my sense is that people who take a long time to respond to messages, or tend to go into shame spirals about them, often put a lot of pressure on themselves to respond in a specific way
Some years back my wife and I got into the habit of asking each other
‘do you want comfort or solutions’ when the other was having a bad time. That one sentence can save us from an argument 9/10 times.
In 1990, a Stanford psychologist called Elizabeth Newton divided participants into two groups: Tappers and Listeners. The Tappers were asked to tap out a familiar tune (like Happy Birthday) on the table. The Listeners’ job was to guess the tune, based on the taps. As you’ll see if you try it, that’s hard. Out of 120 tapped renditions, Listeners... See more