This is not about them

Growing up I thought for quite some time that my work would mostly revolve around machines. I was so interested in understanding their inner workings that I expected to focus on the actual engineering and limit my interactions with people. At the end of the day, most of the machines can either be understood or simply be relied upon. They tend to be predictable in their behavior, to the point that once a machine starts to become unreliable we either fix it or replace it. But people are a whole different number.

From the moment we are born we are exposed to the whims of the people around us. It is well know that mothers are particularly prone to mood swings in response to changes in their hormonal levels, but they are not the only ones affected and that is not the only reason either. This lack of consistency and predictability scared me away from jobs with closer "human contact", so I never followed my parents career as surgeons or even clinical physicians. However, my expectations about the work in engineering were misaligned.

The truth is that, if I had considered it carefully, I should have realized that even in engineering the human factor plays a role, in fact the biggest one. The mechanical part is essential, but its predictable nature automatically limits its complexity. But once you add an operator in the mix the amount of potential problems simply explodes. The number of ways in which a human can deviate from the predicted behavior is simply unfathomable, which is why over the course of the last couple of decades I have taken an increasing interest in understanding human behavior. Even if I cannot anticipate all erratic behaviors, being able to predict some of the most common ones is already a substantial advantage. Some of my (very amateur) research can be found in the pages of this blog, as a mixture of reading, observation and introspection.

Painting: Narcissus by Caravaggio. The Yorck Project 

The three paragraphs above where just a preamble to explain my interest on a behavior that I observed a couple of days ago. Admittedly, it is taken from a TV show, but it reflects quite well a situation that I am sure many of us have witnessed personally. In the Korean comedy series Doctor Slump (spoiler alert!!!) the main character, a very hard-working doctor, quits her job after being repeatedly bullied by her incompetent boss and, when she tells her mother, the mother's reaction is along the lines of "you cannot quit your job; it would hurt me too much". Remarkable, isn't it? And I am sure that many of you have seen similar situations.

The most striking aspect of the reaction is that the mother does not even take a second to consider what might have led her daughter to change course and give up all the long years of extremely hard work, and instead jumps ahead to consider that her daughter's actions will have on her. She completely ignores the fact that her daughter has been having a hard time and starts to lament that she will not be able to flaunt the fact that her daughter is a doctor, let alone claiming part of the merit for all the hard work that she has, in one way or another, enabled and supported.

In the psychological circles this behavior is often referred to as a narcissistic trait: when someone hears about somebody else's troubles and evaluates these troubles only in terms of the effects that they will have on them, with total disregard for the feelings of the troubled person. A similar situation is the one where one of your friends tells you to get over your troubles once and for all, because they are suffering too much seeing you in that condition. They do not stop to think that you are not in trouble because you want to or because you are too lazy to fix things. All their care about is their own feelings, and they want the cause of their distress to "fix itself and quick".

Having a person with this type of personality can put us in a very stressful double bind: on the one hand, we are in a troubled situation where any help would be welcome; on the other, upon hearing about the trouble the narcissistic might not help at all and even make the problem worse by increasing the pressure to see it solved. The conservative approach of trying to solve the problems on our own might just not work, and the only solution would be looking for help from a different source.

This leads to the second trademark narcissistic behavior: once they recognize the problem we are suffering, they quickly make themselves the center of the conversation again by deprecating themselves very openly ("how could I fail you so much?") or feeling insulted by our lack of trust ("why didn't you come to me for help?"). In the TV show the mother makes it her mission to "cure" the daughter's depression, even if the daughter is a physician with fairly good understanding of the usual methods for treating mental disorders.

The same argument extends to almost anything connected to the relationship between parents and children. Just this week I was discussing with a friend of mine what we would do if we disapproved of our children's life choices, and I was quite convinced of my position: I can try to teach them the method to make their choices and follow along as they grow, but there will be a point where I have to let go and start trusting their own judgement. My success as a parent lies in the soundness of their decision process, not in the content of the decision itself: not only they are different people from me, there is likely going to be a time when I will not be able to supervise their decision-making anymore, so they would be better off if I allow them some practice.

It is never easy to handle this kind of conflict situations, but one thing that can help is keeping in mind what the root problem is: if the doctor manages to get her job back, all the other troubles disappear automatically; the mother can boast again and does not have to worry about the level of neglect that she might have imparted on her daughter. And no matter how much they want to turn it around, it not about them, it is about you. Resistance is not always futile. Have a nice evening.