# It's Not About The Nail

_\[This is hardly original; I’m documenting for my own sake since it took so long for me to understand. Cross-posted from [Grand, Unified, Crazy](https://grandunifiedcrazy.com/2020/04/26/not-about-the-nail/).\]_

There’s an old saw, that when a women complains she wants sympathy, but when a man hears a complaint, he tries to solve the problem. This [viral YouTube video](https://youtu.be/-4EDhdAHrOg) captures it perfectly.

Of course it’s not strictly limited by gender, that’s just the stereotype. And the underlying psychological details are fairly meaty; [this article](https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/skills-healthy-relationships/201606/stop-trying-fix-things-just-listen) captures a lot of it pretty well for me.

I’ve known about all this for a long time now, and it’s always made sense at a sort of descriptive level of how people behave and what people need. But despite reading that article (and [a good reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskMen/comments/1maplf/why_do_men_usually_try_to_solve_problems_instead/)) I’ve never really understood the “why”. What is the actual value of listening and “emotional support” in these kind of scenarios? Why do people need that? Well I finally had it happen to me recently when I was aware enough to notice the meta, and thus write this post.

I now find it easiest to think about in terms of the second-order psychological effects of bad things happening. When a bad thing happens to you, that has direct, obvious bad effects on you. But it also has secondary effects on your model of the world. Your mind (consciously or subconsciously) now has new information that the world is _slightly less safe_ or _slightly less predictable_ than it thought before. And of course the direct, obvious bad effects make you _vulnerable_ (not just “feel” vulnerable, although normally that too – they make you _actually_ vulnerable because you’ve just taken damage, so further damage becomes increasingly dangerous).

Obviously sometimes, and depending on the scenario, the first-order effect dominates and you really should just solve that problem directly. This is what makes the video so absurd – having a nail in your head is hard to beat in terms of the first-order effects dominating. But in real versions of these cases, sometimes the second-order effects are more significant, or more urgent, or at the least more easily addressable. In these cases it’s natural to want to address the second-order effects first. And the best way to do that is talking about it.

Talking about a problem to somebody you have a close relationship with addresses these second-order effects in a pretty concrete way: it reaffirms the reliability of your relationship in a way that makes the world feel _more_ safe and predictable, and it informs an ally of your damage so that they can protect you while you’re vulnerable and healing. But of course you don’t accomplish this by talking _directly_ about the second-order problem. The conversation is still, _at the object level_, about the first-order problem, which is why it’s so easy to misinterpret. To make it worse, the second-order problems are largely internal, and thus invisible, so it’s easy for whoever you’re talking to to assume they’re “not that bad” and that the first-order problem dominates, even when it doesn’t.

Working through this has given me some ideas to try the next time this happens to me. At a guess, the best way to handle it is to open the conversation with something like “I need you to make me feel safe” _before_ you get into the actual first-order problem, but I guess we’ll see.