All Around Robin Hood’s Barn

Although our work focuses on communication with many different types of people, even we therapists have pet peeves in the communication department. For some, it might be working with a patient who barely communicates, necessitating great patience and an almost dental extraction of information from him. For others, it might be working with someone who seems to have no words for emotional states; who couches everything in terms of “upset” but who cannot really explain what that means. But the good therapist does her work, patiently adapting to quirks the patient may bring.

However, after our therapeutic work is finished for the day, we might find ourselves less patient (no pun) with friends or partners who make us work to understand them. My particular peeve is when communication breaks down because the receiver seems to be having a different conversation. Let me give an example.

While watching TV, an ad came on for a brand-name drug I’ll call “Gastro.” I asked someone at home “is that X generic or Y generic?” Now, there might be at least 4 answers to that question:

1. X generic

2. Y generic

3. Neither one

4. I don’t know.

Instead the answer I received was, “Gastro is a drug that blocks the production of acid by acid-producing cells in the stomach. It belongs to a class of drugs called H2 antagonists, that is, histamine-2 blockers that also includes….” I had already stopped listening. And I was less than patient.

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In the mental health field, we call this “circumstantiality” and it is also what I call “going all around Robin Hood’s barn” to give an answer. It could also be called “smarty pants” communication in which the respondent feels compelled to let the questioner know how much he knows. Since I know the person who said this, that didn’t seem to be the case. But I wonder how often people who don’t know the person who answers like this would consider them to be showing off. Parenthetically, I suspect that, when a man does this in communication with a woman he does not know well, it is perceived as “mansplaining,” with him assuming he knows more than she about a topic. And sometimes it really is a technique to show he knows more than she.

But other times, circumstantiality is simply the result of a nonlinear thought pattern and occurs when the focus of a conversation drifts but eventually comes back to the point. When someone communicates circumstantially, unnecessary details and irrelevant remarks keep the respondent’s reply from getting to the point right away.

How does this quirk of communication arise? From an early age, we are taught to measure our success by word counts and page lengths. Students are asked to write 20-page papers rather than simply being asked to make their point clear in as many words as they need. Years ago, when I taught students in nursing, I would caution that their final paper was going to be graded on the “cellar stairs method”; that is, I would throw the papers down the stairs and the heavy ones that surely had “padding” would be graded more stringently than ones that got to the point of what they wanted to say. (I also told them I could detect the presence of BS and had a rubber stamp that I would use when so detected; not true, but they got my meaning.)

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Circumstantiality is different from tangentiality, a thought process in which there is an abrupt, permanent deviation from the subject. The new thought pathway is vaguely connected to the original subject but never returns to original subject and thus the whole communication chain breaks down. At least, with circumstantial speech, the question gets answered. Eventually. Painfully.

With patients, we sit patiently, waiting for the point of the interchange. Nevertheless, trying to have a conversation with a circumstantial speaker is frustrating and I probably have less patience at home if I’ve had to work hard during the day in therapeutic conversation. Like a game of tennis, if the conversational ball gets dropped often or is lobbed somewhere over the fence and out of play, it is not enjoyable. It doesn’t matter how interesting the answer is, if it’s filled with unnecessary facts, more often than not, the listener shuts down and stops listening.

Thinking about this ability to maintain composure during work hours but not so much at home, I was reminded of an episode of the old Bob Newhart Show in which he played a psychologist who had a group of people afraid of flying. He had worked patiently with them on progressive desensitization and the next day was going to be their first flight. He asked he wife, played by Suzanne Pleshette, to join them. She said she’d never told him before, but she was afraid to fly. The good psychologist burst out, “What? That’s crazy!”

Do you have a pet communication peeve?

Leslie Durr, PhD, RN, PMHCNS-BC is an advanced practice psychiatric-mental health nurse with a private psychotherapy practice in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the blog post author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Psych Congress Network or other Psych Congress Network authors.