we've got work to do

I've been going through my penance training, slowly and seriously, trying to do the exercises and take the notes and otherwise treat it as though there is something there that I will be able to find useful and to put to use immediately in my work persona.

It certainly got kudos for stating up front that when we meet someone's expectations, we're not likely to get any kind of praise for it, simply because we met expectations. The understanding there was pretty clear that the person giving the training understands how much of the time we should get more praise than we do for meeting those expectations, and don't, because it's "just" meeting expectations.

As I progressed through sections on empathy, mirror neurons, trying to put yourself in someone else's experiences, and eventually, through a section on trauma, with the caveats that we're not here to diagnose other people's traumas, but we should be aware that people have them and that traumas and other actions in the day may be influencing someone's emotional state while they're interacting with a customer service person, a flaming skull lit itself inside my head as I realized there was an underlying assumption there that it seemed unlikely that anyone was going to point out, and that this assumption was clashing fiercely with many of the things I have been reading and listening to for much of my life.

The illuminating question is pretty simple: At what point do I, as the person trying to help someone, become responsible for their emotional state during and after the interaction?

The answer can't be never, because if I'm intentionally antagonizing someone with my actions, then I'm definitely becoming a cause of their emotional state, and am responsible for it through my actions.

The answer also can't be always, because that would mean if someone decided to be an asshole to me because they hate dude-looking people, or because they have a strong vendetta against people with they/them pronouns visibly displayed, that would make me responsible for the abuse I received, because I didn't deny some aspect of myself or undergo physical changes to ensure that this person wouldn't have to encounter someone they hated.

It has to be somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, and I'll bet that if you asked people about where that line is, you'd get different answers depending on the person and their life circumstances, and I'd further wager that they wouldn't have a bright line to define the spot where the person trying to help is now responsible for the feelings of the person being helped, through their actions, both intentional and unintentional. We have to layer in the ways that implicit biases still shape behavior, even if they don't do so consciously, and how you can hold someone accountable for behaviors and their consequences, even if they never intended to do those things to someone else, otherwise we end up in a situation where you have to prove actual malice before you can get anyone to change, and there are a lot of people in the world who know exactly where the line crossing into actual malice is, and they take great joy in tapdancing on the side of the line that can't be proven to be actual malice.

So the line of "when did I become responsible for how someone else feels about this encounter?" is fuzzy at best for most people, and it's probably one of those things that neurotypical people have the feel for on an instinctual level, having observed, and been told, both explicitly and implicitly, which behaviors are on which side of the line in that relationship between helper and helped.

( Brief mention of rape apologia and the general consensus that enthusiastic consent is the standard for consent )

You can see the problem here, and why it's a flaming skull. The training about empathetic customer service is emphasizing both knowing your shit (so you can give accurate answers or alternatives when someone wants a thing they can't have) and also to gauge the person in front of you and their emotional state so that when you deliver that information to them, they feel supported, listened to, respected, and otherwise don't have a negative feeling about the encounter. With much of the "people will forget what you said, but they won't forget how you made them feel" and other such things so far. I get the idea of "don't let yourself mirror someone else's bad mood if they're throwing it at you," which makes sense. But there's still this underlying assumption that as the customer service person, you're responsible for emotionally managing the person in front of you through the interaction. It's not "the customer is always right," which is explicitly called out as not true and not ideal, but there seems to also be an underlying assumption that you, as the helper, are in a subordinate position to the person who is asking, and because you are the subordinate, you bear the responsibility for whatever happens as a result of the interaction. At least, so long as the superior doesn't do something so grossly rude or abusive that your bosses would side with you over them if there were a complaint.

You can tell how this grates hard on someone whose traumas and negative interactions have regularly been on the subject of "you didn't interpret/do/manage this correctly, therefore it's your fault I feel this way/you deserve this consequence for what you did or didn't do." And who is on the receiving end of complaints which, if they stop to think about anything other than "this is how I feel about all of this, do something about it", attribute intentional racism, cultural insensitivity, gaslighting, lack of knowledge, or other motivations that never consider the possibility that something could be a mistake, a misstep, a genuine lack of understanding, or something that can be explained by (temporary/situational) incompetence instead of malice. Yes, sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. Yes, there's no way of knowing whether this particular mistake is the final straw and therefore reaps the entire cascade of dominoes that others have set up and set in motion. There's no way of knowing whether any one person has an entire history of people behaving in plausibly-deniable, but unmistakably -ist ways toward them, and therefore they are primed to see every situation that honks like a goose as being put into action by a Horrible Goose. These are all things that are unknowable, unless someone wants to explain all of it in their complaint. If someone is explaining all of that in their complaint, however, they're probably also thinking through whether or not this is attributable to the single action of the focus of their complaint, or whether they need to moderate the complaint to the level of the infraction actually experienced, and proceeding accordingly. (They might still think that even if it's not fully one person's fault, they need to be harshly disciplined to "teach them a lesson" about whatever deficiency needs to be remedied.)

So if we can agree that the entirety of someone else's situation that they are bringing to the interaction is an orange box, and thus all the attempts at empathy and understanding the person and trying to see from their perspective and framing things so they'll accept them will be educated guesses at their very best, then it would appear logical that the answer to "how much responsibility do I have for the other person's emotional state and reactions to the interaction?" is "Not much, unless you choose to take on more." Someone can choose to take on more responsibility for someone's emotions with courses of action and attitude that will intentionally antagonize further. There are also other courses that, while unintentional, will also antagonize further that can be pointed out and worked on in the service of minimizing the ability of implicit biases to shape interaction behavior. (That's not necessarily choosing, as such, but definitely has he same effect.)

This can certainly read as a long screed of "I don't need to change, I'm fine, and the other person in this interaction chose to complain about what was, at best, a mistake, and being told that if they wanted to go forward with an action, it would go according to how I described it, not how they wanted it to happen." I'd like to believe it's coming across more as "Oh, gods curse this, there's no bright lines anywhere, it's all implicit and relies on everyone in the conversation having the same implicit understanding." Even thinking ll of this through, the best I have is "there are some things that the person doing the helping takes responsibility for with regard to how the person being helped feels, there are some things the person being helped should take responsibility for regarding how they feel about the situation (which requires a level of self-awareness that may or may not be present), and everything in between is someone making their best guess about how to approach the situation, which can be right or wrong for an entire host of reasons that it would be exhausting to have to consciously think about and try to modulate your behavior for, so hope that someone guesses right, or if they're wrong, that the other person isn't too offended or is forgiving."

I have not been guessing right. The other people have not been forgiving. So I'm going through a training that's supposed to help me guess better, and maybe it will help me understand how to notice when I'm not guessing right and how to correct in the moment. (Assuming that my brain ever signals that situation is happening in any scenario other than the one where I've firmly told it going in to assume that I'm coming across wrong, am always coming across wrong, and need to behave as thought everything I'm doing is being taken in the worst possible way.) Because I really can't conclude from this training something that might be true but unhelpful, like "It appears like the expectation set from this training and the fact that I'm doing this training is that I am wholly and solely responsible for the emotional state of every person who asks me for help while I'm on shift. Since I assume we both agree that's unreasonable, where can we set reasonable expectations, and how can we ensure that those expectations will be replicated throughout the organization so that nobody panics when a complaint comes in and there is significant pressure to do something quickly?" (If I articulated that in front of my supervisor, I might get a window into what actually happened and what kinds of safeguards are in place against rash action, and maybe about what kinds of discussions there were evaluating how much fault or blame was to be put on me for what happened. That would be nice.)

I'm not through the training yet, not fully, because I'm trying to take it seriously and slowly, so maybe all of these things will be addressed further down the line. But at least for right now, I'm having a strong clash between what I'm seeing as an unstated expectation that the helper is responsible for managing the emotions of the helped, and all the feminist reading that I've been doing that says "No, you do not assign responsibility for managing the emotions of one person to another person as an unstated default. Preferably, you don't do it at all."

More letters later, I guess, as I continue to try and work through my feelings in places that are not directly related to the incidents themselves. And continue to try and not have the knee-jerk "but I couldn't have been racist to that person, I would never intend that!" and hold space, instead, for adopting ways of making it much harder for someone to reach for that as a possibility.