Reclaiming Conversation (12 page)

The answer for me is not simple. Numbers are an element in a narrative process, but they are not
just
an element. When we have a number, it tends to take on special importance even as it leaves to us all the heavy lifting of narrative construction. Yet it constrains that construction because the story we tell has to justify the number. Your quantified data history can provide material for constructing a story. But here, our language betrays us. We talk about the “output” from our tracking programs as “results.” But they are not results. They are first steps. But too often, they are first steps that don't suggest second steps.

For if the program's results make no sense to us, we have no place to go. So when 750 Words gave Trish a “result” that baffled her (she doesn't think she has morbidity on her mind), it provided no further guidance and no interlocutor. Trish is left puzzled and does not know how to further understand why her words are associated with death—by the numbers.

I talk about tracking and self-reflection with Margaret E. Morris, a
psychologist at the Intel Corporation
who for over a decade has worked on applications that help people record and visualize their emotional and physical health. When Morris considers her work over the years, she says that what strikes her about the feedback devices she has made is that “they are most powerful as a starting point, not an ending point,” and that “every one of them started a conversation.” In terms of making a difference to health and family dynamics,
it was the conversation that brought about change.

Morris says that sometimes the conversation was begun by a family member or friend. In one of Morris's cases, a woman housebound by chronic illness was asked to report her moods to a mobile phone app. Several times a day, this program, called Mood Map, asked the woman
to indicate her mood on a visual display. When she was sad, the program would suggest techniques drawn from cognitive behavioral therapy that might help her see things in a more positive light. In this case, it was the patient's son who used the Mood Map to start a conversation. The technology gave him an opening to talk about his mother's loneliness, something he had not been able to do on his own. Morris sums up: “To the extent that these technologies have an impact, it is because they
spark conversations along the way
.”

L
inda, a thirty-three-year-old business student, is more enthusiastic than Trish about her experience with 750 Words because Linda sees the program as dispensing a kind of therapy. She began using the program when she was under stress, coping with academic pressure, life in a new city, and not having as much money as she did when she was working. As she tried to get her life in order, Linda wanted to know how she was doing, and 750 Words' algorithms promised that they would report on how affectionate, happy, upset, anxious, or sad she was. But after a few weeks with the program, Linda is disgruntled: “Who wants to pour out your heart and find out that you're a self-important introvert? Who wants to be told that you're sadder than most other users? And not only that, but you're not as happy as you were last week?”

But Linda also sees an upside. She says that after two weeks of the program's “constructive criticism,” the program has begun to “train” her.
She now writes what she thinks the program would like to hear.
She makes an effort to be upbeat and to talk more about other people in her 750 words. Linda says that according to the program, she's not as self-important as she once was.

I'm in a group where Linda discusses her relationship with 750 Words. The question comes up as to whether Linda's approach is making her a better person. Sure, she is gaming the system, but maybe the system is gaming her—in a good way. Is this therapy? Is writing a positive version
of your day every day a bad thing? Someone says, “I believe in the idea of ‘fake it till you make it.'” Research shows that if you smile, smiling itself triggers the release of
the chemicals associated with happiness
. Linda believes that if she consciously talks more about other people, she may in fact
become
less self-absorbed. So what starts as an exercise in self-reflection ends up, at least for Linda, as behavioral therapy.

Trish and Linda face the same dilemma: What to do if your feelings don't match the readout. Cara, a college student who has been using an iPhone app called the Happiness Tracker, has a different problem. How much should you look to the “output” of a tracking program to clue you in on your feelings? Over several weeks, the Happiness Tracker has asked for Cara's level of happiness as well as information about where she is, what she is doing, and who she is with. Its report: Her happiness is declining. There is no clear link to any one factor.

When she gets this result, Cara finds herself feeling less happy with her boyfriend. The app did not link him to her declining happiness, but she begins to wonder if he is the cause of her discontent. Uncertain of her feelings, she ends up breaking up with her boyfriend, in partial deference to the app. She says what she got from the tracker was like “a tipping point.” It felt like something external that “proved” she was not on the right path.

In “happiness tracking,” a lot can get lost in translation. Everything depends on how you interpret what the app is telling you. If Cara had brought her “discontented” reading to a psychotherapist, she might have been asked if she and her boyfriend talked about difficult issues—not necessarily things to avoid, but things that upset her because they were painful to deal with. Perhaps it was with her boyfriend—because she felt safe—that she allowed stressful conversations to occur. That might be a good thing, not a bad thing. Perhaps the “discontented” reading was a sign that he was, on balance, a positive force even if his presence provoked feelings that the program registered as stress. All discontent is not equal. Some bring us toward new understandings.

As things played out, Cara's “happiness tracker” didn't lead to this kind of reflection. Indeed, she saw the number she got from the program
as a “failing grade” and it sparked a desire to get a better one. It pushed her into action. But without a person with whom to discuss the meaning behind the number, without a methodology for looking at her current feelings in relation to her history, she was flying blind.

A
s a psychologist, I was trained in a technology of talk, the conversational technology of the psychoanalytic tradition, which would suggest a different perspective to the unhappy Cara. These days, classical psychoanalysis has had many of its ideas taken up in non-classical treatments, usually referred to as “psychodynamic.” Here I'll call them “talk therapy,” with the understanding that this is the kind of therapeutic conversation I mean. In contrast with technologies that propose themselves as quantitative mirrors of self, talk therapy offers interpretive strategies to understand your life story. Here I mention two to give a flavor of the kind of conversations that talk therapy encourages.

A first strategy is not to take words literally but to have patience with them.
Wait and see where words lead you if you let them take you anywhere. The therapist creates a space for a kind of conversation that encourages you
to say what comes to mind without
self-censorship. An algorithm asks for specifications. In talk therapy, one is encouraged to wander.

A second strategy is to pay special attention to how the legacy of past relationships persist in the present.
To this end, talk therapy creates a space in which therapists do not offer themselves as standard conversational partners but remain more neutral. This makes it easier to see when we project feelings from the past onto them. These feelings can be of every sort, positive and negative—of abandonment, of love, dependency, or rage. Our projections are known as the transference:
The feelings we have for therapists not because of what they do but because of who we are, the legacies we bring to the consulting room.

When these feelings can be identified and discussed, a great deal is
gained, because these projections are most likely brought into other relationships as well, where they are harder to recognize and sort out.

In the safety of talk therapy you learn that you tell yourself small, unconscious lies—to large effect. And you learn to stop, reflect, and correct. You come to recognize moments when you accuse your therapist of inattention but are actually addressing someone in your past who ignored you. Similarly, you learn to recognize moments when you accuse an intimate of the qualities that you most dislike in yourself. If you see your husband as a profligate spender, it is worth taking the time to ask if you worry that you spend too much money yourself.

As the therapeutic conversation continues over time—for this is a conversation that is meant to take time—it models a particular kind of self-reflection. You pay attention but you let your mind wander. You focus on detail and discover the hidden dimensions of ordinary things. Talk therapy slows things down so that they can be opened out. Over time, consulting room strategies clarify the conversations of everyday life.

My goal here is not a primer on psychoanalysis. I want only to say enough to say this: The sensibility of psychodynamic therapy—its focus on meaning, its commitment to patience and developing a working therapeutic relationship, its belief that following an associative thread of ideas, even if they seem unrelated, will ultimately have a big payoff—has a lot to offer digital culture. In particular, the psychoanalytic tradition suggests ways to approach technologies that try to capture us through algorithms.

When a computer program told Cara she was discontent, she seized on her relationship with her boyfriend as a reason. Once she had “evidence” in hand, doing nothing became intolerable. In the psychoanalytic tradition, what Cara did is called “acting out.” Conflicted about her feelings, she found relief in changing something. She took action that had no certain relationship to the “readout,” but it was action that made her feel temporarily in control. Talk therapy encourages reflection when we are seized by the need to “fix” something—and now! The psychoanalytic tradition suggests that action before self-understanding is rarely a good
way to improve one's situation. I've said that a therapist might have gotten Cara to talk about whether her boyfriend allowed her to explore unhappy feelings because she felt safe in his presence. That's not something to discard. It's discomfort worth having.

If you act out, you create change and perhaps crisis. All of the new noise you make can drown out the feelings you were originally trying to understand. Nevertheless, it is often what people try first. Central to the method in talk therapy is learning what you think by listening to yourself in conversation. You can't do this if you are caught up in crises of your own devising. To the adage “Stop and think,” talk therapy adds “Stop and listen to yourself thinking.”

The conversations of talk therapy do not follow any pre-set protocol. Therapeutic conversations work not because therapists pass down information but because they form relationships in conversation. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has called psychoanalysis “
solitude for two
.” By the end of a successful treatment, the patient leaves with the voice of the therapist “brought within.” Patients have learned to be their own dialogue partner. One learns to take first reactions and give them a second look. One learns to ask, “Who is really speaking here? Where are my feelings coming from? Before I accuse the world of neglecting me, am I neglecting the world?”

In talk therapy's model for active listening you learn to attend not only to the words but also to the music, to the silences, to how people
sound as they speak
. And you learn to listen to yourself with this kind of attention. You learn to avoid self-censorship and to take yourself seriously. You learn to see patterns in your behavior; you learn to respect history and how it tends to repeat itself unless you are vigilant.

The psychoanalytic tradition deepens the
culture of conversation because it demonstrates how much we can
get out of it.
It teaches that the ways your conversations unfold are unique to your history and that of the person you are speaking with. Conversations have a particularity that matters. As I said at the start, psychoanalysis is more than a treatment; it contributes a vocabulary that suggests a set of core values: patience, meaning, the centrality of narrative.

The vocabulary has its critics, and there are things to criticize. But it provides a powerful approach, even in our most technological times: If you ever have a vexing number from a happiness tracker, you will know how to interrogate it. You'll know that the answer isn't in the readout but in the conversation it helps you begin and how prepared you are to have it. Our quantitative selves leave data trails that are the beginning of our stories, not the results, not the conclusions.

I have a fantasy that in the future, people will look at the output of their tracking apps with a computer scientist to explain how its algorithms work—and a therapist who will help them put the readout in the context of their individual lives. More realistically, people will develop a dual sensibility: The psychoanalytic and computer culture will find their necessary points of
synergy.

“Daddy! Stop Googling! I Want to Talk to You!”

In my family we have our disagreements in Gchat conversations. It makes things smoother. What would be the value proposition of disagreeing with each other face-to-face?

—COLIN, A COLLEGE JUNIOR

A
close friend invites me to a family dinner in Maine. I make the drive up from Boston. I see friends with whom I share a long history; there are conversations about politics, work, children, and local gossip. My attention goes to a girl in her late teens, Alexa, who is staring down at her phone. We exchange a few words. She is polite, but when her phone lights up, she looks at me with a half smile and I understand that our time together is over. She has received a Snapchat, an image that will disappear a few seconds after she opens it. She's anxious to begin. So I excuse myself and she goes to her phone. During the next few hours, Alexa puts down her phone and joins the other guests perhaps four or five times, each time for a few minutes. I look around for younger children and they, too, are on phones.

Stan, a friend in his mid-fifties, has also been watching Alexa. He and I begin to talk. We think back to the family gatherings of our own childhoods. We recall that sometimes we were put at a children's table and would strain to hear the grown-ups' conversations. When our parents spoke to other grown-ups, they seemed to express themselves in a
different language. There was juicy gossip about neighbors. There were stories about relatives that you didn't even know you had. Stan says, “I remember how excited I was when I thought I might finally have something to say to the grown-ups. And if they were interested, I would think to myself, ‘I know how to talk!'” I've found many nostalgics like us. But nostalgia does not reliably drive behavior. Just as people say it is wrong to break up a relationship by text message but do it anyway, those who wax poetic about the conversations during dinners of the past admit to being on their phones, texting, during family dinners today.

So children, from the earliest ages, complain about having to compete with smartphones for their parents' attention. At dinner, a five-year-old girl cajoles, “Mommy, please! You promised! You had five minutes before!” when her mother's phone vibrates for the third time. An eight-year-old boy gets up from the table and tugs at his mother's sleeve when she takes out her phone during the meal. “No. Not now. Not now!” he pleads. As she turns her back to her child, the mother says, “Mommy has to make a quick call.” The boy returns to his chair, sullen.

In what for me is an iconic moment, fifteen-year-old Chelsea, who is on summer vacation at a device-free camp, describes her disappointment when her father interrupted their dinner during parents' weekend by looking things up on his phone.

The other night I went out to dinner with my dad. And we were just having this conversation and I didn't know the answer to something, like the director of a movie we had seen. And he automatically wanted to look it up on his phone. And I was like, “Daddy, stop Googling. I want to talk to you. I don't care what the right answer is! I just want to talk to you.”

Chelsea wants her father's full attention. His preoccupation with his phone upsets her. But when she is not at camp, she says that she treats her friends just as her father treated her, interrupting conversations to look things up or send a text or check her Instagram account. This is the complexity of our moment. These are its contradictions.

A
t first glance, family life today looks much as it always has; we have preserved the form of things—there are dinners, school trips, family meetings.

At second glance, we seem to live a family life squared: We can share so much more with our families—videos, photographs, games, the whole wide world. And we can be “with” our families in new ways—in some ways, never apart. I still remember my first night away from my daughter who was then a year old. I remember sitting alone in a hotel room in Washington, D.C., as I spoke to her in western Massachusetts. I gripped the telephone receiver as my husband held the phone to my daughter's ear and I pretended that she understood I was on the other end of the call. When we both hung up, I wept because I didn't think she had understood anything at all. Now she and I would have Skype. We would have FaceTime. If separated, I could watch her play for hours.

But with yet another glance, the role of technology in family life is more complicated. As in many other aspects of life, we are tempted to be with each other but also elsewhere. At dinner and in the park, parents and children turn to their phones and tablets. Conversations that used to take place face-to-face migrate online. Families tell me they like to have their arguments through text, email, and Gchat—that this helps them express themselves more precisely. Some call it “fighting by text.”

In families, the flight from conversation adds up to a crisis in mentorship. We need family conversations because of the work they do—beginning with what they teach children about themselves and how to get along with other people. To join in conversation is to imagine another mind, to empathize, and to enjoy gesture, humor, and irony in the medium of talk. As with language, the capacity to learn these human subtleties is innate. But their
development depends on the environment
in which a child is placed. Of course, conversations at school and at play are crucial. But the family has the child first, over sustained time, and in the most highly charged emotional relationships. When adults listen
during conversations, they show children how listening works. In family conversation, children learn that it is comforting and pleasurable to be heard and understood.

Family conversation is where children first learn to see other people as different from themselves and worthy of understanding. It is where children learn to put themselves in someone else's shoes, often the shoes of a sibling. If your child is angry at a classmate, you can suggest that it might help to try to understand the other child's point of view.

It is in family conversations that children have the greatest chance of learning that what other people are saying (and how they are saying it) is the key to what they are feeling. And that this matters. So family conversations are a training ground for empathy. When an adult asks an upset child, “How are you feeling?” the adult can make it clear that anger and frustration are acceptable emotions; they are part of being a person. Upset feelings don't have to be hidden or denied. What matters is what you do with them.

Family conversation is a place to learn that you can talk things out rather than act on your feelings, however strong. In this way, family conversation can work to inoculate children against bullying. Bullying is discouraged when children can put themselves in the place of others and reflect on the impact of their actions.

The privacy of family conversation teaches children that part of our lives can be lived in a closed, protected circle. This is always a bit of a fiction but the idea of a protected family space does a lot of work. It means that relationships have boundaries you can count on. This makes family conversation a place to let ideas grow without self-censorship. In the performative world of “I share, therefore I am,” family conversation is a space to be authentic. Family conversation also teaches that some things take time to sort through—quite a bit of time. And that it is possible to find this time because there are people who will take the time. A phone at the dinner table can disrupt all of this. Once a phone is there, you are, like everyone else, in competition with everything else.

The privileged circle of family conversation is delicate. Roberta, twenty-one, complains that her mother has begun to post pictures of
family dinners to Facebook. For Roberta, something has been broken. Now it never feels as though her family is alone: “I can't even relax and wear sweatpants when I chill with my family. My mom might post it.” Roberta says this in a half-joking manner, but she is upset about more than losing an occasion to relax in sweatpants. She wants time when she can feel like “herself” and not worry about the impression she is making.

When you have a protected space, you don't need to watch every word. But these days, so much of what I hear from parents and children is about their desire to say the “right things” to each other. Ideally, the family circle is a place where you don't always have to worry about getting it right. What you can feel is that your family is committed to you. You can feel trust and a sense of security. To give children these rewards, adults have to show up, put their phones away, look at children, and listen. And then, repeat.

Yes, repeat. In family conversation, much of the work is done as children learn they are in a place they can come back to, tomorrow and tomorrow. When digital media encourage us to edit ourselves until we have said the “right thing,” we can lose sight of the important thing: Relationships deepen not because we necessarily say anything in particular but because we are invested enough to show up for another conversation. In family conversations, children learn that what can matter most is not the information shared but the relationships sustained.

It is hard to sustain those relationships if you are on your phone.

I
n 2010, a young pediatrician, Jenny Radesky, began to notice that more and more parents and caregivers were using smartphones when they were with young children. “In restaurants, on mass transit, in playgrounds,” she says, “the phones were always there.” Radesky knew that attention to children during these kinds of moments was crucial: “the bread and butter of relationship building.”

These are the times when we get to listen to our kids, respond to them verbally and nonverbally, help them problem-solve around new challenges or intense reactions, and help them understand themselves and their experiences. . . . This is how children learn to regulate strong emotions, how to read other people's social cues, and how to have a conversation—all skills that are much
harder to learn later on
, say at 10 or 15 years of age.

With caretakers on their phones, Radesky thought, those crucial early conversations are disrupted. How disrupted? And how much are caretakers really on their phones? Radesky did a study of fifty-five adults who were watching over children as they ate meals together in fast-food restaurants. The results: Across the board, the adults
paid more attention to their phones
than to the children. Some adults interacted with children intermittently; most withdrew completely into their devices. For their part, children became passive and detached or began to seek adult attention in futile bursts of bad behavior.

At such moments we see the new silences of family life. We see children learning that no matter what they do, they will not win adults away from technology. And we see children deprived not only of words but of adults who will look them in the eye. Children's inner wisdom is at work as they strain to make eye contact in the fast-food restaurants. From infancy, the foundations for emotional stability and social fluency are developed when children make eye contact and interact with active, engaged faces.
Infants deprived of eye contact
and facing a parent's “still face” become agitated, then withdrawn, then depressed. These days, neuroscientists speculate that when parents caring for children turn to their phones, they may “effectively simulate a still-face paradigm”—in their homes or out in a restaurant—with
all of the attendant damage
. It is not surprising if children deprived of words, eye contact, and expressive faces become stiff and unresponsive with others.

Parents wonder if cell phone use leads to Asperger's syndrome. It is not necessary to settle this debate to state the obvious. If we don't look
at our children and engage them in conversation, it is not surprising if they grow up awkward and withdrawn. And anxious about talk.

A
t Leslie's home, eyes are often down and mealtimes silent. Leslie, fifteen, says that the silences begin with her mother breaking her own rule that there are to be no phones at meals. Then, with her mother's phone out, there is a “chain reaction.” Family conversations at dinner are fragile things.

So my mom is always on her email, always on her phone, she always has it next to her at the dinner table. . . . And if there's the slightest little buzz or anything, she'll look at it. She always has some excuse. When we are out to dinner she'll pretend to put it away—she'll have it on her lap. She'll be looking down but it will be so obvious. Me and my dad and my sister will all tell her to get off her phone.

If I were to even be on my phone at the table I would get grounded by her—but she has her phone out. . . . At dinner, my mom is doing her own thing on her phone, and it ends up my dad is sitting there, I am sitting there, my sister is sitting there, and no one is talking or anything.

It's a chain reaction. Only one person has to start. Only one person has to stop talking.

Leslie lives in a world of missed opportunities. At home, she is not learning what conversation can teach: the worth of her feelings, how to talk them through, and how to understand and respect the feelings of others. She tells me that “right now,” the place she feels “most important” is on social media. But social media is set up to teach different lessons. Instead of promoting the value of authenticity, it encourages performance. Instead of teaching the rewards of vulnerability, it suggests that you put on your best face. And instead of learning how to listen, you
learn what goes into an effective broadcast. Leslie is not becoming better at “reading” other people; she is simply more adept at getting them to “like” her.

Recently, I see an encouraging sign: young people's discontent. Leslie is not alone in expressing her disappointment. Children, even very young children, say they are unhappy with how much attention their parents give to phones. Some are clear that they are going to bring up their own children in a very different way than how they have been raised.