Quick background: I live in a house with my sibling and their parents. My sibling is not legally or biologically related to me, but they ARE my sibling. My sibling’s parents are not my parents, but we are collectively a ‘family,’ in many senses of the word. I call my sibling’s parents “the Elders of Plumley” as Plumley is the name of our house, they are the oldest members of our household, and they are sources of great wisdom. I myself am in my late teens (no longer in high school.) My sibling is in their mid teens (still in high school.) All of us in the household are various hues of neurodivergent. (I have ADHD and my autistic friends are all convinced that I’m also autistic; my sibling is a fellow ADHDer and may or may not be autistic; Elders are ADHD and ??? (cluster of traits that are definitely something but remain undiagnosed) respectively.
Main thing: So, I have this communication issue with my younger sibling. (They’re in their mid teens, I’m a few years older than them.) Sometimes I’ll be trying to tell them something, or ask a question, and they won’t respond; if I say their name a few times, they get frustrated with me (or, they make a noise that sounds frustrated, I’ll admit that I don’t know exactly what all their noises mean.) This isn’t as much of a problem for me as it is for their parents. The elders of plumley have trouble communicating with them, and it has been known to cause arguments/distress. My sibling responds to them in ways that are harder to decipher, and they tend to make more irritated noises. (Or maybe they just get interpreted as irritation more often. I’m not sure.)
My sibling has previously described processing/registering that someone is talking to them, but not feeling the need to respond. I’ve asked about how we could maybe work out a means of more regularly communicating the fact that they’re listening and similar, but they kinda just shrugged at me and made a confused noise. And to be honest, I feel quite similarly about the whole thing too! So, I turn to you lovely internet folks. Do you have any strategies for this kind of thing? Are there things I should be doing on my end to make communication easier? Are there alternate ways of saying “I’m listening” that aren’t just saying the words?
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What you’re referring to is called ‘active listening’.
It’s demonstrating via body language and/or vocalising that the speaker has your attention. It can go further to demonstrating you understand what’s being said but that’s not always the case.
No one is ND in my household as far as I’m aware, but I did have a similar issue with my partner. When he speaks to me, I put down my phone or book, or pause/mute the TV, look at him and make eye contact and at the very least make ‘mm’ noises, or ‘really?’ ‘wow’ ‘huh’ ‘ok’ or paraphrase what he’s said to either confirm or demonstrate I understand him. It’s how I was brought up. It’s how I function at work.
He does none of those things and will get annoyed if I stop taking and ask if he’s listening. He always says he is, but gives absolutely no visual or audible signs that he is.
So it became a point of contention in our relationship. For me what he was doing was rude. I felt stupid talking into the void with no response. Whereas he said he didn’t feel that responding was necessary.
My first approach was passive aggression, I’m not proud to say. I started doing exactly what he was doing when I spoke to him. He haaaaaated it. Kept pausing to ask if I was listening. Got to the point where he’d pick up the remote and pause what I was watching before he started talking to me. It was ridiculous on both our parts and caused a tonne of fights. But the one positive was that I could say to him ‘do you know how rude I felt behaving that way? Did it feel rude to you? Why? Surely you’re not knowingly being rude to me?’
Anyway, the penny dropped. Now he knows he has to give me a perfunctory grunt when I start speaking to indicate he’s listening. And honestly that’s enough for me. If it’s a serious issue or I need his input (so I’m not just rambling about something funny I read or venting about work), I’ll pause, he’ll notice and he’ll drop whatever he’s doing to give me attention.
So that’s all to say, if the person genuinely is listening, they may just need to be told that they’re creating frustration for both of you, and it’s perceived as rude. That all they have to do is make a sound of acknowledgment. That more will be expected from them in the workplace and now might be a good time to start practicing. YMMV with ND but it’s a worthwhile conversation.
Was he raised to never give his opinion on anything ever or something? Because I can relate to that, I had to teach myself how to be opinionated.
I have the problem with signaling that I am listening as well 😃 as well as my son, tho 🤪
Problem here is, that I keep thinking while listening and sometimes slip away up to a point where I not register what exactly was said, or only with delay, completely unintentional.
This mostly happens if I already kinda know (or think I know) what the other person wants to say. With other ND people, it’s mostly ok for them, that I interrupt them and complete what they wanted to say fastly, while regular people tend to feel insulted, it seems.
So, what I want to say: Unintentionally insult enough people by not reacting correctly in conversations and you start not reacting at because it is the better bet, especially if you don’t know the other person.
It may be in your interests to explain to people exactly what you just said to me.
My current boss is ND and very open about it. It means I don’t get frustrated when he’s not communicating the way I’m used to; I don’t take offense to certain behaviours; but also, I can comfortably say to him ‘hold up, let me finish what I was about to say’ wait for him to process that bit, then continue.
You sound similar to him. He knows that the majority of people are going to feel frustration or offense because some of his ways of relating aren’t what is perceived as ‘normal’, or he comes across as plain rude. So when I started work he explained all this to me. Sometimes he is just being a fuckhead - like anyone can be, he doesn’t have a free pass - and I’ll call him out on it. But day to day, to avoid miscommunication or irritation, we’ve found a way of interacting positively.
So I think for you, you’ve got to realise that it’s not about shutting down. I think even in a passing conversation with someone you don’t know, you can probably say ’ Hey, I’m ND - sometimes I can interrupt/talk over you, I don’t mean to - I’m trying to listen but it’s hard for me to stay focused’.
Maybe review any videos or podcasts that hold your attention and figure out if there’s a speech pattern that helps? Is it short sentences with pauses? Is it asking rhetorical questions? Or is that what makes your mind wander?
Anyway, I’m no expert in this specifically but I’m a writer and do a fair amount of public speaking. You can tell when you’re losing someone and I typically don’t think it’s the audience’s job to change how they listen, but rather how I speak. For you though, I think it’s a bit of give and take.
Hahaha, I don’t want to explain to everyone what neurodivergent is meaning 😅😂 no time for that, and I can’t really explain it on demand, that is a very difficult task for me. But I have good way working/living with it. Here in Switzerland, it seems like generally only people below 30 know about this stuff, lol
Linguistics has the term backchanneling to describe verbal ways in which a listener can engage with a speaker to signal that they are listening. The most common affirmations that fall into this category are sounds like “mhm”, “uhuh”, or simple affirming words like “yes” or “I see”. But there’s a whole slew of ways you can signal this which are more complicated, such as rhetorical questions such as “really?” in response to content that is surprising or repeating some of the content back at the speaker like “he did not!”
If you’re looking to step your response game up, there’s a concept known as “active listening” which incorporates some of the ideas of backchanneling into more complex ideas as well as taking some of the more well studied psychology of intimacy and relationships. It’s a framework or structure for listening to somebody and to show that you are listening by synthesizing and repeating some of the information back at the speaker. As an aside this helps to reduce any issues with comprehension or miscommunication as the act of synthesizing and repeating the data back at the speaker using different words can often trigger the speaker to clarify in ways they may have failed to do or highlight that you understood something differently than they expected the information they presented to be parsed.
Back when I took my Anthropology class, one of the things we covered (briefly) was different styles of communicating and how the unrecognized differences between those styles causes stress and frustration between different styles. My professor said the classic example were the stereotypical differences between men and women in American culture, as evidenced in the classic complaints “my husband never listens to me!” and “my wife is always changing her mind!”
There are people who communicate that they’re listening: they nod their head, they said “uhm-hmm”, make eye contact, etc. And there are people who … don’t. When a person who does this style of communication doesn’t get that feedback, they feel unheard and get frustrated. And when a person who doesn’t do that style of feedback receives that feedback, they think the other person is agreeing with them, so they’re blindsided and frustrated when the other person ‘changes their mind’.
I’d suggest explaining this communication difference style to your sibling, because while it’s a frustrating thing to your family right now, I’ve no doubt that your sibling finds (or will find) being on the other side of the divide just as frustrating.
I’d also explain that for some people, making or maintaining eye contact can be difficult, but you can get away with looking at people’s chins or ears; and if even that’s difficult, that’s fine, but then other means of communicating that you’re listening (nodding, going “uhn-hunh” or whatever) becomes even more important.
I don’t know if this is happening in this situation, but sometimes I get into a place where I really can’t do like, the whole interacting with people thing. It’s not that I can’t or even won’t talk, but it ends up getting stressful when I feel like people are demanding that my attention focus in a particular place, especially if they’re not getting to the point.
I don’t mean this in like a motivational sense of just not liking talking to people or being irritable, it feels physically uncomfortable. My muscles tighten, my skin gets prickly, the world shifts focus and my brain feels like a car stuck between gears with another car behind it blaring the horn demanding that i move immediately.
This is why the words ‘we need to talk’ are a sure fire bet that I won’t be talking to you. It’s why I don’t do voicemail and why I don’t really pick up my phone.
Usually it happens when I’m in the middle of something and am keeping track of something elaborate in my head, or trying to work through some bullshit so I can get back to work. I’m better about setting boundaries and communicating about it now, but I wasn’t so much when i was younger, and in the past I’d sometimes totally shut down because of it.
Anyway, if it isn’t something like that, maybe just slip some questions in and try not to monologue?
I’m coming at this from a lens of hypervigilance and mirror/model behaviors, so I hope this is helpful and am apologetic if it isn’t.
There’s a certain range of engagement between parties in a conversation that feels “right” to many people. Sometimes that engagement from the listener comes in the form of eye contact, facial expressions, or body positions - or in the slight changes in each of those signalling devices. Most people are more highly attuned to noticing one of these than the others, separate from how well they perceive or interpret these signals overall. There could be a number of ways for your sibling to signal that they’re listening - occasionally nodding their head, making eye contact at times, allowing how they’re feeling to show on their face, or just small comments like ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘okay’, or ‘uh-huh’.
For me, learning how to perform these smaller tasks as a listener made these kinds of interactions easier overall - I could spend a small fraction of my bandwidth getting the information I needed without having to spend the energy on an argument, especially one about whether I was listening. If your sibling gets frustrated when they are questioned about listening, framing it as a way to prevent their own frustration may be a way forward.
I wish you the best of luck
