by Ethan Kross
As soon as the NYPD Hostage Negotiations Team was up and running, the city saw an immediate decrease in bad outcomes for hostage situations. This breakthrough spurred law-enforcement agencies around the globe to follow suit, including the FBI. The bureau developed its own approach called the Behavioral Change Stairway Model, a progression of steps to guide negotiators: Active Listening → Empathy → Rapport → Influence → Behavioral Change. In essence, it’s a road map for satisfying people’s social-emotional needs that nudges them toward a solution drawing on their cognitive abilities. While law-enforcement negotiators are naturally trying to defuse dangerous situations and arrest criminals, their work bears some similarities to coaching someone we care about through a problem. In both cases, there is a person who can benefit from the right kind of verbal support.
While all of these strategies apply to how you help the people in your life manage their inner voices, they can also help you make better choices when selecting the people you go to for emotional support. After they’ve made you feel validated and understood, do they guide you toward brainstorming practical solutions? Or do they excessively extract details and revive the upsetting experience by repeating things like “He’s such a jerk! I can’t believe he did that.” By reflecting after the fact, you can often determine if someone helped you immerse or distance. Most likely, it’ll be a combination of the two, which can be a starting point for a dialogue about how the person can better help you next time. By thinking through other experiences with your “chatter advisers,” you can also narrow in on which people are right for which problems.
While some friends, colleagues, and loved ones will be useful for a broad range of emotional adversities, when the problems are more specialized, specific people may be more helpful. Your brother might be the right person to coach you through family drama (or, perhaps just as likely, he might be the wrong person). Your spouse might be the perfect chatter adviser for professional challenges, or maybe it’s that person from another department at work. Indeed, research indicates that people who diversify their sources of support—turning to different relationships for different needs—benefit the most. The most important point here is to think critically after a chatter-provoking event occurs and reflect on who helped you—or didn’t. This is how you build your chatter board of advisers, and in the internet age we can find unprecedented new resources online.
A powerful example is the case of the journalist, sex columnist, and activist Dan Savage and his partner, Terry Miller, who in September 2010 were looking for a way to respond to the news of yet another gay teenager committing suicide after relentless bullying. This time it was a fifteen-year-old named Billy Lucas; he had hanged himself in his grandmother’s barn in Greensburg, Indiana. Savage had blogged about his death, and a reader had left a comment saying that he wished he could have told the boy that things—his life—would get better. This prompted Savage and Miller to film themselves talking about how, though their teenage years were hard, they lived happy lives as adults, filled with love and a sense of belonging. They posted the video, and within a week it went viral. Thousands of people made similar videos, and gay teens across the country wrote to Savage to say how it was making them feel more hopeful.
Ten years later—as of this writing—the sentiment that drove that first video is much more than a mere viral phenomenon. It Gets Better is an innovative nonprofit organization and global grassroots movement. More than seventy thousand people have shared their inspiring stories, almost ten times more have pledged support, and untold numbers of young gay people have found comfort, strength, and reasons not to end their lives before they’ve truly begun. It Gets Better has rescued the inner voices of so many emotionally vulnerable people because, in essence, it acts as a distancing tool promoting normalization—everybody gets picked on, but we all get through it—and mental time travel. Most fascinating of all is the fact that people who watch the video don’t have to actually know the speakers to benefit from their advice, a principle that applies to all sorts of similar social-support videos available online. We can find people to coach us through our chatter in the form of prerecorded strangers.
Our discussion of whom we go to for support and how they verbally engage us when we’re dealing with chatter raises a question about therapy and its effectiveness, because it obviously involves lots of talking. Does the talking cure, as it is sometimes called, truly cure?
The first thing to keep in mind is that there are countless forms of talk therapy and they often differ drastically in approach. Many empirically validated forms of therapy such as cognitive behavioral therapy employ precisely the kinds of techniques we’ve been talking about throughout this chapter; they provide clients with emotional support while also crucially helping them engage in cognitive problem solving.
Yet some interventions continue to focus on in-depth emotional venting as a tool for mitigating chatter. Case in point: psychological debriefing, an approach that emphasizes the value of emotional unburdening in the immediate aftermath of negative experiences despite overwhelming evidence arguing against its benefits. The take-home point is that if you find yourself needing more than a conversation with a friend or loved one to deal with your chatter, given what you now know, have a conversation with your prospective mental-health providers to learn about their approach and find out whether it is empirically supported.
Invisible Support
Everything we’ve explored thus far concerns situations in which people seek support. Yet we all know people who experience chatter and sometimes don’t reach out for help. They may be trying to manage a problem on their own or may be concerned about how asking for help might impact the way others view them, or how they see themselves. But often we still want to provide support in some way. After all, observing those we care about in need is a powerful neurobiological experience. It triggers empathy, which motivates us to want to act on their behalf.
Under such circumstances, however, caution is needed. Research shows that there’s a danger in trying to dole out unsolicited advice, no matter how skilled you are at blending the strengths of Kirk and Spock. When we give advice at the wrong time, this too can backfire.
Think about the archetypal experience of a parent advising a child how to do a math problem she is struggling with. The parent earnestly looks over the problem, sure that a patient, clear explanation is exactly what their kid needs to succeed at the assignment and feel better about herself. It’s a cognitive solution that should lead to positive emotion, right? Except it doesn’t play out that way. As the parent explains, the child turns surly and gets agitated. The clean mathematical logic somehow gets lost in emotional static as an argument breaks out.
“I know how to do it!” the kid says.
“But you were having trouble, so that’s why I was trying to help,” the parent responds.
“I don’t need your help!”
The kid storms off to her room. The parent is baffled. What just happened?
(Note: This might or might not have been an autobiographical experience.)
Offering advice without considering the person’s needs can undermine a person’s sense of self-efficacy—the crucial belief that we are capable of managing challenges. In other words, when we are aware that others are helping us but we haven’t invited their assistance, we interpret this to mean that we must be helpless or ineffective in some way—a feeling that our inner voice may latch on to. A long history of psychological research into self-efficacy has shown that when it is compromised, it damages not only our self-esteem but also our health, decision making, and relationships.
In the late 1990s, the Columbia psychologist Niall Bolger and his colleagues took advantage of the New York bar exam to examine when people’s attempts to provide support for another are most effective. The bar, as all lawyers and their loved ones know, is a grueling, chatter-churning test. Bolger recruited couples in which
one person was studying for the bar and, for a little over a month, asked the examinees to answer a set of questions capturing how anxious and depressed they felt, as well as how much support they received from their partner. He also asked the partners of the examinees to report how much support they provided. Bolger was primarily interested in whether benefits that people derive from receiving social support depend on whether a person is aware of the fact that a partner is trying to help.
The study revealed that helping without the recipient being aware of it, a phenomenon called “invisible support,” was the formula for supporting others while not making them feel bad about lacking the resources to cope on their own. As a result of receiving indirect assistance, the participants felt less depressed. In practice, this could be any form of surreptitious practical support, like taking care of housework without being asked or creating more quiet space for the person to work. Or it can involve skillfully providing people with perspective-broadening advice without their realizing that it is explicitly directed to them. For example, asking someone else for input that has implications for your friend or loved one in the presence of the person who needs it (a kind of invisible advice) or normalizing the experience by talking about how other people have dealt with similar experiences. Doing these things transmits needed information and support, but without shining a spotlight on the vulnerable person’s seeming shortcomings.
Since Bolger’s first experiment pioneered this domain, other research has converged to validate the effectiveness of invisible support. A study on marriages, for example, found that partners felt more satisfaction about their relationships the day after receiving invisible support. Another experiment found that people were more successful in meeting their self-improvement goals if the support they received from their partner toward those goals was delivered under the radar.
Further research has yielded insights into the circumstances in which such invisible support is most effective: when people are under evaluation or preparing to be. For example, when they’re studying for exams, preparing for interviews, or rehearsing the talking points of a presentation. During such times people feel most vulnerable. In contrast, when people want to manage their chatter as quickly and efficiently as possible, it’s not necessary to be subtle or crafty in how you support. In this case, direct advice that blends Kirk and Spock is most needed, appropriate, and likely to succeed.
Along with the forms of invisible support we’ve discussed, there is one other pathway for subtly aiding people we are very close to who find themselves submerged in chatter, and it’s completely nonverbal: affectionate touch.
Touch is actually one of the most basic tools that we use to help those we care most about turn a negative internal dialogue around. Like language, it is inseparable from our ability to manage our emotions from infancy onward, because our caregivers use affectionate physical contact to calm us from the moment we leave the womb. Research shows that when people feel the welcome, affectionate touch or embrace of those they are close to, they often interpret that as a sign that they are safe, loved, and supported. Caring physical contact from people we know and trust lowers our biological threat response, improves our ability to deal with stress, promotes relationship satisfaction, and reduces feelings of loneliness. It also activates the brain’s reward circuitry and triggers the release of stress-relieving neurochemicals such as oxytocin and endorphins.
Affectionate touch is so potent, in fact, that one set of studies found that a mere one second of contact on the shoulder led people with low self-esteem to be less anxious about death and feel more connected with others. More striking still, even the touch of just a comforting inanimate object, like a teddy bear, can be beneficial. This is most likely a result of the brain coding contact with a stuffed animal similar to how it codes interpersonal touch. Indeed, many scientists consider the skin a social organ. In this sense, our contact with others is part of an ongoing nonverbal conversation that can benefit our emotions.
What we give to and receive from other people in our daily interactions constitutes a rich portfolio of comfort for the inner voice. The science of how these techniques work is becoming increasingly clear, though of course employing them with people we love takes a certain art, not to mention practice.
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Ultimately, the conversations we have with others aren’t all that different from the conversations we have with ourselves. They can make us feel better or worse. Depending on how we engage other people, and how they engage us, we experience more or less chatter. This has likely been the case since our species started sharing its problems. We just didn’t understand the underlying psychological mechanisms until recently.
Yet in our young twenty-first century, our relationships have begun to migrate to a novel environment for our species and our chatter, the same place the students at Northern Illinois and Virginia Tech went in the wake of their respective tragedies: the internet. A natural question is if the ways in which verbal support succeeds and fails carry over to how we “talk” on social media, over texts, and through other forms of digital communication.
While psychology is only just beginning to grapple with this question, we’re already seeing some clues. For example, in the mid-2010s, my colleagues and I wanted to better understand the nature of co-rumination via social media, so we asked people who were in the midst of grappling with an upsetting experience to chat with another person via a computer messaging app. What they didn’t know was that the other person was an actor who had been carefully trained to nudge half of the participants to keep talking about what happened. For the other half, he gently encouraged them to zoom out and focus on the bigger picture.
Sure enough, the participants who were led to rehearse their feelings became increasingly upset during the conversations. Their negative emotions skyrocketed from the time they sat down at the keyboard until they left. In contrast, the participants whom the actor helped to zoom out remained just as calm and collected as they were when they first came into the lab.
The thing we don’t often think about when we seek or give support, online or off-, is that, objectively speaking, the people in our lives form a social environment. What we’ve been learning is how to navigate that environment to maximize positive outcomes for the inner voice. Our surroundings are inseparable from the human beings who inhabit them, and when we use the resources that are available to us in our relationships with others, the benefits are powerful. But other people are only one facet of our environment that we can harness to improve our internal conversations.
We can also go outside for a walk, attend a concert, or simply tidy up our living space, and each of these seemingly small actions can have surprising effects on our chatter.
Chapter Six
Outside In
In 1963, the Chicago Housing Authority completed construction on a monumental project on the city’s historically black South Side: the Robert Taylor Homes. A vast syndicate of twenty-eight sixteen-story concrete towers, it was the biggest public housing complex in the history of the world.
Built to halt the rise of slum conditions that were taking over more and more neighborhoods, the Robert Taylor Homes were named after a prominent, recently deceased black community leader and architect. Unfortunately, the final product didn’t honor his memory. Not only did the Robert Taylor Homes reinforce the citywide structure of segregation that already reigned in Chicago, they gradually exacerbated the challenges facing the community.
By the 1980s, the Robert Taylor Homes had become notorious as a microcosm of the same problems plaguing dozens of American cities: gang violence, drugs, and people beset with fear, ill health, and disenfranchisement. A grand, much-touted attempt at urban renewal had crumbled into yet another example of urban decline that disproportionately affected African Americans.
If you lived in the Robert Taylor Homes, you didn’t have to turn on the
television or read a newspaper to witness the devastating effects that poverty and segregation were having on America during the second half of the twentieth century. You simply had to walk outside your apartment. But within this atmosphere of crime, amid the daily tumult that defined the lives of the Robert Taylor Homes residents, a groundbreaking experiment would soon take place.
When people applied for an apartment in the Robert Taylor Homes, they had no say over the building where they would live. They were randomly assigned to a unit in almost the same way that scientists randomly assign subjects to different groups in an experiment. As a consequence, tenants found themselves living in apartments that, in many cases, looked out onto dramatically different landscapes. Some units faced courtyards filled with grass and trees. Others looked out onto gray slabs of cement.
In the late 1990s, this unique circumstance ended up providing Ming Kuo, a newly minted assistant professor working at the University of Illinois, with an unexpected opportunity. With short dark hair, glasses, a warm smile, and a penetrating mind, Ming was interested in understanding whether the physical surroundings of residents affected their ability to cope with the stress of living in a drug- and crime-filled environment. Like many other scientists, she had been struck by a growing body of research that demonstrated a link between views of green spaces and increased resiliency.