mixed messages and unconscious negotiation

With emotions, when someone’s sending a clear nonverbal message of being angry, since it’s not explicit it’s taboo for you to talk about it.  I can comply if that’s compatible with their other expectations (and it often isn’t); I can refuse and make them angry; or I can try to open up discussion and really piss them off.

The third (or possibly fourth) way is to respond in the same implicit emotional language.  I don’t think most people are conscious of that; I think it’s often subconscious, unrecognized arguing that bypasses your conscious limits on what you consider acceptable to talk about.  But if your receptive and expressive communication is primarily conscious, you have to deliberately choose whether you’re going to act in contradiction to your values; you don’t get the option of getting more of your way while still believing that you’re being ethical.  You know that you’re doing something wrong.  (Which also opens you up to being accused of having overly stringent moral standards for yourself, when the primary problem is that you’re more aware of having violated them.)

Worse, though, you might not be able to get the signals right – you don’t know what you’re supposed to send or how you’re supposed to send it, and if you try to send it consciously, it might break into the other person’s awareness and they’ll feel accused of something they’re not aware of doing.

It’s one-way communication and can be one-way intimidation.  Which wouldn’t be intimidation if you could play the game in the same way – it would just be a run-of-the-mill, unnoticed background aspect of communication.  The other person might even be happier that way, since you would be negotiating their nonverbal and verbal expectations to a workable compromise, instead of leaving them with contradictory desires where whatever happens, one of those desires won’t get met. i.e. when you play the game properly, you get their conscious and subconscious expectations to match up so that it’s actually possible to make them happy.  And if you don’t play the game properly, they’ll want conflicting things and they’ll be unhappy because it won’t actually be possible to meet their contradictory expectations.

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