Quiet (40 page)

In her book
Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion
, Carol Tavris recounts a story about a Bengali cobra that liked to bite passing villagers. One day a swami—a man who has achieved self-mastery—convinces the snake that biting is wrong. The cobra vows to stop immediately, and does. Before long, the village boys grow unafraid of the snake and start to abuse
him. Battered and bloodied, the snake complains to the swami that this is what came of keeping his promise.

“I told you not to bite,” said the swami, “but I did not tell you not to hiss.”

“Many people, like the swami's cobra, confuse the hiss with the bite,” writes Tavris.

Many people—like Greg and Emily. Both have much to learn from the swami's story: Greg to stop biting, Emily that it's OK for him—and for her—to hiss.

Greg can start by changing his assumptions about anger. He believes, as most of us do, that venting anger lets off steam. The “catharsis hypothesis”—that aggression builds up inside us until it's healthily released—dates back to the Greeks, was revived by Freud, and gained steam during the “let it all hang out” 1960s of punching bags and primal screams. But the
catharsis hypothesis is a myth—a plausible one, an elegant one, but a myth nonetheless. Scores of studies have shown that venting doesn't soothe anger;
it fuels it
.

We're best off when we don't allow ourselves to go to our angry place. Amazingly, neuroscientists have even found that
people who use Botox, which prevents them from making angry faces, seem to be less anger-prone than those who don't, because the very act of frowning triggers the amygdala to process negative emotions. And anger is not just damaging in the moment; for days afterward, venters have repair work to do with their partners. Despite the popular fantasy of fabulous sex after fighting, many couples say that it takes time to feel loving again.

What can Greg do to calm down when he feels his fury mounting? He can take a deep breath. He can take a ten-minute break. And he can ask himself whether the thing that's making him so angry is really that important. If not, he might let it go. But if it is, then he'll want to phrase his needs not as personal attacks but as neutral discussion items. “You're so antisocial!” can become “Can we figure out a way to organize our weekends that works for us both?”

This advice would hold even if Emily weren't a sensitive introvert (no one likes to feel dominated or disrespected), but it so happens that Greg's married to a woman who is
especially
put off by anger. So he needs
to respond to the conflict-avoidant wife he has, not the confrontational one that he wishes, at least in the heat of the moment, he were married to.

Now let's look at Emily's side of the equation. What could she be doing differently? She's right to protest when Greg bites—when he attacks unfairly—but what about when he hisses? Emily might address her own counterproductive reactions to anger, among them her tendency to slip into a cycle of guilt and defensiveness. We know from
chapter 6
that many introverts are prone from earliest childhood to strong guilt feelings; we also know that we all tend to project our own reactions onto others. Because conflict-avoidant Emily would never “bite” or even hiss unless Greg had done something truly horrible, on some level she processes
his
bite to mean that she's terribly guilty—of something, anything, who knows what? Emily's guilt feels so intolerable that she tends to deny the validity of all of Greg's claims—the legitimate ones along with those exaggerated by anger. This, of course, leads to a vicious cycle in which she shuts down her natural empathy and Greg feels unheard.

So Emily needs to accept that it's OK to be in the wrong. At first she may have trouble puzzling out when she is and when she isn't; the fact that Greg expresses his grievances with such passion makes it hard to sort this out. But Emily must try not to get dragged into this morass. When Greg makes legitimate points, she should acknowledge them, not only to be a good partner to her husband, but also to teach herself that it's OK to have transgressed. This will make it easier for her not to feel hurt—and to fight back—when Greg's claims
are
unjustified.

Fight back? But Emily hates fighting.

That's OK. She needs to become more comfortable with the sound of her own hiss. Introverts may be hesitant to cause disharmony, but, like the passive snake, they should be equally worried about encouraging vitriol from their partners. And fighting back may not invite retaliation, as Emily fears; instead it may encourage Greg to back off. She need not put on a huge display. Often, a firm “that's not OK with me” will do.

Every once in a while, Emily might also want to step outside her usual comfort zone and let her own anger fly. Remember, for Greg, heat means connection. In the same way that the extroverted players in the football game study felt warmly toward their fellow competitors, so Greg
may feel closer to Emily if she can take on just a little of the coloration of a pumped-up player, ready to take the field.

Emily can also overcome her own distaste for Greg's behavior by reminding herself that he's not really as aggressive as he seems. John, an introvert I interviewed who has a great relationship with his fiery wife, describes how he learned to do this after twenty-five years of marriage:

So what's John's secret for relating to his forceful wife? He lets her know that her words were unacceptable, but he also tries to listen to their meaning. “I try to tap into my empathy,” he says. “I take her tone out of the equation. I take out the assault on my senses, and I try to get to what she's trying to say.”

And what Jennifer is trying to say, underneath her freight-train words, is often quite simple: Respect me. Pay attention to me. Love me.

Greg and Emily now have valuable insights about how to talk through their differences. But there's one more question they need to answer: Why exactly do they experience those Friday-night dinner parties so differently? We know that Emily's nervous system probably goes into overdrive when she enters a room full of people. And we know that Greg feels the opposite: propelled toward people, conversations, events, anything that gives him that dopamine-fueled, go-for-it sensation
that extroverts crave. But let's dig a little deeper into the anatomy of cocktail-hour chatter. The key to bridging Greg and Emily's differences lies in the details.

Some years ago,
thirty-two pairs of introverts and extroverts, all of them strangers to each other, chatted on the phone for a few minutes as part of an experiment conducted by a neuroscientist named Dr. Matthew Lieberman, then a graduate student at Harvard. When they hung up, they were asked to fill out detailed questionnaires, rating how they'd felt and behaved during the conversation. How much did you like your conversational partner? How friendly were you? How much would you like to interact with this person again? They were also asked to put themselves in the shoes of their conversational partners: How much did your partner like you? How sensitive was she to you? How encouraging?

Lieberman and his team compared the answers and also listened in on the conversations and made their own judgments about how the parties felt about each other. They found that the extroverts were a lot more accurate than the introverts in assessing whether their partner liked talking to them. These findings suggest that extroverts are better at decoding social cues than introverts. At first, this seems unsurprising, writes Lieberman; it echoes the popular assumption that extroverts are better at reading social situations. The only problem, as Lieberman showed through a further twist to his experiment, is that this assumption is not quite right.

Lieberman and his team asked a select group of participants to listen to a tape of the conversations they'd just had—
before
filling out the questionnaire. In this group, he found, there was no difference between introverts and extroverts in their ability to read social cues. Why?

The answer is that the subjects who listened to the tape recording were able to decode social cues
without having to do anything else at the same time
. And introverts are pretty fine decoders, according to several studies predating the Lieberman experiments. One of these studies actually found that introverts were better decoders than extroverts.

But these studies measured how well introverts
observe
social dynamics, not how well they participate in them. Participation places a very different set of demands on the brain than observing does.
It requires a kind of mental multitasking: the ability to process a lot of short-term information at once without becoming distracted or overly stressed. This is just the sort of brain functioning that extroverts tend to be well suited for. In other words, extroverts are sociable because their brains are good at handling competing demands on their attention—which is just what dinner-party conversation involves. In contrast, introverts often feel repelled by social events that force them to attend to many people at once.

Consider that the simplest social interaction between two people requires performing an astonishing array of tasks:
interpreting what the other person is saying; reading body language and facial expressions; smoothly taking turns talking and listening; responding to what the other person said; assessing whether you're being understood; determining whether you're well received, and, if not, figuring out how to improve or remove yourself from the situation. Think of what it takes to juggle all this at once! And that's just a one-on-one conversation. Now imagine the multitasking required in a group setting like a dinner party.

So when introverts assume the observer role, as when they write novels, or contemplate unified field theory—or fall quiet at dinner parties—they're not demonstrating a failure of will or a lack of energy. They're simply doing what they're constitutionally suited for.

The Lieberman experiment helps us understand what trips up introverts socially. It doesn't show us how they can shine.

Consider the case of an unassuming-looking fellow named Jon Berghoff. Jon is a stereotypical introvert, right down to his physical appearance: lean, wiry body; sharply etched nose and cheekbones; thoughtful expression on his bespectacled face. He's not much of a talker, but what he says is carefully considered, especially when he's in a group: “If I'm in a room with ten people and I have a choice between talking and not
talking,” he says, “I'm the one not talking. When people ask, ‘Why aren't you saying anything?' I'm the guy they're saying it to.”

Jon is also a standout salesman, and has been ever since he was a teenager. In the summer of 1999, when he was still a junior in high school, he started working as an entry-level distributor, selling Cutco kitchen products. The job had him going into customers' homes, selling knives. It was one of the most intimate sales situations imaginable, not in a boardroom or a car dealership, but inside a potential client's kitchen, selling them a product they'd use daily to help put food on the table.