kaberett | Excerpts: emotional labour (Reply)

So. That MetaFilter thread on emotional labour (currently at a whisker over 1500 comments, and I've read all of them). It's kind of an overwhelming job and I've spent most of the past few days reading it; ergo I am taking it upon myself to excerpt for you the comments I particularly adored against the eventuality that you don't actually feel up to reading the whole thing.

On describing this kind of discussion as "venting", and the dismissiveness thereof:

I think the thing that irks me about calling it venting is the implication that it won't change anything, which tacitly states that nothing NEEDS changing. Steam just builds up and needs to be let it off the system every now and then, nothing to see here.

On the intersection of emotional labour and offer culture:

There are those people you love being around because everything just feels easy [around] them. Things go smoothly and everything seems effortless. I've been conceptualizing that as a positive aspect of guess culture, and I'm realizing that more than that - it's a sign that those people are doing a metric ton of emotional work. They are planning and thinking through things in advance and paying attention to the ways in which the needs of other people fit together, etc etc. Guess culture working at its best is everyone picking up and doing emotional labor for the people around them. This, obviously, can get perverted and oppressive when it becomes an obligation for some people to perform while others are exempted.

Followed by:

Ask culture relies on every participant performing their emotional labor inward. Participants need to understand themselves and own their desires. When making an ask, you have to be self-aware enough to know what you want, understand what you're asking for, realize you may not know everything that goes into someone else's decision, and trust that the person you're asking something of knows and owns their own context. When considering an ask, you have to be comfortable weighing your own desires against someone else's, understanding how either answer will impact that, and own responsibility for the answer that you give.

Guess culture, on the other hand, relies on each participant performing their emotional labor outward. Participants need to understand each other, what's going on in one another's life, and be able to contextualize an entire community's needs (whether that community is a couple or an enormous family or a sport team or social group or...).

Ideally, the world runs best on a mix of both. And both require full shares of emotional labor from all participants to run smoothly.

One of the intersections with abuse:

Spoiler alert, though: The reason he's not listening to you isn't because you're not good or worthy, it isn't because you're a nag, it isn't because you're failing at being a woman, it isn't because you're crazy. The reason he's not listening to you is because HE DOESN'T CARE. He just doesn't. Your pain and discomfort is not important enough to him for him to stop doing the things that hurt you, even if not doing those things would make his own life easier. I know it hurts, god, do I ever fucking know, but it's true, and once you realize it, everything will start making sense again, and eventually, you'll stop throwing pearls before swine, good money after bad. Ten years of my life out the window in honor of that godforsaken nonsense, a decade spent convincing myself that I was crazy, that I was asking too much in asking for anything at all. Never again.

On "echo chambers":

There was a meTa a few months ago (can't even remember the original topic now, but I think it was probably feminism-related) where someone, a man, made a comment about echo chambers and it finally, finally dawned on me that a lot of people (mostly men?) see some kinds of threads - like this one - as just an inconsequential nothing full of people nodding their heads at each other. Because no one is arguing on different "sides" it means everyone is in total agreement with everything and therefore it doesn't matter in the way that a thread full of "Yeah but"s and "Actually,"s and "Sarcastic dropping of refuting cite"s matters. That a conversation that spawns epiphanies, new strategies, opens windows, and allows for the sharing of experience is just an "echo chamber," see, and not important. I guess I'm glad to have had that cleared up, you know?

On patient-centred care:

A certain amount of emotional labor - by which I mean, envisioning the world from the point of view of the patient[...]

User centered design as emotional labour? Interesting. Explains a lot.

And yeah, have another one on abuse:

Sorry, having a revelation moment here. This shit is conditioned response. I mean, the flurry of worry in response to a delay[ed reply to a potentially fraught communication] -- shit, I've done that, and it's not because of them exactly, it's because of the ways that people I have loved in my life -- especially men, especially my father and boyfriends -- have responded to even the slightest bit of criticism. With the sulking, and the implicit threat of emotional withdrawal (or the actual practice of emotional withdrawal!), the silent treatment, the immediate defensiveness which I feel obligated to talk down and soothe and actualise for them, and it takes hours and there's the total withdrawal and the mocking and the refusal to lift even one finger for anything and the sitting in your way blocking things or just disappearing altogether without a word and refusing to answer email or phone or anything like that, all the stuff other people have described upthread.

All the flurry and instant anxiety is an attempt to head that off at the pass -- it's going to happen anyway, it happens so often, there's such a risk of it happening again, so why not do it all at once just in case I can soothe them enough to avoid all that? To avoid the feeling of panicking about whether they don't love me anymore, whether this is one moment too far and they never speak to me again and never come back and never like me again?

Ooof. Shiiiiiit.

What is this even called, 'conditioned response to interpersonal violence'? Conditioned fear of abandonment? I dunno. Shit. I mean, this is kind of interpersonal violence, maybe? Ahhh, doubting myself now! But I've always seen that kind of silence and passiveness and defensiveness as a threat, somehow. It's always felt threatening, like the prospect of an ultimatum. Maybe I am just really bad at communication, or having arguments. Though I've had productive arguments, but generally only with people who actually speak to me about what's happening, and it's harder to have a productive argument with someone who makes you beg for the basis of the argument to begin with. Eeeeesh.

That is fucked up.