Stop Picking Up the Conversational Ball
- 6 hours ago
- 13 min read
Updated: 41 minutes ago
How learning to communicate badly taught me to communicate better.
Disclaimer: I use DARVO here to describe conversational behavior, not to diagnose someone as a narcissist.
PDF Worksheet for practice available at the bottom
I've spent years learning how to communicate better. I know how to listen, validate, stay curious, ask questions, clarify what I mean, and try again when misunderstanding occur. I know how to have both deep meaningful conversations and difficult conversations. These are skills I value, and I've worked hard to develop them.
So it feels almost absurd that lately I've been practicing something that seems completely backwards: I'm learning how to communicate badly.
I don't mean I'm trying to become rude, dismissive, manipulative, or impossible to talk to. I'm studying bad communication almost the way I would study bad technique as a dance instructor. Sometimes, in order to show a student why something isn't working, I have to deliberately put my weight in the wrong place, collapse my frame, or disrupt something my body normally does automatically. It's surprisingly difficult because my body has been trained to organize itself correctly. It’s counterintuitive.
Apparently, my conversational brain works the same way.
If somebody tells me, "I barely slept last night because the neighbor's dog kept barking," my brain immediately understands what the person is communicating. They're tired. The dog kept them awake. They're probably frustrated. My natural response follows the meaning of what they said.
So I started practicing doing the opposite.
Their statement: "The neighbor's dog kept me awake all night."
My response: "The dance last night was so much fun. I was wound up too."
It's a ridiculous response. It's also fascinating. I grabbed "last night" and "being awake" and followed an association that had almost nothing to do with what the person was actually communicating.
Then I tried another.
Their statement: "I'm really frustrated because my landlord still hasn't fixed the leak in my bathroom."
"I love the decorations in your bathroom. The ocean theme is so pretty."
Bathroom. Bathroom. Technically related. Conversationally absurd.
The more I practiced, the more I began recognizing something that has exhausted me for years. Some people communicate like this constantly. They grab a noun. They follow a side detail. They substitute an adjacent topic. They respond to factual content while completely missing emotional content. They make a comparison to themselves. They offer a solution nobody asked for. They turn a disclosure into a debate. Sometimes they simply introduce an entirely different subject.
Each individual instance can seem insignificant. Twenty of them in a conversation can make you feel like you're losing your mind.
The Person Who Keeps the Conversation Coherent Does a Lot of Work
I started realizing how much invisible labor I perform in conversation.
When somebody misunderstands me, I clarify. When they wander away from the point, I bring us back. When they respond to something I didn't actually say, I correct the misunderstanding. When they become defensive, I reassure them that I wasn't attacking them and try again. When they pull one detail out of what I said and run down a completely different road with it, I follow them long enough to answer whatever they brought up, then attempt to return to where we started.
I'm constantly preserving conversational coherence.
It becomes exhausting when I'm the one continually trying to hold the thread together.
This is where logical fallacies become particularly effective conversational traps.
If I say, "It hurt my feelings when you made that joke," and someone responds, "So now I'm never allowed to joke around you?" my brain immediately wants to correct the distortion.
"I didn't say you can never joke. I said that particular joke hurt my feelings."
Now I'm explaining.
If the response is, "You're always so sensitive about everything," suddenly I want to establish that I'm not overly sensitive.
If the response is, "Well, you made a joke last week that I didn't like," now we're discussing my joke.
If I answer that successfully and the standard changes again, I may follow that one too.
The original conversation was one sentence long. Somehow I'm now preparing a dissertation.
This is the part I've been retraining.
Context Matters: The Tree Isn't the Forest
Context matters. A mutual conversation requires being able to hold the larger context of what someone is communicating while responding to the individual pieces of it. The meaning of a conversation rarely lives in one sentence, one word, or one detail. It comes from the whole thing.
Some people continually pick a tree out of the forest and respond to the tree as though the forest isn't there. They latch onto a word, a detail, an example, or one technically debatable point while losing the meaning created by everything around it.
If I tell someone I'm exhausted because my father has called me every night this week expecting me to solve his problems, and they respond, "What kind of problem did he have last night?" they haven't completely changed the subject. The question is technically relevant. It makes sense in isolation. But they've picked a tree. The forest is that I'm exhausted by the emotional burden of continually being placed in the role of solving my father's problems.
That distinction matters because these derailments exist on a spectrum. A complete non sequitur is relatively easy to recognize because the response has little or no logical connection to what came before it. If I'm talking about being exhausted by my father's phone calls and someone suddenly starts telling me about the new tires they bought, the break in conversational continuity is obvious.
Picking a tree out of the forest is much more subtle. The response has enough connection to what I said that my brain recognizes it as part of the same conversation. They asked about my father's problem, and I was talking about my father, so of course I answer.
Except now I'm telling them what happened with his insurance company. They have an opinion about insurance companies. I respond to that. Something in my response reminds them of an insurance problem they had last year, and now they're telling me that story. Ten minutes later, we are talking about insurance companies and I'm wondering what happened to the conversation I was trying to have about being emotionally exhausted.
This is part of what makes conversational derailment so difficult to recognize in real time. It doesn't always announce itself by abruptly changing the subject. Sometimes it maintains a superficial connection while losing the contextual one. The individual exchange can appear perfectly logical while the larger conversation quietly disappears.
Sometimes I'm several trees deep before I even realize I've followed them.
That is another part of what I'm practicing: recognizing that relevance to something I said does not automatically make a response relevant to the conversation I was having. I don't have to answer every question simply because it makes sense in isolation. I can keep the larger context in view and decide whether following that particular tree takes me somewhere I actually want to go.
I Don't Have to Pick It Up
Most advice about difficult communication tells us what to stop doing. Don't justify. Don't argue. Don't defend. Don't explain. Don't engage with the straw man. Don't get pulled into DARVO.
Fine.
What the hell do I do instead?
This is what I'm practicing: moving on despite the absurdity.
I don't have to resolve every strange interpretation before I continue speaking. The conversation may remain incoherent. We may never arrive at mutual ground.
Sometimes I can simply keep going.
Resume Whichever Part of the Conversation I Want to Have
This became the sentence that finally clicked for me.
When someone derails the conversation, I don't necessarily need to drag them back to the original point. That's still work. I also don't have to follow them down the road they just created.
I can resume whichever part of my conversation I actually want to have.
Suppose I say, "I had such a hard time trimming the cat's fur because he kept trying to run away."
They respond, "Maybe if you brushed him more often, his fur wouldn't get that bad."
There it is. An invitation.
I could explain how often I brush him. I could explain his coat. I could point out that long-haired cats get knots even when they're cared for properly. I could become irritated that a silly story about trimming my cat has somehow turned into an evaluation of my pet care.
OR I could meet their track-change with my own track-change: "I have the best cats. They're so sweet and affectionate."
Conversation declined.
Here is another.
"I'm making one of my favorite meals tonight, bourbon chicken and rice."
They respond, "You really ought to eat healthier."
I ignore the negative evaluation and continue on the track I want to be on.
"And for dessert, I'm making brownies."
That one delighted me. There is an extraordinary amount of freedom in realizing that another person's comment does not automatically become my conversational reassignment.
It Gets Harder When the Stakes Are Higher
Ignoring a criticism about bourbon chicken is easy. It gets considerably harder when the subject matters, and harder still when the person matters.
There are people with whom we genuinely want mutual understanding because that is part of how we experience emotional intimacy. We want to understand their internal world, how they experienced something, what they felt, what mattered to them, and why. We want to share our own experience in the same way. There is something deeply connecting about being able to enter another person's experience without losing our own, and allowing them to do the same with us.
That makes it much harder to recognize when a conversation can no longer support that kind of connection.
When we are sharing something vulnerable with someone who matters to us, we are often reaching toward them. If they become defensive, respond with a logical fallacy, attribute motives we don't have, or take the conversation somewhere completely unrelated, the instinct is to keep working because what we wanted from the conversation still matters.
So we explain. We clarify. We correct the strange interpretation. We answer the accusation. We try another angle. We attempt to restore the thread because restoring the thread feels like restoring the connection.
Imagine telling your partner that when you were sharing a story about your mother, they immediately started talking about their own mother and you felt as though they stole the spotlight.
They respond, "I was just trying to empathize. I don't know why you always interpret everything I do so negatively."
There are so many hooks in that sentence.
I could explain that I understand they were trying to empathize. I could explain the difference between empathy and spotlight stealing. I could defend myself against "always." I could explain that I don't interpret everything negatively. I could reassure them that I don't think they're a bad person.
Every one of those roads takes me farther away from the conversation I was trying to have while simultaneously making me feel as though I'm working toward getting it back.
That is the trap.
What happens if I simply say, "Anyway, Mom was telling me..." and finish my story?
It feels almost absurd because I have left so much hanging in the air. I haven't corrected the distortion. I haven't answered the accusation. I haven't resolved the conflict they just introduced. I have simply declined the conversational reassignment.
Clarification is usually a perfectly reasonable thing to do. In healthy, mutually attuned conversations, someone misunderstands something, we give them more information, they adjust their understanding, and the thread is restored.
There are also conversations where every attempt to restore the thread simply creates more material for them to muddy the water.
This is where I need to recognize the difference between a conversation that has temporarily lost mutuality and one in which I am continually trying to manufacture mutuality by myself. If every attempt to restore the thread creates another thread I am expected to follow, working harder at the conversation isn't bringing us closer together. It is simply giving me more conversation to manage.
The person may matter. The subject may matter. The connection may matter. In fact, those things may be precisely why I stayed in the conversation so long.
Eventually, though, the objective has to change. At some point, preserving my connection to myself has to become more important than continuing to work for connection with someone else.
But What If They Don't Let the Derailment Go?
Of course, the other person may not cooperate with my decision to return to the conversation I was having.
I say, "Anyway, Mom was telling me..." and continue my story.
They interrupt.
"No, you're not listening to what I was saying. I was trying to empathize with you. You're acting like I did something wrong, and now you won't even let me explain myself.”
This is considerably harder.
Now the derailment has acquired emotional stakes of its own. The other person is upset. They believe I'm not listening to them. They may genuinely feel misunderstood, dismissed, or unfairly characterized, and suddenly everything I value about mutual conversation is pulling me toward their thread. I want to listen. I want to understand their experience. I want people I care about to feel heard by me.
The temptation is to give them the floor because listening and mutuality matter to me. I may think, Fine, let me understand what you're trying to say, and then maybe we can get back to what I was saying.
Except that is exactly how I get hijacked again.
I don't have to turn their derailment into a legitimate new conversation simply because they are persistent about having it. I can say, "I heard you. Anyway, Mom was telling me..." I can repeat that I'm not discussing the new subject. I can continue my original story.
If they refuse to stop pulling the conversation back to their thread, I can end the conversation altogether.
This is important because there may come a point when there simply isn't a mutual conversation available to have. Two people cannot simultaneously insist on two different conversations and still call that mutuality. The objective here isn't to win control of the conversational floor. It is to stop surrendering control of my participation in the conversation.
Sometimes the other person may realize later that I never finished what I was saying. They may even circle back and ask me to finish the story. By then, however, I may discover that I no longer want to tell it.
That matters too.
Sharing something with another person is often about more than transferring information. There was a moment in which I wanted to share an experience with them, and the experience of trying to share it became exhausting. By the time they are finally available to listen, I may have processed it myself, shared it with someone else, lost the emotional impulse to talk about it, or simply decided that reopening it requires more energy than the story is worth to me anymore.
I don't owe the conversation a second attempt simply because the other person is ready for it now.
In fact, that may be useful information about the relationship itself. If enough attempts at connection end this way, eventually I may stop reaching for that person when I have something meaningful to share. It doesn't necessarily happen as a conscious punishment or withdrawal. I simply learn, through experience, where conversation feels nourishing and where it costs me more than I receive from it.
And sometimes, after enough conversations like this, I realize I no longer want to bring that person the parts of myself that matter. Our conversations quietly shrink to surface-level facts, logistics, and whatever requires the least emotional investment. This is one of the main ways spouses become roommates and friendships devolve into acquaintances.
The Reason Doesn't Change the Cost
One of the easiest ways to get pulled back into these conversations is to become preoccupied with why the other person communicates this way. Are they intentionally derailing the conversation? Are they defensive? Is their executive functioning overloaded? Are they so focused on their own internal experience that they genuinely cannot stay attuned to mine? Do they have ADHD, a brain injury, trauma, anxiety, or some other legitimate reason that makes following a mutual conversation difficult?
Maybe.
They may also insist that they are listening, trying to understand, or working very hard to communicate differently. I can believe that they are trying. I can have compassion for whatever limitations they are working with. None of that changes the amount of energy required from me to compensate for those limitations.
Part of becoming more conversationally aware is learning to notice that gap: the space between what I communicated and what the other person actually received or responded to. For years, noticing the gap automatically meant trying to close it. I’m learning to mind the gap without always trying to close it.
And the cost isn't merely cognitive. There is an emotional cost to repeatedly reaching for connection and finding yourself in an argument you weren't having. Ironically, the more conversationally aware person may then be accused of starting fights because they are the one continually noticing and trying to repair what keeps going wrong. There is a cumulative depletion that comes from having to remain regulated while another person repeatedly disrupts the coherence and mutuality that normally make conversation feel connecting.
Intentional derailment and limited capacity are obviously different things when I'm evaluating someone's character. But they are not different things to my nervous system after an hour of trying to have a conversation with them. If I have to continually compensate in order for the interaction to remain coherent, I am still the one doing the compensating. Their explanation for why does not replenish the energy it costs me. Neither does their insistence that they really are trying.
I don't need to prove that someone is deliberately manipulating me or diagnose why they communicate this way before I'm allowed to stop participating in an exhausting dynamic. Sometimes it's enough to recognize the pattern of our conversations and pay attention to how I feel after having them.
Bad Communication Is Teaching Me Something About Good Boundaries
I don’t want to lose my ability to communicate well. I love that part of myself. I want to listen deeply, understand people, stay curious, and make the people I care about feel heard.
I’ve started thinking about mutual conversation almost like a game of tennis. In a healthy conversation, we hit the ball back and forth. I receive what you’re communicating and respond to it, and you do the same for me. Sometimes one of us misses. We repair it together and keep playing.
The problem comes when one person continually misses the ball. I send something across the net and they grab one word, return it out of context, respond with a straw man or other logical fallacy, change the subject, or tell me what I supposedly meant. Historically, I’ve gone chasing after those balls, retrieving them and bringing them back onto the court so we can resume the rally. That is where so much of my conversational energy has gone.
What I’m practicing now is letting the missed ball go and hitting another one.
If they latch onto a subtopic, I keep talking about my main point. If they change the subject, I can change it again. If they respond to something I never said, I continue from what I actually said. If they tell me what I meant, I continue as though they understood me. If they pooh pooh my excitement, I ignore their criticism and stay enthusiastic.
I’m still engaged. I’m still playing. And I can quit the game whenever I want. I don’t have to stay on the court just because we have court time. Their skill level doesn’t determine mine. It only helps me decide how long I want to keep playing with them.
Ironically, practicing bad communication is strengthening my ability to communicate well. I’m learning how to stay connected to my own meaning, context, and conversational choices even when the person I’m talking to can’t consistently do the same. It reminds me of an advanced dancer dancing with a beginner. I can maintain my own technique while adjusting to the level of connection the other person is capable of sustaining. And when I encounter someone who can hold context, follow meaning, stay attuned, and repair the occasional miss with me, I can bring even more of my own conversational capacity to the exchange. Instead of using that capacity to continually repair the conversation, I can use it to take the conversation deeper.
The better I become at recognizing the difference, the better I can communicate with both.
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