Neha Sathish

Have you ever noticed just how much of the drama in movies is generated by an unspoken rule that the characters aren’t allowed to communicate well?

Communication failures like these make for good storytelling where we, the audience, get to watch the characters stumble towards understanding. But you shouldn’t live like someone waiting for the screenwriter of your life to arrange a convenient resolution. Functional people don’t let things linger unspoken — they name what’s facing them out loud.

It sounds like such a simple thing. And yet, so many of us don’t do it. It’s my experience that movie logic is endemic in dysfunctional organizations, friendships, and marriages. People walk around in a haze of denial, simply assuming that their concerns will disappear. They wait until the problem can’t possibly be ignored anymore, instead of naming it well before it becomes critical. Maybe they don’t even realize at a conscious level that the dynamic in question is capable of being named; they just take it as a background fact about the universe that they can strain against but not change.

Outcomes like this are common when you figure out how to break the fourth wall. Whether or not both of you were already conscious of the real, underlying issue, when it is spoken out loud, the result is usually relief, like a spell has been broken. Even if the content is uncomfortable, it feels good in the way cutting through layers of unreality always does.

Some other lines of dialogue that would make for bad movies, but good living:

• “I’ve noticed that lately, every time we have plans to hang out one-on-one, you invite someone else to join us — is that intentional?”

• “I always feel a little awkward around you, and I’m worried it comes across as me not liking you — I just wanted to say that’s not the case.”

• “I’ve been feeling a low-level tension between us, like maybe we’re quietly annoyed at each other but trying to stay polite. Is that just me?”

• “It sometimes seems like when I push back in meetings, it changes the energy in the room — like maybe you’re afraid to engage with me as directly as you do other people. Does that feel true?”
  
  One is that it’s easy to mistake silence for informed diplomacy. If your manager is stressing you out, and you are putting up with it, it’s easy to think that you’re just being a good employee, and everyone is aware of how good you’re being. But unless your manager is quite emotionally intelligent, they may have no idea that you’re unhappy, especially if you’re engaging in people-pleasing behavior to try and cover it up.

  Another reason is that it can feel like by naming an issue, you are making it into a big deal. But problems are real, and exert a toll on you, whether you name them or not. Naming the issue means you can interact with it.

  Finally — often, the people who are most eager to name issues kind of suck. They are critical, judgmental people who lob opinions about how others should live without skill. Think of the person you’ve just met who confidently offers unsolicited advice about whatever they imagine your problem is.

  But the answer to this is not to maintain the conspiracy of silence. The answer is to get skillful at naming issues.
  
  Tip 1: Take yourself outside the movie

  Before you even name an issue, it can help to ask: Actually, is this really the important issue to name? Or is my feeling about the issue a manifestation of something deeper that would be even more powerful to tackle?
  To locate the possibility of going deeper, it can be helpful to take the movie metaphor literally — if you were an audience member watching the movie, what would you be screaming at yourself to say? What would a reader of this screenplay say the real, big unnamed issue is?
  
  Tip 2: If you feel you can’t name the problem, say that

  Let’s say you want to name a problem in one of your relationships, but you’re worried that presenting the problem would start an argument. Congratulations. You have now found the problem to name. You are allowed to say the following: “There’s an issue I see in our relationship, and I want to address it so our relationship is stronger. But I’m nervous about naming it, because I’m worried that it could start an argument, and I really don’t want you to feel attacked.”
  
  Tip 3: Name things before you’re sure of what they are

  Sometimes, it’s hard to name a problem because you don’t fully understand it yet. But that’s completely okay — in many settings, you don’t even have to fully understand your feelings, or what is wrong, before you name a conflict. It can be powerful to say: “Something felt off about that meeting, like maybe something important wasn’t being said.” Or: “I think there’s something weird happening in this conversation, but I don’t know what it is.”

  Human beings are near-telepathic in our ability to sense when an interpersonal dynamic is off — when someone is emotionally uncomfortable, or engaging in concealment. We all know the itchy feeling when nobody in an interaction is really being sincere. Pretty amazing how psychic we are, right?

  Yes, we are psychic, but we are also stupid. Our sense that something is weird is often accurate, but our stories about precisely what the weirdness represents are often way, way off. So, in order to move from an interesting intuition to an accurate story about reality, it helps to enlist other people in the discussion by naming the intuition.
  
  You might ask — ultimately, what is so wrong with movie logic? Maybe you don’t have to address everything now. Sometimes a solution will present itself. And, I agree. It’s not fatal to, on occasion, engage in a little bit of hopeful silence, to see whether the problem you’re having with someone else is just a mood that might shift.

  But over time, hopeful silence has corrosive effects. If you don’t name the real problems in your life, you eventually become alienated from your inner compass. You stop paying attention to your life on an experiential level, because you want to live in a pretend world of self-consolation. You lose the ability to see your life honestly.