tale-bearing

[cellio]

Suppose you are, say, at a convention in another city. You step into a room to hear someone you know talking with a group of people you don't know. The person you know is griping about his landlord (without naming names). The landlord is a friend of yours and is in a nearby room.

Do you (choose all that apply):
(a) listen in unobtrusively;
(b) fetch the landlord and tell him to listen in;
(c) repeat the tale verbatim to the landlord later;
(d) give the landlord some general feedback (e.g. "have you fixed that roof yet?");
(e) approach the group with some general comment about dealing with landlords;
(f) approach the group and say something like "how dare you talk about Joe Blow like that"; or
(g) shrug it off; it's up to the person to approach the landlord himself if he wants things to change?

It would never occur to me to do (b), (c), or (f); it seems like it can only cause hurt to the landlord. Depending on how close my relationship to the landlord is and what else I know of the situation, I might do (d), (e), and/or (g). I suspect I am not always strong enough to avoid doing (a), though walking away is the correct thing to do most of the time.

I'm sure that at times people say unflattering things about me outside of my hearing. That's a fact of life. In some contexts I am a public figure and have to expect that, and anyway, people talk and rant and gossip and that's just something we all have to live with. I figure that if it's important, the person with a complaint will find some way to let me know about it. And if not, well, I can't address problems I don't know about and the other person just has to realize that. No one told me about any telepathy requirements in human interaction, and I don't buy the approach of "leaking" the gripe to mutual friends and relying on it getting back to the person. That kind of sneakiness bothers me.

I have had an encounter with someone whose beliefs about such situations are very different from my own. I thought that by writing this down I would come to some understanding of why the options I find obviously incorrect might be obviously correct to others, but so far that insight is eluding me.

Comments

[siderea]

Hmmm. What about (h) Take up the landlord's side in the gripe (tactfully, of course.)

That's so often what I do. There are two basic sorts of complaints, and in both cases, I am not necessarily (or even usually) a passive audience giving implied or exp licit uncritical sympathy.

One gripe is a factual gripe: Foo complains Bar did/does X, and it's a problem for Foo. When I hear one of those I (1) Express sympathy for Foo's unhappiness, and (2) ask questions meant to steer the conversation towards findi ng productive ways that Foo might be able to address the problem. I rarely recommend confronting Bar -- only in those cases where it's clearly optimal -- because that makes the problem Bar's, and the problem isn't Bar's, it's the Foo's! Telling Foo to d ump the problem on Bar's desk isn't helpful (unless that is the right thing to do.) I'm not talking to Bar; if Bar asks me, I might suggest what Bar can do to work on solving the problem. I'm talking to Foo, so I'm going to talk to Foo about what Foo can do to address Foo's problem, even if the problem is not Foo's fault.

The alternate gripe is the moral gripe: Foo says Bar is a Bad Person for doing X. In that circumstances, I (1) try to express sympathy that Foo is upset and validate Foo's feelings, then (2) ask questions that start exploring, calmly and rationally, and very, very gently, what motivations Bar might have had for X other than being Satan Incarnate.

In both cases, I wind up answering questions about, for instance, how to solve certain problems, or understanding other MB types.

Sometimes people don't want to hear it; usually because they are addicted to their self-righteousness, and don't want to hear anything which might solve the problem. If the problem were to go away, what then would they have to feel self-righteous about?

But I've generally found most people are willing to hear it, and actively prefer it. Most people seem to like being engaged this way, instead of just getting a "yeah, man, they suck" response. It makes the feel much more listened to, and can actually help people find solutions.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. What about (h) Take up the landlord's side in the gripe (tactfully, of course.)

Heh. I have been in this situation (I have been the one griping about a landlord-whom-people-know, to friends, as a way of blowing off steam about the situation) and someone decided to swing into the conversation, tell me what the landlord was doing was perfectly legal (it was, but that didn't mean it was *right*), and that if I didn't like it I could lump it. Made me love them, let me tell you.

In general, one thing I'm coming to learn is that people often complain just to blow off steam, and that the best thing to do if one overhears a friend being complained about and the charges are not serious (e.g, "landlord hasn't fixed the roof yet" not "landlord is demanding sex acts for rent") is just to walk on by. Charging in to defend a friend does not usually help, and telling the friend they were being discussed usually leads to crankiness, not communication, between the people involved. Besides, one doesn't know the whole story. Maybe the landlord, despite being a nice person, *has* blown off fixing the roof, and the tenant is griping about having had to ask five times.

Psychodrama: Just Say No. :)

[siderea]

Well, no. I'm not talking about telling someone "You're all wrong for feeling that way". You'll note that I always start out validating someone's feelings. And furthermore, not only is rebutting someone's complaint about their landlord's behavior with "It's legal" irritating and rude, it's also (1) a total non-sequetur, if the person wasn't talking about legality (2) is a totally pointless and useless thing to say, which in no way is helpful or furthers the conversation.

Now, if someone was goi ng on about how their landlord was unfair and they were going to take their landlord to court, I might observe "You know, I think you should ask a lawyer about that, because my impression that's one of the places the law falls down, and it actually is legal for him to do that scummy thing."

(You may be amused to know that in real life, having had some work experience in the regulations which govern certain parts of lessor/lessee relations, I'm the person at parties helpfully volunteering, "Hey, did you know in this state that's a violation of the sanitary code, and you could sue your landlord for the total of your rent while those conditions existed. May even be a triple damages issue." Yay MA.)

All this also brings up an option (i) turn the gripe to something productive, which perhaps should replace (h). I'm thinking about an issue I had with my landlord many years ago. I griped about it -- mostly making a humorous story about it -- at rehearsal, and someone volunteered the advice they'd gotten when they had griped about the very same problem, and which worked for them. I then turned around, and used the advice -- and it worked for me (no more hole in roof!).

[cellio]

(h): Good point, and one I shuld have thought of -- especially as I do, sometimes, try to explicitly explore favorable explanations for the observed-and-presumed-negative behavior. I usually do it in the form of questions, e.g. are the roofers in your area being slow because it's the busy season? In the public discussion you pretty much have to do it that way to preserve the person's anonymity; privately you can say to your friend "hey look, he called three different roofers this week and they all failed to keep their appointments".

[aliza250.livejournal.com]

Another way to accomplish this is to chime in with your own horror story, complete with explanation of why it wasn't unreasonable of the person responsible (i.e. "it took my landlord two weeks to fix my tub because it's hard to find parts for the odd plumbing any more.")

Alternatively, you can deflect the conversation with a "trump this!" complaint about a long-ago anonymous landlord ("Oh yeah? I once had a landlord who tried to upgrade the kitchen faucet themself, and left the sink unusable when they didn't have the tools to finish the job. We were washing dishes in the bathtub for a week until they gave up and called a plumber!")

[cellio]

Good point -- and the "trump this!" game works especially well for changing the subject, because someone will undoubtedly then try to trump you. Which, in this case, is good. :-)