Refereeing the Text Fight

Dec. 7, 2016
Engaging in "text fighting" with family and friends is a tempting and common problem today, but your relationships are simply too important to entrust to a form of communication that leaves most of your best tools unused.

It’s a rare week that goes by without someone sitting in Althea’s office, smart phone in hand and filled with hurt, recounting a recent “text fight” they had with a spouse, friend, or family member and insisting on a blow-by-blow analysis of the hurtful and immortalized words.  Sometimes the texts are few, an outburst of emotion expressed in a fit of pique, and some number in the hundreds detailing a longstanding enmity, with her clients’ emotions are laid raw.  If you’ve ever doubted the violence of words you should spend a day with a therapist, counseling people whose bruises are all on the psyche, delivered with the ruthlessness of a curb stomp by someone who claims to love them.  Now, make those words permanent and see how their power multiplies. 

Mike and his colleagues run into the same confrontational dynamic with affronted parties waving phones or hauling in file folders of printed out emails as evidence of their abuse.  For the team of Police Service Officers who man the front desk and manage a daily tidal wave of walk-in reports, slogging through text fights is a daily chore.  Interestingly, the number and rate of verbal domestics do seem to have dropped somewhat in recent years; perhaps the need for screamed insults and threats is less when they can be constructed at leisure and electronically delivered?

Instant written communication is the new normal.  The early 21st Century has brought us in relatively brief time to a point of near constant connectivity with not only close family and friends, but also bosses, coworkers, casual acquaintances and business associates, and even non-human entities (Walgreens, Comcast, various news outlets, and the city we live in text us nearly as much as any live person we know).  The convenience and accessibility this brings is a great advance; through social media, cellular technology, and the inevitable marriage of the two, new paradigms for relationships, business, work life, and how each are negotiated have been forged.  The traditional constraints that limited or stood in their way – time lapsed and distances separating people – have been made largely moot.  Twenty years and 500 miles between you and your old college friend or favorite cousin could once have been a real relationship killer, not because you don’t care but because life and effort gets hard.  Now they are a “friend request” or cell call away and you can pick up anew!  Even better, there really is no need for time-consuming and easily missed phone calls, just text and maintain a running conversation to drift in and out of at your convenience.

Of course, all progress comes with a price, and instant communication and constant connectivity is no different, with a whole new crop of problems and anxieties arising:

  • The convenience for someone else to reach you at virtually any time can prove remarkably inconvenient if and when you’d prefer to be left alone.  Dedicated downtime – necessary to reconnect with yourself and those closest to you, to rest and repair the brain and body after being “on” and connected to work and duty, and to withdraw into pure recreation – is being increasingly marginalized.  We field calls from bosses and colleagues after hours, neglect relationships “under the roof” while nurturing those in the electronic media, and forget the importance of occasional mindless pursuits;
  • We’ve developed the sense of being always “on-call” and responsive to the desires and needs of others, regardless of our own.  Is a friend going through a hard time and needs a shoulder to cry on?  You’ll take that call!  Parents Instant Messaging you on Facebook, wondering why you never call, when you are going to visit, why are you holding their grandchildren hostage from them, etc., etc.?  Better get on that one right away;
  • Social scientists are noticing a phenomena of young adults with delayed and incomplete  separation from family of origin, poorly developed problem solving skills, and increased anxiety when left to their own wiles, in large part due to the ease of connection to parents and peers to whom they look to fix problems and make decisions;
  • And, of particular concern to our topic of “Words that Hurt (and Keep on Hurting),” the trend toward instant communication and instant gratification has weakened some of the psychological filtering we need to have in place during conflict to best present our message, hear others, and avoid doing harm to those for we should be protecting.

Conflict can be emotionally fraught, especially when it is with someone we love and care about – the fear of losing that someone to the conflict, or how you’ll be perceived during and after, creates at least a little anxiety no matter how strong the relationship – and hurtful words, shouted or hissed in anger, can cut to the soul.  But even with all the damage these verbal slashes do, the exact words themselves are typically heard once, replayed many times, and then start to fade as (hopefully) healing and reconciliation begin.  Apologies can be given, forgiveness begged, and, in time, hurt fades.  The simple fact is, ALL of us will hurt those we love with our reckless words and ALL of us will need to beg forgiveness. 

The problem with the words TYPED in anger are their durability and that they come from a place where reckless impulse should have been arrested.  A sharp word fired off in text is a black and white reminder of the anger from which it sprang.  An insult immortalizes contempt.  Their delivery better sears them into memory.  And in written form, both can be revisited again and again. 

All of us are guilty of blurted words that can never be taken back, so most of us have empathy when someone else hurts us.  It hurts, but we understand and stand ready to forgive.  We learn from those times we’ve hurt and been hurt and take greater care in the future.  Conflicts happen – they will always happen – but the smartest among us learn to fight fair and with care.  At its best, conflict is a cool-headed affair; we may even feel anger, rage in our own heads, mentally “really let him have it”, blow off steam, come to a cooler place of reason, and then either drop the whole thing (a lot of what bothers us is just “sweating the small stuff” and ultimately not all that important at all) or devise a strategy to talk it out rationally and with an open mind and open heart.

But taking the time to TYPE angry words is hardly a blurted impulse.  At an infinite number of points between “I’m pissed…!” and hitting *SEND* when the message is one not only likely, but intended, to hurt is a failure to act from a place of concern and love.  And the recipient of your angry words knows it. 

The problem is one of both learned and reinforced impulsivity.  While desiring to respond to hurt and be heard quickly is a natural impulse, and one that drives harsh words and poor timing in the best of circumstances, we’ve never had more opportunity or reinforcement for just such a response as that afforded us now.  Making the written form even dicier is how much of meaning and context are compromised in written communication no matter your emotional state and intent.  Voice tone and inflection, timing, physical expression, and body language may be more crucial to your message than even you know, and are all lost in a text or email (nonverbal and paraverbal communication accounts for between 60% and 90% of all conveyed meaning in the spoken word, depending on personal and cultural practice and standards).  Something said in humor, intended to ease tension and soften your message, can be misconstrued and read as harsh or sarcastic.  The respectful, concerned tone of voice you imagine in your mind may not be the tone imagined on the other end.  And never underestimate how easily even the most carefully crafted writing can be completely misunderstood.  Without being present to offer clarification, misunderstandings can fuel resentment and drive you even further apart.

We often address communication and other interpersonal pitfalls relationships are likely to face, offering ways to negotiate them with suggested skill development to avoid or eliminate maladaptive patterns.  One of our longstanding personal practices, and also what we teach, is to make appointments to discuss areas of conflict, along with a strict fifteen minute time limit for any one session.  This ensures both of you come to the table with the right mindset, minimizes the likelihood of anyone feeling ambushed, and forces the one driving the conversation to organize their thoughts and emotions in order to keep them positive and solution-focused.  The time limit prevents you from being overwhelmed, focuses attention on the most important issue(s), and helps to keep the issue in perspective. 

On top of everything else about the pitfalls of “text fights,” they tend to be free-wheeling, quickly go off the tracks or become all-consuming, and invite ambush and tit-for-tat.  So our ultimate advice is this:  DON’T DO IT!  Don’t engage, don’t respond, and don’t think you can handle it.  Time is your friend, and waiting until you can speak face-to-face is far more respectful and productive than falling prey to impulse.  Chances are, taking time to cool off and clear your head might even show whatever is bothering you isn’t all that important.  And if it is, then it’s too important to entrust to a form of communication that leaves most of your best tools unused.

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