River: Feedback

[mdlbear]

It happens pretty often when I'm driving in unfamiliar territory: I make a wrong turn, say something grumpy, and the first thing Colleen says to me is "don't panic" in a rather frightened voice. The next thing you know I'm shouting at her that I'm not in a panic, just frustrated, and she's shouting back or in tears. It's a feedback loop. She expects me to panic, and everything I say to assure her that I'm not only reinforces her belief that I am.

It happened again a couple of days ago: I was in the middle of a rather ticklish task amid both distractions and knee pain; I dropped something and... I'm not sure whether she actually said anything to try to calm me down, or just gave me a look that I interpreted as being upset. I tried to calm her down, which made her more upset, and I lost it. Feedback.

You've heard it in concerts: all of a sudden there's an intolerably loud whistling sound, and somebody yells "turn down the gain!". The sound guy turns a knob, and there's blessed silence again. If he's really good, and he really needs that gain, he'll adjust a notch filter to take out the one frequency in that room that's ringing.

Positive feedback (in the engineering sense -- they may be negative emotions, but the level increases and that's what makes it positive feedback) happens in any closed-loop system with a gain greater than one. The signal gets reinforced each time it goes around the loop, and all of a sudden you have an earsplitting shriek.

It doesn't take two people, of course. "I'm too nervous: I'm going to screw this up... See, my hands are shaking... Oh, shit!" But having two people in the loop almost inevitably brings up the question of who's responsible for it?

The correct answer is that it doesn't matter. You have a system with two amplifiers and positive gain: the only meaningful question to ask is which gain control is within reach, and how do you turn it. After that, if you need a little more gain, you ask who has the better-tuned filters.

If you have some magic phrase or agreed-on keyword like "calm down", or "safeword", or "Basingstoke" that you can use to get the other person to reduce their gain, use it. A hug, if possible in the situation, might calm both of you down. But in most cases, it's your own gain control that's within easy reach. Use that. What works for me is to take a deep breath, shut up!, and either put some more space between us or go on with whatever I was doing but calmly and without trying to say anything to make things better. Your mileage may vary.

Comments

[mdlbear]

Let me repeat: "who's responsible" is irrelevant. The only question is, given the two people and personalities involved, how best to break the loop. What you suggest would make matters worse -- I've tried it.