Mindreading Fails Both Ways

This is my favorite new-to-me-this-year screenshot:

I’ve revisited it and referenced it in conversation over and over again, since I first saw it; it crisply summed up a thousand awful and frustrating interactions I’ve had throughout my life. I have been the nephew in this story over and over and over again.

(I can’t take credit for the following; it’s a recreation of something I saw once, but:)

Recently, though, it feels like I’ve been taking a lot more damage from the flip side of this dynamic: not that the other person expects me to read their mind, but that they believe they can read my mind, and are interpreting me as sending secret subtle messages that I am not, in fact, sending.

Imagine being the aunt, in the meme, and genuinely believing that you’ve clearly communicated that it’s time to put the laundry out on the line. And then they don’t!

What!

If you’re already in the mindreading world, naturally your brain will try to interpret the tea leaves that your nibling has left for you. Are they defiant? Lazy? Depressed? There must be some reason why they have outright refused your very reasonable request…

If you’re lucky, the aunt is at least somewhat skeptical of her own conclusions, but unfortunately the sort of person whose communication is already this subtle and indirect doesn’t tend to hold that kind of skepticism very reliably. They don’t tend to notice that they’ve Done A Projection, or do any sort of explicit double-check with you.

(If they were the type of person to do that kind of double-check, there wouldn’t have been a problem with the laundry miscommunication in the first place.)

I don’t want to dig too deeply into my own personal examples (since a lot of them are haloed with pain and frustration) but in one of them, I said that I wasn’t making an explicit bid for someone to effortfully respond to some writing I’d done, and they mindread me as saying that I was making a bid for them not to.

“You don’t have to X, by the way!” ➔ “Please do not X.”

Which is a very different sentence!

In another, a person claims to have tried to bring up a certain subject (I have literally no memory of this) and to have ~“gotten the vibe” that I didn’t want to talk about it, and then never brought it up again no, actually, I think they later probed the situation again in equally indirect and subtle fashion and again got the sense (somehow) that the intrusion was unwanted and then never brought it up again, to my own eventual (and substantial) detriment.

The pattern was basically “well, I told you that it was going to be sunny all day, and then you didn’t put the laundry out—how else was I supposed to interpret your refusal?”