Oh, yes of course, I think by “modern conception of emotional labour” we weren’t referring to that, which is I think a very insightful framework. I think we were more talking about the way that that concept has been co-opted in pop psychology or just social media and culture in general, as @Bonsai talked about further. So, more like a regurgitation of the photocopy of a misunderstanding of the concept, rather than the concept itself.
There’s probably a longer conversation to be had about how concepts in psychology or psychotherapy are misunderstood and co-opted, maybe not necessarily for nefarious means, but certainly for unintended means, or at least in suboptimal contexts. It’s not for no reason that there is the trope of the serial abusive manipulator who goes to therapy for a few months, only to come back with newer, fluffier language to hide their manipulation inside of and continue to dodge accountability. Some of that might be because, well, there are certainly less therapists than is needed, but maybe there are less good therapists than are needed for really complex cases, and therapy can feel good and productive for the subject. And, then, when therapy is both voluntary and there’s a financial incentive for the therapist to keep a patient coming… perhaps that results in there being therapists out there who are incentivized to not perform the kind of direct, confrontational work that someone who has developed very toxic behaviours would need to actually address those things.
To be fair, I don’t think most therapists are just in it to string cases along, but, even well meaning and well trained and dedicated therapists are probably constrained by just the overall lack of accessibility to therapy. What is a therapist to do when they have someone in their care who would need years of weekly sessions to really get somewhere, but their insurance is only gonna cover 8 months of biweekly sessions, or whatever? It’s a rock and a hard place all round.
I have another tip for you to not make it sound like an intervention.
Just say that, lol. You know, like, estoy tratando de que esto no parezca una “intervención.” I just put “I am trying not to make this sound like an intervention” through Google translate because I don’t speak a lick of Spanish, so if I sound like a Cathtellano that’s why, . But, you get the picture!
All you really need to do is to speak from the heart, and with some courage, and trust in your friend to hear you and understand your good intentions. If your love for your friend is as obvious to us here, he will surely feel it. Life’s too short and the world is too often cruel to hold back in how we show love to the important people in our lives.
If you haven’t already it might definitely help him if you were to disclose that you have personal experience with this kind of feeling. Just also be careful to not make it sound like you know 100% what he is going through, because even if the way he feels is very similar to how you felt, it could still be coming from a very different place, or be borne out of a very different initial thought process.
I think it’s best to kind of hedge your bets when relating to someone through personal experience like that. It can be encouraging to know someone has gone through a similar experience, and touching to have a loved one be open about a challenge they went through, but at the same time no one likes to be told how they feel or felt. And they certainly don’t like to be told that the solutions to their problems will be exactly the same as how you solved them.
Again if you haven’t already, basically, be as clear as you can on what the perspective of what you’re saying is, when you’re trying to relate to someone with a personal experience. Don’t be like “I just KNOW I felt the same way you do now, so you should just do exactly what I did!” Make sure that when you share your feelings, you’re clear that those feelings were or are yours, and that because you’ve felt that way, you suspect that the way the other person feels could be similar.
Don’t forget–you’re still making an assumption, so, don’t be shy about saying that you know you’re assuming how they feel. This can maybe help someone open up and maybe even start to understand a feeling if they don’t already, because they will likely be able to both compare how they feel to how you feel/felt, and even borrow the same terms and phrasing you used when you explained, but you can also help them open up by asking them to tell you where your assumptions were accurate, and where they weren’t. Ask lots of open-ended questions too, with an open-ended question being anything that doesn’t seem to be seeking for an obvious answer and just gives people a starting point for further reflection. The most closed questions possible are yes or no questions, like, “do you feel guilty when you ghost people?” Instead ask questions like “what are some of the ways you feel when you’re in this kind of situation?”
Lastly to add something else I just thought of, I believe it is always best to be goal oriented and to focus on being constructive.
Try not to leave these conversations at anything like, when you ghost me it hurts, so, promise to not do that, k? I think it helps people if you always try your best to end on some kind of plan or agreement or vision for a better future. There is a world of difference between “don’t do that to me,” and “how can we work together on a better protocol in place for this situation?” or “what do you need from me to feel comfortable to talk to me about backing out?” or “Here’s a few things you can do or say that will help me understand your needs better.”
Maybe it will help him if you really lay out a sort of flow chart on what he should do based on the possibilities you can think of, and really try and work through constructive and helpful ways to frame each choice. So, like, obviously if he feels good and wants to spend time with you, great, everything goes forward as planned. Then there are the subsequent shades of him feeling caught between feeling like he doesn’t want to be around anyone but also feeling lonely or isolated.
You can maybe discuss how, like, if he feels a little off but not too much, he can maybe choose the activity you will do together or the place(s) you’ll go, if there’s something that will feel more chill and safe for him if it’s something about the activities themselves that generate the stress. Like, maybe it will help put him at ease if you’re ready to change from going out in public somewhere to just chilling at his or your place and playing some couch co-op game that you both like. It might really ease off the pressure he’s feeling to just know he won’t be disappointing you just because the activity you’ve planned seems daunting the day of, and reassure him that what’s important to you is him and your friendship, not the activities themselves. Maybe explain to him that if you had a choice, you would surely always much rather prioritize his comfort and your friendship over an activity, or to put it another way, you’d never want to pressure him to do something he doesn’t want to do just so he can prove his loyalty to you or whatever. I don’t really think people think like that but people do think that people think like that.
On that note, it might also help him to reach out and tell you when he needs to back out of something, if you talk about whether or not his participation is required for you to have a good time. Depending on what the activities you two get up to are, maybe it would be best if you mentally prepare to go to something with or without him, and maybe even be upfront about that. Something like, if there’s something you really want to go do or see (let’s imagine it’s time sensitive like a concert or an exhibition or something) and you plan to do it with him, it might help him if you were to be clear about how you’d love it if he came but you’re gonna go and have a good time with or without him. Maybe that sounds counterintuitive, like you’re saying that you don’t value his presence, but at the same time, maybe that’s his motivation for ghosting you and not saying anything–he doesn’t want to hold you back from things you want to do, so he takes the safe route and just assumes you’ll go and do it even if he doesn’t say anything.
Ok, to get back to the sort of flow chart situation. Let’s say he’s really feeling on the fence the day of. Something you could try is to break down an outing into smaller more manageable chunks, which might be able to give him an out. “Going to a concert” for someone who is developing a tendency to shy away from going out in public and spending time with people is probably a daunting idea. That’s lots of stimulation and maybe new and unfamiliar places and experiences, a crush of unfamiliar people, and most of all it’s just hours and hours of time. Perhaps his tendency to ghost is out of a fear that if he does go out, he will all of a sudden be struck with a terrible feeling and immediately desperately want to leave, but he’ll know he has already committed and would probably disappoint or upset you if he did, and so he will just be stuck wearing the Involuntary Bad Time Hat. Maybe it would help that kind of feeling if you just broke down an evening’s activities into discrete chunks of time with discernible gaps between major changes in activity, so that he feels like he has an out. Just knowing that he has an out might help him feel a sense of security enough that he can instead just focus on having a good time, or, it might mean he can have a good time and if things go south he can back out without feeling like he’ll disappoint or inconvenience you.
I’ll keep with the concert idea because that will give me lots of ways to demonstrate what I mean. Just try and reinforce that he always has a choice and he can even potentially scale back his commitment in the moment if he really needs to. Let’s say that he is really unsure of what he wants to do and he has managed to tell you that the day of the concert. You can perhaps help this by incorporating some more preparatory parts of the activity. Maybe, several hours before doors open, you’ll meet him at his place, where you’ll just chill for a bit before you head out to the show. That gives him a chance to not be able to avoid telling you he’s going to change his mind last minute, for one, which is I think a good thing. Then, maybe 2 hours before doors open, you’ll plan to get a snack or have a coffee or a drink either somewhere near his place, or near the concert venue. I think if you can get him with his shoes on and out the door, you’ve already eliminated a lot of the chance that the impulse to back out will win out. He still does indeed have a chance to back out, though, but you’ll still have had some time together, which is a net gain. Then you can just break down the event itself into manageable chunks, too. Get there as doors are opening so there’s time for him to back out before paying cover and before the opening acts are on. Encourage him to check in between acts and especially before the headliners start playing. If you’re there to see a particular act, make sure he knows so that he has a chance to reassess how he’s feeling before the act you really want to see is on. And on the same tack let him know what bands you wouldn’t mind missing so if he really feels a need to peace out, he can let you know and make his exit, maybe with you if you’re already satisfied with the concert, or without you if he can make his own way home.
Then, lastly for the sort of flow chart, you can just plan for how it will work best if he really does just need to back out of something. Maybe you can reassure him that you don’t need a big long explanation, or, like, the conversation you can have with him about this is like doing the prep work for explaining when he needs to back out. Just reassure him that he can just message you that morning or a few hours before simply that he’s not feeling it and that you should go and have a good time without him 'cause he just wants to chill at home. Maybe what stops him from reaching out is the expectation that he needs to have a good excuse to back out or it would be disrespectful if he didn’t provide some kind of elaborate expression of his regret. So maybe take a very “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to this, he’s welcome to do so if he needs to but if that just adds to the pressure to not worry about it, you can discuss it either the next day or maybe just not at all because it’s not a novel feeling, it’s just how he usually feels and you already understand. Maybe even offer to pick up a CD or some merch for him or maybe even ask him if he wants to see pics so he at least feels included and valued in some way.
I guess long story short is that it’s very possible to plan things with socially anxious friends in mind, it just means you have to be a little more thorough and a little more deliberate in how you communicate plans. Think of contingency plans, plans within plans, protocols for what to do if something undesirable happens, that sort of thing. I am a bit of a recluse but I have also had some notorious flakes as friends so I’ve kinda been on both sides of this. Knowing that if I wanted to I would be able to adjust my level of commitment to a social outing without judgement or misunderstanding from my friends helped me, and when my flakey friend backed out of something it never bothered me because we had discussed things beforehand.
Yup, I don’t think it draws attention away from this because I figure they are intertwined issues. I have only ever lived in Canada, which is just Diet America, and I had to learn the hard way just how weird and isolating this culture is, by I guess suffering within it for a long time lol. I just assume at this point that the North American lifestyle is going to be alienating to most other people on Earth. It’s certainly alienating to people in North America, but most of them don’t know anything else so they don’t consciously perceive the problem. And, yeah, you’re exactly right with your points about cost of living and commuting and the work-centric culture.
No doubt they were cooking with that one. But, perhaps there is more of this that is also a byproduct of colonization. Thinking about how it was difficult to even get your friend to to consider that they had had a panic attack, I can’t help but think of machismo, or just the way patriarchy has manifested in many settler colonial societies. That pressure to swallow painful emotions and refuse to admit weakness is very much in line with machismo and western settler colonial patriarchal attitudes and expectations. I wouldn’t know to what degree that is pervasive within Dominican culture, but, you know, I wouldn’t bet against it even without prior knowledge. Perhaps too if your friend is not really that kind of macho kind of guy, at some point it might still be worth exploring with him the idea that even if you don’t think you conform to it, there are still many ways it can influence your behaviour, just from having grown up surrounded by it.