why should i?

In high school, I had a really good friend who never seemed particularly happy with her life. Something was always wrong, she always had something to cry about. After a couple months (or maybe a year or two) of hearing her stories day after day, some of her mutual friends and I got together and wondered if there was anything we could do to help her out besides just listening. We were realizing that it wasn't that life hated her... she just hated life. Her boyfriend at the time finally suggested that she start seeing a therapist, which she reluctantly agreed to. Her parents got involved and found someone who their insurance covered a few sessions with, and we were all very hopeful that maybe our friend would some new light in her life.

She proceeded to spend the rest of high school doing what we liked to call, "Wasting her parent's money once a week for fifty minutes hanging out in her therapist's office and talking about jack shit as far as we were all concerned."

Something would get her down over the weekend, and she'd call her boyfriend to cry, and then he'd be "insensitive" and suggest that (since he honestly had no idea what to do anymore) she talk to her therapist about it, and she'd get mad at him and call me. Then I'd spend hours on the phone or in her room comforting her, but mostly gently trying to convince her that maybe her therapist really was the person that she should be talking to about all this. It never happened. She was perfectly content opening up to me about anything and everything in her life, but refused to even approach any mildly serious subject with her therapist.

I had many theories as to why over the years. The therapist lady was a stranger, my friend had no reason to trust her, my friend was afraid that something would get back to her parents and they'd be mad, confronting your demons is scary... At the time I couldn't really comprehend it. I was always a talker, still am. I've shocked a number of people with how open I'm willing to be. It's rare that I've met a person that I'm not willing to answer any question that they might pose.

It was probably not until I started working at a real job that I cared about that I was finally in a position where maybe I started understanding. (I say maybe because we've drifted since high school, and I'm not going to pretend I can read minds, especially of people I'm no longer in touch with.) But maybe. Because I kept coming up with ideas that I thought were great, or at least interesting, and while I shared them with the other interns that I worked with, I was terrified to say anything to my boss. I'd go home from the office and make dinner with my roommate, and have a million thoughts about the project I was on, and the two of us got really excited about the possibilities. I even jotted down exactly what I wanted to say because I'm notoriously bad at remembering things even a couple of hours later. And I'd walk into a meeting with my manager the next morning, and say... nothing.

The guy was a stranger, and we hadn't really built up a lot of trust, I was afraid that something I'd say would be stupid and my manager would be disappointed, or laugh at me, and confronting the unknown was terrifying!

I think that sharing something always has a potential risk. You might be embarrassed, it might get back to exactly the one person you never wanted to know, someone might think less of you, you make yourself or the other person uncomfortable... there's any number of reasons not to share things.

There's also any number of reasons to share things: you might make an awesome connection, come up with the greatest idea ever, become a superstar, tell someone exactly what they need to hear, inject some excitement into your day, or maybe just earn your two points for participation that day.

Like any choice, opening up has got upsides and downsides. If someone's not opening up, it's probably because the negatives are outweighing the positives. If sharing has risks, and you've got absolutely no incentive to do so, they why would you? I'm not trying to argue that humans are perfectly rational, logical human beings, but subconsciously, at any point, we either want to do something because it seems like a good idea, or we don't want to do it, because it seems like a bad one. If I'm encountering resistance in a conversation, it's because we've gone from "This conversation is a good idea" to "This conversation is no longer a good idea."

Now, I can't tell you what particular downsides a person is focusing on when that switch happens, but I can tell you that if I think the conversation is important, I'm going to try to give them an incentive to keep talking, or possibly try to take away some risk. Maybe that means sharing something myself to build some trust. Or the ever popular, "I promise I won't laugh." In a class, I think this often means tying a student's grade to how often they open their mouth.

I finally started speaking up more at work when I got some feedback that my manager expected me to be a bit more proactive instead of just doing what I was told. He gave me a subtle incentive for communicating. It did nothing to take away the risks I was seeing, but it did add a reason to change my current behavior if I wanted to keep my job. In my friend's case, that never happened. We remained willing to listen to her problems, her boyfriend stayed with her despite their disagreements, and, while she wasn't happy, she wasn't unhappy enough that the risks outweighed the potential benefits.

Finally, to give credit where credit is due, I would like to end this by thanking my fiance for a wonderful conversation we had over dinner at Steak and Shake that led to some of the ideas in this post. It turned out much better than my original idea of complaining for some hundreds of characters about how I couldn't answer this question, because how I get people to open up in conversation and what I did when I sensed resistance was different with every person and every conversation and depended on our relationship and history, and my current read of the situation, and how was I supposed to say anything interesting because all I knew about the topic for sure was "It depends."