with these incompatibilities become too much, and so it falls apart.
rcarr 3y ago
The straw that broke the camel's back. It does make me laugh how hn appears to have a pathological need to come up with a new (and normally "science" based) metaphor for common folk wisdom.
- tbirdny 3y ago
  Yeah, that and "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" (from the current top comment.)
- Eumenes 3y ago
  This is an industry that reinvents open source libraries every 3 weeks, so ......
opmelogy 3y ago
The word he is looking for is resentment. It's well understood in relationship psychology. But it's good to have someone outside of that field be able to untangle these topics and word them in ways that resonate with different people.
xorvoid 3y ago
This! Wisdom! I’ve experienced exactly this multiple times and felt this way. Thank you thank you for the words to describe it John Ousterhout.
MarvinGaze 3y ago
That reminded me of this article: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/04/marriage-problems-fight-dishes/629526/ https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/04/marriage-...
manmal 3y ago
TLDR: Perfectionism and the inability to forgive other people’s mistakes imbues relationships with an expiration date.
munificent 3y ago
I'm always excited to see psychology stuff discussed here, and I like Ousterhout a lot, but I don't think this analogy works very well. Scar tissue really is permanent. Resentment in a relationship can be permanent, but doesn't have to be. The analogy that every unresolved grievance leads to a monotonically increasing amount of perpetual relationship weakness is, I think, wrong. I think of resentment more like foreign bodies. When I was a kid, I got a chunk of pencil lead stuck in my hand without realizing it. The wound healed over it, but it was still in there. I could see it as a dark spot under my skin. Many years later, my body gradually migrated it to the surface and eventually it came out. (This was definitely a weird experience.) When there's some sort of grievance or unresolved conflict in a relationship, I think of it as leaving a little chunk of foreign body or poison in the person's symptom. Some amount of this is natural, and you will just build up a little scar tissue and get by. But if you keep accumulating them, they'll make you less and less healthy. Often, the best solution is to make sure the foreign body is removed before the wound heals over. When a hurt happens, take the time right then to work through it with the partner so that you aren't leaving anything in there and it can heal quickly and completely. But, if that doesn't happen (and sometimes it won't), you can still dig it out later. It just requires re-opening the wound. The longer you wait, the more painful it is. When you re-open that wound, you will feel raw and vulnerable. It requires a lot of trust and care. Sometimes, this may happen years later, but it can be done. If you find yourself doing this so frequently that you feel like you're never fully healed, that's a good sign that you aren't right for each other. Likewise, if you never feel that you're in an emotionally safe enough space to re-open those wounds and clean out the festering gunk in them, that's also a warning sign.
antman 3y ago
I see a lot of models here so let me add another common one: Parallel monologues. Couples discuss and perhaps consent but not realign the criteria. Why would they? The can just ignore the small stuff. But the small stuff is the practice sessions. Once big decisions come aka buying a house, how to grow a kid, move to a different country, finance they are mot prepared
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Fgehono 3y ago
My wife is the person I literally tell everything. Not much scar tissue if you see your partner your bff. Not much of a relationship you have anyway if you withold things. I'm even sometimes take pictures when I experience alone because I immediately want to share it with her.
hackeraccount 3y ago
I appreciate the idea but I think it's trickier then described. There are multiple reasons to tell and not tell a person you're in a relationship with the problems they cause you. Some of them benefit the relationship and some don't. It's a cliche to say that relationships are about compromise but that's because it's true. That compromise isn't always spoken; sometimes it's done without the other person even knowing. If you're clear eyed or empathetic or just love the other person you can know that they do the same thing for you. If you're none of those things you can make the compromise painfully clear and create a zero sum situation.
11thEarlOfMar 3y ago
Trying to get to root cause of what's actually wrong with my communication capability, I've come to the belief that transplanting a thought from my mind to my wife's mind intact is really hard. Fidelity can break down in several transformations: how clearly the thought is formed in my mind, the words I choose and arrange to express it, how fluidly I can speak them, whether there is impedence in the environment or emotional state, how accurately she hears the words, the precice meanings she applies to each word, the context she overlays and finally, any bias that modulates the meaning. Even if all of that goes reasonably well, my expression of thought encounters the intent modulation. What does she believe I am trying to accomplish by communicating this thought? To a large degree, having a positive outcome from any conversation relies on the trust between us, the value we place in the relationship and the willingness of each of us to monitor for and correct misunderstandings so that even when conflict develops, the understanding of the situation is the same for both parties. What gets me down is knowing that for some (most?) people, the above is so intuitive, they've never had a problem with it. Alas.
- digaozao 3y ago
  In my experience, I would say most people have problems with exactly this. They don't even think about the possibility of noise/interpretation in the communication. and they never stopped to think about it the way you did.
  - zerbinxx 3y ago
    If you (+above commenter +any other HN per users) want a good Wikipedia article, the metalanguange/metacommunication ones do a great job of explaining how this works in CS friendly terms - the connection to meta programming is a great aside.
- extasia 3y ago
  What is thought is not what is said. What is said is not what is heard.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thelastparadise 3y ago
[Big Laughter]
- moffkalast 3y ago
  [Sensible Chuckle]
WXLCKNO 3y ago
I think most my long term relationships ended because of an accumulation of small issues. Incompatibility obviously plays a role but I know I fucked up in not sharing enough when I get annoyed with my partner but I don't know why exactly.
andrewstuart 3y ago
Every time you are a jerk to someone, criticise someone, belittle someone, disrespect someone or attack someone, they like you less. Relationships have a "bank account of good will", and each incident/negative interaction withdraws from the account. Positive interactions contribute goodwill to the account. Negative interactions withdraw at many times the rate that positive interactions contribute. It's very easy to destroy a relationship - you can do it in minutes or seconds. It's very hard to build something positive, very very hard to rebuild damage.
jancsika 3y ago
> and it probably drove him crazy that every morning when he came in, I was there standing in the kitchen ready to tell him about all the mistakes he made yesterday (Emphasis mine.) His compulsion to start every morning by enumerating through a list of grievances undermined a relationship. He systematically alienated the person doing an important job for him, apparently fully aware of that person's shortcomings-- i.e., the contractor getting defensive and not owning up to problems. Yet allowing the job to continuing through these periodic grievances was a tacit acknowledgement in the story that Ousterhout thought the work was decent enough. Then, he uses hyperbolic metaphors to describe what he apparently sees as the only possible outcome if he were ever to slip up: > Because if there's anything at all when you're giving in that you can feel bad about later, you're nuking the relationship - you're creating scar tissue with yourself, and that will build up to the point where you wreck the relationship. (Emphasis mine.) (And he ended up wrecking the relationship, regardless!) Yikes! Who in the world could live up to this model? I think a much more workable and reasonable approach would be to reflect on what fuels our own compulsions and shortcomings. To just make up an example-- if I were arguing a point with a contractor every morning in an attempt to convince the five year-old version of myself that I'm important enough to not be abandoned, I should be aware of the fact that I'm doing this. Armed with that knowledge I'd be able to skip at least one morning and go treat myself to some waffles.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cactusplant7374 3y ago
Is there a video for this transcript?
ambyra 3y ago
I can always tell a relationship is about to be over when one person uses the phrase "You always x" or "You never x" or "Why do you always x" or "he/she is always x". It shows long brewing resentment toward the other person. Very funny if you're listening in, very scary if it's directed at you :)
- hackly 3y ago
  Happens all the time in my marriage and still going strong. Sometimes you just accept the way the other person is, doesn’t mean you don’t point it out to them in moments of anger. But not necessarily a relationship-ending signal.
- switch007 3y ago
  I feel like I’ve read that on a billion pop science psychology blog spam websites. Always wondered if there are any serious studies behind it
twelve40 3y ago
This is all great advice until you get stuck with "I don't give a fuck" "it's my way or the highway" people. There are more of them that may seem at a first glance, and it takes some time to figure that out, too. And sometimes it comes with age, so that's even worse, because there is no way to tell early on.
- xkbarkar 3y ago
  Ive found that the “my way or highway” attitrude is often a defense mechanism and they will meet you halfway if you simply ackowledge their point of view. Accepting and acknowledging are not the same thing though so I dont mean to cave in if you disagree. I speak as a toxic person myself. Years of systemaric abuse and I was pretty much a marcissistic asshole. 100% a defense mechanism to avoid abuse. I had never learned what validation was. Also I isually assumed everyone was out to get me. Took me years of living without a relationship to learn to learn what an absolute dunderhead I could be. Sometimes other peoples actions are simply a reflection of your own attitide. I look at it this way, if everyone around me is an ahole, the only thing they have in common is me. Maybe, just maybe, I myself may need to learn to communicate and validate those around me. And I need to do that without selling myself short.
IIAOPSW 3y ago
I wish I could have read this 3 weeks ago. Of all the awful things she said, nothing was the worst.
dav_Oz 3y ago
One thing which is often missing or just left implicit in two-way communication is the self-referential aspect: How are you talking to yourself? Most people have a hard time tuning into this part because self-talk usually starts in early childhood and by the time one can be made fully "aware" of it, it has already faded into the normal background noise of being oneself, so it rarely gets openly interrogated. The self-talk doesn't have to be sophisticated, it can just be a constant pink noise of: "This is just dumb." ... "I'm miserable" ... "It's my fault" ... "I'm not worthy of love" ... "I'm disgusted by myself". And, here, I'm still very polite with the wording. Of course this inevitably bleeds in how you communicate with other people and especially the people in your life you really care about. If you never cultivated to encourage yourself, be kind, patient and forgiving toward yourself at some point you can't sustain the illusion (e.g. "nicest, loving ... person") and eventually it will leash out. There is a solipsistic aspect in communication worth exploring: I often find that communicating with one another openly and freely is also making one aware of each other's (hurtful, embarrassing ...) self-talk and can make way for the kind of primordial empathy buried deep in oneself and by extension make it easier to fully connect with the feelings of other people.
nmz 3y ago
Sounds more like resentment buildup, nothing to do with scar tissue.
rayanm 3y ago
Talking about feelings is all good and healthy assuming the problem to solve is technical and due to a misunderstanding. But what if the root cause of the build up of resentment is when one of the couple is changing and his/her feeling about the relationship is changing. Someone like me with disorganized attachment style can sense subtle changes quickly and react to it
- raziel2p 3y ago
  I don't really see why the two are different. 1. Technical / misunderstanding -> talk about how you feel 2. You or your partner or your relationship is changing (or you feel like it is) -> talk about how you feel
CHB0403085482 3y ago
Make money, don't care about anyone else~ https://www.vox.com/money/23733244/bullshit-jobs-work-employment-lazy-jobless-employed-nothing-to-do https://www.vox.com/money/23733244/bullshit-jobs-work-employ...
w10-1 3y ago
This is a truth misunderstood. No static picture or dynamic model actually works for relationships. No "alignment" or polishing is guaranteed to work. What works is commitment: deciding to do what's necessary to make it work. Not promise, or practice, or experience, or a wealth of emotional intelligence. Commitment. If commitment translates to "avoiding scar tissue", fine. If "avoiding scar tissue" reinforces your commitment, even better. But the main thing for your own identity and your relationships is the commitment. And to realize: if it's not working, you're not committed. (And most likely, you have good reason not to be, and you're stuck half-in, half-out of something you can't stand but need, or with traits that both help and hurt you. Welcome to the real world of beings, which is... complicated.)
justdep 3y ago
People treating each other poorly over a long period of time tends to end the relationship at some point? Shocking.
nzeribe 3y ago
This is a feminine communication style - endlessly talking about feelings, down to the last detail. It's inappropriate for men to use this method.

706 points by ColinWright 3y ago

Scar tissue needs to be massaged often to break it down. Perhaps the same is true of trouble areas in relationships: don't let things sit and seize up.

brookst 3y ago
It’s relatively painless to massage scar tissue. Relationship rough spots are more like cavities that are constantly unpleasant and the require a really unpleasant day to address.

jmbwell 3y ago

As I understand it, scar tissue isn’t necessarily weaker, and can be stronger, but is mostly adapted to the injury and how it was able to heal. If the injury was well attended, scar tissue can be as good or better than what was there before. If the injury is neglected, or repeatedly re-injured before it could ever fully heal, then it will be tougher and less flexible and more painful even long after it has technically healed. It won’t move the same way as before, it won’t be as supple, it will need more attention over time. An injury can take only a moment, but recovery and healing takes much longer. If you address it sooner rather than later, and if you take care to avoid similar injuries, it’s more likely to heal well. If it’s neglected, if you half-ass it, etc., it may never heal properly. A nitpick, but only because other than that it’s not a bad metaphor.

hliyan 3y ago
I agree. I've seen couples who've gone through a lot of turmoil in their younger years but have emerged stronger and have happily grown old together. Granted, they are the minority. So I too, feel the scar tissue analogy is imperfect. Perhaps in some cases, relationship issues are like fractures -- the mend is in fact stronger than the break.
- throwaway173738 3y ago
  That is, if you take the time to mend it.
- haldujai 3y ago
  > fractures -- the mend is in fact stronger than the break. This is also a medically incorrect statement for similar reasons to scar tissue, the resultant trabecular disorganization always results in weaker bone, even for “perfectly” healed fractures. I think the original metaphor (and even fractures) still holds but in a different way than you described. I highly doubt any of those couples (and from personal experience myself) wanted the turmoil however one feels after the fact, “made us stronger” is often a combination of dissonance and a statement that other areas of the relationship strengthened to compensate (in the fracture analogy: if you break your left leg your right one will strengthen from increased mechanical load to compensate). One would not break a bone in an attempt to make it stronger, but a broken bone can heal to near full strength and other bones in the body get stronger to compensate. If you break your bone repeatedly, it heals as a deformed structure that is considerably weaker than what you started and will break from a minor injury. If you substitute bones for relationship I think this holds. With effort it’s possible to recover from and compensate for relationship trauma and thrive as an organism/couple, but it’s still better to avoid emotional trauma to begin with (assuming it’s possible) as with physical trauma.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    > If you break your bone repeatedly, it heals as a deformed structure that is considerably weaker So taekwondo people who train to hit concrete pillars don’t get stronger from the repeated hits, do you confirm? And “what doesn’t kill, makes you stronger” is false too?
    - haldujai 3y ago
      > So taekwondo people who train to hit concrete pillars don’t get stronger from the repeated hits, do you confirm? Stress from repetitive microtrauma is not the same as a fracture (stress to failure). Increased mechanical loading (hitting a concrete pillar, exercise) can absolutely strengthen bone in a similar mechanism to decreased load weakening bones (little old lady, astronauts). Breaking a bone completely disrupts the internal architecture and what is deposited is unequivocally weaker than what was there before. > And “what doesn’t kill, makes you stronger” is false too I have no professional opinion on this aphorism. I do have one on bone healing.
haldujai 3y ago
Medically speaking, your understanding is bit off in that while there are several factors that affect the resulting strength of scar tissue, the underlying disorganization in scar tissue will always leave it biomechanically weaker than than uninjured skin. It is true that with early attention, proper wound care, etc scar can approach normal skin but even in the best of circumstances it will still be “slightly weaker” rather than as good or better. [0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840475/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840475/

dr_dshiv 3y ago

We will obviously have AGI before we figure out relationship therapy— and likely have AI value alignment before human value alignment. Practically, though… try having a conversation with chatGPT asking it to translate what you each want to say into “nonviolent communication”. Wow. AI seems way better than humans at human relationship communication…

nailer 3y ago
Honestly the worst thing about non confrontational communication is that someone named a very useful communication technique after something - violence - that is not the thing being avoided.
ryder9 3y ago
[dead]
ineedasername 3y ago
Yes, I have a colleague whose normal writing tone is confrontational. It’s something they’re aware of and work to remove during the editing process. ChatGPT has made this significantly easier for them: 1st draft -> prompt “soften the language” —-> review and revise output ———> prompt “soften again” ————> final draft Enter more complex prompts or more iterations if you want editing for multiple things, e.g., prompt “suggest edits for clarity, brevity, grammar, and softer language”. You can iterate very quickly.
- unsupp0rted 3y ago
  I'd be curious about what a normal short message from your colleague looks like unedited. I wonder if my writing style is confrontational. I think my client's is.
ada1981 3y ago
We’ve had researcher access to openAI for a couples years to build something that does precisely this.
- 3y ago

gabrielsroka 3y ago

I call it death by a thousand papercuts instead of scars.

flatline 3y ago

I agree with his characterization of relationship breakdowns. I think the scar tissue is a bit of a tortured analogy. At some point you just have to let shit go if you don’t want it to build up. These little things are what Dan Savage calls the “price of admission.” It’s important to have good communication skills, to be able to talk through conflict, to be able to give someone space. But if after talking about how your partner loads the dishwasher three times and nothing has changed? Or the umpteenth big fight where things were mostly patched over bit there’s still some underlying pattern that you know is going to come up again? Now you know the price of admission. Is it worth it to you to pay that price to stay in relationship, or not? The speaker confesses their perfectionist tendencies. People like this, myself included, cannot let go of anything. I’ve spent years learning how and it still takes a conscious effort, but it’s better. My zen teacher used to hand students a stick and tell them to let go of it. So many could not - it’s going to drop, messily, onto the floor! The stick might break! You can’t just let go of it like that, it needs to be put down gently, in its proper place, etc. High achieving individuals, especially in a field like academia which heavily rewards certain narcissistic and neurodivergent traits, are just hard to deal with in relationship. I look around me at the few successful long-term relationships I see and one or both people are usually pretty subdued/chill in every aspect of their life. This is not the norm.

ryanjshaw 3y ago
> But if after talking about how your partner loads the dishwasher three times and nothing has changed? Use it as motivation to become wealthy enough to afford a cleaner who packs the dishes the way you need them to be packed! Joking aside, I'm not sure if you can meaningfully let go of these kinds of things if you don't address the control issues underlying them.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  This seems like quite an uncharitable reading of the situation. They talked about the manner of packing. If things are packed incorrectly then they may block other things from being cleaned or require another cycle of cleaning, which presumably moves to work onto the other partner or in extreme cases could be indicative of weaponised incompetence.

Trasmatta 3y ago

I used to work in construction, and his story about the contractor he worked with was almost triggering. Those types of people were the absolute worst to work for. The closest thing in software development is a client who has no expertise or understanding of the process but still wants to bikeshed every detail. It's exhausting.

zenonu 3y ago
After I took ownership of my home, I cataloged over 100 issues that needed to be attended to post-construction. I want a home without obvious in-your-face-faults. The construction crew wanted to finish and move onto the next project. Our incentives were not aligned, and that's the problem. Next time, I'm specifically going to ensure another contractor is hired to ensure QC of the home during construction. No moving onto the next stage until the 1 foot hole in the subfloor caused by a falling drill from the 2nd story is fixed.
ilovepuppies 3y ago
Spot on. Honestly that construction story was infuriating, he was the problem the entire time and probably shouldn’t be giving relationship advice. There’s no such thing as a “perfectionist” in the first place since what qualifies as “perfect” is a subjective point of view. Anybody, and I mean anybody, can point out little things that are wrong in something. Especially in construction, by people that have never done it themselves but holds financial power. Also, I guarantee all the slight changes he thought were critical enough to warrant constant intervention actually weren’t, or could’ve been addressed later. The cost would have been significantly higher if the contractor factored in the time it took to satisfy him. He was getting what he paid for.

mercurialsolo 3y ago

Human relationships are like complex systems. And some of the principles of antifragile design can also be applied if we look at it from a systemic lens. The build up of small cracks over a period of time can lead to any system getting brittle and fragile over a period of time. That said, resolution or letting go are both viable techniques to make it anti-fragile. Sometimes we have to realize, all of us have some shit we come along with and it's never perfectly matched to someone else. And it would be mad if it were too! Much like you make the best of life and the world around you think of making the best in the relationship by investing into the right things. Sometimes it's ok to let go - at other times it's necessary to draw boundaries and expect resolutions. To keep a complex system running, we also need to keep working at it.

zerbinxx 3y ago
I like this a lot. “Error handling in relationships” is a great concept for a blog post

toxik 3y ago

Would have been nice to have the actual audio. Nice essay though.

personalityson 3y ago

Why are relationships holy and have to be salvaged at any cost? Just let go and move along

dymk 3y ago
Some relationships are important, others aren't. It's good to have a framework for keeping the ones that matter lasting. If you treat every relationship you ever have as disposable, eventually you'll just find yourself alone.
newsclues 3y ago
I only have one Mom. If I didn't put in the effort to fix the relationship I ruined, myself and my mother would suffer. I'm happy to let go and move on from most relationships, but some are holy and must be salvaged at any cost.
- k8sToGo 3y ago
  > must be salvaged at any cost I disagree with this. Relationships with Cluster-B people can become very dangerous. This can even include parent-child relationships, for example, if the parent has NPD (narcisstic personality disorder). At the end you really need to look out for yourself and your mental health first (hence not at any cost).
  - newsclues 3y ago
    You missed the important part in that quote. "but _some_ are holy and must be salvaged at any cost" My relationship with my mother is part of that "some" for me. For others it may be someone else, but I didn't say everyone needs to salvage relationships with their parents at all, I shared my personal experience. Hopefully everyone has a relationship worth saving. Find that and fight for it, because a good relationship is worth any cost, up to including your life (eg. relationship with your child). I'm not an expert but does your way of thinking about this not map to Cluster-B personality types?
    - 3y ago

superposeur 3y ago

The scar tissue model sounds convincing and there’s something to it. But when I reflect on my very long term relationships, it doesn’t seem to get at the core of why we’ve stayed together. Instead, for these relationships there is a deeper alignment of interests / alignment of values / alignment of outlooks (whatever you want to call it) that allows us to get past the annoying stuff. Put differently, a model that resonates more with my experience is that there are two baskets of conflicts: core stuff and peripheral stuff. As long as the peripheral conflicts don’t get too egregious, they don’t actually matter if the core stuff is still working.

haldujai 3y ago
> As long as the peripheral conflicts don’t get too egregious From a scar model perspective this is like a papercut/superficial injury which isn’t leaving you with a scar (or at least a very minor one). > they don’t actually matter if the core stuff is still working. Being stabbed in the heart (literally and metaphorically) will leave bigger and deeper scars that can impair core function and your heart will never pump blood as effectively again.
- superposeur 3y ago
  I guess, but reflecting further, the scar tissue/injury model is a little odd in that it focuses only on the negative, not on what the two parties actually get out of the relationship.
  - solarmist 3y ago
    People remember and hold onto negative things. This is about unblocking/unclogging the system regularly to maintain proper function. It builds up over time so it needs to be regularly flushed.
nokya 3y ago
Thank you for sharing your view, you put words when I couldn't. Shared values is precisely the best explanation to my relationships that wore out in the past, I don't think scar tissue was the reason. The analogy of scar tissue could work for symptoms, though: the presence of scar tissues in a relationship may/could indicate that conflicts never get fully resolved because deep in the relationship, there is a fundamental misalignment of values, and that's what creates scar tissues when conflicts emerge. For me, the real thing that tends to explain my long relationships is the authenticity of someone to her/his own values. Which is not to be confused with sharing the same opinions, I can easily be friends with people who vote differently than me, but what I can't stand is dishonesty (e.g., inventing theories or excuses to put the blame on the "others"). The reason I think it works that way is in part due to my own character: I don't hesitate getting into conflict with other people and more particularly with those dear to me when I disagree or when I feel disturbed by something. I can have intense arguments with some of my friends, my wife, my parents, my boss, but it never damaged our relationship because I think deep under, our values are aligned. Now, what do I mean by "values"? Those are things I characterize as values: - how you negotiate internal conflict - how you respond to being wrong / corrected by someone else that presents a good argument to you - how you treat people of lower socioeconomic level (e.g., disdain, disrespect,neglect vs. empathy/consideration, etc.) - how you treat people of higher socioeconomic level (e.g., jealousy, envy, ass-licking vs. admiration, respect, inspiration, etc.) - whether you behave differently with co-workers situated "below" you vs. "above" you vs. those who can affect your career advancement - whether you are faithful to yourself and your opinions (aka, whether you can stand the cost or implications of your opinions, or if you change your mind and invent yourself another stance just to avoid any discomfort) - whether your respect everyone's right to privacy or assume you can invade your spouse or child's personal space - etc. So, in summary, yes a very interesting article but I can only disagree with the premise: I don't think that scar tissues make relationships wear out, I think values misalignment does.

CPLX 3y ago

This concept is pretty well developed in the context of 12-step programs. What he’s calling “scar tissue” they call resentment.

roenxi 3y ago

> He would have been pretty worried if we sat down and I was like, “Jim, can we talk [Laughter] about my feelings? I mean you left the plastic open and dust got into the house, and sometimes I feel like you don't respect me as a person.” This is one of those moments where someone is theory own worst enemy. The expectation for people to bottle up their feelings and sit there in annoyance is silly. There are only two basic scenarios here. The cause of the annoyance mainly sits with... 1. Jim. 2. John Ousterhout. 3. Some unidentified cause. The proper approach is to think carefully about whether it is case 2. If it is, stop feeling annoyed - the annoyance is harming the self and the relationship for no reason. It is an illusion that can only cause trouble. Most of the time that is the end of it. However, sometimes it is a case 1 or 3. Then it is perfectly fine to sit down with Jim and talk feelings. Just do it. Learn to make it sound natural and stilted and people only notice that you seem really easy to talk to. Figure out whether it is case 1 or 3 and whether it can just be resolved on the spot. Nobody is helped by bottling even minor things up. Learn to live a comfortable life. It drives me crazy when I find out people just sit there and don't tell me when I'm upsetting them. Communication, my men! If you can't fix it in your own head, get other people involved and talk it through. Plug for Marshall Rosenberg and Nonviolent Communication. This stuff really can be reduced to an algorithm as long as it accompanies a relentlessly nonjudgemental mindset and a tolerance for not getting your own way.

SomeCallMeTim 3y ago
I don't know that NVC always works the way its proponents think it does. I've been around a lot of NVC practitioners. Many have been active NVC educators. Maybe they've all been Doing It Wrong, but...I find that when presented with the "NVC way" of discussing a problem, my brain always translates it to the emotional symbols I understand, which are nearly identical to the symbols generated by an overt criticism. That said, I recognize that could simply be a "me problem." Which I won't dispute. I'm not entirely neurotypical. And generally if something I'm doing is bothering someone, I try to deal with it; I don't make everything into drama. I just don't parse the NVC words appreciably differently than a normal, polite request. (Overt hostility does push my buttons, but short of that, it doesn't seem to matter.) Just saying that NVC isn't magic. If the person making the request has a reasonable point, I'll acknowledge and do what I can to adjust my behavior. If they seem to be asking something less reasonable, wrapping it with NVC language doesn't change the request materially for me at all. > It drives me crazy when I find out people just sit there and don't tell me when I'm upsetting them. Communication, my men! If you can't fix it in your own head, get other people involved and talk it through. Agree that people should generally be open about issues. But there's appropriate context for everything. I really don't want coworkers coming up to me and asking to work through an emotional issue for an hour because something I suggested was different than their suggestion, and my suggestion bruised their ego. Close friends? Sure. I probably have higher than average tolerance for such conversations among those I care about. But I choose my close friends, and largely don't get to choose specific coworkers, and so demanding that level of emotional work seems outside of the job description. Also: Totally agree about telling the contractor that dust got everywhere and letting them know that's a problem. But for me, it wouldn't be at all about "my feelings." It would be about a request to a contractor to adjust their behavior or that of their subs based on reasonable expectations. I would personally feel foolish taking an NVC approach with a contractor in that situation, TBH. Not "It makes me feel disrespected when dust gets all over the place," but something more like, "Hey Jim, someone didn't seal the plastic around the construction area and we had a bunch of dust we needed to clean up. Can you be sure that everyone knows that it's important to keep the dust seal closed? Thanks." Heck, the latter is even less confrontational than the "you left the plastic open" in the OP's comment.

softwaredoug 3y ago

I think I would replace scar tissue with known limitations of the other person. You can learn in a long term relationship you can trust a person in certain ways and not in others. You learn you will be fulfilled in certain ways but not others. Long term relationships work out of accepting limitations. There’s also plenty of examples of long term collaborations in business, so I’m not sure the underlying premise is solid.

wellthisisgreat 3y ago

Compromises make relationships wear out. If you land on a compromise where it’s one person giving in rather than both changing their requirements, that one person will always feel like they have been wronged. You only need to a couple of such instances to burn out the strongest affection

m3kw9 3y ago

That’s why letting yourself/significant other sleep still angry after an argument is not such a great idea. Resolve it before sleeping or it gets swept under the rug, or as he said, adds one scar tissue, as nobody will bring it back up next morning. It will be remembered when it happens again next time

for_i_in_range 3y ago
On the flip side, when you have a partner that brings up issues almost every night before going to bed, that gets old too.
- lazide 3y ago
  It can also just be dangerous - before bed is usually when people have the least emotional regulation and are the most tired and cranky. It’s peak ‘domestic’ call time. Well, outside of end of year holidays. Ideally, being able to go ‘now is a shitty time, let’s laugh about it and check tomorrow if it’s still an issue’ would be better. But emotions don’t always work that way.
- m3kw9 3y ago
  Only for fights that seem warranted, otherwise it could get too much. Most time small arguments gets “resolv-ish” right away, say small stuff like leaving a mess and being an ass about it, you know? You say sorry, next time I’ll be better and it’s usually done
scarface_74 3y ago
There are a lot of times when you need to let cooler heads prevail. You’re not going to get less cranky as the night progresses. On the other hand, it took literally years to come to a compromise between my very devout wife whose had it drilled into head that you should give 10% to the church as a family or we will never have a good life and we will be damned to hell. The argument would always come up after we made a big financial commitment and while I was still trying to dig myself out of some bad financial decisions that I made before we even met. She was fully aware of them. But one thing it’s almost impossible to square is a disagreement between two people when it involves religion or cultural disagreements. When someone believes their actions will lead to damnation and burning in hell for eternity, no amount of logical argument will ever dissuade them from this. Faith is by definition not based on physical reality - and that’s not meant to be demeaning. The compromise we came to is that she does what she wants as long as she stays within the overall budget we agreed to and I give what really amounts toward a “this is the price I pay for never having to hear mention of giving again”. While I will say that my wife has her belief system. She is what I would consider a “liberal Christian”. She isn’t judgmental about other people and we have friends across the divide.

agumonkey 3y ago

Some people have a natural talent to turn friction into lively repair tissue and not senescent scars. Whereas others (myself included) have two modes: suffer into submission or avoid forever (basically the point of this article). It's an important topic, I'm surprised (but happily so) to find out about this in a gist from a CS teacher.

jeffreyrogers 3y ago

I like the analogy and think what he's describing is a big reason relationships fail, but I don't think he's right that you need to make sure scar tissue never occurs in long-term relationships, at least romantic ones. That's an almost impossible goal. I've seen a lot of good relationships, and the level of conflict that exists in them is all over the place. What actually seems to matter is that the people involved learn to repair whatever damage is done after the conflict. That can also happen months or years later. It also requires much less saintliness than avoiding scar-tissue in the first place does.

steve_adams_86 3y ago
I agree. Like my physical scars, the ones in my relationships still serve as a useful reminder. Injury is a fact of life and one we should become good at responding to. A comfortable and hassle-free life is virtually impossible (and perhaps not even desirable), so it appears to me that the injuries should be attended to, healed, learned from, then used as a symbol of that process to reflect on.

mkl95 3y ago

Different ideologies make relationships wear out, all the time. Some manager does not care too much about documenting some area of the product, some IC does not care enough to dig into the code to understand it, etc. Week by week these people's trust on each other will be eroded by the disagreements that stem from what they expect from each other. I may be a cynic, but I don't believe in fixing most if not all of these relationships. Life is too short, and the industry is huge.

pstuart 3y ago

That's HN. I come for the tech and leave with the advice...

csallen 3y ago

My ex was a relationship therapist. She was absolutely allergic to letting scar tissue build up. She would tell me about every little negative thing that happened between us. And she would phrase it by talking about her feelings rather than about my actions. ("I felt hurt when I heard you say X," rather than "You shouldn't have said X.") Suffice it to say, it freaked out. I wasn't used to people sharing their feelings with me. In normal relationships, by the time someone is telling you they feel <insert negative emotion>, a ton of scar tissue has already been built up, and they're at a breaking point. So I was conditioned to believing that sharing feelings = things have gotten really bad. But early on she would calm me down, and say no, things aren't bad, she's fine, she's just into sharing feelings early and often to prevent the buildup of resentment. So I got used to it, and even started doing the same thing back. Eventually our relationship ended, but I brought the practice to new relationships I entered afterwards. And, unsurprisingly, it kind of freaked people out! Almost nobody is used to it at first, just like I wasn't. It's incredibly easy to get defensive when someone lets you know that they felt bad in response to something you did. And it's usually vulnerable and risky to find the words to share feelings without arousing the other person's defenses. Still, when I look back at how I've evolved as a person, I credit this "scar tissue" view of relationships with a lot of personal growth. It's given me a habit of confronting people problems head on, something past-me was unconsciously avoidant of. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and being willing to have uncomfortable conversations instead of kicking the can down the road is one of the hallmarks of adulthood and maturity.

nazka 3y ago
This type of communication has actually a name, it called non-violent communication. There are books about it. It is one of the best way to communicate when things gets tough or are in a crisis. Since it avoids finger pointing, personal attacks (even when we don’t mean to), etc... and still being able to talk about the issue and how we feel (instead of how the other should do such and such or putting words in their mouths). But I guess it can be weird to be used all the time and maybe without explicitly talking about.
- kortilla 3y ago

AlbertCory 3y ago

An anecdote about contractors, since that's Osterhout's example: In my book, The Big Bucks I used some of my actual history with Jerry, my contractor, as the basis for Walt. I say "some" since Jerry was already married, and he never did an Eichler in Palo Alto. Plus we started in 1992, whereas in the book it was 1983. Jerry did about ten jobs on my house after that. I'm not giving a plot spoiler on what happens with Walt /s I just found his traits endearing. He was just like an engineer in so many ways, and he'd even vacuum up rooms he hadn't been in. But basically it was consideration and respect for each other. A lot of homeowners treat contractors like lower-class servants. I gave him a copy of the book and he loved it: he finished it in two days, and then gave it to a contractor friend, who also loved it.

piloto_ciego 3y ago

The key to long lasting relationships is pretty simple to be perfectly honest. Forgive people, have empathy, and don’t sweat the small stuff.

dinvlad 3y ago

Oftentimes people enter relationships since they’re too afraid to be alone, and so are willing to close their eyes and tolerate something in a partner (be it a friend or a lover) they would not otherwise. Of course, there comes a time when the accumulated annoyances with these incompatibilities become too much, and so it falls apart.

rcarr 3y ago

The straw that broke the camel's back. It does make me laugh how hn appears to have a pathological need to come up with a new (and normally "science" based) metaphor for common folk wisdom.

tbirdny 3y ago
Yeah, that and "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" (from the current top comment.)
Eumenes 3y ago
This is an industry that reinvents open source libraries every 3 weeks, so ......

opmelogy 3y ago

The word he is looking for is resentment. It's well understood in relationship psychology. But it's good to have someone outside of that field be able to untangle these topics and word them in ways that resonate with different people.

xorvoid 3y ago

This! Wisdom! I’ve experienced exactly this multiple times and felt this way. Thank you thank you for the words to describe it John Ousterhout.

MarvinGaze 3y ago

That reminded me of this article: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/04/marriage-problems-fight-dishes/629526/ https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/04/marriage-...

manmal 3y ago

TLDR: Perfectionism and the inability to forgive other people’s mistakes imbues relationships with an expiration date.

munificent 3y ago

I'm always excited to see psychology stuff discussed here, and I like Ousterhout a lot, but I don't think this analogy works very well. Scar tissue really is permanent. Resentment in a relationship can be permanent, but doesn't have to be. The analogy that every unresolved grievance leads to a monotonically increasing amount of perpetual relationship weakness is, I think, wrong. I think of resentment more like foreign bodies. When I was a kid, I got a chunk of pencil lead stuck in my hand without realizing it. The wound healed over it, but it was still in there. I could see it as a dark spot under my skin. Many years later, my body gradually migrated it to the surface and eventually it came out. (This was definitely a weird experience.) When there's some sort of grievance or unresolved conflict in a relationship, I think of it as leaving a little chunk of foreign body or poison in the person's symptom. Some amount of this is natural, and you will just build up a little scar tissue and get by. But if you keep accumulating them, they'll make you less and less healthy. Often, the best solution is to make sure the foreign body is removed before the wound heals over. When a hurt happens, take the time right then to work through it with the partner so that you aren't leaving anything in there and it can heal quickly and completely. But, if that doesn't happen (and sometimes it won't), you can still dig it out later. It just requires re-opening the wound. The longer you wait, the more painful it is. When you re-open that wound, you will feel raw and vulnerable. It requires a lot of trust and care. Sometimes, this may happen years later, but it can be done. If you find yourself doing this so frequently that you feel like you're never fully healed, that's a good sign that you aren't right for each other. Likewise, if you never feel that you're in an emotionally safe enough space to re-open those wounds and clean out the festering gunk in them, that's also a warning sign.

antman 3y ago

I see a lot of models here so let me add another common one: Parallel monologues. Couples discuss and perhaps consent but not realign the criteria. Why would they? The can just ignore the small stuff. But the small stuff is the practice sessions. Once big decisions come aka buying a house, how to grow a kid, move to a different country, finance they are mot prepared

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Fgehono 3y ago

My wife is the person I literally tell everything. Not much scar tissue if you see your partner your bff. Not much of a relationship you have anyway if you withold things. I'm even sometimes take pictures when I experience alone because I immediately want to share it with her.

hackeraccount 3y ago

I appreciate the idea but I think it's trickier then described. There are multiple reasons to tell and not tell a person you're in a relationship with the problems they cause you. Some of them benefit the relationship and some don't. It's a cliche to say that relationships are about compromise but that's because it's true. That compromise isn't always spoken; sometimes it's done without the other person even knowing. If you're clear eyed or empathetic or just love the other person you can know that they do the same thing for you. If you're none of those things you can make the compromise painfully clear and create a zero sum situation.

11thEarlOfMar 3y ago

Trying to get to root cause of what's actually wrong with my communication capability, I've come to the belief that transplanting a thought from my mind to my wife's mind intact is really hard. Fidelity can break down in several transformations: how clearly the thought is formed in my mind, the words I choose and arrange to express it, how fluidly I can speak them, whether there is impedence in the environment or emotional state, how accurately she hears the words, the precice meanings she applies to each word, the context she overlays and finally, any bias that modulates the meaning. Even if all of that goes reasonably well, my expression of thought encounters the intent modulation. What does she believe I am trying to accomplish by communicating this thought? To a large degree, having a positive outcome from any conversation relies on the trust between us, the value we place in the relationship and the willingness of each of us to monitor for and correct misunderstandings so that even when conflict develops, the understanding of the situation is the same for both parties. What gets me down is knowing that for some (most?) people, the above is so intuitive, they've never had a problem with it. Alas.

digaozao 3y ago
In my experience, I would say most people have problems with exactly this. They don't even think about the possibility of noise/interpretation in the communication. and they never stopped to think about it the way you did.
- zerbinxx 3y ago
  If you (+above commenter +any other HN per users) want a good Wikipedia article, the metalanguange/metacommunication ones do a great job of explaining how this works in CS friendly terms - the connection to meta programming is a great aside.
extasia 3y ago
What is thought is not what is said. What is said is not what is heard.

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thelastparadise 3y ago

[Big Laughter]

moffkalast 3y ago
[Sensible Chuckle]

WXLCKNO 3y ago

I think most my long term relationships ended because of an accumulation of small issues. Incompatibility obviously plays a role but I know I fucked up in not sharing enough when I get annoyed with my partner but I don't know why exactly.

andrewstuart 3y ago

Every time you are a jerk to someone, criticise someone, belittle someone, disrespect someone or attack someone, they like you less. Relationships have a "bank account of good will", and each incident/negative interaction withdraws from the account. Positive interactions contribute goodwill to the account. Negative interactions withdraw at many times the rate that positive interactions contribute. It's very easy to destroy a relationship - you can do it in minutes or seconds. It's very hard to build something positive, very very hard to rebuild damage.

jancsika 3y ago

> and it probably drove him crazy that every morning when he came in, I was there standing in the kitchen ready to tell him about all the mistakes he made yesterday (Emphasis mine.) His compulsion to start every morning by enumerating through a list of grievances undermined a relationship. He systematically alienated the person doing an important job for him, apparently fully aware of that person's shortcomings-- i.e., the contractor getting defensive and not owning up to problems. Yet allowing the job to continuing through these periodic grievances was a tacit acknowledgement in the story that Ousterhout thought the work was decent enough. Then, he uses hyperbolic metaphors to describe what he apparently sees as the only possible outcome if he were ever to slip up: > Because if there's anything at all when you're giving in that you can feel bad about later, you're nuking the relationship - you're creating scar tissue with yourself, and that will build up to the point where you wreck the relationship. (Emphasis mine.) (And he ended up wrecking the relationship, regardless!) Yikes! Who in the world could live up to this model? I think a much more workable and reasonable approach would be to reflect on what fuels our own compulsions and shortcomings. To just make up an example-- if I were arguing a point with a contractor every morning in an attempt to convince the five year-old version of myself that I'm important enough to not be abandoned, I should be aware of the fact that I'm doing this. Armed with that knowledge I'd be able to skip at least one morning and go treat myself to some waffles.

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cactusplant7374 3y ago

Is there a video for this transcript?

ambyra 3y ago

I can always tell a relationship is about to be over when one person uses the phrase "You always x" or "You never x" or "Why do you always x" or "he/she is always x". It shows long brewing resentment toward the other person. Very funny if you're listening in, very scary if it's directed at you :)

hackly 3y ago
Happens all the time in my marriage and still going strong. Sometimes you just accept the way the other person is, doesn’t mean you don’t point it out to them in moments of anger. But not necessarily a relationship-ending signal.
switch007 3y ago
I feel like I’ve read that on a billion pop science psychology blog spam websites. Always wondered if there are any serious studies behind it

twelve40 3y ago

This is all great advice until you get stuck with "I don't give a fuck" "it's my way or the highway" people. There are more of them that may seem at a first glance, and it takes some time to figure that out, too. And sometimes it comes with age, so that's even worse, because there is no way to tell early on.

xkbarkar 3y ago
Ive found that the “my way or highway” attitrude is often a defense mechanism and they will meet you halfway if you simply ackowledge their point of view. Accepting and acknowledging are not the same thing though so I dont mean to cave in if you disagree. I speak as a toxic person myself. Years of systemaric abuse and I was pretty much a marcissistic asshole. 100% a defense mechanism to avoid abuse. I had never learned what validation was. Also I isually assumed everyone was out to get me. Took me years of living without a relationship to learn to learn what an absolute dunderhead I could be. Sometimes other peoples actions are simply a reflection of your own attitide. I look at it this way, if everyone around me is an ahole, the only thing they have in common is me. Maybe, just maybe, I myself may need to learn to communicate and validate those around me. And I need to do that without selling myself short.

IIAOPSW 3y ago

I wish I could have read this 3 weeks ago. Of all the awful things she said, nothing was the worst.

dav_Oz 3y ago

One thing which is often missing or just left implicit in two-way communication is the self-referential aspect: How are you talking to yourself? Most people have a hard time tuning into this part because self-talk usually starts in early childhood and by the time one can be made fully "aware" of it, it has already faded into the normal background noise of being oneself, so it rarely gets openly interrogated. The self-talk doesn't have to be sophisticated, it can just be a constant pink noise of: "This is just dumb." ... "I'm miserable" ... "It's my fault" ... "I'm not worthy of love" ... "I'm disgusted by myself". And, here, I'm still very polite with the wording. Of course this inevitably bleeds in how you communicate with other people and especially the people in your life you really care about. If you never cultivated to encourage yourself, be kind, patient and forgiving toward yourself at some point you can't sustain the illusion (e.g. "nicest, loving ... person") and eventually it will leash out. There is a solipsistic aspect in communication worth exploring: I often find that communicating with one another openly and freely is also making one aware of each other's (hurtful, embarrassing ...) self-talk and can make way for the kind of primordial empathy buried deep in oneself and by extension make it easier to fully connect with the feelings of other people.

nmz 3y ago

Sounds more like resentment buildup, nothing to do with scar tissue.

rayanm 3y ago

Talking about feelings is all good and healthy assuming the problem to solve is technical and due to a misunderstanding. But what if the root cause of the build up of resentment is when one of the couple is changing and his/her feeling about the relationship is changing. Someone like me with disorganized attachment style can sense subtle changes quickly and react to it

raziel2p 3y ago
I don't really see why the two are different. 1. Technical / misunderstanding -> talk about how you feel 2. You or your partner or your relationship is changing (or you feel like it is) -> talk about how you feel

CHB0403085482 3y ago

Make money, don't care about anyone else~ https://www.vox.com/money/23733244/bullshit-jobs-work-employment-lazy-jobless-employed-nothing-to-do https://www.vox.com/money/23733244/bullshit-jobs-work-employ...

w10-1 3y ago

This is a truth misunderstood. No static picture or dynamic model actually works for relationships. No "alignment" or polishing is guaranteed to work. What works is commitment: deciding to do what's necessary to make it work. Not promise, or practice, or experience, or a wealth of emotional intelligence. Commitment. If commitment translates to "avoiding scar tissue", fine. If "avoiding scar tissue" reinforces your commitment, even better. But the main thing for your own identity and your relationships is the commitment. And to realize: if it's not working, you're not committed. (And most likely, you have good reason not to be, and you're stuck half-in, half-out of something you can't stand but need, or with traits that both help and hurt you. Welcome to the real world of beings, which is... complicated.)

justdep 3y ago

People treating each other poorly over a long period of time tends to end the relationship at some point? Shocking.

nzeribe 3y ago

This is a feminine communication style - endlessly talking about feelings, down to the last detail. It's inappropriate for men to use this method.