Emotional bids. First some caveats/context: this is something I've referenced a bunch over the years in conversation and found a very helpful little mental shorthand. I can't, however, remember the original source where I came across this (maybe a podcast like Hidden Brain? I don't know), and looking it up now mostly points me to lots of pop-psych sites the general look and layout of which tend to make me highly skeptical about what they contain. So: take anything that sounds definitive about human nature or makes broad and definitive pronouncements with a heavy dose of sodium.
BUT I have found them a genuinely useful concept to distil, so I'm going to talk about them anyway.
- An emotional bid is when somebody in a relationship says or does something that is seeking some kind of reaction for reasons of emotional reassurance.
- (I'm using 'relationship' encompassingly, though it's even more obvious in romantic relationships)
- They might not know they are doing it for this reason.
- They might be doing it for other reasons as well.
- But at some level it disguises/encodes a sort of emotional 'ping' that's looking for some reciprocal interaction.
- Asking someone to tell you about their day would be one example. Maybe they do actually care about the vagaries of your day, maybe they don't; it's an excuse to solicit some emotionally nourishing interaction.
- Another, flipped example might be my saying something about my day which isn't meaningful/substantial by itself, but is intended to elicit further questions/interactions.
- There are lots of things that can fit into this general definition.
- The original source (and see the above caveats here) referred to recognising and responding to emotional bids as being a very clear predictor for a strong, lasting relationship.
- Crucially, this doesn't necessarily mean responding to them positively and necessarily engaging on the hinted terms. Yes, that's obviously better, but the ability to recognise the bid and turn it down ('I can't talk about that right now' or even something less direct) still indicated a level of awareness of the other person's emotional needs and interiority (acknowledging, consciously or not, the reason behind the surface action.)
- They are, essentially, emotional 'hooks' that offer the chance for someone to see and recognise your emotional needs when they are not plainly stated.
- This is where I've found most interesting to see -- examples between other people where it's clear from the outside that someone is making some form of emotional outreach, looking for a response, and the other person just misses it altogether for one reason or another.
- I find it really notionally close to when you see two people juuusstt talking past each other and not getting why, because someone's missed some piece of important context, or because they're actually just not... hearing what each other is saying clearly?
- There's probably some interesting technique to be drawn from this around writing good scenes between people. So much of that comes down to understanding or creating subtext anyway, or reasons for there to be subtext or omission.
- I realise after writing all this out that I've actually mentioned this exact concept before, back in What are we really talking about. Still, I think I've added more info/detail here rather than just treading the same ground.
- But it's a good time to reiterate that, actually -- so much of this type of communication (all communication, really) comes down to skills for really hearing what the other person is saying and being aware enough of their interior state to figure out what you're both really getting at!
No post tomorrow as I’m: not here.