Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to re: Nope...never said it was

Nuclear energy
Mary Anne — (archived)

You know, Tom, I live close enough to Three Mile Island for it to make a difference.

Engineers and other tech people would talk to the residents exactly as you have talked here. They got nowhere. Numbers mean nothing to people who've been frightened by something they don't understand or understand only dimly, especially if the something has been somehow connected to lasting struggle in their lives.

I had a little conversation with one of the engineers once, after watching him have a conversation with a woman who suffered emotional trauma because of the accident. She started to talk about the things that had frightened her, and he replied by correcting and contradicting her assertions with facts. He meant to comfort her by presenting her with logic and fact so she could fight her fear, but she heard him call her stupid, and her fear stupid. She heard him degrade her experience, as she saw it, in order to justify his own career and the industry he worked for. I could see it in both their faces. She shut her mind to him within two minutes; he never got another chance.

After she excused herself, I tried to explain that he could only hope to change people's minds about things one at a time, since they were all frightened one at a time, and that the best, the only, way to do that does not involve starting out with "You're wrong about X, Y and Z". It involves starting out listening to one person's fear and acknowledging its validity. One way to put this is, "If all I knew was what I read in the papers, I'd be scared too." Only after acknowledgement of the emotional reality that a person lives with can anyone be expected to listen to the underlying facts of the situation that made him or her fearful.

You say you're banging your head against a brick wall. You'll continue to do that for as long as you seek to gain entry where there is no entrance. But there's almost always an entrance. Try knocking on the door instead.

Log in or register to post.

The whole thread (83 posts)