Why I Don’t Play Well With Others

There are any number of reasons, of course. I touched on one of the main reasons in the last blog post – all the (generally) negative opinions I have about others as a result of Naïve Realism. And as many of us have experienced directly from Polyvagal Theory, most all unwanted evaluation is experienced as threat. Who wants to have judgy people around saying and doing things that continually make us feel bad in our mind, brain and body?

Something called Signalling Theory provides another metric by which I can measure how well I play with others. One of the signals I have to send a potential friend is the amount of time I offer to spend with them. How much time? Well, 41 minutes a day is the average amount of time Americans currently devote to all socializing. I’m way below that. According to researcher Jeff Hall, I need to spend 60 hours over 9 weeks with someone I’m playing minimally well with. 100 hours means I’m pretty okay at playing. If I spend 200 hours or more, I’m a true-blue player. I seriously doubt that’s going to happen in my remaining lifetime.

But there’s a concurrent metric in Signalling Theory that additionally determines how well I play with others. And that is: how vulnerable am I in another person’s company? Showing vulnerability signals that I am very likely to be a trustworthy person. Personally, I suck at vulnerabiltiy. When it comes to the Scary Rule – if something scares you to say, say it – you’ll rarely hear a word out of me. In order to avoid having to say something vulnerable, what I mostly do is my best to focus the conversation on you and get you to be the vulnerable one. It’s a self-protective strategy that has essentially failed me for much of my life. Nevertheless, it works.

And the Winner Is …

In his book, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, UCLA social neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman writes: “The neural systems that handle social and nonsocial reasoning are quite distinct, and literally operate at odds with each other much of the time. The more you turn on the networks for nonsocial reasoning, the more you turn off the networks for social reasoning. This antagonism between social and nonsocial reasoning is really important because the more someone is focused on a problem, the more that person might be likely to alienate others around him or her who could help solve the problem.”

So, because of a structural limitation in my brain, I have a hard choice to make: direct the focus and emphasis of my daily life towards I.Q. (cognitive intelligence) or E.Q. (emotional intelligence). And my time spent undercover with some of the world’s best and brightest seems to bear this out: many of the esteemed scientists I observed for nearly a decade did not particularly play well with others. A preponderance of their lives was spent in the service of becoming world experts in their chosen field of knowledge rather than in cultivating social/emotional intelligence. In fact, the organization had to have a full time social director on staff to organize and facilitate various kinds of interactions between visiting scholars, in other words, to try to teach them to play well with others.

Transaction Jackson

Much of the difficulty in learning to play well with others originated in my close and extended family. In the 1950s and 1960s we didn’t know much about the lifelong, brain-disorganizing impacts of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES). Decades later, after getting little help from professional therapists for what was essentially frequently having The Big Brain Question answered “No” for me, I came to the conclusion that transactional relationships were not sufficient to heal wounds that had taken place in non-transactional relationships (nuclear and extended families). People I was paying to “be there for me” were simply not going to be once I stopped writing the checks. And the conventions of the profession taught me not to expect them to. Transactional relationships had limited healing potential.

Science writer Eric Barker, in his recent book aptly named for this blog post, Plays Well With Others, points out similar limitations with communities like Multi-Level Marketing Organizations, Self-Help Groups and books like the perennially popular How to Win Friends and Influence People: “Friendship may be defined as mutual aid, but it is not transactional. We don’t keep score with friends. Our brains tell us the story that friends are a part of us, and this is how we overcome the dictates of ruthless Darwinianism and act altrusitically….Dale Carnegie got the initial parts of meeting people right, but then we must display the costly signals of time and vulnerabilty to forge and maintain true friendships that will last….We must aspire to a fearless open love that sees in others more good than danger.” This is something I consider worth aspiring to in the life time remaining to me.